Adding an audience from Amazon Marketing Cloud to your Sponsored Ad campaigns is one of the best ways to improve performance. But sometimes AMC audiences aren’t worth the hassle.
For as powerful as AMC audiences for Sponsored Ad are, they ultimately work best at scale. Before you create an AMC audience, you have to ensure it is large enough to be worth your time.
Think about bid boosting, where you bid up whenever a shopper from a pre-defined AMC audience searches one of your terms.
Bid boosting works. If you do it right, a shopper in your AMC audience is more likely to purchase from you than a typical shopper who searches one of your key terms. That’s why they’re usually worth the extra spend.
But for every given shopper, the increase in conversion rate is only marginal. Extrapolated across only a few thousand people, in other words, your ACOS or ad revenue numbers won’t look so different with an AMC audience than without.
You only start to reap the real rewards at scale. Across hundreds of thousands or millions of shoppers, you see major improvements in efficiency and ad revenue.
That means creating AMC audiences for Sponsored Ads is only worth it to you when you have a big audience pool.
How do I know if AMC audiences are worth the effort?
Technically, you only need to have over 2,000 shoppers to execute an AMC audience. But just because an audience will run doesn’t mean it’s worth running.
You can only run one AMC bid boosting audience per campaign, so activating a very tiny audience is a wasted opportunity.
There’s no hard-and-fast rule for assessing worthwhile audience size. It depends a lot on the scale of your brand, the strength of the audience (how high-converting is it?), and your campaign goals.
Generally, we recommend having at least 10k shoppers in your AMC audience before you consider pushing it to your Sponsored Ads campaign.
Remember, however, that this is a dynamic calculation and it depends on a number of different factors.
Your campaign spend and impression count is just as important as your audience size.
There isn’t really a point in attaching an AMC audience to a low-impression campaign, for the same reason as there’s no point in using a small audience. If only a tiny number of shoppers are even engaging with a campaign, then you won’t see very impressive returns from bid boosting.
Similarly, at least to start, you should be prioritizing audiences for your high-spend ad campaigns. Many brands we work with reserve these audiences for their top 10 campaigns.
AMC audiences are really great at deepening the efficiency of already strong campaigns.
My AMC audience is small—can I expand it?
Let’s say you’ve identified an audience that you really want to bid boost on, such as a group of high-value shoppers.
You know that, if your audience pool is only, say, 4k shoppers, bid boosting probably isn’t going to drive very good returns. It’s just too small of a number.
Is there anything you can do?
The good news is, you can artificially inflate the size of your audience through lookalikes.
To return to the previous example, you can inflate the size dramatically by adding in a lookalike audience of your high-value customers.
If you want to stay conservative about lookalike audiences, no problem. In Intentwise Explore, you can select the MOST_SIMILAR lookalike audience, which means you’ll only reach the 500k-1M shoppers who most closely match your existing pool.
Pair those lookalike shoppers with your existing pool of high-value shoppers, and all of a sudden you have a group of over half a million valuable shoppers that you’re bidding up on.
You can apply this logic to any audience group you’re trying to prioritize. Let’s say you’re re-targeting shoppers. You might create an AMC audience of shoppers who viewed your product page but didn’t purchase.
That’s a very high-intent group, and those shoppers are probably worth the elevated bid to get them to see your ads. But depending on the size of your brand, you might only have a few thousand shoppers who fit that criteria.
The solution: Find shoppers who match the profile of your product page viewers through lookalike audiences.
Of course, the one note of caution here is to watch the size of your AMC audiences. If you have a limited budget, you don’t want to spend too much extra money on bid boosting.
That’s what’s so great about lookalike audiences: You get to choose how big you want your audience to be.
