How to Build Your Brand on Amazon with Display Advertising
Brand building on Amazon with Sponsored Display and the Amazon Demand Side Platform (DSP) allows advertisers greater control over targeting, giving you options of who to target, which products, from yours to competitors’, and where to target.
What is display advertising on Amazon?
Unlike search ads, which are prompted by customers’ queries of advertisers’ targeted keywords or products, display ads are exclusively triggered by advertisers’ targeting of products, audiences, their viewing behaviors, and their interests, and not by customers’ searches. This means that display ads can appear to an existing audience in addition to a potential audience that consists not of your current customers but of people who have shown interest in your products, among other placements. Amazon’s display ad unit is offered as Sponsored Display and via the Amazon DSP, both of which are often referred to as display advertising strategies. Because of their granular audience segmentation and the extensive reach of the DSP’s placements both on and off Amazon, an impactful brand building strategy often includes both search and display advertising, and an effective display advertising strategy combines the use of Sponsored Display and the Amazon DSP.
This blog below from the ad experts at Perpetua will show you how to implement effective display advertising to grow your business faster.
Why should I be running display ads?
A more complex (and potentially rewarding) digital tactic compared to Amazon’s Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands (the ad units which are primarily used as search advertising tactics) Sponsored Display builds on more basic and direct search with views remarketing and product targeting. And the Amazon DSP leverages behavioral and contextual targeting to engage audiences in a comprehensive customer journey beginning from initial brand awareness, to consideration, through to purchase.
A user is 9.6 times more likely to make purchases after viewing both a Display and a Sponsored Products ad versus solely a Sponsored Products ad. The powerful combination of display ads’ full funnel targeting capabilities, easy-to-use creatives, and vast audience reach empowers advertisers to meet customers where they are with the messaging that is most likely to drive the intended actions.
Pro-tip: If cashflow constraints are holding back your Amazon ad spend and you want to be able to invest more on display advertising to build your brand, Payability can help. We provide fast funding to Amazon sellers with over $10k in monthly sales to help them reinvest in their growth.
Where do display ads appear?
Both Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP ads can be served to audiences on and off the Amazon shopping platform. On the Amazon shopping website, Sponsored Display ads can show up in many places:
- The Amazon home page (or app home page)
- Search results pages
- Below the buy box and/or product description on a product detail page (PDP)
- Top of the offer listing pages
- Customer review pages.
More inclusively, Amazon DSP ads aim to catch the attention of audiences on Amazon owned-and-operated (O&O) properties, which apart from its eCommerce platform, also includes its Prime Video site and IMDBtv, its movie & TV shows site (which is free due to ads); Kindle reader; Twitch (the live video streaming site primarily featuring video games among other creative content); and Goodreads, to name just a few.
In addition to Amazon O&O destinations, display ads can be found through its open exchange (OE) medium which includes tens of thousands of sites and apps belonging to Amazon Publisher Services and millions of third party sites through its ad exchanges. Prime real estate for ad placements on and beyond Amazon itself allows advertisers to build their brand by supplying content in the most convincing context for customers to take action, whether it is viewing a video ad, buying a product for the first time, or purchasing something again.
What do display ads look like?
Ads should be as visually engaging as they are relevant. Leading to the PDP of an advertised product, a Sponsored Display ad is automatically generated with the product listing’s main image, price point, star rating, badge, and a call-to-action. It can also include an optional custom headline and logo. Amazon DSP ads are made up of more ad formats and offer greater flexibility in creative customization. They include over-the-top (OTT), video, audio, and of course, display ads.
Like Sponsored Display ads, Amazon DSP’s Dynamic eCommerce ads (DEA) and Responsive eCommerce creatives (REC) display ads also lead to PDPs. By default, both ad types generate the product listing’s main image with the choice to select any other one within the product listing in RECs, which allows featuring up to 20 ASINs in up to 10 creative sizes and the option to customize product titles and ad copies. These ads dynamically adapt the display of the combination of their available creatives and ad copies based on Amazon’s calculated probability of a customer’s likelihood to purchase. Essentially, Amazon serves up different combinations of the ad and sees which ones perform best with the audience you’re targeting.
This means that a customer may see the same ad twice or that two customers can see the same ad, allowing advertisers to discover the combination of the automatically served creatives and ad copies that bring them closer to their specific ad objectives, whether their brand building goals for these Amazon DSP display ads are, for example, click-through rates or purchase rates.
How does targeting in display advertising work?
The ability to granularly segment audiences and precisely target them in accordance with an Amazon advertiser’s specific marketing goals is the crux of Amazon display advertising.
Targeting with Sponsored Display Advertising
Sponsored Display is made up of two targeting types: product targeting, aimed at Amazon’s categories of products as well as products, in addition to views remarketing, directed at shoppers both on and off Amazon.
Brand Defense Product Targeting aims to shield you from competition by reducing the chances of competitors’ product listings showing up on your own PDPs – the listings featuring your products. One way this works is that your complementary and/or similar products appear as ads on your PDPs to respectively cross-sell and upsell to customers. In the same way, the purpose of your wide range of additional products also showing up on your own PDPs as ads, is to keep customer traffic within the product listings that belong to you. Similarly, in Competitor Product Targeting, your product ads showing up on your competitors’ PDPs positions you to steal their customer traffic to direct to your own product listings.
One of the two options of the second targeting type, Similar to Advertised Products Views Remarketing, retargets shoppers who have viewed products similar to yours, such as your competitors’, but have not bought them in the last 30 days. The other option, Advertised Products Views Remarketing, retargets shoppers who have viewed your products. Brand building requires reaching the right audience, and product targeting’s defensive and offensive strategies and views remarketing’s objectives allow advertisers to do so with relevance.
IDEA: You can spend more on Amazon display advertising when you have fast funding at your fingertips from Payability.
Targeting with the Amazon DSP
In terms of targeting, the Amazon DSP’s programmatic advertising is defined by real-time and automated bidding so advertisers can secure the most effective ad placements seen on desktop and mobile, Amazon O&O properties, and publishers off Amazon, depending on which stage of the funnel you are targeting. The Amazon DSP’s highly refined segmentation coupled with Amazon’s extensive first-party customers and expansive third-party data (available through its partnerships) enables advertisers to target very specific audiences at every single stage of the marketing funnel.
Brand building efforts can begin at the top of the funnel (TOFU), targeting an In Market audience; Amazon shoppers who have recently considered products within specific Amazon categories. Moving lower down the funnel, advertisers can consider middle of the funnel (MOFU) strategies to drive consideration or re-engage audiences who’ve interacted with their brands’ products or those of other brands.
Similar to Sponsored Display’s Competitor Product Targeting, the Amazon DSP’s multiple Competitor Conquesting (MOFU strategy) options range from capturing customers who have viewed competitor’s product pages but did not purchase from them, alternatively, those who have previously purchased competitor products, or again, customers who have purchased but have not repurchased competitor products in a defined period.
Sponsored Display’s Brand Defense Product Targeting resembles the Amazon DSP’s cross-selling strategy in that it is another MOFU strategy that targets complementary products to customers who have previously bought from the same brand. Advertisers also have the option to select an objective, each of which corresponds with a certain stage of the funnel.
For instance, a health supplements advertiser selecting the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) objective of loyalty purchases would be optimizing for return on ad spend (ROAS), remarketing (or retargeting) to an audience limited to those who’d bought within the last year but have yet to repurchase in the last three months, an example of a time range, which advertisers can define. All of these DSP targeting strategies reaching audiences both on and off Amazon give advertisers the power to present the most relevant products, increasing the chances of converting sales on Amazon.
Using Display Advertising to Build Your Brand on Amazon
That depends on your advertising objectives, whether your product or brand is entirely new or has been selling on Amazon for some time, the types of audience segments you’d like to target, and your available ad budget.
Growth idea: Unlock the money in your account level reserve using Payability, then use that cash as a down payment on your brand building strategy via display advertising.
In terms of display advertising, running Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP ads in tandem is recommended to achieve full funnel marketing objectives. A customer is 1.7 times more likely to make a purchase after viewing the combination of an Amazon DSP display ad, a Sponsored Products ad, and an Online Video Advertising campaign compared to a customer viewing an Amazon DSP ad alone.
The Amazon DSP is available as a managed service, typically requiring a minimum spend or as a self service, with both options offered by Perpetua. Reach out to us at hello@perpetua.io to explore the ways it may be able to help in your brand building journey.