Amazon is always looking for new ways to improve their advertising platform by adding new features that both sellers and vendors can take advantage of to increase their brand presence and ultimately their sales on Amazon. In 2022 Amazon rolled out lots of new features across all sponsored ad types and for data and performance reporting.
Sponsored Products
A new feature for creating Sponsored Product campaigns is Suggested products. When you filter to show ‘Suggested’ products, Amazon shows products they believe will have the best chance of being clicked on based on their machine-learning. This is useful for any new brands on Amazon that don’t know what the best products to start advertising could be.
Expanded product targeting was added for product targeting (PAT) campaigns. It means advertisers can automatically target other similar products as well as products they choose to target. This helps discover new product targets that may be successful in ads that the advertiser may not have been aware of without the expanded product targeting. This is helpful for brands looking to identify new competitor products to target to increase ad sales from PAT campaigns.
Pre-set campaign settings now mean you can launch new Sponsored Product ads for a list of eligible products with a daily budget, bidding strategy and targeting strategy already set by Amazon. Amazon sets this based on historical performance for similar products. Again, this is useful for any advertiser who doesn’t know what the best products may be to start advertising or what budget or strategy should be applied.
Another new Sponsored Product feature launched was Performance recommendations. These are customised recommendations that Amazon makes based on the performance of Sponsored Product campaigns. The recommendations can be applied with one click. These recommendations are specifically for underperforming campaigns to help improve performance. This is useful for advertisers who may be new to advertising on Amazon and need help understanding why campaigns aren’t doing well and what to do to improve performance.
Sponsored Brands
Amazon Creative Services was launched in 2022 to help brands on Amazon easily find help for creating stores, videos, image design or translation. Advertisers can view the work of providers, filter by price to suit their budget and filter by customer reviews. This is a useful service for anyone in need of help with creative design for Amazon.
An addition to Sponsored Brand Video ads was Video Builder Templates. This new feature makes getting started with video advertising on Amazon much easier as Amazon provides free to use templates that you can customise with images and copy from the product detail page or other lifestyle images and copy. You can filter templates based on your category or style of video you want. Any brands that want to get started with video ads on Amazon but don’t have the budget to pay a designer or the expertise to create a video themselves should use these templates to start.
Another new feature launched for video ads was the ability to use Sponsored Brand Videos for Store pages. Before this feature was launched you could only use Sponsored Brand Videos for one product that leads to the product page of that product. Brands that want to use video ads to show a range of products on a page in their brand store rather than one specific product can take advantage of this new feature.
The new features for video ads continued as Streaming TV video ads are now available in the Amazon advertising console. This is a big move from Amazon to start making components of DSP available through the ads console and therefore more accessible to more advertisers. This means advertisers can now set up video ads for platforms off Amazon like Twitch, Freevee, during live sports on Prime Video and on apps on Fire TV.
Note – The option for TV streaming ads in the advertising console will not appear until you gain the required access from Amazon.
Sponsored Display
Sponsored display ads also got some new features in 2022. Deny lists were added for Sponsored Display ads earlier in the year. Deny lists allows advertisers to add any third-party websites that they do not want their display ads to appear on to stop their ads being shown on those sites. This provides advertisers with more control over their display ads off Amazon. This should be used by any brand that has specific websites or mobile apps in mind that do not align with the values of the brand and therefore don’t want the brand appearing on those sites or apps.
Targeting in Sponsored Display got a new feature called Contextual targeting. When using product and category targeting, Amazon will now automatically find websites or apps to target potential customers on whereas before when using this targeting type, ads would only appear on Amazon.
Another new feature for display ads launched in 2022 was Customise Creatives. This means you can now add a logo, custom lifestyle image and a headline to your display ad. Before this feature, the display ad would automatically feature the main image and product title from the product listing.
An additional component of the custom creatives that was added later in the year was Video Creative Capabilities. Brands can now add videos up to 45 seconds long to their sponsored display ads both on and off Amazon as opposed to having a static image of the advertised product. This again shows the importance that Amazon is now placing on video ads by adding them to sponsored display as well as increasing video features in sponsored brands ads. Any brand looking to increase the click-through-rate of their display ads should be considering custom and video creatives for their ads.
Amazon Marketing Stream – Real-Time Data and Performance Reporting
Probably the biggest improvement Amazon made to their advertising platform in 2022 was the introduction of Amazon Marketing Stream. This new feature significantly improves the data reporting and campaign information available to advertisers by providing real time metrics on ad campaigns. This means Amazon Marketing stream gives hourly performance data whereas before data provided would have been daily.
This is a major improvement to performance reporting for Amazon ads as the hourly reporting now means advertisers have insights into when ads perform better or worse and have higher or lower conversion rates at certain times of the day. This means advertisers can make changes to budgets at certain times for optimal performance and return on ad spend.
Brands should be using Amazon Marketing Stream if they want to utilise as much data and analytics as possible to make the best and most informed decisions on their ad’s campaigns, and improve efficiency by potentially reallocating budgets to different hours of the day. This new feature is a big step for Amazon in bringing their advertising performance reporting up to the same standard as other major digital advertising platforms and something that all advertisers on Amazon should consider implementing in their analysis of campaigns.
Some of these new features will be more beneficial to certain advertisers than others but every advertiser should find at least some of these new additions useful for improving their advertising on Amazon whether it’s doing more with videos, improving the visuals of ads, improved targeting of ads or better insights with improved analytics.
Of course, if all of the above sounds like a foreign language to you, we at eCommerce Nurse are on hand to help optimise your brands listings which can increase your selling power and visibility on Amazon. Reach out to find out how we can help your business grow in 2023!
