Sponsored Product campaigns have long been the bread and butter of Amazon’s advertising platform. These campaigns are fast and easy to launch, making them the most popular and accessible option for advertisers on Amazon.
Sponsored Product campaigns have been a consistent, bottom-funnel campaign type until now. Amazon announced on Wednesday, August 16th, that the flagship ad product is getting a new placement…off Amazon.
This is a huge development for these ad campaigns. Historically, Sponsored Product ads appear on Amazon within the search result pages and on product detail pages. With this change, Amazon is now serving Sponsored Product ads on “…premium apps and websites, including Pinterest, BuzzFeed, Hearst Newspapers, Raptive, and Ziff Davis brands like Lifehacker and Mashable…” according to the e-commerce giant. You can read more on Amazon’s guide to discovering new selections with Sponsored Products.
The goal, as Amazon states, is to help shoppers discover more products and deliver them directly to the product detail pages on Amazon as they are browsing elsewhere on the internet.
As Amazon advertisers, we have long understood that the journey for many shoppers does not happen in isolation but rather across multiple sites, social media, email, and more. Amazon’s expansion of Sponsored Product ads off-site falls in line with this expectation.
To take advantage of this new off-site opportunity, Amazon states that there is nothing advertisers need to do to enable their campaigns to be shown on other sites. Sponsored Product ads will automatically be shown when the Amazon algorithm believes a shopper will be interested in your advertised product. Supposedly, this will be gauged based on page context, the Sponsored Product campaign, and the cost-per-click bids that are assigned.
This new advancement of the Sponsored Product campaign type leaves advertisers with many questions.
- How will Amazon determine targeting for these off-site campaigns?
- Will there be other targeting options beyond keywords and product ASINs for Sponsored Product campaigns?
- Will there be the ability to select which off-site placements are used in an ad campaign?
- What additional data will be shown to gauge performance? Right now, Amazon says that reporting will be available in the placement reports download, but no additional information has been made available.
As we learn more about this new option for these Sponsored Product campaigns and what this means for the ad, we will continue to update this post.
Until now, Sponsored Display campaigns have been the only option available to show off-Amazon ads on other sites. Sponsored Display campaigns that serve off-Amazon ads have been reliant on audience targeting up until this point. We are eager to see how Amazon has adapted a keyword-based campaign (Sponsored Product) to function similarly to the audience-driven Sponsored Display campaigns.
As the consumer journey continues to evolve, so too do the tools that advertisers can leverage to guide that journey. This makes it critical for advertisers to stay up to date on the latest advances that Amazon and other ad platforms publish. Be sure you are using the latest campaign options and are continually testing these advances to serve your campaigns best. This advance from Amazon is no different.
