Amazon is finally letting brands track traffic from Facebook in its latest effort to cozy up to big marketers
- Amazon is letting marketers measure Store traffic that comes from Facebook, which advertisers have been clamoring for.
- The e-commerce giant is also rolling out autoplay video features for Stores and new metrics.
- As Amazon's ad business grows, it's been on a mission to prove that it can increase metrics that big brands care about like awareness and loyalty.
As part of its ongoing effort to show brand marketers it can do more than crank out conversions, Amazon is starting to let brands track traffic that comes to their pages from Facebook.
Amazon said in a blog post that it's rolling out new metrics and features for Stores, which are custom landing pages that brands like Coca-Cola, Maybelline and Bose use as mini branded websites to display and sell their products, unlike Amazon's algorithm that places brands in search results based on what a browser is looking for.
Marketers have increasingly linked to their Stores from ad campaigns but say it's hard to drive traffic to them.
"A year or two ago, enhancements here wouldn't have been very valuable but now they can be key, especially for brands trying to introduce alternate products or share additional information," said Eric Heller, CEO of WPP's Amazon-focused agency Marketplace Ignition. "Now that Amazon Advertising has really evolved, these pages are working above expectations for things like engagement."
Read more: 'It's in this weird middle ground:' Amazon has a new plan to win over big brands with video ads, but agencies aren't buying it
Now, Amazon is expanding the number of traffic sources it measures that go to a store to 100 from 30. It calls these sources "source tags." One of those traffic sources is a Facebook page, according to a screen shot in Amazon's blog. Facebook and Amazon both wall off their advertising data, and marketers have long asked for a way to track traffic from Facebook ads to Amazon.
"They're clearly trying to give out more information than we've ever seen before," said Alasdair McLean-Foreman, CEO of Teikametrics, which provides technology to optimize Amazon advertising for sellers.
Amazon is also getting more granular in its reporting to give brands access to metrics like sales per visit, order size and order value about sales from their Stores. The data can help marketers tweak the order of landing pages, Amazon said. Previously, marketers could only view generic stats like page views, daily visits and sales.
Amazon is adding more video to its platform
Amazon has slowly been rolling out more video formats for marketers and is adding a video template to Stores that allows marketers to upload a short video clip that autoplays at the top of the page to capture shoppers' interest.
The feature is similar to Facebook Pages where brands can upload a video at the top of the page to get someone's attention.
Amazon has been making a big push to increase brand awareness and loyalty for marketers, and video is one way of doing so, said Marketplace Ignition's Heller.
"As we know with detail pages, anything that increases time-on-page like video increases likelihood of conversion," he said.