Guide to Sponsored Display views remarketing and lookback windows

Sponsored Display audiences is a display advertising tactic that empowers advertisers of all sizes to help grow their business with Amazon by reaching audiences across their shopping and entertainment journey wherever they spend time.

To date, advertisers have used Sponsored Display audiences to discover, reach, and engage relevant shoppers throughout this journey to help drive awareness, consideration, or purchase. Previously, custom-built audiences (i.e. “views remarketing”) were powered by first-party shopping signals based on historical detail page views, but with this release, we have expanded custom-built audiences with “purchases remarketing”—empowering brands to help drive repeat purchases of their products and cultivate brand loyalty. Purchases remarketing enables advertisers to help reach audiences based on historical purchase behaviors on Amazon. Advertisers can now remarket to previous audiences of their promoted products, other popular products, as well as products from specific retail categories. Like other custom-built audiences, advertisers can customize these campaigns based on their real-world insights using retail-centric refinements such as price point, brand name, and star rating.

This release also introduces customizable “lookback windows.” Different products have different buying lifecycles: for example, audiences may spend more time mulling over which pair of jeans to buy compared to which toothpaste they will pick. Using this feature for views and purchases remarketing, advertisers can further define the audiences they hope to reach by indicating their preferred lookback period for when historical shopping actions took place (e.g. past 30 days, 7 days, etc.).

Why use Sponsored Display purchases remarketing?

  • Granularity and flexibility:
    Sponsored Display audiences is the only sponsored ads tactic that leverages first-party shopping and streaming signals. By using Sponsored Display’s purchases remarketing feature, you can now reach audiences via classic remarketing to reengage previous audiences and drive brand or product loyalty, as well as audience discovery to reach audiences more broadly beyond those only buying from your own catalog. Further optimize your selections by refining on key product attributes—including brand, price range, star rating, and Prime shipping eligibility—and assigning separate bids for the audiences selections that you want to reach.
  • Designed for retail:
    Sponsored Display audiences was designed as a retail-centric solution from the ground up. We help protect your advertising spend through features such as out-of-stock awareness, delivery promise awareness, and Featured Offer awareness. This means that your ads will automatically stop serving if your product is no longer available to purchase. You can add products to your campaigns even if they have low inventory, are currently out of stock, or are no longer the Featured Offer, and you can be confident in knowing that you will not spend on ads that cannot lead to an order.
  • Expanded access to the shopper journey:
    Sponsored Display audiences can help you expand your Amazon Ads efforts to all stages of the shopper journey. On average, it takes 6 to 7 days for shoppers to make a purchase after they’ve started shopping. Sponsored Display audiences can help keep your products top of mind during this critical consideration window and reach audiences throughout their shopping and entertainment journey: when they’re browsing the web, on Twitch, on the Amazon homepage, and Amazon detail pages. Sponsored Display audiences has been observed to be one of the most effective Amazon Ads strategies at driving new-to-brand (NTB) sales: on average, advertisers using audiences are seeing up to 82% of their sales driven by NTB customers.

When should you use Sponsored Display purchases remarketing?

As a part of Sponsored Display audiences, advertisers are now able to use purchases remarketing to help:

Drive brand loyalty through repeat purchases

Help drive repeat purchases by remarketing to audiences who have previously purchased your brand’s products. For example, a beauty brand could advertise their 7-day pack of sheet masks to shoppers who bought a single sheet mask using a 30-day lookback window. You can pair your campaigns with custom image creatives to help convey your unique brand narrative while connecting with existing audiences.

Cross-sell complementary products

Help drive product consideration by cross-selling your products to audiences who have recently bought other related/complementary products. For example, a brand that’s focused on selling electronic accessories, such as headsets and webcams, can now reach shoppers who have recently purchased a new computer within their preferred lookback window (e.g., in the past 14 days).

Reach new audiences

Help discover new audiences by reaching audiences who have previously purchased from other popular categories and brands, as you launch new products to market or seek to improve the visibility of existing products. Our custom creative headline and logo features can help you stand out when engaging new audiences, while our dynamic badging allows you to augment markdowns and leverage high-traffic promotional periods. We’ve observed that dynamic badging can help you drive up to +42% ad click-through rate.1 Finally, as you reach new audiences, you can quantify your efforts by using our suite of new-to-brand metrics.

How should you use Sponsored Display purchases remarketing?

Product and category remarketing

We recommend that advertisers using purchases remarketing adopt our dynamic segments. These segments—“advertised products” and “related to advertised products”—can help you launch your campaigns easily and effectively. Specifically, “related to advertised products” leverages our machine learning algorithms to help discover and reach audiences who previously bought products that are related or complementary to your advertised product(s). To add additional scale, we recommend selecting category-based audiences. Start with the category that your product is in, and then test-and-learn with other relevant categories. Use refinements to broaden or narrow reach. You will always be able to adjust bid values based on your preferences and willingness to pay.

Customizable lookback windows

Similar to refinements, we recommend that advertisers customize their lookback windows based on their real-world insights and campaign goals. Lookback windows define the historical time period when a shopping action took place, such as detail page views for views remarketing or purchases for purchases remarketing. For example, if you’re promoting your best-selling sheet mask to help drive repeat purchase, you can use purchases remarketing to help reach audiences who have bought your advertised products in a defined lookback window of 14 days. Similarly, if you want to cross-sell to a broader audience, you can use purchases remarketing to help reach shoppers who have purchased from the facial mask category in a defined lookback window of 30 days.

Bid optimization

Pair your audiences campaigns with the appropriate bid optimization. If you are looking to help drive repeat purchases and product loyalty, we recommend “optimize for conversions.” If you are looking to help drive consideration or awareness with broader audience reach, we recommend “optimize for detail page views” and “optimize for viewable impressions.”

Key features

  • Mix and match up to 20 audiences within a Sponsored Display ad group—including views remarketing, purchases remarketing, and Amazon audiences
  • Help reach audiences who have purchased from specific categories/browse nodes on Amazon, with the ability to refine your selection based on brand, price, star rating, and other filters
  • Easily remarket to audiences who have purchased your promoted products, as well as other related or complementary products
  • Select your preferred lookback window for each audience when using views and purchases remarketing
  • Show ads on Amazon—including on prominent detail page and home page placements wherever they spend time, and on Twitch to reengage audiences throughout the entire shopping and entertainment journey
  • Specify bid amounts and see performance metrics for the audience selected
  • Select one or multiple products to advertise
  • Customize creative using headlines, brand logos, or custom images

To get started with Sponsored Display audiences, sign in to your advertising account.

1 Amazon Internal, June 26 - July 24 2019