Amazon Sponsored Products and Amazon Sponsored Brands are both PPC advertising products offered by Amazon. However, they are two different services that serve slightly different purposes. These services help sellers drive more traffic to their products and increase sales.
Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and the new Sponsored Display Ads furnish a world of opportunities to sellers to put their products in the limelight and in front of the right customer group. But all these ad formats are not equally created.
In this article, we will explain the difference between Amazon Sponsored Products and Amazon Sponsored Brands so that you can use them to your best advantage when advertising on Amazon.
What is an Amazon Sponsored Product?
Amazon Sponsored Products are the listed individual products that are promoted on Amazon. Such targeted ads help sellers increase the visibility of their products when the keyword they bid for appears in the customer’s search results. It also gets appears on the product detail page of the website. Concisely, Amazon Sponsored Products are the PPC (Pay Per Click) ads that will enable you to drive traffic to your product listings on Amazon.
When customers see that the product is displayed at the top of the search result, they feel it is popular and should also buy it. Henceforth, it boosts the sales of the product. The primary goal behind using this ad campaign is to boost the product’s sales, thereby increasing its visibility and ranking among
competitors’ products. You can find various Sponsored products report that will help you understand how your PPC ad campaign is performing. You can view these reports in one place by importing them into a warehouse of your choice using our Amazon Sponsored Products connector.
What is an Amazon Sponsored Brand?
Amazon Sponsored Brand ads enhance the brand’s awareness among the customers. Amazon Sponsored Brand Ads operate in a procedure wherein you pay only when someone clicks on your ad. A point of mention here is that these ads carry a higher CPC than Sponsored Product Ads as they have the edge over others. It is at the sole discretion of Amazon as to where these ads will appear, and it depends on the amount of the bid. When an online customer clicks on this ad, he will be navigated to a particular product category, a product listing, or your Amazon storefront. The amazon sponsored brand ads are cost-effective. The objective of these ads is to drive more customers to the website, thereby enhancing brand awareness.
Sponsored Brands can help customers highlight their brands and products with creative ads that appear in relevant Amazon shopping results. Sponsored Brands ads reach and engage new audiences with custom headlines, videos, and images, consisting of three different formats: Store Spotlight, Video, and Product Collection. In this article, we are focusing on the differences between Amazon Sponsored Products vs. Sponsored Brands. While a campaign is ongoing, Amazon Sponsored Brand Ads provide new ad placements and bidding options, as well as improved ways to monitor performance. You can view these reports in one place by importing them into a warehouse of your choice using our Amazon Sponsored Brands connector.
How to create Amazon Sponsored Products?
Amazon Sponsored Products is an advertising solution used by thousands of sellers on Amazon. It could transform the way you sell. It facilitates the sellers with an opportunity to get their products featured on the first few search result pages, which are directed at targeted buyers on both desktop and mobile. Similarly, it helps relevant buyers/shoppers discover a product amidst thousands of product listings.
Registration
- First, log onto the Seller Central Account with your Username and Password.
- Register for Sponsored Products.
- Next, accept the terms and conditions, and click “Join Now.”
- You will be directed to the campaign creation page under the Campaign Manager.
Creating Advertising Campaigns
- Name of the Ad Campaign: Enter a campaign name that you have planned and choose the option of “Sponsored Products.”
- Daily Budget: This is the average amount you have planned and are willing to spend per day.
- Enter Start and End Date: The ideal way is to provide the “Start Date” and leave the “End Date” blank to allow the campaign always to stay “live.” Doing this means you do not have to create a new campaign and can update the budget when required.
- Targeting Type: You can select your target type by either manual or automatic targeting. You can benefit by selecting automatic targeting, as, through automatic targeting, Amazon makes your ads available to all relevant customer searches based on your product information, and you are not required to enter specific keywords. In the case of manual targeting, you will have to add keywords yourself manually.
Creating an Advertising Group
The next step will be to create an ad group which will be a collection of all your products/ASINs that you want to advertise under one group.
- First, you need to enter the ad group name.
- Next, you must enter the Bid, which is your CPC Bid. The maximum bid amount is what you are ready to pay when a customer clicks on your ad. It can be as low as ₹1, but we suggest you begin with ₹5 as a CPC bid for optimum ad performance.
- Select the products you plan to advertise from your listings under this ad group. The next step is to save the relevant changes.
- Amazon will review the campaign and will set it to run if approved.
Campaign review can take up to three working days. You will receive an email that informs you about your campaign status. Upon successful approval of your campaign, the ad will start running immediately. Amazon will collect data for you to apply to future campaigns if you run an automatic campaign. It may take up to 2 to 4 weeks to gather enough data to see which campaigns are doing well.
How can Amazon Sponsor Brands be created?
A new Sponsored Brands (formerly Headline Search) Ad campaign can be set up and completed by following these steps within Amazon Seller Central.
Registration
- Log into your seller central account.
- Navigate to the “Advertisement” Tab. Then navigate to the “Campaign Manager.”
- Click on the “Create Campaign” option and select “Sponsored Brands.”
- Under the “Settings” tab, enter a campaign name, campaign start, and end date, and set the campaign budget. You can set a daily budget or a lifetime budget. Next, select the brand you are going to advertise.
- Next, select the ad format. Different ad formats include:
- Product collection
- Store spotlight
- Video
- Then choose a landing page for drawing ad traffic. You can either select your Amazon store (including subpages) or a new landing page where you must select at least two products to display.
Keywords and Ad copy
After registration, you need to add relevant keywords and set up bids. But first, you should pick relevant and profitable keywords and set up bids for your target keywords.
Now, you must produce creatives with personalized text and images. For creatives, you need to enter your brand name with a maximum of thirty characters, a logo image, and an amazon sponsored brand’s headline with a limit of fifty characters. The last step is to click on the “launch campaign” option.
After all the above steps, the sponsored brand ad must go through Amazon’s review process. This process usually takes 24 hours to finish. However, it could go longer, up to three business days.
What are the targeting options in Amazon Sponsored Product and Amazon Sponsored Brands?
- Keyword targeting is available for both Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands.
- ASIN and category targeting are available for Sponsored Products.
Keyword Targeting
Amazon Keyword Match Type
Match types will allow you to control what customer search queries will match the keywords in your efforts of manually targeting Amazon advertising campaigns. It is nearly impossible to account for all the various phrases a customer could use when searching for a product on Amazon. The keyword match types help you combat that challenge.
Using match types to your advantage will help you find new customers, discover the best keywords to target to meet your goals, and eliminate wasted spending.
As with Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, Amazon Ads has a keyword match type to refine targeting.
| Keyword Match Type | Details |
| Broad Match | Search terms must contain all the keyword terms or close variations in any order. |
| Phrase Match | Search terms must contain all the keywords in the same order |
| Exact Match | Search terms match your keyword word by word. |
Negative Keyword Match
Negative Match types are available for only Sponsored Products. Negative Keywords reduce costs by ensuring you only advertise for the most relevant searches and do not waste money on irrelevant click traffic. These are searches for the exact match type or phrase match. It is a phrase match that is less restrictive by allowing additional words before and/or after. Additionally, an exact negative match is more targeted – blocking the exact search entered by Amazon. Sponsored Brands do not have Negative phrases or negative exact match types.
How to select Keywords on the Amazon Marketplace?
You can insert keywords like those from Google Ads or use Amazon’s suggested keywords. The suggested keywords are generated from customer search queries that drive traffic to the ASINs in your campaign on Amazon. Suggested keywords are automatically set to a broad match and cannot be changed. In addition, you can use the advertising console, bulk operations upload, and API to input keywords.
Product Targeting
Product Targeting is just available to Sponsored Products only. This targeting option provides more control when your ads appear on product detail pages and search results. Product targeting for manual campaigns targets individual products or product categories. This helps shoppers find your product when searching for products on Amazon or browsing detail pages and categories. Automatic targeting, product targeting, and negative targeting options are not available for Sponsored Brands, just Sponsored Products.
Targeting by ASIN (Individual products)
ASINs are Amazon’s unique identifiers for individual products, like an SKU or inventory code. ASIN targeting suggests individual products like the product you are advertising. Another way to find relevant products is by searching for specific products in the search field or uploading a list of ASINs. Targeting by ASIN shows your adverts to people browsing certain ASINs on Amazon.
Targeting by category
Categories are groups of ASINs organized by similarities. Each category will have an estimate of the total products contained within it. You can limit the ASINs in your category with the “refine” button. This allows you only to target ASINs associated with specific brands, prices, and star reviews.
Targeting by category shows your adverts to people browsing within product categories, with options to refine for the price, brand, and star ratings. These refinements allow you to use specific criteria for when your adverts are shown. We recommend using the most specific category available. Category targeting enables you to refine price, brand, and star ratings. These refinements allow you to set specific criteria for when Amazon will show your ad.
Negative Product Targeting
Use negative product targeting to prevent your ads from appearing on specific search results or detail pages that do not meet your performance goals. Like negative keywords, negative product targeting blocks irrelevant traffic. Negative product targeting can filter out specific products or brands to prevent your ads from showing for these. It is also possible to search for products and then exclude these too. Prevent your ads from appearing on specific search results or detail pages.
What is the difference between Amazon Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands?
Sponsored Brands will always be on the top spot on the search results page. It allows sending shoppers directly to your custom build brand store as more brand exposure is at stake. Because of the broad exposure, there will be so much potential that Sponsored Brands will continue to be under-utilized. As a result, sellers and buyers could be able to churn out only 11% of ad revenue from Sponsored Brands.
Sponsored Products have 0.42%, and Sponsored Brands have a 0.38% median click-through rate for this.
| Parameter | Amazon Sponsored Products | Amazon Sponsored Brands |
| Benefit | Cost-effective PPC ad type when compared to other PPC ads | Best used for brand awareness and drawing potential customers |
| Automatic targeting | Available | Not available |
| Keyword targeting | Available | Available |
| Product targeting | Available for specific products only | Not available |
| Ad placement |
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| Eligibility |
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| Reports |
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Read more about different Amazon reports that benefit your business.
What is an Amazon Sponsored Display?
If you are an Amazon vendor or a Brand-Registered Seller, you can access several powerful advertising tools to help scale your business on Amazon. One of those tools is Sponsored Display Ads. If you want to retarget Amazon visitors to your listing, then Amazon Sponsored Display Ads is your go-to PPC ad type.
Sponsored Display Ads allow you to reach relevant audiences on and off Amazon. So, your ads will not only be displayed across various Amazon pages but also will be visible to customers on third-party websites and apps. It is a self-service advertising solution launched by Amazon for its advertisers. Product targeting works in the same manner for Sponsored Products as well as Sponsored Display Ads. However, in the case of Sponsored Display, you can permit Amazon to extend product targeting for an item automatically. You can reach beyond Amazon as they can exponentially grow their businesses by boosting their discoverability. You can potentially target a huge proportion of the customer base on Amazon with the help of Amazon Sponsored Display.
How Amazon sponsored display ads different from other offerings?
The significant difference between the Amazon Sponsored Display Ads and other offerings is that the Display Ads will not appear based on customer keyword searches. Unlike the Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brand ads, the Sponsored Display ads work slightly differently. The Sponsored Display ads tend to serve the customers if:
- They looked at the products’ lists which look like the seller’s product listings.
- They have previously viewed or bought the seller’s product.
- They have purchased a product in the same category as those of sellers.
As you are aware, Sponsored Product Ads are beneficial for launching products and having the product reach the first page of search results which can be positively lucrative. But Sponsored Display Ads off-Amazon advertising tends to work differently.
Launched in 2019, Sponsored Display is an additional form of Amazon PPC advertising and is still growing in popularity among sellers. In 2021, 25% of the third-party sellers will use Sponsored Display ads, and spending on this type of ad accounts for 2% of Amazon’s advertising revenue.
Learn more about Amazon PPC advertising to understand what PPC campaigns can help you grow your business.
Conclusion
Amazon Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands help brands advertise on the Amazon marketplace. Understanding Amazon Advertising Console’s various dashboards and reports will grant insight into the ad performance of your sponsored products and sponsored brand campaigns.
We understand that as your business objectives grow, your data needs grow with them. We at Saras Analytics can help with our eCommerce-focused Data pipeline (Daton) and custom ML and AI solutions to ensure you always have the correct ad data at the right time. Request a demo and envision how reporting is supercharged with a 360° view.
