unBoxed 2023: Amazon Ads expands product availability to help advertisers reach audiences at scale

Today, at the inaugural unBoxed on Tour 2023 event in London, Amazon Ads announced the expanded availability of several of its ad tech solutions to help international advertisers of all sizes reach audiences at scale and better measure the impact of their campaigns.

To help advertisers serve relevant ads without relying on third-party cookies, Amazon Ads has extended the availability of Contextual Targeting for self-service advertisers using Amazon DSP. Previously only available in the US, Contextual Targeting is now available for self-service advertisers worldwide.

Contextual Targeting helps advertisers to reach consumers based on real-time content consumption. Through Amazon's retail taxonomy of over 40K product categories, advertisers can select specific Amazon Products (ASINs) or Categories (Browse Nodes), and express the type of content where they want their ads shown on Amazon.com and 3rd party supply. We are bridging content and commerce with this unique way to classify content, creating an opportunity to match advertising messages to any moment in customers’ purchasing journey. This helps to provide advertisers with a durable strategy to get in front of previously unreachable audiences on systems and browsers like iOS, Firefox or Safari.

To further help advertisers increase their addressable reach, Amazon Ads has also expanded modelled Amazon Audiences for advertisers in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK. Available to advertisers using Amazon DSP, Amazon Audiences’ model-based audience inference methodology matches the right message to the appropriate audiences by leveraging available event and contextual signals.

Advertisers using expanded Amazon Audiences and Contextual Targeting saw 20%-30% incremental addressability on inventory that was previously unaddressable.

Optimizing campaign performance

To help advertisers understand the holistic impact of their campaigns and optimise across audiences, creative and overall brand strategy, Amazon Ads announced new campaign planning and measurement products, powered by the Amazon Shopper Panel.

Advertisers in the UK, Germany, and Canada can now design, launch, and view reporting of Audience Research studies studies from within the Amazon DSP console and through the Amazon Ads API. Audience Research helps advertisers quickly source feedback from selected audiences to optimize their messaging before campaigns launch or to guide general marketing strategy. Through using Audience Research surveys advertisers can understand the perceptions, preferences, and shopping behaviours of the same audiences they want to reach with their Amazon Ads campaigns, all before they’ve committed their marketing budget and put their campaign live.

Creative Testing is a new survey tool, now available to advertisers in the UK, Canada, and Germany, which helps advertisers choose the most relevant image or video to include in their upcoming brand campaigns by providing insights into what resonates best with their key audiences. Using Creative Testing, advertisers can run surveys to identify the most appealing image or copy for a specific campaign, or test general branding direction such as messaging tone and visual style. This helps brands to understand the reactions, preferences and perceptions that their image or video ads evoke, before putting their full campaign live.

The launch of Omnichannel Metrics (OCM) in the UK enables advertisers to measure the aggregated, total impact of their ad tactics on shopping activities across Amazon and thousands of third party destinations, while campaigns are still mid-flight. OCM insights can help advertisers adjust budget allocation, optimize campaign tactics, and maximize media investment ROI. This tool is available for CPG and grocery advertisers, including both managed-service and self-service accounts, with eligible Amazon DSP campaigns.

These new product announcements made at unBoxed on Tour follow a series of announcements made at unBoxed in New York in October. Dive deeper into our unBoxed 2023 announcements.