Amazon Marketing Cloud isn’t just about improving the efficiency of your ads.
Now that everyone is registered for AMC by default, you want to start integrating the powerful insights from AMC into all aspects of your business.
Yes, we’ve talked before about how brands and agencies are using AMC custom audiences to fine-tune their ad targeting.
That’s a great use case that everyone should absolutely be taking advantage of. But only thinking of AMC as strictly an ads engine misses the immense opportunities it creates.
What about when you’re a brand onboarding a new acquisition? Or you’re troubleshooting your path to conversion? Or you’re trying to figure out whether something is going wrong with your content?
When we say the possibilities of AMC are limitless, we really mean it. Here are some other ways real companies have leveraged AMC.
Use first-party uploads to onboard new acquisitions
Recently, the vitamin and health supplements band Life Extension acquired one of its competitors. In doing so, it inherited an entire list of customers who had previously purchased from that newly acquired company.
Life Extension wanted to cross-promote its catalog to these shoppers, nudging shoppers who used to buy from its former competitor deeper into the overall Life Extension portfolio.
To do that, Life Extension decided to connect these customer lists to AMC.
Anyone can do this. Upload your first-party data to AMC, in a privacy-safe way, and Amazon will, using anonymized IDs, match your first-person customers shoppers to Amazon shoppers.
First-party data in AMC is so powerful because it lets you form connections between Amazon shoppers and those who buy from you on other channels—in your DTC, in your physical stores, and so on.
You can track overlap across channels, create powerful new audiences, cross-promote, and more.
Intentwise Explore speeds up the process, helping to segment and enrich your 1P data for you. For Life Extension, our team sorted these shoppers into three key groups—recent purchasers, lapsed users, and high-AOV buyers.
These 1P shoppers were then pushed, as distinct audiences, to the brand’s DSP account.
Thanks to the audience segmentation, Life Extension could advertise to previous customers of its newly acquired company. High-AOV buyers could be advertised pricier products, whereas lapsed users might get the company’s classic gateway ASINs.
To check its progress, Life Extension regularly ran queries in Intentwise to track engagement metrics and impression-to-purchase journeys.
By the end of the campaign, Life Extension saw a 24% increase in New-To-Brand shoppers and a 14% increase in Subscribe & Save purchases—and all at a much stronger ACOS.
The savvy segmentation helped it cut the cost per acquisition by 13%.
(Read more about Life Extension here.)
Build the custom dashboards of your dreams
Possibly the most powerful use case of AMC is the one only you can think of. You know your business, or clients’ businesses, inside and out.
- What is the totally unique view of performance you wish had, that will save you ~20 hours of data collection and processing time every week?
- What is the custom audience that’s going to supercharge your campaigns?
- What is the question about your business that you’re dying to answer with the right query?
To really stand out on AMC, you need to be able to create your own custom views and queries. Look beyond the one-size-fits-all dashboards that Amazon provides for you.
Of course, building this highly custom view can be complicated, since to create custom views for AMC, you need both SQL skills and domain knowledge. (So you avoid common pitfalls around aggregation thresholds and audience size limits.)
The agency SPINS wanted to build unique views across Amazon, Walmart, and Target for its clients.
In particular, SPINS wanted to see AMC-sourced data points alongside data about its ads and its inventory.
Working with Intentwise, it created dashboards that showcased statistics on time to conversion, top 25 products, inventory forecasting, weekly and monthly pulse checks, and more.
Path to conversion was another key metric it wanted to track closely. SPINS knew that shopper journeys are more complicated than just searching a keyword and clicking a Sponsored Products ad.
Bringing the path to conversion data into its main dashboard allowed it to spot new opportunities.
SPINS discovered that, for one client’s product, shoppers often landed on a competitor’s product page, clicked on a Sponsored Display ad, and then converted that way.
That insight told SPINS that it should up the spend on competitor targeting for that product specifically.
When it increased spend on competitor targeting, New-To-Brand orders improved by 80% in the first month.
(Read more about SPINS here.)
Use Time to Conversion to find content issues
The agency Motif Digital looks at its Time to Conversion data as a proxy for how well its product content is working.
Time to Conversion measures how long it takes shoppers to make a purchase after their most recent interaction with your ad.
While many shoppers convert within minutes, others take hours or days. Your time to conversion often varies by price. Low-price products convert faster than high-price ones.
But if it seems like people are taking a suspiciously long time to purchase, or if the Time to Conversion is actually getting longer over time, that’s a sign that customers are bumping up against something on your page.
This is why Motif Digital tracks this data. In Intentwise Explore, the agency is constantly glancing at its Time to Conversion metrics across the ASINs it manages.
If certain products are experiencing disproportionately long Time to Conversion numbers, and their price isn’t notably high, that’s a sign that it’s taking shoppers a while to sort through photos, descriptions, and reviews.
Motif sets aside these products for a content review.
(Read more about Motif Digital here.)
