Curiosity has the power to help marketers challenge the status quo and make game-changing discoveries. When it comes to making data-driven decisions, curiosity pushes us to get to the why behind the whats, towards better outcomes and visionary innovation.
That’s why Skai dedicated a whole day to the theme in our first fully-virtual summit, CURIOUS 2020. Thirty-four hours of content and 25 sessions later, CURIOUS 2020 has come to a close. If you weren’t able to watch the sessions live, then don’t worry – they are now available to view on our on-demand hub in your own time.
Visit the CURIOUS 2020 event page for informative and inspiring video content!
Without proper measurement, marketers don’t know what is and what isn’t working. They need these insights in order to optimize their programs in order to improve them.
This is an ongoing issue in marketing. 82% of marketing leaders surveyed cited the inability to attribute campaign or content activity to revenue as one of their major marketing challenges.
While intra-channel measurement is fairly solid at this point, cross-channel measurement can sometimes still be difficult. For example, as more brands direct ad traffic to their Amazon product detail pages (PDPs) using Paid Search and Social Advertising, they want to know what value those ad clicks generated—if any. While digital marketers are able to see Amazon sales increase when they launch their cross-channel campaigns, the truth is that they need more than just directional indicators. They need to understand granular performance down to the keyword or ad so that they can optimize accordingly.
Hosted by Skai’s Christian Tabing-Dalit, the Skai CURIOUS 2020 masterclass, Grow Your Amazon Business by Optimizing Search and Social, walks marketers through the basics of Amazon Attribution including the challenges, the benefits, and how Skai’s support for this feature makes it easier and more powerful.
Amazon Attribution Masterclass 101
Kicking off the masterclass was Amazon’s Danielle Wolfe, Senior Marketing Program 
Manager who explained her company developed Amazon Attribution.
“Before coming to Amazon, I worked at a media agency,” shares Wolfe. “I would spend hours pulling together reports across channels. I was frustrated that I had no way to tie upper funnel metrics to direct sales impact.”
Amazon Attribution is a free measurement solution that enables advertisers and marketers to get insight into how their non-Amazon media—such as Search and Social ads—impact shopping activity and sales performance on Amazon.
Wolfe splits Amazon Attribution capabilities into three key stages:
- Measure and gain insight into how all of your digital advertising channels impact shopping activity and sales on Amazon across the shopping journey.
- Optimize your cross-channel advertising. It’s important to note, you don’t have to wait until the end of a campaign to begin making optimizations. With on-demand reporting, you can make adjustments to your campaigns in flight.
- Plan future marketing strategies that help maximize ROI using insights you pick up along the way. For example, you might notice that search ads are driving the most efficiency for your retention campaigns focused on your existing product line. You can set up future marketing campaigns with this information in mind enabling you to drive marketing efficiency from the start.
Amazon Attribution offers many beneficial metrics to help guide marketers across the funnel:
Wolfe also shared that Amazon Attribution is currently available to both vendors and sellers enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry that sell products on Amazon in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.
Amazon Attribution best practices
Wolfe shared four solid best practices for marketers who utilize Amazon Attribution:
Reach the right audience. Find out which audiences engaging with your brand outside of Amazon are most likely to buy your products on Amazon
Maximize channel performance. Identify which non-Amazon marketing tactics are most effectively helping you achieve your goals
Ensure creatives resonate. Test and learn the impact of elements like creative and messaging so you can ensure holiday campaigns are set up for success
Create engaging experiences. Understand how shopping activity changes based on whether you direct customers to Stores or detail pages and optimize accordingly
Empower Amazon Attribution case study
Next up in the masterclass was Will Hoverman, Senior Specialist, Search at Empower.
Hoverman shared a recent Amazon Attribution success story for their client, children’s toy brand, Vtech. What made Vtech a perfect candidate for this type of measurement is that they sell through retail partners and don’t have an ecommerce property. Because of this, they will never have the level of insight into ad impact on sales that companies who do sell via their own websites can garner.
“We had a lot of Google Search campaigns driving to Amazon,” explains Hoverman. “We felt there was a measurement black box, and we couldn’t link media touchpoints to sales and business results. We had so many questions: Did our ads even drive profitable sales on Amazon? If they did, were they even profitable?”
With Amazon Attribution—and Skai’s feature support—Empower was able to understand down to the keywords about what was driving performance.
With the insights they learned about their Google Search Ads performance on Amazon.com, Empower was able to increase total ROAS by 85% and their conversion rate by 64%.
Skai + Amazon Attribution
Next, Skai’s Senior Director of Product, Jerome Crochat, explained some of the challenges that marketers have with Amazon Attribution:
- It’s highly manual to set up and time-consuming. To set up tracking, marketers need to:
- Manually add the products for which they want to measure
- Manually generate tags
- Manually implement tags across Search & Social ads
- While you do get cross-channel insights out of the box, the data is fragmented. To really get the full story, marketers must:
- Export Amazon Attribution dashboard data
- Export Search & Social ad platform data
- With Excel, merge data from Amazon Attribution and Search & Social ad platform data
- Because the data is fragmented, so is the optimization workflow. To take action, marketers must:
- Use Excel to manually identify optimization opportunities
- Then navigate to each Search & Social ad platform, manually update bids, budgets, pause ads, etc.
However, marketers using Amazon Attribution with Skai gain some real benefits:
Going beyond measurement with Social
The true value of using Skai’s Amazon Attribution support is that by taking out all of the time-consuming, manual steps, marketers can take advantage of some truly innovative ways to use those insights within Skai Social.
Cross-screen activation. Skai Social’s integration with TVTY allows advertisers to boost the visibility of their Facebook and Instagram ads whenever their ads are airing on live broadcast TV. Activating across screens helps advertisers break-through the noise and stand out. And, when paired with Amazon Attribution, it allows you to optimize the delivery of Facebook ads towards consumers most likely to add your products to their cart or Buy Now. You can also use TV Sync to boost your Facebook ads whenever your competitor’s ads are broadcast on live TV.
Precision Targeting. Skai Social’s integrations with Oracle, Experian, Epsilon, and other 3rd party audiences providers, enable advertisers to target audiences with precision on Facebook. For example, you could target your Facebook ads (with Amazon PDP landing pages) to only Amazon Prime customers, and target niche audiences, such as high spenders on baby products or homemakers. With Visa and Mastercard audiences, target those that have recently purchased products from your competitors.
Weather-based Activations. Skai Social’s integration with Accuweather allows advertisers to sync their Facebook ads with local weather conditions. For example, if it’s raining in New York City, you could automatically boost the visibility of ads on Facebook pointed to Amazon.com promoting rain boots. But, if at the same time it’s sunny in Tempe, you could automatically boost the visibility of ads on Facebook promoting sunglasses.
Health-based Activations. Skai Social’s integration with Accuweather also allows advertisers to sync their Facebook ads pointed to Amazon.com with local health conditions. For example, if pollen counts are excessively high in San Francisco, you could automatically boost the visibility of ads for allergy-relief medication.
Are you driving Search/Social ads to Amazon.com?
If you are driving cross-channel ads to Amazon.com, how are you measuring the impact? If you’re not using Amazon Attribution, you are missing out on a powerful way to drive better performance across your Paid Search and Social Advertising campaigns.
But, if you are already using Amazon Attribution, then the benefits of adding Skai to the mix presented in this masterclass probably resonate with you. By removing a lot of the manual work required for this solution, you can save time and redirect those hours to more strategic tasks.
Once you have the combined Amazon Attribution + Skai solution in place, you can go beyond just the measurement and take advantage of some of the advanced tactics and automation to take your Amazon.com performance to the next level.
Interested in learning more? Reach out today to learn more or even schedule a quick demo to see Skai’s innovative and award-winning platforms in action. And, if you’d like to watch the on-demand recording of the Amazon Attribution masterclass, please visit the CURIOUS 2020 page.
