Dissecting Amazon's Path to Purchase

Dissecting Amazon's Path to Purchase Speaker 2: Welcome to Better Advertising with BTR Media. My name is Justin Knuckles and I'm your host here on the show. On our podcast, we like to talk about e-commerce advertising, both from brand founders to hands-on keyboard advertisers to give the strategies of growth and how these brands have grown to be what they are today. Today, I'm sitting alongside one of my good friends here at BTR Media, Austin Hoggett. Welcome in, Austin. Speaker 1: Pleasure to be here. Speaker 2: We wanted to jump on today because Austin's really been leading the front here on the path to purchase data, which has now become available with an Amazon ad console for a lot of our clients. It's been something we've all been wanting to see for a long time. I think last year, Amazon started rolling it out via their Ad Executives internally to some brands, basically showing it as a patchwork Excel sheet that wasn't very pretty. But now we have a module directly within ad console and directly within DSP to look at the same data. So I wanted to let Austin kind of just describe what this is before we get into how to use it, why it's important, etc. So Austin, let's bring everyone up to speed. What is this path to purchase? Speaker 1: So this path to purchase report basically shows you your top...right now, it's just your top five conversion paths. And in short, it's describing basically the customer journey leading to a purchase. So, you know, I'm going to say this 99 times out of 100 because the one time I've seen it, DSP was actually leading the charge as the number one path. But your number one path will usually be your sponsor products directed to a purchase. You know, that's typically the bread and butter ad type on the Amazon console. And then it'll kind of show you whether people touch DSP, whether people, you know, get insured through sponsor brands and either lead to a sponsor product and then to an actual purchase. So basically just kind of confirming the customer's journey leading directly to a purchase. So yeah, I'll leave it there. Speaker 2: Yeah, and I can add a lot more of my perspective in terms of I think why this is important. But before I state my reasons, Austin, why do you think this is such a big advancement and rollout from Amazon for us? Speaker 1: I think it's, you know, it helps you tell the story from a consumer's point of view, you know, whether people are introduced to sponsor products and then need that additional touchpoint against or across sponsor brands. Campaigns are across DSP orders, whatever it's going to be. It kind of shows you like, hey, we need to be running these strategies concurrently to lead to a purchase or this is how everything's going to be most effective when it all plays together. So, you know, that that's probably the most important aspect of it. But yeah, I'll let you kind of take it from there, too. Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think Amazon being a last touch attribution is been very hard to explain to brands as we're Implementing strategies that are mid-funnel, upper funnel, such as, as an example, let's launch a sponsor brand ad or a sponsor brand video ad at the top of search for some of our most competitive non-branded keywords. This is a great point of discovery for customers that are coming into the aisle looking for a generic keyword and they haven't decided on the brand. This is a great point for them to discover us. Now, depending on is your product of impulse purchase or does it require a little more research? Customers might come back to the platform and search for that keyword again and click on a sponsored product ad or perhaps search your branded keyword. And so that campaign that they last touch is going to get the attribution for the sale. Now that very first point that drew them into discovering your brand, coming back to search for your brand is not going to get any credit other than the spend and the clicks that it generated. So we've often had conversations as I'm sure many advertisers have had conversations Around why are we running the sponsor brand at it's not working. It's not driving sales. Now this data within path to purchase completely turns the argument on its head and says no actually the sponsor brand ads are leading to future sponsor product clicks as an example and purchases. So I think this helps us tell that full end-to-end story of how ads are working together to drive that final purchase now. I know Amazon is in the process of rolling out multi-touch attribution as I go back to where I started saying Amazon was a last touch attribution model. So I'm excited to see what this ends up looking like and chatting about it once we have access to it. But yeah, I think this is a step in the right direction towards multi-touch attribution and helping us describe why these different strategies work together to result in an end purchase. Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it also adds that level of credibility. It's just showing like, hey, running these upper funnel tactics across DSP, we're getting people in the door. This is the number one thing that they're seeing, whether it's an in-market off Amazon ad or basically just an engaged upon DSP ad and then ultimately it's leading to that, hey, I remember this brand. Let's search up either the brand name or let's search up what the product was and then boom, your sponsor product, your sponsor brand ad is there and then ultimately it's leading to a purchase. Seeing how different advertising tactics are either getting the foot in the door of a consumer and leading to an overall purchase or just driving that overall intent. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And I know we've had the conversation with many brands where People will run DSP and say, is it worth it? Like, is this making an impact? Is it making a difference? And we come right into the path to purchase report now and show DSP being a top one or two or third overall path to purchase for many of the brands that run DSP. And that's not just for brands that are running remarketing. That's for a lot of brands also running mid funnel, upper funnel tactics too. So I know you and I have both looked at certain data that shows DSP leading into a sponsor product click. To a purchase, which in my mind tells me that prospecting ad drew that customer into the aisle or into your brand. Again, they came back and maybe searched for. A generic keyword to branded keyword and clicked on your sponsor product, add and purchase. So that DSP is still doing a good job at drawing in customers. But again, we can explain the value of DSP with path to purchase a lot better now. Speaker 1: 100%. And I think, you know, Amazon adding in that, hey, this is actually a new to brand purchase. We'll kind of show that, hey, this was driven through, you know, mid to upper funnel tactic and led to this new to brand search that you might not have gotten without DSP either running or without a sponsor brand. Campaign running so definitely definitely makes it a little bit easier to kind of get the detail behind, you know, this strategy is working. This is why we're using it and this is why it's running. Speaker 2: Yeah, a hundred percent. So let's walk through though. Let's walk the audience through the anatomy of what this report looks like. I'm not sure if you have it in front of you. But as you mentioned, there's the top five path to purchases and it lays out exactly what those ad types are such as the one I'm looking at here for a brand being sponsored products. Number one overall. Followed by a purchase. Number two path to purchase being an online video from sponsored brands leading to a purchase. So this brand must have amazing assets or very good targeting on that video ad. But so on and so forth down the line to position five and at points you're going to see multiple ad types as we've been describing here together in a path to purchase such as sponsor brands followed by a sponsor products ad and then a purchase. So this is kind of the anatomy of it. But what additional data Austin do we get in this report? Speaker 1: So again, kind of limited from the top five conversion path standpoint, but you ultimately get the overall sales generated by that conversion path, the NTB sales generated by that conversion path, the percentage that path makes up in the overall sales. And then you get another kind of comparison between new to brand product purchases and total product purchases. Basically paints a picture of, hey, here's how many sales were driven. Here's how many were new to brand. And then here is the chunk of the pie that this specific path to conversion is taking up. Now you can go a lot deeper when you pull like AMC reports, but that's probably for a deeper conversation that we can have later on in the road. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And what's really cool here is I think most of us have been sorting these path to purchases by just overall sales. However, you are able to rank these path to purchases by sales or purchases or new-to-brand sales or new-to-brand purchases. So if your brand goal for the next quarter, next six months is we really need to acquire more new-to-brand customers, rank these path to purchases by new-to-brand purchases and see what your top overall New to brand purchase path is and lean into those ad types more. So there's a variety of ways you can use this. And I'm sure this is just V1 of many iterations that Amazon's going to roll out. I'm sure, you know, a couple weeks, couple months from now, we'll probably have the top 10 path to purchases. But for right now, I think this is a really great conversation point that I'm finding a lot of value out of. Um, anything else to note here on the anatomy? Oh, well, one more thing. The date ranges we can look at on this are the last 30 days and the last seven days. So, um, a little bit limited in that standpoint in terms of how far back you can look at your path to purchases, but it's a start. Like I said, I'm sure there's gonna be many iterations. So, um, I think that's kind of all to really mention on the anatomy, but anything I'm missing there, Austin? Speaker 1: No, and I do think as they continue to open up, like the date ranges that you can take a look back at, it'll be very interesting to see like the different path to purchases around, you know, your bread and butter, your normal days throughout the year where there's no temple events compared to, you know, temple events like what we just came off of in Q4 with Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the Christmas shopping period. Shoot, if you can go back a month prior to November, you had the big Amazon, was it the big deal days or the prime fall event, whatever it's going to be. So definitely something interesting that, you know, hopefully they add into the future so you can kind of gauge like, hey, this is what worked during Temple events. Here's how this is layered into what we're actually doing on, you know, like a typical shopping day. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. I think the extended look back window will be really helpful. And one question I'm sure a lot of the audience is asking themselves is, do I have access to this data even if I don't run DSP? I know you and I are super excited to talk about this report because it highlights the importance of DSP. But yes, you can look at this data. You do have access to this module, even if you're not running DSP. So, Austin, where can we direct people to go look at this data if they want to go check it out themselves? Speaker 1: So you just go into your ad console, take a look at your account and then it should be right next to the big graph at the top of the page. It'll again show you the top five conversion paths at your brand level. And again, Like I said, typically you'll see that sponsored products, so don't ever be alarmed if that's number one. But yeah, definitely, you know, a lot of good information that you can pull from this. Speaker 2: Yeah, and I know that left hand box, we'll call it, next to that chart in ad console, the last couple weeks has shown up with other recommendations. So if you need to, you know, take action on those recommendations or close them out to kind of sift through the deck to get back to position, you know, the third or fourth card that actually has that path to purchase report, I'm sure it's in there, but If you're having issues finding it, feel free to reach out to Austin or I on LinkedIn. Reach out to the BTR Media team. We'd be happy to help you find access to this data for yourself and even explain the data if you're questioning what does this mean? Is this good? Is this bad? Any other thoughts on this, Austin? Speaker 1: No, no other big thoughts. I just think this opens the door to A lot of different things that you can begin to layer in with like AMC and seeing like overall conversion rates from a certain path. And then as you kind of touched on with the, what is it? The multi-touch attribution, seeing like what campaign led to this campaign and so on. So as that stuff begins to open up, like strategizing is going to become a lot more granular. You'll be able to see like, Hey, somebody touched this campaign, so we need to direct them here and so on. So a lot of interesting things that are going to come out in the future. And I'm sure we'll, you know, we'll be able to chat about those as soon as they're readily available. Speaker 2: Yeah, so what we do best here at BTR Media is be cutting-edge and bring the newest rollouts to the industry. As soon as we have more data to talk about, we'll be happy to do so and we'll be back here on the podcast to chat about it. If you found value in this episode, please share it with anyone that you are alongside and you're scratching your heads wondering what ad types are working, what path to purchase looks like. Hopefully they find some value in this. Hopefully you found some value in this episode. Thank you again, Austin, for jumping on and helping break this down for us. Speaker 1: Yeah, always happy to be here. Speaker 2: If you haven't yet, please subscribe to the show so you don't miss any of our future episodes, future news that we're rolling out here on the show. So again, thank you so much for being here. Have a great rest of your week and cheers.