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The deprecation of the cookie is bound to accelerate over the next 12 months within EMEA - meaning that first-party data and the usage of clean rooms are critical pieces of the puzzle of building effective, optimized media strategies. Without digging in here, advertisers risk falling behind their competition.
In this blog, we’re looking at Amazon Marketing Cloud specifically (Flywheel is the #1 user globally) and how utilizing the tools available to advertisers can ensure your business is driving profitable and incremental growth along with extracting maximum value from your media budgets on Amazon across Europe.
Revisiting Amazon Marketing Cloud
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a secure, privacy-safe, cloud-based clean room solution, from which advertisers can perform analytics and build audiences across pseudonymized signals using Amazon templates or your first-party data.
The possibilities within AMC for driving business growth are plentiful but for simplicity, we like to break down how we think about and use AMC into two different arms - tactical and strategic:
- TACTICAL - AMC’s tools can help advertisers understand and execute campaign measurement, audience analysis, media optimization, and more - think of this as the short-term output.
- STRATEGIC - AMCs custom query capabilities allow advertisers to explore unique brand marketing questions and address top business priorities to drive and optimize long-term strategy.
There are countless other ways AMC can support strategic direction and budget efficiency, but true focus needs to be assigned to actionable insights that push you closer to your objectives. Other opportunities include:
- Cross-campaign analysis across video, audio, display, and search to gain an overarching understanding of the customer journey within the Amazon ecosystem (multi-touch attribution, and a deeper understanding of shopper path to purchase).
- Build bespoke audiences for use within the Amazon DSP, which utilizes signals across multiple channels. Custom audiences can be used to drive incrementality or improve retargeting efficiencies.
To summarize, Amazon Marketing Cloud provides the advertiser with a unique and unmatched opportunity to review the effectiveness of both search and display media on Amazon, but our approach hasn’t always been the same over time.
The past, present and future of campaign optimization & measurement on Amazon
Historically, Flywheel would hypothesize on tactics such as New to Brand and effective Awareness Audiences to drive the creation of a holistic full-funnel strategy - relying on proactive ‘test & learns’ to understand performance and optimize towards a set of agreed objectives.
Advertisers are now able to be much more precise with the execution of campaign optimizations that were simply not possible before the launch of AMC. Specifically:
(1) Using clean room data - advertisers can review the optimal range of reach and frequency of each DSP campaign; from which the budget can be conserved and assigned to more incremental tactics.
(2) Time to conversion - advertisers can review how long after a click or view before a customer purchases. Based on this data, retargeting strategy optimizations can be implemented to reduce the time (and potential blockers) between view and purchase.
The cost of not playing for businesses across EMEA
Within the unpredictable economic landscape that e-commerce operates within, unforeseen changes happen, and often result in media budgets becoming a little tighter. Flywheel works to make those media pounds sweat harder and extract maximum efficiency for our clients, and by using the newly available and unique tactics afforded to advertisers since the launch of AMC, media budgets can be optimized by reducing inefficiencies blind to advertisers in historic campaigns.
Across EMEA, as major publishers commit to 3rd Party Cookie depreciation over the next 24 months, 1st Party Data and the use of Clean Room solutions are going to transform the way
advertisers build media strategies and optimize campaigns. Moving quickly to better understand and utilize clean room solutions (such as AMC) is especially important within EMEA when you look through the lens of GDPR / privacy regulation and how future changes in the media ecosystem will impact advertisers' capacity to understand the shopper's path to purchase.
At Flywheel, we are in the weeds with our clients every day. We can empathize with the pace of change in media buying in EMEA as the ecosystem shifts into a cookieless world, which will no doubt put pressure on the justification for ad spend in the EU where budgets are already tight -especially in more nascent markets such as the Netherlands, for instance. We are leaders at the forefront of ad tech, partnering with some of the world's largest brands, giving the strategic insight needed to drive efficient and incremental growth.
If you aren’t using AMC to query your Amazon performance, you are potentially leaving media budget on the table that could be utilized to generate incremental revenue for your business.
How do I get started?
If you are a Flywheel client, speak to your Client Services team who can advise on the right solution for your brand. If you are not a Flywheel client, reach out to our experts today to learn more.
