Nectar Launches Customer Atlas, Extending Amazon Marketing Cloud Audience Targeting From Display Into Search Bidding
A new Amazon Marketing Cloud capability that indexes a brand’s purchase history against all 6,728 Amazon audience segments and applies the results to search bids, where most Amazon ad budget sits.
Nectar, an Amazon Advanced Advertising Partner managing more than $2.5 billion in annual client sales, has launched Customer Atlas. The new Amazon Marketing Cloud capability changes the unit of targeting in Amazon search advertising from the keyword to the shopper.
Search campaigns bid on words. A brand sets one price for a category term and pays roughly that price for every click, whether the shopper is a likely high-value buyer or someone who will never buy at that price point. Amazon Marketing Cloud can tell those shoppers apart, but in practice it has been aimed almost entirely at Amazon DSP, the smaller half of most advertisers’ spend. Customer Atlas points it at the larger half.
Key takeaways
- Customer Atlas indexes up to five years of a brand’s purchase history against all 6,728 audience segments Amazon exposes.
- It builds two lists: segments that concentrate among high-value buyers, and segments of one-time buyers to suppress.
- Both lists run as audience bid modifiers in Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, with no new campaigns required.
- In the first live deployment, audience bid modifiers cut cost per click by a third against the brand’s standard campaigns.
How Customer Atlas works
The capability has three parts.
| Part | What it does |
|---|---|
| Full segment index | Indexes up to five years of purchase history against all 6,728 Amazon segments (5,268 in-market and 1,460 lifestyle), correcting for repeat buyers belonging to roughly 10% more segments by default |
| Two lists, not one | A targeting list of segments that concentrate among high-value buyers, plus a suppression list of segments tied to people who buy once and never return |
| Activation in search | Both lists deploy as Amazon DSP audiences and as bid modifiers in Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands: a low base bid, boosted only when a targeted shopper searches |
The suppression list is the part most media plans miss. Without it, brands pay full rates to reach shoppers their own data already marks as unlikely to return. No new campaigns are required, and the budget is already committed.
What the data shows
The results often run against what a category plan assumes. In one engagement, the largest audience segment 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.
“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.”
Youval Peltier
Chief Strategy Officer, Nectar
Built to be tested
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. In the first live deployment, campaigns using audience bid modifiers cut cost per click by a third against the same brand’s standard campaigns.
Availability
Customer Atlas launched on 14 October 2026. Engagements begin with an audience analysis of the brand’s existing Amazon account. Harriet Carson, VP of Advertising at Nectar, described it as a change to bids on spend that is already happening, one that works alongside whoever runs the search account today.
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