Amazon Ads launches new full-funnel advertising capabilities

Amazon Ads has unveiled new full-funnel advertising capabilities, including enhanced measurement and reporting tools.

Phil Christer, managing director of Amazon Ads UK, announced the news at the tech giant's annual event, unBoxed 2024.

He said: “Advertisers need unified insights and an end-to-end view of the customer journey but face significant obstacles in the highly fragmented media landscape.

“Today’s launches provide advertisers the ability to consolidate signals across channels and streamline campaign planning and optimisation with direct measurement – from the first impression all the way through to purchase.”

Amazon’s demand-side platform has undergone a significant upgrade. Its streamlined user interface reduces the time needed to set up campaigns by 75% across desktop, mobile, and app inventory, taking just a few clicks.

New features include enhanced reporting tools powered by machine learning, real-time insights and recommendations with insight cards, which alert users when a campaign is underdelivering and offer one-click optimisation suggestions to improve performance. Amazon's DSP now has frequency cap controls, which give advertisers greater ability to manage ad exposure across various channels and devices at a household level.

Amazon also used the event to announce enhancements to Performance+, the AI-driven optimisation tool within Amazon DSP. This tool automates audience targeting and campaign optimisation to meet lower-funnel goals using advertiser-provided signals and predictive AI.

New features for Performance+  available in beta include remarketing and retention. Advertisers can set goals for conversion or awareness, choose KPIs such as cost-per-acquisition, and let Performance+ manage optimisation.

The company has also launched Amazon Marketing Cloud solutions, which allow advertisers to combine first-party data with Amazon Ads signals to understand customer journeys and target audiences. The solutions include a no-code, user-friendly interface, which makes the analytics accessible to brands of all sizes.

Additionally, high-value audience analysis enables advertisers to visualise how a customer base is distributed by total spend, while optimal frequency analysis helps monitor KPIs to set efficient ad frequency caps.

Amazon Ads will launch conversion-path reporting, which shows brands their top-converting customer journeys across the past 30 days and the channels that contributed to conversions. Currently, AMC’s most popular insight report will soon be available as a self-service option for ad consoles and Amazon DSP reports.

In addition, Amazon Ads is working on launching long-term sales insights, which estimate future sales potential based on how effectively campaigns move new customers down the purchase funnel. These insights combine immediate sales and long-term projections to help advertisers understand the full impact of customer engagements throughout the funnel.

Both conversion-path reporting and long-term sales insights are currently in closed beta in the US. Still, they will be available to UK advertisers in open beta in 2025 and later this year, respectively.

Paula Despins, vice president of ads measurement at Amazon Ads, said: “Our mission is to be the most customer-obsessed advertising service by giving all brands the measurement and data-driven, machine-learning optimisation capabilities they need to drive business growth through simple, easy-to-use tools.

“Today’s launches put our most sophisticated full-funnel measurement and optimisation capabilities into the hands of all marketers from small businesses to major brands.”

The article originally appeared on Campaign's sister publication Performance Marketing World.