So it happened: you’re automatically registered for Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC). AMC is now available, self service, in the Ad Console.
This is a big deal. AMC availability is putting imaginable amounts of processing power at your fingertips. But a whole new influx of advertisers leveraging the platform means boilerplate strategies won’t suffice anymore.
You need to differentiate yourself with AMC, and locate new opportunities before your competitors do.
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The central promise of AMC is to track shoppers across their entire journey. It unifies signals from DSP ads, Sponsored Ads, and Amazon events, like add to cart.
AMC does this in an anonymous, privacy-safe way through a user_id, a unique number sequence that corresponds to a specific shopper.
With user_ids, you can see that the same person who interacted with your DSP ad later clicked your Sponsored Products ad, and so on.
What kinds of events can AMC track?
AMC organizes all kinds of customer interactions, from ad views to product page views, into “events.” In AMC, you can track shoppers across events like:
You can use these events to track a customer purchase journey, or create an audience (say, of someone who bought from you but didn’t subscribe and save).
By default, from the moment your AMC account is activated, you get 12.5 months of historical data.
But you can also unlock a whopping 5 years of historical data using the Amazon Retail Purchases data set. The data set is free for audience creation. It costs $500 per month for running queries.
Reach out to your Amazon Ads representative, or fill out this form on Intentwise’s website. We’re happy to request an instance on your behalf, free of charge.
The central promise of AMC is to track shoppers across their entire journey. It unifies signals from DSP ads, sponsored ads, and Amazon events, like add to cart.
AMC does this in an anonymous, privacy-safe way through a user_id, a unique number sequence that corresponds to a specific shopper.
With user_ids, you can see that the same person who interacted with your DSP ad later clicked your Sponsored Products ad, and so on.
AMC can help you identify opportunities your competitors are missing, and save you money while doing it.
On the query side, you can ask AMC pretty much any question you can imagine. Want to know which series of ads drives the highest conversion rate? An AMC query can instantly generate those answers for you.
On the audience side, you can refine your ad campaigns with highly targeted audiences. Audiences essentially help your ads become more efficient.
In a high CPC category? Create an audience of high-value shoppers and bid up, so you can be sure those shoppers who see your ad will be highly likely to re-purchase
AMC lets you group shoppers into custom audiences, which you can then push out to your advertising accounts.
You can use audiences for DSP or Sponsored Ads campaigns, but there are differences for each ad format.
For DSP, you can specifically target ads only to shoppers in your chosen audience. Say, you want to run mid-funnel DSP ads only to people who preview saw one of your streaming TV ads.
With DSP, you can also exclude any custom audience from your campaigns. For instance, you can create a custom audience of people who bought from your DTC site, and negate them from DSP ads.
For Sponsored Display ads, you can similarly target ads only to shoppers in your audience. You can’t, however, create exclusion audiences with SD.
When you attach AMC audiences to your Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products campaigns, you can’t target ads only to shoppers in that cohort.
But you can choose to boost your bid when anyone from that audience searches one of your key terms.
Bid boosting is a clever way to go after high-value or high-intent audiences. You might bid up specifically on your high-value shoppers, or you might bid up on shoppers who have already visited your product page.
You can only attach one bid-boosting AMC audience to every campaign.
Lookalike audiences let you take your best groups of shoppers—shoppers who bought from you in the last six months, for instance—and automatically target others that look like them.
Essentially, you can take an existing pool of shoppers and find others that have a lot in common with them.
You can also select the ideal size for that audience. Choose how precise you want this new set of shoppers to be, from “most similar” to “most broad.” The more specific the match, the fewer shoppers you will have in your audience.
Here’s how the size of your audience varies based on the precision of the match:
MOST_SIMILAR: 500k to 1M
SIMILAR: 1.5M to 3M
BALANCED: 2M to 5.5M
BROAD: 2.5M to 7.5M
MOST_BROAD: 3M to 10M
We go deeper on lookalike audiences here.
For privacy reasons, AMC will only let you create a custom audience if it contains 2,000+ shoppers.
To ensure your audience is big enough, just run a test query in AMC.
You may be encountering AMC’s aggregation thresholds. AMC has some built-in minimums for a query to return complete data. This is to ensure that AMC doesn’t identify shoppers.
Aggregation thresholds apply only to certain columns, such as campaign name, postal code, user_id, and more.
AMC breaks up its aggregation thresholds into “Low,” “Medium,” “High,” and “Very High.”
Per AMC, a “Low” threshold means that, as long as you have at least 2 unique users in the sample, the results will load.
A “High” threshold requires at least 100 unique users in the sample.
If your query result doesn’t meet those thresholds, then some of those columns may be blank.
If you get a user_id is “null” on AMC, it’s because Amazon has lost track of the identity of a shopper. They can’t figure out who, exactly, viewed your ad.
Why does this happen? There two main ways:
AMC is free to use, but some of its key features are behind a paywall. Amazon has a category of datasets called Paid Features that integrate data with Foursquare Store Visits, Vehicle Purchase Insights, and Amazon Brand Store Insights.
The price of Paid Features is customized to each account. It depends on the size of your instance, and there is no easy way to guess the cost without consulting Amazon.
If you want to know the price of Paid Features for your instance, reach out to Intentwise for help.
Yes! Amazon’s data set, Brand Store Insights, can dramatically improve how you analyze the performance of your Brand Store.
This paid subscription gives you a much more granular look at your Brand Store than has ever been possible. You can track, among other metrics: Conversion rates: How often do shoppers make a purchase after landing on your Brand Store? Dwell time: How time do shoppers spend on your store?Ingress_type: How do shoppers find your store? (search, ads, clicking your byline, etc).
Read more about it here.
Every brand with an active first-party presence—a DTC site, a physical store, a newsletter—should be thinking about how to use their shopper lists to build better Amazon audiences.
By uploading your first-party data to AMC, you can track the overlap between your first-party shoppers and your Amazon shoppers. You’ll see how many people interact with your brand on multiple channels, and how their purchases vary from channel to channel.
1P data uploads unlock a lot of powerful new audiences for your ad targeting. That can mean creating wholesale exclusion audiences to ensure there’s no overlap, or crafting highly granular lookalike audiences.
For ideas on how to use 1P data more effectively, read our blog posts here and here.
Yes! Amazon’s paid data set, NCS CPG Insights Stream, gives you modeled data on your offline sales at the user level. It uses in-store data from 20+ major national and regional CPG retailers across the U.S. You can now do exciting new things like:
Tie your digital ads to offline sales. Did seeing an ad on Amazon influence a shopper to later buy your product in a physical store?
Expand your view of the path to purchase. What are the digital ads or series of ads that are most likely to result in an in-store purchase?
Share of Wallet. What is your Share of Wallet in your specific product category, and how do your Amazon ads impact that? By how much do Amazon ads increase your SOW in offline channels?
All of this should make Amazon a more attractive home for big brands in physical stores that don’t yet control their Amazon presence.
Read more about in-store purchase tracking here.
Learn how to leverage AMC to transform your ad strategy with best practices, queries, and hands-on exercises.
