Learn how to optimize your Amazon advertising strategy by diversifying beyond Sponsored Products. Discover the benefits of Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Displays, and Amazon DSP for driving growth.
With Amazon increasing the volume and size of ad placements across all ad types, organic placements are being pushed further down the page. This means to succeed on Amazon, it’s important to expand your advertising strategies beyond bottom-funnel tactics and have a greater presence across ad types to connect with shoppers at every opportunity.
Most advertisers start with Sponsored Products ads, as these are a great way to capture high-intent shoppers and drive sales more directly. But when is the right time to expand beyond Sponsored Products to more middle-funnel and upper-funnel ad types? As you evaluate your advertising performance, there are some key indicators and factors to help you identify when the right time is to expand your efforts.
Expanding beyond sponsored products
Ensuring you are present across all sponsored ad placements isn’t just about adding new ad types to your arsenal—it’s about ensuring you occupy more placements and thus reach more potential customers. Assessing your Sponsored Products’ non-branded performance can be a great way to identify if you’re hitting a plateau and need to find other ways to drive category growth for your brand.
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Both Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display ads are great tactics to use for:
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Increasing your visibility and reaching new-to-brand customers
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Controlling the messaging of your ad using custom imagery, video, and headlines
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Protecting your branded search results or product pages from being targeted by competitors
Focusing only on bottom-funnel tactics like Sponsored Products targets customers who are ready to purchase. But this can only go so far. By using middle—and top-of-funnel tactics (like Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Displays), you can guide customers from initial interest to consideration to purchase, using personalized content to build brand trust.
Sponsored brands help tell your brand story
To achieve this, sponsored brand ads allow you to showcase custom videos or imagery beside multiple products at the top and middle of search results. In most cases, this Sponsored brand ad placement is the first thing people see in their search results and is a visually striking way to capture the attention of new-to-brand and/or loyal customers.
With these ads, you can control what you show and tell the customer more tightly. For example, suppose you have a first-to-market product or a product that many knock-off sellers have copied. In that case, Sponsored Brands are an excellent way to communicate what your product is and why it’s unique compared to your competition.
Sponsored Display helps boost your non-branded growth
Sponsored Display ads offer a different range of placements and have unique use cases. For instance, if you find competitors occupying the ad placements on your ASIN’s product pages, this is an easy win for Sponsored Display. Brand defense tactics are an easy and relatively inexpensive way to block competitors from entering your product pages, thus increasing the CVR of your other ads. You can increase your cross-sell or upsell opportunities if you tactically choose the products you advertise here.
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With Sponsored Display, you can also integrate audience targeting into your ad strategies, using a mix of custom audience segments and retargeting interested consumers. Sponsored Display provides a great introduction to audience targeting and is an excellent entry point for Amazon DSP.
When to adopt the Amazon DSP and why
If you’re finding that your Sponsored Ads have saturated your current potential customer base and are looking for further growth avenues – Amazon DSP is the ideal next step. The Amazon DSP is a great expansion tool when looking to:
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Scale New-to-Brand (NTB) customer acquisition
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Amplify brand presence
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Drive incremental sales
Unlike Sponsored Ads, the Amazon DSP allows brands the freedom to curate an audience through granular targeting options. Brands can choose from thousands of relevant first-party InMarket and Lifestyle segments to widen their reach or can specify targeting via segment customization to drive consideration and conversion. In addition to targeting, the Amazon DSP has an amplified reach due to its ability to target active users on and offsite through its various inventories.
Establish brand identity with custom creative
Creative freedom is another strong selling point for Amazon DSP. Brands can leverage various creative types at each funnel stage, allowing for flexibility in brand positioning per user profile. For instance, brands seeking to build brand presence can implement fully customized Lifestyle imagery with branding elements to capture new-t-brand users in their awareness efforts. This personalization helps humanize the brand.
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However, if you are more conversion-focused, you can use Product-centric imagery through responsive e-commerce creatives to help push that purchase intent. These creative types dynamically pull in product details (name, pricing, review count, and ratings) from your Amazon Product Detail Pages while still allowing for a certain level of customization. Brands with a vast creative catalog are advantageous as activating quickly and hitting the ground running is much easier.
Attract new customers with engaging video
If you want to explore new avenues to amplify your brand presence on Amazon and beyond, video ads with the Amazon DSP are the way to go. You can implement Streaming TV, Prime Video (CTV), and Online Video (a more interactive video type) with enhanced targeting. We strongly recommend having high-quality production and a significant investment/testing budget, as we find this better captivates users and drives greater impact.
Customizable strategies with the Amazon DSP
Depending on your objective, whether you’re looking to drive NTB or ROAS, you can customize your strategy and investment level to align with your overall growth goals. Nothing is set in stone—tactics can be altered to accommodate shifting priorities. That is the beauty of the Amazon DSP: It arms brands with the tools necessary to create, build, and control their narrative on and off Amazon.
Recommended budget for the Amazon DSP
Investment-wise, we recommend a 3:1 budget split between your Sponsored Ads and Amazon DSP efforts. This is because Sponsored Ads are the foundational ad units driving most of the traffic necessary to scale on Amazon DSP, hence the heavier investment. Typically, brands with over $45K in monthly sponsored spend tend to be great candidates for the Amazon DSP, given that their products are retail-ready and have a high repeat purchase frequency.
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Conclusion
Amazon’s advertising landscape is ever-evolving, emphasizing the need for diversification beyond just Sponsored Products. Sponsored and Display ads offer enhanced visibility and brand messaging, while Amazon’s Demand-Side Platform (DSP) provides precision targeting and scalable growth opportunities.
Striking a balance between Sponsored Ads and Amazon DSP investments, with a recommended 3:1 budget split, ensures brands maximize reach and adapt to changing market dynamics for continued success on Amazon. Each business on Amazon will see success in a different mix of tactics, so we recommend experimenting with each ad tactic to see what combination is best able to reach your customer.
