Where do you start, where do you stop? An eventful year is coming to an end and let's take a look back!
There have been numerous changes in the analysis options and the orientation of advertising alone. The advertising reports, for example, were added to other types of analysis. In addition to Sponsored Product Campaigns, Sponsored Brand & Sponsored Display Ads can now also be evaluated more precisely. Performance can therefore be divided more easily into various factors and better controlled.
There were also some new features in the advertising campaigns themselves, which we would like to discuss in more detail in this blog post.
Sponsored Brands
Since June 30, 2021, landing pages for Sponsored Brands campaigns only redirect to the Amazon Store, Store Highlights or product list pages. Previous, user-defined landing pages can therefore no longer be used as such. So you should convert them into product listing pages or design your own Amazon store for your brand.
You can also store, manage, and reuse your brand content, such as logos or images, in Creative Asset. This allows you to create a holistic and consistent shopping experience for your customers. With the creative asset or ad content, you can upload and manage files for Amazon Advertising and Amazon shopping pages using tags and products. In the USA, Amazon is even ready to offer content services (photography, videography,...) on various types of models. It is still unclear whether and when this will also be possible in Europe. But one thing is certain, when the time comes, it will represent strong competition for some service providers.
Sponsored Display Ads (DSP)
DSP campaigns help you consistently build and apply a consistent image of your brand and drive your branding forward. A lot has happened here too in 2021:
From a simple retargeting option to target group targeting and new cost types, we had the biggest leap in this form of advertising in 2021. You can now set a retargeting target on product views or purchases and control them with various lookback windows. In addition, target groups can access four audience areas.
- Internal market target groups (recent purchases and product category)
- Lifestyle (customer behavior across various platforms on and off Amazon)
- Interests (insights into what customers frequently browse and buy)
- Life events (shows relevant products based on life moments)
There was an extension of the user-defined review period for Sponsored Display target groups beyond the previously existing 30-day limit. Campaigns can now be moved to Invoke 7, 14, 30, 60 or 90 days in retrospect or when remarketing to Purchases even 7, 14, 30, 60, 90, 180 or 365 days.
Advertising is thus becoming more and more scalable and offers different bidding strategies based on target KPI's (conversion, page visitors,...) and cost types (CPM, CPC).
Budgeting for Sponsored Product Campaigns
Budgeting in the advertising console is equally new and just as exciting. Using the dashboard, we can not only see whether campaigns are using their budgets efficiently, but also whether they have been used up early on. In addition, budget rules with predetermined metrics can be used to control performance for desired periods of time and target values such as RCAS, ACOS, CTR or CR. Especially on busy days, their use is a good tool for cost and efficiency management.
To round this off, there is another tab in which all orientations are shown in a bundle. This makes it easy to see where sales are being achieved across campaigns. In addition, cost-driving trends are identified at an early stage and can be adapted to the selected strategies.
Overview of other changes
- You can manage A/B testing for the title and main image yourself via Seller Central under the “Experiments” tab.
- Metrics such as new customer orders and their percentage of sales can now be measured. This information offers great advantages, particularly in terms of branding and acquiring new customers.
- Amazon opened up further marketplaces in Sweden, Poland, Egypt and Turkey and is thus driving forward its internationalization. Whether these marketplaces are promising will be seen in 2022.
We are excited to see what news, expansions and changes we can expect again this year.
