Amazon Advertising in 2021: Latest Updates and New Features

Amazon advertising is a landscape that is continually changing. The tools Amazon gives third-party sellers for advertising and marketing are constantly improving, offering new avenues for growth for sellers.

In this article, we’ll go over the most popular Amazon Advertising tools, the latest and most relevant updates, and we’ll show you how you can take advantage of each tool to boost your sales and improve your marketing game. 

Read on for more!

About Amazon Advertising

Amazon Advertising is a suite of tools designed to support sellers with their marketing efforts to increase their sales, brand awareness, and reach on the platform.

Since using these types of tools can be overwhelming, especially for new sellers, Amazon made sure to provide them with customizable solutions and educational resources to help them reach their short, medium, and long-term goals. 

Here’s a list of some of the most popular tools that we’ll look at:

1. Amazon DSP
2. Sponsored Brands
3. Sponsored Display
4. Sponsored Products
5. Amazon Attribution
6. Video Ads
7. Stores

Amazon DSP

Amazon demand-side platform (DSP) is a platform where advertisers can pay to show display, video and audio ads across the web on Amazon sites and apps, but also with other publishing partners and third-party exchanges. 

Not only you’ll be able to reach new audiences, but you’ll get access to audience insights and performing reports that can be great to identify which ads bring the best results. 

You can use Amazon DSP to work on remarketing strategies for those users that have checked out your product before. 

Amazon DSP Updates

Here are some of the latest updates to the Amazon demand-side platform:

1.Audience Detail Pages

Sellers using Amazon DSP now can see the audience’s details on and off Amazon. When you go to the Audiences tab, you’ll find the forecast impressions and reach, categorization, status, data provider and pricing by clicking on the audience’s name.

2. Twitch Audiences 

This feature is available on Audience Builder in Amazon DSP. You can start building an audience based on genres, games or channels they have streamed on Twitch. Advertisers can look back up to 30 days and get the metrics to work on their next campaign. 

At a line-item level, you can use Amazon shopping and streaming to increase your audiences even more.

3. Pre-bid Filtering

Advertisers can now use DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science products with a pre-bid filter to avoid fraud and invalid traffic on Twitch. This is helpful because you’ll be alerted about any supply that DoubleVerify or Integral Ad Science deems fraudulent or invalid.

Related content: Twitch Affiliate Links: How Can Gamers Make Money On Amazon?

4. Overlapping Audiences’ Insights

If you’re an advertiser using Amazon DSP, you’re now able to get insights about overlapping top audiences using the Amazon Advertising API, with these three new features:

1. maxResults: Specify the number of overlapping audiences you’d like returned in one call up to 500.
2. forecastedDailyReach: When the audience is included in the campaign, get an estimate on the number of devices that can be reached across all inventory types.
3. forecastedDailyImpressions: See an estimate number of impressions on all inventory types when the audience is included in a campaign.

Sponsored Brands

Sponsored Brands are your typical cost-per-click (CPC) ads, except they have your brand logo, allow you to customize your headline, and show multiple products. 

Sponsored Brands ads are a great way to increase visibility and it gives you more autonomy on how your brand is presented. 

Advertisers can optimize their strategy to reach their advertising goals. They only pay when a user clicks on their ad, so they can control their budget by choosing how much to bid per click.

Sponsored Brand Updates

Check out what’s new in Amazon Sponsored Brands:

1.Sponsored Brands Video 

Sellers who are registered in Amazon Brand Registry can now get access to Sponsored Brands video.

And those who are building a Sponsored Brands campaign can choose to run video ads on shopping pages to get new audiences to discover their brand. 

The video ads redirect possible buyers to your product detail page; they are keyword-targeted and cost-per-click.

2. Sponsored Brands for KDP Authors in the US

If you live in the U.S. and are a KDP author, you can create CPC ads with you as the author and you can include multiple books. The ad will direct users to a landing page where you can showcase your titles.

3. Sponsored Brands Landing Pages

Beginning June 30th, 2021, Sponsored Brands campaigns will only support the following:

• Store
• Product list page
• Display campaign types
• Browse pages

This means that custom landing pages will no longer be used as such, but they’ll be converted to product list pages instead.

4. Self-Service Brand Management

Manage and review brands from your advertising account. 

You can do so by going to the Access and Settings menu and selecting Brands for the self-service console. 

You can remove misclassified brands from your console or add new ones. However, you should know that all changes will have an impact on product selection, advertising attribution, and reporting across all advertising campaigns.

5. Creative Assets 

You’ll be able to store, organize, and reuse brand content (such as logos or images) to provide a comprehensive and consistent shopping experience from a single interface. 

Also, it allows you to use tags and products to upload and organize files across Amazon Advertising and Amazon shopping pages. 

Creative Assets can help you build ads and connect with your customers in an easy way.

Sponsored Display

This is a self-service display advertising solution that works on and off Amazon, and that helps you engage shoppers as they go through their purchase journey.

You can create a display campaign that fits your budget in a couple of minutes with automatically generated creatives.

Sponsored Display Updates

Here are the newest updates to Amazon Sponsored Display Ads.

1.Amazon audiences for Sponsored Display

Advertisers can now access prebuilt audiences in Canada and the U.S. with Amazon’s first-party shopping and streaming signals. Also, they can reach audiences off and on Amazon to boost their sales and business through 4 new segments:

1. In-market audiences (recent purchases and product category)
2. Lifestyle (customer behavior across different platforms on and off Amazon)
3. Interests (share insight into what shoppers frequently browse and buy)
4. Life Events (shows relevant products based on life moments)

2. Self-Service Brand Management

Manage and review your brands from your advertising account. You can select the self-service console on the Brands tab of the Access and Setting menu.

You can include brands that represent you and remove the ones that are misclassified with the goal of providing better reports to measure the effectiveness of your ad campaign. 

Sponsored Products

This is also a CPC ad feature but that promotes individual product listings on Amazon. It’s very simple to create an ad, even if you have never done it before.

 Your ads can appear in the first page of shopping results and product detail pages and buyers will be able to discover your products. 

Advertisers are also able to access sales and performance metrics to measure the direct impact of advertising on your business on Amazon. This information is helpful to design your campaign strategically.

Sponsored Products Updates

These are the latest changes and updates to Amazon Sponsored Products:

1. Search term impression share report

You’ll be able to see how your Sponsored Products impression share compares to other sellers with a single report. You can check this report in the Report Center and review your account-wide impression share for each search term and compare it over a specific period of time. 

2. Manage brand to product relationships

Improve your attribution by adding brands or removing products that are not classified properly. All you have to do is go to the Access and Settings menus and select the Brands tab.

3. Suggested Campaigns 

Create and launch automatic targeting campaigns for Sponsored Products with a couple of clicks. When creating a campaign, if you click on Review and launch, you’ll see a pre-populated campaign and ad group settings for you to review. You can also change your settings after you launch your campaign.

Amazon Attribution

Amazon Attribution gives advertisers insights on how sales in channels off Amazon (video, display, social, and email) actually impact sales performance and shopping activity.

You can use this data to improve your customers’ experience and increase your sales.

Amazon Attribution Updates

Here’s what’s new on the Amazon Attribution front:

1. Amazon Fresh in-store Attribution

If you’re an Amazon DSP advertiser, you can use attribution for Amazon Fresh stores in the US. That means that you’ll be able to check your overall campaign performance with online and in-store impact. 

Use this information to understand how your ads are helping your business, especially if physical stores are your main sales channel.

2. New product-level reporting 

Amazon Attribution has launched a new Products Report to keep track of your non-Amazon marketing campaigns. 

The report includes information about paid and organic search, impact shopping activity and sales for your products on Amazon. It’s a comprehensive view of your sales activity as a result of non-Amazon marketing.

This can be helpful to measure your business impact better and to improve your non-Amazon strategies and to discover new opportunities.

Video ads

Video is a quick and effective way to communicate your brand’s message and showcase your products in a unique way, and video ads on Amazon can definitely help you target new customers.

Video ads Updates

Check out the latest on Amazon Video Ads:

1. Reach new audiences with Fire TV in France, Italy, and Spain

Fire TV is a streaming service with access to movies and TV shows. As of 2020, Fire TV had over 50 million monthly active users around the world and brands in France, Italy and Spain can connect with this huge audience through ads. 

2. Video Creative Builder

Build new video creatives with customizable templates available in the Video Creative Builder. You can also enhance videos you’ve used in social media or TV before. It only takes a few minutes and it can be a huge help in reaching your marketing goals.

3. Custom Enhancements 

Over-the-top (OTT) video creators can also enhance their videos on Amazon. 

OTT Studio lets you add product information to generate a new video creative. This means you can include brand attributes of Amazon, like product detail, star ratings and Prime eligibility, or even CTAs specific to Amazon. 

Stores

Stores are a way for sellers to showcase their brand and products in a multipage on Amazon, creating an exciting experience for customers. 

You can use templates or drag-and-drop tiles to create your multipage Store and enrich it with images and video without using code at all!

Also, the Stores dashboard will help you keep an eye on store-related sales, visits, and page views, as well as traffic sources both on and off Amazon. Plus, you get to have your own amazon.com web address.

Stores Updates

Here’s what’s new with Amazon Stores:

1. Creative Assets

Like we explained above, you can store, manage and use brand content like logos or images, which is what is called “creative assets.” This way, advertisers can reuse brand content from a single interface across Amazon. 

2. In-Store Conversion Signals

You can now access datasets of conversions at Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh physical stores on Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC).  This is great news, since before they launched this update, it was not possible to know if your media campaigns were driving offline sales or what ads were contributing to them.

Final Thoughts

If you want to stand out from the crowd in a huge marketplace like Amazon, you’ll have to use every tool you have access to. Keeping up with Amazon Advertising updates and tools, and being aware of the latest features is a must for every brand.

Staying out of touch with what’s new will drag you behind when it comes to other advertisers and sellers you’re competing against.

Make it a habit to constantly review what other brands are doing to attract and retain buyers, and make Amazon Advertising your best friend.

About Our Guest Author: 

AMZ Advisers is a full-service eCommerce consultancy focused on creating growth opportunities for brands, manufacturers, and private labels across the US, Europe, Canada, and Asia. 

The AMZ Advisers team has been able to achieve incredible growth on the Amazon platform for their clients by optimizing and managing their accounts and creating in-depth content marketing strategies.