The new power of AMC Audiences for Sponsored Ads: Marketing to “who” instead of “where”

Amazon’s recent announcement of AMC capabilities extending to Sponsored Ads has fundamentally shifted how advertisers market to shoppers at the point of purchase and beyond. Advertisers now have the opportunity to build AMC Audiences comprised of who should be seeing an ad based on behavioral insights rather than having to target where placements appear (such as on keywords that advertisers hope high-intent shoppers see), increasing the precision of lower-funnel efforts like never before.

This blog covers the value of AMC Audiences and behavioral targeting throughout the purchase journey for advertisers, how AMC Audiences for Sponsored Ads changes the lower-funnel piece of the puzzle, and Flywheel’s new AMC Audiences for Sponsored Ads product built to streamline audience creation for Sponsored Ads campaigns.

To learn more about Flywheel’s AMC Audiences for Sponsored Ads, head to the bottom of this blog. For the story of how we got to this point and why AMC Audiences for Sponsored Ads is such a big deal, keep reading.

Why are AMC Audiences valuable to advertisers?  

The Amazon Marketing Cloud is a data clean room that allows advertisers to securely access anonymized user-level data, helping brands to unlock the power of connecting SKU to Customer ID (purchase data + behavioral data, at the consumer level). Layering ad-attributed data on top of this, advertisers have the ability to see who is purchasing what and where, and what media touch points truly contributed to the end sale.

With these insights, advertisers can build AMC Audiences based on these specific behaviors, making marketing efforts much more precise. With increased marketing precision and enhanced measurement capabilities thanks to the clean room element of AMC, advertising can become much more intentional and results-driven, and goals are more efficiently achieved. In fact, the beauty of AMC is that with this level of measurement and marketing granularity, you may discover that your goals need to shift based on what metrics should matter for the long-term growth of your business.

Audiences have always been a critical piece of upper-funnel advertising via ADSP, but the signals within AMC that can be tapped into to build custom audiences provide advertisers with more features and levers to work with, helping to elevate your approach with those precise goals in mind. AMC Audiences historically could only be marketed to via ADSP, but this is no longer the case – keep reading to learn about this massive unlock for advertisers and what we’ve built to support this new capability.  

The evolution of how and where AMC Audiences can be used  

As mentioned above, AMC Audiences could previously only be marketed to via ADSP campaigns. This was great, however, there was still a gap in precision as consumers moved through the funnel toward purchase and loyalty.

This brings us to talking about how marketing to consumers via Sponsored Ads has traditionally worked. Advertisers had to rely on achieving placements on highly searched keywords because that was the best way to measure consumer intent. With search still the driving behavior of how shoppers interact with Amazon.com, advertisers had to aim for placements on highly searched keywords hoping that their products would place in front of eyeballs with purchasing intent for that term.    

Imagine, though, if instead of targeting where your ads show up (i.e.: on a highly searched keyword relevant to your product), you could show your ads to those who are more likely to make a purchase based on previously demonstrated behaviors.  

Advertising to high-intent audiences vs. keyword-based placements  

With the launch of AMC Audiences for Sponsored Ads, advertisers now can market to defined audiences with high intent, or, to who they want to market to.  

Most brands’ budgets lean heavily on the search side, and this capability expansion means that advertisers can maximize those search investments and connect the dots of each shopper’s purchase journey.

Here’s the specifics on AMC Audiences for Sponsored Ads:  

1. AMC Audiences can be used to market to shoppers who have exhibited specific behaviors via Sponsored Display  

2. AMC Audiences can be used to boost bids for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands  

Using AMC Audiences to market to shoppers exhibiting similar behaviors via Sponsored Display is a great tactic for brands with more budget to work with in Sponsored Display than Amazon DSP, and it can also be done on a CPC basis. But what we’re excited about is the ability to boost bids for specific audiences via Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands (“targeting” in the traditional use of the word via AMC Audiences is not yet available for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, but boosting bids for those placements is a highly pinpointed action).  

Let’s say that many shoppers have viewed an ad for your brand before but haven’t yet purchased a product. When combined into an AMC Audience, you can then boost the bid for your product to place when these shoppers search for a relevant term. These shoppers would be past the awareness stage having seen your ad before, therefore it may be worth boosting the bid for your product to place in search because the chance of conversion is increased for these likely new-to-brand shoppers.  

Multiple audiences can also be combined and then used for bid boosting. If multiple shoppers have viewed your ads before, have viewed your PDP, and have maybe even added products from your brand to cart before, these shoppers can be combined into a custom AMC Audience and would likely be worth a significant bid boost to place in search based on the multiple indicators of getting closer to making the purchase.

Beyond converting new-to-brand shoppers, advertisers can also build customer long-term value more efficiently by guiding shoppers beyond just one purchase toward loyalty. New-to-brand shoppers can be further reached with messaging encouraging SNS subscriptions, turning these shoppers into product lovers who can then be prompted to explore more items from the brand. For products that don’t make sense for SnS, advertisers can still create AMC Audiences with messaging encouraging brand exploration, overall guiding all shoppers to be brand loyalists with higher long-term value.

Flywheel’s AMC Audiences for Sponsored Ads Solution  

You may be thinking that all of this sounds great. But where do I start?  

With an AMC instance set up, any brand can go into the AMC console and explore some of the pre-built, templated queries and audiences that Amazon offers to advertisers who don’t have advanced coding skills. However, these audiences are not custom enough to meet as specific of objectives throughout the purchasing journey that we’ve described in this blog and are not taking advantage of the full scope of what AMC Audiences can be.  

That’s where we come in, and that’s why we've launched our AMC Audiences for Sponsored Ads. These are templated audiences built by our AMC experts to help you guide new-to-brand shoppers > product lovers > brand explorers > brand loyalists and beyond. We've identified what behaviors lead to meaningful results and have used those behaviors to inform how we've built these audiences. To bring a use case of one of these audiences to life, imagine an advertiser's goal is to turn new-to-brand shoppers into product lovers or even brand loyalists who sign up for Subscribe and Save on a product. An SnS Willingness and/or SnS Purchasers Lookalike AMC Audience for Sponsored Ads can be utilized to reach high-intent shoppers (based on behaviors they've shown indicating a willingness or likelihood to sign up for SnS) with personalized messaging encouraging SnS at scale. Marketing to these shoppers is a much more efficient use of your advertising dollars than just targeting a keyword placement.

These audiences empower brands to explore reaching high intent shoppers with precision on their own, or Flywheel can of course entirely handle this for you. As always, Flywheel’s AMC team can also develop bespoke audiences to market to or boost bids based on highly specific/nuanced desired outcomes – so reach out to us if you’re ready to dig in even deeper.  

Want to see success stories of our AMC Audiences for Sponsored Ads in action? Check out these case studies.

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