Measure Your Full Funnel with Amazon Ads
▼ Summary
– Marketers are often trapped in bottom-funnel strategies due to organizational incentives and limited attribution tools, prioritizing short-term efficiency over long-term growth.
– Amazon Ads provides unique visibility into the customer journey through digital tracking, especially for Prime members and within its closed-loop ecosystem, offering better attribution than many other channels.
– Amazon’s Marketing Cloud and multi-touch attribution enable brands to gain detailed insights into customer behavior, such as purchase paths and new-to-brand metrics, which can inform real-time campaign adjustments and cross-channel strategies.
– New metrics like long-term sales (LTS) and conversion path reporting help brands measure incremental growth over time and understand the impact of upper-funnel advertising on customer acquisition and retention.
– Brands should commit to using Amazon’s advanced metrics and adopt a full-funnel strategy, allowing sufficient time to evaluate effectiveness for sustainable growth rather than relying solely on short-term, last-touch attribution.
Measuring the entire customer journey with Amazon Ads offers a powerful solution for marketers stuck between traditional business structures and the need for comprehensive success metrics. Organizational habits and limited attribution tools often trap us at the bottom of the funnel, prioritizing short-term efficiency over sustainable growth. Amazon’s evolving retail media and measurement capabilities now provide the visibility needed to connect advertising investment directly to broader business outcomes. While sticking with familiar metrics might work for capturing existing demand, brands focused on acquiring new customers and building resilient growth must adopt a full-funnel approach.
Amazon holds a distinct advantage in tracking the customer journey because most interactions leave a digital trail that can be monitored at the individual user level. This is especially true when a shopper is a Prime member, consumes content, or completes a checkout within Amazon’s trusted, closed-loop environment. Few other channels deliver this degree of visibility. Even major physical retailers face attribution hurdles due to numerous offline interactions, a particular challenge in sectors like consumer packaged goods where cash transactions are common or where loyalty programs have limited adoption.
Turning these insights into actionable growth strategies becomes possible with Amazon’s wide range of advertising options. By analyzing which ad formats, content types, and attribution windows influence your audience, you gain a deeper understanding of shopping behaviors. This intelligence allows for real-time campaign adjustments, whether for active promotions or upcoming launches. For instance, you might discover that a specific product acts as an entry point, attracting clicks but leading to purchases of different variants like alternate colors or sizes. While the immediate return on ad spend may seem modest, its overall contribution to the product line’s revenue can be significant.
Amazon Marketing Cloud provides brands with a clean room environment that isn’t tied to gross merchandise volume or ad spend, unlike some competing retail platforms. It delivers rich audience data covering the path to purchase, impression frequency, new-to-brand metrics, and behaviors that lead to subscriptions. Accessing these insights typically involves SQL queries, and Amazon offers a starter library to help. Although complex custom queries may require SQL expertise, the ability to examine detailed purchase and browsing behavior over extended periods represents a major industry advancement. Brands can also integrate their own first-party data, extending these insights to other channels such as direct-to-consumer websites, additional retailers, and emerging social commerce platforms.
For those not yet prepared to explore the clean room, Amazon’s multi-touch attribution metric, currently in beta and available directly within the platform, offers an alternative. Similar to cross-channel reporting in tools like GA4, it identifies referring sources across Amazon’s ecosystem. MTA delivers granular insights into which ads, creatives, placements, targeting methods, and keywords generate value at various funnel stages, empowering advertisers to refine their strategies, budgets, and creative assets more precisely.
Supporting long-term business growth demands robust customer relationships and historical metrics to track progress and forecast future direction. Amazon’s new long-term sales metric, also in beta, assists brands in planning for seasonal events and adapting to changes like extended Prime Day schedules. LTS and long-term sales ROAS estimate the incremental value a brand can anticipate over the next twelve months from new-to-brand customers who engage through actions like detailed page views, branded searches, add-to-carts, or initial purchases. For example, during a recent Prime Day event, while most direct sales happened in the first two days, the most substantial new-to-brand customer acquisition occurred on days three and four. Ongoing tracking of these shoppers helps determine customer retention, while retargeting campaigns based on their historical behavior keep them engaged.
Another beta feature, conversion path reporting, tracks customer ad interactions over a 30-day period starting from the point of purchase. Soon to be available across Sponsored Ads and Amazon DSP, it offers visibility into ad events spanning formats like Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, Sponsored TV, and DSP. For upper-funnel initiatives such as streaming TV campaigns, this reporting delivers cross-channel insights that help advertisers balance brand-building objectives with performance goals.
Achieving a balance between short-term and long-term growth necessitates a strategic shift: treating Amazon’s upper-funnel advertising as a core component of brand strategy. It’s common to remain focused on the bottom of the funnel, dependent on last-touch attribution simply because it was previously the only measurable option. That is no longer the situation. Today, marketers can assess topline growth, customer longevity, and purchase frequency, aligning strategies more closely with actual customer behavior than ever before.
Amazon Ads is at the forefront of in-platform attribution, transforming data into accessible and actionable intelligence. For the upcoming holiday season, select one beta metric you haven’t utilized, whether multi-touch attribution, long-term sales, or conversion path reporting, and commit to integrating it fully. Make a deliberate business decision to adapt and embrace a longer-term media strategy aligned with a specific objective, such as growth, brand awareness, operational efficiency, or increasing average order value. Allow sufficient time for evaluation; more than three weeks, ideally up to six months, to accurately determine how effectively the data drives results for your business.
(Source: MarTech)
