How to make Amazon Marketing Cloud work for you this Black Friday

Image by Amazon.

The evidence so far shows it’s a bit of a straitened Q4 for retailers.

October’s Prime Deal Days were disappointing for Amazon compared to the previous year’s, with gift-buying lower than expected. The reasons are financial: thanks to tariffs, margins and a weak economy, sellers couldn’t afford to offer big discounts, and shoppers were unwilling to spend the money.

What this means for the Black Friday week, we’ve yet to see. It’s possible the lack of gift buying in October will equate to more shoppers being ready to spend big bucks over Black Friday week and Cyber Monday, with only a month to go before Christmas, and no more significant sales days coming between now and then.

But with tight margins, strict budgets and tariff trouble, it’s also possible that brands won’t be able to afford to slash their prices like they’d like to over the Black Friday week.

Luckily, we have Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC). If you can’t afford massive, headline-grabbing discounts, you can use the data and reports in AMC to finely tune your advertising towards your audience, ensuring your ads are seen by shoppers who are already low down in the funnel, and more likely to be converted by a smaller discount.

Here are some of our favourite strategies for using Amazon Marketing Cloud this Black Friday. Our gift to you.

What is Amazon Marketing Cloud?

AMC is a clean room data solution introduced in 2021. Amazon sellers use it to join datasets from Amazon and other platforms, creating actionable insights into their real customers’ shopping behaviour.

These insights help you better manage your advertising on Amazon and off, with campaign measurement, audience analysis and use of media across video, audio, display and search ads. You can analyse ad engagement and conversion signals across channels and sources, and build custom audiences for your ads.

You hold the keys with AMC: you can choose the analytics you want to see, building queries that will help you in your marketing.

It gives you a full picture of your customers’ journey, from initial touchpoints to conversion – meaning actionable insights into which ads products work best for you, in which combinations, and where to place your ads.

On Amazon event days, like Prime Days and the Black Friday week, AMC can be even more valuable: it can help you pinpoint the audience you want from the much larger volume of traffic, meaning you don’t necessarily have to rip through your budget to make an impact. It can also give you more data for future use.

How can I use AMC for Black Friday week?

When we’re working with AMC for a client on Black Friday week, we tend to take a three-pronged approach:

• Leverage last year’s customer journey data to see which products served as gateway products. That means using AMC reports such as the New-to-Brand Report (see below for more) to find your hero ASINs, which tend to perform better as introductions to your brand. Then you can put your ad spend with those ASINs to attract the higher volume of shoppers over the Black Friday week.
• Find which audiences over-perform for promo events. In AMC you can segment high-value audiences, based on total purchase values over a given period – such as last Black Friday, or the most recent Prime Day. You can then target your advertising to that segment.
• Leverage which ads touchpoints delivered the highest conversion rate. Using the Path to Conversion Report (see below again), you can check which combinations of ads – such as DSP + Sponsored Brand, or Sponsored Video + Sponsored Products – will yield the highest CVR.

“If your margins won’t allow big discounts, it’s more important than ever that you use Amazon Marketing Cloud: it allows you to fine-tune your advertising campaigns for more precise targeting and re-targeting, helping your budget go further.”

- Claudiu Clement, CTO, e-Comas

Which AMC reports should I use?

Here are four AMC reports we like best for targeting high traffic with a smaller budget over event days like Black Friday.

New-to-Brand (NTB) Report: This report is used to identify a brand’s top-performing categories and products for new shoppers. That allows you to increase your spend on those categories or products during peak seasons like the Black Friday week, to maximise new customer acquisition from the higher volume of traffic.

You can also use the NTB Report to encourage repeat purchasing: by increasing spend on the categories less purchased by new-to-brand shoppers, you can increase customer lifetime value. This works well in the lead-out time from Black Friday, when you can retarget those who bought from you over the event.

Purchase Overlap: This report is used to identify items frequently purchased together.

You can deploy cross-sell and up-sell campaigns to remarket to customers who bought item A by targeting them with item B.

If you’re offering a small discount on both of them, even better. On Black Friday, a small discount on two products can look more attractive to a shopper than a small discount on one product.

Path to Conversion: The Path to Conversion report is used to identify the most effective ad combinations. For example, it may find that your campaigns that use DSP and Sponsored Products together have a higher conversion rate than if you use DSP alone.

This helps you make informed decisions on ad type synergies, and optimise your campaign design.

Use the report to decide what ad types you want to use over Black Friday week.

Amazon Tentpole Phase Analysis: This report helps you analyse the main KPIs across the three main phases of any event - Lead-up, Main Event and Lead-out. You can analyse them one at a time, two at a time or the three combined.

We recently used the report for a client to check Purchase Rate across Prime Day. We found that most traffic came through the Lead-out phase, while higher ROAS was recorded during Prime Day. However, the highest Purchase Rate came from the combination of the three phases. 

What does that mean? It means that shoppers who saw our ads throughout the three phases were the most likely to convert.

TOP TIP: After Black Friday week, use the data from the event to see what worked and what didn’t. Use that knowledge to inform your strategy over future Amazon sales events.

e-Comas is an official Amazon Marketing Cloud services provider. We can help you win on Amazon using the power of AMC. Contact us today!