Sponsored Brand Ads on Amazon: The Complete 2026 Guide
Nishant Singh
TL;DR
Key takeaways
Sponsored brand ads show your logo, a headline and several products or a video, mostly at the top of Amazon search results.
Sellers need Brand Registry. In 2026 the formats are collections, Store Spotlight, video, Brand Gallery and paid prompts.
Pick a goal, then adjust bids by placement and by audience, such as shoppers new to your brand.
Judge them on new-to-brand orders and branded searches as well as ROAS. View attribution changed on January 1, 2026.
Sponsored Brands is the ad type most brands set up once and then leave alone. In the accounts we manage, that is usually where the easiest growth is hiding.
This guide covers how sponsored brand ads work in late 2026: who can run them, every format, landing pages, targeting, bidding, creative rules, reporting, and how they fit with Sponsored Products and Amazon DSP.
What Are Sponsored Brand Ads?
Sponsored brand ads are Amazon's self-serve ads that promote a brand rather than a single listing. Each ad combines your brand logo, a custom headline and either several products, a video or your Brand Store, and it can send shoppers to your Store or a product page.
Amazon describes them as display and video creatives that help shoppers find a brand in the Amazon store, often paired with Brand Stores. The format was called Headline Search Ads until 2018, which is still a good description of where most of them show.
Here is how they compare with the other two sponsored ad types:
Sponsored Brands | Sponsored Products | Sponsored Display | |
|---|---|---|---|
What it promotes | Your brand: logo, headline, several products, a video or your Store | One product | One product, as a display ad |
Main placements | Top of search, within search results, product pages, home page | Search results and product pages | Product pages, Amazon and third-party sites |
Pricing | CPC, vCPM or fixed upfront | CPC | CPC or vCPM |
Brand Registry for sellers | Yes | No | Yes for most |
Best at | New-to-brand customers, brand visibility, Store traffic | Converting high-intent searches | Retargeting and competitor pages |
Our guides to Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display cover the other two in the same depth.
Who Can Run Sponsored Brands?
Sponsored Brands is open to professional sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, vendors, book vendors, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) authors and agencies. Adult, used, refurbished and closed-category products can't be advertised.
That Brand Registry requirement is the answer to the most common Search Console question we see on this topic. A seller without a registered trademark in Brand Registry can run Sponsored Products, but not Sponsored Brands.
Three more things to have in place before you launch:
A registered logo you have the right to use. Amazon pauses ads whose logo breaks its creative rules.
A Brand Store. It is optional for collections and product-page video, but required for Store Spotlight and Brand Gallery.
Listings that can convert. Several products share one ad, so a product with few reviews or a weak main image drags the whole unit down.
If your Store is still a single page, our guide on how to create an Amazon storefront covers the setup and the subpage structure Sponsored Brands needs.
Sponsored Brands Ad Formats in 2026
Sponsored Brands now has five formats. Two of them are less than six months old, and one replaced the format most advertisers knew.
1. Collections
Collections show 3 to 10 of your products in one ad, each with its price, rating and any deal. Amazon's AI can choose the products for each search from signals like search intent and browsing behavior, or you pick up to 10 yourself, according to the Sponsored Brands collections announcement.
This format replaced the old product collection ad. In the US the switch started in late January 2026, as PPC Land reported, and Amazon's bulksheet documentation now lists 3 to 10 ASINs and no custom image or headline for collection ads.
Existing one- and two-product campaigns keep running, but you can't add ad groups to them. If you relied on a custom lifestyle image to stand out, that lever has moved to Store Spotlight and Brand Gallery.
On automatic selection, exclude ASINs that are low on stock or low on margin. The AI chooses for relevance, not for your P&L.
2. Store Spotlight
Store Spotlight features up to three Brand Store subpages, each with its own image and label, under one headline. Amazon's Sponsored Brands guide requires a Store with at least three subpages, each with a unique product.
We use it on broad brand terms and for brands with distinct product lines. A shopper searching your brand name sees your range, not just your best seller.
3. Video
Sponsored Brands video plays automatically, muted, inside search results. It has its own placement and auction, so it doesn't compete with your other Sponsored Brands campaigns for the same slot.
A click goes to a product detail page or, with a Store-linked video, to your Brand Store. Video is the format we test first for a new product, because it explains in six seconds what a thumbnail can't.
4. Brand Gallery
Brand Gallery launched on May 28, 2026. It pairs a lifestyle image and headline with a carousel of three to five Brand Store categories or collections, and it shows at the top of search for branded queries.
It is only available in reserve share of voice campaigns, which buy that top slot at a fixed price with a minimum spend. For a brand whose own name is a battleground, it is the strongest defensive format Amazon offers.
5. Prompts
Sponsored Brands prompts are AI-generated questions or facts attached to your ads. A tap opens a conversation in Alexa for Shopping (the assistant that absorbed Rufus) or answers on the page.
In the US they moved from beta to general availability on March 25, 2026. Campaigns are enrolled automatically and prompt clicks are charged under your normal CPC, so they are spending your budget whether or not you looked at them. Our guide to Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands prompts covers how to review and pause them.
Where Do Sponsored Brands Ads Show?
Sponsored brand ads appear at the top of search results, within and below search results, on product detail pages and on the Amazon home page, on desktop and mobile. Which of those your campaign can reach depends on the goal you choose when you create it.
Campaign goal | You pay | Where it can show | Success metric |
|---|---|---|---|
Drive page visits | Cost per click (CPC) | Search pages, detail pages, home page | Clicks |
Grow brand impression share | Cost per 1,000 viewable impressions (vCPM) | Top of search only | Top-of-search impression share |
Reserve share of voice | Fixed upfront price, minimum spend | Top of search on branded keywords | Share of your branded search |
The first two goals came from Amazon's goal-based campaigns launch. Existing campaigns were tagged as drive page visits, which is why most accounts still run everything on that one goal.
That default is fine for performance campaigns. For a category where being seen at the top matters more than the click, a vCPM campaign on grow brand impression share is the cleaner buy, and you judge it on impression share rather than ACOS.
CPC and vCPM campaigns have no minimum spend. Amazon recommends a daily budget of at least $10 so ads keep showing through the day, and your daily spend can run over budget on busy days as long as the month averages out.
Landing Pages: Brand Store or Product Page?
Sponsored brand ads can send shoppers to your Brand Store, a Store subpage or a product detail page, depending on the format. The right choice depends on how much the shopper already knows.
Amazon's own data leans toward the Store. In its Brand Gallery announcement, Amazon says shoppers spend 1.5x more per order and buy 12% more units per order when Sponsored Brands land on a Brand Store rather than a product page (Amazon internal data, worldwide, 2025).
We agree for brand searches. For category and competitor searches, we usually don't.
A shopper searching "chef knife set" is comparing prices, ratings and Prime delivery. A collections ad that lands on product pages shows exactly that, while a Store home page asks them to browse first.
A shopper searching your brand name already chose you. Show them the range and let them buy more than one thing.
Older product collection campaigns could also land on a simple or custom "new landing page" with a selection of products. Amazon's 2026 collections announcement lists the product detail page as the destination, so check what your console offers before rebuilding an old campaign around that option.
Whatever you pick, the page has to match the ad. Amazon's moderation rules reject ads whose products, claims or offers don't appear on the landing page.
Sponsored Brands Targeting
Sponsored Brands targets by keyword, by theme, or by product and category. Each ad group uses one targeting type, so most accounts run separate keyword and product targeting campaigns.
Keyword Targeting and Match Types
Keyword targeting uses the same broad, phrase and exact match types as Sponsored Products. Amazon's guide suggests starting with at least 25 keywords across all three, and broad match accepts a "+" modifier to force a word to appear in the search.
We group keywords into four types, because each wants a different format, landing page and budget:
Keyword type | Example | What we run | What to expect |
|---|---|---|---|
Branded, general | "acme kitchen" | Store Spotlight or Store video | Lowest ACOS, few new customers |
Branded, specific | "acme knife set" | Video or the matching Store subpage | High conversion, protects the sale |
Category | "chef knife set" | Collections or video, exact and phrase | The main source of new-to-brand orders |
Competitor and complementary | "rival knife set", "knife sharpener" | Collections, exact, small test budget | Higher ACOS, high new-to-brand share |
Our keyword research guide covers how to build each list. The Sponsored Brands search term report shows which searches actually triggered your ads, and negative keywords work the same way as in Sponsored Products.
Theme Targeting
Theme targeting lets Amazon pick the keywords for you, in two groups: keywords related to your brand, and keywords related to your landing pages. Each group carries one bid, and Amazon keeps refining the keywords inside it, per its theme targeting launch.
Treat themes like an auto campaign: a discovery tool on a modest bid. Pull the search terms they find into keyword campaigns where you control the bid per term.
Product and Category Targeting
Product targeting shows your ad on specific product detail pages, including your own. Category targeting covers a whole category and can be narrowed by brand, price range and star rating.
Keep your own ASINs and competitor ASINs in separate campaigns. Defending your own pages converts at a very different rate from attacking a rival's, and one bid can't be right for both.
Bidding and Budgets
Sponsored Brands bidding has three layers: the goal, your bid per target, and adjustments by placement and audience. Amazon hasn't announced a single brand-level bid; the closest controls are theme targeting on your brand's keywords and the audience adjustments below.
1. Bid Per Target, With or Without Cost Controls
You set a bid on each keyword, theme or product target. On the drive page visits goal you can switch on cost controls instead, which aim for a target average cost per click over time.
Note the word average. Amazon's bid adjustment guide says cost control is a target, not a cap, so individual clicks can cost more and bid adjustments push the average up.
2. Placement Adjustments
Sponsored Brands lets you raise top of search bids, and since June 15, 2026 Amazon no longer accepts new negative placement adjustments. Existing ones keep running.
Where top of search converts best, we now raise top of search and lower the base bid instead. Our placement bid adjustments guide has the math.
Read the Sponsored Brands placement report first: it splits performance into top of search and other placements and has a 90-day lookback. Our placement modifiers guide covers the method.
3. Audience Adjustments, Including New-to-Brand
Audience adjustments raise your bid when the shopper searching belongs to an audience you choose. Sponsored Brands added an Amazon-built new-to-brand shoppers audience on May 6, 2025: people who haven't bought from your brand in the past 12 months.
Amazon says advertisers who raised bids on that audience by 100% or more saw 2x more new-to-brand orders on average than those who didn't. On August 26, 2025 it added two more: "Purchased brand's product" and "Clicked or Added brand's product to cart".
Amazon reports average conversion-rate lifts of 24.9% and 16.3% for those two (internal data, worldwide, May to June 2025). You can also use Amazon's in-market and lifestyle audiences, or a custom audience from Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC).
Two rules matter. You can adjust for only one audience per campaign, and placement and audience adjustments stack, up to a 900% total increase.
The stacking surprises people. A $1.50 bid with a 40% reduction for other placements and a 100% new-to-brand boost costs up to $3.00 at top of search and $1.80 elsewhere.
Pick the one audience that matches the campaign's job. Category campaigns get new-to-brand, brand-defense campaigns get past purchasers, and launch campaigns get cart abandoners. Our guide to audience bid boosting and our post on AMC custom audiences go further.
4. Budgets
Give category and competitor campaigns their own budgets, separate from brand terms. Branded campaigns convert so cheaply that a shared budget always flows to them, and the new-customer work starves.
Creative Rules and Moderation
Every Sponsored Brands ad is reviewed before it runs, and Amazon's guide says review takes up to 72 hours. Its moderation guide advises submitting at least a week before launch, which we'd extend to two weeks before Prime Day or Black Friday.
Element | Spec | Source |
|---|---|---|
Headline | Up to 50 characters (35 in Japan), sentence case | |
Brand name | Up to 30 characters | Amazon Ads bulksheets guide |
Logo | 400 x 400 px or larger, 1 MB or less, PNG or JPG | |
Video | 6 to 45 seconds (20 or less recommended), 16:9, 1280 x 720 to 3840 x 2160, MP4 or MOV, 500 MB or less |
The rules that get most ads rejected, from Amazon's moderation guide:
Capitalization. Sentence case only. Title Case and ALL CAPS headlines are rejected.
Claims. "Best" or "better than" need substantiation, and claims must match the product page.
Pricing. No "Save 50%" or "$20 off". "Save now" or "Great savings on [product]" are allowed, and "deal" only while a live Amazon deal runs.
Pressure and personal language. No "Act now" or "Last chance", no "you" or "your", and no competitor names.
Punctuation. No repeated "!!!" or "???", and no special characters in place of letters.
Images. No added text, no products on a plain background, no letterbox or pillarbox framing.
Video. No star ratings or reviews, no Amazon branding, no deal messaging, and no black bars. Show the product in the first two seconds.
Videos play muted, so on-screen text has to carry the message. Amazon also asks you to keep text out of the lower right corner, where the mute button sits.
How to Set Up a Sponsored Brands Campaign
Since September 2026 Amazon has been folding the ads console into Amazon Ads Agent, so menu names may differ in your account. The steps are the same:
Click Create campaign and choose Sponsored Brands.
Choose the goal: drive page visits, grow brand impression share, or reserve share of voice.
Name the campaign, set a start date, a daily budget and a portfolio.
Set placement and audience bid adjustments on the Campaign Bid Adjustments card, or switch on cost controls.
Create an ad group, choose the format and the landing page.
Add products or Store pages, the logo, headline, video or images the format needs.
Add keyword, theme or product targets with bids, and the negatives you already know you want.
Submit for review and check the campaign within a day of approval.
Sponsored Brands Reporting: New-to-Brand, Branded Searches and Store Traffic
Sponsored Brands reports attribute sales, detail page views, add-to-carts and branded searches to clicks and views within 14 days. They also carry new-to-brand metrics, which are the main reason to run the ad type.
Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
Purchases (new-to-brand) and Sales (new-to-brand) | First purchases from your brand in the past 12 months |
% of purchases new-to-brand | How much of the campaign is finding new customers |
Branded searches | Searches containing your brand name within 14 days of a click or view |
Detail page views | Product page visits driven by the ad |
Top-of-search impression share | How much of the top slot you hold (vCPM campaigns) |
Store visitors, views per visitor, dwell time | Store Insights, for traffic that lands on your Brand Store |
The report below shows why new-to-brand matters. The brand campaign has the best return, but it mostly sells to people who would have found you anyway.
Cost per new-to-brand order is the column we add first: spend divided by new-to-brand purchases. Set a ceiling from your customer lifetime value, not from your ACOS target. Our guide to new-to-brand metrics covers that math.
The January 1, 2026 View Attribution Change
On January 1, 2026, Amazon changed how view-through conversions are counted for Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display campaigns billed on vCPM, including branded keyword campaigns. A new model weighs shopping signals and uses a shorter window than the old 14-day view window.
Click attribution didn't change. Amazon kept the old count as "all views" metrics, such as Purchases (all views), in the unified reporting experience.
In practice, a vCPM campaign's view-based sales may look lower in 2026 than in 2025 with nothing else changed. Compare year over year on "all views", or on clicks only, before you cut a campaign that is working.
For journeys longer than 14 days, or for traffic you send from outside Amazon, see our guides to Amazon Attribution and Amazon advertising reports.
How Sponsored Brands Fit With Sponsored Products and DSP
Sponsored Brands sits between reach and the sale. Amazon DSP and video build awareness, Sponsored Brands turns category searches into new-to-brand customers, Sponsored Display brings viewers back, and Sponsored Products closes most of the sales.
The value is in what passes between them:
Search terms. A term that converts in Sponsored Brands goes into a Sponsored Products exact campaign, and Sponsored Products winners become Sponsored Brands keywords.
Audiences. Shoppers reached by Amazon DSP or a Sponsored Brands video become AMC audiences you can bid up in search.
Measurement. Branded searches and new-to-brand orders show whether upper-funnel spend is creating demand that search ads then capture.
As a rough split, most of the brands we work with put the largest share of sponsored ads budget into Sponsored Products and a smaller share into Sponsored Brands. That share should rise when growth, not efficiency, is the goal. Our full-funnel strategy guide covers how to plan it.
What Changed in Sponsored Brands in 2025 and 2026
Sponsored Brands changed more in the last 18 months than in the five years before. The auction is the same; the formats, the audiences you can bid on and the way views are counted are not.
Date | Change | What to do |
|---|---|---|
May 6, 2025 | New-to-brand audience for bid adjustments | Use it on category campaigns |
Aug 26, 2025 | Purchased and Clicked or added to cart audiences | Use them on brand and retargeting campaigns |
Nov 2025 | Prompts enter open beta | Nothing yet |
Jan 1, 2026 | New view attribution for vCPM campaigns | Compare years on "all views" |
From Jan 28, 2026 (US) | Collections replace product collection | Rebuild one- and two-product campaigns with 3+ ASINs |
Mar 25, 2026 | Prompts generally available in the US, billed per click | Review the Prompts tab and pause poor prompts |
May 28, 2026 | Brand Gallery in reserve share of voice | Test it if competitors bid on your brand |
Jan 2027 (US) | Branded Conversations | Prepare brand briefs now |
Branded Conversations Arrive in January 2027
Amazon announced Branded Conversations at unBoxed on September 29, 2026, as "the next evolution of Sponsored Brands prompts". Brands add their own product expertise, and Alexa for Shopping uses it when a shopper taps a prompt.
They launch in the US in January 2027 and are labeled Sponsored. Amazon says nearly 20% of shoppers who interacted with a Sponsored Brands prompt in early testing kept talking about that brand.
Amazon hasn't published pricing or reporting details yet. Start writing down how your products differ and which ones go together; that brief is what the format will need. Our post on Amazon Rufus covers how the assistant reads your listings.
Mistakes We See in Sponsored Brands Accounts
Every campaign on drive page visits and judged on ACOS. Category campaigns look expensive and get cut, and they were the only ones finding new customers.
Brand and category terms in one campaign. The brand terms take the budget and the new-to-brand share collapses.
Sending category searches to the Store home page. Comparison shoppers want prices and ratings, not a browse.
Never opening the Prompts tab. Prompts have been billed in the US since March 2026, enabled by default.
Stacked adjustments with no math. A new-to-brand boost on top of a placement boost doubles some bids without anyone noticing.
Old product collection campaigns left as they are. One- and two-product campaigns keep running but can't grow.
Comparing January 2026 to January 2025 on default view metrics. The model changed, so the drop may be the measurement.
Late creative. Ads submitted the week of a big event can still be in review when it starts.
Our Amazon PPC audit has the full list we check when we take over an account.
How We Run Sponsored Brands in Adbrew
Everything above works in Amazon's console. Across dozens of brands and hundreds of campaigns, the reporting and bid work alone becomes a job.
Adbrew is an agentic retail media management platform for Amazon and Walmart, and Sponsored Brands runs inside the same Sponsored Ads management workflow as Sponsored Products and Display:
Rulesets with control. Bid, budget and placement rules on thresholds and lookbacks you set, including rules on cost per new-to-brand order rather than ACOS alone. Automated audits flag rules that conflict.
Share of voice tracking. Digital Shelf Analytics tracks your top-of-search position on branded and category keywords hourly, and a rule can raise bids when a competitor takes the slot. Our post on Amazon share of voice explains the metric.
AMC audiences without SQL. Build cart abandoners, repeat viewers or high-value customers in Amazon Marketing Cloud and use them for Sponsored Brands bid adjustments.
Retail-aware automation. Ads pause when the advertised ASINs go out of stock, which matters more in a format that shows several products at once.
Adbrew Intelligence. Ask for "Sponsored Brands campaigns ranked by cost per new-to-brand order" or "move converting Sponsored Brands search terms into Sponsored Products exact", and the agent builds it from your data.
Brands on Adbrew cut ACOS by 46% on average. For Sponsored Brands, we care just as much about the new customers behind that number.
Make Sponsored Brands Earn New Customers
Most Sponsored Brands budgets defend the brand name and stop there. The growth is in category searches, measured on new-to-brand orders, with the right format and landing page for each.
Want to see Sponsored Brands rules, share of voice tracking and AMC audiences on your own account? Book a demo with our team and we'll walk through it with you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are sponsored brand ads on Amazon?
Sponsored brand ads are Amazon's self-serve ads that promote a brand rather than one listing. They combine a brand logo, a headline and several products, a video or a Brand Store, appear mostly at the top of search results, and send shoppers to a Brand Store or a product detail page.
Is Brand Registry required for Sponsored Brands?
Yes, for sellers. Amazon requires professional sellers to be enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry to run Sponsored Brands. Vendors, book vendors, KDP authors and agencies are also eligible. Adult, used, refurbished and closed-category products can't be advertised with Sponsored Brands.
How much do Sponsored Brands ads cost?
Sponsored Brands has no minimum spend on CPC and vCPM campaigns. Advertisers pay per click on the drive page visits goal, per 1,000 viewable impressions on grow brand impression share, or a fixed upfront price for reserve share of voice. Amazon recommends a daily budget of at least $10.
Where do Sponsored Brands ads appear?
Sponsored Brands ads appear at the top of Amazon search results, within and below search results, on product detail pages and on the Amazon home page, on desktop and mobile. Grow brand impression share campaigns show only at the top of search, and Brand Gallery shows at the top of branded searches.
Where does a shopper go after clicking a product in a Sponsored Brands ad?
A click on a product inside a Sponsored Brands collections ad goes to that product's detail page. Clicks on the logo, headline or Store elements of Store Spotlight, Store-linked video and Brand Gallery ads go to the Brand Store or one of its subpages.
What is the difference between Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands?
Sponsored Products promotes one product and sends shoppers to its detail page, and doesn't need Brand Registry. Sponsored Brands promotes a brand with a logo, headline and several products or a video, needs Brand Registry for sellers, and can send shoppers to a Brand Store.
What is the character limit for a Sponsored Brands headline?
A Sponsored Brands headline can be up to 50 characters in every marketplace except Japan, where the limit is 35. The brand name can be up to 30 characters. Headlines must use sentence case and avoid unsubstantiated claims, pricing and pressuring language.
What are new-to-brand metrics in Sponsored Brands?
New-to-brand metrics count purchases from shoppers who haven't bought from the brand on Amazon in the past 12 months. Sponsored Brands reports show new-to-brand purchases, sales, units and their share of the total, which shows how much of a campaign's revenue comes from new customers.
