The real ROI of Q4 shows up in Q1.

The real value of Q4 isn’t the short-term revenue spike but the audience and data foundation it builds for Q1 and beyond.

The purchase path data I’ve seen across brands reinforces this idea. Using five-year lookback windows from my clients’ Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) instances, the data consistently shows that Q4 shoppers often make another purchase within three months. These repeat purchases start meaningfully changing the unit economics of customer acquisition and strengthening organic visibility across product lines. This shows that strategic holiday spend can deliver returns long after the season ends.

When it’s time to defend your budget, position Q4 spend for what it is: a prepaid customer acquisition voucher for Q1, bought at a 50 percent discount. This framing eases CFO concerns about short-term efficiency when you have the data to show you are buying future Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) that outweighs the immediate cost. Effective brands measure beyond short-term revenue by tracking LTV, New-to-Brand (NTB) acquisition, and repeat purchase rate.

If you don’t have AMC, start by tracking NTB Purchase Share during Q4 and revisit those shoppers in Q1. Quantifying how many came back and bought more can demonstrate long-term value without a complex tech stack. 

But the groundwork for that ROI is laid earlier than you think.

Many brands still invest the majority of their ad dollars in an extremely short holiday window and hold their breath for marketing KPIs hour by hour throughout Cyber Week. However, there are two challenges with this.

First, ROAS and ACoS are shaped by two unpredictable variables that marketers do not have direct control over: cost-per-click (CPC) and conversion rate (CVR). When those shift drastically due to surges in shopping behavior (for example, we often see CVRs double in a matter of hours or days once deal periods begin around November 21), performance can look unstable even when it isn’t. If you react by lowering bids or cutting keywords that are performing, you’re playing a losing game of whack-a-mole and risk losing reach right when shoppers are ready to buy.

Second, the data shows that purchasing behavior is spread over a much wider window. Aligning spend with real shopper behavior makes every dollar work harder, and brands that stay active through this lead-in period capture the surge when shoppers move from browsing to purchasing. Brands should think of holiday in three phases with long bookends: late summer through early November builds awareness and consideration. Mid-November through Cyber Week drives conversion. Early to mid-December is for remarketing and retention, which trickles into that Q1 payoff mentioned before. Each phase compounds on the one before it. Instead of aiming for perfection in ad performance during a handful of days, focus on building momentum in the weeks and months preceding.

The payoff from investing early in generating demand dwarfs the effect of focusing so heavily on demand capture during Cyber Week, but requires time-sensitive shifts to your media planning. For example, video is one of the best ways to prime consumers earlier in the buying journey, but many DSPs and publishers of premium video placements (from Disney to Netflix, to Amazon) shift toward guaranteed buys during the holidays. Late planners or brands trying to react to in-flight micro trends during peak periods will be priced out of top placements. Securing them early gives you an edge competitors can’t match, and primes consumers for purchase of your products before the competition heats up.

Measure the health of Q1, not just the success of Q4.

When brands treat the holidays as an investment in future performance rather than a sales sprint, they start the new year ahead. The best-performing brands keep investing through the holidays and enter January with stronger visibility, more efficient ad spend, and shoppers who convert faster.

Watch your post-holiday data closely. Consistent traffic to product detail pages and steady organic conversion rates are signs that your strategy is working. These indicators show that visibility and intent built during Q4 are carrying into the new year.

The smartest brands see Q4 (and earlier) as the start of a new growth cycle, not the entire moment of payoff. Every dollar spent builds data, loyalty, and future revenue. That is how short-term spend becomes long-term strength, and how real ROI is earned.

If you want to refine your Amazon holiday planning or evaluate your Q4 to Q1 performance, connect with our team.

Navigating the Amazon Ecosystem with AI.

Many of us know Amazon for its ecommerce prowess and popular media platforms like Prime Video and Twitch. But Amazon boasts over 40 different owned properties, and this extensive network creates a rich tapestry of first-party data, offering a significant understanding of consumer behavior. However, truly harnessing this data and understanding how shoppers move across properties—from watching a show on Fire TV to shopping on the Amazon website—can be complex.

Beyond Amazon's owned properties, Amazon DSP also offers access to a massive network of third-party inventory through Amazon Publisher Direct and various ad exchanges. This opens up even more avenues to reach your audience wherever they are online. The challenge, then, becomes identifying the most efficient path to deliver your impressions. This is where Amazon's human-centered AI truly shines.

Introducing Brand+ and Performance+

Amazon's AI models, Brand+ and Performance+, are built on the foundation of Ad Relevance, an AI machine learning tool developed to increase addressability in cookieless environments. These models are not about replacing the human media buyer; instead, they are designed to collaborate, offering transparency and control. You can see exactly what the AI is doing, why it's doing it, and crucially, you can intervene, nudge, and redirect to ensure it aligns with your strategic goals.

While both models utilize the same underlying logic, their primary differentiator lies in the outcomes they are designed to generate:

• Brand+: Focuses on the top of the funnel, prioritizing awareness, reach and frequency, with a secondary goal of future conversions within a 12-month conversion horizon. This model is ideal for building long-term brand salience and memory structures. We've seen Brand+ campaigns perform exceptionally well with video creative and streaming inventory.
• Performance+: Centers on consideration and conversion within a shorter 30-day conversion horizon, aiming for immediate conversions and measurable ROI. This model is highly effective for driving actions like purchases. While it can utilize streaming and online video, we often recommend focusing on online video (OLV) and display inventory for optimal results.

How do these models work?

The intelligence behind Brand+ and Performance+ can be broken down into four key components:

1. Advertiser Event (Human-Defined): The process begins with you! You define the specific conversion events you're tracking. This could be anything from website purchases tracked via the Amazon ad tag, offline conversions integrated through a Conversion API, purchases of specific products on Amazon via ASINs, or even mobile app installs and actions reported by an MMP. This human input is crucial, ensuring the AI aligns with your unique business objectives.
2. Addressability Graph: Based on your defined advertiser events, the AI creates a comprehensive "addressability graph." This map provides a multi-property overview of how your converting customers interact across the vast Amazon ecosystem and beyond. It helps understand their journeys, their paths and their engagement patterns.
3. AI Prediction (Lookalike Audiences and Predictive Scores): From the addressability graph, the AI intelligently creates audiences similar to your existing converters—essentially, a lookalike audience. It then generates predictive scores for individuals within this lookalike audience, identifying those most likely to convert based on the creative being served and the desired outcome within a specific timeframe. This ensures your ads are delivered to the most receptive audience.
4. Campaign Delivery and Continuous Optimization: The AI then dynamically delivers impressions through the most efficient channels, whether it's Amazon Prime Video, Magnite or Amazon Publisher Direct. What's truly powerful is the continuous learning loop. The AI constantly tracks post-impression conversions, updates its model, and refines its targeting as more data becomes available, ensuring your campaigns are always optimizing for better outcomes. This process requires a consistent feed of advertiser events, as static data alone isn't enough.

Easily set up your campaigns.

Setting up campaigns with these AI models is incredibly straightforward, often taking less than two minutes for Performance+ and even quicker for Brand+.

For Brand+, once you've defined your conversion event and set your budget, you're ready to launch.

For Performance+, you have the flexibility to choose from three sub-models:

• Customer Acquisition: Targets net new shoppers who haven't interacted with your brand, excluding those who have converted in the past 90 days.
• Remarketing: Focuses on users who have engaged with your brand or product but haven't converted in the last 90 days.
• Retention: Aims to re-engage customers who have interacted with your brand and have not converted in the last seven days, fostering loyalty.

We often recommend starting with all three sub-models for Performance+ and then reviewing their performance to optimize your strategy.

Empowering marketers beyond automation.

Even with AI doing the heavy lifting, you retain full access to all the familiar optimization tools and reporting capabilities you'd expect from Amazon DSP. This includes granular inventory reports, creative performance analysis and insights into geographic and audience metrics. You can still leverage pacing controls, day-parting, frequency settings and the powerful insights from Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC).

For first-time users, we always suggest running Business as Usual (BAU) campaigns alongside Brand+ and Performance+. This allows you to truly appreciate the incremental value these AI models deliver. We also recommend a minimum flight of two months for both models to allow the AI sufficient time to learn and optimize.

Demonstrating real-world impact.

We've seen firsthand the significant impact these AI models can have. In a recent link-out campaign (tracking conversions outside Amazon's ecosystem) for an advertiser, our manual interventions—specifically refining sub-models and optimizing frequency caps based on AMC insights—led to an incredible 400% increase in ROAS for the Performance+ campaign. Ultimately, this campaign delivered 1.6 times more ROAS compared to the BAU approach.

Similarly, for a link-in campaign (tracking purchases on the Amazon website), the Performance+ campaign achieved a 50% higher ROAS than BAU. While the CPM for Performance+ was 13% higher, the CPA was 66% lower, underscoring the AI's ability to drive more efficient outcomes by focusing on valuable conversions rather than just cheap impressions. This highlights the ongoing industry conversation about prioritizing effective inventory over merely the cheapest.

A partner for success.

At Monks, we're proud to be an AWS Partner, with a 13-year partnership with Amazon. Our expertise in AI has been recognized with awards like the AI Pioneer by The One Show and AI Agency of the Year from AdWeek. We are also a certified AdTech Reseller and Activation Partner for Amazon DSP.

If you're looking to simplify your media buying, unlock the full potential of Amazon's ecosystem, or just want to explore how these human-centered AI models can transform your advertising strategy, we're here to help. Reach out to us for a tailored session or a casual conversation about achieving your goals with Amazon. We'd love to partner with you on your journey to growth and innovation!