For a long time, Sponsored Ads on Amazon had a clear trade-off: In exchange for targeting shoppers who are close to making a purchase, you don’t get a lot of control over who you’re targeting.
You could target Sponsored Ads ads based on keywords or ASIN, for instance. Or, in the case of Sponsored Display, you could reach groups of shoppers like In-Market, Lifestyle, Interest-based, and Life Event audiences.
But if you wanted to reach a very specific group of shoppers—for instance, only shoppers who have already seen one of your ads—then that hasn’t been possible.
Until now.
At unBoxed, Amazon made it possible to create custom audiences for Sponsored Ads. Simultaneously, Amazon made AMC available to all advertisers, regardless of whether they spend on DSP.
That means anyone can now use AMC to create custom audiences for Sponsored Ads. Right now, directly targeting your custom audience is a feature only available specifically for Sponsored Display ads. (FYI: We broke down SD ads—and why they matter—here.)
But if a custom audience you create happens to see your Sponsored Brands or Sponsored Products ads, you can boost your bids, only for that audience. You just can’t directly target that custom audience along with SB and SP ads.
This is a huge deal. And it is the first step in what may soon become a sea change in the way Sponsored Ads are targeted.
Now, if you want to run a highly granular ad campaign, you can do it easily with custom audiences for Sponsored Ads.
What do custom audiences for Sponsored Ads look like?
The short answer is, you can probably create any audience that you dream up. The possibilities for audience creation in AMC are pretty much limitless. But to get the ball rolling, we’ll give you some examples:
Create a powerful upsell audience. Let’s say you have a less-expensive Product A that you know pairs well with the more-expensive Product B. Now, you can run Sponsored Ads touting Product B specifically to the customers who already bought Product A.
In AMC, you can create an audience of shoppers who bought Product A, export it to your Sponsored Display campaign, and then run Sponsored Display ads only to those shoppers, promoting Product B.
But really, to understand the power of custom audiences for Sponsored Ads, you can extrapolate this lesson out to all sorts of scenarios. Through SD ads, you can now reach any group of shoppers who took some given set of actions.
Again, these are close to limitless possibilities.
Target shoppers who already saw an ad from you
When you start using AMC, you might find that the average customer sees multiple of your ads before they convert.
Often, multiple ads work in combination to convert a sale—but this multi-step process is invisible with Amazon’s last-touch attribution system.
With AMC, as we discussed recently, you can get around last-touch attribution and measure the full customer acquisition costs for Sponsored Ads.
Custom audiences also help you target shoppers who already saw a certain ad from you.
Let’s say you do run some DSP ads, and you discover that a DSP —> SD ad is a great path to conversion. Now, you can create Sponsored Display ads that specifically target shoppers who already saw a certain DSP ad of yours.
Or, even if you don’t run DSP, maybe you know that shoppers are most likely to convert after seeing two ads from you within the same week.
A great audience, then, consists of shoppers who saw a Sponsored Ad from you within the last 5 days. Export that audience to SD, and start running ads. That way, you can be sure you’re only running ads to shoppers who recently engaged with your marketing.
Calibrate ads based on past search behavior
Obviously, most of your Sponsored Ads are targeted based on keywords that shoppers search.
But what if you want to target shoppers differently based on their past search behavior?
With AMC, you can create audiences of shoppers based on their historical searches. If a shopper recently searched for a generic term related to your product but didn’t yet make a purchase, you can use custom audiences to push a SD ad out to that shopper.
Target subscribers and non-subscribers differently
Want to run different ads to shoppers who currently Subscribe & Save to one of your products than to shoppers who don’t?
Again, you can easily create separate audiences based on who SnS—or even, if you want, based on how long they have stayed subscribed—and then push it to your Sponsored Display campaigns.
Create powerful new audience filters
As we discussed here, custom audiences in AMC let you get extremely granular with the audiences you create. You can access all sorts of new filters that aren’t even possible in DSP.
These filters are now also available when you use AMC to create audiences for Sponsored Ads.
You can create audiences of shoppers who’ve never seen an ad from you, who viewed your product page 90+ days ago, who purchased from you more than a year ago, and so much more.
Let’s say you sell a product, like a bed frame, that people only purchase every few years. Now you can easily push a Sponsored Display ad to all of the customers who bought from you two years ago, encouraging them to buy an upsell.
Are there any limitations to these custom audiences for Sponsored Ads?
One of the big limitations at the moment is that you can’t yet create negative audiences for Sponsored Display ads.
Exclusions are a big part of AMC audiences for DSP, including by setting frequency caps. But when you create custom audiences for Sponsored Ads, these audiences can only be affirmative.
Also, right now, the capability to target Sponsored Ads to custom audiences is only available for Sponsored Display ads.
You can boost your bids when your custom audience happens to see your Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads, but you can’t directly target that custom audience.
Bid-boosting is still extraordinarily useful, though.
Let’s say you define an audience of shoppers who previously searched for one of your brand terms. Maybe you’re willing to bid higher for people from that cohort to see your Sponsored Products ad.
Now, you can bid differently for that highly granular audience of your dreams.
But we expect this capability to only expand, and reshape how advertising on Amazon works at large.
