Amazon Sponsored Brands vs Sponsored Display: Where Each Fits.

Amazon Sponsored Brands is a search ad that shows your logo, a custom headline and several products or a video, mostly at the top of Amazon search results. Amazon Sponsored Display is a display ad that targets shoppers by what they viewed or bought, or by the product pages they are on, and it can serve on Amazon and on third-party sites and apps. Both sit on top of Sponsored Products, and both only pay off once your listings already convert.

We run these formats on our own Amazon Professional Seller accounts with Brand Registry, so this guide is written from the Ads console, not the brochure. It covers the formats and placements of each, how targeting works, video, Brand Store landing pages, cost models, new-to-brand measurement, and the order we fund them in after Sponsored Products.

What Each Ad Type Actually Is.

Amazon Ads has three self-serve Sponsored Ads products. Sponsored Products promotes a single listing and looks like an organic result. Sponsored Brands promotes the brand: a banner-style unit with a logo and headline plus a set of products, a Store spotlight, or a video. Sponsored Display promotes a product to an audience or on a product page, using an image or video creative that Amazon can assemble from your listing.

Both Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display require the brand to be enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry if you sell through Seller Central, and vendors can run them through Vendor Central relationships. If Brand Registry is not in place, that is the first project, and our e-commerce and Amazon service covers how we sequence it with the ad build.

Formats and Placements.

Sponsored Brands formats. The product collection format shows your logo, headline and typically three products, and clicks can go to a product list page or your Brand Store. The Store spotlight format features several subpages of your Brand Store, each with its own image and label. The video format autoplays a short video in the search results, either tied to a single product (clicks go to the detail page) or as a brand video that sends shoppers to the Store. Placements are top of search, rest of search, and product detail pages, with top of search being the reason most brands buy it.

Sponsored Display formats. Creatives are image or video units built from your listing, with optional custom headline, logo and lifestyle image. Placements include product detail pages, search results in some positions, the Amazon homepage and other shopping surfaces, and, for audience campaigns, third-party websites and apps through Amazon's supply. The same campaign can therefore show on a competitor's detail page on Amazon and on a news site a day later.

Targeting: Keywords, Products and Audiences.

Sponsored Brands targets like a search ad. You can target keywords with broad, phrase and exact match, target products (specific ASINs) and categories with brand and price refinements, and use theme targeting, where Amazon matches keywords related to your brand or to your landing page. Negative keywords and negative products work as they do in Sponsored Products, and you will need them.

Sponsored Display targets contextually or by audience. Contextual targeting places ads on specific ASINs or categories, including your own detail pages to block competitors or cross-sell. Audience targeting includes views remarketing (shoppers who viewed your products or similar products in a lookback window), purchases remarketing (past buyers, useful for replenishable products), and Amazon audiences built on in-market, interest, lifestyle and life-event signals. There are no keywords in Sponsored Display, which is the single biggest mental shift for teams coming from search.

Video and Brand Store Landing Pages.

Sponsored Brands video is often the most efficient Sponsored Brands placement because it takes a large slot in the middle of search results and moves while everything around it is static. It rewards simple production: show the product in use within the first seconds, keep text readable on a phone, and assume the sound is off. Amazon reviews every video before it serves, and rejections for claims, pricing language, or awkward edges on the frame are common enough that we build a second cut before submitting the first.

The Brand Store is the landing page that makes the product collection and Store spotlight formats worth running. A Store with a clear home page, a subpage per product line, and shoppable images turns a click into browsing across the catalog, which is where Sponsored Brands earns its keep. A thin Store with one page and a grid of every SKU wastes that click. Build the Store first, then send traffic to it.

Cost Models and New-to-Brand Measurement.

Both formats are auction based. Sponsored Brands is mostly cost per click, and Amazon has added an impression-based option for campaigns with a reach goal, where you pay per thousand viewable impressions. Sponsored Display lets you choose a bid optimization (page visits, conversions, or reach) and bills by click or by viewable impression depending on the choice. There are no minimum spends for the self-serve formats; the budget is whatever daily cap you set.

Measurement is where teams misjudge both formats. Amazon reports new-to-brand metrics for Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display: orders and sales from shoppers who have not bought from your brand in the previous twelve months. That number tells you whether the spend is finding new customers or just charging you for people who would have bought anyway. Sponsored Display on remarketing audiences will usually show a strong ROAS and a low new-to-brand share; Sponsored Brands on generic category keywords will often show the reverse. Both readings are useful, and neither is visible if you only look at ROAS.

When Each Earns Budget After Sponsored Products.

Our order of operations on our own accounts is consistent. Sponsored Products first, until the core keywords are profitable and the search term reports have given us a clean list of winners and negatives. Then Sponsored Display on our own detail pages and on views remarketing, because it is cheap defense and it recovers shoppers who were already close. Then Sponsored Brands, once there is a Store and at least three related products to show. Here is the sequence we follow when we build it.

What Usually Goes Wrong.

• Launching Sponsored Brands before Sponsored Products has found converting keywords, so the brand pays top-of-search prices to test keywords.
• Mixing branded and generic keywords in one Sponsored Brands campaign, which lets cheap branded conversions hide an unprofitable generic program.
• Pointing Sponsored Brands at a one-page Brand Store with every SKU in a grid, which turns an expensive click into a bounce.
• Running Sponsored Display audiences with no exclusions on remarketing, which spends on shoppers who already bought a durable product and will not buy again soon.
• Judging Sponsored Display by the same ROAS target as Sponsored Products and killing it, or scaling it, on a comparison that measures different things.
• Submitting one video with pricing claims or cluttered text and losing two weeks to rejections and resubmissions.

Where the Console Stops and the Work Begins.

The Ads console makes launching either format easy. The work that decides whether they pay is everything around it: harvesting keywords from Sponsored Products into Sponsored Brands without cannibalizing them, building a Brand Store that actually sells a catalog, producing video that passes review, setting exclusions on audiences, and reading new-to-brand and Brand Analytics data together so budget moves toward new customers rather than the ones you already had. It is also the reporting discipline to keep three ad types with three different attribution behaviors from being compared on a single number.

That structure, creative and weekly bid and budget work is what we do day to day on our own accounts and for brands as part of Amazon PPC management.