Regardless of size or category, all sellers share a need to better understand their customers in order to provide tailored product selections, maintain a competitive position and grow their business.

Amazon offers free shopping audience insights across consumer demographics and lifestyle preferences to empower sellers to explore ways to position their products before investing or advertising with Amazon. Here’s a couple examples of the powerful insights you can learn from Amazon shopping audience Insights:

• 38% of skin care shoppers self-identify as male shoppers ~ consider your next targeting: Men shopping for anniversaries and birthdays.
• 33% of Kitchen/Storage shoppers are considering taking a cruise ~ consider shopper interested in travel and leisure
• 50% of top spenders are into wine and salty snacks, and 50% are gift givers ~ consider targeting: Wine accessory category and top spenders audience for holiday anniversaries, and birthdays.

Sellers and brands have found that using retail shopping insights to find and engage their customers at the point of purchase can be the most effective pillar of their marketing strategy. A recent user research study found that participants ranked “increasing sales of a specific product” as their top business strategy objective (60%). Yet, participants also reported seeking brand growth to reach first time shoppers (51%), increasing category sales (45%), and driving awareness of new products (25%) as key objectives. Within the study, it was shown that participating sellers struggled to achieve these goals without knowing when, where, or how much to invest in each strategy, and could not articulate what goals to focus on.

That’s where the shopping audience insights comes in.

The shopping insights provided in Ads planner can help address these challenges by answering two key questions:

1. How big is my potential customer base?
2. Where are they in their purchase journey?

With ads planner, you can consider the opportunity for your brand by exploring the shopping intents and behavioral attributes associated with different retail categories and the products you wish to promote.

Define the right shopping audience for your brand

There are three shopping audiences for you to consider when connecting your brand:

1. Conversion and loyalty
2. Consideration
3. Awareness

Conversion and loyalty

Start by identifying the set of products you wish to promote. These are the products you wish to sell, drive traffic to, and increase conversions on. For those products, ads planner will tell you the estimated shopping audience sizes for 1) Those who have already purchased (Loyalty) and 2) Those who visited the product detail page but did not yet purchase (Conversion). Together, these represent the consumers that have already engaged with your brand, and this information helps you think about the opportunity for marketing to drive conversions.

Consideration

Customers in the consideration phase have been searching for products similar to yours, but haven’t explicitly engaged with your brand’s products. They’re shopping in your aisle, but haven’t yet considered placing your products into their cart. This audience helps you understand the opportunity for creating new-to-brand customers with marketing investments to drive brand consideration. Typically, you’d select the appropriate Amazon retail category for where you want your products to be listed, but based on the products you wish to promote, ads planner will offer suggestions for the product categories that most closely align. You can also search for, and add additional categories that you find to be most relevant. Ads planner also provides detailed demographic and behavioral attributes so you can better understand who is shopping in your aisle.

Awareness

These are the customers who aren’t yet aware of your products and haven’t shopped in your product category/aisle. These users match your ideal customer’s lifestyle, but aren’t part of your purchase or consideration audiences. This audience helps you understand the opportunity to grow New-to-Category customers with marketing to build awareness.

If you have any questions and are interested in learning how to build your shopper audience insights report, please attend our Ask Amazon event scheduled for 8/29 here in the forums! If you are planning to attend Accelerate (9/17-9/20), come find us at Accelerate, using this link to register!