What Is Amazon Sponsored Products Ads? What Is the Main Difference Between This Type of Advertising from Others?

Amazon Sponsored Product Ads, also known as Amazon Adwords, is a product ad that appears in Amazon’s organic search results. Not like other types of Advertising, Amazon Sponsored Products is easy and cheaper. Due to the fact that such advertisements are placed directly in the list of organic search results, buyers are more likely to click on it and then buy the product.

Getting started on advertising products with ASAs is so easy, because such a campaign can be set up automatically without a thorough preliminary investigation. Plus, if you're not good at advertising, you can start this amazing journey with just such an advertising campaign.

Why Does the Seller Need to Use This Type of Advertising?

There are many good reasons why you need to use this kind of advertising. Five of the most popular ones are:

• Brand Awareness Raising: Your advertisements will show right where clients will see them, like on the first page of search results as well as product pages, giving visibility a fast boost.
• Attracting Potential Clients: This type of Ads can help sellers to attract potential clients, because not every buyer who is looking for products has already made a choice. When you advertise your products, you increase your reach.
• Growth In Sale: This method helps to boost your sales by reaching clients looking for a product similar to yours, then driving these traffic into your own product page.
• Built Brand:  This type of advertising also helps you to build a brand as well as product trust for succeeding repeat sales.
• Cost control. This type of advertising involves pay-per-clicks, so you will only pay when potential buyers click on an Ad. In addition, you can set a daily budget, set fixed or dynamic bids, and this will allow you to control costs and not exceed the budget.

Who Can Use This Type of Advertising?

The Sponsored Products Ads on Amazon works ideally for professional vendors, sellers, agencies, KDP authors, as well as book vendors. Products should be included in any or more eligible categories as well as Buy Box eligible to be able to promote or advertise.

Where Will Such Ads Appear on the Search Results Page?

Sponsored Products Ads are shown directly in the natural search results on Amazon. That is the reason why it is beneficial as well as reliable. Clients or shoppers that browse Amazon to purchase something see suitable Ads for their search during the searching and purchasing process. In general, ASP Ads can be shown in various places during your search and purchase process, such as top of search results, in the middle, at the end, and also next to the search results, on product pages. Advertisements will be displayed no matter what device buyers use to search (mobile or desktop).

What Products are Forbidden to Use in Such an Advertising Campaign?

At the moment, this Ad campaign prohibits adverts of used products, refurbished items, adult products, as well as items under closed categories.

How to Set Up Amazon Sponsored Product Ads?

When using Sponsored Products, you have two options for customizing your campaign:

1. Automatic, in which, based on the Amazon search algorithm, the most relevant search queries of buyers for your product are selected. And it’s for such clients that your advertisements will be displayed (provided that your bid is winning).
2. Manual, in which targeting is configured by the seller. This campaign requires a deep immersion in the advertising process, the selection of keywords, etc., therefore it is not recommended for newbies.

In the Automated Ad campaign, you don’t specify keywords that your Ads should target, which greatly simplifies the setup process. However, this way you lose most of the control, so you can spend part of your daily budget inefficiently. If the product listing is optimized correctly (title, description, bullet points, images), such an advertising campaign will work quite well.

In more detail we talked about the Automatic Advertising Campaign earlier. However, in connection with the recent update of Amazon Sponsored Products, we’ll write about some of the changes in the Automatic campaign.

Now you can improve your targeting using one of the available options in the Campaign Manager:

1. close match;
2. loose match;
3. pages of those products that complement your product;
4. pages with products similar to yours (for example, pages with products of your competitors).

Which option to choose? It depends on your goals and financial capabilities. Try campaigning with a variety of targeting options to determine the best marketing strategy.

As for the Manual Advertising Campaign, there have also been changes. You can choose Keyword targeting or Product Targeting, which now allows you to configure additional options for better optimization. With Manual Product targeting, you can use categories or specific ASINs to configure campaign parameters. At the same time, you can also specify additional options, for example, specify refinements by brand, price or rating. All this allows you to more accurately customize the Advertising Campaign and find an individual marketing strategy that is beneficial to you.

Bids

You bid the highest amount which you are willing to shell out once shoppers click on Ads of your items. When the bid is competitive, there is a chance that your ad will be displayed once it matches a customer search.

There are three bidding options available to sellers at Amazon Sponsored Products to help build the right advertising strategy:

1. Dynamic Bids - lower;
2. Dynamic Bids - higher or lower;
3. Fixed Bids.

Dynamic Bids - lower means, that Amazon will automatically lower your bid if the likelihood of converting clicks to sales is low. 

Dynamic Bids - higher or lower means that Amazon will increase your bid (to a maximum of 100%) if the probability of conversion of clicks to sales is high, and lower the rate for clicks that are less likely to lead to sales.

Fixed Bids is a strategy in which you select a bid for different Ad placements (Top of search results, Product pages, Rest of search), and this bid does not change depending on the probability of conversion of clicks to sales.

Product Targeting in Sponsored Manual Ads

Setting targeting is possible in two directions:

1. Categories - you can choose one of the proposed categories or find a suitable category yourself;
2. ASIN - use ASIN of certain products that are similar to yours.

In addition, you can specify options of an advertising campaign, for example, rating, price or brand.

You can use both targeting options (Categories, ASIN) in the same Ad campaign.

Another addition is Negative product targeting. With this option, you can fine-tune your Advertising Campaign and make sure that your Ads do not display in specific search results or product detail pages.

Now you are ready to launch your Ad campaign.

Conclusions

Amazon Sponsored Product Ads is a valuable and lucrative addition to ad strategy. However, you have to extra careful when using it, and it is highly suggested to explore the latest mechanisms as well as their performance before giving out time and budgets.