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Since its debut at Unboxed last October, the AMC audience integration into Sponsored Ads has gained a lot of momentum. Originally reserved for DSP campaigns, these custom audiences can now be used to enhance Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and select Sponsored Display campaigns.
But instead of direct targeting, AMC audiences function as bid modifiers, allowing brands to prioritize high-value segments like cart abandoners, repeat purchasers, or lookalikes.
It’s a powerful new lever for performance-driven brands, but one that brings added complexity.
In this article, we’ll break down how to apply AMC audiences in Sponsored Ads, covering core features, strategic considerations, and campaign design, as well as use cases from the Acadia team.
Sponsored Ads and AMC: Understanding How Bid Modifiers Work
The integration of Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) audiences into Sponsored Ads represents a pivotal shift, but it functions differently than many marketers may expect.
Unlike Amazon DSP, where advertisers can explicitly target or exclude specific audience segments, Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands operate on a bid modification model when using AMC audiences.
This means advertisers are not selecting a defined group of users to target. Instead, they are signaling to Amazon that they are willing to pay more, via boosted bids, for shoppers who fall within a particular AMC audience segment. The system does not currently support exclusions or negative bidding against these audiences, which limits strategic flexibility but still offers powerful targeting enhancements.
To put it another way: AMC audiences don’t change who you show your ads to—they change how much you're willing to bid when a relevant shopper from that segment sees your ad.
Your ad might appear to a wide range of users, but Amazon prioritizes impressions for users in your boosted segments, assuming all other factors (like keywords and product relevance) remain the same.
Sponsored Display sits somewhere in the middle. It offers more direct targeting capabilities than Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands, but still lacks the full customization of DSP. If precision targeting is your main goal, DSP remains the more powerful option.
That said, the lack of current support for audience exclusions in Sponsored Ads has been flagged as a major limitation. The hope among advertisers is that Amazon will evolve these capabilities, such as adding audience-level exclusions, to better match the nuanced controls already available in DSP. Features like keyword or product negation are already common in Sponsored Ads, so adding audience-level exclusion would be a logical next step.
For now, advertisers can use AMC audiences to increase their bids for high-value segments, but must use creative strategies, like large bid boosts and duplicate campaigns, to more narrowly focus on their ideal customers.
How to Start Integrating AMC Audiences into Sponsored Ads
For many brands, AMC audiences in Sponsored Ads are still an underutilized opportunity. Just months ago, the ability to apply AMC insights to Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands didn’t exist.
Today, advertisers are beginning to realize that AMC audiences can be a powerful tool, not only for targeting but for boosting campaign efficiency across the entire funnel.
But how do you go from not using AMC audiences at all to making them a meaningful part of your strategy?
Define Your Objectives
Before building audiences or launching new campaigns, clearly define what you're trying to achieve:
- Upper funnel goals (e.g., customer acquisition, brand awareness) benefit from lookalike audiences, targeting people who resemble your current purchasers or subscribers.
- Lower funnel goals (e.g. loyalty, repeat purchases, subscribe & save sign-ups) are better served by audiences composed of existing customers, such as high-value purchasers, cart abandoners, or brand searchers.
Your campaign goal will determine which AMC audience segments are most relevant and what type of performance to optimize for.
Build Campaigns Around a Single Audience
At the moment, Sponsored Ads only allow one AMC audience per campaign when using bid modifiers.
This means you’ll need to duplicate and tailor campaigns for each audience you want to test. That may sound cumbersome, but it's necessary to isolate performance and accurately assess impact.
Early on, test a handful of high-potential audiences, such as:
- Purchaser lookalike
- Subscriber lookalike
- High-value customer lookalikes
- Cart abandoners
- Brand searchers
- Customer exposed to upper funnel DSP campaigns
Start with low bids and boost only for the target audience. This will help you identify which audiences respond best without overspending.
Identify Top-Performing Audiences Through Testing
When AMC audience functionality first became available, one proven method involved running “blank” auto campaigns with very low base bids, layered with high bid boosts for specific audiences.
This allowed us to isolate the true impact of each audience on conversion and ROAS.
Over time, patterns emerged: some audiences consistently outperformed others, offering higher conversion rates and better return on ad spend.
Once those winners are identified, they can be scaled into broader campaign structures or layered into existing strategies.
Operationalize with Intent
As you grow more confident, build your AMC audience strategy into your core advertising architecture. Use structured naming conventions, meticulous tracking, and intentional audience-campaign matching to manage complexity. But don’t overengineer and avoid trying to test everything at once.
Focus first on the high-impact audiences that align with your business goals. Then iterate slowly, adding complexity only when justified by results.
This framework doesn’t require a complete campaign rebuild, it’s an iterative enhancement. Over time, AMC audiences can evolve from an experiment to a key performance lever within your Sponsored Ads strategy.
AMC Audience Tiers: What to Prioritize, Test, and Avoid
With AMC audiences now usable in Sponsored Ads, the natural question is: which audiences actually deliver performance, and which are more trouble than they’re worth?
After months of hands-on testing across a variety of brands and verticals here at Acadia, some clear tiers have emerged.
Understanding these tiers can save both time and budget while guiding your audience strategy with confidence.
Tier 1: Must-Use Audiences
These audiences have consistently delivered strong performance improvements, sometimes doubling ROAS or conversion rates in non-branded campaigns.
Purchaser Lookalike Audiences: Built from historical buyers, these segments help you reach new customers who resemble your existing ones. When used in non-branded campaigns, they have shown significant lifts in ROAS and conversion efficiency.
Subscriber Lookalike Audiences: Particularly valuable for subscription-based products or brands with “subscribe & save” offerings. These audiences help bring in high-intent new shoppers who are more likely to commit long-term.
These segments help advertisers focus spend where it's most likely to convert and return value, especially in new customer acquisition and incremental sales.
Tier 2: Worth Testing
Add-to-Cart Audiences: These are great for re-engagement and lower-funnel conversion. By focusing on users who nearly completed a purchase, you're targeting those already primed to buy.
High-Value Customer Audiences: Built from your most loyal and valuable buyers, these audiences help ensure that your budget is concentrated on users most likely to generate long-term revenue.
These audiences can perform well depending on the brand, product category, and campaign structure. Results tend to vary, so they’re ideal for controlled testing.
Tier 3: Avoid
Some audiences sound appealing in theory, but break down in execution. These tend to be too narrow or deliver insufficient scale, making them risky or inefficient to activate.
One-to-One Product Audiences: For example, building an audience of users who purchased just one specific ASIN and targeting them with that same ASIN rarely delivers results. These audiences are often too small or too fragmented, leading to low reach and underperformance.
Hyper-Granular Segments by SKU or Minor Behaviors: Going too deep, such as trying to segment based on customers who bought a product within a certain date range or only interacted once, adds unnecessary complexity without measurable return. These micro-segments typically lack the scale needed for meaningful campaign performance.
Instead, broader audiences—like brand-level purchasers or category-based segments—tend to be more effective and manageable.
When it comes to AMC audiences, start broad and impactful. Focus first on high-performing, well-validated segments that offer both scale and targeting power.
Avoid chasing hyper-specific audiences unless you have the volume, budget, and measurement sophistication to validate their performance.
Iterative Testing Over Full Rebuilds
The key is to treat AMC audience activation as an augmentation, not a complete reinvention of your ad architecture. If you already have Sponsored Products campaigns that are working, the recommended approach is to duplicate those campaigns, apply a relevant AMC audience with a boosted bid, and monitor performance.
For example, if a campaign is performing well for category keywords, clone it, apply a high bid boost to a purchaser lookalike audience, and see how it performs side-by-side with the original.
This method enables you to layer in AMC without disrupting what's already working, while opening a path to potentially lower CPCs and improved ROAS.
A Strategic Add-On, Not a Centerpiece
AMC audiences should be seen as a performance enhancer, not the foundation of your PPC strategy. Their best use is in improving efficiency, reducing CPCs, improving conversion rates, and layering in audience intelligence where it counts. But they’re not meant to replace keyword or product targeting entirely.
The sweet spot lies in combining AMC's precision with the broader scale of traditional targeting. That means running AMC-boosted campaigns alongside your legacy campaigns, refining without sacrificing reach.
Case Study
Efficiency Without Losing Scale
One of the biggest concerns when applying more refined audience strategies is the potential loss of volume. After all, by narrowing the audience, aren’t you also narrowing your reach?
The strategy here was to run AMC-audience campaigns in parallel with legacy campaigns:
- The original campaign continued running broadly, capturing general traffic and maintaining volume.
- The new AMC-layered campaign honed in on high-value users, driving efficiency and better return per click.
By pairing these campaigns together, the brand was able to maintain overall spend levels and reach while simultaneously improving the quality of traffic and reducing wasted ad dollars.
Why This Approach Matters
This dual-track setup reflects a fundamental understanding of AMC’s current limitations and strengths:
- AMC-audience campaigns have less scale by nature, since they filter traffic more narrowly.
- But they offer better targeting, which means lower CPCs and higher conversion rates from the impressions that do happen.
This strategy doesn’t just prove that AMC audiences can drive efficiency; it also shows that you don’t have to choose between scale and precision.
You can have both, as long as you structure your campaigns to balance reach and refinement.
The Evolution of AMC Integration
The core functionality of AMC audiences within Sponsored Ads hasn’t changed dramatically since its launch, but the way advertisers can interact with it has evolved significantly, marking an important shift in accessibility and adoption.
Initially, using AMC for Sponsored Ads required direct access to AMC and knowledge of SQL to build and apply custom audience segments. This made it a powerful but exclusive tool, primarily used by technically advanced teams and agencies with the resources to extract value from the data.
But over the past several months, Amazon has started bringing AMC-style capabilities into the native campaign workflow, making them easier to use and available to a broader range of advertisers.
Amazon’s “New-to-Brand” Bid Boosting Feature
One of the first clear signs of this evolution appeared in Sponsored Brand campaigns, where Amazon introduced a new “new-to-brand” bid boosting feature.
Unlike traditional AMC workflows that require custom audience construction, this feature leverages Amazon’s own audience modeling to identify customers likely to be new to a brand and allows advertisers to boost bids for those users directly in the ad console—no SQL, no AMC instance required.
This shift represents a broader trend: Amazon is taking the insights generated by thousands of advertisers using AMC and packaging the most consistently effective strategies into off-the-shelf, automated tools. In other words, Amazon is watching what works with AMC audiences at scale, and then embedding those features into the Sponsored Ads platform so everyone can benefit, whether or not they have access to AMC.
Keyword Themes
A similar trend is emerging in keyword targeting. Advertisers can now select keyword themes, like “related to my product” or “related to my category,” instead of manually entering exact terms.
This is part of the same movement toward black-box simplicity: using Amazon’s vast data and machine learning to automate the most effective campaign setups, while reducing the manual work required of advertisers.
The end result is a slow but steady “AMC-ification” of Sponsored Ads, where the advanced data logic and audience modeling that once required technical expertise is becoming part of the standard toolkit for all advertisers, baked into the user interface itself.
As this trend continues, the practical impact is clear: in the future, advertisers may no longer need to be AMC experts to benefit from AMC-level targeting. The tools are becoming more intuitive, integrated, and intelligent, lowering the barrier to entry while raising the performance potential.
The Strategic Shift in Amazon Advertising
Amazon’s advertising strategy is undergoing a fundamental transformation, from a model built on keywords and product placements to one increasingly driven by audience attributes and user-level data. This shift is changing not only how campaigns are built, but also what it means to be an effective advertiser on the platform.
In the early days, campaign strategy was simple: choose a list of keywords, apply match types (exact, phrase, broad), and let Amazon decide when and where to serve your ads. Then came advancements like product targeting and merchant feed-driven ads, which allowed for more automated, data-rich advertising experiences.
But now, Amazon is entering a new phase—one where advertisers are bidding not just on search terms or products, but on the behavior and characteristics of the individual shopper.
This emerging model mirrors the logic of programmatic platforms like DSP, where campaigns are built around detailed audience personas and customer signals.
With AMC audiences in Sponsored Ads, advertisers can now apply that same strategic thinking to search and shopping campaigns. For example, instead of only targeting a broad keyword like “protein powder,” brands can boost bids specifically for users who look like past purchasers, high-value customers, or subscribers.
This means advertisers must shift from thinking about what a person searched, to who that person is and what signals they’ve given about their intent or potential value.
The Evolving Role of the Advertiser
As this shift continues, the role of the advertiser is becoming more complex and strategic. Rather than optimizing for share of voice on a keyword, trying to win every impression, advertisers are now focused on winning the right impressions: those tied to shoppers most likely to convert, subscribe, or deliver high lifetime value.
This is a departure from traditional thinking. It's no longer about maxing out visibility across the board. It’s about precision, delivering the most relevant message to the most valuable user at the right time.
In this environment, budget stewardship takes on a new meaning. Advertisers must evaluate each impression not just by click cost, but by the quality and long-term potential of the user behind it.
AMC audiences make it possible to target based on those deeper signals, and that elevates the responsibility and the opportunity for media buyers.
Embracing the New Frontier
The integration of Amazon Marketing Cloud audiences into Sponsored Ads marks an interesting evolution in how advertisers can approach campaign targeting and optimization.
While this new capability introduces added complexity, it also offers outsized rewards for those who apply it thoughtfully. The most successful advertisers will be those who approach AMC audience integration with a test-and-learn mindset, layering it into high-performing campaigns, focusing on well-validated segments, and avoiding the trap of over-segmentation.
In the end, AMC audiences aren't a replacement for traditional Sponsored Ads tactics—they're a high-impact enhancement. When used correctly, they can unlock higher efficiency, better ROI, and smarter allocation of ad spend, helping brands stay competitive in an increasingly data-driven retail media landscape.
Give It a Listen
Interested in this topic? Check out our episode with Acadia's expert Ross Walker and Carlos Sastre on the Ecommerce Braintrust hosted by Julie Spear and Jordan Ripley.
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