When a large telcom brand was rich with first-party signals. Amazon Ads helped them to optimize it for a better campaign.

When a large telcom brand offering cable and broadband services in the U.S. to over 6 million homes and 335,000 businesses across 18 states wanted to rethink the way they leveraged their own first-party signals, Slalom and iProspect knew where to turn. As a brand that does not sell on the Amazon store, the brand works with Amazon Ads to reach customers who aren’t currently subscribed to the communication company’s suite of services, including internet, phone, and cable. Largely, the brand has used their own base of customer information to help identify who has or has not become a customer, but in an effort to tap unreached audiences, the telcom brand began to reassess their approach.

With an objective to reach new customers by leveraging a combination of Amazon’s signals, their own first-party signals, and suppressing those who are already customers when deploying marketing campaigns, the brand reached out to Amazon Ads to see how the intersection of information could help the telcom giant reach customers who aren’t currently subscribed to their services. The brand turned their attention to four instrumental products in 2023 that set the foundation for their Amazon Ads strategy: Audience API, Conversions API, Performance+, and Amazon Marketing Cloud. Each has its own robust benefits, but when used in tandem, the combination of products has the potential to yield stronger performance, promote less waste, and provide more actionable insights.

Like all advertisers, the telcom brand’s customer base changes constantly, with new customers signing up for internet or purchasing a wireless service daily. But the cataloging process behind that changing customer base is both lengthy and subject to human error, leading to wasted ad spend and poor customer experience. Working with Capgemini, the brand leaned in to Amazon’s Audience API to maximize the signals they used to match their first-party audiences to Amazon’s, inclusive of name, email address, mailing address, and phone. As a result, the telcom brand saw drastic improvement in match rate—meaning the ability to cross-check first-party signals against one another—experiencing a shift to 90% up from 60%. And because Amazon’s matching is conducted through deterministic methods (direct matching of customers) as opposed to probabilistic models (a hypothetical matching with less accuracy), the results increased the confidence that their campaigns using Amazon DSP would reach more prospects with less wasted ad spend. After the success of that refinement, Amazon DSP became the brand’s primary programmatic solution for lower-funnel media.

In pursuit of continuing to make the most of their audiences combined with Amazon’s, the telcom brand was keen to test Performance+, a new Amazon DSP campaign type focused on driving performance using a bespoke predictive model to identify new customers with a high affinity to convert. The test yielded positive results with an improved 40% reduction in cost-per-action when compared to their business-as-usual media.

After only using signals from online conversations to inform the model, the advertiser considered how the audience would fare if they used all conversion insights—specifically those from conversions made in-person, over the phone, or via a non-online means—to inform it. They pursued a Conversions API, allowing them to leverage approximately 80% of their purchases that come from call centers and in-store into Amazon DSP. Now the totality of their conversions from all sources inform their predictive audiences, feeding a model that gets smarter as more customers convert. Notably, this non-endemic brand is the first advertiser with services exclusively sold via its own channels to use these products together.

Finally, with the support of their partner Slalom, the telcom brand brought all of this together with Amazon Marketing Cloud, marrying their first-party signals with Amazon DSP campaign insights to understand how media translates into reaching new customers and leading them to lower-funnel conversions. And in doing so, the company won’t just be able to have a better understanding of the impact of their teams’ strategic big bets, but also optimize campaigns mid-flight, making for an even more customized experience for potential customers.