For e-commerce brand owners and Amazon advertisers, building brand awareness and driving sales are critical goals. However, the shift in consumer behavior and the deprecation of third-party cookies have posed significant challenges. Advertisers now struggle to answer fundamental questions such as:
– What is the demographic of your most engaging audience?
– Which location generates the most sales?
– What media mix brings the highest conversion rates for your brand?
Enter Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), a robust solution designed to provide comprehensive data insights to advertisers. This guide will explain AMC and how it helps businesses make informed data-driven decisions.
Table of Contents
What is Amazon Marketing Cloud?
In the world of advertising, data is everything. For years, advertisers relied on third-party cookies to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. However, as privacy concerns led to blocking third-party cookies, tracking customer journeys, and measuring cross-channel conversions becoming increasingly difficult, this gap left advertisers in search of more reliable, privacy-safe data solutions.
Amazon Marketing Cloud, launched in 2021, is Amazon’s response to this challenge. AMC is a cloud-based, privacy-safe platform that allows advertisers to analyze vast amounts of aggregated data. It provides a holistic view of customers’ shopping journeys, both on and off Amazon, by combining Amazon Ad campaign data with an advertiser’s own data sets. By doing so, AMC helps brands understand campaign performance across multiple touchpoints without exposing individual user data.
How Does Amazon Marketing Cloud Work?
One of AMC’s primary features is its commitment to privacy. It doesn’t provide user-level data but instead shows aggregated data from groups of at least 100 users. This aggregation enables brands to gain insights into customer behaviors while protecting their privacy. With AMC, advertisers can dive into customer journeys, from awareness to conversion, and understand how different elements of their campaigns impact sales.
Additionally, AMC supports full-funnel analysis, providing insights into how various marketing channels—such as Sponsored Ads and Amazon DSP—contribute to overall campaign performance. Whether it’s understanding purchase behavior or measuring the effectiveness of a media mix, AMC offers an array of insights that allow advertisers to make better data-driven decisions.
Maximizing Your Use of Amazon Marketing Cloud
With so much data at your disposal, AMC can become overwhelming. Therefore, starting by establishing a clear business goal or identifying a specific problem to solve is critical. Let’s say you’re a fashion retailer launching a new clothing line. You could use AMC to analyze customer demographics, buying behavior, and top-performing keywords. Armed with this data, you can create a product launch strategy tailored to your target audience, maximizing visibility and sales.
Some specific insights AMC can provide include:
– Audience Analysis: AMC lets you segment audiences based on behaviors, preferences, and purchase patterns.
– Customer Journey Analysis: Understand the customer journey from awareness to conversion, allowing you to optimize ad spending across touchpoints.
– Media Mix Analysis: Evaluate the effectiveness of various advertising channels and combinations to find the most efficient path to conversion.
– Purchase Behavior Analysis: Identify what drives customers to purchase, enabling you to tailor your marketing efforts.
– Full-Funnel Analysis: Go beyond Amazon DSP and evaluate your marketing efforts across all stages of the funnel.
Registering for Amazon Marketing Cloud
Accessing AMC requires meeting several prerequisites. You must have an Amazon DSP account and have run campaigns within the last 28 days. Additionally, you’ll need someone proficient in SQL to query the AMC database and an AWS account to store and analyze your data. Once you meet these requirements, you can register for AMC and leverage its powerful insights.
Key Benefits for Advertisers
AMC allows advertisers to achieve a more granular understanding of how their marketing efforts are performing. Here are a few practical ways AMC can benefit your business:
– Reach Broader Audiences: AMC enables you to measure your brand’s reach at each stage of the marketing funnel, from awareness to conversion. With this information, you can refine your targeting strategy and maximize reach.
– Gain New-to-Brand Insights: AMC helps advertisers identify new-to-brand customers, offering insights into how these customers engage with Sponsored Products or DSP campaigns.
– Analyze Gateway ASINs: Discover which products serve as gateway items that first-time shoppers purchase. You can then allocate ad spend to these ASINs to increase customer acquisition.
– Optimize Market Reach: Identify the geographical regions driving repeat purchases and launch targeted campaigns in these areas.
– Measure Conversion Rates: AMC allows you to analyze conversion rates by creating custom attribution models. For example, you might discover that a combination of Sponsored Display ads and Product Targeting ads yields better conversion rates than either campaign type alone.
Differences Between AMC and Amazon DSP
While both AMC and Amazon DSP provide valuable insights, AMC offers a more comprehensive view across multiple channels. Amazon DSP focuses on media bought through its platform and delivers pre-aggregated metrics via its console. In contrast, AMC enables deeper analysis by letting advertisers create custom reports using SQL queries, offering more flexibility and detailed insights.
Conclusion
Amazon Marketing Cloud is an indispensable tool for brands that advertise across multiple platforms. With AMC, you can harness the power of data-driven insights to optimize your campaigns, reach new audiences, and improve your conversion rates. By understanding your customers’ journey and using aggregated data to guide your strategy, AMC provides a competitive edge in the ever-evolving world of digital advertising.
