unBoxed 2023: Amazon Ads announces ad tech capabilities to drive improved advertiser outcomes

Today, at the unBoxed 2023 conference, Amazon Ads announced a host of new capabilities across campaign planning, activation, and measurement that give advertisers more control over the audiences they reach with faster, more actionable insights into ad performance.

“Advertisers tell us demonstrating the impact of their marketing is their biggest challenge, and that they are still having difficulty measuring performance across the customer journey. They need more actionable insights to reach current and potential customers at scale,” said Kelly MacLean, vice president of Amazon DSP. “We aim to solve this and help advertisers thrive in a world of model-based solutions, because how brands reach their audience tomorrow will look completely different than it does today. We’re simplifying fundamental marketing tasks like planning, activation, and measurement, and I’m excited to see how advertisers use our new capabilities to unlock incremental reach and drive meaningful business outcomes.”

Amazon Ads announced several complementary capabilities across Amazon DSP, Amazon Ads APIs, and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) that empower advertisers through more holistic audience insights; advanced campaign planning, activation, and optimization controls; and comprehensive measurement.

The cross-channel planner is part of a new media planning suite in Amazon DSP that provides holistic insights and performance related to audiences and supply, across both Amazon and third-party sites and apps. Advertisers can forecast relevant reach by channel or determine where to de-duplicate reach based on campaign performance over the past 12 months, and then allocate campaign budgets to drive the desired business outcomes.

Once an advertiser has allocated their budgets, Amazon Ads is making it easier and more impactful to activate and optimize campaign performance. Today, advertisers can turn their AMC insights into custom audiences available for use in Amazon DSP with just a few clicks. AMC Audiences now also have a custom look-alike modeling feature so that advertisers can choose to unlock incremental audience reach in line with campaign goals. Additionally, recent Amazon DSP performance enhancements include predictive modeling and the ability for advertisers to set a target key performance indicators (KPI), such as reach or conversion, and let Amazon DSP optimize campaign bids accordingly. Using these solutions, a U.S. streaming TV provider looking to drive new subscriptions was able to lower their cost-per-action (CPA) by 39%. A national automotive brand using Amazon DSP modeled audiences saw a 40% lower CPA than their campaign goal.¹

Amazon Ads is also expanding the breadth of real-time campaign metrics available to advertisers. Amazon Marketing Stream, a push-based API solution that delivers hourly campaign metrics, is now available worldwide and includes Amazon DSP metrics alongside already-available Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display reporting feeds. Quartile used Amazon Marketing Stream to help drive an average conversion rate increase of 15%, and a 45.6% increase in sales across such clients’ Amazon Ads campaigns across their customer base.² Rapid Retail Analytics complements Amazon Marketing Stream by delivering hourly Amazon retail metrics such as sales, traffic, and product inventory levels. Advertisers can combine these insights with Amazon Marketing Stream to optimize campaigns in near real-time. Ad agency Acorn-i used both Amazon Marketing Stream and Rapid Retail Analytics to help Naturediet optimize their campaigns during peak purchase hours, driving a 27% increase in return on ad spend.³

Amazon Ads has expanded its new-to-brand metrics suite, which helps advertisers understand, reach, and optimize their campaigns toward new customers. Hero Cosmetics worked with Perpetua from Flywheel to conduct a new-to-brand analysis and confirmed 76% of customers who saw their online video ads were new-to-brand shoppers.⁴ With the addition of new-to-brand consideration metrics, advertisers can now see, by campaign, how many customers saw their ad and visited the brand’s product page or added one of its products to their cart for the first time in the past 12 months. With this insight, a brand can understand how its advertising is growing reach and engagement with new customers.

Truly understanding the customer journey means using all of a brand’s available signals together, as easily and effectively as possible. With Amazon DSP Events Manager, advertisers can create predictive audiences, measure performance, and automate optimizations using their first-party conversions and other types of event signals. For example, a fashion brand or automotive dealer may learn that new-to-brand purchases made by those who have watched videos on their website lead to more purchases down the road. The brand can use Events Manager to create predictive audiences based on this insight in Amazon DSP, to reach the most relevant audiences, customize how they measure campaign success, and optimize toward those goals. Financial services and automotive brands that have used Events Manager have improved cost-per-acquisition by 30% or more.⁵

Events Manager will soon feed into Amazon Marketing Cloud, the flexible Amazon Ads clean room analytics service. AMC provides advertisers, including those that do not sell in Amazon’s store, the ability to analyze their first- and third-party signals to produce core marketing metrics on such as cross-media reach, impression frequency, and path-to-conversion, to name a few. With AMC Template Analytics, advertisers now use prebuilt templates to generate these insights faster, and without needing to develop any code.

“Today’s customer journeys are complex. Marketers need the ability to easily bring together disparate signals and analyze them in ways that serve their unique business needs, for example, understanding what combination of advertising touchpoints lead to a conversion. This is what we’re solving for with Amazon Marketing Cloud,” said Paula Despins, vice president of measurement at Amazon Ads. “More insights mean more impactful advertising for both brands and shoppers, which is what it’s all about at the end of the day.”