September 16th, 2021
How effective are your advertising campaign efforts? Are your campaigns driving more new customers to your brand, or are you having more repeat purchases? This information can play a valuable role when deciding your next steps for advertising and how to engage best with your customers.
New Amazon Metrics for Advertisers
Amazon is continuously working to improve their advertising platform. After all, they have to compete with outside advertising like Facebook and Google. One way that they are working to do this is by offering brand registered sellers on Seller Central, vendors through Amazon Marketing Services, and Amazon DSP users, who run sponsored brand ads, this metric called New-to-Brand (NTB).
What Are New-to-Brand Metrics?
New-to-Brand metrics tell you what type of customer, either from your existing customer base or a brand new customer, has clicked and purchased through your sponsored ad.
To find your New-to-Brand metrics go to your Amazon Campaign Manager.
Using New-to-Brand Metrics
Customer loyalty and garnering new interest in your products and brand is essentially the bread and butter of your business. You need both.
NTB metrics helps advertisers distinguish whether the ad-attributed purchase was made by a repeat customer or a new customer. Amazon defines a new customer as “one buying a brand’s product on Amazon for the first time over the prior year.”
These metrics can be downloaded, and a number of them can also be added to the performance dashboard and data table located in your Campaign Manager.
Let’s review what these seven New-to-Metrics mean for your business.
- New-to-Brand Orders: Number of first-time orders within the past 12 months
- New-to-Brand Sales: Total number of sales for first-time (new-to-brand) orders
- % of Orders New-to-Brand: Percentage of total orders that are new-to-brand
- % of Sales New-to-Brand: Total percentage of sales that are new-to-brand
- New-to-Brand Units: Number of units from first-time orders within the one-year window
- % of Units New-to-Brand: Percentage of total units from new-to-brand orders
- New-to-Brand Order Rate: Number of new-to-brand orders relative to the number of clicks (New-to-Brand Orders / Clicks = New-to-Brand Order Rate)
Applying New-to-Brand Metrics to Advertising Campaigns
Now that you are aware of these valuable metrics available in your Campaign Manager, what are you going to do with them? Here are three methods to get you started.
Targeting Keywords
Attract new customers by targeting high search volume keywords for a minimum of 14 days. Then, use those NTB metrics and filter them by RoAS and the ACoS. The keywords with the highest percent of orders are those you should focus on.
Review Copy
Look at the campaigns with the highest percentage of new-to-brand orders. Check for patterns within the headlines and creative. This will give you a good idea of what is working and what you should be avoiding. Increase your bids on what is working because acquiring new customers is traditionally more expensive. You don’t want to be wasting your budget on mediocre campaigns.
Don't Forget Existing Customers
Brand loyalty is an essential part of any business. Whether that garners repeat sales or encourages the customer to explore more of the products you have in your Store. Engage with those customers by looking at the lowest percentage of new-to-brand orders/sales. Consider promoting these ads to shoppers already familiar with your brand.
Customer Acquisition Strategy
Every business, no matter the size, needs to gain new customers. The cost of acquiring new customers is up roughly 60% in the last five years. What this means is that we need to be smart when planning an acquisition strategy so you’re not just tossing money (or potential profits) around.
We just learned how to use Amazon’s New-to-Brand metrics to gain important information as it relates to new customers versus brand loyal customers. As advertisers we know how to evaluate and change keywords, and in order to continue to drive traffic we need to duplicate the methods (copy and creative) that are working. But that may leave some of us scratching our heads and saying, well what else. That’s just a small part of the equation.
According to our friends over at HubSpot, there are four main areas to focus on when working on your customer acquisition strategy. We took their advice and made it relevant for eCommerce sellers.
- Sustainability
Whatever you choose to do going forward, make sure you can maintain the efforts, whether that is money, time or staff.
For eCommerce, this may be seen through continuous advertising efforts. Having ads run consistently over time increases your brand exposure. Follow the Rule of 7. Someone needs to hear your message at least seven times before they take action.
Plan your budget ahead and don’t neglect your advertising efforts. Ensure that your advertising budget doesn’t run dry after one month (or one day - depending on your product category, keyword, competition and traffic). - Flexibility
Understand that your audience is constantly changing and growing, and so should you as a brand.
One way to keep growing with your audience is to listen. Are you seeing repeat questions about your products being asked? Are your reviews less than 5 stars - or worse, you have no reviews?
Keep track of what is going on with your customers and how they are feeling about your products. Then work to answer questions. The best way to answer common questions may be to improve your listing with better images and copy. Or, perhaps build your credibility with reviews. The key here is to not remain stagnant as a seller. Be ready to adjust your strategy to improve your presence. - Targeting
Not everyone is going to fit into your target market (or need your product). Defining who your customer persona is can help improve your marketing strategy and efforts.
Speak to your target audience. If that demographic values videos over heavy text - then add a product video to your listing. If they value reviews, then allocate some of your budget to utilize the Amazon Vine program to garner more trusted reviews. - Diversifying
Where else can you get new traffic? Is social media (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest) a good ally for you to consider putting time and effort into? Think outside of the Amazon box and how else you can pull customers over to your catalog on Amazon.
There is always something to evaluate, change and make better. Determining what is best to start with is where we can help, as well as executing these tasks in an efficient and timely manner.
Need help planning how to utilize your New-to-Brand metrics and your Sponsored Brand campaigns to further promote your products and build your fan base? That’s what our advertising specialists live for. Let’s chat.