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New Sponsored Brands Placement Options - Be Careful

Published on December 31, 2024

About this video

In this video, we dive deep into Amazon's updated feature that simplifies bid adjustments for Sponsored Brand placement settings. While this change makes it easier to update your campaigns, it comes with risks that could impact your sales and profitability if not handled carefully.

### *Key Insights Covered in This Video* 1. *Understanding Placement Performance* Discover the importance of analyzing placement-specific performance using Amazon’s Sponsored Brand Placement Reports. Learn how to navigate to these reports, download the relevant data, and interpret metrics such as sales, spend, ACoS, and conversion rates across placements like "Top of Search," "Rest of Search," and "Product Pages."

2. *Data-Driven Decision Making* See real-world examples of campaigns where "Top of Search" delivers the highest performance compared to other placements. Learn how to identify unprofitable placements and optimize your bids to reduce wasted ad spend.

3. *Advanced Optimization Techniques* Gain actionable tips on: - Adjusting placement bids to prioritize high-performing placements. - Increasing your base bids while lowering adjustments for less effective placements. - Analyzing how ACoS impacts profitability and how small changes can significantly improve your margin.

4. *Sponsored Brand Video Insights* Uncover the real story behind impressions, viewable impressions, and video engagement. Learn why impressions alone are a misleading metric and how to focus on meaningful data like viewable impressions and video completion rates.

5. *Best Practices for Campaign Management* Understand the importance of regularly pulling reports to evaluate performance. Depending on the volume of your campaigns, review these metrics biweekly or monthly to ensure your creatives and strategies are aligned with your business goals.

### *Why These Reports Are Essential* Amazon’s detailed Sponsored Brand Placement Reports give you access to crucial metrics that help pinpoint wasteful spending and optimize your advertising strategy. From visibility to engagement rates, these insights empower you to make data-backed adjustments that enhance profitability.

### *Contents* 0:00 Introduction to Placement Adjustments 0:25 Accessing the Campaign Placement Report 1:19 Understanding Placement Metrics 2:15 Challenges in Adjusting Product Page Bids 3:50 Using Base Bids to Balance Placements 4:30 Sponsored Brand Video Metrics Analysis 5:53 Case Studies: Campaign Optimization Examples 8:45 Final Recommendations and Summary

By the end of this video, you'll have a clear understanding of how to maximize your Sponsored Brand campaign performance and make data-driven adjustments to achieve better results. Watch now to get the most out of your Amazon advertising efforts!

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Transcript

hi guys so recently Amazon added another feature where it's now easier than ever for you to update your sponsor brand placement adjustments but there's the catch since it's much easier for you now just to update bit adjustments for placements other than top of search there is a great possibility that you will hurt your sales if you do just that before you do that I'm going to show you which report you need to pull to see the exact placement performance for each of your placements and for your campaigns it's pretty easy to find it so navigate to your usual uh sponsor sponsor reports and then go to the create report from the drop- down select sponsor Brands and then choose the campaign placement report once you download it this is what you'll be presented with so um this is what's very important so let's move our head a little bit down okay so this is what's really important uh now I pulled some meaningful data for you here so this is for campaign one you can see the the actual spend and sales per each placement once you see this report so for rest of search and top of search for this campaign number one it's insignificant so for this campaign it's going to be pretty straightforward to decrease the bids for for placements other than top of search because it's only top of search which is performing right here then for the next campaign it's similar so no actual spend on rest of search and most of the things are happening on top of search campaign number three same thing and this is where it gets interested now this is a video campaign but regardless of is if it's a video of key or keyword targeting you will get the same data so here you can see that on product Pages actually have the most of the spend and most of the sales at uh pretty miserable conversion rate and pretty high a cost so this is the most valuable information for you that you can gather uh from this report so take a look now if you go ahead and limit and adjust your bits or other the top of search you will actually decrease your sales by a lot now that's fine because here you have unprofitable sales most of the accounts will not be profitable at an a cost of around 74 uh% so anyway um you need to have an informed decision what's actually happening happening on each of the placements before you decide to use that option uh so be aware that this functionality was there in the past and I had a video on how to use this placement optim placement adjustments for sponsor Brands but here since it's much easier you need to be more careful not to mess with that without proper investigation here if you limit rest of search and product pages and decrease the bits over there you will only be left with top of search which in this case is pretty decent AC cost but only one sale in a 30 day so you will have to be aware of that unfortunately we're not able to uh limit only product pages hopefully in in the future we're going to see that functionality too but now we are only limited to top of search and the other two guys so here your hands are tied but maybe you can what I would do in this situation is that maybe uh lower the bits on these placements other than top of search but increase the base bit so you have the higher CPC for for top of search and then experiment if that's going to bring more uh meaningful sales for you the other example from another account um is this one so for example this is sponsor Brands campaign the keyword targeting take a look at this one so product pages $117 of spend High a cost rest of search $100 of spend High a cost and and top of search is killing it so 87 sales in 30 days pretty good acost so this is complete waste so this is the the good information crucial information that you can get from this report here you can go ahead and limit reduce the bits on on product pages and rest of search and just enjoy the better profitability so let's quickly calculate so here campaign on a campaign level the and is 724 and the sales are 3,6 let's see the a cost quickly so a cost would be 20% which is good but there's actually a lot of waste over here so only for eight orders in total your your AC cost could be 17 or 18% and that's right I mean that's your margin actually you so you can increase quick L your margin by 2% by just adjusting these placement adjustments so next campaign um similar situation so we have only three orders out of SE 17 that are coming in this campaign and on from top of search 14 are coming with a with a decent a cost so again a good situation where you can actually limit quite quite much of the C uh wasted adpen so here in total that's 2 97 and sales are quickly let's see 677 so the echos is 43 in total while if you limit the placements other than top of search and lower their bits and increase your top of search or leave it whatever you decide you will have 4% less an AC cost there are a few other examples also what you can do here uh um also rest of search product pages not that good of um of performance and you get the idea so there you go it's pretty important to pull these reports before making any changes on sponsor brand uh placement adjustments while we are here this report Camp sponsor brand campaign placement report is useful for a few additional metrics available so I keep telling you guys on LinkedIn and on on my videos that impressions are completely meaningless information meaningless metrics let's just switch quickly to sponsor video I think in the other reports yes we had a sponsor video here so the same point let's freeze here so um sponsor brand video this is going to be the good example so almost 40K Impressions out of that only 10% of that is viable and when we go uh further down to see the actual video performance so the first quarter of the video only, 1600 people saw it so remember that it's your reach is not 40K only 1,600 people saw the first uh quarter of the ad and not to mention that complete video views only 40490 people so let's say 500 people out of 40K Impressions so just be a whereare that Impressions doesn't mean anything do not mean anything and focus on the detailed reports that Amazon made available for you so you can pull that and this is also nice uh metric that 5sec views so 3,000 actually saw the first 5 Seconds of your video and if you did a good job then those 3,000 will not drop that much if the video uh shows and catch the attention in the first 5 Seconds which is not that not the case here so 50 around 50% of people dropped up after first 5 seconds so from 3,000 to 1600 that's almost half so yeah pull these metrics as often as needed I would say depending on on the volume of your account like in two every two weeks or every every month depending on on that let me know what you think in the comments make sure to pull these reports on a regular basis before you make any adjustments by heart and stay tuned for more videos bye-bye guys

Frequently asked questions

What risk does the simplified Sponsored Brands placement adjustment feature introduce?

Amazon updated Campaign Manager to make it easier to set bid adjustments for Sponsored Brands placements other than top of search, which covers both product pages and rest of search. Because the interface makes these changes quick and accessible, there is a real risk of reducing bids on those placements without first checking whether they are actually generating sales. In some accounts, product pages or rest of search are responsible for a meaningful share of orders, and reducing bids there without data to justify it will simply cut sales. The simplified interface does not prompt you to review performance before making changes.

What is the correct process before adjusting Sponsored Brands placement bids?

Before making any placement bid adjustment, pull the Sponsored Brands Campaign Placement Report. To access it, go to the Sponsored Ads reports section, select Sponsored Brands from the dropdown, and choose Campaign Placement as the report type. The downloaded file shows spend, sales, orders, and ACoS broken down separately for top of search, rest of search, and product pages for each campaign. Only after seeing that breakdown should you decide whether to reduce bids on any placement. In cases where top of search is driving nearly all sales and the other placements have high spend with few or no orders, reducing those bids is clearly justified. In cases where product pages are generating a significant share of orders even at a higher ACoS, cutting those bids without a plan will reduce overall sales volume.

What should you do when product pages and rest of search are unprofitable but you cannot disable them independently?

Amazon currently does not allow you to adjust product pages and rest of search bids separately within Sponsored Brands campaigns. Both fall under the single "placements other than top of search" adjustment, so you cannot lower product page bids while leaving rest of search unchanged or vice versa. The practical workaround is to reduce the multiplier for placements other than top of search and simultaneously increase the base bid, which raises the effective CPC for top of search while lowering it for the other two placements. This shifts budget concentration toward the placement that is performing and reduces exposure in the placements that are not, without eliminating them entirely.

How does reviewing the Campaign Placement Report improve overall ACoS even when overall performance looks acceptable?

Blended campaign-level ACoS can hide significant inefficiency at the placement level. A campaign may show an acceptable overall ACoS while a large share of the spend is going to product pages or rest of search at very poor efficiency, subsidized by strong top-of-search performance. In the examples from the video, one campaign had an overall ACoS of 20% that appeared healthy, but removing the wasted spend on poorly performing placements would have reduced it to 17 or 18%. That 2 to 3 percentage point improvement goes directly to profit margin. Identifying and acting on this kind of placement-level waste is one of the highest-leverage optimizations available because it improves profitability without requiring any changes to targeting, bids, or creative.

What do the video engagement metrics in the Campaign Placement Report reveal about Sponsored Brands video ad reach?

The placement report for Sponsored Brands video campaigns includes a breakdown of video engagement that exposes how far removed the impression count is from actual viewer reach. A campaign may record 40,000 impressions, but viewable impressions, which require at least 50% of the ad to be visible for more than one second, may represent only 10% of that total. Of those 4,000 viewable impressions, the number who watched the first five seconds of the video might be around 3,000, and the number who watched the complete video may be only 500. This means the effective reach of the campaign in terms of people who actually engaged with the video content is roughly 1% of the impression number that gets reported at the top level. Optimizing based on impressions in this context is misleading. The five-second view count and complete view count are the metrics that reflect actual engagement.