One of the best ways to ensure success through advertising on Amazon is by defending your turf. What I mean by this is when a potential customer is searching for your brand or even better is on one of your product detail pages, you don’t want it to be easy for the customer to click away and purchase from the competition.
The first step that a lot of advertisers take to help prevent this is by making campaigns focused on branded keywords. This way, when customers are searching specifically for a brand, it’s more likely that ads for the brand’s products and the brand store will show. This is a crucial step in getting customers searching for your brand and your products onto your product detail pages. The defense of your turf can’t stop there though.
The product detail pages on Amazon are loaded with ads. A good portion of the time, these ads are the competition targeting specific Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (ASINs) so their version of the same product is showing to the customer when they might be close to making a purchase. To protect your brand, it is key to generate campaigns that specifically target your own ASINs.
An important aspect to remember is that it is almost impossible to have your ads show up 100% of the time. There will be times when the competition has ads on your product’s page, but the goal is to show your brand’s products earlier in the ad placements or more frequently on product pages.
You can use all three campaign types (Sponsored Display, Sponsored Product, and Sponsored Brand) to help prevent the competition from showing as best you can. In this post, we will cover these campaign types and where they show up on the Amazon product detail page.
Sponsored Display
The newest type of campaign that Amazon has introduced is the Sponsored Display campaign, and it has maybe the most notable ad placements on product detail pages. Sponsored Display ads can show up in three different spots. When making these campaigns, it is important to know that Amazon determines your ad placement based on its algorithm and bidding system. Let’s look at an example of what competition could do with Sponsored Display ads to your product detail page with what Hisense is doing to Samsung on this TVs page. The first spot is on the very top of the page:
This ad could catch the attention of the customer before they even start looking into the content on the detail page. So in this example, the customer could click away to the Hisense TV before looking through the Samsung TVs page if at all. Now, if the customer either misses this first ad placement or chooses to not click away, there are still two more Sponsored Display ad placements that could influence the shopper to click on your ad.
This placement could grab the customer’s attention as they are looking through the bullets and other content on this page. If we scroll down the page a little more, we see the third Sponsored Display placement directly below the Buy Box and add to cart block.
What makes these last two placements interesting is that they both show up very close to where the customer clicks to add the Samsung TV to their cart. So these ads allow Hisense to try to capture the customer’s focus one last time before they make a purchase. With the next two campaign types, we can see how Samsung has tried to combat some of the competition showing on their products.
Sponsored Products
As you get further down these pages, the ads don’t stop showing. When you make a Sponsored Product campaign and target ASINs, the carousels further down the page are where these ads can show. As you can see, Samsung has much better coverage in this campaign type, and if the customer wants to shop around more and looks to this carousel, they would be more likely to click to a different Samsung TV than a competition’s TV.
In the case above, the products in this carousel all have an average rating of 4 stars or above. This isn’t always the case, and down the page further, there is another carousel that doesn’t have this rating requirement. Samsung is also well represented here. One aspect to consider with Sponsored Product campaigns is the pure volume of ads. I only included the first page of ads for each of these examples. Your competition will often get placement in these areas. This makes it even more important to also have your products represented in these spots as well.
Sponsored Brand
You’ll typically find Sponsored Brand ads prominently displayed on the search results page, but they still have a spot on the product detail page as well.
A big component of these Sponsored Brand ads is that if the customer clicks on one, it will take them to the brand store and not directly to a product. Samsung once again has good coverage here, and if the customer clicks one of their two placements, they will be able to scroll through all the products that Samsung has on Amazon.
In this case, Samsung has a Sponsored Brand campaign focused around Samsung TVs for customers shopping for a TV as well as a campaign focused around their brand (the ad with the laptop) for customers that are shopping for the brand of Samsung.
To best set up your brand defense strategy for success, it is important to include product targeting and to target your brand’s ASINs by using all three campaign types. This way you can have potential ad coverage in as many different spots on the product detail pages as possible. Another step to take is to constantly be checking your product detail pages to see what kind of placement you are getting, and if you are unhappy with these placements, you can adjust the bids accordingly.
Also, remember that you aren’t guaranteed to always get the best ad placements, so when competition is getting good placement on your product detail pages, it isn’t necessarily because the strategy you have in place isn’t working or you aren’t bidding enough. Take note of this, and continue to monitor because your strategy could be working very well still.
It is almost impossible to have all the best ad placements 100% of the time. It takes time to set up and monitor these campaigns, but it is well worth it in the end if you are making it hard for a customer to click away from your brand to a competitor’s page or store.
