Every smart Amazon seller knows that the foundation for successful advertising is knowing your target audience and how to reach them.
During the dawn of Amazon ads, it was a relatively simple task to figure out. Keyword targeting was predominately used to target online shoppers searching for a seller's products.
In recent months, Amazon advertising has expanded their capabilities to include more tools to help sellers to find their audiences. These new tools help sellers to target shoppers earlier in their buying cycle. Sellers are able to utilize Amazon ads as a way to help shoppers discover and then consider buying their products.
In this blog, you will discover how to effectively identify and target your audience with Amazon advertising.
It doesn't matter what product you are selling on Amazon; you will have an ideal target audience of potential buyers for it.
By definition, a ‘target audience’ consists of a group of people defined by certain demographics and behavior traits. Knowing your target audience and how to reach them, is arguably the most important step when creating a successful marketing strategy.
Sellers must uncover the needs and motivations of their audiences, so that they can grow to understand what factors influence their potential customers' buying behaviors.
Amazon has introduced several new features within Amazon DSP to help sellers to better engage potential customers, so that their advertising campaigns are more effective for generating sales.
Affinity Overlap Audiences
Overlap reports are the ideal way for sellers to discover which audiences they should be including within their Amazon advertising campaigns. They help to extend a seller’s campaign reach with overlapping audiences.
The Affinity Overlap Audiences feature is available to sellers that have access to DSP. It helps sellers to tap into very broad audiences who at some point, may be interested in purchasing their products.
This report can be used to understand the relationships between a brand’s target audience and other audiences on Amazon. The metric to study is the Affinity score, which measures audience overlap and the similarities between this overlapping audience and the audience which was already chosen when creating the report.
Sellers can also use this report to provide insight into other ancillary audiences on Amazon that are likely to buy a competitor’s products, and then targeting these audiences.
Category Targeting Amazon
Inside of Sponsored Display there are three tools that Amazon has recently provided sellers with to help them to ‘cast a wide net’.
The first is…
Interests
These are the audiences that have shown up recently inside of Sponsored Display ads. Interest-based audiences allow sellers to help raise awareness with prospective customers based on what they frequently browse and buy. Sellers can get in front of shoppers very early in the buying cycle by targeting interests that are directly and loosely related to their category.
Next, is…
Lifestyle
Positioned for awareness campaigns, these audiences reflect a variety of aggregated shopping and viewing behaviors. These behaviors reflect shared preferences and map to lifestyle segments. This tool allows sellers to target very broad audiences to test which ones might have an interest in their products.
The third tool is…
Life Events
Life events audiences give you the opportunity to drive awareness and consideration for relevant products based around life moments, such as “traveling soon” for shoppers going on vacation. This tool also helps sellers to explore reaching different audiences to increase their reach.
Discovery Audience
The Discovery Audience feature is used to go after a much more specific audience than Affinity audiences. While the seller's goal is still to widen the potential audience for their products, that audience is more drilled down and niche specific. Seller are seeking to target niches that are related to their products, where they can be 'discovered' by new audiences.
Consideration Audience
With the Consideration Audience feature, sellers are seeking to build relationships with potential customers when they’re already in the market for their products. Using this tool, they seek to establish as many touch points as possible with relevant audiences.
By targeting Consideration audiences, sellers want to get potential customers to start thinking about their products and look for more information about them. Consideration advertising is focused upon introducing new audiences to a seller’s products and then building lasting connections with them.
Sellers want to show up multiple times in front of hyper-relevant audiences so that their products are chosen over their competition’s products.
Amazon provides these tools to help with this objective called Similar To Advertised Audience:
The final tool is Searches. With it, sellers can target shoppers that have previously searched with keywords relevant to their advertised products, engaging them during the Consideration phase.
Sellers who fail to establish (and grow) their target audiences are at risk down the road, for significant losses because of poorly performing ad campaigns and wasted Ad Spend.
Use these recent Amazon advertising tools in order to gain a better understanding of who your potential customers are, their needs, and to improve your reach to them. Alternatively, you can have a company like PPC Entourage manage your ads for you.
