Understand Tentpole Events and how to optimize Amazon campaigns across lead-up, event day, and lead-out phases for maximum sales and new-to-brand growth.
Understanding Tentpole Events
Tentpole events are large, high-impact shopping periods on Amazon such as Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Holiday Sales. These events drive spikes in traffic and conversions, making them crucial opportunities for brands to maximize reach and revenue.
With Tentpole Phase Overlap dashboards in AMC, you can analyze shopper behavior across different phases of these events (before, during, and after). This allows you to identify the strategies that work best in attracting new-to-brand customers and boosting total sales.
Tentpole Phases Explained
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Lead-Up Phase: The days/weeks before the event, where ads build awareness and consideration.
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Event Day(s): The core period of peak shopping activity. Conversions and ROAS typically spike.
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Lead-Out Phase: The days after the event, where remarketing helps capture additional sales from engaged audiences.
Tentpole Phase Overlap (Top Metrics)
This view summarizes overall performance during tentpole events.
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Total Sales ($9.44M): The revenue generated during the event.
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NTB Sales ($1.71M): Portion of sales from first-time customers, highlighting customer acquisition.
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Purchased Users (559K): Total unique shoppers who purchased.
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Reach & Impressions (32M / 197M): Scale of audience exposed to campaigns.
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ROAS (6.4) and Purchase Rate (0.25%): Efficiency and conversion effectiveness across phases.
Use this snapshot to understand topline impact and quickly evaluate whether your tentpole strategy is working for both revenue and NTB growth.
Unique Reach, Total Sales, NTB Users (Bubble Chart)
This bubble chart visualizes tentpole strategies by size and impact:
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X-axis = Reach, Y-axis = Total Sales, Bubble Size = NTB Purchased Users.
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Larger, higher bubbles = strategies that deliver both strong sales and NTB acquisition.
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Example: Event Day strategies typically appear on the higher-right side, showing big reach and sales.
Use this to compare multiple strategies at once and decide where to double down.
Top 5 Tentpole Strategies by Sales
This table ranks the best-performing strategies by total sales:
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#1 Event Day ($3.18M) with strong NTB share (31.12%).
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#2 Lead Up + Event Day ($1.89M).
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#3 Event Day + Lead Out ($1.45M).
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Others show incremental sales through extended phases.
Helps you identify which phase combinations maximize revenue and NTB contribution.
Total Sales by Tentpole Phase (Pie Chart)
Breakdown of sales by Single vs. Multi-phase strategies.
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Single Phase: Campaigns focused only on one phase (e.g., Event Day).
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Multiple Phases: Campaigns spanning Lead-Up, Event Day, and/or Lead-Out.
Typically, multi-phase strategies deliver more sustained performance, while single-phase can capture peak conversions.
Tentpole Strategy Performance Across the Funnel (Detailed Table)
Deep-dive into each strategy’s funnel metrics:
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Sales, NTB contribution, reach, impressions, clicks.
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Spend and ROAS for efficiency tracking.
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Purchase Rate (%) to assess conversion strength.
This table is most useful for granular budget allocation decisions, e.g., shifting dollars to high-ROAS lead-up campaigns or scaling event-day strategies with high purchase rates.
How it works
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Navigate to Intentwise Explore
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Go to Queries > Query Library
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Search for and add "Tentpole Phase Overlap" to your saved queries
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Fill in the required parameters and run the query (see this article for detailed settings)
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Once executed, access the results under the Insights section for detailed metrics and visualizations.
For more information, refer to our data model.
Use Cases
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Budget Planning: Allocate more spend to event-day and multi-phase strategies with proven returns.
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New Customer Growth: Target awareness campaigns in the lead-up phase to maximize NTB acquisition.
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Post-Event Retargeting: Extend the impact of tentpole campaigns by engaging audiences in the lead-out phase.
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Cross-Event Learnings: Apply insights from Prime Day to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or seasonal sales.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What are instructional queries?
Amazon Marketing Cloud's (AMC) instructional queries provide pre-written SQL code that AMC users can use as is or modify for common measurement and analytics tasks.