From Amazon Marketing Cloud to Selling Partner API, Amazon is sharing more data sets with brands than ever before. But how do you actually integrate these powerful new data streams into your business? 

In this webinar with Angelo D’onofrio of Seller Alliance and Intentwise CEO Sreenath Reddy discussed the ins and outs of building a sophisticated and workable data strategy. Just downloading metrics from Amazon isn’t enough: Ultimately, you need processes, people, and technology to manage all of it.

Here are the key ingredients for brands that want to craft a data strategy. 

Prepare your team for data management

Brands should ensure that members of their team have the critical skills needed to conduct data analysis, such as knowledge of SQL and regressions. 

Skills alone aren’t enough, however. Brands should also be sure that they collaborate on data across their teams, such as by assigning a data steward who works with both the IT and business sides

Create firm processes for data analysis 

All brands should start with a list of 10-15 critical questions they want to answer with data in order to supercharge their business.

From there, they need to build processes that allow them to refine and analyze patterns in their data. They should firmly establish processes for answering:

• Diagnostic questions like, “Why did my ACOS go up?” 
• Operational questions like, “What is my YoY performance?” 
• Strategic questions like, “What is my customer life-time value?” 

Ensure you own your data

Actually collecting all of that data from Amazon is tricky, too. There are many pitfalls to watch out for. First, while many brands are tempted to build their own API connections, doing so is a messy, time-consuming process that is not an end in and of itself. 

Second, one big mistake brands make is to sign away rights to their ad data to a third party. In order to plan for long-haul growth, brands need to ensure they have permanent access to their own data.

(This webinar was hosted by Seller Alliance.)