The silo trap: when strong Amazon performance hides weak business performance

Marketplace performance — particularly within Amazon advertising — often looks convincing on paper.

• Revenue is growing
• Campaigns are scaling
• Efficiency metrics such as ROAS remain stable or improve

From a channel perspective, everything appears to be working.

And yet, many teams encounter the same pattern over time:
budgets increase, but growth does not follow proportionally.

This is where the silo trap becomes visible.

When optimisation is confined to Amazon’s own reporting logic, success is defined by what the platform can measure. Campaigns are evaluated based on how well they convert within Amazon — not on whether they generate additional demand.

At first, this works.

As long as there is enough untapped demand, performance improves. But as competition intensifies and budgets scale, the question changes. It is no longer about conversion efficiency. It is about contribution.
Which activities actually create growth — and which ones merely capture what is already there?

→ The numbers are not wrong — they are just incomplete.

At this point, the limitation of standard reporting becomes obvious. It can tell you what converted — but not what caused the conversion.
This is where the distinction between attributed and incremental performance becomes critical.

Why attributed performance is no longer enough

Attributed performance answers a relatively simple question:
Which campaign was involved in the conversion?

Incremental performance asks a more demanding one:
Would this conversion have happened without the campaign?

The difference matters because the Amazon customer journey is no longer linear — and rarely confined to one platform.

Data provided by Front Row shows that:

• around 40% of Amazon branded searches are driven by off-Amazon media
• roughly 36% of Amazon sales are influenced by off-Amazon advertising, often with significantly higher returns

In other words, a substantial share of what looks like Amazon performance is actually initiated elsewhere.

If teams optimise only within Amazon, they systematically overvalue lower-funnel activities and undervalue the channels that created the demand in the first place.

Marketplace Universe Insight
Attribution tells you where a sale happened.
Incrementality tells you why it happened.

This is exactly the gap that Amazon Marketing Cloud is designed to address.

To understand why, it’s worth briefly looking at what AMC actually is — and what makes it different from standard reporting.

What AMC is — and what it makes visible

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a secure analytics environment provided by Amazon Ads. It allows advertisers to analyse anonymised, event-level data across Amazon touchpoints — including impressions, clicks, and conversions.

Unlike standard reporting, AMC makes it possible to analyse how interactions unfold over time and how different campaigns influence each other. As a result, it shifts the perspective from isolated attribution to actual contribution.

“AMC is no longer optional. It’s essential for brands that want to understand consumers through data, remove friction from the path to purchase, and drive repeat buying.”
— Simone Vobejda, Director Performance Marketing, Front Row

For many brands, Amazon Marketing Cloud is becoming a central tool to better understand the Amazon customer journey, improve retail media performance, and evaluate incremental growth beyond standard Amazon advertising metrics.

In practice, however, many teams are still only using a fraction of its potential.

Marketplace Universe Insight
The value of AMC is not in more data — but in seeing connections that weren’t visible before.

From channel optimisation to Connected Commerce

Once these interactions become visible, the limitations of a channel-centric approach are difficult to ignore.
Amazon is not an isolated system. It is part of a broader ecosystem that includes search, social media, CRM, and D2C channels.

Front Row describes this broader approach as Connected Commerce — an operating model in which data, decisions, and execution are connected across channels.

Connected Commerce is not about adding more tools.
It is about changing how commerce is run:

• aligning teams around shared metrics such as incrementality and customer value
• connecting insights from Amazon with decisions in media, CRM, and merchandising
• shifting from channel performance to business performance

In this model, Amazon does not lose relevance.
But it is no longer treated as a standalone growth engine — and that shift is where most organisations struggle.

Marketplace Universe Insight
Marketplace performance is no longer about who captures demand best — but who understands where it actually comes from.

What changes when you look at the data differently

When AMC is used to analyse interactions rather than isolated results, performance starts to look different.

Incrementality and campaign interaction

AMC analyses often reveal that multiple campaigns reach the same users across different stages of the journey.
In standard reporting, each campaign may appear successful on its own.

But when viewed together, it becomes clear that some of this spend does not generate additional demand — it simply reinforces or intercepts demand that already exists.

Part of what looks like growth is therefore not new demand, but the result of multiple campaigns influencing the same conversion.
Understanding this allows brands to reduce inefficiencies and reallocate budgets towards activities that actually expand their customer base.

Rethinking ROAS in context

ROAS remains a useful operational metric — but AMC data highlights its limitations when used as a proxy for growth.

High-ROAS campaigns often target users who are already close to conversion or have interacted with the brand before.
This makes them efficient — but not necessarily growth-driving.

A campaign with lower ROAS that introduces new customers may create significantly more long-term value.

Case study: what customer-level data actually changes

One of the clearest ways to see this shift in practice is to look at how performance changes once customer-level data is introduced.

What the data actually revealed

In an analysis conducted by Front Row for Wella, AMC was used to examine how different campaigns contributed to customer acquisition versus retention.
The findings were striking.

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) was approximately $30, while the average order value was around $15 — meaning long-term value was roughly 2x higher than initial purchase value
• The top 20% of customers generated 48% of total revenue, with 27% higher purchase value than the average

At the same time, the analysis revealed something even more important.

Campaigns that appeared highly efficient were often heavily skewed towards existing customers. They performed well because they targeted users who were already familiar with the brand.

Meanwhile, campaigns that seemed less efficient at first glance played a disproportionately important role in acquiring new customers.
Even more telling:

• 52% of new customer journeys started with shampoo or conditioner — not hairspray, as initially assumed

This insight led to concrete changes in media allocation, creative strategy, and product prioritisation.

The data didn’t just refine decisions.
It corrected them.

Marketplace Universe Insight
The biggest performance gains don’t come from better optimisation — they come from correcting the wrong assumptions.

From insight to action

The value of AMC lies in how it changes decision-making.

The first shift is conceptual.
Instead of asking how efficient campaigns are, teams need to understand which activities actually create incremental growth.

The second shift is technical.
AMC insights become significantly more valuable when combined with other data sources — such as CRM systems, D2C performance, and margin structures. Only then can performance be evaluated at a business level.

Some organisations are already building more integrated data environments to support this. In this context, tools such as Catapult, Front Row’s analytics platform, help connect signals across brand, demand, D2C, and Amazon — making it easier to identify patterns and translate them into actionable decisions.

The third shift is organisational.
Marketplace teams, performance marketing, and CRM functions need to work with shared objectives and a common understanding of success. Without this alignment, insights remain isolated and underutilised.

Finally, there is a shift in how success is measured.
The goal is not to build more metrics, but to focus on fewer metrics that actually drive better decisions — such as incrementality, customer lifetime value, and contribution to overall growth.

Want to identify your blind spots and move beyond siloed optimisation?
The Connected Commerce self-check offers a practical starting point.

Why this shift is becoming unavoidable

The relevance of this shift is increasing.

• Retail media is expanding rapidly.
• Competition on Amazon continues to intensify.
• At the same time, margins are under pressure.

In this environment, optimising within a single channel is no longer sufficient.
What matters is understanding how different activities contribute to overall growth — and making decisions accordingly.

Amazon remains a critical part of that system.
But it is only one part.

Key Learnings

• Strong Amazon performance can mask a lack of true business growth
• Attributed performance and incremental performance measure fundamentally different things
• AMC makes customer journeys, campaign interaction, and customer value visible
• Connected Commerce links marketplace data with broader business decisions
• Competitive advantage increasingly depends on cross-channel understanding, not channel-level optimisation alone

Marketplace Universe Insight
The challenge for marketplace teams is no longer just execution.
It is understanding what their data actually reflects — and what it doesn’t.

10.04.2026 – Written by Ricarda Eichler, Journalist and Author for OHN

Der Beitrag The Amazon Silo Trap: Why Marketplace Performance Doesn’t Equal Growth erschien zuerst auf Marketplace Universe.