Consideration advertising

You’ve captured their attention. They know who your brand is. But now comes one of the trickiest parts: How do you turn that awareness into actual interest that a consumer is likely to act on? Enter consideration advertising—the turning point in the marketing funnel where brands can transform window shoppers into warm leads. While many brands pour resources into the awareness and conversion stages, they often underestimate the importance of mastering this middle stage of the customer journey.

In this guide, we’ll unlock strategies for consideration advertising and share real-life examples—helping illustrate how brands can close the gap between being just another option and becoming a consumer’s preferred choice.

Consideration advertising focuses on arming consumers with the detailed information they need to make informed decisions. Unlike awareness campaigns that center on broad brand messaging, consideration ads dive deeper into product specifications, use cases, and competitive advantages. The key is delivering relevant, valuable information at the moment customers are actively researching—turning curious browsers into knowledgeable prospects who understand why your products or services best fit their needs.

Consideration advertising aims to foster deeper, more meaningful connections with potential customers. A key way to drive engagement is to create interactive consumer touchpoints, such as comparison tools or immersive marketing experiences. Through these participatory moments, you can encourage shoppers to become more emotionally invested in their relationship with your brand.

An important goal of consideration advertising is to establish and strengthen brand preference during the information-gathering phase of the customer journey. To do this, brands can develop ad content that highlights their distinctive benefits, unique value propositions, and competitive advantages, with an emphasis on factual insights. Through strategic messaging and compelling proof points, consideration advertising efforts aim to reinforce a brand’s key differentiators.

A key objective of consideration advertising is to help your brand rise to the top of consumers’ consideration sets—the short list of options they’re seriously evaluating. This requires a strategic approach that goes beyond simply maintaining visibility to actively influencing how prospects compare and evaluate alternatives. Consideration ads use strategic positioning to help frame the purchase decision around criteria where your brand excels, whether that’s quality, innovation, or specific features.

Ultimately, consideration advertising serves as a strategic bridge, guiding prospects from initial awareness toward purchase readiness in a way that feels natural and valuable. The key is to remove barriers and hesitations while building momentum toward conversion—whether through remarketing that reinforces key benefits, email nurture sequences that address common concerns, or dynamic ads that become more detailed as engagement deepens.

Value-driven marketing is a key tactic in consideration advertising, helping brands position themselves as trusted resources for prospective customers. Unlike upper-funnel techniques that prioritize reach and awareness, value-driven content provides consumers with more substantive information about your products and services. For example, a home appliance brand might create in-depth efficiency calculators and maintenance guides, while a B2B software provider might offer detailed case studies. Through value-driven content focused on helping consumers, your brand can strengthen relationships with shoppers at a key juncture in their purchase journey.

A powerful way to make your consideration ads more effective is by zeroing in on specific customer pain points. This technique requires brands to directly reference the challenges, concerns, and hesitations that customers might have, rather than glossing over potential objections. To address these pain points, a brand could showcase case studies or testimonials from customers who have overcome similar challenges. Consideration ads might also reference statistics that underscore the prevalence or impact of an issue that customers face.

At the consideration stage, it is important to demonstrate your expertise as a way of earning trust. This goes beyond simple product claims to establish genuine insight about customer needs and potential solutions. Sample tactics for showcasing expertise could include analysis reports, expert-led webinars, technical documentation, or a behind-the-scenes look at your development processes.

While awareness campaigns may capture initial attention, consideration ads invite prospects to interact with your brand in ways that feel personalized and directly relevant. This could mean encouraging them to explore product demonstrations, participate in virtual try-ons, use interactive comparison tools, or engage with immersive content experiences. For instance, a beauty brand might offer personalized skincare consultations, while a furniture retailer might provide augmented reality tools to visualize products in customers’ homes.

Brand lift studies surveys are a tool for quantifying shifts in specific marketing objectives, including consideration. These surveys typically compare responses between consumers who have been exposed to the advertising and those who haven’t, helping isolate the campaign’s impact on consumer perception.

Branded search volume is a key indicator of consideration because it demonstrates real consumer intent. By tracking changes in branded search volume during and after consideration-focused campaigns, advertisers can gauge how well their efforts are driving active interest in a brand.

Tracking additional website metrics like page depth, time spent on site, and return visits can be helpful for measuring consideration. When these numbers increase, it often signals that customers are actively exploring your brand and moving closer to purchase.

Amazon Ads offers a range of measurement and analytics solutions fueled by shopping, streaming, and browsing insights. Through a combination of first-party and third-party reporting, our measurement solutions allow you to develop an informed advertising strategy and optimize your campaigns.

Sponsored Brands is an advertising solution built to promote discovery and consideration of brands within the Amazon store. By using static and video brand creatives in the shopper journey, the tool helps engage audiences and drive traffic to your Brand Store or product detail page.

Prime Video ads allow brands to connect with global streaming audiences at scale while they watch the TV shows and movies they love across desktop, mobile, and connected TV environments. Interactivity is available through this tool, making it easier than ever for engaged audiences to browse, learn more about, and shop your brand.

Amazon’s audio ads help brands connect with audiences in those hard-to-reach moments in the home and beyond, including through placements on Amazon Music, Wondery, Twitch, and Amazon Publisher Direct (APD). Optional features include Branded experiences with Alexa, which let you add custom calls-to-action and create interactive destinations where audiences can learn more about your brand.

Device ads, which incorporate both display and video creatives, seamlessly appear within the user interface of certain Amazon devices with screens like Fire TV, Fire tablet, and Echo Show, as well as services like Prime Video. The solution is designed to help deliver on brand objectives throughout the entire marketing funnel, including at the consideration stage.

The Amazon Ads Brand Innovation Lab is a global team of strategists, creatives, and technologists who work to solve strategic brand challenges through custom campaigns. Brands and agencies can collaborate with the Brand Innovation Lab to develop pioneering activations across Amazon properties, helping deepen customer engagement and remove friction from the shopping journey.

Additional resources

Guide: Increasing consideration in the shopping journey in the Amazon store

Understanding Amazon Ads: A guide to our ad products

Amazon Brand Lift studies

A guide to selective attention in marketing

A complete guide to keyword targeting

Sources

^1-2 Amazon Internal Data, US, July 10–31, 2024.