Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) Explained

Advertising is always on. You need to make sure you are continuously checking in on progress and optimizing to continue to succeed. That’s why Amazon continues to make enhancements and updates to its advertising options and measurement solutions, including their data analytics solution in beta, the Amazon Marketing Cloud.

During the 2021 unBoxed event, Amazon shared several brand announcements and hosted various educational breakout sessions with insights and trends in the Amazon Ads space. Among those updates and breakout sessions was a deep dive into Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC).

When AMC was first launched as a closed beta, Feedvisor was one of the first partners to use AMC extensively to drive insights into the optimal campaign mix, reach, and frequency to deliver results across marketing channels, media campaigns, and buying journeys. In the last year, we have been able to use AMC to benefit our clients and gain a deeper knowledge of best practices as well as helpful tips for using AMC.

Continue reading to get an in-depth summary of Amazon Marketing Cloud and how to utilize it to enhance your advertising outcomes. We will also give a high-level overview of the 2021 unBoxed virtual event for more insights and tips to succeed on Amazon today.

What is Amazon Marketing Cloud?

Amazon Marketing Cloud, or AMC for short, is a holistic measurement and analytics solution to evaluate cross-channel campaign performance, refine audience planning, and optimize media investment for brands and agencies using Amazon Advertising. This solution is part of the Amazon Ads Technology Suite.

In the Amazon Marketing Cloud dashboard and web user interface, you will find a schema explorer, query editor, templates for queries, and a log of past submitted queries. The query editor allows you to run a previous query or add a new query. You can also use pre-existing query templates to get started.

The AMC offers a wide range of analytic possibilities from Optimal Ad Frequency and Path to Purchase analyses to Optimal budget allocation across Sponsored Ads and the Amazon DSP. Feedvisor has used AMC to run analyses that reveal incrementality benefits to understanding the path that leads to the highest conversion. Without AMC, you can’t garner these learnings.

Using AMC, advertisers have access to user-level insights. Access to user-level performance is what provides AMC with the ability to deliver robust and granular insights, effectively recreating the path to purchase. Knowing how ad placements and search influenced a journey directly feeds into smarter decision-making and media optimizations. Not to worry, the user-level information is anonymized and protected – advertisers should feel confident in using this data.

Tips for Using Amazon Marketing Cloud as a Brand

Along with explaining the Amazon Marketing Cloud use and product development process, at unBoxed 2021, they gave some tips for how brands and agencies can better use AMC to get the desired results.

Understand your Amazon business goals. Work backward from your goals so that you can use AMC with a clear purpose. If you are clear on the goals you want to achieve, it is much more productive to take steps toward that goal and collect the data you need to measure that goal effectively.
Use AMC across departments. Collaborate with both the marketing team and analytics team to get the best results. Your marketing team and your analytics team will find AMC useful for the tasks they do on a daily basis. Make sure the two teams work together to meet goals rather than live on separate islands within the system.
Stay agile. As with any analysis, it’s important to stay agile. Insight development is an iterative process. You always want to start with a few questions and work from there.
Take the time to set up your AMC tool well. You won’t get the results you want on day one. The AMC tool does require setup. You will need someone that can build and execute queries. After it is set up, it will be a much smoother measurement experience.

There are already brands that have seen success using AMC to get a more holistic view of their Amazon advertising. When set up correctly, it can give you impactful campaign insights, correct channel attribution, media buying recommendations, and a comprehensive cross-media customer journey.

At Feedvisor, we have used AMC with our clients to reach incremental audiences and more effectively connect with existing and new audiences. We do this by calculating how many total consumers see an ad at different phases of the marketing funnel and use AMC to develop custom attribution models to clarify the parts of advertising investments that are most impactful regarding our client’s specific goals. By using this technology correctly, we can better analyze sponsored ad performance in tandem with performance across other types of advertising such as display, streaming TV ads, audio ads, and more.

Advanced Steps for Advertisers

With AMC, you can use a variety of datasets both from Amazon and imported from other systems. Data sets are at the event level, representing audience interaction with your ads, such as ad impressions. The media mix analysis and omnichannel impact analysis can help brands track a customer’s paths to conversion and better understand how customers browse and shop for products on Amazon.

The unBoxed 2021 Event Breakdown

Besides AMC, even more topics were covered at the Unboxed event, so let’s dig into the significant Amazon updates and feature pushes they recommend brands, sellers, and vendors use during Q4 and onward.

Amazon Follow

This Amazon feature enables shoppers to stay up to date with the people, brands, and interests that they care about on Amazon with the “follow” feature. This allows brands to understand their biggest fans better. Don’t sleep on this feature to better understand your core audience.

New-to-Brand Metrics

Use these metrics on Amazon to better understand the measured return on engagement with new shoppers, especially during the holidays. These metrics will help you make informed decisions when optimizing your Sponsored Brands campaigns.

Amazon Brand Lift

This beta program, Amazon Brand Lift, has been released for one year with over 200k active users and is enabled by the Amazon Shopping Panel. Surveys are given to ad-exposed audiences and unexposed control groups. Amazon analyzes survey results using a rigorous methodology and helps advertisers quantify how their campaigns drive brand metrics like awareness, preference, or purchase intent.

About the Author

Rachel Van Clepper is a content marketing writer for Feedvisor, where she contributes to the company’s content marketing initiatives. Before joining Feedvisor, she was a senior content marketing writer for a nonprofit software company.

Final Thoughts

Feedvisor was one of the lucky few eligible Amazon advertising and repricing technology providers to get access to the AMC beta. During the past year, we have used AMC to enhance our work to help brands and sellers with pricing, advertising, and inventory optimization on Amazon.

AMC brings additional flexibility to understanding the sequence of marketing touchpoints that deliver impact and build a comprehensive view of how to engage with audiences most effectively. But, AMC is just one of the tools you can use to better understand your holistic advertising strategy across channels. Leveraging AI technology and big data, Feedvisor’s advertising optimization platform maximizes campaign performance for discoverability and conversions across Amazon Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Product Targeting. Sign up for a demo.

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