Actioning Overlap Data – Making Search + DSP better with AMC

Shubham Maurya Senior Product Manager

August 29, 2023

Interested in a free AMC deep dive analysis for your brand? Click here!

Since its launch, one of Amazon Marketing Cloud’s key features has been the ability to understand the cross-channel impact of DSP and Search advertising. Traditionally, these have always been siloed. It is a significant step forward to measure the actual lift on users who were exposed to multiple ad types. I’m sure everyone has seen some version of the below chart –

This an interesting chart, validating that exposure to multiple ad types does in fact increase propensity to purchase. However, the key question once you have this information is – so what? How does this help our retail media strategy? How do I push more people to engage with multiple ad types?

Over the past few years of working with our customers on AMC, we’ve dived deeper into using AMC to solve this question and enabling our customers to have the right insights.

Getting the full picture

Every single brand has its own context: the competitiveness of the category they operate in, the level of unaided brand awareness, and internal brand goals. Once you’ve accounted for these and have a baseline media strategy (driving sales/improving visibility/driving awareness), its important to continuously test-and-learn which combination of ads is driving most value and shifting spend based on market signals. This is where AMC shines for 2 reasons –

You get a complete picture of how your marketing funnel is operating. With AMC, you’re not limited to 14 day last touch attribution. You can also look at first touch or multi touch ROAS to compare each media type

Sponsored Products New to Brand Data is available. Most brands spend a large percentage of their budget on Sponsored Products. AMC is the only source of NTB data for SP (at the moment)! This helps get a complete view of which channels are most effective with new customer acquisition

With the right retail media setup, you should be able to track where new shoppers are coming from, at what cost and with what efficiency to help you decide where to double down and where to reduce investment.

This view contains the key metrics needed to track your media performance –

NTB Reach: How many new shoppers are coming in through this channel?

Acquisition Cost: How much does it cost to acquire them?

First touch ROAS: Is this channel effective at the top of funnel?

Last touch ROAS: Is this channel effective at the bottom of funnel?

While there are multiple other KPIs you can track – these will give you a good bird eye view of which part of the funnel is driving value for you. Other useful metrics to track are –

Engagement: DPV Rate

Purchase: ROAS, Purchase Rate, Conversion Rate

Incrementality: NTB ROAS, NTB CPA

Once you have a measure of the funnel performance, you can go deeper into customer journeys and use that to allocate budget. Here’s a sample scenario: if your focus is on driving sales from New to Brand shoppers, see which combination of ad types has highest New to Brand RoAS. In the example below, shoppers exposed to a Sponsored Products ad and a Retargeting ad have highest NTB RoAS. This is where you should double down!

Actioning AMC Overlap data

There are a few common ways of actioning this data:

1. Planning your retail media budget

Based on which part of the funnel (and combination) is driving value, its worth testing incremental budget on that tactic. In the above example, it’d be worth testing increasing SP or Retargeting budget (depending on factors like Share of Voice, what % of shoppers are exposed to multiple ads) to maximise the number of shoppers in the performant part of your funnel.

2. AMC Audiences

With AMC Audiences, Amazon took the first step of adding direct actionability from AMC. With AMC Audiences, you can create audiences with much more flexibility than before. For example, you can create an audience that explicitly retargets shoppers who have clicked on an SB ad but have not purchased – these are high-intent shoppers who might need additional nudges to complete their purchase. You can also use signals like branded search, add to cart and engagement with other ad types!

Amazon has significantly upleveled retail media measurement with AMC, allowing advertisers to go deeper into attribution modelling, upper-to-lower funnel measurement and now direct actionability. It is critical for advertisers to take a top-down approach to really utilise this data meaningfully and drive media performance in line with their goals.

CommerceIQ’s Amazon Marketing Cloud Dashboard helps advertisers with all this and more! Reach out for a customised value assessment based on your AMC data today.