Amazon Sponsored Products ads now support dynamic bidding, bid adjustments

Amazon has added more bid management features for Sponsored Products ads in its advertising interface. The updates take a page from the Google Ads interface, so paid search marketers will be familiar with both the automated bidding option and the page placement report Amazon has rolled out.

Sponsored Products ads are targeted by keyword and can be used to promote sellers’ individual products. They can appear at the top of search results pages (as shown in the screen shot above), and further down on the results pages as well as on related product pages.

Fixed and dynamic bidding options. The new bidding tools include a manual option to set your own bids, which is accessed by choosing the new “fixed bids” option; alternatively, advertisers can choose two different dynamic bidding strategies.

The automated options use machine learning to determine the likelihood the ad click will convert and adjusts the bid accordingly in real time. Amazon may adjust the bid by as much as 100 percent, either positively or negatively. However, if you’d prefer to only adjust down, you can choose the “down only” option to instruct Amazon to decrease your bid when a conversion appears less likely (and not increase it even if a conversion is deemed more likely).

Campaign bidding strategies and bid adjustments for Sponsored Products are now live in the Amazon Ads UI.

You can also change the bidding strategy of an existing campaign from the Campaign setting tab at the campaign level in the UI.

Placement bid adjustments and reporting. In addition to the new manual and automatic bidding changes, Amazon is also letting advertisers set placement bid adjustments for Sponsored Products ads for the top of the search page and for product page placements. Bid adjustments can range from zero to 900 percent. As with bid adjustments in Google Ads and Bing Ads, your bid is multiplied by the bid adjustment you set.

A new placement report, under the new Placements tab in the UI, shows where your Sponsored Product ads appeared with performance metrics broken out by placement. The report breaks down performance by “top of search page”, “product page” and “rest of search” placements.

Why you should care. Amazon is getting faster at delivering more sophisticated levers and features for advertisers. Given the current momentum, advertisers should continue to expect to see Amazon continue to “level-up” to achieve parity with more mature platforms such as Google in the coming year. More advanced features could also mean stiffer competition among advertisers on the platform as more sellers embrace what was once a fairly clunky and slow advertising interface.