2026-06-30 · 5 min read
Amazon Sponsored Products vs Sponsored Brands 2026: Which Ad Type to Use When
Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands serve different goals on Amazon. Here is when to use each, what they cost, and how to measure their performance.
Amazon offers three main ad types for sellers: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display. The first two are the most widely used and the most commonly confused. They do different things and should be budgeted separately.
Sponsored Products
Sponsored Products are the most common Amazon ads. They appear in search results and on product detail pages, looking nearly identical to organic listings. They are keyword-targeted (or auto-targeted, where Amazon decides which searches to match). Sponsored Products drive direct product sales and are the first ad type almost every seller should run.
Cost model: pay-per-click (CPC). Average CPC ranges from $0.40 to $3+ depending on category competitiveness. Attribution: a sale counts if the customer clicked your ad within the last 7 days (default) or 14 days.
Best for: launching new products, defending keyword positions against competitors, and scaling volume on proven ASINs.
Sponsored Brands
Sponsored Brands appear at the top of search results (above all product listings) with a customizable banner: your brand logo, a headline you write, and up to three products. They require Brand Registry. They send traffic to either a custom landing page, your Amazon storefront, or a search results page for your brand.
Cost model: also pay-per-click. CPCs are typically higher than Sponsored Products because the top-of-page position is more competitive. Attribution: 14-day click attribution by default.
Best for: brand awareness, capturing shoppers earlier in the decision process, and cross-selling between your product lines. Less effective than Sponsored Products for direct product launches.
When to Use Each
New seller with limited budget: start with Sponsored Products only. Master keyword targeting and bid management before adding complexity. Brand Registry is not even required for Sponsored Products.
Established brand with multiple ASINs: run Sponsored Products as your primary performance driver, add Sponsored Brands to own the top-of-page placement for your most important keywords and branded searches.
Measuring success: Sponsored Products should be evaluated by ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sale = ad spend / ad revenue). Sponsored Brands are partly a brand investment, so evaluating them purely on ACOS misses their awareness impact. Look at new-to-brand orders as an additional metric (available in Campaign Manager for Brand Registry sellers).
How to Split the Budget
There is no universal ratio, but there is a usable starting point. A seller with one or two products and no brand recognition should put close to all of the budget into Sponsored Products, because every dollar needs to produce a trackable sale. A brand with a catalogue and repeat customers commonly ends up somewhere near 70% Sponsored Products, 20% Sponsored Brands, and 10% Sponsored Display, then adjusts from there.
Set the split by job rather than by percentage. Sponsored Products defends the keywords you already convert on. Sponsored Brands buys the top of the page on your highest-intent terms and on your own brand name, which is the cheapest defensive spend available to most sellers. Sponsored Display retargets people who looked and left.
Budget your own brand name deliberately. Bidding on searches for your own brand feels like paying for traffic you already had, and sometimes it is. It is also the only way to stop a competitor's Sponsored Brands banner sitting above your organic listing when someone searches for you by name.
Campaign Structure
Sponsored Products works best split three ways. An auto campaign at a low bid running permanently as a keyword discovery tool. An exact-match campaign holding the terms that have proven they convert, with the highest bids. A broad or phrase campaign for controlled expansion around those terms.
Harvest weekly. Pull the search term report, move anything with sales and an acceptable cost of sale into the exact campaign, and add anything with clicks and no sales as a negative in the campaign it came from. This single routine does more for account performance than bid adjustments do. PPC Autopilot runs it for you every day, free during the beta.
Sponsored Brands needs less structure and more creative attention. The headline is the variable that moves click-through rate most, and the default of your brand name plus a generic phrase performs worst. Test a headline naming the specific benefit against one naming the specific use case, and give each a full two weeks before judging, since Sponsored Brands accumulates data more slowly.
Bidding Behaves Differently
Sponsored Products bids respond quickly. Raise a bid and impressions usually move within a day, which makes iterative adjustment practical.
Sponsored Brands sits in a more contested auction for a single position at the top of the page, so small bid changes often produce no visible change and then a large one at the threshold. Move these bids in larger steps and less often.
Amazon's bidding strategies apply differently too. Dynamic bids down only is the safe default while you are learning what converts. Dynamic bids up and down can pay for itself on a proven exact-match campaign, and it can also double your cost per click on a campaign that has not earned it yet.
Measure With TACoS, Not Just ACoS
ACoS tells you what a campaign cost against the sales it produced. It says nothing about the organic sales that advertising helped create, which is the entire point of Sponsored Brands.
Total advertising cost of sale, which is total ad spend divided by total sales including organic, is the number to watch monthly. A falling TACoS while total sales rise means advertising is building organic rank. A flat TACoS with flat sales means you are renting sales rather than building anything. A rising TACoS with flat sales means stop and look at the listing, because no ad type fixes a page that does not convert.
New-to-brand metrics apply to both types and are reported in Campaign Manager for Brand Registry sellers. Judge Sponsored Brands on new-to-brand orders and new-to-brand sales rather than on ACoS alone.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need Brand Registry to run Amazon ads?
Sponsored Products needs no Brand Registry, which is why it is where every new seller starts. Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display both require an enrolled brand, and enrolment requires a registered trademark you own.
What is a good ACoS on Amazon?
It depends on your margin, not on a benchmark. Work out your break-even ACoS first by dividing your profit per unit before advertising by your selling price. If you keep $8 on a $30 product, your break-even is about 27%, and anything under that is profitable. Sellers launching a product often run above break-even deliberately to buy ranking, which is a decision rather than a mistake as long as it is temporary.
Can I run Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands on the same keyword?
Yes, and for your most important terms you usually should. They occupy different placements, so you are not bidding against yourself for one slot, and holding both the banner and a search result on a high-intent keyword takes up more of the page. Watch the combined cost of sale for that keyword rather than each campaign separately, since the attribution overlaps.
Why are my Sponsored Brands ads getting impressions but no clicks?
Almost always the creative. The banner competes against the organic results directly below it, so a generic headline and a logo give a shopper no reason to click. Name the benefit, use the three product slots for genuinely different products rather than three variations of one, and check that the images read clearly at the size they actually display on a phone.
Which ad type should I use to launch a new product?
Sponsored Products, with an auto campaign to find the terms Amazon already associates with your listing and an exact campaign to press on the ones that convert. Sponsored Brands sends traffic to a store or a collection rather than doing the direct-response work a launch needs, and it requires Brand Registry, which many sellers do not yet have at launch.