What is Audience Targeting and how does it work?

Audience is another targeting tactic that leverages Amazon signals and user behavior knowledge to target ads to relevant users.

In contrast to other targeting methods that rely on keywords and product categories to match users, Audience Targeting allows you to select user interests and categories that align with your objectives. You can select which audience segments to target based on your product, service, or campaign goal.

What are the different audience segments available?

Amazon audiences: These are a set of pre-built audience segments that cover interests, in-market, lifestyle, and life events audiences.
Views Remarketing audiences: These include users who have viewed your product or a similar product on Amazon.
Purchases Remarketing audiences: These include users who have purchased your product or a similar product on Amazon.

All of these audience segments can be managed using Rule Engine.

Which campaigns support audience targeting?

Sponsored Display campaign type provides the functionality of targeting specific audiences for your ads. Rule Engine supports both CPC and vCPM-based Display campaigns.

Create a targeting strategy in Rule Engine

To get started, select the 'Target' scope while creating a new Rule Engine strategy for your Amazon account. You can access Rule Engine using the menu bar or via this link.

Select the 'Audience' option before clicking on the 'Create Strategy' button.

You can now create your strategy and define different conditions to filter the audiences based on performance, targeting type, etc.

How do the conditions work?

This Rule Engine scope works with the target(audience) report, consequently, the conditions will work at the audience level. It will return performance data of all the audiences that are added as targets in different campaigns and ad groups.

You can work with different attributes and metrics in your conditions. For example, the attribute 'Resolved Expression' is used to define the audience name, while the new 'Audience Targeting Type' attribute gives you the segment that the audience belongs to such as

Interests (these are Amazon pre-built audiences),
Views Remarketing, and
Purchases Remarketing.

You can also access new-to-brand metrics and other basic metrics like impressions, spend, conversions, etc.

Supported actions

Include in report
Modify status (enable or pause a target)
Modify CPC bids (for CPC-based display campaigns)
Modify vCPM bids (for vCPM-based display campaigns)

Automation

You have the option to set up automation that serves various purposes, such as receiving alerts when a specific audience target exceeds your budget or becomes disproportionately costly without delivering substantial results.

Additionally, you ensure that your targets are always on track in terms of performance or spend by defining your own conditions and automating the strategy to update bids and notify you at regular intervals.