Sponsored Brands Video Underperforming on a New Category
A kitchen-appliance brand runs Sponsored Brands (headline and video) to drive awareness for a new countertop pizza oven. The SB campaign targets 60 broad category keywords and points to the brand store homepage. After 30 days: 1.2M impressions, 0.18% CTR, 41% ACoS, and only 3% new-to-brand orders. The brand store homepage features 20 products, and the pizza oven is in the third row. The team's goal is to drive new-to-brand customers to the pizza oven specifically. Budget is $12,000/month; they are underspending by about 30% because bids are conservative.
1. Diagnose why this Sponsored Brands campaign is failing to meet the new-to-brand goal.
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Several compounding issues:
- Landing page mismatch: sending traffic to a 20-product store homepage buries the pizza oven in row three. Shoppers who clicked a pizza-oven ad land on a generic page - high bounce, low NTB conversion.
- Creative/format mismatch: a video or headline ad for a specific new appliance should land on that product or a dedicated landing page, not a broad storefront.
- Keyword breadth: 60 broad category keywords with a 0.18% CTR suggests weak relevance or poor creative-keyword match; broad terms attract browsers, not pizza-oven intenders.
- Conservative bids causing 30% underspend mean the campaign is not even fully competing, so impression quality may skew low.
- Low NTB (3%) indicates the audience is largely existing customers or unqualified traffic - consistent with broad keywords and a generic landing page.
The core failure is a broken path from ad to relevant destination, compounded by loose targeting.
2. What specific changes would you make to creative, targeting, landing destination, and bidding to hit the NTB goal?
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Restructure around the pizza oven as the hero:
- Landing destination: point SB to the pizza oven's detail page or a dedicated pizza-oven landing page/collection, not the homepage. If using the store, create a pizza-oven subpage and link directly to it.
- Targeting: replace the 60 broad terms with a tighter set of high-intent terms (pizza oven, countertop pizza oven, indoor pizza maker) plus category and competitor terms where relevant. Use negative keywords to exclude unrelated appliance searches.
- Creative: use video that shows the oven in use and states the value prop in the first 2 seconds; ensure the headline/creative matches the landing page.
- Bidding: raise bids enough to eliminate the 30% underspend - you cannot hit NTB goals while leaving budget on the table. Set bids to compete on the high-intent terms first.
- Measurement: track NTB orders and detail-page view rate, not just CTR, and shift budget toward the terms and creative that produce NTB.