Learning Hub: Amazon Marketing Cloud

An instance is your access to AMC. You need to activate AMC instances for your account before you can start using the tool. A single AMC account can have multiple instances.

When you first create an instance, AMC only populates your data going back seven days. That’s why we recommend creating one now, even if you’re still debating whether to use AMC. 

Certain use cases require having months or even years worth of data to be valuable.

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 organizes all kinds of customer interactions, from ad views to product page views, into “events.” In AMC, you can track shoppers across events like:

• Ad impressions
• Ad clicks
• Ad sales
• Subscribe and save
• Add-to-wish-list
• Add-to-gift-list
• Add-to-registry
• Product detail page views

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).

AMC does track all kinds of organic events, such as organic sales, product page views, adds to cart, and more. Organic sales data is vital for estimating Customer Life-Time Value. 

The caveat: You have to pay extra for it, through AMC Flexible Shopping insights, a paid subscription.

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 and Vehicle Purchase Insights.

Most importantly, Paid Features also includes Flexible Amazon Shopping Insights. This shopping insights subscription contains data about organic sales, Subscribe & Save conversions, and more. 

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 have an AMC instance and want to know the price of Paid Features for your instance, reach out to Intentwise for help.

Yes! Paid Features includes a dataset called “conversion_non_ad_exposed,” which shows conversion events from users who haven’t been exposed to ads in the previous 28 days.

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:

• The shopper was not logged in to Amazon.
• You used non-audience targeting. If you run DSP ads that use geo-targeting or contextual targeting, or that buy from a private marketplace like Paramount+, then you can anticipate a larger number of null values.