In today’s competitive e-commerce landscape, understanding how customers interact with your brand across multiple touchpoints is crucial. The typical customer journey often spans numerous channels and devices, and each interaction contributes to the final conversion. But how do you track and analyze this complex journey?
This is where Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) steps in. AMC provides advertisers with the tools to dive deep into customer behaviors, generating insights that help improve campaign strategies and optimize ad spend. One of the most impactful use cases of AMC is analyzing the Path to Conversion (PTC), which gives advertisers a granular view of the steps customers take before making a purchase.
What is the Path to Conversion in AMC?
The Path to Conversion in AMC allows brands to map out the path a customer goes through before converting. Unlike traditional last-click attribution models, which only credit the final interaction before a sale, the PTC insight gives a holistic view of the entire customer journey, capturing each touchpoint's contribution to conversion.
How Does AMC Provide Path to Conversion Insights?
AMC is powered by a cloud-based, privacy-safe environment where advertisers can query data from their Amazon advertising campaigns, including Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Amazon DSP.
Path to conversion query can help you uncover the following:
Path to Conversion by Campaign Groups: This allows you to group your campaigns by category to identify the most popular path to conversion
Path to Conversion: Identify the paths your customers took before purchasing on Amazon
DSP Path to Conversion by Device: Identify the way shoppers switch between the devices as they move across the funnel to purchase on Amazon
Here’s how AMC helps you analyze the Path to Conversion:
Data Aggregation: AMC consolidates vast amounts of anonymized, event-level data, capturing every interaction a user has with your Amazon ads.
Custom Queries: Using SQL queries, you can segment data based on audience behavior and create custom reports that visualize the exact path customers take.
Cross-Channel Insights: AMC doesn’t just capture Amazon Ads interactions; it can also ingest data from off-Amazon sources, providing a complete view of the customer journey.
Detailed Attribution: AMC allows advertisers to move beyond simplistic attribution models. It offers multi-touch attribution (MTA) in AMC, where each touchpoint’s contribution can be quantified. You can identify how awareness, consideration, and conversion campaigns work together.
AMC Path to Conversion Query & Sample Output
Amazon provides the following sample query for path to conversion insights.
Query template for DSP + Sponsored Ads
Here’s the sample output of the above query
Benefits of Path-to-Conversion Analysis in AMC
Optimized Ad Spend: By understanding which ad interactions and campaigns drive conversions, advertisers can allocate their budget more efficiently. Knowing the role of each touchpoint allows for better optimization across the funnel.
Multi-Touch Attribution: AMC’s path to conversion provides MTA, ensuring advertisers don’t over-attribute success to bottom-funnel ads. Instead, it quantifies the impact of upper-funnel campaigns, helping brands justify and optimize awareness and consideration efforts.
Enhanced Audience Segmentation: By analyzing the most common customer paths, advertisers can create more refined audience segments. For example, if certain customers require multiple brand touchpoints before converting, you can target them with a series of ads to nurture them through the funnel.
Campaign Adjustments in Real-Time: With PTC insights, advertisers can tweak their campaigns in real-time. For instance, if certain ads in the journey are underperforming, you can adjust the creative, messaging, or frequency to improve the overall funnel efficiency.
Personalized Customer Journeys: Understanding how customers move through your funnel enables you to tailor your ad strategies to specific audience needs. Personalization becomes more achievable when you know exactly how customers are interacting with your brand at each stage.
Example: Practical Use of AMC’s Path to Conversion Insights
Imagine you're running a campaign for a brand selling fitness equipment on Amazon. Your ads are running across different formats, including Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Amazon DSP. The goal is to drive sales of a premium treadmill.
Using AMC’s Path to Conversion insights, you discover that the average customer who purchases a treadmill engages with 7 touchpoints before converting. This journey starts with a Sponsored Display Ad that introduces the brand, followed by interactions with Sponsored Brands and Amazon DSP ads that retarget interested customers.
You find that customers who engage with both the Sponsored Brands Video and Sponsored Products Ads are 20% more likely to convert than those who only interact with one ad type.
Further analysis shows that for high-value customers, the combination of upper-funnel video ads followed by retargeting through Sponsored Display Ads drives more conversions than focusing purely on bottom-funnel tactics.
Armed with these insights, you adjust your ad strategy, increasing investment in Sponsored Brands Video and running more retargeting campaigns for users who engaged with the video ads but haven’t yet converted. Over time, this improves both conversion rates and return on ad spend (ROAS).
How Can Hector Help You?
Hector’s powerful reporting dashboard simplifies accessing AMC insights, eliminating the need for complex SQL queries. With an intuitive interface, it delivers actionable insights that empower you to make timely, informed decisions.
Unlock the potential of AMC with Hector and drive incremental growth for your brand.
If you’re new to AMC, Hector can help you get started by setting up your very own AMC instance.
Conclusion
Amazon Marketing Cloud’s Path to Conversion insight is a game-changer for brands looking to understand the full scope of the customer journey. By offering multi-touch attribution and detailed insights into how customers interact with ads across different formats and channels, AMC empowers advertisers to optimize campaigns more effectively, improve ad spend, and ultimately drive higher conversions.
By leveraging these insights, you can break free from the limitations of last-click attribution and make data-driven decisions that truly reflect how customers interact with your brand. With AMC, the path to conversion is no longer a mystery but a roadmap for success.

