Connecting the Funnel with AMC

Connecting the Funnel with AMC Speaker 1: Hello, everyone. I am super excited to be sitting here today in the Amazon Live studios and not only am I in a really cool location, but I'm also with a really cool person. Joe, it's been a while since we've been on a podcast together. Speaker 2: Yeah, this is awesome. It's fun to do it in person. It's fun to do it in the studio here. I'm super excited about it. Speaker 1: We've really set the bar. I think the last one we did was maybe a year and a half ago and now we're here. Speaker 2: Now we're here. Now we're here. And so one of the things we wanted to really dive into is just like The overall Amazon ads ecosystem, it's evolved quite a bit over since last time we've talked. There's so many cool new updates, and so we just want to sit down and talk through some of the things that get us most excited, some of the evolutions we've seen, and just kind of do a deep dive on Amazon ads as a whole. Speaker 1: Absolutely. There's been so many changes. I don't even know we could cover half of it in a short episode, if we're being honest at this point. But one of the things that I would say we've seen a major shift or transformation in the last year is Access to insights is a huge one and creative opportunity. Those are two areas where I feel like Amazon ads has really honed in on and enhanced the opportunity for sellers that are brand new, but also the largest enterprise brands. It's been a major democratization in insights and creative. Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's one key piece is we've seen all these different tools get put in place where we can really lean into all these different shopping insights that Amazon has and be able to help inform our customers through advertising. AMC is an amazing tool that's unlocked a lot of this in terms of creative, just more tools on how we can expand and build out our creatives within the ecosystem, all the way from sponsored flowing through Amazon's DSP, and then layer on all the different areas where we can actually show our content. You tie into the whole media side and there's just this overarching ecosystem People come to shop at Amazon, and so it's an amazing spot to really grow your brand and your products. Speaker 1: And we're not even covering things on the retail side, like search query performance report and all of the changes we've seen from a seller-vendor central dashboard perspective, which really goes to show, in my opinion, how Overwhelming it can be to be in our industry and as a brand, figuring out what to prioritize I think can be really difficult. You're constantly seeing all of these updates when you log in in your email newsletters and on LinkedIn. So something I think Joe and I have really leaned into just with our content, how we educate is not 80-20 per se, but, you know, prioritization. What is right for your brand at any point in time? And that's where I think AMC, in my opinion, is one of the most exciting updates to come to Amazon because it does not matter, truly does not matter what size Of a brand you are, AMC is incredibly powerful. Now, how you prioritize it and how you build it into your systems and operations is a whole different story. And we can talk lightly about that today. But do you want to talk a little bit about how you've seen brands leaning into AMC or as an agency, how you've prioritized AMC? Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so going all the way from like sponsored ads up to full funnel video cascading all the way down, there's a lot of different use cases. And so I think a couple of different ways to look at AMC is. Can I use the insights that I gain to change my strategy as a business? And then can I use it to change how I actually run ads and how do I optimize my ads as I go? And so from like a strategy perspective, there's a lot of cool things you can find. One that's been interesting to me is path to purchase. And so you can find the different journey that somebody takes through the advertising ecosystem to find your products. You layer it in with total time to purchase. This was a super interesting one for me because my mental model originally was I go to Amazon, I usually make pretty quick decisions, and I purchase right there. And if I look at what the information tells me, there's usually a lot longer time period leading up to that. And maybe it's something that I'm not even aware of. And so I think time to purchase is a cool area where you can use AMC to actually change your strategy. For instance, if somebody purchases, they see the first ad and it takes them on average 60 to 90 days to purchase, that's going to change how I view running my ads and how I view the overall advertising funnel. I think that's one way where it's like, Even if I'm not going into the upper funnel or DSP or all the way up to like video brand advertising all the way down, there's a lot of really cool insights that you can get that shifts my strategy and just overall how I approach the business as a whole and then also advertising. Speaker 1: Absolutely. When I'm educating on AMC, I usually start with the fundamental of, it's really valuable for two things, audience or analytics. I am not surprised that you lean into analytics first. That is how we always jokingly differentiate how we run our companies. So the analytical opportunity is incredible. Things like path to purchase, ad type overlap is another good one, and it unlocks an opportunity to better communicate one incrementality. Your touch points in how you're actually viewing Path to Purchase and being able to bring those insights to senior leadership can really help justify different investment changes, I think. Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that's one key piece that you hit on is being able to bring it to senior leadership, too. One thing I think we take for granted since we're so close is that we understand the value of advertising and running that on Amazon and It may not be as apparent, or if I'm the CEO of a big brand, I need to justify all the dollars that I'm funneling into marketing. And so as marketers, if we can bring more information on the true impact that advertising has, it helps to make those decisions. It helps to grow budgets. It helps to grow the brand as a whole. And so I think that's one of the hardest questions we're faced with all the time. Can you truly justify the impact that my ad spend has on growing my brand and achieving my overall results? And that's where I think AMC can really come into play and is huge for being able to communicate to leadership that those dollars that you're putting into this channel really have a huge impact. Speaker 1: Let's take a really basic example or a scenario I see frequently. Brands test a more aggressive upper funnel video budget. A streaming TV budget and they get their performance results and they're unhappy. If you were to just view all of these ad types in a silo, you're not actually understanding how a customer interacts with the platform. So what Joe's saying is we're able to actually pull those insights and something we've seen frequently is when a customer starts their journey with a video ad, they convert much higher on a sponsored product ad. Why? Because they were educated before the intent was there. So when you serve them a video ad, you have an opportunity, one, be more disruptive, two, to educate why your product is best when it's standing on a digital shelf and it's being compared to every other product. So if you can kind of inherently increase that sponsor product conversion rate because of your video ad, One, it helps kind of see total ROAS in a much better way, but it also allows you to reallocate your budgets in a way that may drive a little bit more incrementality, and that's really important. Again, we're only hitting on the analytics side of AMC. I think the next big thing that we should dive into is the audience side and how AMC allows us to view all of our customers In a much different fashion, what have you all been utilizing AMC audiences for? Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess we can even tie together the audiences and the analytics. And going back to your point on a upper funnel video ad, if I just compare it to linear television, I would run my ad to a general audience and I'd have some demo information on who typically views that, whatever I'm running it for. And that's all the reporting I get. And we've had to make a leap of faith that this is driving the brand, it's driving purchases. And so where the industry is going is we can layer in better analytics. On how those perform, but then we can also layer in the audience side too. And so that's the beautiful thing with digital advertising is that now we can make sure that we're reaching the right audience with their ads. And then we can also get the analytics on how those ads perform. So, I may not drive a purchase directly from my Upper Funnel brand ad, but I may see that from a first-touch attribution. So, they saw this ad first, and then they saw three other ads as we go. That audience tends to perform a lot better than this other one. So, hey, this brand ad is working really well. So, a path to purchase. Customer journey, first-touch attribution, you can get all those metrics to see like what upper funnel ad is really resonating. And then the beautiful part is now we can be reaching a specific audience. And then with some of the tools that we have on the creative side, we can make sure that we're customizing those creatives to better speak to that audience. So it's a better overall experience for the customer. You can build that connection quicker because I see the ad and it's like, okay, really resonate with that. It's because I was part of that audience that it was built to resonate on. And so I think that's, on the audience side, it's really fun where you can take these ads that had to be built for more general audiences and now you can really make them more focused and build that connection quicker. Speaker 1: Absolutely. And the whole ecosystem connects. Again, that's the part I don't think a lot of brands quite realize. We could take our AMC audience that we curated and maybe it's something as simple as everyone who viewed my streaming TV ad. You put them in a little bucket. I can now open up Advertising Console, I can create a sponsored product ad, and I can add a bid boost to target that audience. So when Joe talks about things like path to purchase and ad type overlap, this is really where we're strategically implementing those insights. So I can go after my keyword that maybe historically had a higher CPC than average. I can now only apply a bid boost when I know they've seen my video. The likelihood of them then converting on that sponsored product ad is inherently probably going to be higher because they were exposed to my video elsewhere and then had the intent to go to the platform and search for a keyword. So you can get really, really strategic with how we're targeting customers along the path to purchase. But if you're listening in to this and you have no idea what half of the words we're saying, the acronyms, the attribution, the incrementality, even at its simplest, you can use AMC audiences for things like retargeting. You could go in and create a really simple audience because even without access to AMC or DSP, it's now available for everyone within Advertising Console and Amazon's released some really curated AMC audiences inherently in the platform. So you can log into Ad Console right now, open up a sponsored product ad and a sponsored brand ad if you prefer, and you're going to see AMC audiences. And all it's doing is segmenting your audiences between things like high intent buyers. Amazon has the shopper insights to know who is more likely or a higher intent to purchase. And then if you select that audience, you can apply a bid boost to that audience, which is a really cool way to view it. Because think about it, if you're bidding on a keyword, but you know a specific audience who's typing that keyword is going to be more likely to convert, you're probably going to be willing to pay a little bit more to put your products in front of that customer. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a key thing. So if we look at our advertising stack for many sellers, like sponsored ads are going to be the majority of the spend. And then as brands grow bigger, now you can allocate more and more to that brand building side. With Sponsored, our core controls up to this point have been keyword-based. We've been able to then apply some bid boosts to different placements, so where they show up within the page. But now, the key value that Destaney is hitting on is that we can also layer in an extra audience. For instance, if you've seen my products before, I can create an audience that if you search for, say, a more general term, maybe I'm selling athletic running watches, before I'd never be able to target the keyword watch because there's so many different ways that you could I'm what you're looking for when you type in a watch. But now what I could do is I could layer in this additional audience and I could target a more general keyword like watch, but the way that it works is now if they're part of the audience that's already looked at my brand or my products before, now they get shown the ad and there's a much more higher likelihood that they're going to convert into a sale. And so it opens the door to a lot more like general terms that we typically wouldn't be able to target before because they'd be too broad. But now we can make sure that we're reaching the right people who are either know our brand, know our products before, or maybe the right fit. But we just can't tell that just directly through the keyword itself. Speaker 1: Absolutely. All of this can be hard to scale. I would say that's probably one of the biggest difficulties we've seen with all of this being opened up because on one hand, you can get as custom as you like. I mean, I have brands reaching out about like, how do I better analyze household penetration or customer acquisition costs? And those are very custom queries that you have to build Based on, I would say, different intents within the business. On the flip side, you have things like Joe and I have talked about that are pretty easy to incorporate. How are you viewing or working with brands to figure out what's the best fit for them? Like, how do you get them started when there's an unlimited opportunity with AMC? Speaker 2: Yeah. So I think as you're getting going, first is just getting experience on the platform itself. And really the core thing that we want to start with is what questions are we trying to answer? Versus like, I just want access to the platform. And so if we can start with the questions and the overarching business strategy, that'll drive what we need to push. And so based off of that, like anything, as you get deeper and deeper, finding specialists who know how to incorporate these in can always be great, but there's a whole opportunity to just dive in. And it's getting more and more accessible for everybody by the day too. So I think there's a huge opportunity to dive in. So I guess my key feedback is like, Take a look, check it out, start with the questions first, and then make sure that whatever you're learning on, you can actually apply. So whether it's changing the strategy or within your ads themselves, if we can't do anything with what we learn, then it wasn't really useful. Speaker 1: That's actually an area I would say I've struggled with is I've had brands reach out to me saying, I need this done with AMC. And I look at their advertising account. I'm like, oh, you need a lot more done than just working with AMC. But it's the buzzword in the space. It's the newest release. It's the most exciting thing. So I've struggled to articulate that well to brands. I want to solve all their problems, but also brands don't always know what the best question to ask is, especially when they are taking things back to leadership. I'm like, An area I try to focus on is the actionability is what's something that's immediately going to drive results. That's where I typically start with, you know, the audience side. And then we start leaning into more of the analytics side, the ad type overlap, the path to purchase. That's all going to help our budget distribution and kind of where we're focusing on efficiency versus awareness. And then that's when I say we're going to start looking at the little bit more custom queries that are going to be specific to your brand needs. Speaker 2: Like everything, it's building the base first and then we can keep adding on different pieces. And so I think that's probably the best way to conclude this too. Make sure like when you're looking at this that you've got a solid foundation built first. There's a lot of pieces that we can do without layering something like AMC, but then once you've got that solid foundation in place through sponsored ads, maybe I'm starting to dabble into more upper funnel ads or sponsored display. At that point, now we can really start layering these extra insights to bring your ads to that next level. So there's different ways that you can go. Don't feel overwhelmed. Make sure you just get started, but then just know that you can keep building as you go. And then finally, I would say make sure you're following Destaney's content. She's putting out a lot of awesome stuff on just like What are the updates that are coming along? We try to do the same, but it's constantly changing. Unknown Speaker: Absolutely, yes. Speaker 2: We are watching constantly and it's ever-evolving. It is. Speaker 1: I think you and I need to have like a scheduled quarterly review at this point over everything going on in the industry because we both go about the business in a similar fashion, I would say, but also Different. And I think it drives a really unique viewpoint for the industry. Speaker 2: Yeah. Maybe we'll just have to do it quarterly here in the studio. Speaker 1: Yeah. Amazon Live. What do you think? Amazing. Well, this has been incredible as always. Speaker 2: Yeah. Awesome to talk to you, Destaney.