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Amazon’s New Releases and Updates - 2022

In the Amazon world, where new areas consistently emerge, it is tough to keep up. That is why we are here with the blog to help you stay updated with what’s hot and new with Amazon because let’s be honest if you are actively selling in this marketplace, competition is fierce, and you need to be creative by applying these trends to stay successful and stand out from the crowd.

Sales on Amazon in the first two quarters of 2021 were 44% higher than in the same period of last year, with almost 80% of sellers leveraging on and off-Amazon marketing to promote brand awareness and product reach, according to Statista. In other words, not only does Amazon have the vision to build eCommerce into what it is today, but it also has newer events that are paving the way for its retail dominance.

Let’s shed some light in which direction Amazon is stirring its wheel, shall we?

March 2022

1 New Amazon Report Update- View Mobile User Data

The mobile session data from Amazon will now be accessible compared to data from desktop shoppers. Amazon product searches begin on smartphones 80% of the time. Analysts will be able to calculate the impact that product listings have on mobile shoppers.

You can see this report in the business report section to get a detailed and comprehensive report.

2. Search Catalog Performance Dashboard

Search Catalog Performance Dashboard is being rolled out in Brand Analytics to all Brand Registered sellers. Brands will be able to track customer behavior throughout the sales funnel, emphasizing search performance.

Brands can now view their product search engagement metrics such as impressions, clicks, cart adds, and purchases to understand the customer journey better.

Note: These metric values only include organic and sponsored products from search results. It does not include external traffic.

3. Bulk File Updates

Bulk sheets' legacy version will cease to be available on July 1, 2022, and the new version will become mandatory!
The bulk file now includes click-through rates. The difference between Spend and Clicks previously had to be calculated manually, but that has been moved to column AC in the bulk file.
Similar-product targeting is now available in Sponsored Display. Similar products can now be targeted. If you want your ads to be shown to shoppers who viewed the detail pages of similar products, enter similar-product in the "Targeting Expression" field.

4. Matched Targeting Report on Sponsored Display Update

Amazon announced that sellers and vendors can now access the brand-new matched target report.

The report gives you a detailed breakdown of the performance of the PDP pages where your SD ads were delivered.
You can find which ASINS and related product detail pages your ads appeared on and resulted in at least one click.
Using these insights, you can refine your Sponsored Display targeting strategy along the same lines as auto campaigns for SP ads.

Note: You will receive both product and audience targets.

5. Amazon Keyword Impression Data

Amazon now gives access to Impression Share and Impressions Rank data when choosing which keywords to target.

These types of statistics are intriguing since they show where keywords fit into the overall picture.
In addition to suggested bid data and your conversion rate, you can use this new data to determine what bid will best help you scale your products and grow your market share.

6. Direct traffic to Custom URL form Sponsored Brand Ads

With Amazon, you can create Templated, Tailored, or Custom landing pages. This new feature allows you to set up any of these landing pages on Amazon, directing traffic to them directly from a Sponsored Brands campaign.

You can direct users back to this page via a custom landing page as part of your marketing efforts off Amazon.

Note: Currently available in a vendor account.

7. Access Category Listing Report with No Seller Support

To access the category listing report, you no longer need to contact seller support. This is the default setting.

How to navigate easy download?

Download from the Inventory> Inventory Reports> Category Listing Reports.

February 2022

1 First-ever disclosure of Amazon's advertising revenue

Amazon's advertising services generated $9.7 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter, up by 32% year over year, as posited by its earnings release. Ad sales are being reported separately for the first time, previously tucked under "other," where they made up nearly all of the company's revenue.

Ad revenue for Amazon totaled about $31.15 billion for the entire year. Amazon's sponsored ad program is the most important source of that activity, with brands paying to place their products in popular spots around their e-commerce platform, including search results. Executives, however, emphasized the opportunities in video advertising on Fire TV, IMDb TV, and Twitch, all of which are beginning to offer premium programming to advertisers.

Despite this, Amazon's advertising revenue has now surpassed that of Microsoft, Snap, and Pinterest. Amazon continues to grow its role in the marketing ecosystem. For the first time in its earnings report, it broke out revenues from advertising services, which amounted to nearly $10 billion in Q4.

2. Multiple ad groups can be added to Sponsored Display Campaigns

This new update is said to work wonders while working on audience targeting or remarketing, having a cap for a particular category or target audience. It can be efficient for budget allocation and management.

Secondly, as the name says, you won’t have to create separate ad groups, i.e., targeting competition ASINs and lesser no. Of Products for each competition are available. For such a scenario, earlier, it was required to create separate campaigns.

With this, you can target different competition ASINS under different ad groups under one campaign only

3. Suggested bids for Sponsored Display vCPM Campaigns

Now, you'll receive machine learning-based bid recommendations when you create a CPC-based or VCPM-based Sponsored Display campaign. Suggested bids and bid ranges are calculated by analyzing a group of winning bids for similar ads within your category. Suggested bids and bid ranges are updated daily according to the increase or decrease in competing bids.

In case you are unsure which bid to start with, Amazon recommends advertisers select the most likely bid that will help deliver impressions for an ad similar to yours.

4. New View Metrics for Sponsored Brand Videos

Performance metrics for Sponsored Brands video

Viewable impressions-

Views is the number of impressions that met the MRC viewability standard (50% viewable with 2 seconds playback completed).

It will give you results on-

View-through-rate (views/impressions)
Clicks-through-rate for views (clicks/views)
Cost-per-view (campaign spend/views),
5-second view rate,
video midpoint (How much a user view 50% of video),
completion rate (100% video was viewed or not),
the number of impressions where a shopper unmuted the video.

5. Amazon introduces custom mode for brand store

With the Amazon custom advertising team's help, you can now create brand stores that use custom codes to create an innovative and personalized shopping experience for consumers. In addition to improving your reach, it will also help you educate yourself as best as possible about your brands and products.

6. Inventory forecast tool for Amazon DSP

The aim of this tool is to increase the impressions and reach of your campaigns. Using inventory forecasting, you can determine if impressions or clicks are available based on the attributes mentioned below.

Features of this tool include-

Audience impression forecast
Frequency, location, supply, and bidding
Campaign reach unique to this campaign
Calculate the total campaign expenditure
Visualize the impact of bids on inventory availability

January 2022

Amazon New Features and Updates - January

1 Introducing Amazon Ads in Poland

Amazon Poland was launched in March 2021, and with that, Sponsored advertising in the platform is now accessible. Currently, sellers can access Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Stores features.

Sponsored ads are an effective means of boosting sales, growing a new product launch, increasing the visibility of deals, or introducing products and brands to new customers in Poland. Build a comprehensive marketing campaign strategy to engage shoppers at different points in their buying journey and aid their decision-making.

Benefits of leveraging these ads include-

Improved product discovery with Sponsored Products
Enhanced brand awareness with Sponsored Brands and Stores
Potential for expanding customer base with Global Selling.

2. Amazon's first physical clothing store- ‘Amazon Style’

Hundreds of top brands are available, allowing customers to browse brands they know and love as well as discover new and emerging designers. Customers can order items through the Amazon Shopping app, which will be delivered to a fitting room with a touchscreen, where they can browse more selections, rate items, and request more sizes or styles. Amazon Style combines the use of machine learning technologies with its unique store design to provide each shopper with a tailored experience.

Innovative fitting room example that offers personalized experience-

3. Climate pledge friendly getting advantage on Amazon UK

Amazon UK invites brands to participate by securing certifications for products sold on Amazon that improve one or more aspects of sustainability. Climate Pledge Friendly highlights products that help preserve the natural environment. Statista reported that 41% of UK consumers said that eco-friendly and sustainable products are very important to them, and only 5.6 percent said they were not at all concerned about this aspect.

In this case, it's not hard to guess why these products are gaining a competitive edge.

Climate Pledge Friendly products must be:

Certified by at least one of Amazon's external third-party certifications.
Certified by Amazon's own Compact by Design certification.

4. New Features on Amazon Ad Console

(a) Audio Ads on Amazon

You can reach a wider audience with audio ads on Amazon Music's free ad-supported tier. These ads appear during playback breaks, and you can target the listeners who listen to free tiers of Amazon Music on Alexa-enabled devices, including Echo and Fire TV, as well as on mobile and desktop.

How to Create an Amazon Audio Ad Campaign?

Get in touch with an Amazon Ads account executive.
Provide your own audio file and companion banner, or work with your advertising consultant to develop creative assets.
Depending on the campaign, ads can go live in as little as three working days.

Note: These ads are available in the USA, Denmark, and the UK.

(b) Detail Metric Page View Feature

A DPV, or detail page view, occurs when someone visits a product detail page of your brand after clicking on an ad. This feature is live in Sponsored Brands and Display campaigns. It can help to count the bounce rate of your ad campaign for further optimization.

(c) New bulk spreadsheet available on ad console

Amazon Ads bulk operations enable you to make large-scale changes to an account on a regular basis. Your entire advertising campaign can be backed up; you can search and filter account-wide, add campaigns, keywords, bids, budgets, etc.

With this update, brands can now-

Grant campaigns will run indefinitely, with no end dates.
Ad groups and campaigns can be renamed.
Access to new and more data like conversion rate and CPC
Use bulk sheets support for Sponsored Display campaigns and product targeting support for Sponsored Brands.
Multiple ad groups can be added to a single campaign in a bulk upload.

(d) Addition of Brand Analytics (Beta) and Metrics in the API

The addition of Brand Analytics provides a lot more information to calculate the lifetime value of a customer. This feature is only available to sellers who own a brand.

Brands can now see the percentage of repeat customers along with the data on typical cross-purchase and what products customers actually purchase after viewing product detail pages.

As part of the Advertising API, Amazon recently introduced Brand Metrics, which is in the Beta stage. Now, brands can track their brand search activity, see new customers, and benchmark their brand performance against their competitors and peers.

In addition to ROAS or ACOS, combining brand metrics with customer metrics can better demonstrate the ad spend return for formulating a refined strategy.

Note: This feature is available both via Vendor and Seller Central and on amazon.com.

(e) Customer Engagement Tool live on Seller Central

Amazon has unveiled a new customer engagement tool that can be used to engage with your Amazon followers through email and help your brand build customer loyalty and visibility.

The campaigns can be customized to fit events such as Valentine's Day or gift-giving, and according to the study, these campaigns perform best during event seasons.

How to navigate this tool?

Seller Central > Brands > Customer Engagement

Benefits include-

Increasing brand recognition
A helping hand for your product launch
High open rate

Example of its format-

Note: It is available to brand owners who sell in the US Amazon store.

(f) Theme-based bid suggestion for Sponsored Products

Theme-based bid suggestions are helpful in choosing a bid that aligns with your campaign goals. They include historical metrics (past and completed performance of your campaign) based on similar products. Basically, the impact metrics are based on the historic performance of similar products to provide guidance on choosing a bid and are not estimates of expected performance.

You can request bid suggestions for new campaigns or for existing ad groups.

Theme-based bid suggestion is released in the beta phase and offers metrics on weekly clicks, and purchase orders received by similar products to help generate more sales.

Final Thoughts

Amazon has been a global pioneer for eCommerce and leads the way for brands to reach new customers through innovative marketing technologies and a growing number of advertising offerings. Moreover, their continual updates and ventures prove they won’t slow down any time soon.

If you need help with scaling your business on Amazon or how to promote your brands in this competitive market, connect with our AMS certified experts at info@paxcom.net

Amazon’s New Releases and Updates - 2022