Top 4 Amazon Sponsored Ads Trends for 2022  

Oct 13, 2021

Amazon officially released its new advertising console interface today, a suitable coincidence that corresponded to when I began writing this post (it looks fantastic, by the way).  

 

sponsored ads trends

 Intro to the new look of Amazon advertising console 

 

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Every time there is a significant new release in the advertising console, I reminisce about the days when (then called) Amazon Marketing Services had no date range selector. If you wanted to know your week-over-week performance, the best you could hope for was to export the lifetime data at the same time of the day each week and calculate the difference.  

Amazon Ads has changed so much in the past five years. Analyzing its current pace, it seems like 2022 will not be an exception. Competition for advertising placements is fierce on Amazon. The e-commerce giant has always responded to increased demand by releasing more features, ensuring plenty of new placements and features are available for advertisers.  

Below are the top four sponsored ads trends I think will dominate throughout 2022, judging by Amazon’s latest feature releases this year. 

 

Sponsored Ads Trend No.1: Emphasized Focus On Creative And Unique Brand Assets 

 

sponsored ads trends

Adding a custom image in Sponsored Display campaigns 

 

With the introduction of the custom image as part of the “Customize your creative” section for Sponsored Display ads (late August 2021), two out of the three campaign types available on Amazon have custom creative available. You only win in a cluttered space by standing out from the crowd! How can you make your Sponsored Display ad even more clickable and improve that CTR? 

Custom creative comes with limitless potential. You can customize your creative solutions to highlight specific competitive advantages you have over a particular competitor. Another option is to customize creatives depending on which stage of the funnel potential customers are. Besides, you can customize based on different seasons within the year and more!  

The introduction of “Creative Assets” further emphasized the importance of customization. It’s a feature that includes all previously uploaded assets used for the campaigns. This feature makes it easy to store, organize and reuse previously used assets in Sponsored Ads. 

 

sponsored ads trends

 Advertising console’s creative assets feature 

 

What does this mean for brands?

 

It is time to integrate your design team closely with performance marketing. An annual creative calendar can help the teams align on the upcoming campaigns and the creative assets needed to support these efforts.  

Amazon Advertising professionals will need to learn to resist the urge to go towards bid optimization when a campaign underdelivers; perhaps the creative needs some improvements? 

Let’s see some more upcoming sponsored ads trends!

 

Sponsored Ads Trend No. 2: Native Dayparting Will Become As Important As It Is On Google Ads 

 

Only advertisers with support from third-party tools currently use dayparting, which is expected to come to Amazon natively. Dayparting is quite simply a feature that would help advertisers set the run time of their advertising campaigns only between given time intervals in the day (example: 09:00 am – 05:00 pm). This will surely be a welcome change since it can prevent wasted spend. There are periods of the day or the week where your target audience is not engaging with your ads because they aren’t on Amazon during that time. 

 

What does this mean for brands?

 

Brands will be free to request specific time slots during which they want their ads to run or be super highlighted. Advertisers for brands with limited advertising budgets will need to analyze purchase data and discover the best-performing days of the week and hours of the day as an extra lever to keep ACoS down. 

 

Sponsored Ads Trend No. 3: Brand Metrics Will Help Performance Marketers Go Beyond “Bottom Of The Funnel” Targeting 

 

sponsored ads trends

 

Brand metrics is yet another new feature that will surely gain importance throughout 2022. It allows advertisers to learn from retail shopper engagements and optimize their brand advertising accordingly. 

Brand metrics are available on a category level, based on the category a brand has products listed in and include the following main KPIs: 

  • Total Brand Shoppers 
  • Engaged Shopper rate 
  • Customer Conversion rate 
  • % sales new to the brand 

 

For each given category, advertisers can see their performance against peers competing in the same and the brand’s percentile indexes in each customer journey stage represented by the Amazon funnel. 

 

sponsored ads trends 

What does this mean for brands?

 

Brands need to accept that advertising on Amazon has grown more complex, and metrics beyond ACoS and TACoS are required. Brands need to identify which stage of the advertising funnel is a priority for them, given their overall account sales goals, and work with the advertising tools applicable to that stage. 

The available peer comparison numbers will help advertisers see where their brand fits within the broader category and aim for the category median numbers at least. Continue reading to discover the last prediction for sponsored ads trends in 2022.

 

Sponsored Ads Trend No. 4: Sponsored Display CPM Charge Mode Will Redefine How We Measure Advertising Effectiveness 

 

Sponsored Display advertising has horrible ACoS, right? At least in the past month, that statement is, quite simply, wrong. Amazon has worked very hard to improve Sponsored Display advertising campaigns, which they plan to use as a gateway to more DSP features available in the Advertising Console. Since introducing cost per viewable impressions, Sponsored Display campaigns have been more profitable than Sponsored Product campaigns, judging by ACoS only. 

 

sponsored ads trends

 

Optimize for viewable impressions uses a cost per thousand viewable impressions (vCPM) model, where you pay per thousand impressions that shoppers viewed instead of per click. 

Attribution of Optimize for viewable impressions is based on clicks and estimated views – similar to Amazon DSP. 

 

What does this mean for brands?

 

When charged on a per 1000 viewable impressions basis, ACoS can look pretty impressive for popular products. Brands will need to find a way to budget for these campaign types to help with their retargeting, product targeting, and audience targeting Sponsored Display campaigns and measure their performance against their optimize for page views and optimize for conversion counterparts.  

Brands will need to redefine how they measure attribution from advertising campaigns and whether the data shows that Sponsored Display campaigns guided the Amazon shopper further down the funnel. 

Still, with “optimize for viewable impressions” being an awareness driving tool primarily if ACoS is acceptable, it is difficult to argue against the effectiveness of this newly added bidding type. 

 

Conclusion 

 

The sponsored ads trends for 2022 show that Amazon Ads is growing in depth and complexity. The entire buyer journey from Awareness to Consideration to Purchase takes place on Amazon or Amazon-owned media platforms. Development teams at Amazon have been wise to include additional tools to help advertisers influence people with their advertising messages at each stage.

It is up to the Amazon advertising professionals to step up to the challenge and get the most bang for their buck in this new feature-cluttered environment. 

 

About the author

Stefan Jordev

Stefan Jordev is Director of Marketplace Strategy at Elevate Brands, which acquires consumers leading Amazon brands and elevates them to their full potential. Stefan has over a decade of performance marketing experience and is Amazon Advertising, Amazon DSP, and Amazon Strategy and Planning certified. His multidisciplinary digital marketing background includes Google Ads, Bing Ads, lead generation, and social media marketing. 

 

 

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