WD-40 and Amazon Share How To Maximize Brand Growth With Amazon Ads

Digital Shelf Summit 2025

September 2, 2025

6 minute read

Written By: Chris Caesar

Your marketing team can have all the dashboards in the world, but if those dashboards are merely confirming what you already believe, they’re ultimately just expensive noise.

That idea — among others — came into focus during “Driving Impact: Maximizing Brand Growth With Amazon Ads,” a session at Salsify’s 2025 Digital Shelf Summit. The session featured Jeff Cohen, Principal Evangelist at Amazon Ads; Aaron Bert, Vice President of Ecommerce, Channel Marketing, and Sales Enablement at WD-40; and moderator Lauren Livak Gilbert, Executive Director at the Digital Shelf Institute.

Together, these experts unpacked how forward-thinking brands are treating Amazon Ads less like a scoreboard and more like a full-funnel strategy tool. Here’s what stood out among the key ideas they explored.

Look Beyond ROAS

If your Amazon Ads strategy still leans heavily on metrics like return on ad spend (ROAS) or advertising cost of sales, you might be losing the forest for the trees.

It’s time to move “beyond the data points that we have traditionally been using for measurement,” Cohen says. “We’re starting to look at new-to-brand customers. … What's their lifetime value worth? What type of purchases do they make? What product do they start with, and what products do they grow to?”

In short, ROAS might tell you what worked, but it won’t necessarily tell you what’s next. Brands need data that gives them a sense of what’s possible in the future.

Prioritize Amazon Marketing Cloud

If you want to move past surface-level performance metrics and actually understand how your ads influence customer behavior, Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a great place to start. In fact, Cohen says it’s a top priority for ecommerce brands ready to level up.

“I think the first thing you can do is … start talking to [your ad team] about AMC and getting an instance set up for your brand,” he says. That step alone unlocks multi-touch attribution, deeper customer insights, and a stronger foundation for experimentation.

Cohen also says that many brands still treat Amazon Ads as a channel for driving Amazon sales — and nothing more. But in practice, its influence often extends beyond the platform itself. With AMC and Amazon Delivery Service Partner working in tandem, marketers can start to connect the dots between Amazon campaigns and off-platform results, identifying patterns that traditional metrics might otherwise miss.

Break Down the Walls in Your Retail Media Strategy

At WD-40, Bert says that Amazon Ads isn’t just a performance driver. Instead, it plays a bigger role in how the business understands its marketing wins.

“Amazon Ads does not work in a silo — it’s a broader business aspect,” Bert says. “We’re seeing incrementality across the business.” That perspective has helped shift internal conversations at WD-40, particularly with brand stakeholders who still think of Amazon and retail media as strictly lower-funnel channels.

“We know it’s more than that,” Bert says. “And now we’re able to prove it.”

The takeaway? Retail media success shouldn’t be measured in isolation. When brands treat retail media as a collaborative tool that connects insights across marketing, sales, and product strategy, they can get a lot more than just clicks.

Test and Learn — Then Act

Bert says “the most important piece of test and learn is the learn,” but many digital marketing teams fail to adapt. They run tests, gather data, maybe even share it around, and then nothing changes.

“You’re like, ‘Oh, look at this data point. It’s amazing,’” he says. “You show it to everyone, [but] you don’t do anything different.”

For Bert’s team, learning means identifying actionable insights to scale across campaigns. The focus is on finding clear themes — “What can I explore? What can I ignore?” — and using those learnings to guide strategic decisions that actually move the needle.

Think of Prime Day as a Three-Act Play

Cohen says brands should treat Prime Day like a three-act play: pre, during, and post.

While performance during the event often steals the spotlight, the most strategic work starts far in advance of the holiday itself. “The time between now and Prime Day is the best time to be building your audiences,” Cohen says.

That means leaning into mid- and upper-funnel activity — like audience building, prospecting, and crafting awareness-driving creative — rather than waiting until the month of to suddenly go all in.

“It may not necessarily … be about driving a particular product for that day, but about using the moment to fuel purchases later in the year, too,” he says.

And, of course, once the event ends, the show must go on: Brands should be ready to re-engage Prime Day browsers and cart abandoners in the days and weeks that follow.

Winning the Digital Shelf

Amazon Ads has become a diagnostic engine for modern brands — but only when teams are capable of transforming its insights into action. Some of the most effective teams in ecommerce use these data points to closely shape their strategy, build their audience, and measure the efficacy of their creative.

This panel made one thing clear: The advantage goes to brands that move early, test often, and treat retail media as a collaborative engine.

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Tag(s): Digital Shelf Summit 2025 Expert Insights

Written by: Chris Caesar

Chris Caesar (he/him) is a professional writer with two decades of experience working with national publications, as well as top software-as-a-service (SaaS) and technology brands. He is passionate about crafting high-quality, lead-generating content that drives awareness and action.