What is full-funnel marketing?

Creating a funnel strategy that can help your business grow on Amazon.

What is full-funnel marketing?

Creating a funnel strategy that can help your business grow.

Why is full-funnel marketing important?

Understand why a full-funnel marketing approach has never been more critical for businesses of any size.

For many shoppers, research and discovery happen across multiple channels at once.

If you’ve ever scanned product reviews on your phone while shopping in store, or toggled between a brand’s social media feed and website while watching a TV commercial, you’re not alone. 69% of in-store shoppers research reviews on their phones as they browse the aisles¹, and 71% of Americans use a second screen to look up content related to content they are watching on TV².

The ubiquity of mobile devices and social media means that online and offline shopping journeys are becoming more fragmented—making it critical to adopt a full-funnel strategy that drives awareness and demand across multiple channels simultaneously.

69%

of in store shoppers research reviews on their phones as they browse the aisles.¹

1. eMarketer, Retail & Ecommerce Sales, US, October 2019
2. Arstechnica, December 2019

Marketing funnels are linear; customer journeys are not

Customers’ search for information can take many forms. The funnel is a helpful framework for anticipating their needs.

The funnel analogy

When we say “funnel,” we’re referring to the marketing funnel, which outlines the most straightforward journey your customer might take in the path to purchase. The top of the marketing funnel represents shoppers in the awareness stage, and the bottom of the funnel represents shoppers in the purchasing stage.

Upper-funnel marketing refers to strategies to build awareness. For example, many TV commercials are designed to build awareness among audiences who may not have a need for the product yet. Mid-funnel marketing strategies typically focus on building consideration and standing out in your category. For example, blog content can help differentiate a product from others in its category. Lower-funnel marketing drives purchase among shoppers who show potential to buy. For example, remarketing ads with calls-to-action like “Buy now” can bring shoppers closer to the point of purchase. A full-funnel marketing strategy builds awareness, consideration, and purchase simultaneously.

The marketing funnel is a helpful framework for engaging audiences. At the same time, customer journeys and funnels aren’t interchangeable concepts. Funnels are linear, but customer journeys rarely move directly from awareness to consideration to purchase.

Have you ever browsed product reviews on your phone while shopping in-store?

No two customer journeys
are the same

Let’s put this in context. Imagine a hypothetical soap company called Suds and a customer named Matt. Matt is watching Fire TV, a media player that turns any TV into a smart TV, when he sees a commercial for Suds' “Surf and Sea” soap for men. Matt is out of soap and loves surfing, so he pauses Fire TV and opens the Amazon mobile app, typing “surf soap” into the shopping bar.

He clicks on Suds’ Sponsored Products ad and starts reading reviews, but gets distracted when his friend calls to ask about surfing this weekend. After he hangs up, Matt notices clouds outside his window, so he checks his favorite weather website and is relieved to see sunny skies this weekend. He also notices a Sponsored Display remarketing ad for Suds' “Surf and sea” soap on the weather page and remembers why he pulled out his phone in the first place.

The ad brings him back to the Suds “Surf and Sea” product detail page. Matt doesn't want to deal with running out of soap again, so he clicks “Subscribe & Save” and returns to watching Fire TV.

Matt’s path to purchase is representative of today’s purchasing journey in three ways.

1. It’s fast

When the commercial starts, he’s not yet aware of Suds. By the end of the commercial, he’s a repeat customer (assuming he continues his subscription).

2. It’s multichannel

When Matt grabs his phone while watching the commercial, it’s almost as if he’s in the awareness and consideration stages simultaneously.

3. It’s not linear

Matt skips certain stages of the marketing funnel when he opts to subscribe before he even unboxes and tries the product.

On the other hand, Matt’s girlfriend, Mina, might have a totally different customer journey. Let’s say she notices the near-empty soap container and decides to take matters into her own hands. She might type “men’s soap” into the search bar on Amazon.com and start browsing the category for soap that has good customer reviews and fast shipping. She might discover Suds through an ad on another soap

brand’s product detail page, then click on the ad to read reviews about whether customers like the “Surf and Sea” scent, and visit Suds’ Store to learn more about their environmentally sustainable packaging.

In this case, Mina enters the funnel in the consideration stage. She knows Matt needs soap, and he prefers products that are branded for men. She narrows the category,

and Suds successfully stands out among peer products.

In other words, while the funnel is a helpful framework for ensuring you’re reaching customers across potential paths to purchase, few customer journeys will mirror the funnel—and no two journeys will be exactly the same.

Think back to the last time you purchased soap or shampoo. Whose customer journey do you relate with more?

Matt’s – strong creative and branding always pique my curiosity.
Mina’s – I like to read reviews and learn about a product’s functional benefits before I buy.
Neither Matt nor Mina’s experience – my customer journey is unique.

A full-funnel strategy can help you reach more shoppers across more touch points

Shoppers can enter the funnel at any stage, or seemingly skip stages. Nevertheless, in each of these two examples, Suds can attribute the conversions to a full-funnel advertising strategy that encompasses awareness, consideration, and conversion.

If Suds focuses exclusively on driving conversion by investing in Sponsored Products ads and bidding on branded shopping queries, the brand may fail to reach shoppers like Matt and his girlfriend.

If Suds focuses exclusively on driving consideration by investing in strategies like Sponsored Display product targeting, the brand may reach shoppers like Matt’s girlfriend who are actively browsing the category, but miss shoppers like Matt.

If Suds focuses exclusively on building awareness through over-the-top (OTT) video advertising via Fire TV, the brand may reach shoppers like Matt but miss an opportunity to engage with shoppers like Matt’s girlfriend. And they may fail to sustain the engagement with Matt unless they pair their upper-funnel campaign with lower-funnel tactics like the remarketing ads that bring him back to the product detail page.

You may not be able to predict the steps shoppers take before buying your product, but a full-funnel approach is a good framework for an engagement strategy that helps you meet customers where they are.

How to build a full-funnel marketing strategy on Amazon

No matter what journey shoppers take, they may encounter an Amazon touchpoint during their path to purchase.

Customers rely on Amazon
for more than shopping

Each month, more than 215M shoppers visit Amazon.com³ to discover and purchase new products. While Amazon is a retailer, it’s also much more than that. Customers count on Amazon to browse reviews, watch movies, listen to podcasts and music, stream video games, read their favorite books, and keep up with their shows, at home and on the go. They listen to Amazon Music during morning runs, they count on Alexa to create shopping lists for dinner, and they unwind at the end of the day by streaming Fire TV.

No matter what journey your shopper takes, there’s a strong likelihood the path to purchase includes an Amazon touch point. As a result, Amazon Ads is uniquely positioned to build full-funnel marketing strategies that reach audiences throughout their daily lives.

At the same time, this depth and breadth of reach can make it tough to know where to start when building a full-funnel strategy—so we’ve broken the process down into 5 simple steps.

215M

shoppers visit Amazon.com
each month.³

3. ComScore, December 2019

5 steps to build a full-funnel strategy on Amazon

1. Make sure your products are ready to buy

We always recommend starting with the bottom of the funnel and working your way upwards when building a full-funnel strategy. For example, before you pay to promote a product, check to ensure your product’s detail page is free of spelling errors and content mistakes, has enough images, reviews, and ratings to stack up against other products in your category, and you’re presenting the Featured Offer. We call this A+ content within retail readiness.

Tip: Another fast (and free) way to make your products retail ready is through the free branded content that Amazon offers, like Posts and Stores. Stores is a destination to extend your brand and promote discovery. Posts is an opportunity to educate customers about your products through compelling lifestyle imagery.

When you’re creating a product listing, you’re creating a brand story, a product story. Because on Amazon, people shop with their eyes first. [They] look at pictures, look at your title, and see if this is what [they] want to consider purchasing. On the detail page, this is the time for [sellers] to really let the customer know why they should purchase their product. Communicate a good story to customers.

David, Advertiser

2. Reach shoppers who are most likely to purchase

Once you’ve optimized your product detail pages for conversion, start experimenting with tactics to drive purchase. For example, we recommend Sponsored Products ads that reach shoppers using branded search terms indicating high intent (e.g., “Suds surf soap”) or remarketing to audiences who have viewed your product detail page using Sponsored Display.

Tip: Remarketing ads appear on and off Amazon, making this tactic a great way to stay top of mind. Since your total potential remarketing audiences depends on the size of the audience that has viewed your product detail page, consider remarketing following key buying periods like Prime Day and the holiday season, when your product detail pages may have seen increased page views.

What stage are you on in your full-funnel strategy on Amazon?

Getting retail ready
Driving purchase
Owning the aisle
Increasing consideration
Building awareness

4. Build your brand

Once you’re confident you’re owning your aisle, we recommend increasing consideration with products like video and display ads through the Amazon DSP and Sponsored Brands. At this stage, consider bidding on broader shopping queries (e.g., “soap”) and reaching in-market audiences. In-market audiences are audiences whose shopping patterns suggest an interest in your product.

Tip: Consider using Sponsored Brands to drive traffic to your Store page to educate shoppers in the consideration stage about your brand’s story and products.

When we're building out a Store page, we want to have clear, concise headings. We want bright, amazing images, and video if we've got it. And then, how we're getting traffic there—definitely through Sponsored Brands.

Adam, Advertiser, TheGroupDeal

5. Expand your reach

The final step to a full-funnel campaign is building awareness. Amazon DSP can help you scale your reach across multiple channels (including display, audio, and over-the-top video) without sacrificing relevance. Using Amazon Ads’s audience builder, you can define audiences based on demographics, lifestyle (e.g., Jeep enthusiasts), streaming preferences (e.g., recently streamed Soul Surfer on Prime Video) or lookalike audiences (e.g., Amazon Fresh lookalikes).

Tip: Consider combining audio and OTT (over-the-top) to reach audiences beyond the screen and at home. Read more about how Jimmy Dean combined audio ads on Amazon Music’s free tier and OTT video ads on Fire TV to generate double-digit growth in purchase intent and action.

Remember: Full-funnel strategies don’t have to be elaborate to be effective

By using a full-funnel strategy with Amazon Ads, you can combine demographic attributes and audience signals to make your campaigns work harder and engage what would otherwise be hard-to-reach audiences. Whether you want to surface your cosmetic brand among audiences who have recently streamed Lady Gaga films, or launch a new air filtration product to aid allergy sufferers, Amazon’s full-funnel solutions are built to help you connect with any audience, wherever they may be in their customer journey. You don’t need a huge marketing budget or a big agency team to manage a full-funnel strategy that delivers results.

We recommend a full-funnel approach not only because it helps prepare you for a diverse range of customer journeys, but because advertisers who take a full-funnel approach to Amazon Ads see more success than advertisers who hone in on a single stage of the funnel (e.g, driving purchase) or goal (e.g., return on advertising spend).

The best part about full-funnel marketing is that even a modified full-funnel approach delivers better returns across the funnel. In other words, your full-funnel strategy doesn’t have to be elaborate to be effective. Many advertisers start by combining sponsored ads with display, and the results speak volumes. Once you’re ready to broaden awareness by adding OTT or audio, research suggests you’ll see even stronger results.

Video case study: How Osmo built a full-funnel strategy with Amazon Ads to grow

The proven benefits of full-funnel marketing

Learn about the goals a modified or a comprehensive full-funnel strategy can help you achieve on Amazon.

What is it?

Modified full-funnel strategy: Sponsored Products and/or Sponsored Brands, plus display advertising with Sponsored Display and/or Amazon DSP.

Comprehensive full-funnel approach: The above media mix, plus over-the-top video ads (OTT).

Five goals a modified or comprehensive full-funnel strategy on Amazon may help you accomplish

Keep reading

1. Reach new audiences – up to 21% more new-to-brand sales

If you think honing in on branding is the best way to grow new-to-brand sales, think again. Research suggests upper-funnel campaigns work best when paired with lower-funnel tactics.

On average, advertisers who take a modified full-funnel approach have seen 11% more new-to-brand sales than advertisers who use only Sponsored Products and/or Sponsored Brands. Advertisers who take a comprehensive full-funnel approach have seen 21% more new-to-brand sales compared to advertisers using Sponsored Products and/or Sponsored Brands.⁴

Key takeaway: Few shoppers convert to purchase immediately. Pairing upper-funnel and lower-funnel tactics can help your brand stay top of-mind.

4. Amazon internal 2019 – results based on an analysis of more than 600 brands across 5 categories

2. Increase consideration – up to 2.5X more ad-attributed detail page views

While we have a variety of products that are designed to increase consideration and help brands differentiate their products from peer products in the category, research suggests these tactics work best when applying a balanced marketing strategy that combines upper and lower-funnel marketing.

In an analysis of brands who have used a full-funnel strategy intermittently (e.g, on and off), we found that advertisers drive 2X more ad-attributed detail page views and 1.7X more ad-attributed Add to Cart actions when they take a modified full-funnel approach and 2.5X more ad-attributed detail page views and 2.1X more ad-attributed Add to Cart when they take a comprehensive full-funnel approach, compared to when they only use Sponsored Products and/or Sponsored Brands⁵.

5. Amazon Internal 2019 – results based on analysis of more than 4000 brands

3. Drive sales – up to 8% higher sales growth

Many advertisers believe performance marketing is the best way to drive sales, but our research suggests a full-funnel approach is more effective.

On average, brands who take a modified approach to full-funnel marketing have seen 4% higher month-over-month sales growth than brands that rely only on Sponsored Products and/or Sponsored Brands. Brands who take a comprehensive approach to full-funnel marketing have seen 8% higher month-over-month sales growth than brands that rely only on Sponsored Products and/or Sponsored Brands⁶.

Furthermore, in an analysis of brands who have used a full-funnel strategy intermittently (e.g, on and off), we found that advertisers drive 1.8X more ad-attributed sales when they take a modified full-funnel approach and 2X more ad-attributed sales when they take a comprehensive full-funnel approach, compared to when they only use Sponsored Products and/or Sponsored Brands⁷.

Key takeaway: Expanding your strategy beyond the purchasing stage of the funnel can help you proactively engage new shoppers and drive more sales in the long term.

6. Amazon Internal 2019 – results based on analysis of more than 4000 brands
7. Amazon Internal 2020 – results based on analysis of more than 50 brands June 2018 and July 2020

4. Build loyalty – up to 1.9X more Subscribe & Save customers

Some marketers view loyalty as a separate stage of the funnel, but research suggests investing in a full-funnel strategy, rather than pursuing loyalty as a separate tactic, is the best way to set your brand up for repeat purchases.

In an analysis of brands who have used a comprehensive full-funnel strategy intermittently (e.g, on and off), we found that advertisers drive 1.9X more ad-attributed Subscribe & Save customers when they take a comprehensive full-funnel approach compared to when they only use Sponsored Products and/or Sponsored Brands⁵.

Key takeaway: After seeing a message across four channels, trust in that message increases 106% over seeing it one channel.⁸ If you’re trying to grow customer lifetime value, a full-funnel approach may help you build the trust that underpins customer longevity.

5. Amazon Internal 2019 – results based on analysis of more than 4000 brands
8. Edelman; In Brands We Trust; June 2019

A full-funnel strategy can help you create efficiencies across the funnel

When you adopt a full-funnel marketing strategy, you’ll likely see compounding effects that lead to stronger results in every stage of the funnel, from increasing ROAS to growing sales to building awareness and purchase intent. If full-funnel marketing is new to you, start with a modified full-funnel strategy and work your way up to a comprehensive full-funnel strategy.

5 tips for measuring and optimizing marketing effectiveness across the funnel

Hint: It’s not all about ROAS

At this point, you know that a full-funnel approach to Amazon Ads can be a powerful framework for growing your business on Amazon. Not only does a full-funnel strategy make sense in the context of today’s omni-channel journey, advertisers who take a full-funnel approach see better results across the funnel—from awareness to consideration to conversion.

Amazon Ads is uniquely positioned as a full-funnel solutions provider because we reach customers throughout their daily lives, with solutions that deliver unique reach and relevance—and we give the depth and breadth of insights you need to continually refine and optimize your campaigns.

Here are 5 of our top tips for measuring and optimizing your full-funnel strategy to deliver greater customization for your customers and efficiency for your budget.

Next: 1. Measure the impact of your off-Amazon advertising

1. Measure the impact of your off-Amazon advertising

Remember Suds? In our previous example, we discussed a fictional soap company called Suds and how two shoppers might interact with the brand. For example, Matt might discover Suds soap via Fire TV whereas his girlfriend’s path-to-purchase might be informed by reading product reviews on Amazon.

However, Amazon Ads is not the only way shoppers like Matt will discover and engage with your brand. For example, Matt might discover Suds soap through a video on his social media feed. He might search for Suds soap using a search engine rather than coming directly to Amazon, or explore the brand via Suds’ own site.

We recognize that a full-funnel strategy likely includes off-Amazon channels like search, social, email and maybe your own ecommerce website. That’s why we’ve built products like Amazon Attribution to help you grow your business on Amazon by optimizing experiences off Amazon. You can think of Amazon Attribution as a tool that enables you to measure, optimize, and plan.

First off, Amazon Attribution helps you measure how non-Amazon media and marketing channels contribute to shopping activity and sales performance on Amazon.

Second, you can use these insights to optimize your cross-channel advertising. For example, if you find that your Google search ads are performing better than your Bing ads, you can adjust your strategy.

Finally, as you use Amazon Attribution to measure your tactics, you’ll begin to spot trends and benchmarks that can be used to help plan future marketing strategies to help maximize ROI. For example, you might notice email is the most efficient channel for new launches. You can plan future launches with this insight in mind.

Advertisers who turn insights from Amazon Attribution into optimizations to make their full-funnel strategy work harder have seen strong results. For example, Beavercraf doubled sales using insights from Amazon Attribution to inform their marketing strategies, and MidWest Homes for Pets grew ROAS 32% by using Amazon Attribution to optimize their full-funnel strategy.

How does it work? Simply generate tags to implement across search ads, social ads, display ads, video ads, and email marketing. These tags will help you see how off-Amazon tactics are driving metrics like clicks, detail page views, Add to Cart, and purchases on Amazon. Amazon Attribution is free and available to vendors and brand-registered sellers that sell products on Amazon in the US, UK, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany. It’s available both as a standalone measurement solution and through integrated tool providers.

Type your content here…

2. Understand your audiences across the funnel

A more diverse marketing strategy means more insights to understand your audience and fine tune media in response. For example, Suds might think their “Surf and Sea” audience is men aged 30-39. Through audience insights reporting, they might discover their audience overlaps with other audiences who enjoy surfing, are interested in Jeeps, recently purchased sunscreen, and are in the market for beard oil and baby basketball hoops. As a result, they might realize their audience is actually “outdoorsy young dads.”

Suds can take this insight to inform imagery on their product detail pages, Store, and ad creative to drive greater relevance and improve engagement metrics like click-through rate. For example, they might develop lifestyle imagery featuring dads with their children at the beach. They can also use these insights to optimize their audience strategy. For example, they might use product targeting to surface their soap among shoppers browsing for beard oil or use display or video through Amazon DSP to build awareness among in-market audiences with an interest in Jeeps.

Suds might even find that their audience varies across the funnel. For example, Suds might find out that awareness campaigns work best among men, but lower-funnel campaigns work equally well among women. Knowing some shoppers respond well to performance advertising highlighting the product’s functional benefits and price, whereas others respond well to surf imagery and branding can help Suds refine their creative and audience strategies.

You can even place a pixel on your own retail site to understand how Amazon Ads contributes to homepage visits, orders, or other touchpoints along the customer journey. For more information about pixels, ask your Account Executive or fill out the contact form at the end of this guide to speak to a member of the Amazon Ads team.

I and love and you

Watch this video to see how pet food brand "I and love and you" used Amazon Attribution to help get a holistic picture of how all of their ad investments contributed to their sales on Amazon.

3. Customize your shopper’s journey.

Amazon Ads’s ad server, Sizmek Ad Suite, helps customize communications to audiences based on where they are in the shopping journey. Sizmek Ad Suite gives customers creative control to engage audiences with relevant, impactful ads while centralizing cross-channel insights to aid in campaign optimization

For example, you might use an ad server to set up a rule to show audiences who have previously viewed your product a different CTA than audiences who haven’t (e.g., “Buy now” versus “Learn more”) to optimize your campaigns. You might also customize imagery based on the location of your intended audience, or configure rules to show creative spotlighting your second-best-selling product if your best seller is out of stock. Sizmek Ad Suite can take any type of signal or data feed and use that to create hundreds of thousands of creatives to help you reach the right audience with the right creative at the right time. For example, Suds might use Sizmek Ad Suite to test whether images of Stinson Beach work better for audiences in the Bay Area.

Sizmek Ad Suite provides aggregate reporting (for metrics like reach, clicks, etc.) and path-to-purchase insights from your brand’s site as well as Amazon, so you have a single source of truth for all of your marketing activities. For example, if Suds issues a coupon on its website and wants to understand coupon redemption, Sizmek Ad Suite can report on total redemptions across all of Suds’ media providers, including Amazon Ads. Sizmek Ad Suite can also tell you how those conversions mapped to different creative, geolocations, device types, etc., or provide insight into the event that led shoppers to click on an ad and download a coupon—even if that event takes place off Amazon.

4. See how your ad spend compares to your peers

While every advertiser is different, sometimes it’s helpful to see how your advertising strategy stacks up against an aggregate set of peers in your product category.

For example, you may be able to learn how your spend across Amazon Ads channels compares to peers in your category, and whether you’re over- or under-indexing on sales, branded search, subscribe & save, and other metrics. We call these “peer sets”.

5. Think outside of the ROAS box

Finally, we want to emphasize that a full-funnel strategy is about more than return on ad spend (ROAS). As you work your way up the funnel, your upper-funnel activities may appear to drive less return on advertising spend than your lower-funnel initiatives. Don’t panic—this is normal.

As our step-by-step guide to building a full-funnel strategy illustrates, the funnel is a helpful framework for visualizing audience engagement. Lower-funnel activities typically reach a small but highly engaged audience. As you work your way up the funnel, you will likely reach larger audiences, but they may require more information and nurturing before they’re ready to buy. As a result, it may take time to see the returns on your upper-funnel advertising because these campaigns are designed to educate and inspire incremental audiences, rather than drive sales among audiences who are already engaged with your brand.

For example, shoppers who become aware of your brand via a Fire TV ad may ultimately purchase via a Sponsored Products ad, or shop for your specific product and select it from a list of shopping results. While your Fire TV ad wouldn’t get credit for this particular purchase, it’s an important tactic in feeding the funnel.

Advertising not only helps grow your advertised product, but can help grow your entire brand on Amazon as well. That’s why it’s important to look at overall sales, to get a complete picture of the total impact of your advertising.

In addition to total sales, here are some valuable metrics to measure progress at each stage of the funnel so you can assess which parts of your funnel are particularly strong and which parts may need more investment.

A high ROI means I'm just reaching my probable purchasers—the people who would have bought already. So I look for ROI to go down as a signal that I'm reaching more of the people who are less likely to buy—that's when my money is working hard at growing the customer base.

Mark Wieczorek, CTO at Fortress Brands

Growing awareness: reach, click through rate (the number of click-throughs relative to the number of impressions).

Increasing consideration: branded searches (the number of searches that include your brand’s name in the query), detail page views, Store traffic, average cost per detail page view.

Owning your aisle: new-to-brand sales, add-to-cart.

Drive conversion: ROAS, ACOS, orders, cost per purchase.

Retail readiness: winning the Featured Offer, 4+ star rating, 20+ product reviews.

Building loyalty: repeat purchase rate, Subscribe & Save rate, time between purchases.

What measurement tips do you plan to explore further?

Amazon Attribution
Audience insights
Sizmek Ad Suite
Peer sets
Thinking outside of the ROAS box

Case study:

By building audiences across the consumer journey, Noble House Home Furnishings drove results across the marketing funnel

In 2019, Noble House Home Furnishings, an indoor and outdoor home furniture and home goods company, partnered with Tinuiti to build out a strategic Amazon DSP media plan to reach lower and upper funnel audiences based on seasonality.

For example, during the summer season they ran specific segments tailored to outdoor patio furniture and bedroom furniture with large audiences and then followed up with shoppers who didn’t purchase with remarketing campaigns through Amazon DSP. This way, they could help build awareness and drive demand simultaneously.

By taking a full-funnel approach to DSP, Noble House drove results across the funnel. Here are some of the metrics they used to measure their full-funnel success:

From an awareness perspective, they saw a 48% increase in click-through rate.
From a consideration perspective, they saw a 2X increase in total detail page views year-over-year.
When it came to owning the aisle, they saw an 28% increase in new-to-brand purchases.
And finally, from a conversion standpoint, they saw a 4X increase in return on advertising spend.

Evan at Tinuiti understood our goal of both driving traffic in all levels of the sales funnel and spending responsibly with an overall return on ad spend in mind. By building audiences across the consumer journey with Amazon DSP, we’ve achieved incredible results.