In January, Amazon released updates for sponsored product ads. The updates are currently betas but they’ve been rolled out to all advertisers, meaning they’re probably nearing the full release.

The first updates’ release involves new bid strategies with a more complex dynamic bidding that replaces bid+ and which provides different options:

• Down bidding - bids are lowered in real time if a sale is less likely to occur
• Up and down bidding- bids are raised (by a maximum of 100%) or lowered depending on the likelihood of the sale

There’s also the option of fixed bidding if you rather have more controlled bidding. This type of bidding sticks to your max cost per click (CPC) and any changes are done manually.

Another beta that has been rolled out is the option of placement modifiers. There are two locations that we can now add a bid multiplier in order to increase our visibility. These are:

• Top of search – increase bids to increase top of the search page impression share
• Product page – increase bids to improve chances of appearing on the product page of the chosen ASIN - Amazon’s version of a stock keeping unit (SKU). This was previously a space that only the display ads could tap into. Sponsored products can also benefit from bidding on competitor pages and cross selling products within your brand

The final release gives the possibility to use not only a keyword targeting strategy for sponsored products, but to also target by product or ASIN. This gives similar benefits to the product page bid multipliers as it now allows to bid on competitors and cross sell products.

The updates give advertisers a lot more control over where ads will be placed, as well as on how to make them display more often, and work well together as the bid modifiers allow to decide how aggressively you’d like to appear in more specific placements. This more detailed approach should increase the chance of your campaign succeeding.