Amazon Sponsored Display Ads are a popular ad type that allows sellers to target Amazon shoppers both on Amazon and other website’s leveraging Amazon’s rich customer data through display ads. SellerMetrics has extensive experiences helping Amazon sellers set up, manage and optimize Amazon Display Ads as part of our Amazon PPC Services offering.

How do Amazon Display Ads Fits into the Amazon Advertising Ecosystem?

Amazon display ads play a strategic role in remarketing to existing audiences, as well as reaching potential new buyers by addressing a broader prospecting audience with a general interest in your products (Related Blog Posts: Ultimate Guide to Amazon Retargeting Ads).

Amazon display ads can be optimized for a range of objectives including reach, page visits and conversions. Audience targeting options include remarketing warm audiences and prospecting shoppers unfamiliar with your brand. Ads can use assets such as static images or video files.

Driving Sales: Remarketing & Similar Products

You can remarketing amazon shoppers who have:

• Previously visited your product detail pages
• Visited similar product detail pages of competing brands

Targeting similar product pages is a great option for smaller sellers that do not yet have a large remarketing audience pool sizes.

Targeting Life-Events and In-market Audiences

This option is interesting for brands that sell products tied to specific life events (think infant products) or products that are often purchased in the same context as other items (i.e. gardening related products). These are referred to as in-market audiences.

Especially when optimizing for page visits, this targeting option is interesting for brands looking to acquire more qualified page visits.

Broadening Your Brand’s Reach on Amazon

Amazon display ads can also be used to scale your presence on Amazon. However: beware that as you prospect broader audiences by using “interest” or “lifestyle” based targeting options you are also reaching users who are less likely to convert.

So be mindful of your CPMs (Cost to Reach 1,000 Users) and be sure that products and brands that are not closely related to your own are added to your “negative product targeting” and “negative brand targeting” lists to prevent ad budget wastage.

How to Create Amazon Display Advertising Campaigns?

Amazon sponsored display ads are self-serve ads and you can create them directly within the Amazon Ads platform. Follow the steps in the campaign builder starting by providing a campaign name name, a start date and a daily budget. To keep your ads relevant and to better measure performance. We do not suggest that you add too many different products (in some cases just one will suffice) to your campaigns.

Proceed by selecting targeting, bid optimization objective, audiences and negative products.

What are Common Amazon Display Ad Specs and Ad Sizes?

There are a few things to consider when running Amazon sponsored display ads: first of all, do not include a Call-to-Action (CTA) button in the ad creatives. This is not permitted and will get your ads disapproved. Also, ensure that all images are legible and ideally have a resolution of 72 ppi. For video ads a resolution of 1920 x 1080 px (16:9) is recommended. More information on Amazon video ad specs can be found in our guide on Amazon Ad Creative Best-Practices, the official Amazon Ad Specs Documentation and the official Amazon Advertising Guidelines provide a very detailed overview of category specific requirements and restrictions.

Mobile Web and Mobile App Display Ad Sizes

• 300×250
• 414×125
• 320×50

Desktop Display Ad Sizes

• 320×50
• 300×250
• 160×600
• 300×600
• 650×130
• 728×90
• 970×250
• 980×55

Pros and Cons of Amazon Display Advertising

Whether Amazon Sponsored Display ads can be effective for your products depends on a number of factors, such as conversion rate, ad creatives, quality of your product listings and so on (related blog post: Five Common Mistakes When Running Amazon Display Ads).

Pros

• Ideal for brands with significant product detail page traffic traffic (for remarketing)
• Great for brands with significant competitive advantages (i.e. lower prices than competing ASINs)
• Can also give boost to organic search rankings if ASIN sales performance improves (Related: Amazon SEO Services) and Amazon PPC Services)

Cons

• Efficiency can be low for smaller brands with small remarketing pools (Related blog post: Sponsored Display vs Sponsored Products Ads)
• Hard to deliver sales lift if product detail page conversion rates are low (i.e. due to higher price point, or non-optimized product listings)
• Difficult to scale at stable ACoS as efficiency is highest for remarketing campaigns

How to Optimize Amazon Display Ads

Display ads are optimized by making data-driven adjustments to bids, placements and audiences. A list of items we generally check for can found below and for a more detailed explanation on our approach read our blog posts on How to Optimize Amazon Ads.

Product & Brand Exclusions

Bid Adjustments

Best-Practice Creatives

Audience Adjustments

Optimizing Product Detail Pages (for better Conversion Rates)

ASIN Selection