Sponsored Display is Amazon's self-service display advertising format, available to brand-registered sellers and vendors. It places image or video ads on Amazon product pages, in search results and on third-party sites and apps, and it targets by audience (views remarketing, purchases remarketing and Amazon audiences built from shopping behavior) or by product and category. It can be bought on a cost-per-click basis or, for some campaigns, by viewable impressions.
Why it matters
Sponsored Display is the only self-service Amazon format that follows shoppers off the product page. A shopper who viewed your listing and left can be shown your ad on another product page or on an external site over the following days. It is also the simplest way to place an ad directly on a competitor's product page, in the placement below the Buy Box or in the carousel, and to defend your own pages from competitors doing the same.
It is not a search format, so it does not reach a shopper at the moment of typing a query. Its role is to keep the brand in front of people who already showed interest, or to introduce it to shoppers browsing related products.
What moves it
- Audience choice. Views remarketing on your own ASINs is usually the most efficient starting point; category audiences are broader and cost more per sale.
- Lookback window, which decides how long after a visit the ad keeps chasing.
- Creative. Custom headlines, logos and lifestyle images generally outperform the auto-generated product tile.
- Bid optimization setting. Amazon lets you optimize for page visits, conversions or viewable impressions; the wrong choice quietly changes what you pay for.
How we use it
We add Sponsored Display after search campaigns are stable, starting with retargeting of listing visitors and defense of our own product pages, then testing competitor product pages where our page clearly wins on price, rating or content. It is reported with a longer attribution lens than Sponsored Products because the sale often arrives days after the click.