Amazon OTT Advertising: Affordable & Measurable Growth for Advertisers
OTT advertising on Amazon is traditional TV commercials for online streaming platforms. Amazon’s version of this serves through the DSP and reaches viewers on Fire TV and IMDB Freedive.
What makes OTT ads better than traditional TV ads? It is Amazon’s targeting options. Let’s learn everything in detail.
What we’ll cover:
- What is Amazon OTT advertising?
- How does Amazon OTT advertising work?
- What are the advantages of OTT advertising?
- What Amazon Found?
- New changes for Amazon OTT in 2020
- Conclusion
1. Amazon OTT (Over-the-top) video ads
Amazon OTT ads are the video advertisements visible before, after, and during video content. OTT advertising uses Amazon’s own DSP to deliver video ads throughout the Amazon ecosystem; Kindle devices, Fire TV, Prime Video, and IMDb, along with compatible apps across the network.
These ads are not always skippable and are typically viewed until the end of the advertisement. Amazon over-the-top video ads help you share your brand message to unique and relevant audiences at scale.
You don’t have to advertise during a specific show based on the aggregated attributes of the people watching it. Here’s what you can do.
- In-market audiences – Reach people Amazon knows are actively looking for something you sell.
- Lifestyle targeting – Reach people whose interests align with your catalogs (think pet food for “Dog Lovers”).
- Retargeting audiences – Speak to folks that have already viewed your product.
The reporting is pretty great too. You get all sorts of performance metrics about how many people you’re reaching and whether they’re buying from you on Amazon after viewing your ad. There’s no guessing about how your ad performs, which means you can iterate and improve to continue making your ads even better.
You can purchase these ad units through Amazon’s DSP, and they serve on things like fire TV, IMDb TV, and many more apps.
2. How does Amazon OTT advertising work?
Amazon Over The Top Ads work on the DSP platform. OTT Ads are not clickable ads, and so the impact is measured through impressions rather than CTR and is paid per 1000 impressions.
To get started, you can reach Amazon OTT inventory through Amazon DSP. While setting up your Amazon DSP campaigns, follow these steps:
- Set KPIs: Set benchmark or goals indicating growth for your Brand using a selected campaign.
- Identify Target Audience: Leverage Amazon’s Audience Solutions to make data-driven selections of your target audience. For instance, you can segregate them based on the types of shows they are watching.
- Implement: Execute your campaign and make changes based on the performance.
👉See How Hershey made a significant increase in the audience with OTT advertising on Amazon.
3. What are the benefits of using Amazon OTT?
Brand Growth, on & off Amazon
Amazon’s OTT platform enables you to reach your audience and build your brand both on Amazon-owned properties as well as 3P publishers within Amazon’s network.
In fact, 87% of all U.S. digital viewers today use OTT devices to view billions of video content hours each month. (Amazon.com)
Efficient Ad Spending
APS or Amazon Publisher Services integrate with Over The Top applications to remove additional fees. This enables the advertisers to monitor what they are paying and track the success of their campaigns.
Better Targeting
With Amazon OTT, you can target a specific audience and reach the most likely shoppers to buy your products and services. This is done by leveraging Amazon’s first-party data and the platform’s ability to monitor the real-time intent of the video ads displayed.
Performance-based Pricing
You are able to choose from the many options of live shows and events available to advertise on. This involves spending only based on ad performance to get the maximum value out of the OTT ads.
Access to “difficult to reach” audience
With an audience reach of around 180 million at present, OTT helps you reach the previously unreachable. Since Amazon Ads are unskippable, ultimately, a lot more people end up watching your ads.
Ad conquesting
In OTT advertising on Amazon, you can directly hit up the screens of customers who have viewed your competitor’s products.
The unique feature allows you to reach potential customers among the audience of your competitor’s products.
Genre blocking
You are able to pick up to five genres to exclude your ads from. For instance, if you’re selling baby products, you may want to exclude horror, crime, and other similar genres. If your product is under “male apparel,” you may wish to exclude genres that tend to attract predominantly female demographics.
*This feature is available for customers in the US only.
Video Builder
Video Creative Builder provides a quick and easy way to create compelling video assets using a selection of ready-to-use customizable templates. You can build unique variants by changing elements like the background, description, and images. You can even enhance existing videos with product and brand assets and use Amazon co-branding to deliver relevant and engaging ads without production resources.
Tip: Amazon analytics tools can help you better understand your customers and how they engage with your products.
4. What Amazon found?
Amazon measured and compared the success of 28 OTT ad campaigns that fell into three categories based on their audiences:
- Demographics only
- Demographics and behavioral signals
- Behavioral signals only
Brands that used Amazon Advertising‘s behavioral signals saw a boost in consideration, that is, the total number of shoppers that visited the brand’s PDP on Amazon and compared with those that reached the shoppers by leveraging “demographic attributes alone.”
Amazon OTT video ad campaigns that leveraged both demographic attributes and behavioral signals saw a 38% lift in consideration.
According to the findings, OTT video ad campaigns that exclusively used behavioral signals saw a 44% boost in consideration compared to those that leveraged demographic attributes.
Source: Amazon 2020 data
Amazon says that relying on demographics provides a one-dimensional view of audiences. Taking first-party data from Amazon, where people search, listen to music, watch videos, and buy products and groceries, gives brands a well-rounded view. Then match that with contextual targeting.
5. Measuring Success with Amazon OTT
- Brand Search Metrics: It lets you measure the impact of advertising scaling your products’ search by shoppers. And, this stat is directly proportional to your band visibility in search results.
- Reach Metrics: It is the measure of your unique reach and its resultant impact on sales.
- Brand Lift: The brand lift metric measures changes in perception for your brand & reveals audience demographics.
- New-to-Brand: It is the measure of the impact of your ads on attracting new customers. Getting an excellent new-to-brand metric means your video ads are working, and your brand is about to grow.
6. New Changes & additional features in Amazon OTT
Amazon has been adding features that would enhance their OTT advertising. This includes creating more opportunities for more ads and new tools for better ad analytics and campaign building.
- Genre blocking Amazon introduced Genre Blocking in September 2020 to give the advertisers more control over their ad placement. You can block up to 5 content genres to direct your ads’ appearance to relevant genres to garner higher impressions.
- Audience guarantees enable the advertiser to buy advertisements against the audience you want to reach. Like that, you would only pay for the impressions reaching a relevant audience as per your set criteria.
- Video creative builder beta will allow advertisers to create video ads from scratch, even if they do not have their video assets. You can choose from its library of videos and templates so that you can experiment with different ad ideas without the loss of time and money.
7. To Conclude
OTT on Amazon is very similar to other OTT providers; however, you get two significant benefits: targeting and insights.
- The first benefit targeting Amazon knows a lot about its customers, which
gives advertisers many targeting options.
For instance, they are selling dog food. You can use their market audience to reach new dog parents or their lifestyle audience to contact dog lovers. You can even use retargeting audiences to get in front of someone that’s already interacted with your product.
- The second benefit of OTT is insights. Amazon ads reporting for OTT is
fantastic because it helps you understand what you’re getting from your ad spend, and you know how many people you’re reaching on Amazon after seeing your ad. So there’s no guessing whether your ad equals money in the bank. You can easily see what’s working what’s not and make changes if this sounds like something you want to learn more about.
Learn More:
- Optimizing display ads with OTT and Sponsored Brands videos
- Amazon Advertising reaches 55 million monthly viewers of OTT content
- What is Amazon Sponsored Display Audiences?
Author bio:
Pooja is a content & community specialist at DataHawk, a powerful eCommerce Business Management Softwareproviding Brands, Retailers & Agencies, with the analytics, optimization tools & professional services they need to fuel their eCommerce growth on Amazon. She manages and produces content to help sellers sell better on Amazon. Her unique perspective stems from her experience, both, as an engineer and as a content specialist. When she’s not working, you can likely find her trying to pick up a new skill.
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