How to use Amazon Sponsored Brand Video Advertising

How to stand out from the crowd? Or more to the point, how to stand out on a competitive Amazon listing page? It’s a question every seller has to solve. Our Amazon Experts take you through ways to get more from your Amazon ads.

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When every results page is packed with row after row after row of competitors, it can be hard to make sure your product captures your customer's attention. The sheer volume of product images, ratings, prices, and review counts, all make for many distractions and little opportunity for a developed branding experience.

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In such a constrained branding environment, you can forgive customers for not even realizing that Amazon does not actually own all the products on the results page, and for not having any idea of an Amazon marketplace of sellers.

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How to increase your branding experience on Amazon

Sellers can utilise video ads to offer consumers a much more branded journey on listings vs competitors.

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With the addition of video advertising, Amazon offers sellers a much more empowering branding tool for delivering customers both a branding message and to showcase your products in ever greater detail. By their very nature as a native ad on the page, they're almost impossible to miss! Video ads catch the attention of users and offer a much higher engagement rate vs traditional static product images. More engagement naturally increases sessions and brings more opportunities for increased sales.

Don’t take our word for it, see for yourself.

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Video advertising on Amazon: The Basics

Everything you need to know about branded video ads.

• At the time of writing (April 2021), Amazon video ads are available in nearly all markets, except for Brazil.
• You can target your video ads with keywords through Cost-per-click (CPC) bids. These ads also include a link to the seller's product detail page.
• You can use Amazon video ads to target desktop and mobile shopping results pages and product detail pages.
• You select one product per video advert, which will dynamically pull through the title, rating, number of reviews, price, image, prime badge, and delivery date.
• Users have the option to toggle the mute button to play the video's audio as by default it is not enabled.
• Amazon also recommends adding on-screen text to videos that rely on voiceover to communicate product messages.
• You must follow the existing policies in place for the use of creative on Amazon and supported placements.
• Video ads will automatically begin to play when 50% of the video is on screen.

You can access the full video asset requirements here

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Amazon Video Advertising: Best Practice

As with anything, Amazon Video Ads come with a long list of best practices. Our experts outline the best practice guidelines from experience for running Sponsored Brand Video.

• User attention is very short, push your main USPs immediately: The video content itself should be product focussed and demonstrative; there is little time for brand story development with seconds 1–5 commanding the most attention from users. Amazon recommends a video of 30 seconds maximum.
• Understand what searches to target to avoid waste: Use Helium 10 and Google keyword planner to understand how users search for your products, paying close attention to search term volumes for each keyword as a priority guide. This will help provide focus on where to push your marketing spend.
• Determine your strategy on these search terms: this requires a thorough understanding of your organic and paid visibility on each search term. You can use keyword tracker on Helium 10 to track this and understand changes over time. Upon establishing visibility, you can decide whether you want to pursue a strategy of increasing opportunities to sell for each search term (Organic + paid advert = increased share of voice) with the aim to drive more sessions OR, pursue an incrementality approach and only target video ads to searches where you currently have no organic listing visibility.
• Expect a test and learn approach to video advertising and plan to try many creatives over controlled periods of time to see which drive the highest engagement. Note, the number of reviews showing will influence engagement along with price and speed of delivery.

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Amazon Video Advertising Case Study: Beechmore Books

With a focus on profitability, Beechmore Books looked to leverage an incrementality approach to their Amazon strategy targeting. The aim was to leverage sponsored brand video ads to high volume, strategically important search terms, that their A5 journal had no organic visibility for.

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Taking advantage of the size, branding, and the product informational nature of video ads, the aim was to drive click traffic and increase sales. Upon launching, Beechmore Books soon noticed they were achieving a CTR of 1.17% vs the wider account average of 0.21% suggesting very strong engagement on these terms. In addition, video campaigns contributed 47% of all PPC sales driving the lowest ACOS of all campaign types they had running, despite a slightly higher cost per click.

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If you need any additional help with building a strategy for your Amazon video ads, or want to discuss best practice setup, our experts will be happy to help. Get in touch!

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