Advanced PPC Strategy Articles

Last year, Amazon announced that sellers can now use Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) audiences with Sponsored Ads. This development opened powerful new avenues for brands advertising both on and off Amazon through Sponsored Ads and non-endemic Amazon Demand-Side Platform (DSP) strategies.

This “data store” of shopper information unlocks new advertising and attribution strategies to help you grow sales, increase margins, and secure a competitive advantage—no matter how many products or brands you’re marketing.

The Power of Custom Audiences with Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)

It’s hard to overstate the significance of AMC custom audiences—but Trellis Chief Evangelist Ali Babul comes close when he says, “Your current advertising strategies, with this change that’s come from Amazon, are sufficiently dead.”

For brands and sellers competing for profitable sales, the ability to use Amazon’s first-party data is a genuine game-changer. With AMC, you can create audience groups based on specific shopping behaviors and past interactions with ads to reach the right shoppers at the right time. 

For example, a kitchenware brand can target users who:

• Have frequently viewed toasters
• Spent more than $200 on kitchen gadgets in the past 6 months

With detailed data on customer preferences, you can serve ads that are more likely to convert, stretching your ad budget further.

The benefits extend beyond sales, too. By leveraging first-party data to serve your audience with relevant ad content, you can improve the shopper experience and increase brand affinity.

Custom audience campaigns produced 3.1× higher CVR than interest-based targeting for existing-customer cross-sells.

Amazon custom audiences let you upload your own customer lists, email, phone number, or both, and retarget those shoppers through Sponsored Display. You need at least 1,000+ contacts, and match rates typically land around 10% (higher when phone numbers are included). Custom audiences work best for product launches to existing customers, cross-sells, and re-engagement campaigns that deepen loyalty and drive incremental revenue.

Types of Amazon Marketing Cloud Custom Audiences

With access to Amazon’s deep pool of first-party data, you can tailor your advertising strategies to specific audience segments for better profitability across products and platforms.

AMC Rule-Based Audiences for Sponsored Ads

Rule-based audiences help you create highly targeted campaigns by analyzing different customer attributes. The flexibility of these rules gives you the power to fine-tune your target Amazon audiences, driving better campaign results and Return on Ad Spend (RoAS).

In AMC, you can segment audiences based on dozens of data points, including:

• Behavioral triggers: Actions taken by customers, like specific product views or frequency of visits
• Purchase history: Total spend in a category, Average Order Value (AOV), or purchase frequency
• Engagement patterns: Ad clicks or views
• Demographics: Age, gender, location, etc.

These audience insights can inform a variety of sophisticated advertising use cases, such as:

• Identifying high-value spenders: Find customers who consistently spend above a certain threshold on your products or within a certain category
• Following up with product page abandoners: Target customers who have browsed specific ASINs but haven’t completed their purchase
• Product launch targeting: Serve ads to loyal customers who have yet to try a new product
• Engaging shoppers seasonally: Target users who are more active around specific seasons or sales events and tailor offers according to their shopping habits

For example, a kitchenware brand targeting “high-spending kitchen enthusiasts” might serve ads to shoppers who spent more than $200 on kitchen gadgets in the last six months using these rules: Total Kitchen Category Spend > $200 AND Purchase Date <= 180 days.

AMC Rule-Based Lookalike Audiences for DSP

Lookalike audiences in AMC give you a strategic way to expand your reach by targeting new audience segments that mirror your top existing shoppers.

Build audiences using an AMC seed audience, then target that audience within Amazon advertising campaigns (Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Products, Sponsored Display Ads), as well as outside Amazon’s ecosystem via Amazon DSP campaigns.

Here are a few practical use cases for using lookalike audiences in DSP:

• Scaling customer acquisition: Increase market share by reaching relevant audiences similar to your best customers
• Optimizing retargeting campaigns: Retarget expanded audiences who have shown similar interests but haven’t engaged with your brand
• Building brand loyalty: Encourage repeat purchases by targeting users known for high engagement levels with your products
• Testing new market segments: Experiment in a new geo or demographic segment without starting from scratch

It’s worth a reminder that effective Amazon DSP attribution is one of the keys to successful lookalike audience creation. If you identify your “best customers” with messy or inaccurate data, the audiences based on those customers will fall flat.

Lookalike audiences help you ramp up your reach without sacrificing precision, which is essential to maintaining profitability and increasing Amazon RoAS as you scale.

Sticking with the “high-spending kitchen enthusiast” example, let’s say this campaign is exceeding expectations. Now you can create a lookalike audience based on this one and run it on channels outside Amazon through DSP to drive quality traffic and conversions to your DTC site.

3 Ways to Drive Incrementality with AMC Custom Audiences

Optimizing your advertising strategies across channels is about using all the tools and data at your disposal. Now that one of those tools is AMC audiences, it’s time to put that data to use.

Here are three ways to drive cross-channel incrementality using AMC data.

1. Retarget Your Highest Value DTC Customers

Shoppers who have purchased directly from your website are some of your highest-value customers. By identifying and retargeting them, you can increase their Lifetime Value (LTV) and build loyalty.

Strategy 1: Identify high-value customers

Who are these customers? Start by looking for shoppers who buy often or spend a lot (or both!). Look at metrics like:

• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
• Average Purchase Value (APV)
• Average Purchase Frequency Rate (APFR)

Of course, a customer’s value lies not only in how much they spend and how frequently they shop, but also in how much it costs to acquire them—so Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) must also be factored in.

You can calculate these metrics on your own, but many brands use advanced tools for quick and thorough market intelligence. At Trellis, we’re partial to the golden ratio (LTV:CAC) for targeting customers with the highest long-term value.

📈 Discover why LTV:CAC is the key to profitable Amazon ad campaigns.

Strategy 2: Advanced retargeting

By building high-intent, lookalike and remarketing audiences, you can win more sales on Amazon and beyond. Once you’ve identified your target segments, stay in front of them with these Amazon DSP retargeting strategies:

• Use bid multipliers to target the highest value customers
• Cross-sell complementary products
• Upsell higher-end versions of previously bought items
• Retarget users who abandoned carts or product pages to win back DTC shoppers looking for better pricing or free shipping

A customer might be loyal to your product, but marketplace-agnostic. They may buy your products from your website, on Amazon, or anywhere else that offers them the best deal.

By retargeting high-value shoppers, you can stop the revenue leaks, increase sales, and get a higher return on ad spend over time.

2. Leverage First-party Data for Competitive Campaign Management

You already know that tapping into Amazon’s first-party data can help you outperform the competition, but how effectively are you using that data? 

Building high-intent lookalike audiences can help you refine bids on high-converting segments, ensuring that every ad dollar is spent on the right shoppers at the right time.

We’ve already covered how you can use AMC audience data to remarket for upsells, recover abandoned carts, and attract high-value customers. Now let’s take a look at how you can use it to drive greater efficiency across channels.

Strategy 1: Cross-match DTC first-party data with Amazon data

With more data about customers who are both purchasing or visiting your products, you can go a whole lot deeper with your campaigns. For example, you use your Amazon ads platform to see how a DTC purchase impacts repeat sales on Amazon.

First, cross-reference your DTC data with Amazon purchases to see how many customers switch between platforms. Amazon’s Repeat Purchase Behavior Report helps you track these actions over time.

The easiest way to integrate this data is with a specialized tool like Trellis’ Audience Builder +, which connects the dots between your DTC and AMC data—no SQL queries required.

Strategy 2: Analyze purchase patterns

Using a tool like Trellis, examine which products deliver new-to-brand (NTB) and repeat sales. Consider these data points:

• Purchase frequency: Which ASINs are customers repeat buying the most often?
• New-to-brand sales: Which ASINs are bringing in NTB customers?

Determining your gateway ASINs gives you the opportunity to boost these products and reach high-LTV customers without sacrificing your margins.

For example, Express Medals analyzed cross-channel data to identify the products generating the most new-to-brand sales. Their goal was to strategically target repeat buyers, increase purchase frequency, and grow LTV.

Once they identified their NTB-generating products, they ran Sponsored Product ads as well as DSP retargeting campaigns to the NTB audience segments. The result? A 428% increase in monthly repeat sales. 🤯 

Replicate those results. Read the case study to learn more.

3. Optimize Campaigns Based on LTV, Not Just RoAS

RoAS is important, but campaign optimization based solely on RoAS ignores the nuances of customer value over time. Focusing on LTV incorporates a long-term perspective that better aligns your campaigns with true business objectives.

Try it: Strategic campaign adjustments

For this one, you’ll need to use advanced attribution models based on metrics like LTV by Ad Exposure. These models give you a better idea of how each campaign impacts customer LTV. 

Once you’ve combined your AMC and DTC data to build lookalike audiences, refine your bids based on these long-term value metrics. For example:

• Segment shoppers with high potential for long-term value
• Seed lookalike audiences with these segments
• Set rules to increase CAC for high-LTV customers

Cross-channel incrementality is about using all your data to its full potential to ensure that every aspect of your advertising strategy is delivering the right results.

How to Build Smarter Campaigns with AMC Data

Trellis Audience Builder + makes it simple to pull existing DTC and Shopify audiences into AMC to execute these strategies and bypass your competition. These audiences are updated daily, so you know your data is synched.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Navigate to AMC Audiences > Manage First Party Data
2. Choose between linking your Shopify store or uploading a file
3. Create and name a first-party audience using a Trellis template
4. Link it to your Sponsored Ads or DSP ads account

Once linked, you’ll see your audience's size, as well as the overlap between DSP and first-party data across:

• Categories
• Location
• Age group
• Gender
• Income level
• Education

To use these audiences in a Sponsored Ad campaign:

• Go to the advertising dashboard
• Choose the product category
• Create a Media Plan
• Give it a name
• Give it your ACoS range and budget
• Choose an ad type
• Select the products you want to advertise
• Setup a targeting plan > understand your keywords
• Go into advanced settings
• Scroll down and select the lookalike audience you built off first-party data
• Assign the multiplier you’re willing to pay for these higher-converting users

Bid on the Shoppers that Matter

With AMC audiences, you can use first-party data to remarket, cross-sell, recover abandoned carts, and increase bids on high-value audience segments. It’s one more powerful tool for your arsenal to help you ensure that every ad dollar you spend delivers maximum efficiency and results.Ready to see the impact of intelligent targeting? Trellis’s new Audience Builder + makes integrating your DTC and Shopify data with AMC a breeze. We’ll show you just how easy it is in a quick demo—book yours here.