Amazon Ads Unveils New Capabilities at unBoxed 2024
At Amazon Ads’ annual unBoxed event, taking place Oct. 14-16, the company debuted a suite of advertising capabilities that were designed to bring together insights from across the marketing funnel and help advertisers optimize their media investments and launch new products.
“Our mission is to be the most customer-obsessed advertising service by giving all brands the measurement and data-driven, machine learning optimization capabilities they need to drive business growth through simple, easy-to-use tools,” Paula Despins, vice president of ads measurement at Amazon Ads, said in a news article on the retailer’s website for advertisers. “The launches put our most sophisticated full-funnel measurement and optimization capabilities into the hands of all marketers from small businesses to major brands.”
As a destination for product discovery, Amazon already offers new product campaigns, a fully managed service designed to help brands quickly introduce products to customers within the first 90 days of their launch, through advertising placements across the retail giant’s properties as well as broadcasters and publishers.
How New Product Campaigns Work
For example, a customer could see an ad for an easy-to-use espresso machine while watching Prime Video. A week or so later, the customer may hear an ad for that espresso machine on Amazon Music and learn it’s designed to save counter space. The next time they’re shopping in the Amazon store, they may see a display ad for the same espresso machine that communicates it is Prime-eligible. Amazon said that brands that have used new product campaigns have seen up to a 9% increase in their sales growth rate week-over-week.
Expanded New Product Campaign Capabilities
To help advertisers more efficiently acquire new customers and engage prospective customers as they move through the funnel, Amazon Ads has expanded the ability to re-engage audiences reached on streaming TV through sponsored brands and sponsored products ads. Advertisers using Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), Amazon Ads’ clean room technology, can now adjust their sponsored brands and sponsored products bids specifically for audiences who have seen their streaming TV ads and also visited their website, for example, “focusing their investments on these high-value customers,” the retailer said.
New Amazon Marketing Cloud Solutions
AMC enables advertisers to join their first-party data with Amazon Ads signals to understand the customer journey and build and activate audiences. New AMC solutions include “no-code capabilities” in an intuitive interface — extending AMC’s analytics capabilities to brands of all sizes.
The first two AMC solutions launching are high-value audience and optimal frequency analyses. Brands can use the high-value solution to instantly visualize how their customer base is distributed by total spend levels over a period of time. Brands can create related audience segments and activate them in future campaigns with “just a few clicks,” according to Amazon. The optimal frequency solution was created to enable advertisers to monitor how KPIs, such as conversion rate and return on ad spend, evolve as ad interactions increase, and from there, determine the most efficient frequency caps for their campaign.
Amazon highlighted CPG brand Honest Kitchen, which used the optimal frequency AMC solution to improve its Amazon demand-side platform (DSP) campaign performance. After better understanding their cross-campaign ad frequency, Honest Kitchen was able to adjust their daily frequency caps to increase their impressions by 23% and Amazon.com product detail page views by 44% — while maintaining nearly the same budget.
New Measurement, Reporting & Insights
Amazon Ads also unveiled a new multi-touch attribution model designed to help advertisers understand how their marketing drives conversions “beyond last-touch attribution to consider the relative contribution of each marketing touchpoint leading to a conversion,” per the article. Using advanced machine learning models to analyze “trillions of shopping, streaming and browsing signals,” multi-touch attribution determines the relative impact of ad interactions along the path to purchase. It uses advanced techniques, such as hundreds of thousands of randomized control trial experiments — A/B tests — to establish impact.
For example, if an advertiser uses streaming TV, display, sponsored products and other ad types in their campaigns, multi-touch attribution will show the relative contribution of each tactic to their sales. Amazon Ads will start to test multi-touch attribution later in 2024, with a full rollout planned for 2025.
To help advertisers understand the insights from multi-touch attribution, Amazon Ads is also launching conversion path reporting to show brands their top-converting paths to purchase from the previous 30 days. For example, advertisers might see their TV ad is showing in their top-converting paths and learn how it helped drive conversions through lower funnel channels. Amazon said conversion path reporting is AMC’s most popular insight report, and it will soon be available self-service in ad console and Amazon DSP reports. It is currently in closed beta and will be available to U.S. advertisers in open beta later in 2024.
Additionally, to help advertisers measure beyond immediate sales and understand the long-term impact of their upper-funnel tactics, Amazon Ads’ long-term sales insights estimate the sales that a brand can expect to generate over the next year based on how effectively their campaign moves new-to-brand shoppers down the purchase funnel, the company said.
For example, a customer may click on an ad and engage with a brand for the first time by visiting their product page, and go on to purchase from that brand months later. With long-term sales insights, that campaign receives credit for the new product page visit based on the customer’s previous engagement.
Together, Amazon said immediate sales and long-term sales metrics can help advertisers quantify immediate sales and potential return from driving key customer engagements throughout the funnel. Long-term sales insights are currently in closed beta and will be available to U.S. advertisers in open beta later in 2024.
Amazon Ads also introduced a slew of other new offerings for advertisers, including an enhanced Amazon DSP experience.