Unlocking AMC Insights Series: How to Use Tentpole Analysis Post-Prime Day for Smarter Seasonal and Yearly Media Strategy
In today’s data-driven marketing landscape, the ability to ask the right questions is paramount. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) emerges as the magic 8-ball of advertising solutions, offering advertisers a robust platform for precise analytics and strategic decision-making. If you’re new to AMC, it’s a secure, privacy-friendly, dedicated cloud-based measurement and analytics solution introduced in 2021.
Understanding the Value of Amazon Marketing Cloud
Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), AMC provides a flexible environment that empowers advertisers with customizable reporting capabilities based on event-level data across various data sets. These data sets can encompass both advertiser data and Amazon Advertising data, granting advertisers a comprehensive view of campaign performance. In essence, AMC equips advertisers with transparent, cross-channel data essential for making informed marketing decisions, a necessity in today’s marketing landscape.
For a comprehensive understanding of AMC basics, Tinuiti’s AMC overview provides all the essential information about the Amazon Marketing Cloud.
This article is part of a series where we dive into specific AMC use cases. In this installment, we focus on the Tentpole analysis, guiding you through utilizing this report to address critical business questions, pinpoint key metrics, and strategically apply derived insights. View other entries in this series here.
What is Tentpole Analysis?
Tentpole events are key sales periods throughout the year. These could be marketplace-specific, such as Amazon’s Prime Day, Prime Big Deals Day, and Black Friday. They can also be brand-specific, such as seasonal discount periods (for example, Back to School) or bespoke category or brand-specific events (such as Earth Day for eco-conscious brands).
These events play critical roles in not only driving high volumes of sales during the event but also – in the case of a marketplace event like Prime Day – providing an opportunity to reach a high volume of new customers that could turn into long-lasting brand loyalists. As a result of this massive potential, these periods also tend to lead to higher media costs as more brands prioritize participating and competing for customers’ attention. Therefore, it is essential for brands to understand how they’ve performed during past events to optimize their strategy for the future.
Enter Amazon Marketing Cloud.
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) provides the instructional query ‘Tentpole Phase Overlap’ to help brands understand their performance during these Tentpole event periods. This query evaluates event performance in three distinct periods:
- Lead Up: The period of days (typically 1-2 weeks) leading up to the event.
- Event: The period of days when the event occurred.
- Lead Out: The period of days (typically 1-2 weeks) following the event.
The query compares advertising performance across these three periods so that brands can understand how impactful their efforts were to (1) build anticipation about the upcoming event during the Lead Up period, (2) drive traffic to their detail pages and convert sales during the event, and (3) re-engage with any shoppers and customers during the Lead Out phase.
Requirements to run this query are:
- The query can incorporate either ASIN conversions or DTC site conversions tracked by the Amazon Ad Tag.
- A defined time period that encompasses the Lead In, Event, and Lead Out phases of a Tentpole event period.
- Sponsored Ads and/or Amazon DSP media active during the analyzed period.
Business Questions and Challenges Addressed by Tentpole Analysis
- Where will budgets be most effectively allocated between each tentpole phase?
- What media mix is most effective for driving conversions around tentpole events?
- Which tentpole events/phases see the most new-to-brand (NTB) customers?
- Are promotional events working to reach NTB customers?
- Which audience sees the most lift around tentpole events?
Key Metrics to Focus on in Tentpole Analysis
The KPIs for each phase should be determined by each advertiser’s specific goals and strategies. Generally, though, the Lead Up period should focus on building awareness of the seasonal event and your brand’s promotional offer. The Event period should focus on driving traffic to your detail page and sales. The Lead Out period strategy should focus on retargeting users who visited your product pages but did not purchase and/or upselling/cross-selling users who did purchase during the event.
Given the strategic focus of each phase, the following metrics should be prioritized as KPIs to understand the effectiveness of each Tentpole phase.
| Tentpole Phase | Strategic Objective | KPIs |
|---|---|---|
| Lead In | Drive awareness | Reach, CTR, Brand Searches, Detail Page Views |
| Event | Maximize Sales | Sales, New-to-brand Sales, Detail Page Visits |
| Lead Out | Efficiently Re-engage | ROAS, Conv Rate |
Tentpole Analysis in Action
While the Instructional Query in AMC will present how a brand’s campaigns performed, in aggregate, across the three tentpole phases, working with a partner like Tinuiti can help you gain even deeper insights. For example, viewing how each ad type performs during each phase of a Tentpole event can help inform how to optimize the budget across Sponsored Ads and ADSP.
Below is an example of a Tentpole Analysis for a brand from Prime Day 2023. The analysis includes each tentpole phase and views performance by media mix within each phase.
The key takeaways for this advertiser included:
Key Takeaways
The AMC Tentpole Phase analysis provides critical data to understand how a brand’s media performs during the key phases of a seasonal sales event. Having the expertise to customize the AMC Instructional Query, beyond just viewing performance by tentpole phase, helps a brand gain insights into ad-level performance to better optimize their media mix during these key periods.
Additionally, this analysis can also be useful for broader annual planning. Each tentpole analysis pulled can be compared to other tentpole events throughout the year, or to the previous year. This can help a brand understand which annual tentpole events to prioritize throughout the year, and how performance trends year-over-year.
The Tentpole Phase Overlap analysis is part of the Instructional Query Library (IQL) in the AMC console, which offers pre-built templates by Amazon to get started with the basics. If you’re seeking deeper insights with the guidance of experts who understand AMC’s unique landscape, reach out to Tinuiti today.
This post was authored by Averie Lynch, Specialist of Strategic Services at Tinuiti.
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