What is Sponsored Brands Video?

Sponsored Brands Video is a Sponsored Brands format that places a short video in the search results. The video plays automatically without sound, and the ad links to a product detail page or to your Amazon Store. Like the rest of Sponsored Brands, it requires Brand Registry enrolment.

How the format behaves

The mechanics that shape the creative are all consequences of one fact: the video starts on its own, muted, while the shopper is scrolling a results page.

1. The first seconds carry the ad. Whatever has not registered before the shopper scrolls past has not been seen.
2. Assume no sound. Voiceover cannot be the carrier of the message. Subtitles or on-screen text are not decoration here, they are the script.
3. Show the product in use. The format's advantage over a static banner is demonstrating something a photograph cannot.
4. One creative per ad group. Impressions concentrate on a single creative when a group holds several, so isolating creatives is the only way a test tells you anything.

Targeting and pairing

Sponsored Brands Video supports keyword and product targeting, so it can run against the same terms as your Sponsored Products campaigns. Running Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Brands Video on the same keyword gives you more than one presence on the results page, and in our experience the multi-touch coverage tends to help the Sponsored Products campaign's own conversion rate rather than simply cannibalising it.

On targeting hygiene, prefer phrase and exact, and be sparing with the broadest options. Amazon's automated brand-adjacent targeting themes behave like unsupervised automatic campaigns, which is a poor fit for a format you are paying a premium to run.

Billing, and the number to check

Sponsored Brands can bill per click or per thousand viewable impressions. Our house view is to treat sales attributed through a viewable impression basis with suspicion, because impression-based attribution tends to re-label sales that would have happened anyway. If you run a viewable impression lane, sanity-check it by working out what you actually paid for a click.

Effective CPC = Spend ÷ Clicks

Worked example

Suppose a video campaign spends 300 pounds and records 1,000 clicks. The effective CPC is 30 pence. Compare that against what you normally pay for a click on the same terms elsewhere in the account. If the impression-billed lane is quietly costing several times your usual click price, the attributed sales need to be worth several times as much before the lane is defensible.

Where headlines come from

The copy that works is usually already written, by customers. Pull the phrases from your reviews rather than from a brainstorm, and test one variable at a time.