How to Increase Conversion Rates on Sponsored Brand Ads

July 26, 2019
By The Badger

Have your Sponsored Brand ads been overlooked and thrown together? Well never fear the Badger is back with a new, simple strategy that will take your Sponsored Brand ads to another level and boost your overall conversions rates.

Michael and Stephen from our PPC Den podcast will be guiding us through the theory and evidence behind our Single Keyword Ad Groups (“SKAGs”) strategy for Sponsored Brand ads.

Here’s a detailed look at what we’ll be covering:

An Introduction to Sponsored Brand Ads
What are Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs)
The untapped potential of Sponsored Brand Ads
The Striking SKAGs strategy
A case study in Sponsored Brand Ad optimization
The psychology of Amazon buyers

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For all my audiophiles, listen to Michael & Stephen go in-depth on the Single Keyword Ad Group strategy

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An Introduction to Sponsored Brand Ads

Sponsored Brands are ads that feature your brand logo, a custom headline, and up to three of your products. These ads appear on the search results and help generate recognition for your brand and product portfolio.

Sound familiar? That’s because Sponsored Brand ads used to be called Headline Search ads which you may have used before. The good thing is everything still works the same, the name is just different now.

Sponsored Brands help high-intent customers discover and engage with your brand as they research on Amazon.

On Amazon Ads, you can use single keyword ad groups to boost the specificity of these Sponsored Brand ads.

Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs)

Most people are creating Sponsored Brand ads by basing their headline copy off their brand or slogan. As far as keyword research is concerned, they are dumping all the keywords from their other campaigns into a Sponsored Brand ad.

The goal of the strategy we break down today is to increase the relevancy between your headlines, keywords, and search terms. We’re also going to make your product families match the searches that are finding your product.

Here’s an example of matching up product families:

We had a client who’s product either came in a sphere shape or a cube shape. The sponsored brand ad encompassed both of these products. We split these two products into their own ad groups so a search for “cube _____” would show the brand ad featuring the cubed product.

Rethinking Sponsored Brand Ads

Most people really give no thought to Sponsored Brand ads. Sellers usually spend most of their time and energy on Sponsored Products, and when they get around to doing Sponsored Brand ads they throw a lot of keywords in it and rush through picking products. There isn’t nearly as much thought about Sponsored Brands compared to Sponsored Products.

Single Keyword Campaign Strategy

Let’s say you’ve been running Sponsored Products for awhile. You have 10 products that are performing well. Are you supposed to create 10 campaigns, centered around the 10 keywords that correspond to those products? Not exactly.

Start with a Search Term Report for the past 60 days. Find the searches that had the highest traffic and lead to the most sales. After that, look for patterns in the data. Hopefully, you’ll see some patterns and themes come to light.

Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGS) aren’t really composed of one keyword. They follow one of these themes. For example, you might see the following search terms “kettlebell for home workout,” “Kettlebell for home,” and “Kettlebell for home gym,” and identifying “home workouts” as the theme. You would want to write a Sponsored Brand headline targeting this keyword.

The term SKAGS became popular in the Google Ads Space. This post talks about Single Keyword-Theme Campaigns for Sponsored Brand Ads on Amazon. If you’re interested in learning more about SKAGS on GoogleAds and BingAds, our partner agency Search Scientists has a great blog post for SKAGS on Google.

A Case Study in Sponsored Brand Ad Optimization

Enough about the theory behind the strategy. Let’s look at a fleshed out example of how effective this strategy can be.

In this account, there were two campaigns:

A campaign that came to us with a focus on brand image, slogan, etc.
A campaign we changed to be more keyword focused.

Both of these campaigns ran for 60 days, and for privacy we’ll say the brand sold kettlebells.

When the more brand-focused campaign showed up on a potential customer’s screen, it said “Get Fit Faster.” The keyword we were bidding on was “kettlebells for home workout.”

The keyword in this campaign got a CTR of 0.94% (well above average), a Conversion Rate of 16% (very good, especially for a Sponsored Brand ad), and an ACOS of 32% (also very good).

Then, we switched it up.

The headline read “Kettlebells for Home Workout,” aiming for extremely high relevance between what the customer was searching for and the product we were providing.

The result? The CTR for the same keyword in this campaign jumped to 2.11% (a huge jump) and the Conversion Rate doubled as well!

Amazon Ads operates in a way so that the rich get richer. This Sponsored Brand ad, because of it’s increases in CTR and Conversion Rate, gets a high Ad Quality score from Amazon and as a result will get served to more people.

This can happen to your Sponsored Brand Ads too!

In this case study, impressions also doubled after Amazon started serving the ad more frequently. This, coupled with the increase in CTR, means our clicks actually tripled from the original “Get Fit Faster” ad.

ACOS dropped from 32% to 24%, and revenue increased by 400%.

In summary, a sound strategy of serving better ads, with higher click through rates (CTR), and simple product matches will improve the metrics in your campaigns.

A quick recap of our case study:

Conversion Rate Doubled
Total Clicks Tripled
ACOS Dropped 8%
Revenue Increased 400%

The Psychology of Amazon Buyers

As we’ve discussed before on the blog, the psychology of a seller can be categorized into two basic categories:

Hunters (quick decisions)
Grazers (methodical, meticulous)

Sponsored Brand Ads are incredibly attractive to “Hunters.” Potential customers will see it as credible, relevant ad and something that must fit their exact needs since its headline has the exact keyword they searched for.

Key Takeaways

Not utilizing this single keyword ad group strategy will cost you money. By implementing the simple, easy steps outlined in this article, getting returns and improvements like we saw in our case study is very possible.

If you have any questions about this strategy, Sponsored Brand ads, or anything related to Amazon PPC, hit us up on Intercom (located in the bottom right corner of our website), any of our social media channels, or in our voicemail.

Discover Us on our PPC Den Podcast

If you prefer learning via audio, we cover this same info in the podcast episode below. You can also find us on your favorite streaming platforms like Apple, Google, Spotify, and more!