Sponsored Display Campaigns During Holiday Season & Q4 2021

We are already in the middle of Q4. It’s that time of the year when Amazon sellers are getting ready to rank better and take total ad sales to the next level. It’s the year’s prime time for shopping, not only on Amazon but also in global e-commerce. The primary tool for pushing ranking and total sales on Amazon during the current holiday season is Amazon Ads.

Two Major Amazon 2021 Updates  

Amazon Ads has become extremely important in 2021. Nowadays, Amazon puts more effort into improving service quality for all sellers that bid on Amazon. Besides quality and front-end improvements, Amazon upgraded all campaign types and targeting to give more options to those who run PPC on Amazon. Important events took place in 2021–Amazon banned ranking services, two-step URLs (super URLs), and search-find-buy methods.

Good old PPC is always there for Amazon Sellers who want success. When we compared different campaign types and targeting options, we concluded that Sponsored Display Campaigns stood out. These are the creativity and awareness-focused campaigns that Amazon continually develops.

Sponsored Display Campaign or Sponsored Products Campaign – which one is more profitable?

Over the last couple of months, Amazon has worked very hard to improve Sponsored Display Campaigns. They plan to use them as a gateway to more DSP (demand-side platform) features available in the Advertising Manager account. Since introducing cost per viewable impressions, Sponsored Display Campaigns have been more profitable than Sponsored Products Campaigns, if we’re analyzing ACoS only. Think of the Sponsored Display as a younger brother of Amazon DSP that is constantly learning from the older one.

Sponsored Display is the only campaign type that lets you advertise your products off Amazon. Bringing a vast amount of traffic to best-selling products is highly necessary for upper-funnel advertising, while purchase and view retargeting is of utmost importance in lower-funnel advertising. That is one of the reasons why Sponsored Display is so important right now and will continue to be in the future.

Sponsored Display Viewable Impressions vCPM Targeting

As we have mentioned above, viewable impressions are a new option on Amazon. Until now, Amazon has charged only by CPC. But after introducing viewability metrics on Amazon, CPM has become a second charge model on the Amazon Ads platform. This happened mainly due to Amazon’s effort to push brand awareness, viewability, and relevancy of the ads over traditional cost-per-click charging. Viewable impression targeting is more important than ever as many sellers compete during the most hectic part of the year–Q4 and the holiday shopping season. This type of targeting lets you use a custom image/logo and bid on higher brand awareness.  

What is the Core of Optimization for Viewable Impressions?

Optimization for Viewable Impressions is based on clicks and estimated views. Other bid optimization strategies, including Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands Campaigns, have an attribution type based on clicks only. Keep in mind that the minimum bid for this type of bidding optimization is 3$. You can set it lower, but ads may not deliver. Be aware of the bid optimization for page visits and conversions. You can change the bidding strategy whenever you want because both cost types are cost-per-click. But if you select Optimize for Viewable Impressions, you can’t change the bid optimization because it’s only bid optimization with vCPM cost type.

How to Make Holiday Ads More Fun?

In Sponsored Display, you can add your brand logo to increase brand awareness, and thanks to the latest update, you can also add a custom image. Custom images will help shoppers learn about the product and brand. This is an editable feature, and you can change it depending on the seasonality–Halloween ads, Black Friday, or Christmas ads. Editable custom image ads help you drive more traffic to your brand/product, and in combination with audiences, customers can get more information about your product and consider purchasing.  

Purchase Retargeting in Sponsored Display Campaigns

One compelling and relatively new targeting option is Purchase Retargeting in Sponsored Display Campaigns. This feature lies at the bottom of the purchase funnel, where you can segment the audience and retarget them by their purchase action onto your product page. Therefore, we can conclude that Sponsored Display is the only campaign type that brings huge traffic to products, increases sessions and visibility/brand awareness, and narrows the funnel for the most loyal customers. That is the main quality of Sponsored Display Campaigns–covering all parts of the customer journey–the famous AIDA concept. All stages of the AIDA funnel concept should be covered during the holiday season to grow sales in the next stage.

What are the Downsides?

The side effect of creating and pushing Sponsored Display Campaigns during the holiday season (and during any time of the year) is manual campaign optimization. Unlike managing Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, you must optimize SD Campaigns manually on the platform.  

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To Sum Up

This holiday season, brand awareness, custom-made visuals, and charging cost per mille (CPM) will be the hot topics. Standing out in the highly saturated marketplace while increasing the average bid, creating custom-made ads, and increasing brand awareness are three great reasons to start using Sponsored Display in the Amazon Ads console. It is one of the top things to know in advertising on Amazon during 2022.

If you want to upscale your business, now is the right time. With us, you can do it without breaking the bank. A FREE Amazon Audit is the first step towards campaign optimization. This means lower ACOS, higher sales, and more money in your pocket. Contact us and see for yourself!

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