Amazon Sponsored Brands Video, Explained With Real Numbers
Sponsored Brands video is an Amazon ad format that plays a short, muted, autoplaying video in search results and on product detail pages, linking to your Brand Store or a specific listing. It's billed per click or per 1,000 viewable impressions, with campaigns startable from a $10 daily budget.
What this looks like in a real account
What Sponsored Brands video actually is
Sponsored Brands video is one of two Sponsored Brands ad formats (the other is the standard image/logo unit). It shows up inside Amazon's own search results and on product detail pages as a short video that starts playing automatically, muted, once about half the frame is visible on screen. The shopper taps a small icon to unmute it. That's the whole mechanic: no sound unless they ask for it, no separate landing page unless they click through.
Two things make it different from a normal display ad. First, it sits inside the organic shopping experience — search results and detail pages — not on some third-party site. Second, you're not paying to build a video audience; you're paying for clicks or viewable impressions from people who were already searching or browsing on Amazon. That's a much warmer audience than most video inventory gets, and it's the main reason this format tends to outperform static Sponsored Brands creative on click-through rate.
The two ways to run it: Store link vs. product page
When you set up the campaign, Amazon makes you choose a destination, and that choice changes where the ad is even allowed to show. Send clicks to your Brand Store and the video can run at the top and bottom of search results. Send clicks to a specific product page and the video can run inside search results and inside other product detail pages.
This isn't a cosmetic setting. A Store-link campaign is built for someone who wants a shopper to land on a page with your full catalog and brand story. A product-page campaign is built for someone who wants a shopper to land in one buy box, fast. Picking the wrong one for the goal is a common reason a video campaign looks like it 'isn't working' when actually it's just pointed at the wrong finish line.
Specs, and the rejection reasons that actually cause problems
The technical specs are published and mostly unremarkable: 6–45 seconds (Amazon recommends 20 or under), 16:9 only, MP4 or MOV, under 500MB, H.264/H.265, minimum 1 Mbps video bitrate. Almost every editing tool defaults to something inside these limits.
The rejections that actually cost people time aren't about codecs. They're about creative policy: on-screen text or a logo sitting in the bottom-right safe area (where the mute button lives), letterboxing or pillarboxing bars, or a video whose spoken or on-screen language doesn't match the marketplace it's running in. Every uploaded video also goes through manual review before it goes live — budget roughly half a day to a day for that, not minutes, and don't schedule a launch for the same morning you upload the file.
- Safe area: keep logos, CTAs and key text out of the bottom-right corner.
- Sound-off design: the first three seconds have to work with no audio, because that's the default state for every viewer.
- Language match: on-screen text and voiceover need to match the marketplace, not just the product listing.
What good performance actually looks like
Most guides stop at 'it converts better than static ads' without saying what that means in real spend. Some context from our own book: across 30 advertisers we manage, July 2026 delivered 78.4 million impressions at a $4.00 CPM and a blended $1.42 cost-per-click, against a portfolio ROAS of 6.04x and a blended cost-per-acquisition of $5.49 across 57,137 attributed purchases. One in five of those purchases — 20.1% — came from a shopper who was new to the brand. That's the full book across video and other formats, not one cherry-picked line item, which is the number worth asking your own numbers against.
Worth flagging: the $0.41 CPC figure that circulates in this category is an online-video-only number, not a blended account figure. If your dashboard shows $1.40+ blended CPC and someone tells you that's high because 'this category runs $0.41,' check what they're actually comparing — full book against one line item is not the same comparison.
Mistakes that quietly waste the budget
The most common one is treating the video like a 30-second product page: cramming in every feature instead of one hook. Amazon's own guidance is right about this — the video's job is to create curiosity, not close the sale. The listing does the selling once the click lands.
The second is shooting horizontal only. A 16:9 cut made for a desktop screen often loses detail on a phone, where most Sponsored Brands traffic actually watches. We've re-cut a client's horizontal footage into a vertical crop after mobile watch-through came in soft — the fix was reframing the shot for a phone screen, not adjusting bids.
The third is chasing click-through rate as the scoreboard. A video can pull a great CTR and still produce a weak ACOS if the destination doesn't match the intent — which loops back to picking Store link vs. product page correctly in the first place.
Where reMKTR fits
Sponsored Brands video is a Sponsored Ads console product — you don't need us, or anyone, to run it well; the tools above cover it. Where our work overlaps is when a brand wants to know whether Sponsored Brands, DSP video, and everything else are actually adding up, rather than each channel taking last-click credit for the same sale. reMKTR runs 109 live Amazon DSP seats and reconciles that spend in Amazon Marketing Cloud, which is the only place display and sponsored ads stop double-counting each other. If that question — did this actually add anything, or just take credit — is the one you're stuck on, that's the part of the problem we work on.
| Campaign type | Where it can appear | Where it links to | Fits best when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Store link | Top and bottom of search results | Your Brand Store | You want browsing across the full catalog and brand storytelling |
| Product page link | Search results and other product detail pages | One specific listing | You want traffic to convert on a single ASIN with clear intent |
Which one you should actually pick
Sponsored Brands video suits any Brand Registry seller with a decent product shot and either a Store worth sending traffic to or one strong ASIN to push — it's cheap to test and self-serve end to end. It's not built to answer whether that spend is incremental against everything else you're running; that's a measurement question, not a creative one, and it sits outside what this format alone can tell you.
Shortlist on the job, not the feature grid. Pull your search-term report for the last 90 days and total the spend against terms that produced no orders — 33.6% on the account above. Then ask each vendor on your list what they would do about it in week one, and see who answers with a process rather than a screenshot.
Common questions
How much does Sponsored Brands video cost?
It's billed per click or per 1,000 viewable impressions (vCPM), depending on the campaign objective you pick, and there's no set minimum spend — Amazon allows daily budgets from $10. Amazon doesn't publish a fixed rate card, and CPCs vary a lot by category, so check current auction data in your own account rather than trusting a single quoted number from a listicle.
Can I run Sponsored Brands video without a Brand Store?
Yes, if you choose the product-page destination instead of the Store destination. You do need Brand Registry to run Sponsored Brands at all, but a fully built-out Store isn't required for the product-page campaign type — it's required if you want the ad to also run at the top and bottom of search results linking to a Store.
Why was my Sponsored Brands video rejected?
Most rejections come from creative policy, not file specs: text or logos sitting in the bottom-right safe area, letterboxed or pillarboxed footage, or on-screen text and voiceover that don't match the marketplace language. Check those three before re-checking codec and bitrate settings, which are rarely the actual problem.
Is vertical or horizontal video better for Sponsored Brands?
Amazon's spec only supports 16:9 horizontal for Sponsored Brands video today, so that decision is made for you at the format level. Where the vertical-vs-horizontal question matters is in how you shoot and crop the footage — a lot of Sponsored Brands traffic is on mobile, so framing the subject for a phone screen inside that 16:9 frame matters more than the raw aspect ratio.
How do I know if a Sponsored Brands video campaign actually worked?
Look past click-through rate. Check new-to-brand purchase rate, attributed sales against the destination you chose (Store vs. product page), and whether ACOS on the video matches or beats your standard Sponsored Brands creative. A high CTR with a weak ACOS usually means the video is pulling clicks the destination page can't convert.
We show the method before the number.
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