Sponsored Products video: what it is and how to set it up

Most of your Amazon ad budget probably goes to Sponsored Products, the ads that look like ordinary search results. Until recently they were a photo, a title and a price. Amazon now lets you attach short product videos to them, inside the campaigns you already run. For a product that's easier to understand in motion, that is a real change. It's also easy to get wrong, because the creative rules are stricter than most teams expect.

What it is

Sponsored Products video adds one to five short feature videos per product to an ad group you already run. Amazon shows a shopper up to three of them as video thumbnails, choosing the features most relevant to what that shopper searched and browsed. Same targeting, same budget, same campaign. Amazon launched it on November 11, 2025 for sellers and vendors in the US, in the ads console and through the Ads API.

Amazon reports that Sponsored Products campaigns with video saw 67% higher click-through and 9% higher conversion than campaigns without, from its own US data. Read that as Amazon's average. Brands that invest in video tend to be stronger to begin with.

The Canadian catch. Amazon lists Sponsored Products video for the US only. On Amazon.ca, the nearest option today is Sponsored Brands video, a separate format built around your brand, which runs in Canada and takes videos of 6 to 45 seconds.

The specs, from Amazon's guide

• MP4 or MOV, 500 MB or less.
• Horizontal 16:9, with 1920 x 1080 recommended. Amazon says vertical 9:16 is coming in 2026.
• At least seven seconds long. No maximum is stated.
• No audio. Amazon removes it, so every video has to make sense on mute.
• The product should fill at least half the frame.
• A feature title of up to 3 words and 15 characters, plus an optional description of up to 6 words and 55 characters. A checkbox lets Amazon's AI rewrite both.

The don'ts, also from Amazon's guide: no slideshows, no talking heads, no letterboxing, no blurry frames, no captions on screen, no emojis, and no logos or branding unless they're printed on the product itself. Amazon also warns that overly animated videos can erode shoppers' trust.

One rule shapes the whole plan: a product with a single video gets no interactive thumbnails. Amazon shows up to three, so three videos fill every slot.

How to set it up

1. Pick the product and three features. Start from what shoppers ask before they buy: does it fit, is it waterproof, how loud is it. One feature per video.
2. Film the real product in use. Amazon recommends showing people using or reacting to it, with good lighting and a tripod. You can shoot it yourself or ask Amazon's creative services.
3. Write the titles. Three words or fewer, one per feature, saying what the video shows.
4. Attach the videos. Open the campaign, choose the ad group, go to Ads, select the Video tab and click Add video.
5. Start where sales already happen. Add video first to ad groups whose keywords already convert, so the new format spends on proven terms.
6. Decide on the video bid adjustment. Amazon allows 0 to 900%. Its guide says advertisers who used a 5 to 15% increase saw, on average, 33% more impressions and a 5% higher conversion rate. Those are Amazon's averages, so test on your own products.
7. Measure. The video report adds view-through rate and five-second view rate next to the usual clicks, orders, sales and ROAS.

One more check before you launch: the video makes a promise, and the detail page has to keep it. If a clip shows the product handling something, the images and bullets should back it up.

Before you raise a bid, make sure the video can serve

Two lessons from running video ads on the accounts we manage.

Check the creative status first. Amazon reviews video creative before it runs, and the Ads API even has a moderation results call for it. We've found video campaigns that sat enabled, funded and full of keywords for years while their creative was rejected or stuck in review. They spent almost nothing. No bid, budget or targeting change could make them serve. The fix was new footage and a fresh approval.

Only advertise what shoppers can buy. Amazon's best practices say Sponsored Products only appear when the advertised item is in stock, and that stock is what makes it eligible to be the featured offer. We've seen plans to grow video spend stall because several products with video had no live offer at all. Raising bids moved nothing. The real limit was how many buyable products had approved video.

Sponsored Products video is a small change in the console and a real production job outside it. The brands that get value from it treat each clip as the answer to one shopper question, film it to work without sound, and confirm the ad is allowed to serve before they judge it.