Leveraging the power of AMC for pre- and post-Prime Day

Introduction

Sreenath Reddy (CEO, Intentwise):Welcome, everyone. I'm Sreenath, one of the founders and CEO at Intentwise. Today's session is focused on how to put Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to its best use for Prime Day—and frankly, everything we cover applies to any major tentpole event.

At Intentwise, our sole purpose is helping brands and agencies move from fragmented data and signals to insights and actions, rapidly. With Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok sharing more signals than ever, the risk isn't a lack of data—it's being data rich and insight poor. That's the problem we solve.

Amazon hasn't confirmed exact dates, but Prime Day is widely expected to fall around June 22–26. Let's make sure you're ready.

What Is AMC—And Why It Matters

Sreenath:AMC is the one place where every shopper exposed to your brand—and every one of their interactions—is captured at the individual shopper level. This includes:

• Advertising events: impressions, clicks
• Shopping events: detail page views, add to cart, add to wishlist, add to gift/baby registry, purchases

All of these events are tied together by a unique user ID assigned to every Amazon shopper. You can't query what a specific individual did, but you can build cohorts, measure behavior patterns, and design audiences at that grain—something that's simply not possible anywhere else.

Two broad capabilities flow from this:

1. Insights & Measurement — answer questions that require shopper-level granularity
2. Audience Design — create custom audiences precisely tailored to your business goals

Measurement: Are You Acquiring High-Quality Customers?

Sreenath:The central question every brand should be asking heading into Prime Day is: are we acquiring high-quality customers? Revenue spikes on deal day are easy to generate. The harder question is whether those customers deliver long-term value.

AMC gets you meaningfully closer to answering this.

A Simple Measurement Framework

Use this framework to evaluate deal ASINs vs. non-deal cohorts—or any other comparison that matters for your business:

MetricWhat It Tells YouNew-to-brand rateAre deals bringing in genuinely new customers?New-to-brand customer countVolume of net-new acquisitionRevenue per new-to-brand customerQuality of new customers at first purchase90-day repeat purchase rateAre they coming back?6-month lifetime value (LTV)Long-term revenue contributionAd spend + deal discount = CACTrue cost of customer acquisitionLTV / CAC ratioThe number that determines whether it was all worth it

AMC is what makes the top half of this table—NTB metrics, repeat rate, and LTV—measurable at the product level.

What Good Looks Like

When deals work well, you'll see: higher NTB percentages, higher revenue per NTB customer, a stronger repeat rate, and an LTV/CAC ratio that outperforms your non-deal cohort. Even if CAC is elevated (as it usually is with discounts), the long-run value can justify it.

What Poor Performance Looks Like

When deals aren't working, you'll see the LTV/CAC ratio on deal ASINs underperforming the non-deal cohort—meaning you drove near-term revenue but acquired low-quality customers who didn't return.

Key takeaway: ASINs that drive the most sales on deal day aren't always the ones driving your best future customers. Use this framework to decide which products to put on deals—and which to pull back.

A Note on Data Limitations

Sponsored Product and Sponsored Display spend are cleanly attributable by product. Sponsored Brand and DSP spend are not. The recommendation: build this framework using SP and SD spend first. If the LTV/CAC ratio looks unfavorable with just that spend included, it almost certainly won't improve when you layer in the rest. This isn't precise science, but it gets you substantially closer to the truth.

Tentpole Event Overlap Analysis: When Should You Spend?

Sreenath:A question every brand debates: should ad dollars go into the lead-up to Prime Day, event day itself, or the post-event period?

The answer varies by brand—and AMC lets you find your answer by running a tentpole event overlap analysis.

If you haven't run this for last year's Prime Day, do it now. It will show you, by shopper cohort, how performance differs based on when they were exposed to your ads:

• Lead-up only
• Lead-up + event day
• Event day only
• Post-event

What the data frequently shows: shoppers exposed during both the lead-up and event day tend to have higher purchase rates and better ROAS than those reached only on event day. This suggests deploying a meaningful portion of your budget before Prime Day—not just on it.

Run this analysis, get a clean baseline from last year, and use it to structure your spend deployment for this year.

Audiences: The Three Goals to Build Around

Sreenath:Beyond measurement, audience design is the other major lever AMC provides. Before we get to AMC-specific audiences, it's worth knowing what's already available without AMC:

In the Sponsored Ads Console (no AMC needed):

• Add-to-cart audiences — 3-month lookback
• Past purchasers — 3-month lookback
• New-to-brand shoppers (Sponsored Brand only) — 12-month lookback
• High-interest shoppers — based on Amazon's browsing/shopping signals

In DSP (no AMC needed):

• Audiences based on engagement with your brand, products, or competitor brands
• Prime Video signal-based audiences

Where AMC adds unique value: when you need highly specific audiences built around your brand's own characteristics, purchase history, and shopper behavior—beyond what any prebuilt audience can offer.

Three Audience Goals for Prime Day

1. Acquisition — bring net-new shoppers into your funnel

• High-intent category searchers who saw your ads but haven't purchased
• Lookalike audiences modeled on your best customers
• In-market shoppers who have never bought from your brand

2. Conversion — capture deal-motivated shoppers

• Cart abandoners who haven't purchased (activate this one without exception)
• Shoppers who viewed your detail pages but didn't convert
• Wishlist and registry adders

3. Retention — win back lapsed customers and grow LTV

• Customers who previously purchased but have gone inactive (especially powerful with the 5-year purchase dataset)
• High-LTV customers to protect and re-engage
• One-time buyers to convert into repeat purchasers

Activation Timing

• DSP audiences: typically live within 24 hours
• Sponsored Product / Sponsored Brand audiences: 48–72 hours

Have all audiences ready and activated at least one week before Prime Day.

Two Campaign Activation Patterns

• Standalone campaigns: create dedicated campaigns for specific audiences to get clean attribution and performance monitoring
• Bid modifier approach: on existing campaigns, lower base bids and apply an aggressive bid multiplier for the target audience to get the desired effect

Note: Sponsored Product and Sponsored Brand currently support only one audience per campaign—plan your campaign structure accordingly.

How Intentwise Helps

Sreenath:AMC is one of those tools where handing someone a platform and stepping back rarely works. Here's where Intentwise accelerates value:

• Advanced LTV analysis — at brand and product level, with flexible look-forward windows (3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 3 years), with 5-year purchase data baked in
• Repeat purchase and cohort analysis — identify your best customers vs. one-time buyers
• Churn analysis — pinpoint exactly when and where customers go inactive
• Shopper abandonment views — by product, showing where shoppers drop out of your funnel (detail page, cart, post-cart), to directly inform audience creation
• Audience library — growing library of ready-to-activate audiences, deployable to both Sponsored Ads and DSP in a few clicks
• Custom services — strategy sessions, custom query build-out, and hands-on AMC support from practitioners who work in AMC daily

Q&A Highlights

Q: What is the 5-year lookback dataset and how much does it cost?A: It's a paid dataset available within your AMC instance, priced at $500/month. It gives you access to every shopper transaction going back 5 years—enabling true LTV calculation, churn cohort identification, and time-to-purchase pattern analysis.

Q: Is it better to learn SQL and use AMC directly, or use a platform like Intentwise?A: Both, ideally. Learning SQL builds foundational knowledge and helps you ask better questions of AMC. However, the AMC console has real limitations—no scheduled outputs, no easy first-party data uploads, and advanced use cases like LTV and repeat purchase modeling aren't straightforward to build there. A platform handles those gaps while your SQL knowledge helps you engage more critically with the analysis.

Closing

Sreenath:The brands that will win Prime Day aren't just the ones with the biggest ad budgets—they're the ones that know which customers are worth acquiring, when to reach them, and how to keep them coming back. AMC is the tool that makes that possible.

We'll send out the recording and slide deck after the session. Reach out directly if you'd like a walkthrough of the Intentwise platform or want help building any of these analyses before Prime Day.