Diving into Amazon Marketing Cloud: what can I use it for, really?

Shubham Maurya Senior Product Manager

July 18, 2023

Amazon continues to grow faster than the overall digital advertising industry, reporting $11.6 billion in sales through advertising in its fourth quarter. As retail media accelerates, with several retailers now either offering their own ad network or tying up with platforms like Criteo and Citrus, Amazon continues to lead the way. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is their latest offering in their mission to empower advertisers with advanced tools, comprehensive data capabilities, and diverse advertising solutions.

What can AMC help me with?

We’ve seen most success helping brands get answers to top retail media and shopper journey questions:

Analytics	Questions
Media measurement	What should my budget split be between upper funnel and lower funnel? What is the overlap effect of DSP and Search on purchase rate? How impactful is Streaming TV, really?
Lifetime value	What is the 12 month overall sales (organic + paid) of a shopper acquired during Prime Day? How many NTB shoppers repurchase in the 3 months after initial purchase?
Path to purchase	Which ad pathways are most effective for new to brand shoppers? What is the first touch / multi-touch attribution ROAS for your media? How many shoppers visit your DTC site and then buy on Amazon?
Better targeting	How are you ensuring shoppers engage with your ads at different touchpoints? (path to purchase) Do you specifically retarget cart abandonment / NTB users who’ve seen an SB ad? (AMC Audiences!)

What exactly is AMC?

From a technical standpoint, AMC is a new measurement solution which integrates ad-attributed events across Sponsored Ads and DSP platforms within a secure cloud environment that allows advertisers to run custom analytics across media types.

It grants advertisers access to user-ad event level data while also ensuring that privacy controls are in place to safeguard user information. This rich dataset can be queried using SQL or API, which allows users to extract meaningful insights and generate custom reports tailored to their specific needs.

Why should I care about AMC?

While the technical definition sounds like “marketing speak”, this is actually one of the most powerful products Amazon Advertising has launched in the last few years. Before this, Amazon had a separate ad portal for DSP and Sponsored Products, and advertisers had no way of understanding the cross impact. We all know that marketing is a funnel and investment in upper funnel marketing drives lower funnel gains – but what exactly are those gains? How efficient is my marketing funnel, and what are opportunities to optimise it?

With AMC, advertisers can finally understand how shoppers interact with multiple ads across DSP and Sponsored Ads. While standard Amazon reports rely on last touch attribution, potentially overestimating the impact of lower funnel media, with AMC you can get a more balanced view of the actual shopper journey and which part of your funnel is driving value based on your goals. We’ve often seen interesting results with AMC: because Amazon is so search-driven, Sponsored Product Ads drive the highest New to Brand with first touch attribution!

While it can be powerful, it’s also not a silver bullet solution. We need to set realistic expectations about what AMC can and cannot deliver.

What AMC is

Cross-channel Measurement Tool: AMC provides cross visibility and enables you to measure the actual impact of your campaigns across Search and DSP, as well as other organic and paid channels.
Scientific Approach to Retail Media: By analyzing data and insights provided by AMC, you can improve your media efficiency.
Tool for Enhanced Targeting (AMC Audiences): As of Q2 ’23, AMC offers better targeting capabilities through its DSP based on multiple signals. This can help create more granular audience targeting

What AMC isn’t:

Replacement for Existing Stack: AMC does not replace any components of your existing technology stack. Instead, it complements your current tools and provides additional insights and capabilities.
Reporting Tool: AMC is not primarily a reporting tool. While it offers a wealth of data and metrics, the metrics in AMC will not match those available in the DSP and self-serve portals of Amazon and CommerceIQ (CIQ). This is because AMC has privacy controls built-in to avoid event-level data being personally identifiable.
Overlapping Functionality: AMC shares some overlapping functionality with existing features of DSP and Sponsored Products (SP), such as geo, device, and tactic-level reporting. Therefore, the focus should really be on leveraging AMC to gain insights that will enhance your media strategy.

Amazon is also investing heavily into AMC, with several new features launched over the last year. From integrating Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display data, bringing in organic sales data, and bringing in actionability through AMC Audiences – its clear that they’re betting big on AMC being the hub for all retail media activity, giving advertisers more reason to grow their investment with Amazon.

How can CommerceIQ do Search+DSP together, better?

CommerceIQ uses Search and DSP campaigns metadata to upload brand-level mappings to AMC, so that analysis can be actionable at the right level. This includes segmenting DSP campaigns by goal, which helps in making budget allocation decisions.

To streamline the data retrieval process, we utilize the AMC API to pull data into the platform every week. This eliminates the need for your team to manually access the AMC console and run a SQL query to pull data.

Our platform is natively integrated with AMC

We’re connected to AMC via API with an in-product with weekly refresh. This accessibility is crucial because integrating AMC can be challenging from a tech perspective. We also merge with your existing campaign metadata from Sponsored Ads and DSP to give you deep dive analytics – instead of saying SP and DSP is better together, we help advertisers understand which part of the funnel drives value (should I invest in prospecting or retargeting?), and where they should continue to invest.

We’ve built-in overlap analysis, multi-touch attribution, time of day performance, with several upcoming use cases. These functionalities enable us to devise better strategies across Search and DSP. With live implementation for over 25 customers, our Search+DSP integration with AMC has proven successful in harnessing the combined power of both platforms.

We offer AMC at no additional cost!

If you’re subscribed to CommerceIQ’s retail media offering with both Search and DSP, you can access AMC for free. The bundle includes:

AMC Insights dashboard with overlap analysis, multi-touch attribution, time of day performance
Quarterly deep dives on overall media performance including CAC, path to purchase and (if shopping insights dataset available) LTV measurement

Reach out for a free AMC assessment!

If you have an AMC instance but have never really been able to derive meaningful value from it, reach out to us! We’ll create a personalized, deep dive analysis on how your media strategy is performing, and give you 3 recommendations to improve your media strategy! Email us at [email protected]