Lazar: (00:00)

Hey guys, welcome to the Wild PPC Bunch podcast. My name is Lazar and I’m a PPC nerd. I have over 10 years of experience in online advertising. And currently I’m the owner of the growing Amazon advertising agency called Sellers Alley.

Brent: (00:14)

And I’m Brent, the owner of AMZ Pathfinder. I started this company five years ago and we’ve been working in online advertising since 2013.

Lazar: (00:21)

Every week we will spend around 30 minutes covering one topic and it will get nerdy, I promise. We’ll prepare a topic, covering everything from PPC basics, in-depth strategy and current trends.

Brent: (00:32)

One thing’s for sure you won’t be bored and you will hear insights, tactics, and ideas straight from two experienced agency owners so strap in for the ride and enjoy.

Lazar: (00:50)

Hey guys, today we’re talking about one interesting topic called Sponsored Brands, and we’re going to do some deep dive here. Uh, just like in every episode now, Brent is here. Hey, Brent.

Brent: (01:05)

Hello, hello. Hey Lazar! We’re going to do a deep dive today. So get your snorkeling gear ready. Uh, it’s summer, you know, we’re, we’re at the Mediterranean. Uh, there’s no coral, but there’s plenty of good looking fish and they’re called Sponsored Brands. Fish. I dont’ know. Weird, weird intro. It’ll work.

Lazar: (01:21)

Well, it’s a podcast about PPC so we can have stupid jokes. It’s okay.

Brent: (01:27)

Yeah, people already know we’re nerds, so it’s fine.

Lazar: (01:29)

Yeah. It’s it’s it’s cool. So when we wanted to start this episode, then we, when we started writing down, what’s the name of the topic. We started talking about Sponsored Brands and we realized that Sponsored Brands didn’t have that name from the beginning. So it was Headline Search ads…

Brent: (01:47)

For years, it was called Headline Search. We often abbreviated as HSA just to make it easy. You know, like right now we call Sponsored Brands SB, but they were an AMS only ad type at the time. It was not inside of what we now call, uh, you know, advertising console. Well it was inside of advertising console, which was what AMS used to be. It’s already getting confusing, but it was not available importantly, inside of Seller central. Um, that, and that’s where we did the majority of ad management. So it was only if clients had access to a special, special Valhalla of, uh, of AMS. If they could use this ad type back in the day,

Lazar: (02:23)

I think we should make it even more complicated. So let’s go like this. There was Seller central and Amazon advertising console, and you were able to use Headline Search ads in advertising console, but you weren’t able to use them in Seller central. And after some time they introduced it to Seller central and then they started switching Seller central to advertising console. So..

Brent: (02:54)

Even further, they also had feature parody at one point, but you know, in the beginning, the features, and I think even the ad inventory was slightly, slightly different between Seller central and AMS and.. Yeah, that caused issues. Cause we tried to migrate some of them over for easier management. They didn’t work as well. And we had to like push the back. So it was this whole song and dance that Amazon put us through, but now things are much more clear. So they’re available everywhere, uh, as long as you have brand registry.

Lazar: (03:24)

Yeah. So for brand registry is obviously important to register your brand, obviously. And there are two versions at this point. . Like regular one and new version with like 2.0. With 2.0 is you are getting even more options and more possibilities when it comes to, to advertising, but overall for Headline Search ads, for Sponsored Brand ads… Like I really like calling them Headline Search ads today, to be honest. Yeah. And like, you need to have your brand registered to be able to use them. And at the beginning there was no reporting and overall, Amazon advertising console didn’t have a lot of reporting, if it had anything there. I think Sponsored Brand ads are the last one that got negative keywords out of all of them. And they, they, they evolved a lot. Like at the beginning of you were able to, to show up on the, on the top of the page, like on the search result page and it grew like in any direction. So you’re able to use them on top at the bottom, next to the filter, product listing and like whole bunch of different places where you can use Headline Search ads or Sponsored Brand ads and to advertise..

Brent: (04:43)

It would show up everywhere at this point. I mean, there’s no one area I can think of where that ad inventory doesn’t appear. And it’s to the point where a lot of the ad types, you know, when someone sends a screenshot to one of us, I’m sure you get this right. And they say, what ad type is this? What is this? It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell, not only because Amazon themselves is testing and rotating things frequently, but actually the ad inventory is kind of spilling over in places where we traditionally have seen. Oh, that’s clearly Sponsored products. It’s like, no, that could actually be Sponsored Brands, but we have to pay attention to how it’s customized and what it looks like now, um, to make an educated guess on that.

Lazar: (05:20)

At the beginning, it was difficult because you could change the main image. So you could use any image that you wanted. You can use, you could use the logo of you’re company or use a product listing image, or like whatever you wanted. Like we even tested lifestyle images. At the beginning, you were able to create everything like create, um, to, to do some something that is kind of shady and not allowed to do anymore. Like use a product image and just like do Photoshop on the top and write like Prime day deal or stuff like that. So people used to do that kind of stuff. You’re not able to do that anymore, especially because you can show only your logo as a main image and you can add up to three products on the right side. And that’s, that was really bad idea at the beginning. And it was mostly because the size of the ad was different an like when you check from your cell phone, it would look really bad. It would show only your logo. And if you’re a small brand, nobody would literally click on it just because they don’t, they don’t know that you exist.

Brent: (06:28)

Well yeah, no one knows your logo. Historically, we discovered that using a logo was in most cases, not really that good of an idea, even though that was what Amazon suggested, we would most often go with a product image. And so we’d have product image and then three products. And oftentimes it was one of those three products. Um, and now the restrictions around that, as you mentioned are much tighter. However, yeah, there’s new ad types that allow us to put other things in there, custom image types, video. Maybe we should dive into some of the, some of the new things.

Lazar: (06:59)

Yeah. There there’s whole bunch of stuff that you can do. Like just, just to jump in for that part, with logo, they changed the sizes of those ads. So now you can see logo and you can start seeing like half of the next product that’s standing on the right. So you know, that it’s, it’s an ad, so you can scroll to the right and see other products, not just the logo and as you mentioned, like, especially when a product images showed up or lifestyle images. Like it’s something called a BETA version of the images or Sponsored Brands and that’s completely crazy. Like everybody started sharing screenshots of other brands, advertising.. They were like, was this, and like, you, you didn’t know what to answer because he didn’t know. And because it was, it wasn’t available for everybody. It was just for like..

Brent: (07:53)

And I think there’s still some accounts where you’re not going to find it. And we’re talking specifically about US here, right? This is a US primarily thing. Cause we don’t have Sponsored Brands video, uh, what some people call video in search. I think that’s a slightly different thing. Um, in Europe, I can’t think of a single European account that we work with that has that available. As of, as of right now, we’re recording this the 14th of July, uh, to serve as a, to serve as a little memory stamp there. But, um, yeah, the custom images is one of the easiest things to iterate on, uh, cause you just need an image of the right size, but it really can make the ad look so much more professional. And uh, I guess like higher class, especially if you have really good lifestyle imagery, that’s the appropriate place for lifestyle imagery. Because in our experience testing previously lifestyle images did not work as like the image on the left side and now they’re just not even allowed at all. So, uh, I guess Amazon heard us and decided to make a custom image type there instead provide for a place to put that.

Lazar: (08:56)

Oh, you know what I would try there instead of lifestyle image? I would literally try to find my customer using the product. And like it’s still a lifestyle image, but with real customers, because social proof is something that people like to see in the ad. So I would definitely try to AB test like compare a lifestyle image that is really nice clean image, created in studio or wherever and compare it to something that is made by an amateur, like somebody that is using the product, I don’t know..

Brent: (09:29)

Authentic. So to speak. Yeah. Authenticity valued at a pretty high premium these days, I think.

Lazar: (09:33)

Yeah, exactly. And so basically there are, as we to talking there, there are a couple of ways that you can, um, advertise, you can use your products like free main products and logo on, on far left. Uh, you can use custom images and the third version is videos. So this is the big three at the moment. Yeah. And I think videos are going to become like more and more important in, in Amazon world over the time. Oh yeah, we should mention one, one more thing that we saw recently, both of us. And I, I remember that we discussed about it. We still don’t have access to it. And I’m pretty sure in a couple of months when we listen to this podcast, we’re going to laugh about it. Like, because we didn’t have it. It’s audio ads.

Brent: (10:18)

Oh yeah. I’ve seen that. Talked about it just in the past couple of days, but uh, I think that’s only available at a very high minimum spend and through Amazon’s media group, not necessarily through sponsored, uh, Sponsored Brands yet. Although that is exciting and maybe something to put in the predictions section, should we do predictions at the end for things in the future?

Lazar: (10:38)

I think we should definitely especially because..

Brent: (10:40)

Okay, we will save that one for the end. I got a couple other ideas for predictions too, but let’s, let’s talk about targeting types. So historically sponsored brands has been keyword targeting, right? And our advice for years was let’s use exact match keywords because you could use other match types, but there was no search term report. And that’s changed, I think much earlier this year that finally happened. And that was a welcome change. A negative keywords came just before that. So that’s, uh, a very, very welcome change. You know, these things are kind of necessary building blocks for an ad campaign where you’re going to have to measure results and make changes. Um, and then we also have two other targeting types.

Lazar: (11:20)

Yeah. But before we started talking about two other, um, targeting types, I will still stay on keywords since there is a huge difference between Sponsored Product ads and Sponsored Brand ads. Uh, like for Sponsored Product ads, you can create whole bunch of different ad groups and you cannot create ad groups in Sponsored Brands ads. Like, should you place all three match types.. well four match types in..Like, with the twist. Uh, should you use all of the match types in one specific campaign? Like what, what’s your best practice?

Brent: (11:57)

Thanks. Thanks for tossing the softball for me on that one. Yeah. Let, let’s talk about it because what we, what we’ve determined is that broad match inside of Sponsored Brands is different than broad match inside a Sponsored Products. Broad match in Sponsored Brands is lik,e it’s way more of a shotgun approach. It’s broad match keywords in addition to like related and affiliated searches and topics. So let’s say that you’re doing, um, like rain jacket is a good example. You might get searches for rain umbrellas, um, or, uh, I don’t know, uh, like those like rain boots, galoshes. I’m not sure what you call those, but like the really big rain boots, because those are products that are counter related to what you’re selling. So when we tried a broad match, when it first rolled out with Sponsored Brands, we were kind of horrified actually to discover what was in our search terms and how irrelevant a lot of these things were. We, we quickly changed that around. Um, and one thing related to that is, is broad match modified. So what is broad match modified? It’s like broad match with an extra twist to it. And that twist is you put a plus sign after the word. And that means that that word must be included in the search. So it’s more true to how broad match kind of works in Amazon Sponsored Products. Um, and we also don’t really use that too much because our best practice still with keywords is mostly exact match. And then some phrase here and there sprinkled in maybe in its own campaign, broken out entirely separate.

Lazar: (13:23)

Basically Amazon’s approach here is more like Google ads for years. They had both, broad match types, like for ages, including broad match modifier with plus and like the regular broad match. Then now we have that with, Sponsored Brand ads on Amazon and that’s pretty cool. Like I remember one of the first things that I screwed up to be honest ever when they started working on PPC was I worked for Danish market and I was advertising, um, like armband, like for running where you place a cell phone and you run and you can like use it. And like, it’s exactly the same words in Danish that you can use for like bracelets and you can use for, um, bands for watch and whole bunch of different stuff. And it started burning so much money in like full growth. Like I literally wanted to kill myself because I made that kind of mistake. Yeah. You can not imagine it was like a huge campaign in Denmark and I screwed it up big time.

Brent: (14:35)

You definitely walk the line between exposure and spend a little bit too heavily on the, on the exposure side.

Lazar: (14:54)

Full brand awareness.

Brent: (14:54)

Yeah. That’s right. Brand awareness, impressions, brand awareness. Everyone was very aware of the brand. Well, you guys heard it here. First Danish PPC tips hot from 10 years ago when Lazar started working with ads.

Lazar: (14:56)

Yeah.

Brent: (14:57)

Be careful with those broad match modifiers, but that does relate nicely to this point, which is Sponsored Brands are not the kind of ad type where you’re going to put in a bunch of keywords and search for other longer tail stuff. That’s what Sponsored Products is for. And I know we were discussing some of Amazon’s recommended practices just before this recording. And you mentioned something you read on Amazon site recently, what was it? The keyword suggestions they had?

Lazar: (15:22)

Yeah, they said that you should have at least 25 keywords and all match types in one campaign, which to be honest, I find completely insane. I would literally never do that. Especially like one of the basic things that you should know about PPC is when you create campaigns, you shouldn’t place all of the match types in the same ad group. Because when you do some negative keywords and you want to negate stuff, you can either block your exact form or like block everything or damage that campaign a lot. So, uh, when, when you branch them out, when you have different ad groups with different match types, it’s way, way easier to negate stuff and like narrow down the search funnel. So one of the things that you cannot do with Sponsored Brands is basically to have different ad groups. So in this case, what we usually do, we usually create separate campaigns. To be honest, when it comes to this, I didn’t know. What’s your practice?

Brent: (16:21)

Yeah, and if we do add phrase, we’ll sprinkle in just a few. So let’s say we have the top, the top, top, top, um, you know, non non-branded kind of category or generic keywords. And in those aren’t exact, and we have bids on those control date of a software from our own kind of algorithms that we’ve established are suitable for that. And then we might have a phrase version of that at a lower bid, but just like one or two of those sprinkled in, um, just to see what else we can catch. And now, since we have search term reports and we have the ability to set negatives, we can make good decisions based on that. It used to be that you would put in a phrase match keyword, and that could screw up the whole campaign. So that would have to be in its own its own separate ones. I largely agree with you though. I don’t have anything really to add.

Lazar: (17:05)

It was such a huge headache. And I remember having troubles with guys talking about having exact form with plural or not, and like having two versions of the same keyword, one with S at the end and one without and like bidding differently. Right? So that was a huge headache for me as well. Like both versions are going to, To trigger the search term and like that’s the fact, and that’s something that we tested millions of times, but sometimes like people say that one version is going to work better than the other. And you know what’s really common thing that people screw up to be honest, but nobody talks about that. Capital,capital letters. Like they use the same word, like brand with like capital B and the other one is with everything lowercases and they have both versions there. Maybe it’s because, when they prepare keywords like Word or Excel or some spreadsheet or whatever, so it changes automatically. I don’t know, but it’s the same word basically. And I think we went too far with keywords. We went too far…

Brent: (18:27)

Say I, I think that, uh, I think that that is probably a conversation that is certainly applicable to this, but yeah, in general, you know, your keyword should be probably lowercase. I don’t, I don’t see a point in making them uppercase and plurals and that kind of stuff are going to be covered by different match types, depending on how you apply it. But yeah, maybe we should move on to ASIN and category targeting. So in addition to keywords, along with Sponsored Products, you know, shortly thereafter, we got the ability to target by ASIN and category inside of Sponsored Brands. So they’re just multiplying the number of things we can do with these, with this ad type. Um, and so yeah, we use ASIN targeting pretty heavily, uh, from either direct competitor ASIN’s. Once we uncover an automatic campaigns or those we think are just a good fit and want to add in, maybe they’re like less competitive products, a lower traffic, but we think we can probably beat them with our offer or get their ads on there… So it’s pretty much the same premises, Sponsored Products.

Lazar: (19:21)

Is there any specific strategy that you use there? I can share mine, like what we do in Sellers Alley with ASIN targeting.

Brent: (19:29)

I don’t have much more to add besides that. Now just, just pull them out of the campaigns as usual. Typically it’s like Sponsored Products as the testing ground and Sponsored Brands is like, uh, where we have fewer, but more focused keyword, you know? Going back to the discussion about keyword count. It’s like, we usually keep it under 30, under 25..

Lazar: (19:46)

Yeah, definitely. We, we don’t go over 30 keywords in campaign and they’re all more or less the same match type. That’s like the best practice that we realized that we were using and it’s working for us flawlessly. And as you mentioned, like Sponsored Brands are a bit more refined and that’s something that we learn through history. Like you test everything and Sponsored Product ads and like what’s working there, you transfer it to Sponsored Brands. Like that’s the start. Like if something is working in Sponsored Product ads, you take it as exact match type form and create campaign with, with all of that and a form for a Sponsored Brand. Yeah. And the last thing is category targeting. Well, obviously it’s more or less the same as far as Sponsored Product ads where you can target specific categories, obviously, that’s like self explanatory. But the thing is it’s in the name. Still like what you can do there, you can refine it. And if you don’t refine it, it’s like burning money. You can just sit there and burn cash. And like, you’re going to do the same thing. So like, what we strongly suggest is do refining of category targeting and like go through a whole bunch of different options that you can do there from like target specific pricing, target specific, um, review rating, or like brand or whole bunch of different stuff can be refined there. And like…

Brent: (21:14)

Yeah, those refinements are very welcome in terms of, uh, in terms of setting those campaigns up. I think I would never suggest just targeting category straight out, you know, make sure that you’re in the same price ballpark. Maybe you want to target, uh, products that have a lower star rating. That’s helpful. Um, maybe you want to try to target those for a specific brand without the hassle of actually building out all the ASIN’s in a specific campaign, which would effectively have the same result. You know, if you went in and searched for a competitor brand, got all 10 of their ASIN’s…

Lazar: (21:43)

Yeah, literally the same.

Brent: (21:43)

You might be able to do it if you category targeting instead..

Lazar: (21:46)

But what is really cool there like if you target the brands and if you, if they add more ASIN’s, you don’t need to double check that. So you don’t.

Brent: (21:57)

Yeah. Good point. Good point.

Lazar: (21:58)

I would definitely suggest targeting brand instead of just targeting a couple of ASIN’s from one brand. Well, if you want to target those specific ASIN’s, that’s pretty cool. But like, I, I wanted to, to mention one thing that I find super logical about ASIN targeting, like nobody’s going to write down the ASIN and that means that if you’re doing ASIN targeting, are you going to show up on the top of the search result page? I’m pretty sure you’re not going to show up there. You’re going to show up with product listing page.

Brent: (22:32)

You mean when someone types in an ASIN directly?

Lazar: (22:34)

Yeah, nobody’s going to do that.

Brent: (22:39)

Well nobody does that. The only people that do that are us, because we copy and paste it from client accounts or reports and we want to see what it is. Right. So that’s the only time I can think of anyone doing that. No, I doubt that your grandma’s going to go and search on Amazon and put the ASIN in and say wow this is my favorite ASIN.

Lazar: (22:50)

Yeah, that’s not going to happen.So yeah, when you, when you’re going to do ASIN targeting like most of the time you are going to show up at product listing page. I’m pretty sure that’s like pretty logical thing.

Brent: (23:05)

I don’t know. I don’t have any data to share on that. Do you want to talk about pros and cons?

Lazar: (23:09)

Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. But maybe we can, we can mention where you can send your traffic. That’s the interesting one.

Brent: (23:17)

Oh, that’s essential. Yeah, we should do that. All right. So let, let me, let me kick it off. Then the most obvious place would be a custom page. So you’ve created a landing page, which is three or more products and you send the traffic right to that from any one of the targeting types we talked about. Historically, we also had something called, um, like the URL custom URL. To my knowledge Lazar, I don’t know if that exists anymore. Maybe in some Amazon advertising console accounts, but I know in Seller central, I think that feature was never poured it over and back in the day people used to do.

Lazar: (23:49)

Super URLs.

Brent: (23:50)

Those URLs that would, uh, yeah. Yeah. They could do all kinds of little tricks in there. I think none of that stuff really is, is, uh, you know, is of the moment anymore. I don’t hear about people doing that. I don’t think we do that.

Lazar: (24:00)

No, no, no. That’s, that’s the history if you ask me. Yeah. Yeah. So..

Brent: (24:06)

So the other type would be the store page or Amazon store. Um, which I think is probably the most important one to want to cover.

Lazar: (24:16)

Yeah. So you don’t necessarily need to use your landing page for like the homepage of your store. You can use any page of your storefront. So basically like if you’re targeting specific products and group of products, if you’re selling more than one category, if you’re selling a whole bunch of different stuff, you can send people to the specific page of your storefront. And what’s super interesting that changed, I think around the beginning of this year, when they started introducing like onlly ads with logo in front, instead of the image. Um, you can now show your ads with like zero ASIN’s that are available. So if, if you have, if you added like couple of ASIN’s, three, five ten, I don’t know, um, and you ended up without any of them in stock, you can still use.. Your campaign is still alive basically. And you can burn a lot of money that way because of brand awareness. Like Amazon is letting you show your logo. And that’s it.

Brent: (25:22)

I think that also a block, the ability to run a campaign, that gets one ASIN you know, if you have a page that is a store, that’s your landing page. You can run it with one ASIN in particular too, like you could start a new campaign doing that, which is not useful for pretty much any of our clients, because they don’t have catalogs that small, but that might be really applicable and useful for some someone listening to this and that’s worth investigating either way recommend investing in a store page, because Lazar said, you can drive traffic to specific sub pages and like different sections of that store page. So going back to the rain, the rain gear example that I gave earlier, you know, you can have a page just from rain boots, and then if your keywords and your copy’s all align towards rain boots, you’re going to send someone to the rain boots sub page. And what you’re doing is reducing friction, right? So you’re making their kind of purchasing journey as seamless as possible. And you’re getting them aligned as closely as possible to what they’re looking for. You want to remove any kind of barriers to them purchasing or considering a purchase. So, you know, kind of effortlessly guiding them towards that sub page is really a great thing. And I mean, we did this for our clients where possible, you know, they have to have a good store page. It’s really is gonna be compelling to do that in the first place. But I think we don’t see this done nearly as often as, as we probably should, you know, from competitors or just in the marketplace in general and the work to do it is not that much. I mean, you don’t have to build a website, just build a store page. It’s very simple.

Lazar: (26:48)

Amazon like worked really hard to make it complicated, just like always, because why not? Like when you want to send people to your storefront how can you do it? You can use different ad formats. You can use store spotlight, which is pretty cool thing. It’s not like product collection, it’s not video. So it’s, it’s available for mobile only. And that’s, that’s something that is interesting. So you can combine different stuff. But if you, for example, choose a product collection and to promote multiple products from a landing page on your, of your choice and you get one extra option that is called optimize your ad. So you have like a check box that you can like check. And, um, basically what you do there, you let Amazon show other products from, from your landing page in the ad. Uh, if they end up being more relevant for, for that search query, or if there is a chance that your CTR is going to be higher by decision of Amazon’s algorithm or not. So that’s something that’s super interesting that you’re not able to use anywhere else, basically.

Brent: (27:59)

Right. That’s just in combination with store pages.

Lazar: (28:02)

Yeah. That’s just combination with product collection. And if you choose product collection and if, basically, because you can choose which products are going to show in the ad. Like logo plus three products. And if those three products are not going to be like the most clickable, Amazon is going to show some other products instead of those three. And that’s, that’s the whole point. So maybe we should talk about what’s the purpose of Sponsored Brands. Because I know a lot of people are saying like: Oh, Sponsored Brands are really nice, but I don’t have, I don’t have many sales. Like when, when, when you..

Brent: (28:44)

I mean, I think that the purpose of it is maybe more to, and this is one thing we haven’t even covered, but to, to give the ability to kind of tell your story, like your brand story to searchers, and not just on the SERP anymore, you know the search results page, but on everywhere where the ad type shows up on Amazon. Uh, whereas Sponsored Products might be more like, alright, let’s drive consistent sales against this keyword. Sponsored Brands is not really for that. I mean, it’s, it makes up a larger and larger percentage of ad revenue for a lot of our clients as time goes on. Certainly since, you know, two years ago, when was basically the stone age for this like ad type. And they had like no features that we just spent 20 minutes talking about, but I think that all the different creative types that are available here and what Amazon is experimenting with, that’s kind of like the point of Sponsored Brands to me, whereas Sponsored Products, you know, still no ability to create custom creative, can’t even write a headline. Certainly can’t use video, you know, all these new things that Sponsored Brands are the leg up, uh, on the more traditional ad type of Sponsored Products.

Lazar: (29:44)

Yeah. Also you are able to edit your ads now. And that, that’s a really cool thing. So like with combination of different,ad types and different landing pages and different targeting types is getting more and more complicated and it’s giving you more and more options what you can do there. So yeah, like what I like telling people, when we talk about Sponsored Brands, it’s like Sponsored Brands are more brand awareness as well. So, um, everybody talks about last click sales. Nobody talks about how, how you get your, get your client and like, how do they realize that you exist as a brand? And if your product is really cool to purchase or I don’t know. So like the point when you go to like, when you travel or like you’re on the bus or wherever, and like you check your cell phone and you’re searching for something like probably you are going to click on Sponsored Brand ad. And after that, you’re like, Oh, it’s my stop. I’m going to leave the bus or whatever. You’re going to go to your laptop or something on your, you’re going to know what to search for. And you’re going to search for, you’re going to use some other search query, and you’re going to end up with purchasing product, but without affiliating, that sale to Sponsored Brand, basically. So it might be considered to be organic, or it might be considered to be Sponsored Product sale, but not Sponsored Brand sale. And before I usually like, Oh, I got so many clues, but I’m not getting any sales. Well, this might be the reason like why that can happen. So I find them to be really, really good when it comes to brand awareness, especially like with new thing, with video ads, video ads or something that is becoming more and more big, like bigger and bigger. And like, because not everybody’s using video ads, there are not many competitors that are using it. So you can definitely show up and stand out comparing to others by having video ads there. And like..

Brent: (31:49)

Yeah. And Amazon even provides a metric that is specifically designed to measure this right, the new to brand percentage. Right. So typically, and you can share with me what you guys see, but we see anywhere from, uh, 80, like 85%, typically in an account of customers that are new to brand that come through Sponsored Brands sales. That’s just sales I’m talking about. Not like clicks or awareness that Lazar was talking about, which, you know, attribution on Amazon is never 100%, it’s never 100% on Google for that matter or other platforms. But these companies do the best they can with what, with what they have, you know, there’s limitations to technology obviously, but that metric of new to brand purchases, what that basically means is that that person, a shopper hasn’t purchased in the last 365 days. So they haven’t interacted or bought from your brand at least a year. And I think the assumption there is ever would be, would be the case, you know, they’ve never bought from your brand. So that’s a useful metric that we don’t have for Sponsored Products. But I think Amazon put that in there for a reason.

Lazar: (32:48)

We did one kind of analysis inside of our team that literally told us that.. Basically what we noticed there is that a Sponsored Brand ads are having the highest impact on organic sales comparing to other campaign types, just because of that brand awareness that we, that we mentioned.

Brent: (33:08)

Interesting. I like that. That’s very cool.

Lazar: (33:10)

So that, that’s one of the things. So is there anything else that we would like to cover here?

Brent: (33:16)

Maybe just quick pros and cons? I think we’ve already talked about pros, like for most of the episode, like store pages, uh, you know, the ability to adjust, uh, the match types and like how that works. For some cons though, one thing I would say is since there are no ad groups, you do have to scale campaigns up and that becomes more difficult. And another part of that, that’s challenging, since we do have so many levers to pull with creative, true AB testing is not really possible because Amazon doesn’t have a kind of a facility for that built into the, uh, Seller central interface, or certainly not in the API. Um, and another con I would say is that Sponsored Brands video and the data surrounding that is also not in the API. So we use different softwares to do reporting and help us with that, uh, for clients. And we have to gather the data for Sponsored Brands video, which many of our us clients, if not, all of them are using, uh, so that’s like a hole in the data there. And that’s frustrating too. So Amazon is slow to catch up with these things as usual.

Lazar: (34:15)

Yeah. But overall, I think Amazon is going in the right direction when it comes to Sponsored Brand ads and like they’re giving more and more options. And that’s really, really good to see.

Brent: (34:26)

Yeah. I feel like Sponsored Brands has kind of become the testing place for Amazon to roll new stuff out. I feel like it’s hitting there more than Sponsored Products these days. Like a new thing will come to Sponsored Brands and that’s like the hot new thing and all the Facebook groups and everything, the podcasts for a bit. And it’s almost always a Sponsored Brands that gets it first.

Lazar: (34:44)

I remember when, if you asked me like a year or two ago, uh, what’s the percentage of sales coming from Sponsored Brand ads, comparing to other campaign types? I would say like seven, eight, maybe 10%. Not more than that, but now I feel like that Sponsored Brand ads can take way more. Especially if you combine them with, with organic sales that are increasing. So they’re really, really important part of the funnel. Especially like when you do reporting, when you check your campaign manager or like, depending on when you listen to this episode, if everything is moved to advertising console and so on, like when you compare stuff and when you go to, um, business reports, you’re not going to be able to see just because…if, if like people created…Oh, this is one really important thing to mention. If you, if you have AMS like advertising console, and if you have campaign manager, like where are you creating your Sponsored Brand ads? That’s I think something that, that everybody asks you Brent.

Brent: (35:52)

Wherever they have best performance. I mean, at this point, I would say if you’re starting new ones, start them in Seller central or whatever your advertising console login is for your former Seller central account. Not the entity aka, which would be the, uh, you know, AMS formerly AMS, because that’s just..I honestly still think that’s going to go away in time. And there’s a lot of depreciated ad types available in there. Like we have a lot of product display ads, for instance, running in there, or some of the headline search with the custom URL that are still active. I’m not sure how long Amazon’s going to let those things be there before they just consolidate clean up the platform. So I wouldn’t advise building out new stuff there if you can avoid it..

Lazar: (36:33)

Yeah. That makes lots of sense.

Brent: (36:35)

That’s my thought on it at least. If you had to give an estimate Lazar, what percentage of sales in let’s just say like a larger US accounts that really use Sponsored Brand seriously, what percentage of sales do you think would come from that campaign type in those accounts?

Lazar: (36:49)

Well, it’s definitely not 7% anymore. I think it’s double.. It’s like at least 15%, like depending how well you structured your account, but if you have everything set in place, I’m pretty sure that like at least 15% of your, uh, ad revenues coming from Sponsored Brand ads and also like your organic sales are up for at least 10% because of those.

Brent: (37:17)

Because of that. Yeah. I was going to go even higher actually and say in some accounts, I think it may be as high as 20, maybe even the low twenties, 22, 23.

Lazar: (37:26)

That’s a huge change.

Brent: (37:27)

Yeah. That’s a big deal.

Lazar: (37:30)

Yeah. So if you want to increase your business for 15 to 20, 25%, maybe you should consider using Sponsored Brand ads. I think that’s a good takeaway.

Brent: (37:43)

That’s about it for me. I mean, I definitely agree. All brands should be using these testing them aggressively, getting serious about the new ad types, the creative, you know, it might seem like a hassle, but Hey, at the end of the day, if that’s going to bring home another, a large percentage of business and get you in front of a new audience, it’s worth it. So willing to try.

Lazar: (38:00)

Cool. I think we covered everything. Uh, guys, if you have any extra questions that you would like us to cover about Sponsored Brand ads, and if you have any kind of questions, please send us an email on ask@wildppcbunch.com. And we’re going to talk next week about some other cool stuff. Thank you so much, Brent, for joining today.

Brent: (38:23)

Yeah. Thanks Lazar. Talk to you next time.

Lazar: (38:25)

Have fun, have a good one. Bye.

Brent: (38:26)

Bye.