Introduction to Zalando Audiences

This article explains what Zalando Audiences is and how it helps you reach the right shoppers. You’ll learn about the core audience strategy pillars and how targeting impacts your campaign performance.

Zalando Audiences is a standardised catalogue of audience segments built directly from Zalando’s first-party data. It captures verified customer behaviour across millions of active fashion and lifestyle customers. Intent signals include PDP views, add-to-wishlist, add-to-cart and completed purchases. The Audience catalogue forms the foundation of the Zalando Audiences solution, enabling targeting for onsite campaigns and unlocking segment-specific brand insights.

• Discover your growth opportunities through Audience insights.

• Activate a campaign to directly target your chosen segments, turning your insights into action.

• Measure the performance by audience, and iterate on your targeting strategy.

Targeting doesn't strictly make a campaign better or worse—it simply decides who sees it. A Zalando Audience segment acts as a filter on delivery. When your campaign's creative visuals, pricing and article selection align with your chosen segment, targeting concentrates delivery on the customers most likely to respond. When these elements don't align, targeting concentrates delivery on a smaller group at a higher delivery cost, without improving performance. Campaign performance relies on alignment between the audience segment and four key elements:

• Assortment: Customers who naturally buy your brand's styles and prices.

• Creative: Visual direction and tone of voice.

• SKUs: The specific articles featured in the campaign.

• Brand: Existing brand awareness and customer perception.

The Zalando Audience catalogue offers segments across four core categories:

• Demographics: Built using profile-verified data augmented by behavioural signals (e.g. 18–24 Shoppers, Plus-Sized Shoppers, Parents of Young Children).

• Behavioural and lifecycle: Captures customer spending patterns and price preferences over the last 12 months (e.g. High-Price Preference, Value Stretch Buyers).

• Portfolio and affinity: Captures active intent across specific article categories (e.g. Sneaker Shoppers, Beauty Shoppers).

• Lifestyle and values: Captures customers with demonstrated interest in specific brand values or style aesthetics (e.g. Sustainability-Minded, Denim Shoppers).

You have the flexibility to choose where to begin: navigate to the Marketing module in zDirect to access the Audiences insights feature, or review your campaign reporting by audiences in Ad Manager. You can also apply targeting directly to Sponsored Boards (available for all users) and other display formats for campaigns set up by ZMS. 

You can submit a request about this via the support form using the topic: zDirect and request type: Marketing.