In April 2021, Amazon Advertising rolled out a new audience targeting feature in their Sponsored Display product. The new feature is “Amazon audience”. It is another audience type on top of the existing Views remarketing option available. The reason why there is much hype about this new feature was that it was previously only available with Amazon DSP, now it is rolling out to Amazon seller/brand owners on a self-serve basis.
There is always a first mover’s advantage to any new product rolled out by Amazon advertising. So everyone in the community is roaring to try out new campaigns and strategies using these new audiences.
Amazon Audience, What is it?
Amazon audience is a targeting type where your Sponsored Display ads, also called Amazon display advertising, can be displayed on and off Amazon based on pre-built audiences. It is different from Views remarketing in that the potential shopper does not have to interact with your ads previously.
There is probably more than a few hundred of pre-built Amazon audiences that can help Amazon sellers reach new prospective customer either through awareness or brand building.
We don’t know how exactly these Amazon audiences are created. A safe guess is that it is created via a treasure trove of shopping history and behavior recorded on the Amazon shopping platform or/and Amazon-owned websites such as IMDb. These audience marketing formats are actually quite similar to the audience marketing done on Facebook advertising. With these new audience features, we can see how Amazon’s advertising is evolving to compete against the other digital ads platform giants such as Google and Facebook.
Below are the main Amazon Audience categories available:
In-market ➡ audience whose recent activity suggests they are likely to purchase a product in a certain defined product category
Lifestyle ➡audience whose shopping and content consumption indicate interest in a lifestyle, for example, shipping on Amazon, browsing on IMDb or streaming on Prime Video.
Interests ➡ audience whose recent activity suggests they have durable interest in certain categories. A key difference between interest and In-market will be the durability of the interest.
Life Events ➡ audiences with recent activity around life moments such as moving or getting married
How is Amazon Audiences different from View Remarketing?
As mentioned, the key difference between the two audience types is that Views remarketing requires the shopper’s previous interaction with your ads. This is either directly: “Advertised products” or indirectly: “Similar to advertised products”. Basically, remarketing to your existing audience, hence the name “View Remarketing.”
View remarketing is a very effective audience marketing type, but the downside is that the potential reach to these audiences is limited by your existing traffic. Therefore, it can’t be scaled as well as Amazon audiences.
The issue of tapping into new audiences using Amazon Audience will not be an issue. There are hundreds of different audiences by either lifestyle, interest, events, and behavior. Some Amazon audience has a potential reach in the millions. It can be a very effective way to scale your sales and your brand awareness.
How to Set Them Up?
On the Amazon Advertising console, click on “Create Campaign”
Under Sponsored Display tile, click “Continue”
Enter all required campaign information in the settings section
Under the Targeting section, select “Audiences”
In the “Audiences” section, select “Amazon audiences”
Click on “Add” on the audience available under Amazon audiences, you can add multiple audiences at the same time.
Cool New Amazon Audiences to Try
As marketers, especially the ones with some Facebook ads experience, finding the right match between product and audience is basically half the battle. So when there are new or interesting audiences to test, we get really excited and wonder if these audiences will work for our product. Having said that, below are some very interesting Amazon audiences that can be targeted.
Of course not all of the above will make sense for your product, but it does speak to the many possibilities of Amazon audiences to further build your brand awareness.
Sponsored Display Amazon Audience Best Pratices
The characteristics of Sponsored Display Amazon audience are that it is a loose targeting type match with a high potential audience reach. I liken Sponsored Display Amazon audience to fish in the ocean versus a fish farm for Sponsored Products. Hence, these campaigns will have a high ACoS and a low conversion rate profile. So being to attribute their cost and performance is essential.
Before using Amazon Audience, ensure SP/SB/SD PAT campaigns are in order and well-optimized
Make sure to have a campaign objective in mind before creating the campaign
Don’t commingle completely unrelated audiences together into the ad group
SD Amazon audience, like a lot of audience type target, will require more time to optimize. Therefore you should be relatively more patient than other ad types.
How can SellerMetrics help Scale and Optimize SD Audience Ads?
There are different choices for Amazon PPC software for the average Amazon sellers/brand owners to choose from… But not all Amazon PPC software support Sponsored Display Amazon Audience.
At SellerMetrics, we made an important decision – to make sure that we are Sponsored Display compatible before launch. We can make automatic bid adjustments, reporting, and rules for Sponsored Display campaigns.
Automated Bidding
On our Automated Settings page, you can enable automated bidding on your Sponsored Display campaigns. By setting an ACoS goal, our advanced algorithms can make bid changes daily to each product target (PAT), views remarketing, and Amazon audiences.
Manual bidding
One of our best features to allow the user a certain level of control in their optimization. Our manual bidding page allows you to make manual changes to the bid of the Amazon audience. As long as bid automation is not enabled in the campaign then the user can change the bid according to the following:
Decrease/Increase $ from bid
Increase/Decrease % from bid
Decrease/Increase $ from cpc
Increase/Decrease % from cpc
Change to CPC
Change to user define bid
Analytics and Reporting
A clean and organized Analytics and Charting page that allows you to analyze data by date range and account. We offer reporting function by the following:
Using our rules settings, you can create rules around your Sponsored Display campaigns. For example, you can set to harvest ASIN to a Sponsored Display campaign from a Sponsored Product auto, using the following perimeters:
Order Threshold = 1
Max AcoS = 45%
Automate = Enabled
Every time there is 1 order that is less than 45% ACoS in the source campaign, it will automatically add it to the destination campaign/ad group.
Conclusions
Many of us have predicted Amazon advertising will become more and more of a direct competitor to Google and Facebook. With this new audience targeting type, it is really showing its true intention of going after the big players in the digital advertising space. It is an exciting time to be an advertiser on the Amazon platform.
If you have questions or insights to share, please feel free to post them via the comments section. Please also consider joining our Facebook Group where we discuss any questions you may have about running an Amazon business.
We are SellerMetrics, our Amazon PPC Software helps Amazon sellers, brands, KDP Authors and agencies navigate Amazon Advertising PPC via bid automation, bulk manual bid changes, and analytics.
