Exploring Amazon STV Ads - A 3-Week Campaign Breakdown

• Getting Started: Two Campaigns, Two Strategies
• Week 1: A Slow Start
• Week 2: Traffic Begins to Flow
• Week 3: Scaling Up
• Conclusion

Amazon’s Sponsored TV (STV) ads are a unique tool designed for advertisers looking to increase brand awareness rather than drive immediate sales. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been experimenting with this ad type to better understand its potential and to provide actionable insights for anyone considering it for their Amazon advertising strategy.

In this blog post, I’ll walk you through our experience with STV ads, covering the steps we took, the challenges we faced, and the results we saw over a 3-week period. If you’ve been hesitant about trying STV ads, these findings might convince you to give them a go.

Getting Started: Two Campaigns, Two Strategies

We began testing the STV ad type on January 29th by creating two separate campaigns, each targeting different levels of the market:

• Campaign 1: Targeted a broader category.
• Campaign 2: Focused on a subcategory.

Both campaigns were set with a daily budget of $150, and we started with a bid of $20 per impression, with no end date in sight. The goal was to monitor performance week by week and adjust as needed.

Week 1: A Slow Start

The first week was challenging. After three days of no impressions, we decided to incrementally increase the bids. We added $5 to the bid every day for the next four days, hoping this would generate some traction. Unfortunately, even after pushing the bid to $250, we didn’t receive any impressions throughout the week.

Week 2: Traffic Begins to Flow

By the second week, things started to turn around—at least for the subcategory campaign. On February 5th, we began to receive impressions, and by the end of the week, we saw 13,000 impressions at a cost-per-thousand (CPM) of $19.17.

As the subcategory campaign picked up, we increased our daily budget to $500, and that brought in 155,000 impressions with an average CPM of $21. However, it’s important to note that Amazon's STV ads don’t support bulk bid adjustments. This limitation meant we had to manually alter the bids for each subcategory, which can be time-consuming but necessary.

On the positive side, STV ads excel when it comes to video completion rates. Out of 155,000 impressions, 152,000 resulted in complete video views, a staggering 98% completion rate. This level of engagement is something we don’t typically see with other video ad types.

Meanwhile, the category-targeted campaign still hadn’t generated any traffic, prompting us to continue increasing the bid by $5 every other day in hopes of igniting some movement.

Week 3: Scaling Up

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In Week 3, after increasing the daily budget to $500, our subcategory campaign brought in 370,000 impressions and maintained a 97% video completion rate. The average CPM hovered around $20, which was consistent with Week 2.

At this point, we began noticing a significant uptick in metrics related to branded searches and clicks, indicating that our STV ads were contributing to greater brand awareness. However, one downside we encountered was that the campaign was frequently running out of budget by the afternoon or evening. Since Amazon doesn’t yet support day parting for STV ads, we decided to test an end-date strategy to see if we could optimize budget utilization over the weekend.

We increased our daily budget to $1,800 starting on Friday, with an end date set for Monday. The idea was to capture high weekend traffic from Prime Video users, which we anticipated would be more active during this period. The results? We spent approximately $4,500 over the weekend, and CPMs dropped significantly:

• Saturday CPM: $13.22
• Sunday CPM: $11.84

By the end of Week 3, we had generated 513,000 impressions, and 501,000 of those were complete video views, maintaining the high video completion rate of nearly 98%. Additionally, we saw an unexpected benefit: our organic sales increased by 67% during this period, while PPC-driven sales made up 33% of the total. Typically, our organic-to-PPC ratio is 50/50, so this surge in organic sales was a pleasant surprise.

Key Takeaways: Is STV Right for You?

Based on our 3-week experiment, STV ads are incredibly effective at driving brand awareness, particularly if you’re looking for high video completion rates and broad reach. However, they are not the right choice if your primary goal is to lower ACOS or focus purely on conversion-driven metrics.

Here are some key points to keep in mind:

• STV Ads Are Brand Awareness Powerhouses: With video completion rates above 97%, these ads are highly engaging and can significantly boost brand visibility.
• Manual Bid Management: Since bulk bid changes aren’t available for STV campaigns, expect to spend extra time manually adjusting bids for each category or subcategory.
• Testing End Dates: If you’re running a large budget, experimenting with end dates and weekend strategies can help you capture high-traffic periods more efficiently.
• Impact on Organic Sales: Beyond PPC, STV ads may contribute to a broader lift in organic sales, as we saw with our 67% increase during Week 3.

Conclusion

STV ads are a great addition to your Amazon advertising toolkit, especially if you're aiming to amplify brand awareness. While they require a bit more manual management, the high engagement and video completion rates make them worth the effort. If you haven’t tested STV ads yet, now is the time to dive in and see how they can elevate your Amazon marketing strategy.

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