Amazon Releases New Headline Search Ad Placements and Beta Tests New Reporting Platform
In a wave of updates to Amazon’s advertising platform, Amazon released new ad placements for Headline Search Ads and appeared to be beta testing a new reporting interface.
The new placements for Headline Search Ads are fully launched, and Amazon sellers may already see their ads in these new locations.
The new reporting platform, however, appears to still be in beta testing. Advertisers noticed new reporting functionality sporadically appearing a few days ago. Our team has seen these reporting features in a few of our clients. Three main features that are available or may soon be available include: Data Graphing, Campaign/Keyword Filtering, and Improved Reports.
Note: While Filtering and Improved Reporting appear to be officially rolled out, Data Graphing is not regularly available.
If you’re just starting out with Amazon, we recommend you start by reading our How to Advertise on Amazon: Amazon Marketing 101 post.
What’s New in Amazon?
Updated Ad Placements for Headline Search
Merchants now have the ability to display their Headline Ads in other placements below the top of the search results. These placement locations can be viewed by clicking the “Other placements” tab when creating a new Headline Ad (shown below).
The two new available placements are located: 1) on the left side of the search results page and 2) at the bottom of the results page.
What does this mean for Amazon Sellers? Your Headline Ads may already be showing in these new placements. There appears to be no way to opt in or opt out of this new feature, nor are you able to manually adjust your bid higher or lower for above vs. below the page fold placements. Amazon offers Automated Bidding that automatically adjusts your bids to be optimized for below the fold placements. Amazon promises to never adjust your bid higher, but will adjust your bids lower to improve conversion rates.
A New Reporting Platform is in Beta Testing
- Data Graphing:
- Retailers can see high level insights and trend lines when toggling on the Graph View in their Campaign Manager.
- Variables merchants can graph include: Spend, Sales, Average ACoS, Impressions, Clicks, Cost-per-click, Clickthrough Rate, and Orders.
- Includes customizable date ranges.
- Amazon is still beta testing this feature. This functionality is not regularly available, even in accounts where it has been seen before.
- Campaign Filtering:
- Sellers always had the ability to sort or search for keywords or campaigns in the Campaign Manager. Amazon recently released the ability to apply filters to Campaigns, Ad Groups, and Keywords.
- Variables merchants can filter on include: Daily Budget, Impressions, Clicks, Spend, Cost-per-Click, Orders, Sales, and Advertising Cost of Sales.
- Improved Reports:
- Merchants are taken to a new, more intuitive webpage when downloading reports. And more importantly, they can now download reports for Headline Ads including Search Term and Keyword Reports.
- All reports downloaded are in .xlsx formatting instead of .csv.
- Note: the old report webpage will be deprecated.
- Below is an overview of the types of reports available:
Updates in Amazon
Nothing in Amazon stays the same for very long – especially in their advertising platform. Merchants need to stay on top of the changes and new releases that will propel them ahead of their competitors. As Amazon continues beta testing and releasing their new reporting platform, WTM Digital blog will keep you up to date on these new roll-outs.