Sponsored Display Campaigns: Every Targeting Option Explained

Hi, today I'm going to talk about sponsored display. So, it's going to be highly detailed video, highly technical. So, once you're finished with it, you will be absolutely informed how to create properly sponsored display campaign start to finish on every possible detail there is, so every possible optimization strategy, every targeting there is. So, if you're into Amazon PPC, stay with me. So, once we started to create new campaign, the regular process, select the if you want to go with sponsored products, sponsored brands, sponsored display. Once you click there, you will be presented with the campaign name, of course. Now, I fully recommend that you use proper naming convention for sponsored display. We always use SD then dash and then depending if it's the audience targeting or competitor targeting. If it's audience, we're going to do SD-AU and then whatever it is, for example, product name, let's say product name or product family or whatever. If you're using portfolio, do that, but for portfolio, make sure to skip and uncheck the option to share budgets. I don't like that option and and it can create some issues that are undesirable. For daily budget, I don't know why they recommend what to start with $100 because I I don't see that happening in the future. I like to hit it with 20 to 30 at the maximum because typically, if you don't use any bidding campaign bidding optimization, bids can go really high, so you don't want to be burning budget on this one until you're sure if it's going to work or not. Then for the ad format, ad group, you can name it or you can just skip it, but for ad format, you want to select if it's going to be image or video. I encourage you to test both because it's about what your audience is going to like or not and if it's already saturated or not. Then from product, select your products. Now, Amazon recommends that you use as many products as possible for sponsored display for the the whole system to work properly, but I also like to segregate it, you know, if if it's only certain product with certain characteristic characteristics or or some other one. Now, the fun part, optimization strategy. Um you have three options available, reach, page visits, and conversions. Now, reach sounds interesting, but what's bad about the reach optimization strategy is that you will be billed for every 1,000 viewable impressions. And a viewable impression is considered when your product is visible for more than 50% on the page for more than 1 second. Which isn't that bad, but what's bad about the vCPM campaign campaigns is the fact that it will inflate your sales number. So, just to cut the story short, I don't recommend going that way ever in the future, but if you want to experiment with that and see what I'm talking about, you can hit that one small campaign, hit the reach, set the reach goal, and add your targeting, whatever you like, and you will see what I'm talking about. So, you will see the ACOS is 2% on those, uh which is really not the case, unfortunately. In majority of cases, you want to go with page visits and conversions simply because it's the CPC, the good good old one that we all know how to to optimize. So, cost per click and in both cases. Now, if you use cost control option from Amazon, then these make sense because if you select page visits or conversions, you will have the ability for page visits, you will see these cost control options that you can you can select how much you want to pay for for for up to $1 for example and if you select optimize for conversions then you can set how much you're willing to pay per order. Now both cases are worth exploring. Now I usually deselect this one but you have to have in mind that when you select this one your cost per click can go really really high. And then you will just have a have to be well organized with your task management system and get to to this campaign very often to prevent unrealistic, you know, sorry, unexpected spend because clicks can go as high as as three to five dollars on regular categories. I'm not spending I'm not telling about high spending competitive categories but regular categories you will very often see the recommended bids for three to four dollars as you will see in below example. If you're not using cost control then whatever you decide to to select doesn't matter because it's just the cost per click based bidding. That that's it. But just for the sake of it let's take a page visit one. So once again if you select cost control you will have some way of controlling cost per click but you have to think realistically about it. If your average CPC in this account is $3 do not put cost per click expect cost per click here $1. You have to be realistic so if all the others are at three give this a three and also if it's a cost per click that high then you want to rethink the the daily budget. If you with $20 you will only get what six clicks. My math is right. Six clicks and you already depleted your budget. So if if it's that competitive then you can definitely go at 100 per day. And also for the conversions for the cost per order or cost per acquisition whatever you like to call it. Also, Amazon recommends that your cost per order, if it's I don't know, 15, they will very often recommend to achieve this outcome, consider a budget that is at least five times higher than this value. So, take that with a grain of salt, but anyway, test it a little bit. And to set the proper cost per order, you should also uh reference your current cost per orders for the other campaigns that you already have for sponsored products and sponsored brands and test it out a little bit. Go lower, go higher, and see see what works. Uh because I'm going to skip this now because I think uh you will understand what was going on here. Now, what's new is that for conversions here, when you optimize for conversions, you have these options selected by default. Reach audiences likely to be interested in your ad. This is fairly new, and you can select I want to be bidding for whatever the audience Amazon thinks are relevant, and I'm going to bid $1. No, something like that. They said that here I have an issue because I haven't selected any product over here, so that I don't have any any more options to select from. So, you can select as to completely disable these ones if you don't want to um Amazon to reach any audiences that you don't want them to. It's a black box, basically. If you don't like that, you can easily disable it, but I would For example, I would hit this and select a bid, and I would create separate campaign with this optimized targeting, and then I would I want to create a different sponsored display campaign for manual targeting. For this occasion, we're going to remove that and just hit add manual targeting, and you will be presented with the good old good old options here. Now, this is where we go into a lot of details. So, contextual targeting, reach audiences who are browsing products and content matching criteria you choose. Sounds confusing. Here you have two options. You have categories where you can you can have suggested categories. I don't have them here because I don't want to reveal the products that I'm currently advertising, but you will have some suggestions. You can try them, but don't trust them completely. So, categories and individual products. For categories, you can also go to browse and then you will see all of these different ones and I encourage you to go through all of them simply because it's beneficial for you to know what's available out there. Now then, again with the now Rufus being renamed to Alexa, I think this will be more and more popular to explore a little bit what's possible for reaching out users through Alexa skills. There's a really plethora of options over here. Then, when we go back, the next up is remarketing audiences. Now, it's fairly simple. There are basically two options. You have views remarketing and you have purchases remarketing. For views remarketing, simply put, it's just if you put your products over here, so anyone you can define reach audiences only from people who actually seen my product. Or if it's something that's worth to your category or type of product, if it's a consumable or any sort of that, repeat purchases are valuable to you, can select to use purchases and then you will you will chase basically your previous purchases for the number of days that you select. And for both, for views and for purchases, you have the ability to select 7 days, 14 days, 360 and all of these, like purchases up to 365 days. And for views, I think it's a little bit shorter. For views, only up to 90 days. How to know how much to select, for example, for views? Typically, when you use views, you want to chase and retarget those those people who viewed your product but haven't buy bought anything from you. How to know what's the reasonable date range, you can go to the Amazon marketing cloud and select time to conversion report. It's point and click report, you won't be surprised, you won't be perplexed how to use it. So, just select time to conversion, select the date range, select the products or run on on for all of your catalog and then you will see the exact moment after people see your ad, how typically how many days or minutes pass before they buy and you will see is it if majority of of purchase decisions are being made in in the first two days, it doesn't make any sense to remarket your your product viewers for 60 or 90 days. So, you would in that case you would select 7 days and then just add uh that audience. You have to be careful to select advertised products. You don't want to select similar to advertised products because that's basically category targeting in a nutshell because whatever is similar to your product, those are all of your competitors. That's completely different targeting. But for basic views remarketing, you want to go for advertised product, select a lookback period and then adjust the bid. If if for example, you have selected the automation, sorry, not the automation but the optimized bidding for uh page views or conversions, this would be grayed out and you couldn't you wouldn't be able to select the the actual bid. And then let's say I would never put both of these into one campaign, both purchases and views because you can only control the budget on the campaign level. And what if some of these If you put, let's say, $30 of campaign budget for these two targeting options, it may be that purchase history marketing is going to suck all of the budget away from the the other guy, and it's just going to be a waste of of time while you wait for that one to perform. Next up is in-market audiences, and we have to cover interest and lifestyle audiences, and then, of course, custom audiences from the Amazon marketing cloud. In-market audiences, as as the name says, so reach audiences whose recent activity suggests they're likely to buy products in a certain category. So, in-market is based on the recent activity. If people from that audience were browsing products similar to yours, or their buying behaviors are something that Amazon thinks that they're eligible to see and buy your product potentially. So, when you select that, you can go to browse. Again, if you selected, depending on which products you selected in the product section, then your your suggestions will be listed here. They're very useful, but again, I encourage you to go into browse, and then go through these individual audiences. It's really a big list, depending on your product, but I encourage you to go and select multiple of these. It would be too much if you separate these targeting options into every little cat every little sponsored display campaign, but I encourage you to try, for example, and group them by five, or at least at maximum at 10 different in-market audiences, and then, if some of these is working really well, and the others don't, same as the keyword targeting or product targeting, then you would have to separate them. Leave the one which is performing really good, and then extract all the others and create them in into a new campaign. It may be time-consuming to go through all of these and it takes a little bit of a creativity to figure it out what kind of audience could be useful for you. Now, yes, you could get some ideas from Amazon Marketing Cloud, but if you're not comfortable comfortable with that, I encourage you just go up and on Google or use any plan that you like to use your your favorite AI and say this is my product and provide the big context on what you're looking for and then say okay, which kind of audiences I may target and it could be it would be a big time-saver for you. Similar to that is the interest and lifestyle audiences. The difference is in the definition. So, reach audiences whose shopping and entertainment activities suggest certain interests or lifestyle preferences. Again, browse mode, suggested mode, all the same and then you can select do they own a car or whatever. The vehicle vehicle type they're interested in car and crossover vehicle, whatever. It's pretty simple and it's it's similar. These are kind of similar but different different audiences. So, this the first one as I said recent activity and this one the second one interest and lifestyle is shopping and entertainment activity. So, if they're watching certain movies that are I don't know if they that makes them suitable for targeting for your products. It can be creepy but sometimes it really works well. And the last one is the custom audiences. Custom audiences that you created in Amazon Marketing Cloud. So, whatever you created there, it's going to be appearing here if they're eligible. So, if you created audiences who are big enough, so over 2,500 people, then those kind of audiences will be shown here. If it's less than that, you're doomed. You cannot use them, unfortunately, but there is There's workaround that I've shared on our channel how to easily overcome that obstacle where you don't have enough enough people in your audience. And then you select them as well. You put the bid and then you're done with that targeting. Now it it looks like similar to what we can see in DSP. In the past it was completely different. Once you're done with that the campaign and you just wait. I encourage you to also check in first two or three hours to see if there's any issue with the campaign. Is it ineligible for whatever reason or or the ad if you had a video, maybe video is suspended because it it violates the the guidelines and and rules about around that or for the image as well. And then keep looking at it. Sometimes spend can explode, sometimes it can just be dead completely. So you have to be there for the for the several days to until it catches up. I hope it was very useful. It was like a little bit technical for for you if you're not that into PPC, but I I think it will be easy for you to follow and create new sponsored display campaigns because a lot of brands are sleeping on sponsored display and sponsored display when used properly in addition with sponsored brands and sponsored products has a magnificent cumulative effect. Again, holistic PPC is what we aim for. Let me know if you have any further questions in the comments and see you tomorrow in the next video. Bye-bye.