Amazon: Adoption Of Sponsored Products Ads Grew By 100 Percent in 2015

New placements and tools helped drive clicks and performance, the company says.

Chat with MarTechBot

Amazon released a flurry of performance stats for 2015 on Tuesday, including updates on just how popular sponsored product advertisements have become on the ecommerce platform.

The company says global adoption of Sponsored Products grew by 100 percent among Amazon sellers in 2015. The ads drove more than $1.5 billion in sales globally last year, according to Amazon. During the holiday shopping season, clicks on Sponsored Products in the US increased 200 percent year over year.

amazon sponsored products carousel

Amazon added a second carousel of Sponsored Products on product detail pages in 2015.

Amazon made several updates to Sponsored Products that helped drive these increases, including new placements in the first position of Search, the mobile shopping app and a second carousel of sponsored products ads on product detail pages. To improve management, Amazon added new tools including an API and bulk upload sheets. Bid+ was another feature update designed to help advertisers show up in the top row of the search results pages. When the bid boost feature is activated, Amazon increases the maximum CPC bid for products eligible to appear at the top of the search results.

Sponsored Products may also appear in the right column on search results.

The company shut down its advertising service, Amazon Product Ads, which drove clicks to retailers’ own websites, in October. That move also likely helped boost the performance of Sponsored Products throughout the holiday season.


Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. MarTech is owned by Semrush. Contributor was not asked to make any direct or indirect mentions of Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.


About the author

Ginny Marvin
Contributor
Ginny Marvin was formerly Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.