Nectar, an Amazon Advanced Advertising Partner, launched Customer Atlas, an Amazon Marketing Cloud capability that changes the unit of targeting in Amazon search advertising from the keyword to the shopper.
Customer Atlas has three parts:
- A full segment index that analyzes up to five years of companies' Amazon purchase history and indexes it against all 6,728 audience segments Amazon exposes, 5,268 in-market and 1,460 lifestyle. It corrects for the fact that repeat buyers belong to roughly 10 percent more segments by default.
- Two lists, not one. The index produces segments that concentrate among high-value buyers and segments that concentrate among people who buy once and never return.
- Activation in search. Both lists deploy as audiences in Amazon DSP and as audience bid modifiers in Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, using a low base bid with a boost applied only when a targeted shopper searches.
"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, in a statement "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."
Every Customer Atlas engagement ships with a pre-registered test design: one variable per cell, equal budgets across cells, a control cell any advertiser could run without Nectar, and decision gates written before the first impression serves.
"It is a change to bids on spend that is already happening," said Harriet Carson, vice president of advertising at Nectar, in a statement. "It works alongside whoever runs the search account today."