Now that Amazon Marketing Cloud is available, self-serve, to all businesses, a whole lot of people are asking: what can I actually do with it?
Today we want to highlight one of our favorite simple use cases of AMC—shopper abandonment.
Basically, you can use AMC to aggregate all of your shopper journeys, and identify precisely when and where shoppers are most often dropping off.
You can figure out the pain points with your content, product, and advertising, and then take easy actions to resolve them.
Think of it this way: Shopper abandonment data is really a way of seeing a snapshot of your whole marketing strategy.
You probably run a lot of different ad campaigns, all the time. One of the most frustrating aspects of Amazon historically is that it’s difficult to see how your shoppers move through all of those different campaigns.
You can know the metrics for a bunch of individual campaigns, sure, but it’s much harder to uncover how all of those campaigns are working together.
A strong shopper abandoner dashboard changes that, letting you see the dynamism and interconnectedness of your whole portfolio.
With this AMC query, you’ll know exactly what stage in the lifecycle your customers dropped off—and how many of them dropped off. Then, build new audiences to target based on those insights.
Why shopper abandonment data helps you stand out
Just analyzing your advertising based on campaign-level ACOS and ROAS numbers is no longer enough.
The success of an ad campaign depends on so many different variables. You can drive a ton of detail page views with an ad, for instance, but if almost all of those viewers bounce, what have you really accomplished?
Your ad strategy can only be so effective until you understand exactly how your marketing funnel works. And that starts with seeing exactly why shoppers drop off after starting their journeys.
What is a shopper abandoner? We define this cohort as people who took some sort of action around your product—like adding to cart or viewing a detail page—but did not make a purchase.
In Intentwise Explore, we have a fully customizable, pre-written shopper abandoner query. More importantly, we display the results for you, in dynamic, responsive dashboards.
When you use our platform, you’ll see exactly where all of the drop-offs happen—both across your whole portfolio and for each specific product.
See how many shoppers drop off after:
- Viewing your detail page
- Viewing your reviews
- Adding to cart
- Adding to gift list
- Adding to wish list
Our dashboard also breaks this down by ASIN, so you can zero in on products with a disproportionate number of abandoners.
Go line by line, and you’ll certainly find some fascinating trends. Let’s say one of your products has a much higher share of abandoners after viewing the reviews than the others.
That probably suggests you need to troubleshoot the complaints in those reviews, revise your content accordingly, and perhaps consider soliciting more new reviews.
Another telling metric is the gap between total detail page views and the numbers of shoppers who add to cart or add to a list.
Compare the ratio across each of your products, and you might stumble on some revealing findings.
For the products where a disproportionate number of people drop off after viewing your page than after adding to cart: it’s very possible this is pointing to a problem you can solve.
Do a deep analysis of these pages with the high drop-off rates. Are your competitors regularly targeting your page with ads? Then you might consider bidding up on these on-page ads.
Or could it be your images and descriptions? Maybe it’s time to consider a content refresh. Compare the page to those with a lower product view drop-off rate, and you might be able to spot some important differences.
What is the best way to view shopper data?
As we discussed, every advertiser now has access to Amazon Marketing Cloud directly in the Ad Console.
There is a lot you can do with AMC natively, which is great. But there are notable gaps, especially around dashboarding.
The dashboards available in the Ad Console are limited in scope and customization, and they’re static. You also can’t take actions with them.
One thing we are really devoting ourselves to at Intentwise is delivering new, responsive AMC apps, where you can take actions—like creating audiences—in the same view where you see your basic data.
Just last week, we rolled out our updated dashboards, which display all of your shopper abandoner data in a much more usable, skimmable way.
Next up, we’ll be layering on functionality where you can directly create audiences out of these abandoner demographics.
You can identify people who dropped out after adding to cart for a specific product, for instance, and push that audience to your advertising account with only one click.
The add-to-cart and add-to-list shoppers are extremely close to purchase. From our new dashboards, you’ll soon be able to filter for the products with the highest percent of add-to-cart abandoners, and then run a simple ad pushing them to purchase.
One extra targeted ad might be all it takes.
