Amazon Marketing Stream: A New Paradigm in Amazon Search Ads
To understand the impact of Amazon Marketing Stream (AMS), it's first necessary to understand the difference between a push versus a pull of data. Without AMS, advertising data was only as timely as the last time it was pulled from Amazon's systems. With AMS, data is published on an hourly basis, and advertisers can subscribe to have those updates pushed directly to them.
AMS launched in June 2022 and is still evolving. At launch, it was available for Sponsored Products in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, covering advertising data only (not retail data). Nevertheless, AMS fundamentally changes how often advertisers can see their data—which opens up powerful new possibilities for ad optimization.
The Basics: The Two Types of AMS Data
The information available in AMS breaks into two categories: reporting data, which highlights campaign performance such as hourly traffic and conversion data by keyword, target, and placement; and messaging data, such as real-time notifications on budget consumption. Specifically, AMS data currently includes:
- Sponsored Products traffic
- Sponsored Products conversions
- Sponsored ads budget usage
Below are sample records from each of the three datasets. One quick note: the sample data is a representation of real Amazon data, and column names have been adjusted to better illustrate the types of data in plain language.
AMS Sponsored Products Traffic Data
Here's an example of AMS Sponsored Products traffic data:
Advertisers can receive changes and updates to data from previous hours throughout the day. For instance, the negative value for impressions in the record above indicates it is an update to the impression metric for the 17th hour.
AMS Sponsored Products Conversions Data
Here's what AMS Sponsored Products conversions data looks like:
As always, conversion data is click-attributed, meaning conversions are tied back to the original ad click and the hour of the click. Combining traffic and conversion data gives us efficiency metrics such as conversion rate and ACOS. Here's what that looks like in practice in the Intentwise platform:
AMS Sponsored Ads Budget Usage Data
Finally, here's an example of AMS sponsored ads budget usage data:
Amazon notifies advertisers at 5% increments in daily campaign-level budget consumption. This means you get a real-time signal before a campaign exhausts its daily budget.
Watch Hourly Data, But Be Mindful of Delayed Conversions
One of the biggest perks of AMS is that advertisers can now observe hourly (intraday) data—including cost-per-click (CPC), ACOS, and conversion rates throughout the day. We've already observed that CPCs decrease dramatically towards the end of the day, suggesting a key insight: campaigns may be running out of budget before the day ends. There are two simple ways to handle this: raise budgets or lower bids.
But proceed with caution when evaluating conversions-related data. Consider this scenario: a shopper clicks on an ad for dog food at breakfast when they notice they're running low, but doesn't actually purchase until lunchtime. The hourly data captured at breakfast won't show the purchase at lunch. This means that even though data is available hourly, conversion rates and ACOS must be evaluated over longer time horizons to find truly actionable patterns.
Putting AMS to Work in Bid Management
Advertisers can use this hourly data to build smarter systems. If you're using rules-based automation to manage bids, you can set up day-parting based on patterns observed in AMS data. If you're relying on AI/ML-based algorithms, those algorithms can incorporate hourly AMS signals and update bids intraday as conditions change.
AMS is a new, beta offering, and Amazon will likely continue to improve and expand what it can do—including expanding supported campaign types into Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display. Amazon also plans to expand messaging to include notifications about product eligibility, bid recommendations, and other events.
What's New Here, Really?
If you've been in the search advertising world for a while, you might ask: "What's the big deal? Google and Facebook have been sharing hourly data for years." Fair point—the hourly granularity in itself isn't entirely new. But what is genuinely new is the messaging layer: notifications about events (like a campaign running out of budget) delivered as they occur, not hours later.
Advertising performance on Amazon is heavily influenced by retail factors. If I take a speculative view, this could eventually mean a world where Amazon notifies advertisers in near real-time when key retail events occur—products going out of stock, prices changing, competitors running deals. The potential for these notifications is significant, and it could move ecommerce advertising much closer to the ideal of "retail-aware ad optimization."
Interested in learning how Amazon Marketing Stream can improve your advertising? Book an Intentwise demo.
