unBoxed innovation: Empowering customers with conversion path reporting

Advertisers have long faced the same pain point: What’s driving success in their campaigns, and what isn’t? Nicole Landis, a Senior Manager of Product and Engineering at Amazon Ads, is helping to change that. We talked with Nicole about conversion path reporting, a tool that equips advertisers with powerful insights into the customer journey and transforms how they measure and optimize their advertising strategies.

As a Senior Manager of Technical Product Managers (also known as PMTs), Nicole, along with her team, is dedicated to solving advertisers' most pressing challenges. One issue that impacts most advertisers—from large enterprises to small businesses—is achieving full-funnel visibility into how their various ad investments work together to drive customer engagement and conversions.

"While individual campaign metrics offer some insights, advertisers often lack the ability to see the complete customer journey across multiple ad products and formats," Nicole explains. This significant gap in understanding inspired her team to innovate, creating a tool that provides advertisers with a holistic view of their ad performance and its impact on business outcomes.

To address this critical need, Nicole and her team developed conversion path reporting, a powerful new tool that allows advertisers to see the top converting paths in the Amazon advertising console. This innovative feature provides a holistic view of how customers interact with different ad products and formats over a 30-day period, revealing the most effective combinations of ad touchpoints for driving desired business outcomes.

"With multi-touch attribution, advertisers can see the specific contribution of a specific campaign toward driving a conversion. For example, a search campaign may influence 60% of a purchase, while Display and Streaming TV each contribute 20%. Campaign reporting shows these individual contributions but does not connect the touchpoints that collectively influence a customer’s journey,” Nicole explains. "When paired with conversion path reporting, advertisers gain a birds-eye view across touchpoints and can contextualize their campaign performance by identifying the combination of ad touchpoints, from Streaming to Search, that are driving those conversions.”

"It's a validation of their investments,” Nicole says. “These insights give customers confidence in their strategies and results."

As a product management leader, Nicole's role extends beyond feature development. She also serves as the crucial link between customers and technical teams for defining strategic business objectives. Her work on conversion path reporting exemplifies the impact that a PMT can have at Amazon Ads.

"The release of conversion path reporting allows brands to understand the most effective advertising touchpoints that contribute to their campaign objectives, whether that’s driving sales or acquiring new customers," Nicole shares. "Conversion path reporting visualizes the insights we gain from multi-touch attribution to show the most effective customer paths to conversion. Advertisers can use this reporting to identify opportunities to optimize their media mix and scale up investment in ad touchpoints that may be driving a larger share of conversions. It provides advertisers more transparency into the role that brand-focused advertising plays in driving sustainable business growth."

This level of insight has the potential to change how brands approach their advertising strategies on Amazon. By illuminating the interplay between different ad types and their collective impact on conversions, Nicole and her team are empowering advertisers to make more informed decisions about budget allocation and campaign optimization.

Developing a groundbreaking product comes with challenges. Nicole highlights the tight timelines and the need for ongoing cross-team collaboration as key hurdles. The process required Nicole to balance strategic thinking with rapid execution. "It's like building the foundation while designing the blueprint, ensuring that the team has a clear starting point even as the broader strategy takes shape," she explains.

One of the most significant challenges was aligning multiple teams with a unified vision in an accelerated timeline. "This insight and reporting is the first to span all ad products and programs, traversing Amazon DSP and sponsored ads," Nicole notes. "The collaboration required involvement from every ad product team to ensure accurate and cohesive representation of each product offering.”

Nicole's work on conversion path reporting has just started, and it’s part of a broader vision to revolutionize advertising measurement and optimization. Looking ahead, she and her team are focused on several key areas of the evolving landscape of digital advertising:

• Expanding insights across more touchpoints and conversion types
• Delivering additional insights, such as cost-per-acquisition measures for top paths
• Providing peer and category benchmarks
• Incorporating machine learning to provide actionable recommendations
• Enabling seamless integration with campaign planning and execution tools

By harnessing the unique data and capabilities of Amazon’s offering, Nicole and her team are working to set a new bar for advertising effectiveness whereby brands can truly understand and optimize the entire customer journey, from awareness to purchase and beyond.

What makes Amazon Ads a great place to pursue innovation? Nicole points to the combination of both retail and advertising signals as a key differentiator. "The unique thing that Amazon has is signals from Amazon stores, which give direct visibility into the customer journey as they view ads and engage on our retail site," she explains, "and we're able to connect those dots much more holistically for our customers."

This integration of retail and advertising insights allows Amazon Ads to provide a level of understanding that other advertising offerings simply can't deliver. This unique positioning continues to drive Nicole and her team to push the boundaries of what's possible in advertising technology.

Nicole's career journey to Amazon Ads wasn't a straight line. "Prior to Amazon, I was working in management consulting. I came to Amazon through the business school program at New York University and the Amazon summer internship as an MBA product management intern." This transition from consulting to product management highlights the varied backgrounds that contribute to the dynamic culture at Amazon Ads.

"The PMT role brings both complexity and opportunity," she emphasizes. "For every new PMT, I cannot overstate the value of relationship-building. In those early days, when expectations are low, take full advantage of the opportunity to connect with as many people as possible. These relationships, combined with a deep understanding of the space, are foundational to long-term success in this role."

What can a new PMT expect at Amazon Ads? "Advertising is the backbone of almost every business," she explains. "It touches nearly every industry, shaping not only how businesses grow but also how entire industries evolve and operate. When you’re on the outside, you may not fully grasp its breadth, but stepping into this space reveals just how interconnected and influential advertising truly is."