Whether you realize it or not, you’re now officially registered for Amazon Marketing Cloud.
Previously, if you wanted to sign up for AMC, you needed to request an instance from an Amazon partner.
No longer. Now, as Amazon just announced at its Accelerate conference, everyone will see AMC by default in their Ad Console.
That’s true for both vendors and sellers. No instance registration is needed.
This is a big deal for pretty much everyone.
For those who haven’t yet used AMC: “AMC for all” is cause for celebration. AMC availability is putting imaginable amounts of processing power at your fingertips.
For those who already use AMC: A whole new influx of advertisers are about to start leveraging the platform, which means you need to focus on differentiating yourself.
Boilerplate strategies won’t suffice anymore. It’s time to go deeper, and locate new opportunities before your competitors do.
Why is AMC availability such a big deal?
Okay, let’s step for a second. Maybe this is obvious to some of you, but just to spell it out directly: What’s so good about AMC?
At Intentwise, we love AMC because it can help you identify opportunities your competitors are missing, and save you money while doing it.
It might help to think of AMC in two parts: queries and audiences.
On the query side, you can ask AMC pretty much any question you can imagine. Want to know which series of ads drives the highest conversion rate? An AMC query can instantly generate those answers for you.
Want to know which of your ASINs drives the highest share of New-To-Brand shoppers? Easy.
On the audience side, you can refine your ad campaigns with highly targeted audiences. Audiences essentially help your ads become more efficient.
No more throwing money at the wall—with AMC audiences, you can always be sure the right people are seeing your ads.
In a high CPC category? Create an audience of high-value shoppers and bid up, so you can be sure those shoppers who see your ad will be highly likely to re-purchase.
Want to re-target more strategically? Bid up on audiences who already clicked your product page or searched your brand terms.
So that’s the gist of it: AMC can help you a) make your ads more targeted and efficient and b) locate opportunities your competitors are missing.
How do you actually stand out on AMC?
The reality is, the value of AMC comes from scale. Just bid boosting one ad campaign, for instance, is not going to save you a lot of money.
But bid boosting dozens of campaigns? That’s when the results really roll in.
Of course, we know you’re busy. Whether you’re a digital marketer at a brand juggling multiple tasks or an agency account manager juggling multiple clients, you can’t afford to sink hours and hours into AMC analysis.
You need to integrate AMC into your daily processes, so it doesn’t just create extra work.
Here are three things you need to ensure your use of AMC is truly frictionless.
#1. A customizable query and audience library
AMC queries are built on SQL, but unless you’re a coding whiz, you shouldn’t need to worry about that.
It’s now pretty standard that most platforms offer you some pre-coded set of queries and audiences that you can run at scale. This is obviously great. But what is often missing from these libraries is easy customizations.
Let’s say you want to create a query or audience that’s really unique to you and your needs. You want to track how often non-brand searches turn into brand searches, for instance.
You want access to a team of experts who can listen to your idea for a dream query or audience, and swiftly turn it into a reality.
AMC has so many complexities, around audience size limits and aggregation thresholds. Lean on experts who can anticipate this for you, and build you the perfect query, audience, or responsive dashboard.
#2. Responsive and reactive dashboards
So you got results back from an AMC query. How do you make sense of them? Plenty of software platforms, including Amazon itself, now let you visualize your query results.
That’s great—but the problem is that many of these visuals are purely static, contextless displays.
If you want to take any action from them, you have to click around to a separate part of the platform to create a new query or audience.
It shouldn’t be like this. To truly fold AMC into your ongoing workflows, you should be able to take actions directly from the same place where you’re analyzing your query results.
Let’s say you map your most popular paths to purchase, and you find that your best path is DSP -> SB -> SP.
Naturally you’re going to want to create an audience of people who’ve already seen your DSP and SB ads, and then send them a SP ad.
With a responsive AMC app, like in Intentwise Explore, you can do this without any extra clicking. Isolate the segment you want, and then turn it into an audience in your ad account instantly.
#3. A view into what changed in your account
Successful use of AMC isn’t just about AMC savvy. It’s also about having a pulse on what needs your attention.
At Intentwise, we’re calling this e-commerce observability: a full-scale view, across all aspects of your brand (from Buy Box to inventory to Share of Voice).
Ideally, every time you log into your account, you’ll identify which products saw a performance shift and, more importantly, what drove that change.
Don’t race against time to troubleshoot your account—ideally, you’d automatically know what went wrong. (Our new Product 360 solution, FWIW, automatically identifies what changed and why.)
Having a pulse on what’s changing in your account lets you use AMC proactively. Let’s say you realize your revenue is down because you’ve lost Share of Voice to your competitors.
Maybe it’s time to up your ad spend on those low-SOV keywords. Create a lookalike audience of your high-value shoppers in AMC, for instance, and then push it to your ad accounts.
That way, even as you increase your ad spend, you can be sure you’re specifically reaching shoppers who are highly cost-effective.
You can repeat this process for pretty much anything that goes wrong (or right) in your account.
The point is that AMC works best when you already have a question you want answered or a problem you want to solve.
With AMC truly integrated into your operations, you’ll be able to log in Monday to see what changed in your account, and have a new set of audiences ready to run minutes later.
