Custom audiences for Amazon Marketing Cloud are going to change how you run your Sponsored Display campaigns. And as Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach, it’s not too late to harness these audiences for your end-of-year campaigns.
As a reminder, you now have two ways of attaching custom audiences to your Sponsored Ads campaigns:
- Direct targeting: Only for Sponsored Display ads, you can directly show your ad to those shoppers in your custom audience. No one but your custom audience will see the ad.
- Bid boosting: Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands don’t offer direct targeting. But you can increase your bids specifically when shoppers from your custom audience do see the ad. That means, if you know a certain custom audience of shoppers is very likely to convert, you can dramatically increase your bid on SP and SB ads just for those shoppers.
Together, these two types of custom audience targeting will help you get far more mileage out of your typical Sponsored Ads campaign.
Use them well, and you can pull ahead of your competitors—all while saving money in the process.
Here are three custom audiences you need to be using for Turkey 5. You can use them right now for your Sponsored Display campaigns.
Are there any limitations with custom audiences for Sponsored Ads?
First, let’s get this out of the way: Custom audiences for Sponsored Ads come with limitations.
The bulk of this post will focus on Sponsored Display audiences, which are readily accessible to your business right now.
But it’s worth noting that, for SP and SB audiences, you can only run one custom audience per campaign, and you can only run it via API.
Also, you can only boost your bids for certain audiences—you can’t bid down for a custom audience that you know won’t be as effective.
Similarly, Sponsored Display doesn’t offer negative audiences, so you can’t exclude a custom group the way you can with DSP ads.
#1. Reach shoppers who have previously searched specific terms
One use case we really like is to target shoppers who recently searched high-performing terms related to your product but who did not click your ad.
In general, your clickthrough rate on your top keywords is maximum 2-3%. 97% of people who search that keyword aren’t clicking on your ad. AMC now gives you the perfect way to re-target them.
This can be simple, like a shopper who recently searched for a brand term of yours. You know that the shopper already has familiarity with your company specifically, and so they might be ripe to target with an ad.
But also, you can get clever here. Think about the feature that differentiates your product the most. If shoppers specifically searched for a product with that feature, then they are probably primed to make a purchase.
Let’s say you sell a cordless vacuum. If a shopper recently searched for “cordless vacuum,” you know you have a great pitch to make to them. You can add this audience to your next SB or SP campaign, and choose to bid up if shoppers who fit that description see your next ad.
Or, if you want to get advanced, maybe you run a SD ad specifically to that audience, with custom creatives that message around this feature.
This really is the most exciting use case of AMC for Sponsored Ads. If you play your cards right, you can get the same amount of Sponsored Ads spend to go a lot further, by bidding differently for strategic groups of shoppers.
#2. Shoppers who have added your product to cart
The simplest custom audience for Sponsored Ads is shoppers who have already added your product to their cart or to a gift list.
These are shoppers who are already deeply interested in your product, and are just one step away from the finish line. You might create a custom audience of these shoppers and bid a lot higher for them on your SP/SB campaigns.
You could also create a custom SD ad that reaches them directly. For instance, on Black Friday, maybe you want to specifically target these add-to-cart or add-to-list shoppers with a SD ad letting them know that your product is on sale for Turkey 5.
That can be a great, cost-effective way to drive a lot of returns.
#3. Choose the ad that completes the perfect path to conversion
Which combination of ads is the best at converting new shoppers? One great part of AMC is that it lets you project out the most effective path to purchase for your customers.
You can run a query across your historical sales, and figure out which set of ads is the best at converting new shoppers.
Once you know that path, you can orchestrate your advertising strategies accordingly.
If the best path is SP to SD, for instance, then you can create an audience of shoppers who have already seen your SP ads, and then target your SD ad specifically to them.
Or if the best audience is SB to SP, then you can increase the bids, for your SP campaign, on those shoppers who already saw your SB ads.
As a reminder, bid boosting doesn’t allow you to only target those SB viewers but it does allow you to pay more for more valuable shoppers. If you know that previous SB viewers are very close to purchase, you’re probably willing to spend more on them.
How scale is the ultimate differentiator
Bidding differently on shoppers who recently searched for your brand term or who searched a relevant term like “cordless vacuum” is not going to save you that much money. It’s just one audience.
But if you extrapolate that out to all of your campaigns, so that you have dozens of “shoppers who previously searched XYZ” audiences running across your Sponsored Ads campaigns at once, then you’re going to drive far more sales with the same spend.
Think of it like keyword harvesting. Every time you identify a high-performing keyword, what if you could add it as a custom audience to a new Sponsored Ads campaign?
When this happens seamlessly as a part of your workflows, then you are going to be able to sail past your competitors in the market.
This is the kind of scaled use of Amazon Marketing Cloud that you need to work toward in order to get real returns.
You can only get this kind of scale and efficiency in a platform like Intentwise Explore, where you can customize pre-written audiences with a single click, and then schedule them across as many campaigns as you like, at regular intervals of your choice.
We think truly scaling the insights from AMC for Sponsored Ads is the future of advertising. You probably can only do this with a software partner like Intentwise.
