How to Set Up an Amazon Video Ads Campaign

There are several bulbous sites for digital marketing in the modern world. There are social media – like Facebook and Instagram – where you’ll informally market to young people, using brand ambassadors to promote your business. There’s Google, the world’s dominant search engine, where you can boost your SEO to be seen by more web users. And now, rising to join them is Amazon – the world’s largest online marketplace.

Indeed, the statistics regarding Amazonas rise are staggering. The firm now caters towards over 50% of online retail spending in the US. That makes it the dominant online store in the country, dwarfing the likes of eBay and Walmart.

Further, as more and more third-party retailers head onto Amazon to promote their goods and sell their wares, the competition is only becoming fiercer. Now, more than ever, it’s essential to have your products seen of Amazon: 90% of consumers price-check on the site – and the ecommerce platform currently hosts over 200 million products. You need to stand out.

This comprehensive guide looks at how you can use Amazon Video Ads to boost your products and your brand for end-users browsing Amazon’s extensive marketplace. For any company that draws revenues from selling their products online, this guide will be invaluable to boost your next marketing campaign.

Amazon has arranged a simple page to help you understand their specifications for your branded video on its platform. This is incredibly helpful – and we’ll run you through it so that you’re aware of what you can and cannot do with your video advertisements on Amazon.

First: the good news. Amazon is brilliant at converting any videos they display into the formats that are optimized for a variety of different screen sizes and devices.

You’ll see, you’ve got a healthy choice of devices that your advert can be shown on, with the dimensions provided to show you the size your video will play at on each screen. The key here is to recognize that your video advert will play whether end users are on a desktop browser, on a mobile app, or on the Fire Tablet – itself an Amazon product.

Amazon also keeps highlighting that your video will autoplay. Why is this important? Well, if a consumer is scrolling through products, they’re more likely to stop and linger on a particular part of a screen if a video begins playing on it.

Amazon has coded their video adverts to play when at least 50% of the video advertisement is visible on the screen. This is comparable to fakebook’s autoplay feature.

Also, the same as Facebook, autoplay occurs on mute – the user has to interact with the video, by pressing the sound button, to get the full experience. This encourages interaction from the get-go – and represents an investment on the part of the end-user. Finally, autoplay is paused if the video is scrolled outside of the screen.

There is still more that your marketing and creative departments need to know before they launch into the creation of your first Amazon video advert. They will need to know what formats, shapes, sizes and definitions to create your marketing videos in so that they’ll be accepted by Amazon when uploaded. Happily, Amazon shares these specifications in a table, too.

These sorts of specifications may be as good as Greek to you, but they are essential for your digital content creators and your producers and editors. Meanwhile, if you will be creating your marketing video with the help of a video marketing agency, you’ll not have to stress about the specifications – that will be handled in-house by the team you outsource to.

There are two key figures that you should bear in mind from this brief table: you should keep your file size beneath 500MB, and you need to keep your video short. Indeed, Amazon recommends a video advertisement of no longer than 15 seconds, despite allowing uploads of up to 3 minutes.

Why is this? Let’s take a quick look at video length before continuing with this Amazon Video Ad guide.

In general, video marketing has always been seen as an attention-capturing device, through which you transmit the information as quickly as possible. Google, YouTube, Facebook, and other digital media hubs have all set a bar here: short, snappy videos leaving consumers with one, clear message.

If you attempt to build a more extended video advertisement with more than one key message, you’ll risk losing the attention of the end-user who has briefly paused their scrolling to consume your video. You need to respect short attention spans and the enticing nature of digital media by being humble with your video length. Less is more – and this goes for Amazon Video Ads more than any other. That’s because you’re just offering a snapshot of your brand and your products in an Amazon video advert or Amazon video Ads. You’re not doing the long sell. You’re grabbing attention, and aiming to convert that into an impression within ten to twenty seconds.

As well as strongly recommending that your video marketing piece on their site is no more than 15 seconds long, Amazon also offers potential advertisers three more essential tips to help them drive a successful video marketing campaign on their site. They are:

• To keep your key message to within the first 5 seconds of the video advert, that you’re creating and showing on Amazon.
• To not use a call to action button, like a ‘shop here’ button, on the video itself. Amazon’s video playing software doesn’t allow for on-video clicks: they’ll simply play or pause the video.
• To make your video as engaging without sound as it is with sound. Subtitles are recommended as standard, and products should be shown instead of talking heads introducing products.

Next, you’re going to need to know how your video advert will be seen by end-users on Amazon. You already know it’s going to be embedded on the pages in the table above. But what about the format and the link back to your product pages?

Amazon has this built into their video marketing software, which is good news for firms: you simply have to input the following data, and Amazon will take care of the presentation of the video template. Here’s the direct quote from Amazon’s video advert guide:

• Optional logo image (JPG, PNG, and GIF files accepted). Minimum width of 600 px, a minimum height of 100 px, the maximum file size of 100 KB. Note: the logo is not used in 414×125 mobile ads.
• Headline: up to 50 characters of text describing your campaign messaging.
• Supported call to action options: “Shop now”, “Learn more”, “See details”, “Pre-order now”, “Buy tickets”, “Rent now”, “Rent or buy now”, “Get a quote.”

So, you’re able to optionally add your logo (great for brand recognition) as well as tailoring your call to action button with the keywords that match your business. Meanwhile, you can curate a headline of up to 50 characters which describes, in short, what your video advert is showing to consumers.

Here’s the full asset checklist, provided by Amazon, to help you tick off which assets you’ll be bringing to the table with your video advert, and which formats each asset should be rendered in.

There are two main places in which you’ll be able to share your video advertisements with Amazon. They are ‘in-stream’ and ‘out-stream’.

In-stream videos are played either before, during or after video content. They appear, for instance, when a web user is watching a video on Amazon Prime. The main benefit of this type of location for your video ad is that it’s likely to be seen on the big screen – on the television, and not only on smartphones and tablets scrolling through the Amazon website or app.

Out-stream videos, in contrast, aren’t attached to video content, and typically appear in positions where display ads would usually be situated. The benefit of these is that they’ll appear regardless of whether consumers have decided to watch video content – and as such, your reach will be more extensive, though you may find that your engagement is lower.