As of this week, you can now become an official Amazon Advertiser with the launch of Amazon’s Learning Console. With the new Console, you can learn the basics of Amazon Advertising to get started and take a test to become an accredited in Sponsored Ads. Let’s take a dive into the parts of the console and what the accreditation test looks like.
Article Update: The Learning Console is currently available to advertisers in the US, UK, France, and Germany.
The Learning Console Topics
There are 8 segments in total with one general Amazon Advertising overview, one for the Accreditation test, and 6 specialized topics covering all aspects of advertising on the platform. The courses range from around 5 minutes to 20+ and each segment has 1-5 lessons to go through. The lessons teach you all the ins and outs of Amazon advertising; from creating campaigns to lessons on each specific advertising option to how to interpret the data you are seeing in your advertising reports.
This is a huge update from Amazon. It is free to go through the console, though you do need an Amazon account (also free to make), which allows anyone to learn how to run basic ads on the platform. If used, it will lead to an increase in the adoption of the platform by advertisers and sellers. The biggest takeaway though for us advertisers is the ability to get accredited in Amazon Sponsored Ads.
Accreditation
For now, you can get accreditation in Sponsored Ads. The test covers both sponsored ad types – Sponsored Product Ads and Sponsored Brand Ads – but does not include the Advertising Console-only Product Display Ads. That makes sense, clearly, they want as wide an audience as possible to be able to gain the certification and use the knowledge gained. The test itself is 45 questions and you have two hours to complete the assessment. You have two chances to get a passing grade on the assessment to gain accreditation. If you are worried about not passing, there are courses specifically for the accreditation that take a couple hours to complete, if you run through every course. Taking the full time, it won’t take more than 4 hours to gain sponsored ads accreditation.
Learning Console Next Steps
In my opinion, this is only the beginning of what Amazon plans on offering in terms of the learning console. A solid tell is the Topics filter when searching for activities. The filter has three difficulty options – beginner, intermediate, and advanced. As it stands today, there are no advanced lessons to choose from. On top of that, the filter has an Accreditations option, Accreditations being plural, even though there is the one test thus far. I am betting Amazon is planning to build out the console further, similar to Google’s Certification courses, based on the popularity of this initial console launch.
Conclusion
This is a great next step from Amazon to help advertisers adopt and successfully use their advertising platform. Giving advertisers an option not only learn how to best implement Amazon ads, but also be certified in the ads will likely increase the overall users of the console and, in time, the advertising platform. I look forward to taking the test soon myself!
Have you taken the test yet? What did you think of it? Let me know on Twitter!
