Amazon Advertising - What Advertising Formats Does Amazon Offer?

What is Amazon Advertising?

Amazon Advertising summarizes various advertising media from Amazon. With Amazon Advertising, advertising becomes as efficient and targeted as never before, because the advertising formats use the data of the Amazon marketplace in combination with increasing reach. Through advertising campaigns, experience values are also collected that companies can use for planning and optimizing their marketing strategies. The mix of big data, marketing, and sales makes Amazon Advertising an efficient marketing instrument with which revenue can be increased in a planned manner.

In this article, we give an overview of the possibilities of Amazon Advertising. We explain the functional principle of the various advertising formats and show possible goals as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each advertising medium.

Placing Advertising on Amazon: Advantages

By placing targeted advertisements through Amazon Advertising, you have the opportunity to significantly increase the visibility of your products, as they are displayed at key points on search results pages and product detail pages. Through additional sales through advertisements, the organic ranking of your product also improves. If you decide to place ads, you only pay when buyers click on your ad, because Sponsored Ads are a cost-per-click solution. This means you decide yourself how much you want to pay per click. This ensures that you don't spend more money on your campaigns than you earn through them. Amazon provides you with campaign reports to control costs. The allocation of advertising space takes place within the framework of an auction procedure.

Through advertisements, you can achieve the following goals:

• profitable increase in sales
• promotion of rapid sales
• testing new product ideas
• avoiding competition
• increasing organic sales

Placing advertising is therefore worthwhile especially when your product doesn't have good visibility and, for example, doesn't appear on the first page of search results. Products for which no advertising can be placed are the following:

• used products
• refurbished products
• adult products
• products in blocked categories

Amazon Simplifies Advertising

Before September 2018, the central advertising system was still called Amazon Marketing Services, abbreviated AMS. With the conversion to the new system "Amazon Advertising," advertising with and on Amazon is simplified.

What has changed through the conversion to Amazon Advertising?

• Instead of offering ads through three separate platforms – Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), Amazon Media Group (AMG) and Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP) – all advertising media are now united on one platform called Amazon Advertising.
• The former Amazon Advertising Platform was renamed to Amazon Demand-Side Platform (Amazon DSP for short).
• Headline Search Ads was renamed to Sponsored Brands.
• The Amazon Marketing Services Console was renamed to Advertising Console.
• Amazon Advertising now includes all advertising products including DSP, Video Ads, Product Display Ads, Brand Stores, Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Amazon's reporting service.

With these advertising media, it is possible to stand out from the multitude of Amazon providers within a product category. Because the Amazon algorithm presents interested users with products from sellers who place good advertisements.

Components of Amazon Advertising

As part of this article series, we introduce you to the most important components of Amazon Advertising. In this, we offer a professional insight into each advertising solution and then go into the goals as well as advantages and disadvantages of each advertising format in the further course.

Sponsored Ads

Sponsored ads summarize the two advertising media Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands (formerly Headline Search Ads). While the former focuses on individual products, Sponsored Brands focuses on the overarching brand and its assortment. Both advertising media are designed to reach potential buyers who are already on Amazon.de.

Read the full article here: Sponsored Ads

Sponsored Products

The Sponsored Products advertising medium directly promotes individual products as soon as customers perform search queries on Amazon.de.

The goal of Sponsored Products advertising is the sale of individual products. Between the search query of the potential buyer and the concrete offer on the product detail page, there is only one mouse click, which is why Sponsored Products are to be classified in the sales funnel above Sponsored Products.

Read the full article here: Sponsored Products

Sponsored Brands

Through Sponsored Brands ads, customers can be made aware of products they haven't specifically searched for but that nevertheless match their purchase intent. In addition to the brand as a headline of an ad, logos and ASIN-specific images can also be promoted.

Read the full article here: Sponsored Brands

Store Spotlight Ads

A special feature of Sponsored Brands campaigns are the Store Spotlight campaigns. The Store Spotlight campaign was launched by Amazon to help the sub-pages of a brand store gain more visibility. In the banner of the ad, three store sub-pages can be highlighted, which can redirect to this with a mouse click.

Read the full article here: Store Spotlight

Amazon Video Ads

With videos, you can explain complex products to your potential customers in a few seconds or tell emotional stories about your brand. Video ads are displayed on Amazon pages, on Amazon devices such as Fire TV, as well as on third-party pages. Even though this new Amazon advertising format is still in the testing phase, the advantages compared to classic television advertising are clearly obvious.

Read the full article here: Amazon Video Ads

Sponsored Display Ads

Sponsored Display Ads are banners including ad text and logo. You can achieve a very high reach with this advertising medium – on the Amazon marketplace and beyond. Display ads appear on Amazon.de next to search results and at the level of customer reviews. Outside the marketplace, Amazon uses its own websites, as well as apps and pages from third-party providers to spread your advertising message. The ad format automatically adapts to the different sizes of advertising spaces on laptop, tablet, and mobile. Vendors additionally have the option to advertise coupons with which they can give potential buyers a discount on certain products.

Read the full article here: Sponsored Display Ads

Amazon Brand Store - Your Sales Page on the Marketplace

Brand Stores offer the opportunity for retailers, sellers, and agencies to create their own website with their own URL on amazon.de. In a personalized environment, you can present your product portfolio and explain the unique selling points of your offer in detail to potential buyers. Providers can tell their story behind the products directly at the point of sale. Store websites promote cross-selling and up-selling. Additionally, the development of your brand on the Amazon marketplace can take a big step forward with this.

Read the full article here: Amazon Brand Store

Amazon Attribution

Amazon Attribution represents a new advertising console that enables sellers like vendors to gain insights into key figures from various marketing channels, such as Google, Facebook, or Instagram. Amazon Attribution is intended to make the individual touchpoints of customers with a brand with multi-channel orientation more traceable and thus also provide information about customers who come from outside Amazon.

Read the full article here: Amazon Attribution.

Programmatic Advertising: Amazon DSP vs Google Ads

With the restructuring of its advertising offering, Amazon has also renamed its programmatic advertising offering "Amazon Advertising Platform" to "Amazon Demand-Side Platform" (Amazon DSP). Programmatic advertising is a software-based method of automatically booking, displaying, and optimizing online advertising. Amazon DSP enables you to spread your own advertising message on Amazon's own solutions (e.g., Amazon Shopping, Prime Music, Audible, etc.) as well as on pages and in apps of publishing partners. To use this advertising network, it doesn't matter whether you sell your own products on the Amazon marketplace or not.

Read the full article here: Programmatic Advertising: Amazon DSP vs. Google Ads