x
READY TO BECOME A MEMBER?
Stay up to date on the digital shelf.
x
THANK YOU!
READY TO BECOME A MEMBER?
THANK YOU!
“A big trap that a lot of brands fall into is, they may have some growth goals … but they're overly focused on bottom-of-funnel metrics like ROAS [return on investment]. And that is just going to kill any innovation that you might have.” — Kiri Masters, Head of Retail Marketplace Strategy, Acadia
Measuring Amazon Demand Side Platform (DSP) performance usually means looking at return on ad spend (ROAS), impressions, retail media analytics, and more. But Kiri Masters, head of retail marketplace strategy at Acadia, believes brands should be taking much more into account.
Masters recently published a report on 23 unique customer journey metrics that provide a comprehensive picture of brands’ overall DSP health. Brands can also use these metrics to measure the impact of their Amazon DSP investments.
Masters explores these metrics in the “Unpacking the Digital Shelf” episode, “Unlock a Treasure Trove of Data to Measure Amazon DSP Performance.”
Read on to see how brands can develop a deeper, more impactful understanding of their Amazon DSP performance.
While common retail media analytics like ROAS and impressions play an important role, they don’t tell the whole story of your Amazon DSP performance.
For example, ROAS measures what happens at the end of a consumer’s journey, but it doesn’t reveal how impactful each touch point was.
Masters explains that, in her work at Acadia, she found that, “A lot of brands [were] relying on out-of-the-box metrics, like ROAS and impressions, as markers of success on Amazon. And … we would see really good returns from the DSP, but not necessarily on the basis of those individual metrics. We would see incremental sales, we would see pay-per-click performance improve with the addition of DSP. We got the sense that impressions and ROAS alone were not really telling the full story.”
So, what other metrics should brands focus on? Masters says “It’s more of a question of the objective of the brands.”
For a very mature brand with a recognizable name, for instance, the objective is to defend brand equity, so it may still be worthwhile to focus on conversions.
Newer brands, on the other hand, need to grow awareness. These brands may be best served by awareness-related metrics like their audience size over time or how many people are visiting their product pages.
“A big trap that a lot of brands fall into is, they may have some growth goals — they may want to grow market share or introduce a new product line — but they're overly focused on bottom-of-funnel metrics like ROAS. And that is just going to kill any innovation that you might have,” Masters explains.
While diverting focus away from ROAS and toward awareness metrics may seem risky in the short term, it pays off in the long term.
Masters illustrates just how much can be revealed through creative retail media analytics by briefly describing a few of the 23 metrics that impact Amazon DSP performance.
One particularly interesting metric is competitor audience acquisition, which “calculates how many unique users from our competitors' audience we've managed to reach in a given period,” Masters says. This metric is “a great early indicator of market share,” and tracking it can help brands understand how influential their media is in persuading competitors’ customers to consider them.
Other metrics include how many:
While the percentage of product page visitors reading reviews typically isn’t included in reports, Masters explains that it’s important because, “I don't know about you, but for me, when I start to read product reviews, I'm pretty deep in considering a product or an alternative. And so that's a great forward-looking indicator of consideration and ultimately purchase.”
Metrics like these anticipate future purchases, helping brands improve forecasting and gain a new understanding of consumers’ journeys through their digital shelves.
“The issue with both DSP and pay-per-click advertising in isolation is that it's a last-touch attribution model. When we can layer in Amazon Marketing Cloud … we're able to get a much more holistic view of the whole journey and understand, hey, that ad that we've been serving doesn't look super profitable or interesting by itself, [but] it's actually serving a really important role in building awareness.” — Kiri Masters, Head of Retail Marketplace Strategy, Acadia
Brands can also use Amazon data to get a more holistic view of their DSP opportunities.
For example, Masters reminds brands that Amazon DSP can enable exact targeting that creates more sophisticated digital experiences for consumers. “We can reach people with standard demographic audiences, but we can also reach in-market shoppers … [and] we can also reach affinity segments” by using data Amazon has collected from past purchases, she says.
Using Amazon’s wealth of consumer data, brands can devise different DSP strategies for the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel, as well as for acquiring competitors’ audiences.
Masters also says she has been digging into the data available through Amazon Marketing Cloud. This data lets her examine how DSP performance interacts with PPC performance, giving her a picture of the complete consumer journey across both types of impressions.
Equipped with both these sets of retail media analytics, she can see the best consumer paths for volume, viewability, and return on investment.
“We found that certain conversion paths that were not super profitable or interesting on an ad level basis when you combine those ad types, we end up with a really attractive return on investment or much more new-to-brand shoppers,” she says.
Masters continues, “The issue with both DSP and pay-per-click advertising in isolation is that it's a last-touch attribution model. When we can layer in Amazon Marketing Cloud … we're able to get a much more holistic view of the whole journey and understand, hey, that ad that we've been serving doesn't look super profitable or interesting by itself, [but] it's actually serving a really important role in building awareness or warming up a customer.”
When measuring Amazon DSP performance, it can be easy to stick to the retail media analytics served up by dashboards on Amazon or other adtech platforms. But these dashboards only tell part of the story.
By being open to the full breadth of data available to them, brands can make new discoveries about the impact of their DSP initiatives — and gain a new understanding of how to improve them.
For a deeper look at new ways to measure your Amazon DSP performance, listen to the full episode.
