Nectar, an Amazon Advanced Advertising Partner managing more than $2.5 billion in annual client sales, launched Customer Atlas today. The tool extends Amazon Marketing Cloud audience targeting from display into search bidding. As a result, the unit of targeting in Amazon search advertising shifts from the keyword to the shopper.
“The question was never which keywords to buy. It was which shoppers are worth paying more for, and the answer is now something you can act on inside search.” – Youval Peltier, Chief Strategy Officer at Nectar.
Traditionally, Amazon search campaigns bid on words. A brand sets one price for a category term. Consequently, it pays about that price for every click it buys. That holds true whether the shopper is a likely high-value buyer or will never purchase at that price.
Amazon Marketing Cloud made it possible to tell those shoppers apart. However, advertisers have aimed that capability almost entirely at Amazon DSP. For most brands, DSP is the smaller half of their spend. Customer Atlas, on the other hand, points it at the larger half. Amazon Marketing Cloud audience targeting
How Customer Atlas Works
The capability has three parts.
First, a full segment index. The method analyzes up to five years of a brand’s Amazon purchase history. It then indexes that history against all 6,728 audience segments Amazon exposes, including 5,268 in-market and 1,460 lifestyle segments. Instead of picking the few category segments a media plan would typically use, it checks every one. It also corrects for the fact that repeat buyers belong to roughly 10% more segments by default. Otherwise, that gap would create a false signal in every segment measured.
Second, two lists instead of one. The index surfaces segments that concentrate among high-value buyers. It also surfaces segments that concentrate among people who buy once and never return. Most media plans carry the first list. Almost none carry the second. Therefore, most brands pay full rates to reach shoppers their own data already flags as unlikely to return.
Third, activation in search. Both lists deploy as audiences in Amazon DSP. They also work as audience bid modifiers in Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. Advertisers set a low base bid and apply a boost only when a targeted shopper searches. Notably, the setup needs no new campaigns, and the budget is already committed.
The results often contradict what a category plan assumes. In one engagement, the largest audience segment in the category reached 24.9 million Amazon shoppers. Yet it showed no relationship at all to repeat purchase. Meanwhile, far smaller segments predicted repeat purchase strongly.
“Audience targeting on Amazon got classified as a display tactic years ago and nobody went back to check,” said Youval Peltier, Chief Strategy Officer at Nectar. “The question was never which keywords to buy. It was which shoppers are worth paying more for, and the answer is now something you can act on inside search.”
Furthermore, every Customer Atlas engagement ships with a pre-registered test design. It uses one variable per cell and equal budgets across cells. A control cell, which any advertiser could run without Nectar, sits alongside them. Additionally, the team writes decision gates before the first impression serves.
In the first live deployment Amazon Marketing Cloud audience targeting, campaigns using audience bid modifiers cut cost per click by a third. The comparison ran against the same brand’s standard campaigns.
“It is a change to bids on spend that is already happening,” said Harriet Carson, VP of Advertising at Nectar. “It works alongside whoever runs the search account today.”
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News Source: Businesswire.com
