Headline Search Ads are now called Sponsored Brands in AMS Amazon Advertising

Amazon continues to make changes to their Advertising platform. From renaming AMS, AMG, AAP to a generic brand name, Amazon Advertising, to now renaming the Headline Search Ads to Sponsored Brands.

The name isn’t the only change. Amazon has seriously improved the AMS platform in the last months by adding date range reporting, improvement looks for the ads, performance graphs and the much-needed bulk operations features.

The new Sponsored brands AMS campaigns come with new placements, new bidding options and new reports.

 

New placements with Sponsored Brands in AMS

The old Headline Search ads were only appearing above search results. As a side note, that might have been the reason why HSA weren’t performing as good as Sponsored products ads. The new Sponsored Brands will not only appear above search results, but also on the left side of the page, within search results and at the bottom of the search pages. See below a screenshot of all the placements.

By improving visibility and increasing the number of placements, we might see in the future that Sponsored Brands outperform Sponsored Products.

 

New bidding options with Sponsored Brands in AMS

Amazon now offers 2 bidding solutions with the campaigns:

1. Manual bidding – allows you to increase or decrease your bid by a specific percentage.
2. Automated bidding – this is a new feature that allows you to set the system to adjust bids automatically. The system will optimise the bids towards the better performing placements.

 

New reporting options with Sponsored Brands in AMS

To help us understand the performances of these new ads, Amazon made available 3 new reports:

1. Campaign reports – these show the overall results per each campaign, including metrics as: impressions, clicks, DPV, ACOS, Spend, Sales, etc.
2. Campaign placement report – this shows how the campaigns are performing in each placement: top of search; bottom of search; Left-side of search.
3. Keyword placement report – this report goes into even more details than the previous report: it shows the performances of the campaigns for each keyword based on the placement type (i.e. top of search, bottom of search etc.). For example, the keyword “laptop”, exact match, got 100 impressions and generated £1,000 sales when the ad appeared in the top search (placement type).

 

All of these updates are part of Amazon’s efforts to improve the somewhat outdated AMS platform (now called Advertising console). The new features are already available in the console. The new names will be phased in over the next several months, so we might still see the name “Headline Search Ads”, or Amazon marketing Services for a while.