The three ad products
- Sponsored Products (SP). An ad for one product, shown in search results and on other products’ pages. The bulk of most accounts’ spend.
- Sponsored Brands (SB). A banner-style ad for the brand: a logo and headline with a collection of three products, a video with one to three products, or a spotlight of the brand’s store.
- Sponsored Display (SD). Ads for one product shown to audiences and on product pages, on and off Amazon.
How a campaign is built
Ads are organized as campaigns, which hold ad groups, which hold the ads, the targets and the negative targets. A campaign carries the daily budget and the bidding settings; each target carries its own bid, the most the advertiser will pay for one click. There are two kinds of target:- Keyword. A search text the ad should appear on, with a match type that controls how loosely it matches.
- Product target. A specific product (ASIN) or a category the ad should appear on, usually on product pages.
Match types
Exact is not exact. Amazon also serves an exact keyword on close variants of its text. On our own search-term reports, lowercasing, punctuation, dropped function words and plurals explain almost all of the traffic an exact keyword gets on a differently written search. Of the impressions where the search added or dropped a word, 60% involved just “be” or “for”. So two of our exact keywords whose texts differ only that way are, to Amazon, one target with two bids.