Light in the Blackbox: New Customer Metrics for Amazon Advertising

Until recently, measuring the success of Amazon Advertising campaigns aimed at attracting new customers was a challenge for marketers. To address such questions, the online giant has introduced special metrics for new customers.

Note: This update has been rolled out for both vendors and sellers.

What Do the New Amazon Metrics Offer?

Based on the newly available metrics, it is now possible to see exactly which sales were generated by existing customers and to which customers new sales can be attributed. For example, the metrics can help determine the share in sales that belong to new customers.

Brands run campaigns with the goal of generating new customer leads and/or increasing brand awareness. Such campaigns can now be measured with significantly more accuracy by the additional metrics and optimised in a more targeted manner. In addition, the results help to better plan future campaigns.

Note: New customers are defined as users who did not yet purchase any product of the brand via Amazon in the past year.

New Customer KPIS for Sponsored Brands

In the Amazon Sponsored Ads section, new KPIs are only available for Sponsored Brands (SB). They are issued at three different levels:

- In the general overview of all campaigns

- Based upon results of individual campaigns

- At the Keyword level for each individual campaign

The following metrics are available at each level:

New customer data will be available to retrieve retroactively as early as 1st November 2018. If you select a period further in the past, the start date will automatically be set to November 1st, in the course of the calculation.

To view these metrics, you must first add some manually. The data is not (yet) included in the Sponsored Brands reports, which can be downloaded through the Reporting section. Therefore, there are currently still no reports which provide a complete overview of new customer performance across all keywords.

Depending on the level, you proceed differently to add the KPIs:

Overall Overview and Campaign Level

Open the summary or Sponsored Brand campaign and select Add Metric. Now you can integrate the new key figures in the service overview:

Keyword-Level

Go into a particular campaign and select Columns > Customise Columns. Then you can activate the new customer KPIs.

Tricks for New Customer Metrics with Sponsored Brands

Data on new customers offers different possibilities and potential applications:

- You can optimize Sponsored Brand campaigns with a focus on generating new customer leads by identifying keywords that have an acceptable ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales) and a relatively high percentage of new customer orders.

- Information about new customer sales and orders could also be used to filter for keywords that generate larger shopping cart orders or certain price points.

- Various types of campaign strategies (i.e. generic, defensive & competitor) can be evaluated according to new customer share.

- As a user is already considered a new customer, if they have not bought a product of the brand for one year, the use of metrics does not necessarily make sense for every category or every product. For example, it may be that white goods are bought by customers much more frequently. However, that metric might represent a preference of existing customers already loyal to the brand, rather than reflecting new customers only.

- Even for suppliers who offer a very broad range of products, the KPIs may only have limited significance. Examples of this category might be, for instance, electrical manufacturers who offer televisions, smartphones, razors etc.

Nonetheless, there are many really exciting applications such as the use of metrics in the case of a product launch. Here you can analyse for example the proportion of existing customers who bought the newly launched product. Does the new product line also appeal to existing customers? Such information provides pointers to brand loyalty.

For that sort of launch campaign, it’s necessary that the campaign must be product-specific. That means, in addition to the new products, no old articles should be assigned. Otherwise, it will be difficult to yield valid results as the resulting sales could have been created by those products as well. After all, the KPIs are not yet issued according to ASIN, but only at the advertising campaign level.