Succeeding with Amazon’s Sponsored Display Audiences

It all starts with a search – but it very rarely ends there. In fact, only 4% of shoppers buy a product after their first search, according to Amazon. On average, it takes shoppers 6 to 7 days to make a purchase. That’s a lot of time to compare options, decide not to purchase or forget about it all together. So how can Amazon sellers and vendors avoid losing customers during the purchase journey? Enter Sponsored Display Audiences – Amazon’s self-service display targeting solution. Powered by first-party shopping signals, Amazon Sponsored Display Audiences allows brands selling on Amazon to remarket to interested shoppers and engage with customers in a more targeted way. This ultimately enables you to reach more relevant shoppers and boost conversions. In this guide, we’ll cover all you need to know about Sponsored Displayed Audiences, including how to start and how to manage this kind of Amazon advertising campaign.

Benefits of Amazon Sponsored Display Audiences

In late 2019, Amazon launched Sponsored Display ads, a self-service advertising solution, giving sellers and vendors a better ability to reach relevant audiences both on and off the platform. Targeting relevant audiences while they’re not shopping on Amazon helps keep your brand and products at the top of their mind. In late 2020, Amazon unveiled Sponsored Display Audiences to give brands even more tools and strategies to win business on the platform. It’s available on both the Amazon Advertising API and the advertising console.

Note: Amazon states that, “with the launch of Sponsored Display audiences, US advertisers will no longer be able to create legacy view campaigns through Sponsored Display. However, these ads will continue to be served with no loss of functionality.”

The Audiences tool delivers many tangible benefits. As the e-commerce giant attests, Amazon Sponsored Display Audiences enables brands to:

• Launch new products more effectively
• Reach and engage new customers
• Re-engage with shoppers throughout the purchase journey
• Scale an advertising campaign for new and established products quickly
• Reduce advertising waste

“For advertisers not yet ready to make the leap to Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP), SD Audiences unlocks the ability to remarket to consumers and allows you to target competitors with ads in key placements on their listing pages. Overall, this can help you capture more market share.”

• Nate Ellis, Senior Director, Strategy & Advertising at Amify

Features of Amazon Sponsored Display Audiences

Amazon Sponsored Display Audiences has various capabilities and tools to help you gain brand recognition, increase product awareness, reach new shoppers, re-engage potential customers and more. Here are the main Amazon Sponsored Display Audiences features:

Views remarketing: Convert more potential customers

One of the most notable features of Amazon Sponsored Display Audiences is the enhanced views remarketing. As an advertising tool within Audiences, views remarketing enables you to:

• Remarket to shoppers who’ve viewed your product detail pages (like with Sponsored Display)
• Remarket to shoppers who’ve viewed other product detail pages (great for audience discovery)
• Win customers who haven’t purchased your advertised products (but have interest)

For example, if you sell watch bands and someone has been searching for watch bands on Amazon, but still hasn’t visited your detail pages, the views remarketing tool lets you place your ad in front of that shopper in several places, including the Amazon homepage, product detail pages and shopping results pages. What makes views remarketing so effective is that you can place your products in front of customers during the critical consideration phase – even when they’re not on Amazon. That raises the likelihood shoppers will choose your product when it comes time to purchase. Through views remarketing, you’re allowed to target audiences who’ve viewed specific product detail pages in the last 30 days but haven’t completed a purchase of your advertised product(s). This can increase brand awareness and drive purchase consideration with audiences you may not have been reaching before. And ultimately, that will lead to more conversions and revenue.

Audience controls: Target more effectively and reach more shoppers

Look at the product detail listing page of one of Amfy’s clients below. The listing has all sorts of data points and information, from brand and product category to price, star rating and Prime shipping eligibility.

.The point is this: Shoppers are first interested in a product because they want or need it. In the case of the KP Bump Eraser Body Scrub, people buy the product to sweep away dry, rough bumps. However, the reason they specifically choose First Aid Beauty’s product could be due to a reasonable price range, good Amazon reviews, trust in the brand name or other factors. So how do you target shoppers who place a higher value on, say, star ratings than price? Or, how do you advertise to those who want to purchase from a reputable brand? The answer is through audience controls, which allow you to customize campaigns based on key detail page attributes, such as product category and price range. For each audience you select, you can use separate bids. Audience controls can help expand the reach of your brand on Amazon. For example, if you sell men’s hair care products, you can capture a broader audience by setting a higher bid to reach audiences who’ve viewed men’s hair care products in the past 30 days. You can even select complementary product categories to cast a wider net.

Engage at scale: Run large advertising campaigns on any budget

With Amazon Sponsored Display Audiences, you can truly scale your advertising campaign. At no minimum spend threshold, you can launch a campaign with up to 10,000 ASINs. Regardless of your company budget or size, you can benefit from using Sponsored Display Audiences.

“Sponsored Display Audiences are a dead-simple way to scale your Amazon advertising. Before Sponsored Display Audiences was made available, you had no way to re-engage visitors or expand ad placement off Amazon.com without leveraging Amazon DSP, which has significant ad spend minimums.”

• Nate Ellis, Senior Director, Strategy & Advertising at Amify

For brands with lots of products, such as Craft, a performance sportswear company, the ability to scale is highly beneficial because of the breadth of their clothing catalog.

Craft could include all these products, and more, in their Sponsored Display Audiences campaign.

While setting up a campaign, brands may encounter difficulties with figuring out what to bid, how to continuously adjust bid values, which ASINs should get the most focus and more. This is where having an Amazon agency like Amify can help you get maximum ROI from your advertising spend. At Amify, we have an expert Amazon ads team that’s ready to help you navigate the advertising landscape and optimize your campaigns.

Customizable creative: Convince customers with ads that delight

Good content always wins. We’ve seen that with good Amazon A+ Content, which has proven to boost conversion by an average of 10%. With ads, it’s no different. A nice image and logo and a solid headline will generate more clicks.

As you can see, MobyFox uses imagery and copy that should catch the attention of Star Wars and Mandalorian fans.

With Amazon Sponsored Display Audiences, you can customize the ad by writing a compelling headline and including your brand’s logo and image. Since certain ad sizes require a logo and headline, we recommend having both for maximum flexibility with your campaign. Want to learn more about the importance of creative design on Amazon? Read our guide on Amazon A+ Content.

Automated deals and savings badging: Reach more shoppers and boost click-through rates

As Amazon notes, “relevant badging, including Deal of the Day, Prime Eligibility, and best-seller status” are automatically added to your ad creative. This badging has a massive positive effect on click-through rates (CTR), with Amazon stating ads with automated badging have a CTR of 42%.

Imagine getting your headphones on the Amazon homepage of a user that’s been searching for headphones. With that “Deal of the Day” badge, your chances of a click and conversion rise considerably.

Needless to say, you can reap the benefits of automated badging. Not only will your products get in front of more people, but more shoppers will click the ads. This inevitably will drive more purchases.

Read about how the new Amazon Climate Pledge Friendly Badge can help your brand.

Retail aware: Maximize advertising campaign efficiency

Sponsored Display Audiences is “retail aware,” which means campaigns automatically pause if, say, your products have sold out. As you may know, selling out of products is common if you’re running an attractive Amazon deal or promotion. The benefits of the retail aware feature of Amazon Sponsored Display Audiences can’t be understated. Customers will no longer click on ads for out-of-stock products (which would be a waste of money since they would be unable to purchase the product). You’ll only pay for clicks that could lead to orders. That helps eliminate waste and maximize use of your marketing and advertising dollars.

Making the most of Sponsored Display Audiences

Amazon Sponsored Display Audiences offers brands another powerful tool to enhance advertising campaigns, expand the marketing funnel and drive greater revenue and profits. For Amazon sellers and vendors, Sponsored Display Audiences should be used alongside Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display product targeting. The benefits are too great to pass on. Since the Sponsored Display Audiences tool is new and Amazon’s advertising landscape and rules change constantly, utilizing it effectively can be a difficult and time-consuming task. To get the best return on your time and money, partner with an Amazon advertising agency like Amify. This way, you can ensure you set up your campaigns properly and continuously optimize while your ads are live. Would you like to learn more about how we can help you leverage Audiences to win over customers? Contact us by clicking the link below.

Drive More Sales with Sponsored Display Audiences