Amazon
By Averie Lynch
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) emerges as the magic 8-ball of advertising solutions, offering advertisers a robust platform for precise analytics and strategic decision-making.
In this installment, we will focus on Flexible Shopping Insights (FSI) which unlocks a treasure trove of organic shopper data that when used in parity with advertising strategy can reach new customers without wasting budgets.
What are Flexible Shopping Insights in AMC?
Flexible Shopping Insights is a paid subscription add-on for Amazon Marketing Cloud that provides a deeper look into the whole advertising story with organic data. Advertisers can use Amazon’s Instructional Query Library to build custom reports that help answer holistic business questions. Advertisers can also analyze sales events not driven by ads, also known as “organic” sales events.
By contrast, the default AMC data set only provides insight into customers who are buying as a result of clicking on and being exposed to ads. Flexible Shopping Insights offers a fuller picture of customer behavior, impact of ad exposure, and customer long-term value.
The introduction of Flexible Shopping Insights to AMC marks the first time an advertiser has had the ability to analyze advertising and organic sales data together, and incorporate that into campaign strategy. Brands who were initially hesitant to target certain lifestyle segments can now see specific segment size and how many customers converted with the use of FSI. It also allows marketers to narrow down segments with the highest conversion rate. Brands looking to drive market share must look at the entire picture with FSI to uncover wider audiences.
Some business questions that can be answered with the help of Flexible Shopping Insights:
- What is your brand’s ad reach and sales penetration into specific Amazon in-market and lifestyle segments?
- Does exposure to ads increase downstream KPIs compared to similar audiences who weren’t exposed?
- Which customers have the highest organic conversion rate?
- What is the total customer long-term value?
- How can we increase reach while spending budgets efficiently?
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How to Access Flexible Shopping Insights with Amazon Marketing Cloud
As mentioned above, Flexible Shopping Insights is a paid subscription in addition to AMC. The name has since changed to ‘Amazon Insights’ located under the paid features tab in Amazon’s Advertising portal.
These metrics are typically included in the report:
- Reach: Total unique shoppers reached
- ROAS: Return on ad spend
- New-to-brand (NTB) Purchases: Unique shoppers who purchased for the first time in 1 year
- NTB Rate: New-to-brand rate as compared to repeat purchases
How Much Does Flexible Shopping Insights Cost?
Subscription costs vary from brand to brand, and can range from $100/month to over $20K/month, depending on the volume of traffic your products receive. Amazon also offers a 60-day free trial, and sets the paid subscription to opt-in only, meaning that the trial will not automatically roll into a paid subscription.
Applying Flexible Shopping Insights with The Honest Company
Despite strong brand awareness, baby and beauty brand The Honest Company, wanted to boost new-to-brand (NTB) sales on Amazon by uncovering high-intent audiences with limited or no purchase history. The Honest Company partnered with Tinuiti to build a full-funnel strategy to find and convert these new audiences.
Tinuiti identified a new Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) tool to help: AMC Flexible Shopping Insights. Unlike AMC alone, which only tracks ad-attributed actions, this tool gave Tinuiti visibility into organic shoppers, including customers who may have never seen an ad. With these new insights, Tinuiti tested the tool shortly after launch and identified more than 20 previously untapped custom audiences across categories like household, grocery, and adjacent interest areas.
Tinuiti added the audiences into the brand’s campaigns alongside existing strategies, tracking NTB rates and ROAS to measure the efficiency of these additions. With this tool in its arsenal, The Honest Company exceeded its NTB category benchmark by 20%, reducing new customer acquisition cost over the previous period by 52%.
Flexible Shopping Insights uncovered untapped audience segments with high organic conversion overlap, guiding campaign strategy toward new acquisition targets. Read more about The Honest Co.’s success with Tinuiti on Amazon.
Key Takeaways
Flexible Shopping Insights offers a more comprehensive view of buyer behaviors with the ability to incorporate organic data. Get the full story when it comes to customer long-term value versus looking at default data which only shows conversions attributed to your advertising. With FSI, advertisers get a more granular look into where to invest advertising dollars, leading to a larger reach at more efficient NTB acquisition costs.
Flexible Shopping Insights is part of the Instructional Query Library (IQL), which offers pre-built templates by Amazon to get started with the basics. If you’re seeking deeper insights with the guidance of experts who understand how to leverage FSI to its fullest potential, reach out to Tinuiti today.
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