How to Build Audiences in the Amazon DSP

The Amazon DSP has been steadily emerging as the most impactful way for endemic and non-endemic advertisers alike to target customers wherever they are most likely to be reached and engaged, at any stage of the marketing funnel. Digital ad placements across various devices are placed on Amazon Owned and Operated (O&O) properties and via open exchange (OE) supply source, which is made up of 10,000+ Amazon Publisher Services (APS) partner sites and apps, and millions of publishers part of its third-party ad exchange partners including Google AdX.

Why does building audiences in the Amazon DSP matter?

One of the reasons the Amazon DSP is so powerful is because of its audience availability. Aimed at clearly segmented, highly defined audience groups, advertisers can use the Amazon DSP to build brand awareness, drive engagement, consideration, or re-engagement, and increase sales. And with the Amazon DSP’s various audience groups composed of both Amazon’s first-party customer data and its third-party data – advertisers are able to reach audiences at a granular level across various stages of the funnel. Whether you’re looking to target shoppers who have recently viewed your brand's products but have not yet purchased, who are in the same subcategory, have purchased your product or similar products before, among many other options, the Amazon DSP’s audiences allow advertisers to tailor their audience to their objectives.  

What Amazon DSP Audiences and Targeting Types are available?

Lifestyle

Build brand awareness (top of the funnel) or drive consideration (middle of the funnel) to a new set of customers who are actively shopping in relevant categories to your Amazon products or goods/services on your own website by targeting the Lifestyle audience, whose search and purchasing habits are closely related to broad lifestyle groups. For instance, a lipstick brand may target shoppers who’ve bought eyeshadow, driving the brand-relevant customer to their Amazon Product Detail Page (PDP). A customer who constantly shops for travel-related products on Amazon would very likely be interested in an airline’s link out campaign that leads them to a flight booking page.

In-Market

Attract new-to-brand customers to your Amazon products or goods/services on your DTC sites by targeting an In-Market audience, a more refined version than the Lifestyle audience. Based on the past 30 days’ search and shopping behaviors of potential customers who have shown they are likely to purchase your product, they have recently viewed but not purchased your brand or very similar products from other brands. The likelihood to purchase comes from the fact that they habitually buy from an Amazon subcategory and based on the behaviors of having recently searched for a specific product or browsing a specific category. For example, customers who’ve viewed or bought from Amazon’s Automotive Parts & Accessories category would be “in-market” for a car dealership advertiser to drive interest or consideration to their DTC websites where customers would leave their contact information. On Amazon, customers in the market for baby products may be targeted with products belonging to the cleaning subcategory.

Contextual, Complementary, Cross-Selling, Competitor Conquesting

Endemic advertisers can take advantage of contextual targeting to reach their audience real-time on off-Amazon websites as long as their products are relevant to the content the customers are currently browsing. With ASIN targeting, brands can also grow incremental sales by capturing an audience who has already purchased from them (cross-selling) or viewed and/or bought their competitors’ products (competitor conquesting). Brands targeting customers who have bought complementary products on Amazon not necessarily belonging to them (e.g. customers who bought brand A’s hand soap bar are appropriate for brand B’s hand soap bar holder) is a top of the funnel strategy that helps reach new-to-brand customers.

Retargeting

Brands that sell their products on Amazon can retarget customers who have viewed but not bought their products on their Amazon PDPs. For example, customers who have viewed but not bought a t-shirt on Amazon in the last 30 days make an appropriate audience for this bottom funnel strategy, as they likely have high intent to purchase. In addition, a subset of retargeting, remarketing, is defined as an audience who has purchased your product in the last 365 days but have not yet repurchased within a defined lookback window. For example, customers who’ve bought health supplements within the last year but have not repurchased in the last 90 days, lends itself as the suitable target audience of a bottom of the funnel strategy to move towards repeat purchases.

How can retargeting benefit brands that don’t sell on Amazon? Non-endemic advertisers can build brand awareness for their goods or services towards their audience by initially using pixel or hashed retargeting. Then, these same strategies can be employed to re-engage or drive the same audience, now a bigger pool enabled for retargeting, to consideration. For instance, customers who’ve seen a hotel group’s Facebook ads can be retargeted with a link out ad on the Amazon shopping site leading to that same hotel’s booking webpage.

How to build audiences in the Amazon DSP with Perpetua?

Perpetua's new Amazon DSP Optimization Software allows advertisers to more effectively and efficiently target highly segmented audience groups at every stage of the funnel. 11 pre-built audiences templates designed with targeting best-practices in mind, saves advertisers from spending time in an external workflow to create their desired audience groups. 

In Perpetua you have access to: in-market, lifestyle, demographic, similar product views, search prospecting, competitor conquesting, complementary, contextual targeting, cross sell, retention, and retargeting. With Perpetua’s condensed workflow, you now have the ability to customize every single audience group’s specific attributes in one single step at the beginning, allowing you to build tactical audience groups, the basic building block of an Amazon DSP order creation, with precision and speed, before moving on to the subsequent steps.

Building audiences: endemic advertisers 

Selecting target audience groups is a requirement to launching Amazon DSP orders. The ease of using Perpetua’s Amazon DSP Optimization Software to modify audience groups chosen from existing templates, with each group’s attributes represented by fields that are easy to populate or deselect, allows advertisers to quickly fulfill this prerequisite. Advertisers would select the desired audience groups and then customize the attributes of each one in several steps, save it, then repeat as many times as the number of different audience groups needed. For example, the selection of an “in-market” audience can be further refined by an Amazon subcategory (what they are in “in the market” for), and can exclude those who had: viewed the advertised product in the last 30 days and bought the advertised product in the last 45 days, but to include those who’d purchased competitor products in the last 30 days. This enables the advertiser to capture a very segmented audience further defined by subsequent criteria such as frequency cap or device type, resulting in high targeting accuracy and less inefficient ad spend.

Building audiences: non-endemic advertisers

An advertiser promoting goods or services not sold on Amazon using the Amazon DSP would have to select “website traffic” in the Ad Console early on in audience creation, before being able to customize attributes. To target an additional audience group, the audience creation process mentioned above would have to be repeated. In Perpetua, the same advertiser will find themselves easily selecting a plan that outlines a budget and target for their advertised product or service then the desired target markets which have been defined by funnel. For example, an airline company with a link out campaign on Amazon’s shopping site aiming to drive customers to their website to book flights may select pixel targeting aimed at anyone who had visited it in the last 14 days. This enables re-engaging the right audience who has recently been exposed to the ad to move them lower in the funnel at the right time to drive their consideration of using the service, resulting in higher targeting precision and less inefficient ad spend.

The ability to build granular audiences quickly allows advertisers to drive better results by focusing on what matters. Whether you are selling products on Amazon or promoting goods or services on your own DTC site, the power of Amazon’s DSP cannot be ignored. To learn more about Perpetua’s Amazon DSP Optimization Software, please email us at hello@perpetua.io.