Amazon Marketing Cloud: What Advertisers Should Know

More insight for advertisers

In 2021, advertisers invested more than $31 billion in Amazon advertising channels. 56% more than in 2020. The retailer has become the third largest ad publisher in the U.S. behind Google and Facebook. And the trend is growing fast. Amazon owes its success to the large amount of relevant data about our shopping behavior. And on the other hand, its constantly growing catalog of advertising products, with which Amazon customers can be reached at every stage of the customer journey.

Today, companies can place their products in Amazon search results via Sponsored Ads and build brand awareness via the programmatic advertising offering, the Amazon DSP (Demand Side Platform), using videos in the “upper funnel”. However, Amazon is developing its advertising solutions side-by-side and each as stand-alone tools. So far, it has only been possible to analyze the actual advertising impact or the interactions of the various programs to a limited extent.

Thanks to the Amazon Marketing Cloud, advertisers now have access to a powerful analysis tool that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of Amazon’s advertising programs across campaigns and channels.

Amazon Marketing Cloud – what’s behind it, how it works

The AMC is based on Amazon’s well-known cloud platform Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is a so-called data clean room. Such data clean rooms are also available from other providers and are used by analysts to link data from different data providers in a pseudonymized way without the original data being read by the respective owner. Accordingly, in the AMC, advertisers can view pseudonymized customer segments that had contact with at least one of the advertiser’s campaigns. This information from the Amazon Ads programs can then be used to create overarching analyses. In addition, if advertisers also bring data sets of their customers from a customer data platform (CDP), overlaps with Amazon segments can be identified and targeting in ad campaigns can be aligned accordingly.

Important to know: A special feature of a data clean room is that uploaded data is made unrecognizable using “hashing” before uploading.

Who should use Amazon Marketing Cloud

Any advertiser who invests budgets in the Amazon DSP and also places ads through Sponsored Products in search should look into AMC. This applies regardless of whether the campaigns are operated by the advertiser or by a media agency. In the first step, it is not necessary to use your own data to gain valuable analyses of the reach and effectiveness of the used advertising budgets. But keep in mind: Amazon’s Data Clean Room is not a classic, operative campaign optimization tool. The AMC is strong at retrospectively evaluating the budgets used along the target groups addressed, so that future budgets can be used even more effectively (either one self or through the agency).

AMC is less helpful for advertisers who only invest in sponsored products or only in DSP and also do not bring their own data. These benefit more if they evaluate the reports provided by Amazon via Excel export per advertising channel in detail.

Sounds great! How do I get access?

The AMC program has officially left the beta phase and is officially available in many countries. You apply for access directly to the Amazon Ads team or through selected partners like emax digital. Access to the AMC platform is via a web-based interface where analysts can run the necessary queries using the SQL database language. The data is then either visualized directly in the tool using AWS QuickSight, or loaded via an interface (API) into a separate AWS account, from which it can be further processed.

That’s why we at emax digital have developed a simple access to AMC that can be used both by the advertiser and, if desired, by his agency.