Prime Day is over, and we have a few takeaways to share. Specifically, we wanted to take a moment to talk about custom audiences.
Sponsored Ads are obviously essential on Prime Day, since many shoppers are already visiting Amazon.com to score a deal. But many brands also complement their Sponsored Ads strategy with DSP ads to draw audiences back to their product pages.
This year, at Intentwise, we wanted to level up these DSP audiences with fine-tuned audiences. We worked closely with a few clients to test custom audiences built in AMC on Prime Day.
Amazon Marketing Cloud presents a unique opportunity to make your audiences more specific than the typical DSP audience. (Here’s a breakdown of the audiences you can make in AMC that you can’t in DSP.)
In theory, creating your audience in AMC—then pushing it to DSP—lets you get a lot more granular about the shoppers you want to court on Prime Day.
So what kinds of returns can those custom AMC audiences drive?
Here are a few of the audiences we tested with our customers on Prime Day.
#1. Organic shoppers who added to cart and did not purchase
This is something like a dream retargeting audience. You’re reaching people who got very close to the point of purchase, but who bailed at the last minute.
Maybe they were busy and said they’d do it later. Maybe the price daunted them. Etc.
But these shoppers have never seen an ad from you. So if your ads are strong, you can entice them back in, or even just remind them that they had intended to make a purchase.
That goes double when you have a price cut to offer them—either a regular discount or coupon or a typical Prime Day deal.
It is, of course, difficult to share complete results of how an audience like this performed, since Amazon doesn’t break out ad revenue data on the audience level. But for this audience, the detail page view rate (DPVR) here was 1.11%, and the NTB purchase rate was 33% across the accounts we tested it on.
#2. Shoppers who viewed PDP multiple times but did not purchase
This is a shopper group that is probably very close to a purchase. Someone who has already viewed your product page multiple times without making a purchase is deep in the consideration phase, and they may have just run into a small roadblock.
Retargeting them with a good DSP ad to draw them back to your page is a good tactic.
Across the accounts where we tested this query, the DPVR was .7%, and of those who purchased, the NTB rate was 33%.
Also, it’s worth noting: If an audience like this consistently performs poorly for you, that might suggest there’s an issue with your product content.
If a bunch of shoppers are viewing your page and then not converting, even when you direct them back with a discount, perhaps the problem you need to solve is not an advertising one.
#3. Shoppers who are new to brand and not exposed to ads
This is the kind of totally fresh group of shoppers that you aren’t able to target without Amazon Marketing Cloud. This audience provides you access to shoppers who have not purchased from you and who have never seen one of your ads.
This might not be the highest-converting audience, since these are shoppers with likely no real exposure to your brand identity. But this audience is great for a New-To-Brand play.
With this audience, you can reach a whole new set of shoppers on a day when they’re already primed to make a purchase. You might find that many are more willing to convert quickly than they otherwise would.
When we ran this audience during Prime Day, the DPVR was understandably more modest, just .15%. But this is the start of bringing new people into the marketing funnel.
Plus, this audience is useful not just for the results it drives—analyzing the performance of this audience can also help you see how your ads are working.
You’d probably expect this audience not to do as well as previously ad-exposed shoppers, since this is their first touchpoint with you.
Naturally, shoppers who have already seen your ads before are going to be more inclined to make a purchase. So if the ad-exposed audience performs roughly the same as this non-ad-exposed audience, that might suggest the original ads you ran weren’t fully doing their jobs.
What’s the lesson from these AMC audiences?
In general, we found that these more granular custom audiences performed better and with more precision.
Each audience was trying to elicit very different outcomes—re-targeting vs. reaching a wholly new shopper group—so the comparison is difficult. But there’s a lot of upside to refining your ad targets through AMC.
Granular audiences can also help sharpen your sense of how well the non-advertising parts of your business are working. If an ad isn’t performing the way it should, that might be less of a problem with your ads than with, say, your content.
A highly targeted ad that underperforms lets you be more certain that the ad itself is not the problem.
Want to know more about what AMC can do for you? Don’t forget to read our free AMC whitepaper.
