How to drive full-funnel advertising impact with Amazon Attribution

Today, you may already be using any number of Amazon Ads products to engage your customers, as they’re shopping on Amazon and even when they visit other Amazon channels such as IMDb or even Fire TV. But what about when your customers browse non-Amazon channels, such as email, social media or search publishers?

The fact is that the shopping journey today is complex, as 64% of shoppers use multiple channels when making a single purchase.1 After all, just think about how customers browse today. They shift between different devices and channels and sometimes use multiple simultaneously.

So, you can help ensure that you’re engaging customers wherever they are in their journeys – whether they’re just discovering your brand, considering buying your products or even making third, fourth or fifth purchases – through your strategic brand presence across touchpoints. In fact, a recent study revealed that marketers that use three or more channels to reach their customers’ experience engagement and purchase rates 250% higher than those that rely on single-channel campaigns.2

With this in mind, we’ve put together three tips to help you plan and execute your cross-channel advertising strategies, so you can unlock full-funnel impact to help you grow your brand.

1. Test, assess and optimise

When trying to decide which marketing channels you’re going to use to engage shoppers, it’s important to run tests across channels to understand how your customers prefer to engage with your brand. For example, niche craft and supply company BeaverCraft was running ads across both paid search and paid social channels in addition to running organic marketing campaigns across social, their blog and other publishers.

BeaverCraft

Using Amazon Attribution’s unique insights, the BeaverCraft team quickly realised that relying solely on paid efforts for a niche category like woodcarving was not driving sufficient value for the business.

Rather, the team learned that its organic campaigns, focused on educational content across blog posts, social posts and YouTube videos, drove higher customer engagement and ultimately a larger portion of the brand’s sales. These insights enabled the brand to optimise its marketing strategy, focusing its efforts on content creation for organic campaigns that linked to its product listings on Amazon. Over a three-month period following this shift in strategy, the BeaverCraft team achieved a 100% increase in sales on Amazon.

In addition to testing channels, make sure that you test the campaign strategies that resonate most with your audiences. Learn more about testing strategies.

2. Understand your goals

As you review Amazon Attribution reporting to help you understand which non-Amazon marketing channels are best for engaging your customers on Amazon, it’s important to keep the shopping journey in mind. Some channels may be clearly performing well and leading directly to sales for your brand on Amazon. Other channels may be reaching customers still at the beginning stages of their journey with your brand, helping them discover and become familiar with your products. Given that consumers are increasingly willing to try new brands, it’s important to get a clear picture of holistic brand impact beyond just sales.3 So, we recommend reviewing overall performance for your brand on Amazon alongside Amazon Attribution reporting.

SmartyPants

For example, vitamin brand SmartyPants wanted to grow their reach, so they began running paid social ads in addition the Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP campaigns they were already running.

Amazon Attribution reporting showed that while these social ads were getting high engagement rates, they didn’t seem to be having a direct sales impact. However, looking at Amazon Attribution alongside Amazon Ads reporting revealed that the brand’s new-to-brand orders had increased by 125% month over month since the launch of the social campaign. This increase in performance suggests that the social campaign, while not leading to immediate sales, was helping to improve awareness for the brand among new customers.

3. Combine strategies for full-funnel impact

Finally, as you review performance with Amazon Attribution, you’ll begin to notice trends that help you connect different strategies to various parts of the shopping journey. It’s important to also look for gaps in your strategy. In other words, if you realise that social media is helping drive consideration of your products on Amazon, how can you continue to engage shoppers in a way that helps propel them forwards in their journeys with your brand?

Computer, phone, streaming media

Cross-channel advertising strategies

Continuing with our previous example, after SmartyPants realised its social campaigns were improving brand awareness but not having immediate sales impact, the brand relaunched its Amazon Ads strategy across Sponsored Display. They focused the campaigns on re-engagement, reaching audiences that either visited their product details pages and didn’t make a first purchase or had purchased previously but hadn’t made repeat purchases. These re-engagement campaigns not only helped drive the increase in new-to-brand orders, but also improved brand loyalty, leading to a 268% increase in Subscribe & Saves.

Ultimately, by running cross-channel advertising strategies and looking at performance holistically, you’ll be able to optimise your marketing strategy to unlock full-funnel impact.

Register for Amazon Attribution so you can access better measurement for your cross-channel strategies.

Get started with Amazon Attribution

Here’s how you can get started with Amazon Attribution today:

For advertisers interested in using Amazon Attribution to measure their non-Amazon marketing campaigns

For tool providers, agencies and advertisers interested in integrating with the Amazon Attribution API

For advertisers and agencies currently working with a tool provider, get in touch with your point of contact to find out whether they have integrated with the Amazon Attribution API and how to get started.

To learn more about how to begin measuring your campaigns and how to think about optimisation strategies, view our Amazon Attribution guide:

For vendors, view the guide in English, French, Spanish, German or Italian.

For sellers, view the guide in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian or Chinese.

1 Salesforce The State of the Connected Consumer 2019 Report

2 Omnisend, The 2019 Marketing Automation Statistics Report

3 Nielsen, “Consumer Disloyalty is the New Normal”, 2019