Full-Funnel Media for a Brand Selling in Two Places
A brand selling on both Amazon and its own site can run a genuinely unified funnel, using Amazon DSP's shopping-signal targeting for awareness and consideration regardless of destination, then routing the closing touch to whichever checkout — Amazon or the brand's own — fits that specific audience and moment best. The mistake is running two disconnected media plans instead of one funnel with two exits.
What this looks like in a real account
What a genuinely shared measurement view requires
Building the shared view doesn't require a single unified dashboard from day one — it requires three specific pieces of visibility that most two-team structures lack. First, both teams need to see each other's audience definitions, at least at a summary level, so a retargeting pool built on the Amazon side isn't unknowingly duplicated by a similar pool on the DTC side. Second, both teams need access to the same underlying performance data, even if they report on it separately, so a genuine cross-channel question can actually be answered rather than debated from two incomplete pictures. Third, someone needs explicit ownership of the reconciliation — without a named owner, the shared view degrades back into two silos within a quarter, regardless of how well-intentioned the initial unification effort was.
Why treating this as two separate media plans wastes money
The default failure mode for a brand selling in two places is building an entirely separate media plan for Amazon (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Amazon-destination DSP) and for the brand's own site (Meta, Google, email), managed by different people, measured by different tools, with no shared view of the customer across both. That structure duplicates prospecting spend — reaching the same shopper twice, through two unrelated systems, each unaware of the other — and it throws away Amazon DSP's real advantage, which is a shopping-signal audience that's genuinely useful for targeting regardless of which checkout the resulting click lands on.
A funnel mapped to destination, not to channel
Awareness (streaming, video, broad display): destination matters less here, since the goal is reach and recall, not a same-session conversion — Amazon-owned inventory and off-Amazon exchange inventory both work, and either can carry link-out or Amazon-destination creative. Consideration (retargeting cart-viewers and abandoners, sponsored ads on non-branded search): destination starts to matter — an Amazon cart-abandoner is arguably better retargeted back to Amazon, where the purchase friction is lowest for that specific shopper's context, while a shopper who abandoned your own site's checkout is better retargeted back there. Purchase (branded search, high-intent retargeting): route to whichever destination that specific shopper's prior behaviour indicates, rather than a blanket rule for the whole account.
A worked budget example across the funnel
Take a $40,000 monthly full-funnel budget: $15,000 to awareness (streaming and display, split across Amazon-owned and off-Amazon exchange inventory, creative pointed at whichever destination fits the message), $15,000 to consideration (retargeting, split by where the original interest signal came from — Amazon cart-abandoners retargeted to Amazon, site-cart-abandoners retargeted to the site), and $10,000 to purchase-stage (branded search on Amazon plus branded retargeting on the site). The unifying discipline isn't a single blended ROAS across all $40,000 — it's routing each stage's spend to the destination where that specific audience segment's prior behaviour suggests the lowest-friction path to conversion.
Why Amazon Marketing Cloud is the tool that makes this coherent
Building this properly requires seeing the full picture across both destinations, which is exactly what Amazon Marketing Cloud is built for on the Amazon side — path-to-conversion queries, overlap analysis, new-to-brand tracking across DSP and sponsored ads. The gap AMC can't close on its own is visibility into your own site's conversion data, which has to be brought in through first-party upload or reconciled separately against your site's own analytics. A genuinely full-funnel view needs both: AMC for the Amazon-side picture, your own analytics stack for the site-side picture, and a deliberate bridge between them.
The common mistake, including ours
The mistake is letting organisational structure dictate the media plan rather than the customer's actual behaviour — an "Amazon team" and a "DTC team" running separate budgets, separate creative, and separate reporting, each optimising their own slice without visibility into the other. We've inherited exactly this structure from a client before, with genuinely talented people on both sides producing good individual results while the same shoppers were being retargeted, redundantly, by both teams' campaigns without either side knowing. Unifying the plan didn't require cutting either team's budget — it required a shared view of which shoppers each team was actually reaching.
How streaming fits into this specific funnel shape
Streaming and connected-TV inventory deserves a specific note in a full-funnel plan for a two-destination brand, because it's the placement most likely to be judged unfairly if measured the same way as the rest of the funnel. In our own DSP book, streaming carried the highest new-to-brand rate of any inventory type, 56.3%, alongside the weakest attributed ROAS on the whole report — a pattern that makes sense once you place it correctly at the very top of this funnel, reaching people who haven't decided which destination, if either, they'll eventually buy from. Judging it against the purchase-stage metrics further down the funnel misreads what it's actually there to do.
What to do when the two channels start competing for the same budget
If leadership is debating whether the next incremental dollar should go to Amazon or to DTC media, that's usually the wrong question — the better one is which specific audience segment, at which funnel stage, has the clearest path to conversion right now, regardless of which platform it ultimately routes through. Answering that requires the shared measurement view described above, not a philosophical debate about which channel the company should prioritise as a matter of identity.
| Funnel stage | Destination sensitivity | Primary tool |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness (streaming, video, broad display) | Low — reach matters more than destination | DSP, either Amazon-destination or link-out creative |
| Consideration (retargeting cart-viewers) | High — match the destination to the origin signal | AMC-built audiences, routed by where interest originated |
| Purchase (branded search, high-intent retargeting) | High — lowest-friction path for that shopper | Amazon sponsored ads + site-side branded retargeting |
Which one you should actually pick
A brand with basic cross-channel reporting discipline can build this unified view themselves, even without merging teams organisationally — the framework requires shared visibility, not a shared org chart. reMKTR builds full-funnel plans that route by destination-fit rather than channel identity for brands selling in both places, having inherited and unified exactly this kind of duplicated spend before, as part of the discipline behind Full Circle's $500M+ in managed Amazon spend across 100+ brands.
Shortlist on the job, not the feature grid. Pull your search-term report for the last 90 days and total the spend against terms that produced no orders — 33.6% on the account above. Then ask each vendor on your list what they would do about it in week one, and see who answers with a process rather than a screenshot.
Common questions
Should Amazon and DTC media be managed by the same team?
Not necessarily by the same people, but they need a shared measurement view — separate teams with no visibility into each other's targeting will redundantly reach the same shoppers without either side knowing.
How should I split budget between Amazon and my own site across the funnel?
Route by which destination offers the lowest-friction path for a specific audience segment's prior behaviour, rather than a fixed percentage split applied uniformly across the whole funnel.
Does Amazon Marketing Cloud give me full visibility across both channels?
It gives strong visibility into the Amazon side. Your own site's conversion data has to be brought in separately, either through a first-party AMC upload or reconciled through your own analytics.
What's the biggest sign that two channels are competing rather than complementing?
The same shopper being retargeted redundantly by both an Amazon-focused campaign and a DTC-focused one, with neither team aware of the overlap — a strong signal the measurement view isn't actually shared.
We show the method before the number.
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