Today, 1 in every 8 US digital ad dollars are invested in Amazon Ads. This meteoric rise has growing pains, and industry reports show that CPCs are rising quickly on Amazon, as much as 50% year over year.
Rising costs put campaign performance in a precarious position. Advertisers make investment decisions based on bid-to-value calculations, i.e., ROI, ROAS, and ACoS. As costs go up, practitioners may look to move their budgets to other channels. Thus, to fuel the next growth phase, Amazon must provide marketers with deeper insights to drive decision-making in every facet of program management.
This is why the retail giant launched Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)—to give its advertiser base new access to advanced analytics so they can make better decisions that drive performance.
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What is Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)?
Amazon Marketing Cloud is a secure cloud-based data clean room where advertisers can efficiently perform analytics across their Amazon Advertising events and their own data sets. AMC allows advertisers to learn the incremental value of each advertising campaign across the funnel and channels.
It is the first tool to unlock event-level Amazon data additionally providing a clean room where advertisers can integrate their own data sets to generate a more detailed picture of their customer journey, ad influence, and channel effectiveness. This holistic attribution supports cross-channel budget planning, campaign optimizations within channels, and incremental performance done right.
Although there is no single definition of a “data clean room,” its role is to provide a secure place where advertisers and publishers can safely share data without violating user privacy. For example, AMC’s privacy-safe environment only accepts pseudonymized information.
All data in an advertiser’s AMC instance is handled in strict accordance with Amazon’s privacy policies, and not even Amazon cannot export or access it, and advertisers can only access aggregated, anonymous outputs from AMC.
What kinds of things can marketers do with Amazon Marketing Cloud insights?
At its core, AMC is not an insights platform. Instead, it’s a large, raw dataset of Amazon Ad activity. Marketers willing to dive in will find myriad ways to use AMC across the campaign lifecycle:
Campaign Deep-Dive
Practitioners can access the Amazon Ads data they’ve never been able to access, including deep campaign reach, frequency, and total impact across the marketing funnel.
Media Mix Analysis
While existing Amazon Ads reporting shows the performance of each ad type individually, AMC surfaces the incremental value and the effectiveness of different media combinations.
Audience Insights
Marketers always want to learn more about their audience! AMC helps practitioners learn about the composition of ad-exposed audiences and the attributes of engaging audience groups.
Journey Assessment
The fact that Amazon users are always logged in across their devices offers a unique closed environment to understand better how customers search, browse, and shop. AMC enables marketers to analyze the sequence, frequency, and types of audience interactions on the path to conversion.
Custom Attribution
One size never fits all when it comes to marketing measurement. With AMC, advertisers can tailor how different touchpoints play a role in the total contribution of various media and campaigns.
Omni-Channel Impact
Marketers can evaluate how Amazon media campaigns drive engagement and sales on and off Amazon by co-mingling offline and other channel data inside AMC’s data clean room.
How are marketers already using AMC to drive performance?
In a blog post announcing AMC’s release, Amazon Ads outlined some recent use cases to help marketers wrap their heads around this powerful offering:
Reaching incremental audiences. To connect with existing and new audiences more effectively, a consumer brand utilized Amazon Marketing Cloud to understand how many total consumers saw their ad at different phases of the marketing funnel—from awareness and consideration through conversion. Based on this, the brand learned its awareness and consideration tactics and brought a new audience of potential customers to its digital aisle, increasing its remarketing reach by 30%.
Developing custom attribution models. Advertisers are also using Amazon Marketing Cloud to create attribution models that help clarify which parts of their advertising investments are most impactful relative to their goals. A financial services company built an AMC model that reports on how each element of their Amazon Ads investment contributes to conversion events on the brand’s own website.
Similarly, a consumer electronics company is pulling insights from their Amazon DSP and sponsored ads performance to better understand how their investments across display, Streaming TV ads, and sponsored ads campaigns are contributing to achieving their business objectives.
Exploring new measurement opportunities. Today, Amazon advertisers can use Amazon Attribution to measure the on-Amazon impact of their non-Amazon media. They can also measure brand preference, awareness, and brand lift of their Amazon Ads campaigns through leading industry measurement partners.
Amazon Marketing Cloud brings advertisers additional flexibility to understand the sequence of marketing touchpoints that deliver impact and build a comprehensive view of how to most effectively engage their audience.
Ultimately, the insight opportunities available with AMC data are endless. It’s up to each Amazon Ads marketing team to figure out where and when to leverage these potent insights.
How does Skai help marketers access the power of AMC?
While the insights offered by Amazon Marketing Cloud are next-level, accessing this dataset isn’t so straightforward. It requires a fairly strong knowledge of SQL and an API developer to build value on top of it.
This is where Skai plays an important role for our Amazon Ads clients. Skai’s AMC solution fetches AMC query data and automatically parses the raw data and subquery results into easy-to-read visualizations. This structured data provides a better picture of how your media mix on Amazon and beyond ties together.
Skai helps our retail media clients benefit from Amazon Marketing Cloud’s unique dataset
Not only does our solution present Amazon Marketing Cloud data in a format best suited for marketers, but it also allows for faster time to insight and a shorter time to action. This enables our clients to nimbly out-maneuver competitors and realize true performance gains.
Skai’s AMC solution provides:
- SQL Support. Let Skai handle your queries and alleviate strain on SQL knowledge and resources.
- Structured Data. Easy-to-read data visualization automated from raw AMC data means our clients can get to actionable insights quickly.
- Even More Granular Insights. Go beyond the AMC query results with subqueries in multiple visualizations and analyze it all in your custom Skai dashboard.
- Constant Campaign Optimization. Easily identify more details on the path to conversion and incremental ad value to determine where to put the next dollar.
Skai for AMC and all of your advanced retail media needs
Skai empowers the world’s leading brands and agencies across industries to manage omnichannel digital marketing campaigns. Our intelligent marketing platform includes solutions for retail media, paid search, paid social, and app marketing. We’ll keep you at the forefront of the digital evolution with data and insights, marketing execution, and measurement tools that work together to drive robust brand growth.
For more information on Skai’s Amazon Marketing Cloud solution or to see our cutting-edge innovation for yourself, please schedule a quick demo.
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