On October 26, at Amazon Ads' annual UnBoxed event, Amazon unveiled new tools and features designed to help brands improve customer relationships and grow their businesses.
The new features are particularly attractive to advertisers on Amazon. A good relationship between brand and customer is essential. As customer expectations continue to rise, Amazon is focusing on customer-centric marketing solutions with the recently unveiled features.
Alan Moss, Vice President of Global Ad Sales, describes the importance of an authentic customer relationship as follows: "At the end of the day, our job as marketers is to bring together different things - brands and customers, business challenges and solutions, and audiences and the content and services they love. If we relentlessly innovate and are rigorous enough, these connections add value to our customers' everyday lives by being useful and relevant to their actual experiences - no matter how quickly those experiences evolve."
Interactive ads
Since streaming content can have a big impact on building brand relationships, advertisers will have the option to use interactive ads in the upcoming future.
1. Interactive Video Ads
Amazon customers will be able to request product information from interactive video ads on Fire TV. According to Amazon, this turns the shopping action from passively watching ads into an experience. The requested information will be sent to the customer as an email or QR code, directing them to the product detail page on Amazon. As an advertiser, you have the option to include call-to-actions in your streaming TV ads. Verbal calls-to-action such as "Buy now" or "Add to cart" are designed to enhance the consumer shopping experience.
2. Interactive Audio Ads
Similar to video ads, audio content such as Amazon Music or Amazon Alexa will have the ability to send product information or use calls to action. Customers can interact directly with an audio ad in this way. For advertisers in the US, this feature is currently in a limited beta phase.
Brand Follow
With the Brand Follow function, customers from the USA can, as the name suggests, follow brands on Amazon. As soon as a customer follows a brand, he or she is no longer only notified about Amazon livestreams, but also gets offers from the brand displayed on the Amazon home page.
The feature helps to build long-term customer relationships. According to Amazon, more than 20 million Brand Follow connections have been created since the Follow button was introduced in 2019. Alan Moss explains that shoppers who follow a brand spend more than twice as much on average on a product from that brand than shoppers who don't follow a brand.
Sponsored Display Ads in Twitch live streams
Sponsored Display Ads can be created in a very short time and help reach the appropriate audience. Following the launch of sponsored ads on Twitch's Browse tab and directory pages in June, these ads will also be included in livestreams on Twitch in Germany, the US, the UK, Canada, France, Italy, and Spain.
Amazon Marketing Cloud
Launched in January, the Amazon Marketing Cloud analytics platform is now more tightly integrated with Amazon and available anywhere Amazon DSP is available. Advertisers can upload their own data and query the data from Amazon ad campaigns. Thus, the platform helps in planning, measuring and optimizations of ad campaigns. Changes made based on user feedback include shortening query times, adding a simple user interface, and adding a library of templates for a range of campaign measurements.
New solutions for campaign analysis
To help advertisers invest in marketing more successfully, Amazon is introducing Brand Metrics and Amazon Brand Lift as two new campaign analytics solutions. Both tools are currently in beta in some countries.
1. Brand Metrics
As a self-service solution, this measurement tool relates the total number of buyers who considered a purchase based on product detail views and brand searches to the value of actual buyers. Comparison to competitors is also possible with this tool. The tool and measurement of purchase interactions helps advertisers measure and analyze brand management.
2. Amazon Brand Lift
The Amazon Brand Lift tool helps examine campaign goals such as awareness, preferences, and intent. Advertisers have the opportunity to create surveys and get responses from Amazon shoppers. Surveys can be created in minutes and reports are typically available in two weeks. The studies provide quick and meaningful insights at scale.
Development of the new features
Just a few days after the new features were unveiled, advertisers are already impressed by the interactive advertising formats. The newly introduced tools make buying products more attractive and enjoyable for customers. The call-to-action ads address potential buyers directly and can thus lead to an increase in sales.
We are curious to see which changes and features will prevail on Amazon in the future.
