Three Use Cases for Amazon Marketing Cloud

Share

It seems like everyone is talking about Amazon Marketing Cloud lately. You might be wondering why there is so much excitement for AMC, and how you can actually use Amazon’s newest analytics tool to grow your business. Today, we’ll walk through three categories of use cases that advertisers like yourself can start implementing today. 

What is AMC?

But first, let’s recap what Amazon Marketing Cloud is. “Amazon Marketing Cloud is a secure, privacy-safe, and dedicated cloud-based environment in which advertisers can easily perform analytics across multiple, pseudonymized data sets to generate aggregated reports,” the company wrote at the time. AMC is a comprehensive set of signals that brings together a variety of customer touchpoints, from offline traffic to retail signals.

That’s a lot of technical jargon – essentially, think of AMC as a central location for all of your performance metrics at a grain that was previously unavailable. Before AMC, performance metrics were accessible within separate ad products such as Amazon Ads and Amazon DSP. These metrics weren’t connected to each other, so it wasn’t possible to understand the influence of these various campaigns, formats, and devices on a shopper. AMC has changed all of that. By connecting these siloed datasets at a very fine, event and user level grain, AMC enables more analysis than ever before, and allows for a greater understanding of the customer journey. 

In the example above, you can see the field “user_id” appears in reports for DSP Impressions, DSP Clicks, and Sponsored Ads Traffic. With AMC’s clean-room, you can join these disparate data sources together at the “user_id” level, revealing your customers path to purchase across campaigns, devices, and formats. 

AMC Use Cases

Now that we understand how AMC helps advertisers connect disparate datasets, let’s talk about three tangible ways you can use AMC today. 

There are, of course, many ways to use the signals from Amazon Marketing Cloud. At Intentwise, we have five core use cases for AMC data, listed above. In this blog post, we’ll focus on three of the most frequently asked for use cases: Incrementality, Multi-Touch Analytics, and Campaign Optimization. 

  1. Incrementality: New to brand with Sponsored Products

Amazon has provided new-to-brand data for a few years now, with one major caveat – it’s only available for Amazon Ads display, video, and sponsored brands campaigns. With AMC, you can get around this limitation by calculating new-to-brand purchases for Sponsored Products campaigns yourself with a custom query. Here’s an example:

Understanding new to brand metrics for Sponsored Products gives advertisers the ability to optimize for lower customer acquisition costs on Amazon, and is a great way to gage the effectiveness of your non-branded targeting strategy. 

  1. Multi-touch Analytics: Path to Purchase by Campaign Type

Have you ever wanted to know which ad your customers see first, or last, before ultimately making a purchase? With AMC providing event-level signals, you can now answer these questions and more by seeing the exact journey your customers follow before making a purchase. 

One of our customers was able to use the path to purchase by campaign type report from Intentwise Analytics Cloud to discover that purchase rates were 4x higher when shoppers were exposed to both DSP and Sponsored Products campaigns, compared to running each campaign type alone. This is just one example of the insights you can uncover with multi-touch analytics in AMC. 

  1. Campaign Optimization: Time to Conversion

Using AMC, you can calculate the time a customer spends between engaging with your ad, and purchasing your product. We call this “Time to Conversion” in Intentwise Analytics Cloud, and it’s a really insightful metric for optimizing your look-back windows in retargeting campaigns. 

In the example above, you can see that 50% of purchases happen in less than 24 hours. The other 50% of customers take between 1 and 7+ days before coming back to purchase. With this level of information on when customers are purchasing, we can adjust our DSP campaign lookback windows to retarget customers with an ad at the appropriate time to trigger a purchase. 

Getting Started

Amazon Marketing Cloud is an exciting update for advanced advertisers who crave more detailed analytics and control over the performance on Amazon Advertising. To get started with AMC yourself, head over to our SQL Training to learn more about writing queries for AMC, or reach out to book a demo with our team to learn more about our custom AMC solution.

(Want more content like this? Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.)

Recommendations

Subscribe to our Newsletter​

Learn about product updates, webinars, and news for ecommerce professionals.