Don't let the high CPCs in Q4 slow your growth—in this webinar session, we'll show you how to use AMC to convert customers more profitably and drive long-term retention.
As Q4 approaches, brands face a familiar challenge: higher shopping volumes, but also increasing competition and advertising costs. In this webinar, Kenton Snyder, Product Manager at Intentwise, explores five practical ways brands can use Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to make smarter decisions, improve efficiency, and prepare for major Q4 shopping events.
Promotions are a major part of Q4 strategy, but discounts don't necessarily create long-term customers. AMC can help brands compare shoppers acquired during promotional events with shoppers acquired during non-promotional periods.
By comparing repeat purchases and customer value over time, brands can determine whether customers acquired through events such as Prime Day or Black Friday become loyal customers.
If deal-driven shoppers have similar or higher lifetime value, brands may want to be more aggressive with promotions. If their long-term value is significantly lower, brands can reconsider how deeply they discount and how much budget they dedicate to customer acquisition during major events.
Customers often begin researching and adding products to their carts before major shopping events. That raises an important question: Is advertising before the event more effective than advertising only on the event days?
AMC allows brands to compare shoppers who were exposed to advertising during the lead-up to an event with those who only saw ads during the event itself.
If pre-event exposure produces higher conversion rates or ROAS, brands can shift more budget toward the lead-in period, when advertising costs and competition may be lower. Event-day campaigns can then focus more heavily on re-engaging shoppers who were already exposed before the event.
Not every product plays the same role in customer acquisition. Some products are particularly effective at introducing shoppers to a brand and generating valuable repeat customers.
Brands can use AMC to compare products based on new-to-brand acquisition and subsequent customer lifetime value. This helps identify the products that are most effective at bringing in new customers who are likely to make additional purchases.
These gateway products can then receive greater emphasis during Q4 promotions and advertising campaigns, helping brands maximize both customer acquisition and long-term value.
As advertising becomes increasingly competitive, brands need to understand how dependent their products are on paid media.
AMC, combined with Amazon's Flexible Shopping Insights data, can help brands compare sales generated through organic shopping behavior with sales associated with advertising exposure.
For example, if a product generates strong sales organically with relatively little advertising exposure, a brand may be able to reduce ad spend without significantly affecting sales. Conversely, products that rely heavily on advertising may require continued investment, particularly during high-demand Q4 periods.
Amazon has also made Flexible Shopping Insights and other datasets more accessible, giving brands greater visibility into the relationship between organic and advertising-driven sales.
Amazon's standard advertising attribution largely emphasizes the final advertising interaction before a purchase. But that can undervalue upper-funnel tactics such as Streaming TV, Online Video, and Sponsored Display.
AMC allows brands to build a first-touch attribution model that asks a different question: Which advertising tactic first introduced the shopper to the brand before they eventually purchased?
For example, a shopper might first see a Streaming TV ad, later interact with an Online Video ad, then search for the brand and finally purchase through Sponsored Products. A first-touch model would give greater visibility to the Streaming TV campaign's role in initiating that customer journey.
This can help brands identify which upper-funnel tactics are actually driving downstream sales and determine where to increase investment ahead of Q4 events.
These five use cases are starting points rather than a complete AMC strategy. The most valuable AMC analyses are often tied directly to the questions and challenges facing an individual brand.
Brands can use insights from AMC not only for measurement but also to activate audiences. For example, shoppers exposed to advertising during a Q4 event's lead-in period could be turned into an audience for subsequent DSP or Sponsored Ads campaigns.
The key is to establish an AMC roadmap before Q4: identify the business questions that matter most, build the appropriate queries, analyze the results, and use those insights to inform campaign and audience strategies.
Ultimately, AMC gives brands a way to move beyond surface-level reporting and understand why customers behave the way they do. By using those insights before and during Q4, brands can make more informed decisions about promotions, budgets, products, and customer acquisition.
Q4 is the time for new customer acquisition—but without AMC-derived insights, you might be throwing a lot of spend down the drain in this high-CPC environment.
In this webinar, Product Manager Kenton Snyder will sketch out how brands can use Amazon Marketing Cloud to:
Register now, and join us on September 9 at 10 am PST.
Q4 is the time for new customer acquisition—but without AMC-derived insights, you might be throwing a lot of spend down the drain in this high-CPC environment.
In this webinar, Product Manager Kenton Snyder sketches out how brands can use Amazon Marketing Cloud to:
Strem the full session now.