Leveraging Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) for peak events can be a game-changer for brands aiming to maximize their reach and return. AMC provides advertisers with access to historical performance data and critical metrics and insights such as Time to Convert, Path to Purchase, Branded Search, and Sponsored Keywords. These metrics offer a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior, from initial ad exposure and keyword searches to the final purchase, especially around peak events like Prime Day.

Additionally, with AMC’s in-depth user data, AMC audiences enable brands to target shoppers based on previous purchase history, browsing behavior, or engagement with past campaigns, empowering brands to hone in on specific customer behaviors, ensuring that marketing efforts are precise and effective, and optimizing their campaigns for peak performance.

Best practices for using AMC during peak events

Pre-event:

Before the peak event kicks in, it’s crucial to clearly define your primary goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs could range from attracting new-to-brand customers, maximizing Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), or increasing brand awareness. With these goals in mind, advertisers can conduct pre-event analysis leveraging historical data available in AMC to study previous peak event’s performance metrics. Here are some metric examples to assess:

• Time to convert: Understand the duration shoppers take to make a purchase after being exposed to ads during previous peak events. This insight helps in predicting and planning the timing of ad placements to align with the highest likelihood of conversion, ensuring that ads are served when shoppers are most likely to complete their purchase journey.

• Path to purchase: Identify which campaign types historically had the greatest influence on driving purchases. Understanding the path helps in strategizing and allocating advertising budgets more effectively, focusing on campaign types that historically yielded the highest returns and nurturing touchpoints that guide consumers towards conversion.

• Branded search: Discover which branded terms were most frequently searched during past peak events and campaigns that brought the most volumes.

• Sponsored Keywords: Identify high-performing keywords that attracted significant traffic and new-to-brand customers. This ensures advertisers target the most effective keywords, enhancing visibility and attracting new customers during peak shopping times.

During the event

Once you’ve examined past performance metrics, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your ad spend and campaigns for upcoming peak periods. You can further utilize these insights to craft strategic audience targeting to ultimately drive better performance during peak periods. Using Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), you can create custom audiences that target specific user segments for more effective marketing during the event. Here are two powerful audience types:

Rule-Based Audiences

These audiences consist of users who have been exposed to your ads and may have shown interest but haven't made a purchase. For example:

• Cart Abandoners: Users who added products to their carts but didn’t complete the purchase

• Wishlist Adders: Users who added items to their wishlists but did not buy them

• Keyword Searchers:

  • Branded keywords: Users who searched for branded keywords or products but did not purchase. This can be supported by AMC Branded Search analysis to select high-performing branded search terms.

  • Category keywords: Users who searched for category keywords but did not purchase. For example, a running-shoe brand can select keywords such as ‘shoe’, ‘running shoe’. This can be further supported by AMC Keywords analysis to filter keywords that have outstanding performance.

• Campaign Interactors: Users who interacted with certain campaigns multiple times. The campaigns can be picked based on Path to Purchase analysis to select those with a high likelihood to influence conversions.

Lookalike Audiences

This approach is ideal for expanding reach to new, yet relevant, customer segments who are likely to convert. Examples include:

• Peak Event Purchasers: Lookalike users who made purchases during past peak events.

• Category Searchers: Lookalike users who searched for category keywords and made purchases

• New-to-Brand Users: Lookalike users who made purchases and were New-to-Brand

• Multiple Purchasers: Lookalike users who made multiple purchases

By targeting these specific audiences, advertisers can boost their chances of converting potential customers during the high-traffic peak events.

Post-event

Once the peak event concludes, it’s essential to measure the success of your marketing strategies to make informed adjustments for future campaigns. AMC offers the ability to track key metrics including Campaign Linear ROAS, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), and the performance of keywords and campaigns using different attribution models. These metrics provide a comprehensive understanding of your campaign performance and help determine whether your marketing efforts achieved the desired outcomes.

Lastly, businesses can use AMC audiences to refine their marketing efforts further by retargeting and excluding specific audiences. For instance, you might:

• Retarget high-value customers such as customers who purchased and were New-to-Brand (NTB). For example, this can be further supported by AMC NTB / Repeat ASIN analysis which provides insights on what products newly-acquired customers purchase initially and later to look for cross selling opportunities. By doing this advertisers can nurture those newly acquired customers into loyal customers, increasing your customer lifetime value.

• Exclude specific audiences, such as users who added items to their cart but did not complete the purchase. This prevents wasted ad spend on audiences less likely to convert, allowing for more efficient allocation of ad spend towards more promising user segments.

By focusing on the most promising customer segments and continuously refining marketing tactics based on detailed performance data, you can achieve maximum return during and after peak events with AMC. This strategic approach ensures that every marketing dollar is spent wisely, driving better results and more successful campaigns.

To get started with Amazon Marketing Cloud insights and AMC Audiences, email us at hello@perpetua.io