For the past year, advancements in Amazon PPC advertising have been an integral part of creating a more sophisticated selling process. One of the latest of those advancements, Sponsored Display Audiences, makes it easier than ever to target customers with high buying intent inside and outside of Amazon.
While Sponsored Display ads are nothing new (they were launched in 2019, replacing Product Display Ads), the addition of audience groups and remarketing enables sellers to break down the digital walls of Amazon for highly targeted, far-reaching ad campaigns.
Studies show 64% of shoppers use multiple channels to make a single purchase. As customers shop around, it’s critical to keep your product in front of the customer in hopes of landing in their cart.
With Sponsored Display ads, you can bolster your brand presence across channels to stay in the minds of customers. And with Amazon Audiences, you can zero in on customers more likely to complete a purchase for a more efficient ad spend.
What audiences are available?
For this section, we’ll let Amazon tell the story with excerpts from the official overview.
Sponsored Display audiences is a display targeting strategy that uses Amazon shopping signals to help advertisers of all sizes grow their businesses and engage shoppers across the purchase journey—both on and off Amazon.
Amazon Advertising
- In-market: In-market audiences allow you to engage audiences who are “in the aisle” and have been recently shopping for products in a given category. To capture share-of-mind, you can reach audiences in the same category as your advertised products to drive consideration, as well as try out entirely new segments to help drive product awareness.
- Lifestyle: Positioned for awareness campaigns, these audiences reflect a variety of aggregated shopping and viewing behaviors, including shopping on Amazon, browsing on IMDb, streaming on Prime Video, or streaming on Twitch. These behaviors reflect shared preferences and map to lifestyle segments such as “foodies,” “sports enthusiasts,” “tech enthusiasts,” and more.
- Interests: Interest-based audiences allow you to help raise awareness with prospective customers based on what they frequently browse and buy. Examples of these audiences include “interested in Canadian history” and “interested in interior design.”
- Life events: Life events audiences give you the opportunity to drive awareness and consideration for relevant products based around life moments, such as “traveling soon” for shoppers going on vacation
What are the benefits?
First, ensuring your products are seen by customers who are more inclined to make a purchase is always a tremendous benefit. By implementing Sponsored Display ads, you can increase brand awareness, drive traffic to a specific product, earn visibility on competitor listings, and kickstart exposure for new product lines.
By adding audiences to your Sponsored Display ads, you can prioritize customers more likely to add your product to their cart.
With the remarketing option, sellers can reengage customers who have looked at your product, but not made a purchase. At a very basic level, you can safely infer the customer is interested in your product and is still looking, ultimately increasing the likelihood of a purchase.
For the more analytically-minded sellers, you’ll love the refined reporting that comes with these campaigns. Relevant performance metrics include sales, click-through rate (CTR), and new-to-brand (NTB) statistics for each selected audience in your campaigns.
On top of boosting exposure and sales through these campaigns, the data mined could be even more valuable in the long run as you comb through the data on your customers.
Do Sponsored Display audiences actually work?
According to Amazon, absolutely.
Citing internal data, the e-commerce giant noted advertisers who integrated this display advertising strategy with Sponsored Products advertising saw a 4% higher month-over-month sales growth compared to if they only utilized Sponsored Products.
Furthermore, Amazon states the average customer journey on its platform is 6-to-7 days.
“The greatest ability is availability” is often said to describe the value of athletes who can stay healthy. But it could also be said about Amazon products regarding making your products available and exposed to shoppers.
With Sponsored Display audience ads, sellers gain control over how often their products are made available and prioritize who they’re exposed to. Frequently, business owners are tasked with deciding to either branch out to new customers or zero in on the existing target market. Sponsored Display audiences grant the option to pursue both simultaneously.
Of course, success will vary as sellers invoke their own strategies for audiences. Still, the data from Amazon’s case study is encouraging for sellers, and the fundamentals of selling certainly back up their claims.
Who has access to Sponsored Display Audiences?
Presently, Sponsored Display Audiences are exclusive to vendors, and Brand Registry enrolled sellers in the United States.
It should come as no surprise that sellers enrolled in the Brand Registry Program receive yet another perk for those paying close attention. As Amazon continues to add new seller features, those in the Brand Registry program have been receiving more and more tools to fuel their Amazon business lately.
[A Seller’s Guide to Amazon Brand Registry]
What else should sellers know before kicking off their first campaign?
In its introduction, Amazon notes that this ad type is “retail aware.” This means the ads work in congruence with your inventory. For example, if you run out of stock and can no longer fulfill purchases, the ads will shut off automatically. As a result, sellers avoid wasteful spending and aren’t punished if their ads are incredibly effective.
Sellers will be happy to hear that creatives are automatically generated from your product page, so much of the ad creation process is already completed for you.
Additionally, applicable badges such as Prime-eligible, Deal of the Day, Best Seller, and more are made visible in these ads, giving customers even more reason to make a purchase.
Wrapping It Up
Sponsored Display audiences and remarketing opens up even more possibilities for Amazon sellers to build their brand.
As the Amazon Advertising Console seemingly grows more sophisticated each day, savvy sellers should certainly keep a watchful eye on the latest advertising features, trends, and tactics.
Lastly, the steady stream of new features to the Amazon Advertising Console should signal to sellers that PPC advertising will only continue to pick up steam. In the near future, it’s increasingly likely that advertising knowledge, strategy, and execution becomes more of a prerequisite for longstanding success in the marketplace.
