Retail media is arguably a bit more complex than other channels because the ads are not siloed—there’s a direct ecommerce connection that marketers must manage. This means there are many other moving parts to consider than just standard metrics like click-through rate and bid price. There’s profitability, inventory, organic rank, and a host of other variables.
As the retail media channel continues to evolve, marketers will need more data & insights to make sense of the ecosystem and power operational decision-making.
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is one of the first big publisher evolutions in this area of retail media. According to Amazon, AMC is a “secure, privacy-safe, and cloud-based data clean room solution, in which advertisers can easily perform analytics across pseudonymized signals, including Amazon Advertising events as well as their own data sets.”
Is it a data feed? Is it a platform? What we do know is that it has the potential to drive the next era of retail media optimization. Today, we ask our expert panel how they articulate the value of this Amazon Ads offering.
Do you have any burning questions you’d like to ask our expert panel? Would you like to contribute to this series? If so, please reach out to our content director, Josh Dreller, at joshua.dreller@skai.io.
– Rachel Cornell (Product Marketing Manager @ Skai)
Amazon Marketing Cloud offers data & insights to solve
retail media advertising’s biggest challenges
June 2022’s Retail Media Roundtable question
Some are saying that the data & insights that can be accessed by Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is going to unlock a ton of value with Amazon Advertising.
How do you articulate the opportunity and potential of AMC to your clients?
David Grill (Director of Advertising @ Media.Monks)
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) has quickly become the most effective way to measure full-funnel paid media performance across Sponsored Ads and DSP. One of the primary benefits of AMC today is having the ability to unlock incremental reporting insights and custom attribution modeling, which are not currently available on Amazon’s native platforms.
For advertisers only investing in Demand-Side Platform (DSP), there is a variety of new analytics within AMC, such as the path to conversion insights across device types and having the ability to understand the impact various impression frequencies have on conversion. AMC’s additional DSP metrics will certainly have a positive impact on campaign optimizations and future testing as well as strategic planning.
Where AMC really adds significant value is by breaking down the historical data silos that have existed for years across Sponsored Ads and DSP campaigns. Despite the deduplication of conversion data across platforms, advertisers have been forced to make broad assumptions about the relationship each platform has with one another and ultimately, their collective impact on overall business performance. With the new cross-platform path to purchase and campaign overlap reports, in addition to custom attribution modeling, AMC helps advertisers make smarter data-driven decisions regarding budget allocation and optimizations across existing strategies.
On top of that, AMC unlocks the ability to quickly identify incremental paid media and audience-based opportunities. As we look to the future of Amazon paid media measurement and planning, AMC will undoubtedly be the platform to help brands maximize the value of every dollar invested.
Max Schneider (Vice President of Advertising @ beBOLD Digital)
Amazon Marketing Cloud is definitely an interesting opportunity, especially for agencies. I think this is a perfect example of the kind of deep-dive Amazon product that when discussing with a client or brand needs to be kept at a very high level.It’s exciting to have a platform that can help capture more specific, multi-touch, attribution. It’s exciting to have a platform that can supplement the type of audience data that we get from DSP. It’s exciting that Amazon is leveraging its Amazon Web Services to build a more robust measuring, reporting, and optimizing platform.
But unless you are working with a brand that specifically has SQL experience, the nitty-gritty of AMC is probably best kept internal. Clients and brands care about actionable reporting. Don’t let a six-point, multi-touch, technically-weighted, attribution model get you so excited that you bore your clients.
And remember that data mining can lead you down unproductive roads. If you can’t turn AMC into actionable insights, you probably aren’t ready to be diving that deep in the first place.
Spencer Filek-Gibson (Director of Sales @ Skai)
If you’re an Amazon marketer you’re no stranger to last-click attribution models. You’re probably comfortable with these models because you’re used to them, and they have been most readily available to you.
As marketers, we have plenty of empirical evidence across the digital landscape confirming that different channels, campaign types, ad formats, etc. contribute in meaningful ways to our conversions. In short, buying journeys follow non-linear multi-touchpoint paths.
Do you discover every product that you purchase on Amazon.com? Is it the only media you consume? The answers to these questions are almost certainly ‘no’ which means two things:
- that you should be running ads beyond Amazon.com
- that a last-touch attribution model is going to discount the value of those other ads that are contributing to some way to your conversions, hindering the efficiency of your campaign investments, optimizations, and conversions!
How do you graduate from last-click to a more powerful multi-touch attribution model? You make sure your programmatic spend is running through ADSP and you set up AMC to track and attribute.
Amazon Marketing Cloud provides the opportunity to understand which ads your customers see or engage with on their paths to conversion. With a better understanding of what is driving customers to convert you have a massive opportunity to turn these insights into action and optimize your investments to maximize sales and efficiency.
Consider the possibilities for optimization and program growth when you clearly understand the touchpoints required to drive a user down the path to conversion based on specific audiences, geos, frequencies, and more. AMC allows you to identify these granular conversion paths and create sophisticated, performance-driving strategies well beyond what’s available through last click and validate any testing along the way.
Are you using the insights from Amazon Marketing Cloud?
AMC isn’t the kind of platform with ready-to-go dashboards out of the box. You need SQL and API development experience to extract these deep insights. We take on this heavy-lifting for your team so you can focus more on making this data actionable, and less on making SQL and API calls.
As part of Skai’s™ intelligent marketing platform, our Retail Media solution empowers brands to plan, execute, and measure digital campaigns that meet consumers when and where they shop. Built with best-in-class automation and optimization capabilities, our unified platform allows you to manage campaigns on 30+ retailers including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Instacart all in one place.
Client results include:
- 461% increase in Amazon Ads ROAS and 57% increase in page traffic for Bondi Sands
- 92% increase in share of voice on Amazon for a Fortune 500 CPG brand
- 72% increase in revenue for VTech
- 1,390% year-over-year sales growth for Kamado Joe
To learn more about how Skai surfaces Amazon Marketing Cloud insights—or to see our full Retail Media solution in action—please schedule a quick demo today!
