Reaching new audiences with Sponsored Display

As they build, evolve, and maintain brands, marketers balance the need to reengage existing audiences and reach new ones. 80% of shoppers use Amazon to discover new products and brands, and 69% of customer searches do not include a brand name1. This means your Amazon Ads strategy presents a unique opportunity to help drive product discovery and get your brand in front of new audiences.

Whether you are expanding into new categories or simply growing your existing product line, you can leverage Sponsored Display – our self-service, retail-centric display advertising solution – to help you reach these new audiences effectively. In fact, Sponsored Display has been observed to be one of the most effective Amazon Advertising products to drive new-to-brand sales. For example, advertisers who use Sponsored Display audiences are seeing up to 82% of their sales driven by new-to-brand (NTB) customers2.

Navigating the purchase journey

The purchase journey is complex and rarely linear, and it's important to put your best foot forward when connecting with new audiences while they are making their shopping decisions. Sponsored Display was designed with this in mind, helping you to inspire shoppers to discover your products everywhere they spend time as well as reach customers as they browse and shop on product detail pages.

No matter their stage in the purchase journey, Sponsored Display helps you engage audiences with automatically generated ad creatives containing familiar Amazon shopping features, including customer reviews, Prime badging, and “Shop now” call to action. If you are advertising multiple products in a campaign, Sponsored Display dynamically serves the creative most likely to drive a click, and our creative takes into account out-of-stock, Featured Offer and delivery promise status to help you efficiently manage your campaigns.

Many advertisers use promotions, discounts and special offers to entice new customers to try a brand for the first time, and Sponsored Display supports automated deals badging to feature your promotions in creative, driving up to 42% higher ad click-through rate (CTR)3. To help you understand and measure your customer acquisition efforts throughout the purchase journey, we offer a suite of new-to-brand metrics that show how many ad-attributed purchases are from shoppers who haven’t purchased from your brand in the past year.

"The new-to-brand metrics [in Sponsored Display] is a great insight for us to make sure it's worth persisting investment in our campaigns if we're not hitting our ROAS target, but hitting a high new-to-brand %"

Sophia Beinlich, Senior Media Analyst, Spotlight by Ascential

If you’re thinking about how to best reach new audiences, we have two Sponsored Display tips: use audiences to reach new customers throughout the purchase journey, and create a detail page strategy to reach customers as they shop and browse on Amazon.

Sponsored Display audiences

With Sponsored Display audiences, you can leverage Amazon’s rich shopping signals to reach new audiences. You can tailor the language you use in your Sponsored Display strategy to ensure it’s most relevant for the Amazon audience you are reaching. For example, if you sell healthy snacks positioned for vegans, you can select the “Vegan Grocery Shoppers” lifestyle segment and create specific messaging that is most likely to resonate with that audience segment. With Amazon audiences, you can choose from thousands of pre-built audience segments informed by Amazon’s first-party shopping and streaming signals.

Amazon audience segments include in-market, lifestyle, interests and life events, including Twitch and Whole Foods Market audience segments. If you are a seller offering t-shirts with ‘80s video game graphics and are interested in reaching gamers, you can select the “PC game viewers” audience segment that leverages streaming signals from Twitch. If you know from offline research that your typical customer listens to rock and roll, you can select the “classic rock” in-market segment. Sponsored Display audiences also always excludes past purchasers from the past 30 days to help you efficiently spend when reaching new audiences.

Downloadable reports then help you understand not only how successful you are in reaching new-to-brand customers, but also allows you to learn more about your audiences by comparing performance of different segments – for example, learn if your t-shirts resonated better with “PC game viewers” or “classic rock” segments.

We recommend using Amazon audiences to gain insight into your new-to-brand campaign performance and then applying those learnings to create custom-built views remarketing audiences in Sponsored Display. After two weeks of running your “classic rock” campaign, you might use the Purchased Product Report (sellers only) to discover that a high number of new-to-brand shoppers ended up purchasing your newly launched hoodie style.

To help encourage further NTB sales, you could create a new Amazon audiences campaign with hoodie products and assign higher bids to help increase scale. You could also add views remarketing segments to your ad group to manage efficiency in your NTB efforts. For example, you could create a custom-built category audience to remarket your hoodie to audiences who have previously viewed detail pages of highly rated and Prime-eligible “classic rock” detail pages.

These broader targeting options lend themselves to upper-funnel strategies with brand awareness and impression goals perfectly. This setting will be a great way to get in front of customers in the discovery or consideration phase of the buyer’s journey. This kind of targeting casts a wider net than traditional remarketing, which helps increase reach to get in front of more potential buyers.

– ROIREVOLUTION

Create a detail page strategy

Sponsored Display allows you to tell your story to new audiences through both targeting and creative features. Product targeting, for example, allows you to reach new customers on any product detail page or category on Amazon – even outside of your own category. Reaching new customers outside of your category allows you to help inspire shoppers to consider products that might be relevant to them.

As an ‘80s graphic t-shirt seller, you could use product targeting and leverage your offline insights to target “classic rock” detail pages to prospect for new customers, and you could co-sell on detail pages like “men’s jeans” that wear well with your t-shirts.

To help create these product targeting campaigns, we automatically surface those segments in the console with the highest probability of generating clicks. Custom headlines and brand logos in your ad creative then enable you to directly engage with new shoppers and highlight key selling points, establish brand recognition, or help articulate why customers should consider your product. For example, when targeting “classic rock” detail pages, you can highlight your t-shirt is “The perfect cotton tee for your next rock concert!”

Reaching new audiences is important for any brand, but Sponsored Display makes this easy for advertisers big and small to do so.

Learn more about Sponsored Display or get started with a campaign today.

1 Amazon internal, May 2019
2 Amazon internal, February 2021
3 Amazon internal, 26 June – 24 July 2019