Brands still treating full-funnel marketing as a simple progression from awareness to consideration to conversion are missing how people actually shop, according to Jennifer Hodgkinson, VP of Advertising & Client Strategy at Luzern eCommerce.
.“For years, full-funnel marketing has been built around a relatively simple idea: create awareness, build consideration, then convert,” Hodgkinson said.
“But today’s customer journeys rarely work that way. People move between video, retail media, product pages, reviews, competitor websites and other digital touchpoints in ways that are difficult to predict, and often impossible to capture through a last-click lens.”For brands in competitive categories, the challenge is not simply buying more media. “The answer isn’t necessarily more media or more touchpoints,” she said. “It is connecting those touchpoints so that each one makes the next more relevant.”
Hodgkinson pointed to Luzern’s work with Optibac, a premium probiotic brand facing declining average selling prices and aggressive lower-priced competitors. The brand’s existing approach was heavily weighted toward lower-funnel activity that could capture existing demand but did little to create new demand.
Awareness and consideration audiences had fallen 31.3% year over year, new-to-brand purchasers had plateaued around 50% since 2023, and Amazon Marketing Cloud analysis showed that only 60% of the category had been exposed to advertising in the prior six months—leaving 6.6 million customers unreached.“The important insight was that this wasn’t simply a conversion problem. The customer journey itself was fragmented,” Hodgkinson said.
Rather than treating January’s category peak purely as a conversion window, the team worked backward from it. The strategy used premium video on Prime Video and Fire TV, open-internet activation through TripleLift and Amazon Publisher Direct deals, DSP and Performance+, and Sponsored Ads. Critically, these were connected rather than run in isolation.
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Amazon Marketing Cloud served as the orchestration layer, revealing that paths combining upper- and lower-funnel activity were three times stronger than more isolated journeys. Those insights informed audience sequencing and re-engagement.AI played a supporting role in making the journey adaptive.
Performance+, Brand+, and TripleLift’s proprietary AI, TL Spark, dynamically optimized bids, audiences, creative, and supply paths based on live signals rather than a fixed plan set at launch.The results showed the value of the connected approach. Brand-related searches rose 119%, detail page views increased 70%, and new-to-brand purchasers averaged 53% (up 4.8 percentage points year over year).
Market share grew 1.66 percentage points during the campaign period, and Optibac recorded three record revenue months. Beyond the immediate transaction, repeat purchase rose 8 percentage points year over year and sales per customer were 27% higher. There was also a statistically significant positive correlation between campaign spend and first-time purchasers on Optibac’s own webstore.
“For me, that’s the bigger lesson from the case,” Hodgkinson said. “Full-funnel shouldn’t mean adding activity at every stage and calling it integrated. It means designing the journey so that awareness creates a reason to consider; consideration creates stronger intent; and conversion creates the opportunity for an ongoing customer relationship.”
She added that technology makes those connections possible at scale. “AMC can turn fragmented signals into a clearer view of how customer journeys develop, while AI can make the resulting strategy more adaptive. Together, they can shift full-funnel marketing from a collection of tactics towards a continuously evolving, connected customer journey.”
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