Last year, Amazon launched the beta for Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and provided advertisers with advanced media analytics in a privacy-safe environment. The ability to bring together datasets from multiple parties through AMC can help inform marketing decisions across multiple channels.
Amazon Marketing Cloud is a secure, privacy-safe, and cloud-based data clean room solution. This allows advertisers to access analytics across Amazon advertising events and their own data sets.
However, AMC can be tricky for your average executor to put into action. So, this post walks you through the data available through AMC, how Pacvue integrates with AMC and supports advertisers, and how AMC changes the bigger picture for advertisers.
What Data is Available Through AMC?
AMC dataset inputs include Amazon Ads’ campaign events such as ad impressions, ad clicks, and conversion events from your Amazon Ads campaigns. Support for Amazon DSP, Sizmek Ad Suite, and Sponsored Products is already included, and Sponsored Display and Sponsored Brands will be added this year.
You can also add your own datasets into AMC. This allows advertisers to conduct custom analytics to gain a holistic and in-depth understanding of campaign measurement, audience analysis, media optimization, and more.
The most important difference between current Amazon Ads reporting and AMC is that the datasets within AMC are at the event-level. This means that each row in AMC datasets represent an audience interaction with your ads, such as an ad impression. So instead of measuring something like conversion rates by a single campaign or line item, you can now evaluate conversions by custom cross-ad product exposure groups. This allows much more robust, custom attribution models.
How Amazon Marketing Cloud Can Inform Your Advertising Strategy
AMC gives advertisers greater control and flexibility over their insights. With AMC, advertisers can go beyond the pre-aggregated KPIs at the campaign level that they have used to measure success, such as ROAS or purchase rates for a single campaign. Not only does AMC give advertisers greater flexibility over Amazon data, the clean room allows advertisers to add their own datasets in a privacy safe environment to generate insights that can only be obtained from AMC.
Pacvue has gotten creative in a couple of ways to help our advertisers take this data and do something with it quickly. Here are a few of the best use cases and strategies we’ve seen:
Work Backwards from Business Questions
With the volume and flexibility of data available through AMC, it can be difficult to parse through everything for relevant ad insights. Amazon recommends working backwards by first formulating the business questions you would like to answer, then anticipating how you will use the AMC insights. Starting with the end in mind allows you to work backwards from the goal and use AMC with a clear purpose.
Move Towards Holistic Measurements of Ad Success
Amazon DSP is a fantastic tool for advertisers, but it can be difficult to really prove the ROAS of DSP because its value is much further down the funnel. AMC makes it easier to explain and quantify Amazon DSPs net contribution to actions down funnel.
Using AMC to power Pacvue’s budget suggestion algorithm showed one of our clients that their 80-20 split between search and DSP spend was packing too much money into the bottom of the funnel in sponsored ads. By switching to a 60-40 search to DSP split for only a month, our client increased their ad sales by 64%.
Create Cross-functional Ad Teams
Too many companies split their advertising efforts across multiple teams or even multiple agencies. Having one team manage Sponsored Ads and another manage DSP means neither has the data and purview needed to make AMC actionable. Silos for programmatic and Sponsored Ads also inhibit the cross-pollination and network effects needed to capitalize on AMC.
The most successful AMC users work cross-functionally, valuing the unique perspective that each team contributes while ensuring that everyone supports and benefits from the accessibility of ad data. Data analytics teams should also be hands-on AMC users. They are the ones building queries and distilling insights from the reports, so it is important for them to understand the needs of the marketing teams and contribute to the insight planning, discovery, and application.
Pacvue’s AMC experience is designed to be a no-code environment to help improve this disconnect between advertisers and data analysts. Users have access to a dashboard full of premade visualizations of queries, some from Amazon Ads’ Instructional Query Library and some Pacvue specialized queries. The goal of our dashboard is to provide hands on keyboard users with real-time, unfettered access to this data in a digestible way, meaning you log in and the data is automatically displayed in a visually appealing format.
Amazon Marketing Cloud is still onboarding new datasets and features as part of their ongoing development roadmap. Stay tuned for more information as new releases are announced.
