Nearly a year ago, advertisers started to use Amazon Marketing Cloud to create Sponsored Ads audiences.
Since then, it has quietly revolutionized how brands and agencies do business.
AMC audiences have suddenly become table stakes in our industry. If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, AMC audiences should be part of your regular advertising strategy.
You should be layering them into your DSP ads if you run DSP—but also, yes, into your Sponsored Ads campaigns.
The simple truth is that AMC audiences just make your ads a lot more efficient.
At a time when costs are rising and most businesses are counting every dollar to make sure they stay profitable, AMC audiences are a no-brainer cost-saving tool.
When you boost bids on select audiences that see your Sponsored Brands or Sponsored Products ads, or when you directly target certain audiences with your Sponsored Display ads, you make every ad dollar go further.
We’ve watched our clients have a lot of success leveraging AMC audiences through our Intentwise Explore platform.
Here are three ways they have used AMC audiences to get ahead and stay profitable.
Focus on high-value shoppers
If you’re in a high CPC category, it’s inevitably going to cost a lot of money for you to convert a New-To-Brand shopper.
That’s why you want to be absolutely sure that the NTB shoppers you spend money targeting are going to be highly likely to repeat their purchase.
Recently, the agency Nectar wanted to help its client Doctor’s Best, a supplements brand in a high CPC environment, grow more profitably.
Nectar’s solution was to activate AMC audiences of shoppers that appeared likely to become heavy spenders.
Using the pre-built and fully customizable audiences available in Intentwise Explore, Nectar created a series of audiences of high-value shoppers and pushed them to its Sponsored Ads campaigns.
When these valuable shoppers searched the Doctor’s Best keywords, Nectar chose to boost bids by 80%.
Meanwhile, Nectar slashed its baseline bids by 50% on other campaigns.
Bidding up specifically on high-value audiences while cutting base bids meant it could focus its spend on the audiences that work.
Overall, with these new AMC audiences in its arsenal, Nectar drove a 17% increase in New-To-Brand customers for Doctor’s Best. That happened even as its total customer acquisition costs actually went down.
(Read our full case study with Nectar here.)
Expand your reach with lookalike audiences
One great thing about AMC is that, if you have a highly desirable—but relatively small— audience, you can always artificially enlarge it with lookalike audiences.
The coffee brand COLETTI found this out firsthand when it used Intentwise Explore to improve the efficiency of its Sponsored Ads.
COLETTI identified 12 different high-intent shopper segments in AMC that it really wanted to prioritize.
These audiences all focused on shoppers who had in some way engaged with a COLETTI product but not purchased: “Shoppers who viewed a product but did not purchase,” “Shoppers who viewed the product three times but didn’t add to cart,” and more.
In some cases, these were relatively small pools of shoppers. To get the most value out of these audiences, COLETTI added in shoppers who closely resembled these key segments.
In Intentwise Explore, this was as simple as checking a box when creating a new audience.
COLETTI was willing to bid a lot more when those shoppers searched its keywords than when the typical shopper did. The brand bid up 120%.
That spend almost always paid for itself—and then some. In one campaign, a modest 0.5% increase in ad spend resulted in a 5% lift in total sales.
Today, these AMC audiences contribute to 10% of total sales across COLETTI’s top campaigns.
That means the coffee brand was able to use AMC to harness a large cross-section of shoppers that would have fallen through the cracks otherwise.
(Read our full case study with COLETTI here.)
Locate—and exclude—potential subscribers
Other clients have had success using audiences related to Subscribe & Save. This success encompasses both SnS inclusions and exclusions.
First of all: If you sell an item that gets frequently repurchased, like a supplement or a CPG product, you probably have a lot of subscribers.
So when you run retargeting campaigns, you want to be sure you are not advertising to people who already subscribe to your brand.
One client recently used Intentwise Explore to exclude existing SnS customers from its DSP re-targeting campaigns. It saw a massive 15x improvement in ROAS.
That meant there was a lot of wasted spend going to customers who were already loyal—but one AMC audience put a stop to it.
(A quick reminder: you can only exclude audiences for DSP campaigns. Amazon only lets you activate AMC audiences for positive inclusions in Sponsored Ads campaigns.)
AMC audiences can also help affirmatively target potential subscribers. The same client found, through AMC research, that New-To-Brand customers who had purchased in the last 30 days were the most likely to convert into subscribers.
The client ran a big SnS campaign as a follow-on to its New Year’s advertising push.
The client wanted to convert all of those new customers into loyal subscribers—making that original ad spend go even further.
With AMC audiences, it was easy.
