Choose your target wisely

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🎯Choose your target wisely

Amazon Marketing Cloud’s latest update looks like another targeting feature.

It isn’t.

For the first time, AMC custom audiences and lookalikes can be activated inside Sponsored Products, the campaign type where most Amazon brands spend the majority of their ad budget.

That changes one important question.

You’re no longer deciding who to target. You’re deciding which customers teach Amazon who to target next.

Every customer in your seed audience becomes training data. The quality of tomorrow’s targeting depends on the quality of the customers you let into that dataset.

Stop feeding the algorithm every purchase.

A purchase proves someone converted.

It doesn’t prove they’re the customer you want more of.

A discount hunter who never returns teaches Amazon something very different from someone who buys at full price, leaves a detailed review, reorders and never requests a refund.

Instead of building audiences from all purchasers, build them from customers who demonstrate conviction after the sale. Repeat purchases, thoughtful reviews and meaningful post-purchase engagement are stronger predictors of future high-value customers than the purchase itself.

Solve the real bottleneck.

The challenge isn’t building an AMC lookalike.

It’s creating a large enough pool of high-conviction customers to build one from.

Most brands wait months for enough detailed reviews and engaged buyers to accumulate naturally. That means their targeting model is learning from weak signals for far longer than necessary.

This is where Stack Influence changes the equation. Instead of hoping enough ideal customers appear over time, creators purchase your product on Amazon, genuinely use it, leave detailed experience-based reviews and create original content. You’re not just generating reviews. 

You’re accelerating the exact behavioral signals AMC uses to identify and find more customers like them. Every campaign strengthens the training data behind your highest-spending Sponsored Products campaigns, creating value long after the creator campaign ends. 

Before your next Sponsored Products budget cycle, build the audience Amazon actually deserves to learn from. You can sign up in the next two weeks and take 10% off your first campaign.

Keep raising the bar.

As your catalog grows, become more selective about who enters the seed.

Better algorithms don’t come from more customer data. They come from better customer examples.

The brands that win with AMC won’t have the biggest audiences. They’ll have the best teachers.

Together with Billo

Half of the top UGC ads share 3 hook types. Most marketers skip all of them.

Billo analyzed every top-performing creator ad on the platform and tagged each one by hook type. The hooks most marketers default to - list formats, FOMO framing, comparison setups, and insider angles barely showed up at the top.

The three that won are in the full breakdown, with the exact lines those ads opened with.

Read it before your next round of creator ads.

🤖 Google Brings More Visibility to Performance Max 

Google is expanding both AI-powered advertising and campaign reporting, with AI Mode showing ads on more searches while Performance Max now reports product data across all eligible networks.

The Breakdown:

AI Mode Ad Growth - Google AI Mode displayed text ads on 29.45% of commercial queries in SE Ranking's study, with keywords costing $10+ CPC showing ads on 53.56% of searches.

Ads Don't Boost Visibility - Buying AI Mode ads did not improve AI citations or organic rankings. Only 11.53% of advertiser domains appeared as cited sources, while about 85% didn't rank organically for the same queries.

PMax Reporting Expands - Google expanded Performance Max product reporting to include all eligible networks, including Search, Video, App, and Demand Gen campaigns, providing a broader view of product performance.

Reporting Metrics Shift - Advertisers may notice sudden increases in impressions, clicks, conversions, and other metrics, but Google says these reflect expanded reporting coverage rather than improved campaign performance.

Google is separating AI advertising, AI visibility, and organic search into distinct channels while giving advertisers more comprehensive measurement across its ad ecosystem. Brands should evaluate reporting changes carefully and avoid comparing new Performance Max data directly with historical results.

👨‍💻 Quick Hits 

💡 Your AI can talk email strategy all day, but it cannot open your platform, pull live data, and build the campaign while you watch. Omnisend MCP gives Claude or ChatGPT direct access to your live campaigns and automations, so the only thing left is saying go. Migration is free for 5 days, and your bill drops up to 35%. Connect Omnisend to your AI and run your first prompt today.

🛍️ Google will automatically enable Local Inventory Ads for eligible Shopping campaigns from August 31, replacing the old “Local products” setting with a new Inventory filter to manage online and in-store inventory separately.

📺 Netflix logged 97 billion viewing hours in the first half of 2026 as Q2 revenue rose 13%, while its advertising business continued to scale rapidly, with the company remaining on track to generate $3 billion in ad revenue this year.

🤖 X is testing Grok inside Ads Manager, giving advertisers an AI assistant that offers campaign recommendations, creative ideas, and optimization guidance as the platform moves toward fully AI-powered ad creation and management.

🚫 X is tightening its creator rewards program by removing engagement baiters and content thieves, using improved AI detection to shift over $1 million in payouts back to original creators while penalizing copied and spammy content.

That’s a wrap for today! Tell us your thoughts about today's content as we line up more Shorts! And don’t hesitate to share this with someone who’d adore it. 🥰