Agency Amazing shares how brands can optimise their advertising strategy across the shopping journey

Before defining the formats to use with a new client, we must determine the state of maturity of their products. We have to identify whether it is a new product, a product in its maturity stage, or already a product with declining growth. On the other hand, we must also assess whether we are working with a well-known brand or a smaller, emerging brand that still needs to gain awareness.
As a starting point, we typically use sponsored ads, which gives us the chance to reach potential customers who are interacting with the client’s category in the Amazon store. Sponsored Products is a great starting point if the brand is interested in hitting lower funnel goals such as sales. We use Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Brands video formats to increase awareness within the client’s category, though we have also seen successful sales ratios with these ad products. Finally, Sponsored Display gives us the possibility to show brands within product cards on the client’s product detail pages, as well as on other product pages within their product category.

Once we achieve our objective in a specific category, we incorporate Amazon DSP campaigns to reach potential customers anywhere they spend time.

As a starting point, the setup of Amazon DSP campaigns is geared towards engaging potential customers that are not currently interacting with the brand’s category but might be interested in it. We connect these audiences to brands’ product detail pages, to help increase visits to those pages as well as the likelihood of conversion. When focusing on reaching shoppers who are interested in our category but are not actively interacting with it, we do research on which audiences may be the most suitable. This could be by using Amazon audiences, complementing them with third-party audiences and then optimising audiences based on learnings from performance.

We also look at remarketing opportunities with Sponsored Display with audiences who have visited or purchased your products and audiences who have visited or purchased similar products. This combination of Amazon DSP and Sponsored Display allows us to reach new, potential customers and increase the conversion rate of campaign impressions.

It’s our experience at Agency Amazing that Amazon DSP can cover the full sales funnel. Amazon DSP allows us to execute awareness campaigns with key performance indicator (KPIs) aimed at increasing brand growth. These KPIs can include volume of impressions and unique customers. We can also move down the funnel to a consideration or purchase intent goal and work with Detail Page Views objectives. Finally, we can move all the way down the marketing funnel to a sales objective, where we would focus on setting our campaigns to reach audiences who are already interested on purchasing with in-market or remarketing audiences.

The best recommendation is to be open-minded about the audience options that Amazon Ads enables you to tailor and use for campaigns to reach new and more optimised audiences. Amazon Audiences include audience segments that are created based on Amazon’s first-party streaming and shopping signals. We recommend advertiser use these for campaigns created with Amazon DSP or Sponsored Display.