One of the most effective advertising tactics for brands is to isolate your best shoppers, and simply create an audience that looks like them.
We’ve found again and again that creating lookalike audiences is one of the most powerful use cases of Amazon Marketing Cloud—but these audiences are still woefully under-leveraged in our business.
Think of it like this. With lookalikes, you can take your best groups of shoppers—shoppers who bought from you in the last six months, for instance, or who have a high life-time value—and automatically target others that look like them.
It’s the closest thing to a surefire success that we have in the world of Amazon ads.
This is a strategy that you shouldn’t be skipping out on. And luckily, we just released a new feature in Intentwise Explore, our platform to supercharge your use of AMC, that makes it far easier to deploy lookalike audiences at scale.
What is a lookalike audience?
When you create a lookalike audience, Amazon is essentially taking that pool of shoppers you first selected and finding other shoppers that have a lot in common with them.
This process happens instantly and in the background—and you can create a lookalike of pretty much any audience you like.
You can create lookalikes of simple audiences, like people who added a product to your cart.
Or you can go very granular, and create a lookalike audience of shoppers who purchased from you after seeing exactly 2 of your streaming TV ads.
Whatever audience you dream up, you can probably replicate it with AMC. In Intentwise Explore, we do this for you easily. Every time you create an audience, you can automatically select to create lookalikes.
You can also select the ideal size for that audience. Choose how precise you want this new set of shoppers to be, from “most similar” to “most broad.” The more specific the match, the fewer shoppers you will have in your audience.
Here’s how the size of your audience varies based on the precision of the match:
- MOST_SIMILAR: 500k to 1M
- SIMILAR: 1.5M to 3M
- BALANCED: 2M to 5.5M
- BROAD: 2.5M to 7.5M
- MOST_BROAD: 3M to 10M
Why use lookalike audiences?
Lookalike audiences offer a great way to expand the scope of your existing customer base.
They are especially helpful if you have a small but powerful group of shoppers you really want to expand.
Let’s say you want to expand your number of Subscribe & Save customers. Unless you’re a major brand, you probably don’t have that many subscribers in the first place.
But just by creating even a “most_similar” match lookalike audience in AMC, you’ll suddenly have a group of 500k+ shoppers who look a lot like your existing subscribers.
This is a powerful group to advertise to.
And remember, these audiences can be used across all parts of your ad funnel. You can directly target these audiences with DSP or Sponsored Display ads, or you can increase your bids for these audiences on Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads.
Either way, using lookalikes allows you to get a lot more strategic with your ad spend. You probably will be willing to bid higher on a lookalike audience of your SnS customers, for instance. Those shoppers, if you convert them, are likely to be highly valuable to you.
What about lookalikes of your first-party shoppers?
So far, we’ve been talking about lookalikes of pre-existing Amazon audiences. But AMC also lets you generate lookalikes of your first-party shoppers.
If you upload your first-party data to AMC, which is a process that Intentwise supports and accelerates, you can create groups of shoppers who resemble your first-party shoppers.
Let’s say you want to run Amazon ads targeting shoppers who look like your newsletter shoppers. You can easily do this with AMC.
Or let’s say you want to exclude audiences that look like the people who buy from your DTC site, so as not to potentially cannibalize sales that might go to your DTC site. Creating lookalikes is the simplest way to do this.
What are the limits of lookalike audiences?
Lookalike audiences will probably give you a very good return on investment.
Since you’re reaching people based on the shared attributes they have with your existing shoppers, you can assume they will probably convert at a higher rate than if you were to run ads to just anyone.
What lookalike audiences can’t do, however, is help you reach an entirely new demographic of people. Ultimately, when you create a lookalike, you’re just doubling down on what is already working.
Let’s say your core shopper base is dads in the Midwest. There are, of course, a lot of dads in the Midwest—and by creating lookalikes of your existing customers, you are certainly reaching more net-new shoppers.
But you aren’t actually expanding the type of people who shop from you.
Maybe your product could also have a lot of appeal to single women in California, if you just slightly refine your pitch. Lookalike audiences can’t tell you that, or can’t help you find new pockets of customers that you wouldn’t have envisioned yet.
So lookalike audiences are excellent for doubling down on what is working. With lookalikes, you can easily scale your existing strategy. What they can’t do is introduce you to new types of marketing strategies or new audiences for your product.
