When it comes to advertising on Amazon, brands face a wealth of powerful options spanning the full marketing funnel. From awareness and consideration stage placements to purchase-driving ad types, Amazon Advertising Services offer robust solutions to meet all your campaign objectives.
At the core of most successful Amazon ad strategies, however, are two primary workhorses: Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. Determining when to leverage each format - and how to properly structure campaigns - is absolutely crucial for maximizing your return on ad spend (ROAS) and overall Amazon PPC strategy performance.
Let's explore the key differences between Amazon Sponsored Products campaigns and Sponsored Brands so you can optimize your ad mix accordingly.
What Are Amazon Sponsored Products?
Sponsored Products ads are the most prominent and commonly utilized Amazon PPC ad type. These keyword-targeted product listing ads appear mixed directly into Amazon search results pages and product detail pages across desktop, mobile, and even voice-based shopping queries.
Featuring a product image, title, pricing info, Prime badge, review rating, and customizable brand logo, Sponsored Products drive clickthroughs directly to the corresponding product detail page. They're ideal for promoting individual product visibility and conversions.
Setting up Sponsored Products campaigns involves bidding on relevant customer search terms and deploying either automated or manual targeting strategies to dictate ad delivery triggers across Amazon audiences.
You have extensive manual campaign controls with Sponsored Products such as:
- Targeting by keywords, product categories, specific ASINs or brands
- Employing negative keyword sculpting and bidding multipliers
- Utilizing custom ad copy and branded logos
- Implementing product bidding adjustments based on margins
- Applying granular campaign budget management and pacing settings
- Advanced audience refinements like lifestyle segmentation
What Are Amazon Sponsored Brands?
Whereas Sponsored Products are centered around individual product promotions, Sponsored Brands campaigns take more of a holistic approach to elevating your entire brand catalog and portfolio. These versatile placements can contain customized ad creative while highlighting 3 to 8 different products within one larger ad banner.
Sponsored Brands enable you to highlight your brand logo much more prominently, incorporating lifestyle imagery, benefits-focused ad copy, and eye-catching multimedia placements. They appear both within Amazon search engine results and across various high-visibility locations like the Amazon mobile shopping app and external sites/streams within the display network.
Like Sponsored Products, you also bid on relevant product keywords with Sponsored Brands campaigns to trigger the ad deliveries. However, Sponsored Brands aid that upper-funnel brand awareness in addition to generating product views and purchases.
Brands take advantage of Sponsored Brands to accomplish objectives like:
- Launching a new product line or portfolio brand
- Re-engaging prior customers to promote related items
- Cross-promoting complementary/bundle purchases
- Boosting visibility around key shopping events and peak seasons
- Building brand affinity across multiple consumer touchpoints
- Driving traffic to Amazon brand storefronts and customized brand experiences
Both ad types are complementary parts of a comprehensive full-funnel Amazon ad strategy. But determining the ideal distribution between Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands involves several key considerations.
How to Split Your Amazon Ad Budget Between Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands
There's no one-size-fits-all formula for the perfect Sponsored Products vs. Sponsored Brands investment mix within your holistic Amazon PPC strategy. Each brand has unique goals, product lines, target audience behaviors, and budgetary constraints to account for.
However, experts generally recommend allocating between 60-80% of your total Amazon ad spend to Sponsored Products campaigns, and the remaining 20-40% to Sponsored Brands depending on your objectives.
Sponsored Products tend to be the campaign workhorses that convert extremely well and directly translate to efficient ROAS delivery. So dedicating the bulk of your investment here supports strong revenue performance.
Sponsored Brands, meanwhile, aid in those upper-funnel efforts around brand-building and awareness but typically exhibit higher costs-per-click and lower conversion metrics. However, their impact still warrants dedicated budget for the long-term brand equity and customer relationship development they facilitate.
As your brand grows and Amazon advertising sophistication matures, many sellers unlock additional budget to allocate even more aggressively into Sponsored Brands promotions, particularly around major shopping periods and product launches. Having a steady always-on Sponsored Products presence complemented by seasonally-amplified Sponsored Brands pulsing is a proven formula.
Advanced Brands Go Beyond Sponsored Campaigns
While Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads should receive the majority of your Amazon PPC strategy emphasis, savvy marketers don't stop there. They further amplify their brand presence through other high-impact ad formats like:
- Video ads on Amazon: Prominently showcase your brand ethos and connect emotionally through the power of sight, sound and motion. These unskippable videos play before some product detail pages, across mobile and Fire TV.
- Amazon Posts: Tell rich multimedia stories, share lifestyle content, and connect with fans by publishing scrollable content feeds that live along your product detail pages.
- Brand stores: Create immersive, customized multipage brand destinations beyond standard product detail pages. Craft relevant, shoppable content that educates shoppers and converts.
- Amazon Influencers: Partner with rising content creators within your niche who recommend your products to their loyal audiences through video reviews, unboxing, tutorials and more.
While not strictly "ads" by definition, brands must also prioritize optimized Amazon A+ Content across their product listings. These Sponsored Products and Brands campaign efforts are all complemented by engaging EBC pages featuring descriptive product details, video tours, comparison charts, and more to drive maximum conversions.
Lastly, many brands collaborate with ecommerce agencies that specialize in holistic Amazon advertising strategy development, day-to-day Amazon ad campaign management, and robust analytics reporting. This streamlined professional expertise maximizes ROAS while eliminating wasted spend and internal strain.
The Future of Amazon PPC is Holistic
At the end of the day, Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands aren't competing ad types, but rather dualistic forces that work in tandem to propel your Amazon business forward. An Amazon PPC strategy relying solely on one format or the other is severely hamstrung.
To unlock the full potential of your Amazon advertising investment, you need the perfectly synced product listing promotions of Sponsored Products campaigns combined with brand-building, traffic-driving Sponsored Brands plus supplementary efforts across Amazon's entire digital ecosystem. That's how you position your business for long-term momentum on the digital shelf.
So while budgets and priorities will ebb and flow, keep your Amazon ad spend laser focused on making Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands your "always-on" PPC foundations. As long as your strategy taps into their complementary strengths of revenue-generation and audience engagement, you'll be set up to outmaneuver competitors.
