A remarkable aspect of Amazon Marketing Cloud is that it empowers brands to see a fully, multi-channel view of their customer journeys.
Big brands probably have three different major touchpoints with their customers:
- Their DTC website
- Their presence in brick-and-mortar stores
- Their digital storefront on Amazon or Walmart
They’re kind of like your three major storefronts. This is simplifying a bit, obviously, but bear with us.
For a long time, these three types of storefronts were heavily siloed. You might intuitively know that your digital ads were having a trickle-down impact on your in-store sales, but it wasn’t easy to forge those connections.
Amazon Marketing Cloud changes all of that. With AMC, you can see all of these touchpoints as distinct events in a shopper journey.
Let’s say someone visits your Brand Store on Amazon.com, and then a week later buys your product from a physical Whole Foods store.
AMC can now make those connections—tracking all of these touchpoints as part of a single, fluid journey.
Closing the knowledge gap across your three storefronts is so important now because the lines between all three are blurring.
Through its new Direct brand-site shopping feature, for instance, Amazon has begun referring people browsing on Amazon to DTC sites to make purchases.
Amazon wants to be the beginning point of all e-commerce searches. It doesn’t mind if shoppers ultimately check out on a DTC site—as long as they start their searches on Amazon.
Basically, your DTC site and your Amazon Brand Store are no longer totally separate silos. A visit to one directly impacts a purchase on the other.
It’s time to bridge those gaps in your data, too.
Connecting your Brand Store to AMC
Shopper interactions with your Amazon Brand Store are now visible as part of the customer journey.
Through AMC’s Brand Store Insights package, a Brand Store visit will show up as an event along a customer journey.
You’ll be able to see how customers arrived at your Brand Store and what they do after visiting it.
Did they make a purchase? Did they see another ad? Did they drop off entirely?
You can also layer on this look at how your Brand Store fits in your customer journey with a whole other package of insights, too.
Brand Store Insights also lets you see data on:
- Conversion rates: How often do shoppers make a purchase after landing on your Brand Store?
- Dwell time: How time do shoppers spend on your store?
- Ingress_type: How do shoppers find your store? (search, ads, clicking your byline, etc).
Layer in your DTC data to AMC
We all have some sense that our DTC sites and our Amazon storefronts are probably intertwined.
The marketing you do on Amazon naturally impacts your off-Amazon performance, and vice versa.
When you upload your first-party data to AMC, which you can do in an entirely privacy-safe way, you can finally forge those connections.
Take any 1P data set—like your email subscribers, emails of recent purchasers, and so on—and AMC can connect your 1P shoppers to Amazon’s shoppers.
You’ll be able to see how, if at all, the same shoppers who buy from your DTC interact with your brand on Amazon.
You’ll be able to see how Amazon and your DTC site fit together into the customer journey, and you’ll be able to create audiences around it.
Want to exclude certain DTC shoppers from your Amazon DSP campaigns, so you don’t accidentally cannibalize your sales? Easy.
(Read more about how Life Extension did this with Intentwise Explore.)
Tracking in-store sales in AMC
AMC lets you follow the shopper journey all the way down to in-store sales.
It does this in two ways.
The first is to directly track an in-store purchase at Amazon-owned stores like Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh. These are generated as “events” in AMC with little effort.
You’ll be able to see how often your ad campaigns and other marketing strategies convert into in-stores sales.
Through AMC, you can only see how your Amazon ads influence sales at other retailers. If you choose to purchase Amazon’s paid NCS CPG Insights Stream data set, you’ll get modeled data on your offline sales at the user level.
The paid subscription uses in-store data from 20+ major national and regional CPG retailers across the U.S. You can now do exciting new things like:
Expand your view of the path to purchase. What are the digital ads or series of ads that are most likely to result in an in-store purchase?
Tie your digital ads to offline sales. Did seeing an ad on Amazon influence a shopper to later buy your product in a physical store?
Understand Share of Wallet. What is your Share of Wallet in your specific product category, and how do your Amazon ads impact that? By how much do Amazon ads increase your SOW in offline channels?
All of this should make Amazon a more attractive home for big brands in physical stores that don’t yet control their Amazon presence.
Want to see what else AMC can do for you?
We recently updated our AMC Learning Hub to outline all of these exciting new possibilities with Amazon Marketing Cloud.
Our AMC Learning Hub is designed as an education center for brands and agencies alike.
Bookmark it, share it with your team, and, if you have unanswered questions, reach out to us and we’d be happy to address it.
