The rise of tools like Amazon Marketing Cloud has led marketers to focus on an important new advertising metric: their New-To-Brand rate.
New-To-Brand (NTB) measures how many of your conversions come from customers who haven’t bought from your brand within the past year. It tracks not just how many sales you convert with each ad campaign, but specifically how many new people you are bringing into the fold with those ads.
The problem? New-To-Brand metrics have been largely unavailable on Amazon’s most important ad formats. But that is starting to change. Today, NTB is becoming a key way for brands to measure success.
More traditional metrics, like ROAS and ACOS, measure short-term wins. Because it’s cheaper to convert pre-existing customers, for instance, you can run a campaign with a high ROAS largely by retargeting people who already bought from you.
Retargeting is a good strategy—but it should not be your whole approach. Ultimately, using NTB as a metric helps you shift your priorities toward future growth. If your campaign has a high New-To-Brand rate, that means you are bringing many new people into the fold.
Sure, maybe your ACOS goes up in the process. But NTB metrics can tell you whether that extra spending was worth the trade off.
It’s now easier than ever to prioritize New-to-Brand metrics
For a long time, New-To-Brand data was difficult to untangle. Within the Amazon Advertising console, Amazon reports the share of New-To-Brand customers for many of its ad units, but not for the most important one: Sponsored Products.
Sponsored Products ads make up around 80.6% of spending on Amazon, and until recently, there was no way for brands to know how many of their conversions came from first-time buyers of the brand.
But New-To-Brand metrics deserve a second look now in part because they are now more accessible than ever. With Amazon Marketing Cloud, Amazon’s newest analytics tool, brands can search for an assortment of new metrics—including, for the first time, uncovering NTB metrics on Sponsored Brands ads.
AMC also makes it much easier to see more granular New-To-Brand insights. You can, for instance, use Amazon Marketing Cloud to quickly identify which of your products has the highest NTB rate.
Why bother with New-To-Brand data?
New-To-Brand is not just a more dynamic way to measure your ad campaigns. It can also help you reshape your marketing strategy for the better.
NTB can push brands to:
Focus on new products. Brands might discover that their product with the highest NTB rate was overlooked in their catalog. It’s like finding a diamond in the rough: Once you realize that a certain product brings in a lot of first-time customers, you will want to put it at the front of your catalog, and shift your ad spend on non-branded terms accordingly.
Identify a new path to purchase. One of the many benefits of Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is that it can map out various paths to purchase. AMC can tell you which specific series of ads, served in which order, produced the highest conversion rates.
You can do the same with NTB metrics. Let’s say you discover that a specific DSP ad followed by a specific Sponsored Products ad produced the highest ratio of New-To-Brand customers. You might begin investing more money on that specific path to purchase. Even if your ACOS goes up in the process, it could be worth it, because you know the ad campaign is bringing so many first-timers to your brand.
New-To-Brand case study: Café Britt
New-To-Brand metrics are meaningful for any brand, but they are especially useful for companies that sell products with a high repurchase rate.
For instance, we recently worked with Café Britt, a mid-sized seller of coffee products. Café Britt knew that coffee tended to have a high retention rate—across the industry, 29.6% of coffee customers repurchase a new product. Its biggest issue was getting new customers in the door. So the company decided to prioritize New-To-Brand metrics as a way to measure their success in reaching and acquiring net-new customers.
After working with Intentwise to craft a strategy focused on new customer acquisition, Café Britt discovered that some of its ads on Amazon had significantly higher New-to-Brand rates than others. The brand tested four new Sponsored Brands ads with custom images. It found that the best custom images had 13% more New-To-Brand conversions than its previous set of ads.
Knowing they had a unique appeal to first-time buyers, Café Britt decided to run more ad campaigns with these custom images.
Not sure where to get started?
Amazon Marketing Cloud is a powerful tool, but it is complicated. You need a working knowledge of SQL to even use it, and most brands and agencies on their own don’t have the technology to process and visualize all of the data.
That is especially true for New-To-Brand data. Within Intentwise’s Amazon Marketing Cloud solution, we offer a platform to connect, collect, and visualize all of your fragmented data.
We also make it easy to search for NTB metrics. For AMC, for instance, we have a pre-built SQL query entitled “NTB Gateway ASINs” that help you quickly identify which of your ASINs have the highest NTB metrics.
Some of our customers, such as the e-commerce agency RivellePro, have seen as much as an 84% increase in New-To-Brand orders after using Intentwise tools.
