Case study

Diving into full-funnel solutions from Amazon Ads for Unilever’s Robijn

Robijn, Unilever’s laundry detergent

When it comes to advertising with Amazon Ads, brands that sell in the Amazon store may be inclined to rely only on lower-funnel solutions to drive sales. However, what is the impact of activating a full-funnel marketing strategy on campaign performance? That’s the question Unilever’s Dutch brand Robijn and GroupM Nexus Mindshare & Greenhouse set out to answer when they worked with Amazon Ads.

The objective was to determine if a full-funnel strategy – an approach that uses different advertising solutions to engage customers at various stages of their buying journey – would improve the efficiency of lower-funnel campaigns and lead to a better purchase rate for Robijn, Unilever’s laundry detergent.

Informing campaign strategy with key insights

When looking into the laundry segment in the Netherlands, new-to-category customers primarily enter through liquid detergent compared to other segments.1 This meant that Robijn could benefit from promoting their liquid detergent products to attract new customers and capture a larger market share.

Another key insight based on Amazon observations is that combining sponsored ads and Display is found to be more effective in reducing the time it takes for a brand to reach their sales baseline.2 This approach works by allowing a brand to reach their target audience through both sponsored ads and Display placements, which increases the likelihood of conversion. Additionally, the use of both ad types facilitates the creation of more precise marketing plans, as a brand can better analyze the performance of each ad type and adjust their strategy accordingly to maximize results.

Campaign execution with the dynamic duo: Full-funnel and AMC

At the start of 2022, Robijn launched a full-funnel campaign with Amazon Ads to help reach new customers and improve the efficiency of the whole funnel. On Amazon DSP (Amazon.nl and wherever they spend time) the campaign launched with two objectives and two responsive e-commerce creative assets: one for reach, and the other for remarketing. In parallel, Robijn utilized Sponsored Products for three months, reaching shoppers who had looked for their products or similar keywords.

Robijn products on Amazon website

To understand success and continuously optimize the campaign, it was imperative to have a holistic view, from upper- to lower-funnel performance. That’s why GroupM Nexus Mindshare & Greenhouse turned to Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and their path-to-purchase analysis. AMC is a secure, privacy-safe, and cloud-based data clean-room solution, in which advertisers can easily perform analysis across pseudonymized signals, including Amazon Ads insights as well as their own insights.

Utilizing event-level data sets available in AMC, Robijn gained valuable insights into the path to purchase of their customers. By following their journey through the sales funnel and measuring the impact of different types of ads on their shopping behaviour, Robijn uncovered important metrics such as the influence of ad exposure on purchase rates, the reach and sales generated by different ad campaign groups, return on ad spend (ROAS) and new-to-brand percentage (NTB%). Armed with this knowledge, the Robijn brand was able to identify the most effective paths to conversion and optimize campaigns for maximum impact.

Measuring the impact of key results

Ultimately, Robijn and GroupM Nexus Mindshare & Greenhouse could measure the impact of upper-funnel tactics in creating tangible downstream effects. With sponsored ads and DSP ads running together, the campaign gathered better results while improving efficiency with multiple touchpoints throughout the customer journey. Here are three notable observations:

  • Shoppers who saw all the three ad types (Amazon DSP consideration, Amazon DSP conversion, and Sponsored Products) had the highest purchase rate of 4% vs 0.04% than when running a single ad type.
  • Amazon DSP campaigns played a significant role in driving sales, initiating 45% of the total sales. This means that a considerable number of people who made a purchase were initially exposed to a DSP ad.
  • Furthermore, out of all the people who bought the product, 85% of them were first introduced to it through a DSP ad. This highlights the effectiveness of Amazon DSP campaigns in helping to reach potential customers and drive sales.

By using the synergy between Sponsored Products and Display running simultaneously, Robijn was able to drive more customers to browse, with 16% of Sponsored Products searches acquired from journeys starting with display campaigns.

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Having a holistic view of performance, from upper to lower funnel, is crucial when activating different advertising solutions in a full-funnel strategy. By tapping into the opportunities provided by AMC, we were able to understand the path of customers’ ad exposure prior to making a purchase. Apart from the valuable data gained regarding our Dutch consumers, we were able to provide solid insights for our brands in regards to multichannel attribution on Amazon.

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– Vincent van Duuren, Performance Marketing and Retail Media Manager, Unilever

1 Amazon internal data, NL, 2021
2 Amazon internal data, NL, 2021

*Results in this case study are based off a single advertiser’s use of the mentioned Amazon Ads product from the campaign period of August to October 2022, and are not indicative of future performance.