Taking Sponsored Displays To the Next Level

Paul Sonneveld
I'm your host, Paul Sonneveld, and today we are going over Sponsored Display. It's probably quite a familiar topic to many of you, but what you may not be aware of is that Amazon has been releasing a lot of new features, bells, and whistles, allowing you really to take Sponsored Display as a campaign type, really to the next level. So to help us really demystify that and work through this particular topic, I've invited Elizabeth Green to join us and share her expertise. 

Elizabeth Greene, along with her husband, founded the Amazon advertising agency, Junglr. She started helping sellers with their Amazon PPC and along the way, uncovered a deep love for all things, spreadsheets, and data. I know what that feels like. She's a wife and mom of six and if she's not at the computer exploring the latest ad updates, you'll find her enjoying time with her family. So she brings a broad range of experience to the conversation today. Thank you for being on the show today. 

Elizabeth Greene 
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Paul Sonneveld
Hi. Yeah, I'm pretty excited, we've all kind of run off a mile million miles away talking about DSP and Amazon Marketing Cloud, but actually, most of the Ad span is still going through the Amazon, marketing platform and Sponsored Display is one of the most common types that's out there. So I'm really excited to get into that particular topic today. But before we do that, I'd love to just hear a little bit about your story, Elizabeth. tell me a bit about your agency and how it all started. 

Elizabeth Greene
Yeah, definitely. So the intro kind of summed it up. Really got started, helping sellers in Facebook groups. Really into answering questions and then started answering enough questions people wanted to inquire about what we're doing. So kind of got a lot of clients, first clients, through that and then found out, Hey, I actually know what I'm doing and I enjoy this thing which is great to be able to do something that you love and it's really just grown from there.

Paul Sonneveld
That's really fantastic. And how long you've been up and running now? How long has it been? 

Elizabeth Greene
I wanna say it's a little over three years now as like an official agency doing, you know, calling ourselves as an agency. 

Paul Sonneveld
Cool. No, that's great. I know you've got a great wonderful team of people as well.

Elizabeth Greene
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. 

Paul Sonneveld
So, so let's dive into the topic for today. Before we sort of go really deep into, sponsored brands, maybe just set the scene a little bit. There may be some people just a few who are tuning in today don't really understand the different campaign types that we're talking about. So help us set the scene and sort of explain the different types before we dive deep into the Sponsored brands.
 
Elizabeth Greene
Yeah, definitely. So if you are unaware, there's three different Ad types available inside of Amazon Advertising and those are Sponsored products, which is like the OG, the original what was there first. That's where you run your automatic campaigns and also can run manuals. And there's a lot of things that have been happening to Sponsored products, but those are like the OG ones. And then there's two other ones which are Sponsored Brand Ads, which are where you get kind of like the big headline displays and Sponsored Display Ads.

Now, Sponsored Brand Ads and Sponsored Display Ads originally were just something that was available to vendors. So in Vendor Central. So fun fact, there used to be some accounts that would actually get access to a vendor account just to be able to run those two Ad types. There was kind of a very, very limited version of what we have currently, as Sponsored Display available inside of the Seller Central Advertising that has grown exponentially. And it's one of the reasons why it's today's topic because I think other than just typical like data updates or giving us access to more data as far as the actual, like advertising nuts and bolts updates. By far the most has been through Sponsored Display recently.

Paul Sonneveld
So, let's talk some of those. I know you're in regular dialogue with the team over in Amazon and they've been releasing quite a lot of new features. 

Elizabeth Greene
Yeah. 

Paul Sonneveld
Let's just, I'm not sure we've got time to cover them all, but let's just cover some of the big ones. Where should we start?

Elizabeth Greene
Yeah. so maybe I can start with the targeting available inside of Sponsored Display and then kind of go over some of the updates to those two targeting types that may be helpful. So there is, available inside is there's audience targeting and then there's product targeting. Now, audience targeting has the availability to show up on and off Amazon.
So Amazon is targeting specific audiences. They have access to way more buyer data than we do. So they can look at somebody who has been recently shopping in the baby category and then maybe serve your products up to them. But then maybe someone who's recently shopping in the baby category is also browsing other listings, so you might want to show up on and off platform.

Or you can do product targeting, which is your typical, like I want to show up on this listing and inside it. So it's very similar to like say, Sponsored Product Ads where you can have like your autos and then you can have your manuals or you can use phrase, or body. Each of these kinds of changes how your Ad is going to appear.
Think of it like that. So within these couple targeting and then within those targeting, again, there's been more updates to kind of how they behave and I guess you could say, control on how specific we want to get with our targeting. 

Paul Sonneveld
So just on that targeting, and I'm really interested in, you know, the targeting off Amazon, that's always such a big topic. What does it look like? How deep can you go in terms of targeting, what are the dimensions there that are available? 

Elizabeth Greene
Yeah, definitely. So within audiences you can show up, you can do something called remarketing, which is basically like if somebody lands on your listing but they did not purchase, then you might want to show up to that audience. Maybe they're in the market for something and they land on your listing like, ah, that's not the one I don't want, I want to buy this. So you could show up there. Or you could show up to a specific audience and within audiences, there's several layers. There's quite a bit you can niche down into.

Now audiences get a little bit broader. So a lot of sellers when they're running Ads, they're not really thinking of like awareness top of the funnel, a lot of traditional, especially like paper click platforms, people are really focused on ROI. When you're running audiences, you're not being as very, very specific with your targeting.
So a lot of sellers just really haven’t explore these yet. But if you have a product that really you know appeals to a specific audience, you definitely can go into a Sponsored Display and just test that targeting, and see how that's going to appear.

And then the other update that they've had is they do Purchases Remarketing.
So before it was just, if somebody landed on your listing but they didn't purchase, then you can retarget them. Well, now what they've updated is the availability to say, Hey, if somebody's landed and purchased my product, I would like to remarket to those specific shoppers. And why this can be very powerful, especially if you have replenishable items and you have a specific look-back window.

So you say like, okay, I have supplements and I know that my supplements are you know, I have a 30-day supply or something, so I want to remarket to the shop, you know, people who have purchased my product within the last, let's say 30 days, and then show up to those customers again. Again on and off platform.
So wherever they're naturally browsing the web, they might see it. Oh yeah, that's right. I need to reorder that. And then, you know, hopefully you have a repurchases set up. 

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that's, and I'd love to see, I mean, what sort of results are you seeing with the particularly the retargeting of sort of more, most of those, I call it like, frequent purchases or, replenishables. The reason I ask is I always feel there's such, wasted Ad Spend. If I buy a product then tomorrow they'll be retargeting me for the same product.

Elizabeth Greene
Yeah. 

Paul Sonneveld
Sometimes they'll definitely get it wrong and I feel like, well, I've already bought your, you've just spent, you've just wasted $5 there on a on a click. What are you seeing? I mean, when you do, when you do it right, when it comes to retargeting, what do you see? 

Elizabeth Greene
Yeah, so I think it definitely depends on the product. For sure. You want to just think logically about your shoppers, how they're interacting with your product, and where you feel like it makes sense for you to show up again. For instance, you know, like I said, like the remarketing. If you have a replenishable product that makes sense for us to show up again. if we have a very high ticket item that people probably purchase once and we've built our product well, that they should never have to repurchase. You probably aren't going to want to run purchases remarketing because that makes no sense. However, in those cases, if especially if you have a very, high ticket item, you might want to use views remarketing because maybe it's a product that you know people do a lot of window shopping on and there's a lot of discovery that goes on before the purchase. So that may make sense. 

The other thing that I would love to point out is that these models do have a pay per click model available. So there's something else we can talk about as far as, the different, models because there's paper per click and now there is our bidding strategies. There's, you can use traditional like paper click models or they now have views remarketing, which gets a little bit more into the paper impression model, which is something that has not yet rolled out before to, Amazon Advertising.

So that's interesting. But you can put, I want to say Sponsored Display has as low as like 10 cent clicks or something. So you really, honestly, if you're testing out these things for your product, highly recommend you start with lower bids and then just work your way up and gauge the performance. Don't throw crazy money at it, test, see if it works for your brand, and then adjust accordingly. 

Paul Sonneveld
Excellent. That's great. Is there an ability to control where your Ad is shown off Amazon? Does Amazon give you any control or levers in terms of where your Ad is shown outside the Amazon environment? Or is that really up to Amazon?

Elizabeth Greene
Yes. So now we do. That's another update when I was talking about Sponsored Display, rolling out the most updates, like, yes. So previously, no, like there was no way for us to adjust for the audiences. Now there is a way for us to go through and specify to Amazon like, hey, we don't want to show up on these places. And the words are escaping me on what they actually call that now. It's just essentially a way the same as you would use like negative keywords which fun fact again, there is a new report because before we would set up these targeting, through Sponsored products, maybe categories, and there were ways for us to add negatives. 

But because we couldn't see the kind of like where shoppers were interacting with the Ads, like when am I supposed to put in the negative? Because I don't know what's performing. Now we have a report. They don't call it a search term report, but essentially it's like a search term report for Sponsored Display Ads, where now we can go through, see what is working, see what isn't working, and then kind of use Negative Targeting to adjust and then make our ads perform better, which is phenomenal.

Paul Sonneveld
That's fantastic. I think you hinted it before. But creative, what's changed on the creative front? I know that's always a big, big topic for marketers.
 
Elizabeth Greene
Yes, definitely. So again, when these were part of Vendor Central, you had the ability to put a headline and you also had the ability to put a logo, that was not available inside when they rolled it out to Seller Central. So a lot of people kept their Sponsored Display Ads running in Vendor Central. They then rolled that out to the people using Seller Central, and so there was no longer any advantages that happened in Vendor Central. So you could put a logo and then you could put a headline kind of calling out something kind of like the original or make sure it's in terms of service.

Then they also rolled out the lifestyle image. So if you're familiar with. Sponsored Brand Ads, maybe you've been browsing the platform and you see those like gorgeous life kind of like in use image of the product in the Sponsored Brand Ads. You're like, oh my goodness, it looks beautiful. Well, then they rolled it out to Sponsored Display Ads. Well, when they did that, I actually did a whole presentation for my team and I told them like, Hey, when you run lifestyle images, the logo and the headline are not available. So actually the logo and the headlines tend to convert a little bit better. So I was saying like, hey, unless we have sort of like, maybe we're doing more top of the funnel stuff and we want click throughs, purchase rates are better with the logo and the headlines, so let's use those. They now just updated it. 

So you have the ability to run all three at the same time. The only caveat is for some of the placements because there's a couple different places, depending on where it shows up. You might not have all three, the logo, lifestyle, and the headlines show up. so in these cases, you do have the availability to like click through it and just kind of like, see what the app is going to show. It gives you like a display and you can have say like, oh, okay, that's where it doesn't show up like that doesn't look very good. And you might adjust for that. 

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. So add on and maybe this is too early and maybe say, look, come back and ask me in a month. In instances where you can now use all those three elements together in a single ladder, you don't have to make that trade-off anymore, what are the results that you are seeing?

Elizabeth Greene
Yeah. So again, it's a bit early to tell, for sure. But I would say, the more creatives you can use, the better. The only problem that when it comes to like split testing things like these creatives, is the fact that there's so many variables. You have a headline, you have a logo, you have a lifestyle image. So is your lifestyle image good with the headline right? Sometimes it's a bit hard to tell which piece of it is working best. But what I will say is if you are not using images, if you haven't adjusted any of your creatives, good news is you don't have to completely restart your campaigns.

Sometimes like OG that you used to have to completely restart and you're like, oh my goodness. Like just keep the original campaigns because they performed. You actually can go through and you can update creatives on your current campaigns. So you don't have to give up anything. You don't have to give up all the testing you've done. You can just try a bit of the creatives and see if you can get better performance.

Paul Sonneveld
That is good news. I just reminded how quickly things. I remember AB testing and using different creators and different options is great, but very quickly you get into, okay, I want to set up 300 different permutations so I can work out exactly what this, this smiling person in this lifestyle image Ads versus everything else.

And before you're trying to tame this monster with you know very low volume going through every single permutation. So yeah, that's good to know that you can update things for campaigns that are already in play. Let's move on to the loop-back window. I know there's some changes around the loop back window as well. What are you seeing then and what are you hearing?
 
Elizabeth Greene
Yeah, so I want to say it is for purchases remarketing I believe. One of them Purchased Views Remarketing or Purchases Remarketing. One of those actually has a longer look back window. I want to say it's the purchases remarketing. But you'll have to go through and launch like a dummy display Ad and then double check that. And so that just gives us a longer look back window. So again, if you have a longer cycle, for people browsing your product or maybe, like, Hey, in a year people want to repurchase my product, then it would make sense to take advantage of that longer look back windows.

Paul Sonneveld
That makes sense, cool. Are there any other major updates that we've missed? What else do they know?

Elizabeth Greene
There’s two that I think will be beneficial to the audience if I cover. One of them is the change in the targeting for Sponsored Display Product Targeting. Specifically categories or for similar to Advertised Product Targeting inside of product targeting. So traditionally, remember I talked about audiences and sharing your products to audiences on and off the platform. Well, typically in the past what we had is when you set up Sponsored Display Product Targeting, you would only show your Ads to shoppers that were browsing on the platform. So if you're targeting a product like, Hey, I'm going to show up on this specific listing, that's where I'm going to show up. The reason why this update is kind of really important to understand, is it actually changes how some of your current Ads may be functioning and then it might not necessarily be a bad thing. You might not have seen, crazy swings of performance, but it will change where your Ads can show up. 

So currently, if you are running Category Targeting or Sponsored Product, Product Targeting, Category Targeting, and our Display Product Targeting, similar to advertised products, your products can show up on those listings, same as usual. But then they can also show up to shoppers off the platform. Now this is actually different from the audience targeting, which is very interesting to me. And again, I haven't fully, fully tested how this plays out. Again, I would just start with little bits. 

But the way audience targeting works is it targets very specific shoppers. So like these shoppers are in market for this. This person has interacted with your product just a single shopper. The way the targeting works inside of the Sponsored Display Product Targeting categories similar to Advertised Products is, it will show up contextually. That means Amazon says, okay, you are targeting, the category bath house. We found all these blogs that are relevant to the category bath house. I mean, I'm just spit balling. I don't have access to their back ends. But I'm thinking things like, maybe bathroom remodels or, people talking about how to bathe their kids. I don't know. 

But something that would be relevant to that particular category that you've chosen or relevant in the similar to advertised products. Just kind of relevant to whatever you're choosing, which is very interesting. But the only thing is if you currently have Sponsored Display Product writing category set up your like the way the targeting can show up has actually changed.
I want to say it was like in June, when this update rolled out. So if you've seen some funky numbers in those campaigns back in June, that might likely be the case.

Paul Sonneveld
Thanks Elizabeth. That's really great. Some really great updates there. So imagine, what if I'm one of an Amazon brand. I'm listening to this show here. I mean, I haven't been doing a lot of Sponsored Brands at all and like, geez, it’s been a while. I want to get back into. I'm going to spend some time this week just to set up a couple of campaigns and try to tap into some of the things that you've been talking about. What advice do you have for listeners? What are some of the quick tips if I'm going to spend a couple hours to set up some campaigns? What are the things you recommend, to focus on?

Elizabeth Greene
Yeah, definitely. so I think the OG strategy is always going to be the OG strategy. What is working? How can I expand on it? So what I would do, I would go into my Sponsored Product Ads. I would see what ASINs am I converting well on for what products and I would start with Sponsored Display Product Targeting targeting ASINs. That's going to be typically like the most bottom of the funnel for your Ads. And if you're looking at the audience types it's like paper impression paper, optimize for page views and optimize for conversions. I would pick optimize for page views personally. If you are looking at it from an ROI perspective.

Now, if you don't really care about ACOS so much and you really want to focus on generating more sales on these particular ASINs, you can click optimize for conversions, if you're setting that up. And then again, I would just say, hey, what's working in sponsor products? Where else can I show up on those listings? Because fun fact Sponsored Display Ads can show up underneath your competitor's buy box. 

So if you have somebody like we'll have people at a time that our clients are like, hey, you know, these products are doing really well in my space, how can we get them to like Sponsored Display, high bids right underneath their buy box all day long, all over the page. And fun fact also, if you're running coupons, these show up on Sponsored Display Ads. So if you want to show up right underneath your competitor's buy box with a coupon, like Sponsored Display is the way to do it.

Paul Sonneveld
Awesome. Some really great tips there. Very. I love that. So, what about the flip side of this? You work with a lot of clients and I'm sure a lot of clients come to you say, look, we've tried it, we're given up. Things are out of control. They've given the business to you to manage. When you look at those clients and as you're diagnose, what they've been up to before you sort of put your strategy in place, what are the most common mistakes that you see people make when it comes to Sponsored Display?

Elizabeth Greene
Yeah, probably, really large targeting. And then also, a lot of times honestly just kind of he same things that don't really work in your traditional Ads. So like, just like a whole bunch of products thrown in there, a whole bunch of dump campaigns.
Again, like I said, we have more insights into what's working now with sort of like that new report. 

But Sponsored Display in a lot of ways, it's still a little bit tricky to unravel if you have just like a whole bunch of campaigns thrown in there. And then also, again, a strategy that oftentimes kind of brings us trouble in just your regular Ad structure is if you have just like a whole bunch of categories mixing with ASINs mixed in with, like similar to advertised products, like all of those targeting will
perform a little bit different. And sometimes we'll say like, hey, these ASINs are performing phenomenal. We would love to give these more budget. But if they're lumped in with a whole bunch of things that aren't performing as well, do you want to give everything more budget? And in a lot of cases, no.

So you just have to like slowly and painfully unravel all the things that are working, and it can be done but speaking as someone who's been through it, it's quite painful. So if you can segment your audiences, segment your categories away from your ASINs, your future Ad manager will thank you.

 
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, As you started talking there, I just want to ask you all these questions about campaign structure and how to do that. I'm like, well, that's probably another, conversation on its own. So I'm going to do my hardest not to try and get drawn into that conversation because you know that's a big one. I did have another question for myself and, it's kind of left field, but it's something that's completely, I wouldn't say bugging, but it's certainly been on my mind. And that is these different attribution models Amazon's now bringing in. Click-based attribution versus view-based attribution. And you know what, what we're seeing there. Certainly what we are seeing from our clients, as soon as the campaign is view based attribution, Amazon is attributing, obviously a lot more views. There's time to attribute a lot more sales. Guess what your ACOS looks like way better. 

Elizabeth Greene
Yes, it does. 

Paul Sonneveld
What's your perspective on that? I, you know, I'm still struggling to kind of understand. How the 

Elizabeth Greene
Where the model fits into the overall structure. I very much agree with you. Yes. So the way fun fact, in the View Attribution model, somebody only has to see, and I forget the percentage of the total image. It's like they only have to see, I have to look. It's not a hundred percent of the total image for at least a full second for a sale to get attributed.

So you can see why you would just get a whole lot more sales attribution when you're doing a paper impression model. And also if you are doing, a lot of times people do brand defense. I've spoken to the internal team. They said, if you are advertising on your own listings, we do not recommend you do a pay impression model. Because f they're on your listing, they're going to see that Ad. 

So that sale is going, you're going to get a whole lot more sales attributed to those Ads than you would think. And honestly, they're just kind of artificial. I don't want to say artificially inflated, because there's not that, there's no validity to that model. It's just that's not the appropriate place to use that strategy. So think of it like that. Like if I have my own listings, if I think that this could show up on my own listing, It's probably not the best place to use it. It is very much a more broad awareness campaign where if your focus is ROI, even though the ROI on those looks phenomenal, really we want to play in real numbers. And so that's, that's probably not the best place for you.
 
Paul Sonneveld
Very insightful. Thank you for that, Elizabeth. Final question for me for today because we're about to cross over the 30-minute mark here. But the final question, I know you're in regular, like you, you've got a bit of an inside scoop when it comes to, Amazon and the advertising team, or at least I know you've got great relationships with the team directly. Anything that you can see that they're working on, what's coming down the funnel in the next few months? What are you excited for or what are you hoping for and perhaps, being a little bit more than that without giving it away? 

Elizabeth Greene
Yeah, definitely. So I think the internal team I have the most contact with is the bulk file team, which is a whole another subject, something near and dear to my heart. But I'm really, really interested personally to see what's going to come out of this new hourly data available. So right now, there's a whole lot of people that's available through the API. There's whisperings that are coming out in other places. I'm kind of interesting to see how this plays out long term.

Right now, the most application I'm seeing for it is maybe not like real-time application. It's more of like an analysis. It's going to be really interesting long term to see how that plays out and how we can use the analytics we're getting from like receiving real-time. I mean like real-time data on am I making sales? Am I not making sales? And then also those of us in the industry, like you, myself, trying to puzzle out, okay, if we are getting real-time sales data, but our attribution windows are seven to 14 days, how are we going to marry those two aspects? And what makes the most sense to take action on? It's, it's going to be tricky for a while. But I'm really interested to see what the great minds in the space come up with.

Paul Sonneveld
Those are some great challenges for Amazon to solve for us. 

Elizabeth Greene
Yeah.

Paul Sonneveld
I agree. It'd be very, very exciting. But there's some practical things to really think through and solve before that's all ready. So, let's wait and see. Well, we are out of time today, so we're going to have to wrap it up here. Elizabeth, first of all, I just want to say thank you for joining me today. I, I love the expertise. I love the passion that you bring to it. I can generally, I'm starting to worry about your kids because I worry that you care so much about Amazon Advertising that of course now I'll stop there.

Otherwise I'm going to think you better. Clearly you are super passionate about this stuff. I can see that it's not just a day job for you. It's more than that which is great to see. I appreciate the really practical tips and advice too. I'm sure there are viewers here are thinking, gee, I I'd love to have a chat with you. Maybe you can help me, what is the best way, for them to get in touch with you?
 
Elizabeth Greene
Yeah, for sure. So if you just want to pick my brain, I put out the most content on LinkedIn. So if you're just interested, like what are you talking about? You could go over follow me on LinkedIn, if you are interested in seeing if we can help, manage your Ads for you, the best place is our website, which is Junglr, J-U-N-G-L-R.com. Go over there, there's a Calendly link at the bottom. Get in touch. I'm still doing the calls, so you'll get in touch with me. 

Paul Sonneveld
Awesome. Thank you very much, Elizabeth. 

Elizabeth Greene
Yeah. Thank you very much.

Paul Sonneveld
All right everyone. That's it for today's episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed it. I look forward to joining you on the next one. Until then, have a great week.