Benefits of leveraging behavioural signals in OTT advertising
2 December 2020
By Katherine Vasilopoulos
Sr. Product Marketing Manager
Behind the streams: In this blog series, we’ll help you to gain insights and learn about the latest trends that are shaping OTT (over-the-top) video advertising, also known as Streaming TV ads.
The TV advertising industry has leveraged demographics to engage audiences for decades, with adults aged 18–49 being the most commonly reached segment. Although this audience is popular among advertisers, it consists of a wide range of customers with unique interests and shopping behaviours. There’s a big difference, for example, between 18-year-olds planning for their first year of university and 49-year-olds planning their 20th anniversary party. Although it is common practice to use demographic attributes to reach potential customers, there are likely to be more effective options for driving relevance among audiences.
Build better connections based on demonstrated behaviours
Amazon is a store, but it’s also much more than that. Customers rely on Amazon to browse new products, watch films, keep up with their programmes, listen to podcasts and music, and read their favourite books. These daily interactions translate to billions of first-party metrics that can help advertisers better understand the audiences that are interacting with their brand across the customer journey wherever they spend time.
The images below illustrate this concept using an advertiser who considers women aged 18–49 as their core audience. The circle on the left represents the demographic on its own, while the circle on the right highlights a variety of lifestyle and in-market segments – such as heavy TV watchers and gamers – that help provide a full picture of the audience.
Illustration of lifestyle audiences and in-market segments outside of demographic attributes
With behavioural signals, advertisers can drive consideration among audiences that have regularly demonstrated shopping behaviours reflective of broad interest groups, such as ‘deal seekers’. They can also leverage lifestyle audiences to reach shoppers who regularly visit and purchase products from particular aisles. For example, if they wish to promote the release of a new device, they may want to reach the lifestyle audience ‘tech enthusiasts’ to drive awareness with shoppers who regularly browse and purchase tech products on Amazon.
Behavioural signals can help drive consideration
So how much more effective are behavioural signals than demographic attributes for OTT video ads? Amazon Ads sought to answer this question by measuring the success of and comparing 28 Amazon Streaming TV ad campaigns that fell into three categories based on their audiences: demographics only, demographics and behavioural signals, and behavioural signals only. Here’s what we found.
Brands that leveraged Amazon Ads' behavioural signals saw an increase in consideration – which refers to total customers who visited brand detail pages on Amazon – compared to those that reached audiences based on demographic attributes alone. Amazon Streaming TV ad campaigns that leveraged both demographic attributes and behavioural signals saw a 38% lift in consideration. Further, Amazon Streaming TV ad campaigns that exclusively leveraged behavioural signals drove a 44% increase in consideration compared to those that used demographic attributes.
Source: Amazon internal, 2020
It’s time to use behavioural advertising signals in your OTT ads campaign
For advertisers, the takeaway is that behavioural signals can drive more connection and consideration among current and potential customers for OTT ads than audiences based on demographic attributes. And for advertisers who sell products on Amazon, leveraging behavioural signals could translate to a 38–44% increase in branded searches or glance views to your product page, meaning more demand for your brand. This isn’t to say that advertising using demographic attributes should completely disappear. However, it is clear that even in combination with demographics, behavioural signals can play an important role in the success of OTT video ad campaigns.
Want to learn more about Amazon Streaming TV ads and our unique behavioural signals? Check out our video ads page.