For brands, selling on Amazon isn’t just about listing your products; it’s a complex dance of visibility driven significantly by advertising. Historically, if you’re selling on Amazon, you’re pretty much penciled in to invest in Amazon’s ad products - and there’s no shortage of products available to leverage. Each has their own place in the funnel, but there’s no one size fits all. It’s important for brands to keep their own goals, audiences and budgets in mind when selecting advertising products, but it’s equally as important to be knowledgeable about what each offers.
With this in mind, we’re diving into Amazon’s Performance Plus and sharing what brands need to know.
Performance Plus Overview
Amazon’s Performance Plus is a DSP tool designed to enhance how brands engage with consumers through highly specialized, brand-site centric models. This means ads using Performance Plus aren’t just reading a general audience, they’re reaching a highly targeted audience who are actively engaging with similar products on your brand site, not just Amazon.
Navigating Amazon’s advertising landscape can be a rollercoaster for brands, especially when it comes to direct response and driving traffic to DTC sites. The biggest pain point? Conventional Amazon ads, like DSP or basic search ads, are inherently tuned to favor on-Amazon behaviors and interactions. This means they often fall short when trying to link outside Amazon, typically resulting in underwhelming performance on external DTC sites compared to platforms like Google or standalone DSPs.
Enter Performance Plus, a shift from an Amazon-centric to a client-site-centric audience modeling approach.
This model customizes audience building based on how users interact on the advertiser’s own website rather than how they navigate Amazon. This leads to audiences that are more in tune with the specific behaviors and preferences relevant to the specific DTC sites, not just generic Amazon shopping behaviors.
Advantages of Performance Plus
One of the most exciting and unique features of Performance Plus is its predictive audiences with rapid refresh rates. Unlike traditional platforms where audience data might refresh every 24 hours or even weekly, Performance Plus has an hourly update frequency. This means your campaigns are always informed by the most up-to-date data, allowing for agile adjustments and more precisely targeted messaging.
When pitting Performance Plus against traditional Amazon campaigns, the difference is clear. Performance Plus not only enhances site engagement but also significantly improves the efficiency of ad spend, thanks to its tailored and timely audience refresh rates. This makes it a good tool for brands looking to drive specific actions on their sites rather than general brand awareness.
Looking ahead, Amazon is not stopping at Performance Plus. With upcoming innovations like Brand Plus, which aims to optimize for brand lift and ad recall, Amazon is indicating a shift towards more nuanced and goal-specific advertising tools, empowering brands with precision targeting and improved outcomes.
When to Opt for Performance Plus
Performance Plus isn’t for everyone. It’s best suited for brands that see their D2C site as a pivotal part of their business strategy. If your brand prioritizes direct sales or specific consumer actions through your website, this tool might be the game-changer you need. Additionally, brands that do not sell on Amazon but wish to leverage Amazon's vast data for performance marketing can find great value in Performance Plus.
Amazon's Performance Plus represents a significant leap, offering brands a more robust and effective way to engage consumers directly. As we continue navigating the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape, staying informed and adaptable is key.
What’s Next for Performance Plus
Given the success Amazon has seen with the predictive audience technology powering Performance Plus, they’re working toward bringing this technology to more products, including link-in campaigns. In the near future, instead of using DTC site activity as the seed for audience modeling, individual PDPs on Amazon will most likely be the seed for link-in predictive audiences. This underscores the importance of retail readiness so that AI powering Performance Plus is being given the most comprehensive signals to inform the machine learning model.
Are you ready to take your digital advertising to the next level with Amazon's cutting-edge tools? If so, let’s chat about how Code3 can amplify your brand’s digital strategy with Amazon Performance Plus.