What are Sponsored Brands?

Sponsored Brands are Amazon ads that put your brand in front of a shopper rather than a single listing: a logo, a custom headline and several products, or a short video, shown above, alongside and within shopping results. A click can land on your Brand Store, on a product detail page or on a landing page of products you select.

Definition

Sponsored Brands is the brand-level member of Amazon's sponsored ads. Amazon makes it available to vendors, KDP authors, agencies and professional sellers enrolled in Brand Registry (Sponsored Brands, checked 2026-10-03). The ads appear at the top of search results, within results, on product pages and on the Amazon home page, on desktop and mobile, and each ad is reviewed by Amazon before it runs.

The three formats

Store spotlight needs a Brand Store with at least three sub-pages, each with a unique product. Amazon also says Sponsored Brands video has its own placement and auction, so a video campaign does not compete with your other self-service campaigns for the same slot (Sponsored Brands guide, checked 2026-10-03).

Goals, billing and targeting

A campaign starts from a goal, and the goal decides how you pay:

• Drive page visits, billed per click.
• Grow brand impression share, billed per thousand viewable impressions (vCPM).
• Reserve share of voice, a fixed upfront price for top of search on your branded keywords, with a minimum spend commitment.

Targeting is either keywords (broad, phrase or exact) or products and categories, one type per campaign, and negative targeting can be added to keep ads off searches or product pages that do not perform. Bids can then be adjusted by placement and by one audience per campaign. Unlike Sponsored Products, the placement adjustment can also lower a bid: Amazon's help page describes an adjustment for placements other than top of search, shows it used as a decrease, and allows increases of up to 900% (Sponsored Brands bids by placement and audiences, checked 2026-10-03).

How Sponsored Brands sales are counted

This is where most Sponsored Brands analysis goes wrong. Amazon's attribution rules (ad campaign attribution, checked 2026-10-03) work differently here from a seller's Sponsored Products:

• The lookback is generally 14 days from the ad interaction, against 7 days for a seller's Sponsored Products.
• Sales of other products from the same brand can be credited, not only the products in the ad. Amazon calls this brand halo.
• On vCPM campaigns, purchases after a viewable impression with no click are counted as well, and Amazon labels the click-only figures separately.
• A sale is credited to one ad interaction at most, and a click outranks a view.

Amazon also reports new-to-brand purchases: orders from shoppers who had not bought from your brand in the previous 365 days.

The formulas to use

ACoS                         = Spend ÷ Attributed sales
Break-even ACoS              = Contribution margin ÷ Price
Spend per new-to-brand order = Spend ÷ New-to-brand orders
Effective CPC on vCPM        = vCPM ÷ (1,000 × Click-through rate)

The last line turns an impression price into a click price, using the click-through rate on viewable impressions, so a vCPM campaign can be compared with a click-billed one.

Worked example

Example inputs, not benchmarks. A product collection campaign over a period that ended more than 14 days ago:

• Spend $600, 480 clicks, 50 attributed orders, $2,000 attributed sales.
• 30 of the 50 orders are new-to-brand.
• The products that sold carry a contribution margin of 40% of price, so break-even ACoS is 40%.

Working through it:

• Cost per click: 600 ÷ 480 = $1.25
• ACoS: 600 ÷ 2,000 = 30%, under the 40% break-even
• Contribution after advertising: 0.40 × 2,000 − 600 = $200
• Spend per new-to-brand order: 600 ÷ 30 = $20

Now suppose a vCPM campaign for the same brand costs $6 per thousand viewable impressions and earns a 0.4% click-through rate on them. That is 4 clicks per thousand, so the effective cost per click is 6 ÷ 4 = $1.50, 25 cents more than the click-billed campaign. Its attributed sales include purchases after a view that the click-billed campaign cannot claim, so compare the two on clicks and on click-attributed sales before preferring either. The break-even ACoS calculator gives you the 40% figure from your own price, fees and landed cost.

Using it to make decisions

• Judge each campaign against its goal. A page visits campaign is judged on contribution after advertising. An impression share campaign is judged on impression share and spend per new-to-brand order, with ACoS as a guardrail rather than the verdict.
• Weight break-even by what was bought, not what was shown. With brand halo, the products that sold may not be the ones in the ad. The purchased product report lists them, so compute a revenue-weighted break-even on those.
• Compare like with like. A 14-day Sponsored Brands ACoS that includes halo sales cannot be ranked against a 7-day Sponsored Products ACoS on the same keyword. The attribution window entry explains why recent days also read worse than they will end up.
• Test one creative per ad group. When an ad group holds several creatives, impressions concentrate on one of them, so a side-by-side comparison inside a single group tells you little.

Common mistakes

1. Borrowing an ACoS target. Halo sales, a longer window and the value of a new customer all change what a good result is for your brand. Start from your own break-even.
2. Counting view-through purchases as if they were clicks. On vCPM campaigns, read the click-only figures too.
3. Leaving the spend off your product P&L. Amazon publishes an advertised product report for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display but not for Sponsored Brands (report types, checked 2026-10-03), so Sponsored Brands spend does not land on a product line by itself. Left unassigned, per-product profit looks better than it is.
4. Pointing Store spotlight at a single-line brand. With nothing to choose between, a product collection does the job better.
5. Mixing brand defence and category conquest in one campaign. Branded searches convert differently from category searches, and the blend hides both.

How it relates to adjacent ad types and metrics

Sponsored Products sells a listing. Sponsored Brands sells the brand and the range. Sponsored Display reaches shoppers away from the results page, through audiences and product pages. Running Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands on the same term gives you more than one presence on the results page, and the two should be read side by side rather than in competition. ACoS, ROAS and new-to-brand share all apply to Sponsored Brands, but on the 14-day window. TACoS, which divides all ad spend by total sales, is the clearest check that brand-level spend is growing the business rather than only claiming credit for sales.

How Shurq helps

Shurq's ad manager shows Sponsored Brands campaigns next to Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display, with an ad type filter so each is read on its own terms. Its SB spend allocation lets you choose how each Sponsored Brands campaign's spend lands on your products in P&L, with suggestions drawn from the creative, the campaign name or the attributed sales, and any campaign you leave unassigned keeps the automatic split by attributed sales. The optimisation preview proposes Sponsored Brands keyword and target bids and placement adjustments, including decreases where Amazon allows them, and holds each row for your approval. The Assign Audience bulk action applies audience bid adjustments across Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns, and skips legacy Sponsored Brands campaigns, which Amazon does not accept audiences on, with the reason shown. The Amazon bid optimisation guide sets out the method behind the proposals.

Sources

All checked 2026-10-03:

• Amazon Ads: Sponsored Brands
• Your complete guide to Sponsored Brands
• Sponsored Brands bids by placement and audiences
• Ad campaign attribution
• Sponsored ads report types, Amazon Ads API