Best Practices for Advertising New Brands and New SKUs

Features/Ad Units

When launching new brands and SKUs on Amazon, paid advertising is only one piece of the puzzle. Amazon's native promotion levers can help you build early credibility, improve click-through rates, and capture event-driven traffic — all without spending a dollar on ads. Used together strategically, these tools can accelerate review velocity, increase product visibility, and create the conversion foundation that makes your advertising work harder.
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​Amazon Vine
For new ASINs with zero or few reviews, Amazon Vine is the most powerful tool at your disposal. Vine puts your product in the hands of Amazon's top reviewers, generating up to 30 authentic reviews before or shortly after launch. Products must have fewer than 30 existing reviews to enroll, and the program costs $1,750 per ASIN plus the cost of units shipped. The fee is charged seven days after the first Vine review is published — and if no review is published within 90 days, you're not charged. Enrolling in Vine before a major media push or tentpole event (like Prime Day) is best practice to ensure your listing has the social proof needed to convert paid traffic.
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⚠️Important:⚠️
Incentivizing reviews in any other way (e.g., coupons in product packaging) is against Amazon's policies and risks account penalties.

Price Discounts apply a visible reduction to your list price, displaying the original price with a strikethrough and the savings amount in red — a format shoppers immediately recognize as a deal. These are more flexible than Deals (no minimum discount required, run up to one year), making them a good option for sustained early-launch visibility without the lead time or fee requirements of Lightning Deals or Best Deals.
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​Event-Badged Deals: Lightning Deals & Best Deals
For launches timed around high-traffic events, Amazon's deal formats can dramatically amplify visibility:

How to use them together:
Enroll in Amazon Vine as early as possible — ideally pre-launch — to seed your first reviews before your advertising goes live. Layer in a Coupon to lower purchase friction during the first 4–6 weeks and boost CTR on your early SP campaigns. Once you've accumulated 15–20 reviews and your listing is fully optimized, consider a Best Deal or Price Discount to drive a velocity spike and signal sales momentum to the algorithm. Reserve Lightning Deals for tentpole events once your ASIN has a proven sales history
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​Coupons (Green Badge)
Amazon Coupons are clip-to-save discounts that appear directly on PDPs, in search results, and on the Coupons hub page. The green badge is a proven CTR driver — it visually distinguishes your listing in search and signals value to deal-seeking shoppers. Coupons are especially effective for new or low-review ASINs where you need to lower purchase friction to drive early conversions. Unlike Deals, coupons don't impact your list price, making them a safer long-term tool for maintaining price integrity while still driving velocity.
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​Price Discounts (Strike-Through Pricing)

Strike-through pricing refers to displaying a higher “was” price alongside a lower current price on the product detail page, visually highlighting the savings to shoppers without requiring a coupon clip or deal badge. This pricing strategy creates an immediate perception of value by showing a clear markdown from the reference price.

​Why it’s beneficial for new products or SKUs:

Best Practice: Use strike-through pricing strategically during launch windows or key traffic periods to accelerate early momentum, then gradually normalize pricing as reviews and organic ranking improve.

For brands new to advertising — or those working with a brand-new ad account — auto campaigns are the essential starting point. In Perpetua, auto campaigns are exploratory by design: they continuously discover new keywords, ASINs, and category targets by scanning search history and surfacing what's driving conversions. This is especially valuable when there's little to no historical performance data to work with, as the engine needs signals to build relevance over time.
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​How Perpetua handles auto campaigns:
Perpetua's SP Target Harvesting engine automatically discovers and adds keywords, ASINs, and category targets to your campaigns based on past performance — no manual keyword research required. For very new campaigns (fewer than 15 keywords), harvesting triggers with as few as 1–2 conversions, making it well-suited for early-stage launches where data is sparse. As the campaign matures and accumulates more keywords, the harvesting threshold increases to maintain quality.
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​What to do if auto campaigns are struggling to spend:
A new ad account may take time to build relevance, and auto campaigns alone may not generate enough traffic at launch. In this case:

SB ads appear at the top of search results and allow you to craft a custom headline that speaks directly to your new product's value — "Brand new from the number one pet brand", "Try our new flavors!", or "Just landed – new model convertible laptop". You can add your new product to an existing, relevant SB campaign to immediately start generating views and impressions from an already-active audience. Additionally, featuring your new product on your Brand Store homepage is a great way to drive early traffic from loyal shoppers who are already browsing your brand.
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A few things to keep in mind for SB:

Perpetua supports SD with base segments including Competitor Product Targeting, Brand Defense Product Targeting, and Views Remarketing (30-day lookback). Best practice is to launch Competitor and Brand Defense segments once you have Sponsored Products data to inform your targeting, and use your SP ACoS as a starting point, adding 5–10% for your SD ACoS target.
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​Example use case:
At launch, activate a Brand Defense SD segment targeting your own hero ASINs to lock out competitors from your PDPs. Once your new product accumulates 20+ reviews, layer in a Competitor Conquesting segment targeting similar products in your category — positioning your new listing as the fresher, better-reviewed alternative.

When selecting targets to launch with, it's critical to identify opportunities with the greatest potential. Perpetua provides two powerful research tools to help guide your strategy:
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​Search Insights allows you to analyze keyword performance across your category at an hourly level. This feature tracks Share of Voice (SOV) for up to 100,000 search terms, showing you which keywords are driving traffic and conversions in your market. You can use this data to identify high-intent, high-volume search terms and spot gaps where competitors are dominating — giving you opportunities to capture incremental sales.
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​Market Intelligence (Prism Explorer) provides competitive landscape analysis by allowing you to search for any brand, category, or ASIN on Amazon to understand how competitors are performing. Within Explorer, you can view competitor product performance, pricing, ratings, and estimated sales data — giving you visibility into what's working for your competitors and where they're investing their efforts.
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​How to use them together:
Start by using Search Insights to identify the search terms that matter most in your category — specifically those with high search frequency rank (SFR) and strong conversion data. Then, use Market Intelligence to research which competitor ASINs are ranking highest for those terms and analyze their product attributes, pricing, and reviews. This combination reveals both what customers are searching for and which competitor products are winning on those searches.
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​Example use case:
You identify that "athletic shorts for men" is a high-volume search term with strong conversion data. Using Market Intelligence, you discover that three competitors dominate this term with products priced $5-10 higher than yours. This insight tells you that there's an opportunity to target this keyword aggressively with a competitive price positioning — positioning your product as the better value.

Within a manual Sponsored Products campaign, Amazon's Product Attribute Targeting (PAT) feature allows you to target specific product categories — and then narrow that targeting further using the Refine option.
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After selecting a relevant category, click "Refine" to filter your audience by:

This approach is particularly effective for new product launches or competitive conquesting. By targeting competitor products that are more expensive or lower-rated than yours, you can place your ad directly on their product detail pages — positioning your product as the better alternative for shoppers who may be on the fence.
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​Example use case:
If your product is priced at $25 and has a 4.5-star rating, use category refinements to target competitors in the same category priced above $30 or rated below 4 stars. This ensures your ad appears in front of shoppers already browsing similar products, giving you a high-intent audience at the moment of consideration.

If you find this information to be out of date, please contact hello@perpetua.io.