Sponsored Display does not target keywords. It targets people — shoppers who viewed something, bought something, or fit a lifestyle Amazon has inferred. The Audiences screen reports how each of those segments performed.

[Watch the walkthrough](https://kb.trackiq.com/kb-assets/kbvideo-audiences-explainer-038acbae.mp4)

*Prefer to watch? A hundred and five seconds on the four segment families, and the target that cuts the one that was working.*

## **Where it is**

**Amazon Ads → Audiences.**

![The Audiences screen](/kb-assets/shot-b37-aud-top-42c60d.png)

Same anatomy as the rest of Amazon Ads: six KPI tiles, **Performance Trends** with Day / Week / Month, **vs previous**, **Values / % change**, then a table with Search, Filters, Manage Columns and Export.

**If it is empty**, that is expected on an account not running audience-targeted campaigns. The tiles read `$0.00` and the table reports *There is no data for the selected period*. Audiences populates from Sponsored Display and audience-targeted Sponsored Brands — without those, there is nothing to report.

**This screen is not Amazon DSP.** DSP audiences are separate and live under **Amazon DSP → Audience**.

## **The table**

One row per campaign per audience segment:

| Column | |
|---|---|
| **Campaign name** | |
| **Audience segment** | the segment targeted |
| **Segment type** | which family it belongs to |
| **Ad type** | SD, SB |
| **Status** | |
| **Spend, Sales, ACoS** | |
| **CPC, CTR, Clicks, Impressions** | |
| **Orders, CR, RPC, ROAS** | |

**Segment type is the column that makes the screen readable.** Without it you are looking at a list of names; with it you can group performance by targeting strategy, which is the level decisions are actually made at.

## **The families, and what they are for**

**Remarketing / views** — shoppers who viewed your product, or a similar one, and did not buy. The warmest audience available, the smallest, and usually the best ACoS. Where to start.

**Purchases** — shoppers who bought. Used for replenishment on consumables, and for cross-sell onto a complementary product. Wasted on a once-in-a-decade purchase.

**In-market** — Amazon's inference that someone is shopping this category now. Broad, cold, and useful for reach rather than efficiency.

**Lifestyle** — long-run behavioural groupings. The coldest and broadest of the four; upper-funnel spend, and it should not be judged on last-click ACoS.

**Judge each family against its own job.** Remarketing should convert. Lifestyle should reach people who have never heard of you. Holding both to a 25% ACoS target guarantees you cut the one that was working.

## **How to read it**

**1. Group by segment type.** Read families first, individual segments second.

**2. Compare within a family, not across.** Remarketing beating Lifestyle on ACoS is not a finding; it is arithmetic.

**3. Look at CTR for relevance.** A segment with impressions and no clicks is the wrong audience, whatever the ACoS eventually says.

**4. Check the new-to-brand split for the cold families.** Reach spend is supposed to bring new customers. If it is not, it is not doing its job, and ACoS is the wrong measure to have judged it by. See [**NTB Customers: New vs Repeat, Counted as People**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/ntb-customers).

**5. Cut on evidence, not on rank.** The worst segment in a list is not automatically bad — it is just last.

## **Cautions**

**Cold audiences look terrible on last-click.** Views-remarketing will always beat lifestyle on ACoS, and cutting lifestyle on that basis removes the thing that fed remarketing its audience in the first place. See [**Decide Whether Your Upper-Funnel DSP Is Worth Keeping**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/is-your-dsp-worth-keeping).

**Segments overlap.** One shopper can sit in several. Adding segment sales together double-counts.

**Small segments are noise.** A segment with a handful of clicks has no reliable rate.

**Attribution lag applies**, and Sponsored Display uses the longer fourteen-day window — so recent days under-report more here than on Sponsored Products. See [**Time to Conversion: Checking Your Attribution Window**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/time-to-conversion).

## **Related**

- [**NTB Customers: New vs Repeat, Counted as People**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/ntb-customers) — the right measure for cold audiences.
- [**Shift Budget from Harvesting to Acquisition**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/shift-budget-to-acquisition) — acting on the split.
- [**Why SP, SB and SD Numbers Don't Simply Add Up**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/why-sp-sb-and-sd-numbers-dont-add-up) — before totalling anything.
- [**Create a Sponsored Display Campaign**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/create-a-sponsored-display-campaign) — creating the campaign these segments belong to.