January 2019: What’s New in The Amazon Advertising UI?

Dynamic Bidding, Placement Bid Adjustments, Placement Performance Reporting, New-To-Brand Metrics and Portfolios.

There’s a lot new with the Amazon Advertising UI for 2019! In this post I’ll break down some of the most valuable and interesting changes.

Dynamic Bidding

New campaign optimization settings (Dynamic bids – down only, Dynamic bids – up and down, and Fixed bidding) are now available for Sponsored Products. This feature allows you to modify your bid up or down in real time, at a maximum of 100%, based on how likely Amazon thinks a conversion would be.

When you select “Dynamic bids – up and down” Amazon predicts the likelihood of that click converting, and when a conversion is likely, Amazon will increase that bid by the pre-defined percentage adjustment that you set. Alternatively, when the likelihood of a conversion is low, Amazon will decrease the bid the same percentage amount.

There is also a “Dynamic bids – down only” option that only allows Amazon to decrease your bids if the likelihood of a conversion is low.

“Fixed bidding” is an option that does not allow Amazon to increase or decrease your bids.

Placement Bid Adjustments/Reporting

Amazon has introduced new controls to help influence where your Sponsored Products Ads will show. You can now enter bid adjustments up to 900% for “Top of search (first page)” or “Product Pages” placements. Placement level reporting is now available for each campaign. This allows for greater visibility into where your Sponsored Products Ads appear, and how they are performing in each placement.

“New-To-Brand” Metrics

The Amazon Advertising UI now has new metrics that are only available for Sponsored Brands (Formerly Headline Search Ads) campaigns, and only for data dating back to 11/1/18. These unique new metrics track the number of orders, and the amount of sales that are generated from first-time customers of your brand on Amazon. With new-to-brand metrics, you can better measure and optimize in-flight campaigns, as well as plan future marketing strategies, to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty.

Amazon determines if an order is new to your brand by reviewing the last 12-months of a shopper’s purchase history. If the shopper has not purchased from your brand within the 12-month look back window, the order is considered new-to-brand

Portfolios

You’ll also notice a new Portfolio feature. The Portfolio feature in Amazon Advertising gives you the ability to organize your campaigns by business line, product category, or season, and manage total spending with budget caps. You can also group Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands (Formerly Headline Search Ads). Product Display Ads campaigns are not supported in Portfolios.

So, what does all this mean?

There are more levers to pull, more optimizations to make, and more tests to run! These new capabilities, reporting features, and metrics are all brand new to Amazon Advertising and provides agencies and advertisers with a plethora of new and valuable features to test in 2019.

Looking for more on Amazon Advertising?

Check out some of my other recent Amazon blog posts and POVs:

• Amazon Advertising Update: New Sponsored Products Targeting Types
• Amazon Attribution: Catalyst POV
• Catalyst Employee Spotlight: Craig DeTora
• Are You Ready to Advertise on Prime Day?

A Deeper Dive: eCommerce Research & Webinars

For more in-depth ecommerce and Amazon Advertising strategies, don’t miss Catalyst’s latest whitepapers and Amazon webinar.

• Era of Ecommerce: Capitalizing on the New Customer Journey (Whitepaper)
• Age of Amazon: Maximizing the B2C Marketing Opportunity (Whitepaper)
• 5 Ways to Dominate Amazon’s Digital Shelf (Webinar)

Questions on Amazon Advertising?

Have questions on Catalyst’s eCommerce marketing solution and approach to Amazon Advertising? Drop us a line at info@catalystdigital.com.