It’s now table stakes for major brands to market on dozens of different channels. That has made full-funnel measurement far more complex, too.
Mature businesses aren’t just running search ads on Amazon and other marketplaces. They’re also running streaming TV campaigns, partnering with influencers on Instagram, pushing out TikTok ads, and maybe even marketing within Rufus or ChatGPT.
These full-funnel marketing tactics don’t necessarily result in a 1:1 sales conversion. They’re part of longer-term efforts to convert shoppers or improve life-time value and repeat purchases rates.
These days, when conversions happen, they also tend to cross channels. Customers might land on your TikTok account or Shopify store, before eventually purchasing from you on Amazon.
Modern e-commerce is a web of connections. But how are you supposed to track these multi-channel touchpoints, and measure what’s actually working, to convert shoppers?
This is a topic that we could talk about for hours—but today, we’ll keep it brief. We’re offering something of a cliff-notes guide to full-funnel measurement across channels, with a focus on your Amazon store.
Here’s how to think about tying each of the key parts of your marketing funnel back to Amazon.
And if you want more assistance—or help building powerful custom dashboards or predictive models that can improve this measurement—book a demo with us today.
Tracking path to conversion within Amazon
It’s worth quickly reiterating that, through AMC, Amazon has made it possible to measure a full-funnel strategy.
Rather than relying on last-touch attribution, you can see that many of the shoppers who viewed your streaming TV ad later saw your non-branded search ad, and then converted.
These links are now incredibly easy to forge between Amazon ads and Amazon purchases. Within Amazon’s walled garden, you now have more measurement capabilities than ever.
Through AMC, you can also layer in many other kinds of touchpoints on Amazon. If part of your marketing tactic is to push shoppers toward your Brand Store, AMC lets you see how Brand Store impressions show up in your path to conversion. (More on Brand Store Insights here.)
How does the conversion rate—or LTV—increase for shoppers who visit your Brand Store versus those who don’t? AMC has the answers.
All these queries (and so many more) are pre-loaded into Intentwise’s library, and we make it easy to customize them and schedule them to run in the background. We also display your results in actionable apps.
Through our Shopper Abandoner dashboard, you can track where in the funnel your typical shopper is abandoning cart.
Now, let’s talk about some of the more difficult use cases for full-funnel measurement.
Measuring the long-term impact of social marketing
Major brands are marketing on social channels in all kinds of ways. They’re running ads on TikTok and Instagram, and they’re partnering with affiliates on these and other social channels.
What happens on social channels inevitably influences your Amazon sales. Successful TikTok affiliate marketing, for instance, is inevitably going to lead to an uptick in your Amazon sales. But it can be difficult to trace back those threads.
A few measurement tactics we recommend:
Analyze link clicks. Through Amazon Attribution, you can see how many people landed on your Amazon page after clicking on a TikTok link. From there, track how many people added your product to cart or converted.
The downside of this approach is that TikTok isn’t a very link-heavy platform. Many shoppers will probably see your product on TikTok, and then later search it on Amazon, without ever clicking a link.
Study branded searches on Amazon. After encountering your product on TikTok or Instagram, shoppers are probably more likely to search for it on Amazon than click a direct link.
Building a predictive model that correlates the number of branded searches on Amazon to your marketing spend on TikTok is one way to improve your social marketing measurement.
You can also further refine these predictive models with a bit of Amazon Marketing Cloud savvy.
The Intentwise team can help write custom AMC queries that isolate shoppers who searched for your branded terms on Amazon after first searching your non-branded terms on Amazon.
These are shoppers you converted purely through the Amazon channel—they didn’t arrive on Amazon after hearing about your product on TikTok or Instagram. (Read the full case study here.)
Subtract that group of shoppers from your total branded search interest, then, and you’ll have a clearer sense of how many of your Amazon branded searches came from purely off-Amazon marketing.
Improve attribution for affiliate marketing. Your creator partners on Instagram, TikTok, and other channels pose a particular challenge. You need to understand how effective these creators are at referring sales in order to set proper commission rates.
But this isn’t as easy as just comparing affiliate rates to ACOS. Luckily, in our webinar this week, the team at Levanta will break this all down. Register now if you haven’t already.
What about the trickier measurement use cases?
Now, let’s go through some of the other marketing channels.
DTC sites. Is your DTC site a part of your Amazon conversion funnel? Do shoppers stumble on your DTC site, and then eventually make their final purchase on Amazon?
Probably—whether you want that or not.
AMC makes it easy to track the overlaps between your DTC site and your Amazon channel.
You just need to gather together the hashed data of DTC visitors, upload it to AMC through Intentwise, and Amazon will match your DTC visitors to its own customers, in a privacy-safe way.
From there, you can see the interplay between Amazon and your DTC site within the funnel.
In-store visits. We’ve written more in-depth about tracking the links between digital ads and in-store sales here and here.
In AMC, the NCS CPG Insights Stream gives you a rough measurement of how your Amazon ads translate into in-store sales. Meanwhile, Walmart Connect specifically ties digital ads to in-store purchases.
Physical mailers. Old-school mailers still work, and many brands still make it a part of their marketing strategy. If you want to see how your mailers translate into interactions (and sales) on Amazon, uploading first-party data to AMC helps.
Cobble together the list of addresses where you sent mailers, upload them to AMC through a platform like Intentwise, and you can see how many of those shoppers later purchased your products after receiving the mailer. We wrote about how this works here.
Generative AI. AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT represent a small but fast-growing slice of the e-commerce pie. For now, reporting is limited on how well these AI assistants actually drive sales.
While Shopify lets you directly track checkouts and other site visits from ChatGPT, Amazon gives far less information on how Rufus searches or ads translate into sales. Sales that start in Rufus are simply reported as “Other” in Amazon’s third-party reports.
