Nectar, an Amazon Advanced Advertising Partner managing more than $2.5 billion in annual client sales, launched today Customer Atlas, an Amazon Marketing Cloud capability that changes the unit of targeting in Amazon search advertising from the keyword to the shopper. The capability indexes a brand's own purchase history against all 6,728 audience segments Amazon exposes, builds both a targeting list and a suppression list, and applies them where the majority of Amazon advertising budget actually sits.
Amazon search campaigns bid on words. A brand sets one price for a category term and pays approximately that price for every click it buys, whether the shopper is a likely high-value buyer or someone who will never purchase at that price point.
Amazon Marketing Cloud made it possible to tell those shoppers apart. In practice, that capability has been aimed almost entirely at Amazon DSP, which for most advertisers is the smaller half of their spend. Customer Atlas points it at the larger half.
The capability has three parts. A full segment index analyzing up to five years of a brand's Amazon purchase history and indexing it against all 6,728 audience segments rather than selecting few category segments. It corrects for fact that repeat buyers belong to roughly 10% more segments by default, an adjustment that otherwise manufactures false signal. Two lists, not one, producing segments that concentrate among high-value buyers and segments that concentrate among people who buy once and never return. Activation in search deploying both lists as audiences in Amazon DSP and as audience bid modifiers in Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, using low base bid with boost applied only when targeted shopper searches.
What the method surfaces is routinely the opposite of what a category plan assumes. In one engagement, the largest audience segment available in the category reached 24.9 million Amazon shoppers and showed no relationship at all to repeat purchase, while far smaller segments predicted it strongly.
"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. "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, VP of Advertising at Nectar. "It works alongside whoever runs the search account today."
About Nectar
Nectar is a full-service e-commerce performance marketing agency for mid-market and enterprise brands, managing more than $3 billion in Amazon sales across 200+ brands and $250M in ad spend. Founded in 2018 by former Amazon sellers, Nectar combines an in-house creative studio, marketplace advertising, retail operations, and its proprietary iDerive analytics platform under one roof.
