The Skai 5: Five Key Takeaways From Skai’s ‘Data Is Power’ Webinar with Amazon Ads

Make no mistake! Retail media is no longer an emerging channel. It’s a staple in today’s CPG advertiser marketing mix. 

In fact, one in five ad dollars is predicted to go toward retail media in 2023. With this rapid growth, there are a lot of opportunities to innovate: something both Amazon and Skai have prioritized. 

A successful retail media program doesn’t exist without first-party data. It’s absolutely key to reaching your consumers where and how they like to shop. But finding and using that data is often harder than it may first seem. How can advertisers best harness that data and truly make it work for them? 

Because of how fast this channel has grown and the demand from advertisers for more data, Amazon Ads has been busy developing insights solutions for their clients. When coupled with a marketing platform like Skai, these insights can make the difference.

Five key takeaways from Skai’s Data is Power webinar with Amazon Ads

Ana Santaella, Skai’s Director of Commerce, Product Marketing, recently hosted a webinar with Rob Quattromini, Senior Partner and Development Manager at Amazon Ads, to explore how insights can help brands and agencies succeed on and off the platform. 

This webinar was an unrecorded exclusive event, so if you missed it, here are five compelling insights-driven technology areas your retail media teams should consider:

Amazon has built a suite of insights tools for advertisers

Back in 2012, Amazon was the first to introduce retail media ads on its network. With this level of maturity, Amazon—more than any other retailer—has the foundation to innovate and build new developments that provide a powerful opportunity for advertisers. 

Amazon Ads has evolved from a media provider into a tech provider, developing unique data-focused solutions to cater to different needs. Whether it’s addressability, cross-channel measurement, or program efficiency, Amazon’s built advanced tools to help marketers overcome these challenges, including Amazon DSP, an API, Marketing Stream, and Marketing Cloud. 

Taking these challenges and turning them into opportunities, Amazon’s tools lift barriers and give advertisers a way to assess retail and ad performance together for a complete picture of their program. Skai is proud to innovate alongside Amazon to help our clients achieve success with these tools.

No two advertising programs are the same, each with unique metrics to measure. That’s why Amazon has created not one but three core products, Amazon Marketing Cloud, Amazon Marketing Stream, and API, to deliver powerful insights to marketers.

The front line of insights: Amazon’s API

Amazon’s API provides basic reporting on your campaigns without too much detail. Posted daily, these reports are high-level and provide a holistic view of both your retail and ad data. Previously only available to sellers, it’s now also available to vendors worldwide. 

As one of the first Amazon API developers, Skai has a track record of delivering additional value on top of the Amazon Ads’ API functionality. With our cutting-edge advertising innovation forged from our 16+ year history in paid search and social advertising, we know what tools marketers need. 

With customizable metrics, these insights are easy to understand, and most importantly, marketers can quickly turn these insights into actionable optimizations to improve performance. 

Faster insights to action: Amazon Marketing Stream

Amazon Marketing Stream upgrades the base, nightly reporting from the Amazon Ads API with more and faster data. Advertisers get the information they need quickly and throughout the day with a higher level of granularity to understand performance in near-real-time. 

For example, with a push-based, intra-day messaging system, marketers can see when campaigns are out of budget and optimize throughout the day according to clicks and sales. This is a pretty important function for the year’s biggest shopping days. You don’t want to log in the day after Black Friday or Prime Day and realize you had issues that hampered performance. 

Skai leverages Stream’s near-real-time data to support our existing features for enhanced accuracy and efficiency. Get reports as data refreshes, maximize budgets with bid optimizations, understand performance with dashboards, and improve dayparting with hourly insights.

Detailed program performance: Amazon Marketing Cloud

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a secure data clean room that brings in your first-party data to provide holistic, full-funnel, cross-channel performance insights. Bringing together signals from multiple sources allows advertisers to better understand the customer journey and what leads to sales on Amazon. 

This unmatched granular level of detail and insight leads advertisers to new ways to optimize channels and help clients with media planning and how to spend their next dollar.

Skai’s dashboard helps clients leverage AMC insights for DSP performance—especially to understand on-site and off-site Amazon ads. Easy-to-read charts help to visualize data with custom meta-data attributions to show what drives performance, which is helpful for measuring brand awareness campaigns.

Omnichannel insights: Skai HQ

With our new Skai HQ dashboard, users can see a bird’s eye view of their advertising program across retail media, search, (and social coming soon). Using data integrated from across channels, advertisers can understand how all campaigns work together, where to take action for quick fixes, what’s working well, and what needs extra attention. 

This consistency, accuracy, and measurement across channels lead to better workflows and higher performance on Amazon Ads and beyond. 

Want to take your Amazon Ads programs to the next level?

As part of Skai’s omnichannel 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.

We invite you to schedule a brief demo to see our cutting-edge innovation for yourself.