If you are actively selling on Amazon, keeping up with the trends coming down the road in 2022 is not optional, but mandatory. Competition for advertising placements on Amazon remains fierce amongst sellers and will only continue to increase in the new year.
Sellers must seek out new ways to compete successfully within their niches whether they are relatively new or an established brand looking to introduce their products to a wider audience. This means keeping an eye out for how to best leverage Amazon's ever-expanding list of advertising features.
It's also an occasion for thinking about what new features Amazon might develop that could improve not only the customer experience but also give sellers more tools to sustain and grow their audiences and profitability.
Here are some important trends on our radar to watch, as well as our Wishlist for things we'd like to see in Amazon advertising for 2022.
Trends in Amazon Advertising for 2022
The prevalent use of Custom Creatives in Sponsored Display Ads.
With the introduction of custom images as part of the “Customize your creative” section for Sponsored Display ads near the end of August 2021, sellers can now customize their creative solutions to highlight specific competitive advantages that they have over a competitor.
They can also customize creatives depending on which stage of the Customer Buying Cycle a shopper may be in or based on the different seasons. In the coming year, the usage of customized creatives will continue to grow as sellers battle for the attention of shoppers whose eyes are more attracted to arresting visual images over more traditional written copy.
In 2022, sellers will need to resist the urge to automatically focus on bid optimizations when a campaign underperforms and look to see if perhaps the creative needs improvements.
Amazon Cost-Per-Click Increases
The Amazon marketplace will continue its journey towards saturation. Sellers can expect Amazon's ad auctions to become fiercer for placements, generating higher cost-per-click(s). 2021 saw all ad types including Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display ads increased, and it is expected they will continue to do so in 2022.
In 2022, sellers should be prepared to spend more money in order to maintain ad placements similar to their current or previous ones as CPCs continue to increase. They should also expect their daily budgets for overall Ad Spend to double or even triple during the peak holiday season.
Amazon Posts Plays Larger Role in Customer Engagement
Until recently, while Amazon has traditionally been a customer-first platform, it has lacked a means for creating an engaging and interactive experience for its shoppers. Amazon Posts is Amazon’s version of Instagram. Amazon Posts, which started as a beta solely in the US, has now expanded to multiple marketplaces around the world.
What can make them even more valuable moving forward into 2022, is that they can now be scheduled to support product launches, brand campaigns, and other social initiatives. Sellers will be able to create posts and set them to run at a time of their choosing.
In 2022, Amazon seems to be shifting from a customer-first mentality to an ecosystem, which gives sellers more creative control over how a shopper experiences their brands on Amazon.
Dayparting is expected to come to Amazon natively
Dayparting splits up the day into hours. This permits sellers to see how their metrics change hour-by-hour in order to adjust their bidding strategy accordingly. Sellers can bid more when they tend to get clicks and orders and bid less when they tend not to. Currently, only sellers with support from third-party tools like Entourage 2.0 can use dayparting.
In 2022, sellers will be able to request specific time slots during which they want their ads to appear.
Sellers with limited Ad Spend budgets will be able to analyze purchase data and discover the best-performing hours of the day and days of the week, which can then be leveraged to better manage ACoS.
Use of Cryptocurrency on Amazon
As Cryptocurrency becomes more popular and adoption continues to increase, Amazon will look to allow purchases on their platform with Cryptocurrency. There is some speculation that Amazon may even create a unique Cryptocurrency of their own for use in their marketplace.
Other Notable Trends in Amazon Advertising for 2022
Seller Inventory Struggles Persist
Those products that will command the highest market share will not necessarily be the ones that are the most recognized or manufactured with the highest standards of quality, but those that are consistently available to shoppers throughout the year.
Sellers will continue to struggle in 2022 to keep their products in stock as supply chain woes persist.
In 2022, sellers must strategize in order to strike an optimal balance between not enough inventory coverage and being overstocked.
Inventory Restriction Within Fulfillment Centers Will Continue
With the exponential growth of the number of new sellers and products launching on Amazon every day, the space available within Amazon's fulfillment centers is continually stressed and shrinking.
2022 will be a continuation of space allocation based upon sales performance. This system will be a mainstay for Amazon in order to prioritize the products that regularly sell well from both a seller and a vendor perspective.
Those sellers who are able to improve on their core IPI (Inventory Performance Index) metrics will have a distinct advantage over newer sellers and those with slower sales velocity. As a result, the expectation is that sellers will look to adopt secondary order fulfillment options earlier in the year, regardless of their category.
In 2022, sellers will look to backup fulfillment methods to prevent these restrictions from impacting their profitability such as drop-ship FBM (Fulfilled By Merchant).
Our Wishlist for New Features We’d Like To See From Amazon In 2022
More Video Ad Inventory
The creation of a carousel of video ads similar to the carousel of ads that currently appears on mobile devices, the Search Results page, and the Product Detail page.
Carousel ads are a kind of advertising format that combines multiple videos or images into a single ad. Carousel ads are most popular on Instagram and Facebook, where advertisers can highlight a number of images to improve their chances of a sale.
One of the best ways for sellers to tell their product or brand story is by adding video content. We would like to see more carousel video ads (and placement options) in Amazon advertising because video carousel ads can help sellers reach potential shoppers in new, more immersive ways.
Amazon Develops a Feature Similar to Facebook's Dynamic Creative
Dynamic Creative takes multiple media (images, videos) and multiple ad components (such as images, videos, text, and calls-to-action) and then mixes and matches them in new ways to improve the advertiser's ad performance. It allows advertisers to automatically create personalized creative variations for each person who views their ads, with results that are scalable.
The creative variations are only based on the media and ad components that an advertiser provides unless the “Optimize Creative for Each Person” toggle is also turned on. When that toggle is also enabled, Facebook will apply Dynamic Experience optimizations.
Dynamic creative is an ideal optimization tool when an advertiser is unsure of which media or ad components will resonate best with different audiences.
If a similar feature became available to Amazon sellers, they would have the ability to upload as many as four different lifestyle images, or headlines at once, and Amazon would create different combinations to serve to their audiences.
Hopefully, Amazon would improve upon Facebook's Dynamic Creative reporting, which suffers from a built-in weakness of only displaying the aggregate performance of all variations (meaning it is not suitable as a substitute for split testing).
The Ability to Create Ad Campaigns in Bulk
The E team would like to see Amazon develop a feature that gives sellers the ability to create campaigns in bulk.
Sellers would be able to create multiple campaigns with multiple targets and purposes in order to save time. This feature would give sellers the capability to launch completely different campaigns at once and choose whether they wanted to have the same targets across multiple campaigns or have the same settings across multiple campaigns.
More Sophisticated and Detailed Targeting Inside of the Sponsored Display Console
The E team would like the Sponsored Display console to offer the same level of sophistication that is currently offered by Amazon DSP (demand-side platform), with look back periods and detailed audience targeting.
The Ability to Lower Budgets in Real Time
Amazon only allows sellers to raise their budgets on an active campaign. For example, if a seller's ACoS is good, Amazon will allow the seller to raise their budget, but if the ACoS is poor, Amazon will not allow the seller to lower their budget. Amazon exhibits a clear bias towards sellers spending more money. The E team would like to see Amazon provide sellers with the opportunity to save money by lowering budgets on active campaigns in real time.
Create a 'Quality Score' Feature
The E team would like to see Amazon create a feature that would give sellers a quality score for a campaign (numeric range). This metric would show the relevance of campaign keywords in relation to the listing.
Amazon will continue to work to cement its role as a place for testing new ways to engage shoppers at each stage of their customer journey. If you are a seller that needs help navigating the ever-changing world of Amazon, schedule a call with our Amazon Advertising experts today. We provide complete, done-for-you advertising management services for sellers looking to free up their time and have their ads managed by the pros.
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