What is Amazon Marketing Cloud?

It’s no secret that Amazon advertising has very quickly become crucial to ecommerce success. So much so that one in eight US digital ad dollars are currently invested in Amazon Ads. But as demand for Amazon ads grows, so too does competition, making it more difficult than ever to create impactful campaigns on the platform. 

However, Amazon may have come up with a solution to its overcrowding problem in the form of Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC). AMC provides marketers with anonymous insights into its vast stores of data and even allows brands to upload their own insights in a safe, private data clean room. From there, marketers can get customized reports in order to better understand customer behavior, both on and off Amazon. 

What Is Amazon Marketing Cloud?

Amazon Marketing cloud is a tool for providing anonymous, aggregated data about Amazon user behavior to Amazon advertisers. Advertisers can also upload their own data in order to provide deeper insights across all channels. In order to provide these insights, Amazon Marketing Cloud provides a secure cloud-based data clean room. In this space, 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.

Amazon Marketing Cloud is significant because it is the first tool to provide event-level Amazon data, while 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.

How does Amazon Marketing Cloud work?

The Amazon Marketing Cloud works by providing a clean data room to share audience insights while also respecting end-users’ privacy. 

A data clean room allows giant publishers, such as Google and Amazon, to share data with advertisers in a way that does not infringe on user privacy. Data clean rooms allow companies to keep users anonymous by aggregating data–organizing it into groups or cohorts–instead of sharing individual customer information. In the Amazon marketing cloud, advertisers can’t see individual users’ event-level data. Instead, each aggregate report includes data from at least 100 different users. 

Brands can also upload their own data Amazon Marketing Cloud also provides privacy to advertisers uploading their own data to gather cross-channel insights and access custom attribution in a space where Amazon cannot access, view, or export that data in any way.

Combining these datasets in Amazon Marketing Cloud’s clean room helps advertisers to link user actions with impressions, clicks, and conversions on Amazon. These insights help advertisers better visualize the impact of marketing efforts both on and off Amazon and strengthen future campaigns by helping marketers create reports focused on their individual goals and KPIs across channels. 

6 benefits Amazon Marketing Cloud provides advertisers

Unlike other analytics platforms, which provide specific details about clicks, impressions, etc. AMC is not so much of an insight platform as it is a large, raw dataset of Amazon Ad activity. The possibilities for using that data are ultimately up to the brand and can be used in myriad ways across the campaign lifecycle. Here six of these benefits:

1. Campaign deep-dive. An unprecedented amount of Amazon’s vast data stores across the marketing funnel.
2. Media mix analysis. A broader picture of the incremental value and the effectiveness of different media combinations.
3. Audience insights. Vital information about the composition of ad-exposed audiences, and the attributes of engaging audience groups.
4. Journey assessment. Better predict the sequence, frequency, and types of audience interactions that lead to conversion.
5. Custom attribution. How different touchpoints play a role in the total contribution of various media and campaigns.
6. Omni-channel impact. Take a closer look at the ways 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.

Who can use Amazon Marketing Cloud?

Currently, the Amazon Marketing Cloud is only available to agencies and advertisers that are actively using the Amazon Advertising DSP.  In order to qualify for AMC, a partner must have planned or run a campaign within the previous 28 days in addition to having completed an Amazon DSP Master Service Agreement.

In addition, those wishing to access AMC will need an Amazon Web Services Account. The platform Those who meet the requirement should then contact their dedicated Amazon Advertising account executive to request access. 

Skai makes it easy to work with Amazon Marketing Cloud

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. 

And, 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.

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 our Retail Marketing solution and how we help marketers access the powerful insights of Amazon Marketing Cloud, please schedule a brief demo today!

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