How long does it take your shoppers to make a purchase?

5/3/2024

After a major sales event like Prime Day, your team will dive into reporting, but when should you start your final analysis? Some shoppers might take days, weeks, or even a month to purchase after seeing your ad. How can you determine when your ads have run their course?

This is a challenging question. Consider the lead-out phase of a sales event, where you re-target shoppers who nearly purchased but didn't. When should you start these re-targeting campaigns?

To answer this, understand the average time it takes for a shopper to buy after seeing your ad—known as Time to Conversion.

What is Time to Conversion?

Time to Conversion is the duration it takes for a shopper to purchase after viewing your ads. Amazon ads have attribution windows of 7 to 14 days, crediting a sale to an ad if the purchase occurs within this period. However, not all conversions happen within 14 days; some may take three weeks. You can explore a 28-day attribution in Amazon Marketing Cloud.

Using the 14-day window, how soon should you expect purchases? The only way to know is through the Time to Conversion query in Amazon Marketing Cloud, which shows how long it took shoppers to buy after seeing your ad.

Average Time to Conversion

For those without Amazon Marketing Cloud, we've analyzed Time to Conversion data to provide a rough benchmark.

Key insights include:

The most common Time to Conversion is 1-10 minutes after an ad impression (24.9% of conversions).
Nearly 50% of purchases attributed to an ad occur within the first hour.
About 20% of conversions happen more than seven days after an ad impression.

This means conclusions about your ad campaign shouldn't be drawn until at least two weeks after an ad impression.

Factors Influencing Time to Conversion

Time to Conversion varies with product price. Generally, more expensive products have longer conversion times. For low-priced items like snacks, purchases happen quickly, allowing you to start reporting and re-targeting within a day. For expensive items like jewelry, expect a longer Time to Conversion, and wait several weeks before evaluating campaigns or starting re-targeting.

Practical Application

Consider re-targeting audiences like "Shoppers who added to cart but didn’t purchase." Shoppers may leave jewelry in their cart for weeks while deciding, so delay re-targeting to avoid wasting resources. For snack foods, follow-up ads might be needed sooner, as they could be forgotten.

Lessons from Time to Conversion

Beyond price, ad formats also affect Time to Conversion. For example, DSP ads typically have longer conversion times than Sponsored Products ads. Understanding Time to Conversion helps improve reporting accuracy and refine re-targeting strategies. You can optimize follow-up ads by knowing when your typical shopper completes their purchase, making planning more effective.