Ready to get in the weeds of Amazon Marketing Cloud? Amazon’s newest analytics tool is incredibly powerful, but to use it effectively, you need to keep these best practices in mind. 

Our two speakers, Sreenath Reddy of Intentwise and Jack Lindberg of The Mars Agency, have been in the trenches with AMC for longer than anyone. In this webinar, they walk you through not only why you should use AMC, but also how to make your experience as smooth as possible. 

They answer questions like: 

What events can you track in AMC? 

Right now, most people seem to be focusing on AMC’s purchase data. Brands and agencies use the purchase data to figure out which steps shoppers take before they convert. 

But AMC has much more to offer, too. It lets you understand a whole host of other unique user behaviors beyond just purchases. AMC tracks when shoppers visit a product details page, add a product to their cart, add a product to their wishlist or to a wedding registry, and much more. 

Why is my user_ID blank? 

Amazon assigns a user_ID to every ad interaction that it captures. User_ID lets you map out a shopper’s journey: it tells you that the same person who viewed your DSP ad also added the product to their cart later. 

But sometimes, the user_ID is blank in AMC. That’s because Amazon can’t figure out who the user is who saw your ad. 

Why? A user_ID might turn blank when your ad targets someone who isn’t signed into their Amazon account.

How much data do you need for your query to work? 

Not every AMC query will return a result. That’s because AMC requires a minimum number of user_IDs before it will give an output. 

How many user_IDs do you need to get your query working? It can vary widely. 

Sometimes you don’t need any specific number of rows in order to get an output. Other times, you need 100 distinct user_ID fields. 

What does that mean in practice? Let’s say the threshold is 100 user_IDs. If you write a query that would only return 99 user_IDs, AMC will instead return a blank output. 

Why create an AMC audience? 

Custom audiences build on your query results. You take the output of a query and move the results into your DSP account, so you can target that group with DSP ads later. 

Here’s one example: You could write a query that shows you everyone who added a product to their cart in the last week, but didn’t check out. Then, you can re-target that audience with a DSP ad.

The problem? You need 2000+ people to create a custom audience in AMC. 

How do you get around this? You should run what we call a count query first, to make sure that your audience is big enough and can be created. If it’s too small, you should broaden your criteria to hit the 2k minimum.