Building a multiphase ADSP & AMC audience strategy for Black Friday Cyber Monday

The importance of a multiphase ADSP & AMC audiences strategy for Black Friday Cyber Monday

Any major deal event creates the opportunity to speak to consumers at multiple points in their shopping journey. While a rock-solid search strategy is a critical element for deal event success, there is abundant opportunity to be unlocked by building out a multiphase ADSP strategy, utilizing AMC for full-funnel measurement and AMC audiences for more strategic reach.

As we approach black Friday Cyber Monday, it’s important to understand tactics for each phase of an ADSP strategy. These phases include:

• The lead-in - for building brand awareness and growing consideration pools
• The during (event days themselves) - capturing built-up demand and driving conversion 
• The lead out - remarketing to purchasers and retaining new customers

Of course, a strong budget is needed to stay live through all three phases. Adequate planning in the weeks (and even months) leading up to a deal event can help set a brand up for success.

Why AMC audiences?

Utilizing AMC for measurement allows for the most complete picture of a campaign’s performance, and as Amazon continues to build up the capabilities within AMC, we’ve seen worthwhile success from efforts put into deal event strategies that utilize AMC audiences. But what are AMC audiences?

According to Amazon, “Similar to how advertisers can run queries to build aggregated and anonymized AMC reporting today, advertisers have the flexibility to define their own queries and create custom audiences in AMC that best support their advertising and business goals, on top of utilizing audience options available in Amazon DSP.”

Here are some examples of audience types (source):

• Awareness: Audiences who have engaged with Streaming TV ads but not yet exposed to display ads, or audiences who are over-exposed to ads across media channels (used for audience exclusion)
• Consideration: Audiences who viewed the product detail page multiple times after ad exposure, audiences who added advertised products to their wish list, or lookalike audiences that allow us to capture similar NTB purchasers, which supports incremental growth
• Conversion: Audiences who explored certain keywords post ads exposure, or audiences who added the product to the cart but did not complete the purchase
• Loyalty: Audiences who purchased from the brand last year but have no recent engagements, or audiences with high customer long-term value (CLV) based on past purchases

To bring this to life, we can look at one of Flywheel’s clients who put a Prime Day Purchaser Retargeting AMC Audience test into place this past Prime Day. Our team built a custom audience composed of consumers who had purchased from the brand during Prime Day 2023 with the goal of recapturing tentpole event shoppers. The brand saw 50% NTB, implying that many of these shoppers had not purchased from the brand since the previous Prime Day - we call these types of shoppers “deal seekers” and bringing these shoppers back year after year can be a critical development for media tentpole strategies.

With a case like the above in mind (and that was only one specific audience test), imagine the possibilities of a well-planned audience strategy for every phase of the next major deal event - Black Friday Cyber Monday. Read on for our full breakdown and recommended approach for each phase throughout the event.

Pulling together the strategy

The lead-in phase

The lead-in is all about generating awareness for your brand and prioritizing consideration tactics against high purchase intent audiences by 1) dominating consideration in the aisle and 2) showcasing your brand with assets. Detail Page View Rate increases are the measure of success in this phase.

We observed significant personalization of the homepage this past Prime Day where most deals shown to consumers were for items they had been exposed to before or had even purchased before. This means the lead-in should receive more attention than ever as brands need to get in front of consumers before the actual event if Amazon continues this strategy.

We also observed a shift from brand-led to ASIN-led deal tiles, meaning deal tiles directed to PDPs rather than brand pages or category-wide pages. This further emphasizes the need to deeply understand consumer behavior via utilizing AMC - you want to understand, before the event, which items are driving trial and then long term value.

Dominating consideration in the aisle looks like:

• Getting in front of shoppers who are in the researching stage or comparing brands and products via AMC Audiences (NTB Lookalike, Multi Detail Page View, Frequent shopper lookalike), Video (OLV, STV, Prime Video Ads) or Fire TV/Alexa 
• Leveraging strong competitor conquesting and contextual targeting strategies

Showcasing your brand with assets looks like:

• Telling your brand story with custom creatives or video assets - leaning into your value prop & certifications as a brand that differentiates you from the competition. Developing creatives specific to each stage of the funnel is key here to drive the right messaging for each targeting type.
• Featuring lifestyle content and/or key ASIN product imagery and call-to-actions to resonate with consumers
• Ensuring creatives are following Amazon specs

Applying this to Black Friday Cyber Monday - we recommend beginning the lead-in phase 14 days before the event. Budget should heavily be focused on awareness and consideration tactics (more specifically, higher purchasing intent audiences known as “Contextual” audiences when targeting), and custom creative/video assets should be ready to go, maximizing the seasonality of the event (ie. creative that features gifting visuals).

The during phase

The during phase is for driving sales - we break this down below into 4 key areas where your brand needs to be on top of its game throughout BFCM:

Maximizing retargeting

Aim to dominate as much real estate as possible and leverage retargeting to attract customers who showed interest in your product during the lead-in phase to encourage conversion

Increasing frequency

Increase frequency caps to ensure your brand is visible to users throughout the day - from Prime Day 2022 we saw that customers spent 39% more time shopping between last ad click and purchase during Prime Day compared to the prior 4 week average, illustrating why higher frequency is critical to nurture those shoppers to convert

Monitoring bids

CPM bids can be very volatile on the days of the event and vary from day to night. We suggest monitoring the bids and increasing them in case you are bidding under your competitors

Responsive eCommerce

Featuring responsive ecommerce ads to showcase the deal ASINs allows for shoppers to be shown the ads most relevant to them. For example, if someone consistently looks for product reviews, these will be the types of ads served to this shopper, creating a more personal point of connection.

Between both the lead-in and the during phases, this is where exploration of a retargeting AMC audience test could be a worthwhile investment for your brand, similar to our story in the beginning of this blog. Custom audiences can be built that target previous deal event shoppers of your brand with the hopes of re-engaging them and bringing them back to purchase again during each deal event. To drive loyalty beyond just a deal event - that is what the lead-out phase is for.

The lead-out phase

The event might be over, but it’s not time to take a break quite yet. The lead-out phase is critical in retaining new customers and continuing to drive loyalty in existing customers. Your brand wants to maintain momentum rather than lose a bunch of one-time purchasers until the next deal event. 

This can be accomplished by retargeting engaged consumers and continuing to promote deal ASINs for the 14 days post-event. Because BFCM is the gateway to the entire holiday shopping season, there are customers to be captured who may have viewed your products but did not make purchases during the actual event.

Engaged consumers can be reached in a variety of ways, such as:

• Retargeting people who viewed but did not purchase
• Retargeting AMC SP viewers
• Retargeting AMC Add to Cart
• Remarketing to  people who purchased with complementary products
  • AMC NTB Purchaser Audience
  • AMC NTB Purchaser LAL

And with all of that, your brand has a solid multiphase ADSP and AMC audiences strategy for Black Friday Cyber Monday 2024, as well as most future significant shopping events. Before we wrap it up, let’s look at how success should be measured across the phases of the event.

Measuring success

While the metrics that define success differ by brand and deal event-specific objectives, we guide brands to look at detail page view rate as a KPI of the lead-in phase, sales as the success indicator for the during phase, and more future-looking metrics such as LTV during the lead-out phase.

Because shoppers wait until the actual deal event to make purchases, the best a brand can do in the lead-in is drive more eyeballs to the PDPs with the hopes of the shoppers saving the item or adding it to cart because of the advertising nudges during the lead-in.

The during phase is all about conversion and therefore all about sales that prove that the lead-in efforts were worthwhile. Going back to basics, a lot of the during phase comes down to visibility of your products in search, making sure they’re in stock, and optimizing PDP for conversion.

Lastly, the lead-out begins with measuring the effectiveness of the efforts to continue to drive sales of the products even though the deal event is over as well as continuing to promote to new to brand shoppers to keep them engaged. Over time, as more deal events pass, brands can get a read on the actual lifetime value of these deal-event shoppers while continuing to try and increase purchase frequency and overall loyalty of shoppers who discover or come back to the brand during deal events.

Is your brand prepared to implement a multiphase ADSP and AMC audiences strategy this BFCM? Let’s chat.

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