From Awareness to Conversion: Driving Market Share Growth for illy on Amazon
Winner of the 2025 Amazon Ads Partner Award for Seasonal Sales Strategy – Americas
The Challenge
Illy, serving up high-quality coffee, wanted to grow their market share. However, competition was brewing hot in the ground coffee category.
The coffee market is dominated by a few giants like Starbucks, Peet’s, and Maxwell House, who control a significant portion of sales. The rest of the market is fragmented among over a hundred smaller brands, which makes it incredibly difficult for a brand like illy to grow and stand out, even though it’s a top 10 player.
In a crowded marketplace dominated by legacy brands and a lengthy list of niche competitors, illy needed to find new ways to increase their visibility, conversion, and momentum in the category.
Results
+28%
click-through rate
+42.8%
new-to-brand customer acquisition
+34%
revenue growth
How We Did It
Q4 is full of big milestones for coffee brands, with International Coffee Day kicking off the winter season. Tinuiti knew any marketing shifts they made needed to be tested and proven before Q4 to make the most of illy’s budget and their audiences’ attention. They also knew the best way to make it happen was with Amazon Ad solutions.
During Q2 and Q3, the Tinuiti team started testing different changes for illy’s upper-funnel strategy, focusing on growing brand awareness and new-to-brand (NTB) acquisition. They convinced illy to reinvest in higher-cost, slower-converting formats, like Streaming TV and Prime Video, to garner more engagement. illy had been cautious to rely on these channels before, as the ROAS are generally lower in the beginning. But this time, the results were immediately clear—illy saw a 21% increase in consideration metrics after incorporating streaming ads that focused on NTB growth.
Once Q4 kicked off, Tinuiti shifted the focus to conversion and efficiency. Factors like seasonal demand and the presidential election meant a possible rise in CPCs and CPMs, so they moved to defend brand search terms and use features like Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) Audience Bid Boosting to optimize for search. Tinuiti used Amazon DSP to route investment into the upper-funnel tactics that worked during Q2 and Q3, maximizing page traffic and brand searches, and capturing non-converting leads with Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) Retargeting campaigns.
Not only were these changes efficient, they were highly effective. Focusing on NTB growth won illy the #1 Best Seller badge for 23% of Q4, driving 35% more glance views and 13% more orders. Click-through rates rose 28% when the badge was present, and streaming continued to drive traffic at the top of the funnel, with 42% more shoppers engaging and 45% more converting.
Bliss Point by Tinuiti proprietary measurement tech surfaced key performance metrics across the brand. They watched brand campaign ROAS increase by 4%, CTR increase 54%, and conversion rate increase by 14% YoY—despite rising CPCs. With transparent reporting, Tinuiti was able to show illy’s leadership how their work resulted in a 59% increase in organic sales, proving the value of the new upper-funnel strategy, and getting buy-in for 2025.
I have never worked with such a great agency. It’s not easy to find good agency partners that really put the effort and time in and this team is like a one in a million find for us! Each person is professional, knowledgeable and truly invested in our success.
Jessica ImperatoHead of Digital Multi-Channel Orchestration at illy
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