Amazon Path-To-Purchase Report Explained

Amazon Path-To-Purchase Report Explained Speaker 1: Alexa, play That Amazon Ads Podcast. Unknown Speaker: Which one would you like to hear? Speaker 1: The best one. Unknown Speaker: Okay, now playing that Amazon ads podcast. These gentlemen are completely changing the game. Speaker 2: After listening to that Amazon ads podcast, my ads are finally profitable. Unknown Speaker: I also heard they're pretty cute. Speaker 2: So, Amazon just gave sellers of all sizes access to a new report called the Path to Purchase Report. Now, what this report tells you, basically, is what different ad types customers are interacting with on Amazon before they end up purchasing. So it gives you kind of a journey of how this customer ended up purchasing from you. Did they just see a sponsored product ad and then buy? Did they see a sponsored product and then a sponsored brand and then end up purchasing on a sponsored product again? This report gives you that level of insight and helps you diagnose and figure out which Campaigns are most effective at driving new sales, new to brand sales, and what combinations of interaction with customers are most effective at contributing to key KPIs that a lot of brands have, which is driving new customers and attracting and converting new customers. Speaker 1: And the reason why this report is so valuable is because Amazon Ads is a last touch attribution Which means if you're running a sponsored brand ad and let's say you're getting premium real estate, sponsored brand video or just like featured images, lifestyle images, whatever. It looks great. It's phenomenal. Someone clicks that ad. They're shopping your store. They love what they're seeing. Like, man, this brand is awesome. And then they leave and then one day they come back and then they search your brand name. Like, I really love that brand. They search your brand or they search on Amazon again. They click on a sponsored product and they buy the product. The way the ad console would attribute that sale is basically the sponsored brand got a click but no sale. There's no sale attributed to that brand ad, that sponsored brand ad, which could be hurting the ROAS and the perceived ROAS, I should say, and the perceived conversion rate on that sponsored brand ad. But that sponsored product got all the credit. And especially if it was a brand defense sponsor product campaign, technically, that was a little bit of a new-to-brand sale. It just happens to resolve through a branded search term. But it was really the sponsored brand that drove that new-to-brand purchase. But with this simple last-touch attribution, we can't always see the true effectiveness of how our ad types are all working together towards one ultimate goal of pulling in that shopper and winning that purchase. Now previously, these reports were very exclusive, difficult to obtain. You had to be running a minimum $30,000 budget on Amazon DSP, which is their advanced display advertising portal. And then you would have to integrate with AMC, which is Amazon Marketing Cloud. And then you would have to learn SQL and be able to write specific queries into SQL to figure out how effective are your ads You're different ad types working together. And now they've made this in a simple interface that you see here on the screenshot we've got pulled up. But this is one of Andrew's accounts. And Andrew, tell us what we're looking at here. Speaker 2: Yeah, real quick. If you don't see this in your account, by the way, where it shows up typically is like right on the graph, right to the left of the graph, you'll see it. But sometimes it's like not always there. Sometimes Amazon's recommendations are there. If that's not there, I don't know what to tell you because I've looked around and I can't find where to actually get to it. So if you don't see it, I don't know, you might be out of luck here. That's a good point, Andrew. Speaker 1: Interesting that in the ad console, It should pop up right there where it's like conversion paths. Like it should be like right up in your face. We don't know how to trigger that. It's like an automated thing that happens from Amazon. And also not everybody has it. I think from the accounts I've been looking at, like half of the people have it. By the time this episode is airing, probably a lot more people will have it. But the alternative is if you don't have this exact visual, you can go check your advertising reports. And when you hit the report category, you'll see the typical sponsor products, brands display, and then all Amazon campaigns. If you click that, you'll then be able to download the conversion path report. And then you can essentially recreate this visual through that Excel file. So back to you, Andrew. Speaker 2: Yeah, great point. So yeah, this gives you a little bit of flexibility, being able to pull different date ranges, all that type of stuff. But really, this report kind of confirmed a lot of stuff we already know and kind of assumptions that we had. But maybe we should switch to the other report here so we can kind of dig into how to actually use the report. Reports. Speaker 1: This is not the right, this report. Speaker 2: Okay. What was that? Anyway, so as you see here, One of the coolest things that you can do with this report with a little bit of manual work is you can figure out which ad types are driving that first interaction and what the contribution those ad types are making versus last touch attribution, which is what you were describing, Stephen, which shows kind of where that last click happened and the purchase happened. So this gives you the ability to kind of look at both ends of the spectrum and see like, okay, which Ad types are most effective at attracting sales or new-to-brand sales on that first click. Where are customers, where am I reaching new customers most effectively and driving sales through it? Real quick, if you toggle to that other tab, Stephen, this view doesn't come super easily. You do have to do a little bit of manual work to get this. As the report exports, you're just going to have that conversion path where it shows all those individual touch points on different ad types. And then I just, I basically just did some formulas to pull out what that first interaction was versus what that last interaction was before the purchase. And then, then you can kind of pivot things out and you can see the delineation between first touch, last touch attribution. So that just doesn't come naturally. You do have to do a little bit of manual work to get that. Speaker 1: It's also interesting that they're calling. I could not figure this out. And I don't know if we know the answer, but it says display sponsored brands. I think they're just like classifying sponsored brands as a display type in this tactic. My first thought when I saw that was that this meant they received an impression, but not a click. But I don't think that's the case. Speaker 2: It could be. Speaker 1: I don't think that's necessarily the case because they also say display Amazon DSP. They're not really tracking click. So I think, first touch, I think these are all click-based. Do you know if there's anything on that? Speaker 2: I don't know. Amazon doesn't have a whole lot of documentation. I'd have to look into it a little bit more, but maybe we can figure that out and do a little write-up on it. Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe we're recording this podcast too soon. Speaker 2: Maybe. Speaker 1: All right, we'll catch you guys next time on That Amazon Ads Podcast. All right. My guess is I'm guessing it's click paths. So one thing that's usually pretty interesting, though, and this is very basic conversion path information that's been democratized and given to everyone. But in AMC, you still have a lot more complexity with how you can do these different queries and layers. And you can track the differences between impressions versus clicks as those touches. So, for example, Sponsored products, let's say your sponsored brands has a really low ROAS and sponsored products does extremely well. But then you end up realizing that that sponsored brand ad, just when people, even if people aren't clicking on it, if they scroll past it, you're still kind of planting that seed of your brand name, building a little bit of brand awareness. So when they scroll down and if they see that product again, in the search, or they see that brand name again, there might be something in their head that goes, That seems, you know, I feel like I recognize this brand. It must be reputable if I recognize it. They don't realize it's because they just saw the sponsor brand ad like two seconds ago. In their mind, they just like, they've seen the brand so many times. So the question is, does that actually improve? The performance of sponsored products, even if sponsored brands is not doing that well, does sponsored products do better when a customer was served a impression for sponsored brands before that? And that's something that when we were working with that large toy brand, that was something and we were using the full-on DSP, AMC. That was one thing that we did identify was that the conversion rates, it wasn't huge. It was about 5% higher. So if they averaged a 10% conversion rate on sponsored products when it was just sponsored products, If there was a sponsored brand and a sponsored product in their journey, like an impression to sponsored brands and then a sponsored product, those ads had a 10.5% conversion rate. So tiny things like that that this report doesn't quite show us. But anyways. Speaker 2: Yeah, that is a great point. And then that's something I've just observed anecdotally just as I've been managing things. As we launch good quality sponsored brand video and sponsored brand type of search, The performance, the ranking, everything, it kind of all works in together. And, you know, those additional placements that you're winning are just another touchpoint with the customer influencing that sale. You know, it takes so many interactions with your brand for a purchase to happen. So adding those sponsor brands and sponsor brand video placements are just another interaction. So it's only going to help your chances of actually converting that shopper. Speaker 1: Something else here is, I mean, I guess we could kind of So yeah, I'm pretty sure that sponsored, this here is when it says display sponsored brands leads to a purchase. I'm pretty sure that that is signifying that it's a click. And then we could see when it goes sponsored brands to sponsored products purchase. So this is something that you could drill down, you could look at these two different paths where When someone goes directly from a sponsored brand to a purchase versus just a sponsored product purchase versus they click on a sponsored brand and then click on a sponsored product, what are the performance metrics for that now? Speaker 2: And the one thing that it's kind of limiting because it doesn't give you the conversion rates of each of these paths. You don't know which ones are really getting purchased, that type of thing. It's a little limiting still. When it comes to getting the most out of this report, AMC is going to be your way to go. But for people that don't have access to it, this is as good as we're going to get. And it's still insightful and informative of what we should be doing. Do you have anything you wanted to add here? Speaker 1: No, I mean, I would love to see, to make this report more valuable, I would love to see how much traffic in total, because then if we add the total traffic amounts, Then we could look at purchases divided by traffic to see what is the conversion rate between each of these things. So I think this report was probably going to get better. They'll probably start doing that, but that is one of those applications that just a minute ago we were explaining where Right now, we're just seeing how many sales in total went through these different conversion paths. And it'd be nice if we had the traffics, then I could calculate how does the conversion rate change for sponsored products when they first are exposed to a sponsored brand or even you could throw in a sponsored display to sponsor product purchase up here. So that's important to see. Speaker 2: Yeah. So the real main or one layer that was really pulled back by Amazon on this report is giving you insight to new-to-brand sales for sponsored products. I think that's like one of the most insightful pieces of this report that we didn't really have before. No insight into We've been talking about the incrementality of sponsored products, and this has really allowed us to dig into that and just see how important and how impactful those sponsored products are when they're deployed correctly. A lot of times, this brand in particular doesn't do any brand defense targeting in this timeframe that we're looking at. And so all of this is just going after non-brand keywords. And we can see that sponsored product new to brand rate, 64% of those sales are net new to brand, meaning that they haven't That customer hasn't purchased from the brand in at least a year. So yeah, I think that was super insightful and just gave a little bit of credibility to some of the stuff we've already thought and going after new to brand terms being the most incremental opportunity, especially with sponsored products, given that there's so many more placements and availability of inventory there, that's really enlightening to see that 64% right there. Speaker 1: And then Andrew, you've also got this month over month report. So we're comparing November to December. What do we got going on here? What you doing? Speaker 2: Yeah. I just added this one because basically this could be insightful as you're tweaking your strategy, tweaking what you're trying to do within the ad console to be able to track and measure how things have progressed, how things have changed with different shifts in strategy. So how you would need to do this and how you need to format this is you'd have to download this report monthly. You could do it weekly too if you wanted to, I think, but I think monthly is fine. And then you would just stack. You can look how I did it in sheet one there. I have just labeled each of the blocks of data, just the 11th month of 2024 and the 12th month of 2020, all the way up there. Yep. Yeah, so you just got to label that and then you can pivot it out and then you can get kind of a month-over-month view. And then as time goes on, you can continue to add to it and just see how, you know, maybe we're going to try to pour more into non-brand sponsored products and see how that new-to-brand sales growth happens over time. I think that's really valuable just for reporting purposes and informing the client like, hey, this strategy is working. This is why. Here's how we're able to see, you know, the change. New to brand growth with sponsored products, all that type of stuff is super valuable to be able to share and show and build charts and all that type of stuff. I love visualization. So that's just how you would go about doing that. And I have a whole other episode on I think it's called the seven most important Excel functions for Amazon PPC to teach you exactly kind of how to do all that type of stuff. Speaker 1: Yeah. And one final thing that I just thought would be interesting was Because I'm really smart, I know how to count just the carats in these cells. So it's a complicated formula that I did not ask ChatGPT to help me write. And I was curious to see, so like if we come down here, sponsor products purchased, that's one carat. That means one touch, right? So how many touches? Actually, this probably should have been called touch count. So I was just curious to see between people who were only touched once from a sponsored brands or sponsored display versus they were hit multiple times with different ad types. How does that look? And so we pivoted it out. And, you know, just an interesting view. It's not necessarily insightful. What would be insightful is if we had the traffic so we could look at the conversion rate difference. Because if we saw that like multiple touches really increased conversion rates, that's just a really good case for saying we need to really be maximizing our ad type mix and allocation because we get better conversion rates. Right here, it looks like one touch is the overwhelming, I mean, what's like 2.9 divided by 3.5. We're on 83% of all sales and those new to brand sales as well. Only one touch, and most of that from sponsored products, which makes sense. It's Amazon, right? It's a search engine result page. People are searching for things. Sponsored products, that's always gonna be a big part of it. Even if someone just clicks the sponsored brand and purchases, that's still one touch. So that makes a lot of sense, but it is interesting to see the two touch and three touch. Seeing very rarely do people ever get hit with all four. In this case, there's only four that we can count. Sponsored display, DSP, sponsored brands, sponsored products. We're missing a lot of things in this report. Andrew, we're also not hitting frequency. Sometimes people get hit with sponsored display ads two times, three times. So there's a ton of stuff missing in this report. So to kind of wrap up this episode, I would say this report's not that helpful yet. Hopefully, we get more information and more data, more stuff that's usually available on AMC, and then this report will be very helpful. Speaker 2: Yep. The writing's on the wall. So Amazon, Go ahead and make those updates. We appreciate it. And for everybody listening, thanks so much for watching another episode. Make sure you like and subscribe. It really helps us out. And yeah, we'll see you next time. Speaker 1: Peace out.