Amazon is one of the most visited websites globally, with over 310 million active customers, making it a dominant force in online retail. This enormous audience is why the Amazon Ads platform is such a powerful tool—it allows your brand to gain visibility in the world’s largest online marketplace.
When you advertise on Amazon, you’re not just showcasing your products; you’re also leveraging the trust and credibility that Amazon has built with its customer base. This is why more and more brands are increasing their advertising budgets to make the most of Amazon’s reach. For any e-commerce business, Amazon advertising isn’t just an option; it’s essential.
That said, diving into Amazon ads can feel daunting. How do you navigate Amazon’s advertising ecosystem? What types of ads should you choose to achieve your business goals? And where exactly do these ads appear?
To help you get started and make informed decisions, we’ve put together a comprehensive guide that breaks down the different types of Amazon ads and how they can work for your brand.
Types of Amazon Ads
Amazon offers a variety of advertising options designed to help you find, attract, engage, and retain customers at every stage of their purchasing journey. To kick things off, there are three primary types of ad campaigns you can create on Amazon.
Let’s take a closer look:
1. Amazon PPC
Amazon PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is an advertising platform that enables sellers to promote their products directly within the Amazon marketplace. The PPC model means you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, making it a cost-effective way to drive targeted traffic to your listings. This advertising option is available to individual sellers, brands, agencies, and even those using Amazon’s self-service portals.
With Amazon PPC, you have the ability to target specific keywords, allowing your products to appear in relevant search results and even on competitor product pages. This strategic visibility can boost brand awareness, increase sales, drive visits to your Amazon Store, and more.
Learn more about the three main types of Amazon PPC ads—what they are, how they work, and how they can benefit your business—below!
Sponsored Brands
Sponsored Brand ads play a crucial role not just in promoting individual products, but in building brand awareness on Amazon. While it’s important to drive sales, showcasing your brand identity is equally essential, and this is where Sponsored Brand ads excel.
Previously known as Headline ads, Sponsored Brands are PPC ads designed to spotlight your brand and up to three of your products. These ads appear prominently as banner placements at the top, side, or bottom of the search results page, capturing shoppers’ attention right from the start of their search.
They use both static images and video creatives to enhance brand discovery and encourage shoppers to consider your brand during their purchasing journey.
Benefits of Sponsored Brands
You have a high level of control over how your ad looks, enabling you to customize its appearance to match your brand identity.
Video ads can be incorporated to enhance engagement and boost conversions.
Sponsored Brand ads help build trust and establish authority with both new and returning customers.
They also allow you to target your competitors’ loyal customer base by appearing in search results when users are looking for competing brands.
Amazon Sponsored Display Ads
Sponsored Display ads are a powerful display advertising solution designed for businesses of all sizes, whether they sell on Amazon or not. Leveraging machine learning and multiple ad formats, Sponsored Display helps businesses reach customers not only on Amazon but also across thousands of apps and websites.
Sponsored Display is a self-service platform that allows you to target relevant customers both on and off Amazon. It’s an efficient tool for sellers and vendors alike, providing a way to enhance campaign performance and maximize reach.
Sponsored Display ads are placed automatically based on your chosen targeting strategy, ensuring that they show up in the best locations to drive the outcomes you want.
Benefits of Sponsored Display ads
It makes it easy to promote your products with automatically generated campaigns that are optimized for high conversion rates. This saves you time and effort while delivering impactful results.
Retargeting potential customers becomes more straightforward. While Amazon’s DSP (Demand-Side Platform) also offers retargeting, Sponsored Display simplifies the process, allowing you to quickly reach previous visitors without the complexity.
Sponsored Display ads provide direct access to Amazon’s display inventory without the need to navigate the more stringent requirements of Amazon DSP. This flexibility makes it a go-to option for businesses looking to broaden their reach without jumping through extra hoops.
Amazon Sponsored Products
Sponsored Products is a PPC advertising format that directs potential customers straight to your product detail page. This ad type is designed to increase sales by making it easier for shoppers to find and purchase your products with just a couple of clicks.
Sponsored Products help promote individual items, enhance brand visibility, and boost sales, not just on Amazon, but also across select premium apps and websites. This ad format offers a cost-effective and data-driven way for both new and experienced advertisers to plan, launch, and optimize campaigns with ease.
Here’s how Sponsored Products work: You choose specific keywords or products for your ad to appear when customers search for relevant terms on Amazon. The goal is to match your ad with shoppers’ intent, encouraging them to click and view your product detail page.
You maintain full control over your bids and budgets, allowing you to fine-tune spending and measure performance in real-time. These ads can appear on both desktop and mobile browsers, as well as the Amazon mobile app.
Benefits of Sponsored Products
Build sales momentum for newly launched items, helping them gain visibility and traction quickly.
Achieve top positions in search results for targeted keywords, ensuring your products are seen by more potential customers.
Tap into your competitors’ customer base by positioning your ads on their product detail pages, giving you a chance to attract shoppers considering similar products.
2. Amazon DSP (Demand Side Platform)
Amazon DSP (Demand-Side Platform) is an advanced programmatic advertising solution that allows businesses to buy ad placements across the web to target both new and existing audiences. Unlike traditional ad buying, Amazon DSP uses Amazon’s vast data and shopping insights to help you connect with highly relevant audiences wherever they spend their time—whether that’s on Amazon or other websites, apps, and even audio platforms.
You can extend your reach far beyond by leveraging display, video, and even audio ads (currently in beta), allowing you to create rich, engaging experiences for your potential customers.
Amazon Live
Amazon Live offers an exciting way to engage with customers through real-time, interactive video content. Through live streaming, you can demonstrate product features, share stories, and provide valuable insights that help customers make informed purchasing decisions—all in a format that feels personal and authentic.
You can create your own Amazon Livestream using the Amazon Live Creator app, or partner with Amazon for a professionally produced live event. This feature is especially effective during major shopping events like Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, where the heightened visibility can significantly boost your brand’s reach.
By tapping into live video content, you can capture attention, drive engagement, and ultimately, increase sales.
Custom Ads
Amazon Custom Ads offer a tailored advertising solution that allows brands to utilize all available ad formats on Amazon in a cohesive, full-funnel strategy. This approach is designed to provide a more personalized and brand-centric experience, making it an ideal option for advertisers looking to create a distinctive presence.
Custom Ads can be fully customized with your brand’s messaging, visuals, and fonts, ensuring that your advertisements align perfectly with your brand identity. This flexibility allows for the creation of unique campaigns that stand out and resonate with shoppers, particularly those encountering your brand for the first time. By integrating custom ads into your overall Amazon strategy, you can engage customers at every stage of their purchasing journey, from initial discovery to final conversion.
Amazon Audio Ads (Beta)
Amazon Audio Ads offer a powerful way for brands to reach diverse, ad-supported audiences across both Amazon’s first-party and third-party streaming audio services. These ads are designed to engage listeners in those “screen-free” moments, whether at home, in the car, or on the go, making them an ideal tool for connecting with hard-to-reach audiences during times when traditional ads might be overlooked.
With Amazon Audio Ads, you can align your brand messaging with streaming audio content, helping you build awareness in a less crowded, more personal environment. Although brands cannot choose the specific songs that accompany their ads, this format leverages Amazon’s advanced data and shopping insights to help advertisers reach relevant audiences.
This marks Amazon’s first foray into incorporating paid product placements within its Alexa voice-activated ecosystem, expanding the potential for audio ads to integrate seamlessly into everyday life.
Amazon Posts
Amazon Posts offers brand-registered sellers a unique way to share lifestyle images and product-related content through a social media-style feed directly on Amazon. This feature allows customers to scroll through your feed, engage with your content, and click through to your product detail pages. The goal of Amazon Posts is not just to showcase your products but also to tell your brand’s story and encourage deeper exploration of your offerings.
Content from Instagram or Facebook can easily be repurposed for your Amazon feed, providing a seamless way to engage with your audience. Customers can find these posts in your brand’s feed and click directly on your product pages. Amazon Posts are visible on iOS, Android, and mobile web, ensuring accessibility across different devices.
Creating Amazon Posts is free, giving brands the opportunity to share inspiring, story-driven content that captures the essence of their brand.
Video Ads
Amazon OTT (Over-the-Top) and out-stream ads provide brands with the opportunity to reach customers through video content across Amazon’s websites, mobile apps, Fire tablets, and more. These ads offer a dynamic way to tell your brand’s story, creating engaging experiences that captivate audiences beyond static images or text.
Why should you consider Amazon video ads?
Amazon video ads are strategically placed on platforms where customers are already engaged, ensuring your content reaches them when they are most likely to consume it.
These ads make it easy for advertisers to run multi-language campaigns, increasing your reach to diverse audiences.
Video ads are highly effective in driving conversions, particularly when they resonate with the right audience.
Traditional marketing often lacks clear performance metrics, but with Amazon video ads, you can gain valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, helping you optimize your campaigns for better results.
With Amazon’s vast customer data, you can share your brand message with users in a personalized and impactful way, delivering content when they are most likely to engage.
Additional Amazon Advertising Solutions
Lock Screen Ads
Lock Screen Ads offer a unique way for sellers to promote eBooks directly to targeted Kindle and Fire Tablet users. These ads are tailored based on user interests, such as specific genres, and appear on the lock screen of the device, capturing attention as soon as the device is activated.
These ads come in full-screen or banner formats, and when readers tap on them, they are taken straight to the book’s detail page, where they can easily purchase and download the title.
With Amazon Lock Screen Ads, you can:
Control bids and budgets, paying only when customers click on your ad, making it a cost-effective option.
Target the right audience who are already interested in eBooks similar to yours, increasing the chances of driving sales.
Add custom text to your ad to give potential readers a glimpse into your eBook’s content, helping entice them to click through and make a purchase.
Amazon Attribution
Although not an advertising platform itself, Amazon Attribution is a free tool designed to help brand-registered sellers measure the effectiveness of their external marketing efforts. This tool provides in-depth analytics and insights, allowing sellers to track which non-Amazon marketing channels—such as social media, search, display, video, and email marketing—are driving the most traffic and conversions to their Amazon listings.
With Amazon Attribution, you can easily assess the impact and ROI of your external campaigns. By understanding the performance of your external marketing efforts, you can refine your strategies and optimize your budget for better results, making Amazon Attribution a key resource for enhancing overall marketing efficiency.
Optimizing Your Amazon Ads
If boosting your campaign effectiveness is a top priority, AdvertizeIQ is here to assist you in multiple ways. Optimizing your Amazon PPC campaigns requires fine-tuning your ads to enhance performance, increase visibility, and maximize ROI. Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t worry—we’ve got you covered.
How to Lower Your ACoS
Our advanced dashboard analyzes thousands of keywords, products, and campaigns to identify the optimal ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales), CPC (Cost Per Click), and CTR (Click-Through Rate). With our tools, you can take control of your ad spend by setting target ACoS for each keyword, enabling you to automate and streamline your campaign management process.
Optimize Your Campaigns for Maximum Efficiency
When optimizing your campaign, it’s essential to have clear goals. Whether you prefer a self-optimized PPC solution or expert-managed services, AdvertizeIQ can be your trusted partner. Why? Our customized optimization solutions are designed to automate your Sponsored Products campaigns and help you strategize for Display Ads effectively.
Use Effective Ad Copy
Customers today crave quick, easily digestible information, so it’s crucial to optimize your Amazon listings in a way that immediately grabs their attention. At the same time, you must also focus on ranking well for Amazon SEO to boost visibility and drive more sales. The key is to strike a balance between creating a listing that is both customer-friendly and SEO-optimized.
Final Thoughts
Amazon offers a variety of ad types that allow sellers to effectively promote their products and build brand awareness. Sponsored product ads and sponsored brands ads are powerful tools for driving Amazon sales by increasing visibility in organic search results and customer review pages.
With automatic targeting and negative keywords, advertisers can fine-tune their advertising campaigns to focus on relevant keywords, maximizing the impact of their PPC advertising solution. Amazon sponsored product ads offer flexible options to showcase your products, while product display ads provide targeted exposure across the platform.
Additionally, sponsored brands ads (formerly known as headline search ads) allow you to highlight your brand logo and feature a custom headline and custom landing page, giving you control over how your advertisement appears. For businesses enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, these ads can elevate your advertising campaigns by driving traffic to multiple product ads with exact match targeting.
Whether you’re aiming to boost individual products or promote your entire brand, Amazon’s robust advertising options can help you achieve your goals, and remember we’re here to help!