An overview of Sponsored Display audiences
Sponsored Display audiences is a display targeting strategy that uses Amazon shopping signals to help advertisers of all sizes grow their businesses and engage shoppers across the purchase journey wherever they spend time. Flexible controls enable advertisers to use self-service display ads to introduce products, engage new customers, and remarket with scale, helping existing Amazon Ads efforts.
Sponsored Display audiences is available to sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, vendors, agencies, and technology providers in AE, CA, DE, FR, ES, IT, the UK, and the US. On average, the customer journey on Amazon is 6-7 days;1 display advertising helps engage shoppers throughout their purchase journey. For advertisers with an existing Amazon Ads strategy, audiences can complement your efforts. We recently observed advertisers who combined display advertising strategy with Sponsored Products saw a 4% higher month-over-month sales growth than if they only used Sponsored Products.2
Why Sponsored Display audiences?
Control and flexibility
Sponsored Display audiences uses first-party shopping signals. With custom-built views remarketing, you can reach audiences that have viewed your detail page as well as new audiences that have viewed detail pages of similar products or any category on Amazon to help drive consideration and awareness. Further optimize your audience selection by refining on key product attributes—including brand, price range, star rating, and Prime shipping eligibility—and then assigning separate bids for each of the selected audiences you want to reach.
With Amazon audiences, sponsored ads users are now able to select audiences in a similar way to how they would describe their brand’s core customer—for example, “outdoor enthusiasts” or “environmentally conscious shoppers”— and these self-service advertisers can now directly connect the language used in their overall brand marketing strategy to Sponsored Display.
To help you as you build campaigns, we’ve included potential reach metrics into our campaign builder and added insights on campaigns, targeting, advertised products, and purchased products with downloadable reporting.
Designed for retail
Sponsored Display audiences is retail aware, so that your ads will automatically stop serving if your product is no longer available to purchase. You can add products to campaigns even if they have low inventory, are currently out of stock, or are no longer the Featured Offer—and be confident that you will not be charged for ads that cannot lead to an order. You can help drive awareness with new audiences by customizing creative headlines and adding your brand logo, and your creatives will automatically surface relevant badging including Deal of the Day, Prime eligibility, and Best Seller status. Certain Sponsored Display ad sizes may only be accessible with a custom headline and logo, so we recommend you add both a custom headline when creating a campaign to access all ad sizes.
Engaged shoppers at every stage
Sponsored Display audiences can help you expand your Amazon Ads campaigns to reach all stages of the shopper journey, including the Amazon home page, helping drive consideration and awareness at scale. Audiences can keep your products top of mind as shoppers look for and discover products through high-visibility on-Amazon placements that may appear close to the Featured Offer.
What audiences are available?
Custom-built audiences uses Amazon shopping signals to remarket with intuitive, flexible targeting controls (e.g., views remarketing).
Amazon audiences gives advertisers access to a large catalog of audience segments that are easy to use and ready to go. Amazon audiences is a way to engage new customers as well as to help you better learn about your brand on Amazon.
Amazon audiences includes:
- In-market: In-market audiences allow 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 reach audiences in the same category as your advertised products to drive consideration, as well as try out entirely new segments to help drive product awareness.
- Lifestyle: Positioned for awareness campaigns, these audiences reflect a variety of aggregated shopping and viewing behaviors, including shopping on Amazon, browsing on IMDb, streaming on Prime Video, or streaming on Twitch. These behaviors reflect shared preferences and map to lifestyle segments such as “foodies,” “sports enthusiasts,” “tech enthusiasts,” and more.
- Interests: Interest-based audiences allow you to help raise awareness with prospective customers based on what they frequently browse and buy. Examples of these audiences include “interested in Canadian history” and “interested in interior design.”
- Life events: Life events audiences give you the opportunity to drive awareness and consideration for relevant products based around life moments, such as “traveling soon” for shoppers going on vacation.
When should you use Sponsored Display audiences?
Create awareness
Audience discovery enables you to create brand awareness for your products by reaching audiences of other popular categories or brands. You can view performance metrics for each selected audience in your campaign with downloadable reporting, which helps you to continuously optimize and learn about prospective audiences.
Acquire audiences
You can help expand the reach of your existing products through audience discovery. A customized headline and logo help your brand stand out in front of shoppers, while deals badging helps you augment markdowns or high-traffic promotional periods with appropriate ad creatives.
Reengage audiences
Custom-built views remarketing keeps your products in front of prospective shoppers to help reengage those who have viewed but not purchased your product.
Extrapolate insights
With Amazon audiences, advertisers can bring your unique brand insights in order to connect your display advertising strategy to their brand positioning. You can learn about which Amazon audiences resonate most with their promoted products through campaign metrics including sales, click-through rate (CTR), and new-to-brand (NTB).
How should you use Sponsored Display audiences?
Custom-built and Amazon audiences
We recommend that advertisers use both both custom-built audiences and Amazon audiences. Start by including both “advertised products” as well as “similar to advertised products” in your Sponsored Display audiences campaigns. “Advertised products” remarkets established products to past detail page visitors, while “similar to advertised products” uses our machine learning algorithms to reach viewers of other popular products, helping add scale to campaigns for both new and established products. To add further scale, we recommend adding the custom built categories and Amazon audiences; start with the segments that describe your customer as well as the category that your product is in. Evaluate success using Sponsored Display's suite of downloadable reports, and then apply your learnings to create and manage your Sponsored Display product targeting and custom built views remarketing campaigns. Advertisers will always be able to adjust bid values for each audience selected based on your preferences.
Key features
Select one or multiple products to advertise.
Create and reach audiences of shoppers who have visited specific category product detail pages on Amazon (beyond your own product catalog) with custom-built views remarketing. You have the ability to refine your selection based on brand, price, star rating, Prime delivery eligibility, and other filters, as well as specify bids for each audience. We will always automatically exclude recent past purchasers of your promoted products.
Show ads wherever they spend time to reengage audiences anywhere, including ads that may appear on the Amazon homepage.
Access metrics such as new-to-brand, as well as Sponsored Display’s suite of downloadable reports to analyze campaign performance.
To get started with Sponsored Display audiences, sign in to your advertising account.
1 Amazon Internal 2019
2 Amazon Internal 2019. Results based on an analysis of more than 4000 brands.