Last year was the first trillion-dollar end-of-the-year holiday shopping season in the U.S. Even though this year’s pandemic has negatively affected the economy, the latest research shows that consumers will end up spending more during the holidays this year than in 2019. A new forecast from Deloitte projects that holiday retail spending will increase by 1% to 1.5%. While this is a bit of a slowdown from the 4-5% year-over-year increase in 2019, the fact that 2020’s Q4 will be up over last year is a good sign for the recovering economy.
That’s great news for retailers, manufacturers, and the entire country.
For digital marketers, the really big shift this year will be how much of that is spent online. With consumers looking to avoid COVID-19 by staying out of physical stores, this is set to be the biggest online Q4 ever. In a recent survey, 71% of US adults said they planned to do more than half of their holiday shopping via ecommerce.
With more shopping being done online, Amazon.com and its sellers and manufacturers will certainly benefit from this new shift in consumer shopping behavior. And, with Amazon Prime Day moving to Q4— just a few weeks away—even more consumer shopping dollars will most likely be spent at Amazon in 2020 versus any previous holiday season.
Brands that want to stimulate sales to their products on Amazon.com can either use Amazon Advertising or drive traffic from other channels to their product pages. While measuring Amazon Advertising’s effect on Amazon.com sales is rather straightforward within the closed ecosystem, it can be difficult to attribute value from other channels on those sales.
Measuring external ad traffic to Amazon—critical for the holidays
In the past few years, online ad publishers such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Pinterest have changed their editorial policies to enable marketers to send their advertising traffic directly to Amazon. Amazon launched Amazon Attribution to enable brands to track their advertising performance across multiple channels.
According to Amazon, Amazon Attribution offers three core values:
- “Measure. Understand which publishers or channels are most effective and efficient at helping you to achieve your media goals on Amazon.
- Optimize. Explore which audience strategies increase the performance of your campaigns and make informed choices about your marketing approach.
- Plan. Discover how various Amazon landing pages help inform shopping behaviors and learn which creative messages and imagery resonate most.”
Once a brand has been approved to use Amazon Attribution (it is still in beta), advertisers can set up tracking and access reports that include impressions and clicks, and Amazon conversion metrics, such as detail page views, Add to Carts, and purchases.
Having this level of tracking is absolutely critical in Q4 for any brands advertising their Amazon products using external ad channels so that practitioners can optimize their programs throughout the holiday shopping season. Without it, marketers would be in the dark and unable to truly maximize the potential that driving Search and Social ads can have to increase their Amazon sales.
Skai’s Amazon Attribution integration—in time for the holidays
The underlying technology to monitor external ad performance on Amazon.com is done via tracking tags added to each ad’s URL. Skai helps clients with an integration that automatically applies Amazon Attribution tags to Search and Social ad traffic which saves time and reduces errors versus manually adding all of the tags that are required to make this program work.
In addition, by bringing campaign performance together from Search, Social, and Amazon Advertising, marketers have a complete view of what is and isn’t working without having to combine these disparate data sources manually.
As every marketer who has ever worked through the craziness of Q4, time is precious!
This new Skai integration helps marketers on both on the front-end to enable tracking and on the back-end for instant analysis so that practitioners can spend less time in the setup and report aggregation and dedicate more time improving and optimizing their programs using Amazon Attribution.
Amazon Attribution is going to be more important than ever this Q4
Without proper closed-loop measurement, marketers can’t ensure that they’re driving the highest return on the Search and Social ads they are driving to Amazon.com.
Amazon Attribution is one step to solving this issue. Still, to extract the full value of this data, marketers need a fully automated solution that ensures all of its cross-channel campaigns pointed to Amazon.com are optimal.
Reach out today to schedule a brief demo to see how Skai can help you take advantage of Amazon Attribution within your entire media mix.
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