Increasing consideration in the shopping journey in the Amazon store

• Create a Sponsored Display audiences campaign
• Create a Sponsored Display contextual targeting campaign

Ready to stay top of mind in your category?

Here’s your checklist to help increase consideration in the Amazon store.

Here’s your strategy to help stay top of mind in your category among your current customers and potential new shoppers. Following these tactics will help create engaging experiences for shoppers with your business wherever they spend time that put your unique brand differentiators on display. You’ll also get tips on reaching shoppers who are browsing in your category, helping you engage the right audiences at the right time in their shopping journey.

If your goal is to stay top of mind in your category, try using these tactics for greater results:

• Create a Brand Store for your brand
• Add subpages to your Brand Store
• Use non-Amazon marketing efforts to bring traffic to your Store
• Share brand content with Posts
• Create a Sponsored Brands campaign linking to your Store
• Create a Sponsored Brands video format ad campaign
• Create a Sponsored Display audiences campaign
• Create a Sponsored Display contextual targeting campaign
• Use “optimize for conversions” in your Sponsored Display campaigns

Amazon Ads allows us to engage with our clients’ customers at different points of their buying journey. Having the ability to reach customers when they’re in a buying frame of mind is a valuable proposition for any brand or agency.

— Mark Pettit, CEO, Skye High Media

Consideration tip: You can connect your brand marketing strategy to your digital advertising strategy using Amazon audiences, helping to drive consideration as you reach new audiences and gain insights into your brand in the Amazon store.

Try these campaign strategies

Using Amazon audiences in your campaign, you can leverage thousands of pre-built audience segments to help reach new prospective shoppers through your consideration campaigns. Amazon audiences are comprised of four major categories, which are built and curated by Amazon Ads using a variety of first-party shopping, streaming, and entertainment insights:

• In-market segments help you to engage audiences who are “in-the-aisle” and have been recently shopping for products in a given category. To capture share-of-mind, you can potentially reach audiences in the same category as your advertised products to drive consideration, as well as try out entirely new segments.
• Pre-built lifestyle audiences reflect a variety of shopping and viewing behaviors, including shopping in the Amazon store, browsing on IMDb, and streaming on Prime Video or Twitch. Each one maps to specific lifestyles such as “foodies,” “sports enthusiasts,” “tech enthusiasts,” and more.
• Interest-based audiences help you engage groups of shoppers who share a common interest based on Amazon browse and purchase signals.
• Life event audiences can help introduce relevant products and services to shoppers based around life moments in order to drive consideration.

Choose your targeting method

Within your contextual targeting campaign, you can choose from similar product and category targeting:

• Similar product targeting: If you’re looking to increase consideration, product targeting can help you promote your product among shoppers where they’re browsing products wherever they spend time that are related to your ad. You can target specific products that are similar or complementary to your advertised product to make high-intent audiences aware of your products. You can also consider targeting your own products for the opportunity for your ads to appear on your product detail pages, rather than ads for another brand.
• Category targeting: You can also reach audiences who are browsing “in the aisle,” or in the same categories that you choose in your campaign. Using this targeting option, you can increase consideration among a wider set of potential customers actively looking at other products or content within your own category or a related category.

Use “optimize for conversions” in your Sponsored Display campaigns

Sponsored Display offers granular yet flexible bidding controls through custom bid optimizations, which can help you engage and re-engage audiences as you grow your business with Amazon.

When creating a contextual targeting or audiences campaign, you can optimize bidding for your specific needs, including to increase conversions. This allows you to signal your campaign needs, deliver against those needs, and further optimize campaigns against metrics such as sales.

By choosing “optimize for conversions” under bid optimization strategies, you can help drive product sales and create customer loyalty by showing your ads to shoppers most likely to purchase your product.

Create a Brand Store

Your Brand Store is your destination on Amazon to help your brand shine and to showcase your full product catalog. To use your Brand Store as a tool to drive consideration, design your page to highlight your top products across all of your key categories or sub-categories.

Then, use these widgets to make it easy for customers to browse and add products to their shopping carts directly from your Brand Store on both desktop and mobile:

• Product collection: Use this widget to organize multiple groups of products on the same page within your Brand Store and provide shoppers with the ability to quickly and easily add items to their carts.
• Featured deals: If you have active deals, including Best Deal, Deal of the Day, and Lightning Deals, use this feature to display your promotions automatically.
• Shoppable image: Highlight up to six products within an image. When shoppers click on a featured product, they can view key information, add the product to their cart, or navigate to the product detail page.

With a Store, customers get a detailed overview of all our products, and that increases the likelihood that they’ll buy more of our products than only the single product they were looking for.

— Albert Vu, Managing Director and Founder, AZDelivery

Add subpages to your Brand Store

Think of your Brand Store as an educational destination page for your brand within your category. Group products together on multiple subpages at the category or sub-category level, focusing on the categories that are most important to your business. While shoppers may visit your Brand Store with a certain product or category in mind, this layout can inspire them to consider additional products or categories your brand has to offer.

On your subpages, consider using video assets to introduce your key products and demonstrate them in action. High-quality videos can help you build more meaningful connections with customers, providing a way to quickly offer key information. Give details they can’t get from images or text, like the product performing under challenging conditions or a person interacting with your brand. This can help develop loyalty among new and returning customers.

Or incorporate shoppable images onto your subpages to inspire customers with rich lifestyle imagery that features your product in different settings or in collections with complementary products in your portfolio. You can choose to make any of the products in the image shoppable, enabling customers to click on the featured products to see basic information, such as name, price, customer ratings, and Prime availability. They can also add the product to their cart or navigate to the product detail page.

Use non-Amazon marketing efforts to bring traffic to your Brand Store

Help reach audiences wherever they spend time and encourage them to visit your Brand Store by sharing a link to your Brand Store in your social media posts, email marketing campaigns, and your brand’s website.

Then, using Amazon Attribution, you can find the insights you need to understand how your non-Amazon marketing efforts—including those across search, social, digital, video, and email channels—are driving value for your brand in the Amazon store.

To get started, you can access Amazon Attribution through the advertising console alongside your self-service ads campaigns.

• Sign in to the advertising console.
• Set up measurement by creating your first campaign.
• Access step-by-step instructions in the help center to create your Amazon Attribution tags.
• When selecting the creation method, you can manually create the campaign structure or set up measurement with bulk operations for your Google search, Facebook, and Instagram ad campaigns.

3. Apply the Amazon Attribution tag into the final destination URL of the associated paid or organic campaign within the publisher interface. This tag will drive directly to your Brand Store.

Once you apply your tags and launch your campaigns, the advertising console will display reporting—most likely only clicks to begin with. Wait one to two days to review and validate your reporting. Once you’ve confirmed that your tags are reporting correctly, you can use the Amazon Attribution campaign manager to access your reports. You’ll be able to review key metrics like clicks, detail page views, add to carts, and purchases so you can make in-flight optimizations to your campaigns.

Email your followers on Amazon

With the Amazon Customer Engagement tool, you have a way to connect with customers that follow your brand on Amazon.⁹ This tool allows brands to email their followers directly and share information about new product launches that may be relevant to them. This can help you nurture customer relationships and drive visibility and consideration of your products.
To help grow your followers that you can connect with via email:

• Create an engaging Brand Store experience and share your unique Brand Store URL
• Post frequently to keep your brand top-of-mind
• Encourage your social media followers to follow your brand on Amazon

Share brand content with Posts

Reach shoppers and drive consideration with Posts’ authentic lifestyle content that can deliver your brand story to relevant shoppers—at no cost, as often as you'd like.

Each post links to a product detail page and includes category tags so shoppers can continue exploring posts in related categories. Posts appear on product detail pages on the Amazon mobile shopping app (iOS and Android) and on mobile web in the US. Your posts will also appear on your Brand Store, allowing shoppers to move between inspiration and shopping while browsing.

Start posting with these tips:

• Help customers imagine your products in a realistic context with lifestyle photography and descriptive captions that align with your brand’s personality, from playful to professional. Showcase product collections by tagging multiple products in each post.
• Create content that’s relevant to your category and audiences. We automatically showcase your posts in your Store and on product detail pages based on relevance and shopping engagement.
• There’s no limit to how often you can post, so make sure you’re frequently posting high-quality content to help increase the likelihood of your post being displayed and to help grow your following.

Sponsored Brands with Brand Store spotlight

You can feature up to three Brand Store subpages in your ad and customize the headline along with the subpage image and label. This gives you the opportunity to highlight a range of categories or multiple complementary sub-categories from your Brand Store. Customers will be directed to those subpages when they click your ad, so they have the opportunity to continue engaging with the rich content in your Brand Store.

When adding images for each of your subpages to your ad creative, choose customized lifestyle images that will represent your brand identity, stand out in shopping results, and encourage customers to click through to your Brand Store to explore these categories.

Your Brand Store must have a minimum of three subpages to be eligible, with a unique product on each subpage. The first three subpages of your Brand Store page will be preselected for the Sponsored Brands creative, but you have the option to change which subpage you want to feature. You’ll also have the ability to enter a custom headline, select a brand logo, and change the labels and images that represent the subpages within your campaign.

Sponsored Brands with product collection

Promote multiple products from your Brand Store, focusing on your bestselling products with high ratings. This can help catch the attention of shoppers as they’re browsing and encourage them to visit your Brand Store for deeper engagement.

Add rich custom images representing your brand portfolio to help tell your brand story to shoppers as they’re browsing. Or use images of specific products in use to increase product consideration.

Note: If you select Brand Stores as your landing page, you must have at least one product that displays the featured offer for your campaign to be active. The products you want to advertise must already be available in the Brand Store.

Create your video to increase consideration of your featured product

Consideration tip: By appearing in shopping results, your videos have the opportunity to show to customers when they’re already browsing and looking for inspiration.

Make sure your video illustrates how your products can fulfill the needs of shoppers and helps inspire them to consider trying your brand:

• Focus your video on building an emotional connection between customers and your products with inspirational and entertaining visuals. Videos that connect or resonate emotionally with customers help brands and products stand out.
• Showcase quick product demonstrations on features and uses in your video that will help customers to imagine using the product in a real-life setting.
• Strike a balance by highlighting your product for about 80% of the video, with the other 20% dedicated to your brand and other related product offerings. For example, if your ad features a video for a lawn mower, shoppers might also be interested to see the other products your brand offers in the lawn and garden category.
• Grab customers’ attention by showing captivating images or videos of your product within the first two seconds of the video, and include the product function within the first five seconds.
• Have your logo appear at the beginning or end of your video to help remind customers who you are.
• Keep mobile viewers in mind by making sure the product is not too small throughout the video.

Explore Brand Metrics

Brand Metrics (beta)¹⁰ provides a measurement solution that quantifies opportunities for your brand at each stage of the customer journey in the Amazon store, and helps brands understand the value of different shopping engagements that impact stages of that journey. You can access awareness, consideration, and purchase indices that compare your performance to peers using models predictive of consideration and sales.

Brand Metrics quantifies the number of customers in the awareness and consideration marketing funnel stages and is built at scale to measure all shopping engagements with your brand in the Amazon store, not just ad-attributed engagements. Additionally, Brand Metrics breaks out key shopping engagements at each stage of the shopping journey, along with the return on engagement, so you can measure the historical sales following a consideration event or purchase.

Benefits of Brand Metrics

Brand Metrics helps you:

• Understand your brand performance by measuring the number of actual on-Amazon shopper engagements.
• Measure the impact of your upper and mid funnel tactics and see how they contribute to shoppers moving through the purchase journey.
• Evaluate engagement metrics to understand the value of your branded intent, and how brand purchasers go on to generate additional sales in the 12 months following a purchase.
• Monitor your performance relative to your category and peers at each stage of the purchase journey and over time.
• Optimize your marketing and advertising efforts in the Amazon store to engage more shoppers and build your brand.

Amazon Ads has been very pivotal for a brand like ourselves. We have all of these tools at our disposal to reach the relevant audience and a way to stand out. Amazon has been instrumental in our growth as a brand.

— Ralph Newhouse, CEO, Chefman