Announcing Sponsored Display audiences in the United States

November 18, 2020

By Raja Ghanta, Sr. Product manager
and Starry Peng, Sr. Product manager

We’ve launched Sponsored Display audiences for vendors and sellers registered in Amazon Brand Registry in the United States.

Sponsored Display audiences is a self-service display targeting strategy powered by our first party shopping signals that helps you grow your business on Amazon by reaching relevant shoppers throughout their purchase journey. Our flexible controls enable you to define the audiences you want to reach, helping you introduce new products, engage new customers, or remarket with scale. With this launch, we’ve introduced views remarketing, a subset of Sponsored Display audiences that enables you to reengage audiences who have viewed specific product detail pages but haven’t purchased your advertised product(s) in the past 30 days.

Within our sponsored ads suite, Sponsored Display audiences is the only strategy that gives you access to placements wherever they spend time including highly visible placements on the Amazon home page. If you are currently running campaigns with Amazon Ads, Sponsored Display audiences complements and expands your efforts to help reach customers. After all, with only 4% of shoppers converting to purchase immediately, display advertising can help you reach the remaining 96%.1

Sponsored Display audiences is easy to use, whether you’re a seasoned expert or using display advertising for the first time. You can create a campaign containing up to 10,000 ASINs in a few clicks at no minimum spend threshold–making it accessible to all advertisers, regardless of your size or budget.

Sponsored Display audiences is available in both the advertising console as well as the Amazon Ads API. The console and Amazon Ads API make it easy to create and manage campaigns, as well as view reporting metrics to continually optimize towards your marketing objectives.

Sponsored Display audiences features

Control and flexibility

Sponsored Display audiences uses Amazon’s first-party shopping signals to help reach shoppers throughout their purchase journey. If you’ve previously used Sponsored Display views targeting, our enhanced views remarketing still allows you to reengage high-intent audiences who have viewed your detail pages, and product pages similar to yours. Now, however, you can also use views remarketing for audience discovery, which means you can remarket to audiences who’ve viewed any detail page on Amazon—not just your own—to help drive consideration and awareness.

Sponsored Display audience controls allow you to build and customize the audiences you want to reach; for example, you can refine your campaigns using key detail page attributes, such as brand, price range, star rating, or Prime shipping eligibility, to reach audiences that have viewed detail pages with your desired attributes. You can then assign separate bids for each of the audiences you’ve selected. If your marketing goal is to drive increased product awareness, you can set a higher bid for a broader audience—for example, audiences who’ve viewed products in the men’s shoes category in the past 30 days.

Designed for retail

Sponsored Display audiences is “retail aware,” meaning campaigns will pause if, for example, your products sell out quickly due to a promotion or a deal. This means that you won’t be wasting valuable marketing dollars on ads that cannot lead to an order.

You can also customize your Sponsored Display creatives with your brand’s logo and a compelling headline to further communicate your brand’s story and stand out from the crowd. Certain Sponsored Display ad sizes may only be accessible with a custom headline and logo; as such, we recommend you add both a logo and custom headline when creating a campaign to ensure access to all ad sizes.

Your creatives will automatically include relevant badging, including Deal of the Day, Prime Eligibility, and best seller status.

Engage shoppers at every stage

Sponsored Display audiences can help you expand your Amazon Ads efforts to all stages of the shopping journey. On average, it takes 6 to 7 days for shoppers to make a purchase after their first search.2 Views remarketing can help keep your products top of mind during this critical consideration window through placements wherever they spend time, as well as placements on Amazon, including product detail pages, shopping results pages, and the Amazon home page.

3 ways Sponsored Display audiences can help you grow your business

Create awareness for a product

Use views remarketing to help create awareness by reaching audiences that have viewed other popular products, brands, or categories. Let’s say you want to generate awareness for a toy ahead of the holiday season—consider using views remarketing to reach shoppers who’ve recently viewed other products in the toys category. Sponsored Display audiences reporting can then help you optimize your campaigns in real time and learn about prospective audiences to engage.

Reach new customers

Leverage views remarketing to expand your reach and discover new audiences. Customized headline and logo can help you differentiate your brand for prospective customers, and our automated deals and savings badging allows you to augment your markdowns and promotions with ad creative. We’ve seen automated badging encourages an average of up to +42% ad CTR (click-through rate).3

Suppose you sell a toy that is your top-selling holiday product on Amazon. You can use views remarketing to reach new audiences, like shoppers who recently viewed categories like children’s books or video games. If you’re running a holiday promotion on this toy, you can take advantage of Sponsored Display’s automated badging and introduce your toy and promotion to a new audience.

Reengage shoppers

Finally, Sponsored Display product targeting can help drive traffic to your detail pages by reaching relevant audiences directly on popular detail pages; you can also use product targeting on your detail pages to promote complementary products. It is an effective way to cross-sell, capture demand, and drive traffic to your products. Consider complementing your product targeting campaigns with views remarketing to reengage audiences who haven’t yet purchased from your brand by keeping your products top of mind throughout their purchase journey.

Now say you’re also selling a dollhouse; consider using product targeting on complementary product pages, like the detail pages of dolls that you also sell. Based on the traffic you see to your dollhouse’s detail page, you can use views remarketing to reengage audiences who showed interest in your product and clicked on your product targeting ads as they browse wherever they spend time.

Optimization tips

Regardless of your Sponsored Display audiences strategy, we recommend including both “advertised products” as well as “similar to advertised products” from the Products tab in your view remarketing campaigns. “Advertised products” reengages audiences who have previously visited your detail pages, while “similar to advertised products” leverages our machine learning algorithms to reach audiences who have viewed other popular products, helping add scale to campaigns for both new and established products.

To add further scale, we recommend using the Categories tab along with the Products tab. Start with the category your product is in and then test complementary categories to broaden reach. You can always adjust bid values for each audience selected based on your preferences.

With the launch of Sponsored Display audiences, US advertisers will no longer be able to create legacy views campaigns through Sponsored Display. However, these ads will continue to serve with no loss of functionality, and we encourage you to take advantage of the enhanced views remarketing as an alternative. If you’re a seller or vendor on Amazon who is already using Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, or Sponsored Display product targeting, Sponsored Display audiences is a simple way to increase your remarketing efforts and expand your marketing funnel.

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

Sources

1, 2 Amazon Internal, 2019

3 Amazon Internal, June 26- July 24 2019