Since its launch at Unboxed 2022, the Amazon Ad Tag has been top of mind for every marketer active within Amazon’s ad tech stack.
But what does the Amazon Ad Tag actually track, and how can you use these signals? We’ve broken down everything you need to know about the Amazon Ad Tag below 👇
What is an Amazon Ad Tag?
The Amazon Ad Tag (also known as Amazon Advertising Tag or Amazon Ad Tag 2.0) is a tag-based product that allows you to capture events users take on your website in a privacy-safe manner. The Amazon DSP then ingests and displays this information into events and attributes (like purchase, and purchase value) and makes this information available to you to use for targeting or marketing.
Benefits of the Amazon Ad Tag
Multi-event capture without 3P cookies
A traditional pixel (usually a 1x1 transparent square that companies place on their website) would typically only fire when a specific condition was met. These usually operate on a one-to-one basis, meaning one event to one trigger. This can often be limiting to marketers looking to gather a robust set of insights from various actions across their site.
The Amazon Ad Tag, however, differs from legacy pixels as the ad tag is a snippet of code that, when implemented on your website, can track multiple events per page. This gives marketers a more efficient and precise way to capture meaningful events without relying on 3P cookies to relay that information back to Amazon.
Events you can track with Amazon Ad Tag
The Amazon Ad Tag offers relatively limitless possibilities regarding what events you can track. Because the ad tag activates when a website loads, you can track a wide range of events including: Conversions, Checkout, Contact, Lead, Sign-up, Purchase, Subscribe, and ‘Other'. The biggest differentiator for the Amazon Ad Tag here is that it tracks this regardless of whether the customer was exposed to an Amazon Ad or not.
Additionally, you can create a custom category if you want an event that is not expressly listed. This “other” category allows marketers to track additional actions, such as if you have custom buttons across your website that lead to “request a demo” or a newsletter sign-up. In tracking these custom actions, marketers expand the potential for their audience creation capabilities within AMC.
Improved conversion measurement and campaign optimization
With Amazon Ad Tag’s ability to capture multi-event measurement, marketers can more easily understand the customer path to purchase, and which audiences and campaign results deliver the most impactful returns both on and off Amazon. Additionally, Amazon Ad Tag is great for measuring the performance of link out campaigns that drive back to a brand site versus the Amazon store.
Custom and lookalike audience building
Without reliance on third-party cookies and access to first-party insights with the Amazon Ad Tag, you can build first-party audiences to optimize your campaigns. These can be targeted to reach high-intent shoppers, cross-sell or upsell products, or reach similar users with lookalike audiences, increasing your percentage of new-to-brand purchasers and increasing your percentage of new-to-brand purchasers who are loyal, high-lifetime value customers.
How the Amazon Ad Tag Works
Interaction with other Amazon properties
The Amazon Ad Tag is well integrated into other Amazon properties like the Amazon DSP, and AMC (when set up correctly). To ensure proper set up, once your Amazon Ad Tag is activated on your website, you must add events to your Amazon DSP within the Events Manager. And, to ensure the data flows through to the Amazon Marketing Cloud, you also need to add these events to your Amazon DSP Orders but, if you choose to set-up your campaigns with Gigi, this step is automatically done for you.
Once implemented, you can access new metrics within the Amazon DSP console like Off-Amazon Views, Off-Amazon Purchases, Off-Amazon Clicks, and more. However, the Amazon DSP has limited flexibility on measurement and does not allow you to combine different datasets. The power of using AMC to analyze Amazon Ad Tag data is that it allows you to query all of the event types available within Events Manager and combine these with different datasets (like Sponsored Ads) to get a full-funnel view. This will unlock more robust measurement and audience capabilities for targeting and negation tactics. For example, if you want to view Off-Amazon Add-to-Carts, you must query this in AMC, as the Amazon DSP console does not allow this.
Privacy thresholds
When bringing first-party data into the Amazon Marketing Cloud, there are often privacy thresholds to ensure the proper aggregation of data and signal anonymity are met. This means meeting the minimum number of users needed to return an aggregated result. You can query and return results with only two distinct users for the Amazon Ad Tag.
If you were to add first-party data directly through AMC, the privacy threshold level for data aggregation is set to HIGH, meaning you’ll need 100 matched users to return an aggregated, queryable result. But, since the Amazon Ad Tag’s privacy threshold is only 2, it is a better signal when there are fewer conversions for measurement. This allows marketers to analyze more granular data sets at a lower thresholds and scale. This is particularly beneficial for brands with fewer singular actions, i.e. a smaller volume of customers that viewed an STV ad and then converted on your site.
Limitations of the Amazon Ad Tag
While the Amazon Ad Tag offers many benefits to marketers, it is not without its limitations. Like other tag-based tracking solutions, the Amazon Ad Tag can experience some signal loss. This means it won’t return data for users that implement browser or operating system blockers, and ad blockers, or similar. Apple’s ongoing iOS updates may prevent further limitations of the ad tag.
Additionally, it can be a challenge to properly implement the Ad Tag. Given that this requires snippets of code to be implemented at the front end of your website, you will likely require an engineer or technical support staff or both. Then, you will need to ensure that your agency correctly implements the Ad Tag in the DSP Events Manager and the Orders of your DSP campaign.
Understanding how to append the Amazon Ad Tag to your Amazon DSP order is also important. You can learn more about how to do this in this blog.
Finally, the Ad Tag only begins generating data from the moment that you implement the Ad Tag. While this isn’t much of an issue for measurement, this can be incredibly limiting for audience creation. You would ideally want to mirror the lookback window of purchasing data that Amazon offers within AMC, which is 12.5 months.
How to use the Amazon Ad Tag with Gigi
The Gigi 1P platform allows marketers to collaborate their first-party data with Amazon ads in a host of different ways depending on the sophistication (or lack thereof) of a brand’s existing data infrastructure, privacy and security concerns, and the richness of a brand’s first-party transactional signals.
So, how should a marketer reconcile Gigi’s 1P Platform with the Amazon Ad Tag? Should one use either one or both? We recommend leveraging both. The Amazon Ad Tag complements the Gigi 1P platform and can be used as an additional signal to enrich audiences and improve measurement.
Where the Gigi 1P Platform excels
First, the Gigi ingests the last 365 days of first-party transactional signals (as a default) from the moment it is created and continues to ingest daily transactional signals after that. This allows us to backfill purchasing data to be as long—or longer—than Amazon Marketing Cloud’s lookback window of 12.5 months. As a result, marketers can create seed audiences for lookalikes from a wider pool of a brand’s best customers. If you recall, the Amazon Ad Tag only allows you to begin building audiences from the moment the tag is implemented. It does not backfill previous transactional signals and, in turn, can initially limit audience creation.
There’s also no signal loss with Gigi. Unlike the Amazon Ad tag, the Gigi 1P Platform brings in 100% of conversions. The results in more accurate measurement so marketers can garner the full impact of their Amazon ads activation on first-party channels.
How do the two work in practice?
When you have both Gigi’s 1P Platform and the Amazon Ad Tag implemented, our product intelligently chooses the ideal source between the two to extract the most insights for our customers based on optimal signal and signal robustness across either the ad tag or Gigi’s 1P Platform.
This becomes particularly acute when navigating Amazon’s privacy thresholds. For example, if the number of matched users who a) were exposed to an STV ad and b) converted on a first party data source is low, then the ad tag would be the optimal source for insight because the ad tag’s lower privacy threshold will be met (but AMC’s higher privacy threshold will not). However, if the number of matched users is high, and AMC’s higher privacy threshold is met, Gigi’s data pipeline will be used because it brings in 100% of conversions, and there is no signal loss. The best part is that Gigi’s customers don’t need to make any changes to reporting, we have built the ability to intelligently use the optimal source (Ad Tag or Gigi 1P Platform) based on signal and maximizes insight to the marketer
The Ad Tag’s ability to measure non-conversion events on first-party channels is also complimentary to the Gigi 1P Platform. This can be beneficial for both audience targeting and measurement. For example, a common strategy to ensure your audience focuses on acquiring new-to-brand customers is to exclude past purchasers and product views. Since product views aren’t a conversion event, the Gigi 1P Platform wouldn’t capture this alone. So, the Gigi 1P Platform leverages the Ad Tag to exclude product viewers on Amazon and first-party channels with a customizable lookback window. Similarly, the Ad Tag is also complimentary if a marketer prioritises website traffic or product views on a first-party channel (in addition to conversions).
Schedule a call with the Gigi team today to learn more about the Amazon Ad Tag and how to leverage it to track events across your site and optimize your audience creation.