Amazon Sponsored Brands: Formats, Targeting & Best Practices

This is where advertising stops being about single products and starts being about your brand. Sponsored Brands owns the top of search — and in 2026, video owns Sponsored Brands.

01What Sponsored Brands are and where they show

Sponsored Brands command the most premium real estate on Amazon: the banner position at the very top of search results, above every organic listing and every Sponsored Product. Unlike Sponsored Products, which use your existing listing automatically, Sponsored Brands give you creative control — your logo, a custom headline, a hand-picked set of products, and a choice of video or image. The one gate: they require active Amazon Brand Registry. If you’re not brand-registered yet, your roadmap starts with Sponsored Products until your trademark clears.

02The three formats

Sponsored Brands isn’t one ad — it’s three distinct formats that should each run in their own campaigns:

One important 2026 change: Amazon rebuilt Product Collection with an AI-powered format that dropped the lifestyle image from top-of-search and leans harder on products, auto-optimizing which of your 3–10 ASINs appear and in what order. It converts well by shortening the path to purchase, but it’s noticeably less “brand” than before — which is part of why video and Store Spotlight now carry more of the brand-building load. All three are covered in detail in Sponsored Brands formats.

03Why video is winning in 2026

If your Sponsored Brands budget is mostly static banners, you have it backwards. Sponsored Brands Video now takes the majority of SB spend in well-run accounts, and for good reason: an autoplaying product video in the middle of search stops the scroll in a way no static ad can, frequently driving around twice the click-through rate. The 2026 accelerant is that SBV inventory became Rufus-eligible — Amazon’s AI assistant can surface your video creative in conversational shopping recommendations, so one video earns traffic from both keyword search and AI discovery. The full creative playbook — the 15-second structure, the mandatory captions, the decisive first three seconds — is in Sponsored Brands Video.

04Brand Store vs product page

Product Collection and Store Spotlight let you choose where clicks land, and in most cases sending traffic to your Brand Store beats a single product page. A Store increases basket size, enables cross-selling across your range, and — crucially — removes competitors’ ads from the shopper’s view, since your Store is a competitor-free environment. The exception is a focused goal like promoting one sale item, where a custom product page may convert better. Sponsored Brands Video clicks typically go straight to the product detail page.

05Targeting and format separation

Sponsored Brands targets by keyword or by product, the same as Sponsored Products, with negative targeting to trim waste. The one discipline unique to SB: run each format in its own campaign. Product Collection, Store Spotlight, and Video have different performance profiles and creative levers, and blending them into one campaign muddies your data so badly you can’t tell what’s working. Separate first, then optimize. Note that this only pays off at sufficient volume — over-segmenting a low-budget account just fragments the signal.

06Brand defense — no longer optional

Here’s a use of Sponsored Brands that pays for itself: defending your own brand terms. Branded-search CPCs jumped roughly 22–31% into 2026 as competitors aggressively bid on rival brand names — which means if you’re not running Sponsored Brands on your own branded keywords, you’re leaving the top of your own brand’s search results open for a competitor to occupy. A branded Sponsored Brands campaign is cheap (you’re highly relevant to your own name) and it walls off that premium space. It’s step one of any brand-registered account’s strategy.

07Measuring Sponsored Brands the right way

Judging Sponsored Brands purely on ACoS is the classic mistake. Because SB works higher in the funnel, its job is often acquisition, not immediate efficiency. The metric that captures this is New-to-Brand (NTB) — the share of orders from shoppers who haven’t bought your brand in the past year, now reported down to the SKU level. A campaign with a mediocre ACoS but a high NTB rate can be a genuine win, because you’re buying customers, not just sales. Branded-search lift and Brand Store metrics round out the picture, all covered in measuring Sponsored Brands.

08Sponsored Brands vs Sponsored Products

They meet the shopper at different moments. Sponsored Products intercept someone ready to evaluate a specific option; Sponsored Brands greet someone earlier, still in discovery, comparing and forming preferences. That means different creative, different budgets, and — most importantly — different success metrics. Run both, but don’t grade them on the same number. The full comparison, including when to lean on each, is in Sponsored Products vs Sponsored Brands.

09Lessons in this module

This guide is the overview — go deeper on each piece:

Frequently asked questions

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