How Do I Get Started With Amazon Marketing Cloud?

December 15, 2023
By The Badger

There has been a lot of buzz around Amazon Marketing Cloud lately. In this blog post, Head Badger, Michael Facchin, and Brent Zahradnik, founder and CEO of AMZ Pathfinder, discuss Amazon Marketing Cloud, its reporting capabilities, and how it differs from conventional Amazon advertising reporting. Let’s dive in!

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What Is Amazon Marketing Cloud?

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a cloud-based database on Amazon’s AWS server that allows you to query business and marketing questions related to your Amazon advertising presence.

The data available for queries isn’t limited to PPC ads within the Amazon marketplace. You can get your Amazon advertising insights on all platforms where Amazon advertising takes place.

How Does Amazon Marketing Cloud Work?

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) functions like a finely woven tapestry with a core commitment to safeguarding end-user privacy.

AMC adeptly shields individual user data from prying eyes, choosing discretion over disclosure. It groups the activities of a hundred distinct users and offers advertisers a consolidated panorama of valuable insights. This ingenious approach upholds user privacy and also equips advertisers with a comprehensive grasp of their customers’ journeys.

Imagine AMC as a digital octopus, its advertising channels extending like tentacles across the vast Amazon ecosystem. In other words, Amazon Marketing Cloud gathers signals from all your Amazon advertising efforts, whether Sponsored Product ads or Connected TV. It listens to every action taking place inside anything related to Amazon marketing.

It plays the role of an ever-vigilant observer, capturing each action that unfolds within the Amazon marketing universe.

For example, if it’s a click, AMC tracks who clicked it, what they clicked, and when they clicked on it. Then, it connects the dots to other user actions anywhere within the Amazon ecosystem.

With this in mind, there’s no doubt the raw data on Amazon Marketing Cloud is vast, so you can’t analyze everything on AMC. To unlock this treasure trove of data, you need to use Structured Query Language (SQL) to pull the data in a CSV file. SQL is a programming language that helps you process raw data in tabular form.

Once you process your data, you can then put it in a database and use a visualization tool to make sense of the data.

How Does Amazon Marketing Cloud Data Differ From Normal Amazon Ads Reporting?

You might be saying to yourself, “Amazon already offers ad insights. Why should I bother with Amazon Marketing Cloud?”

Well, for starters, you should bother with AMC because regular Amazon ads reporting will provide the data on the number of clicks on a Sponsored ad and the action after the click, like a conversion.

Amazon Marketing Cloud data goes deeper to show what else the people who clicked on your ads did besides clicking and the actions directly associated with the click.

Diving deeper, Amazon Marketing Cloud is all-encompassing; it ties together Amazon ads’ upper and lower funnels. For context, PPC ads are lower-funnel ads, and DSP ads are upper-funnel ads.

AMC isn’t meant to replace the reporting in PPC ads and DSP ads; its purpose is to give you a bird’s-eye view of everything in the Amazon ads ecosystem. You can get data at the user ID level to see individual actions by shoppers like adds to cart or wishlist.

Amazon Marketing Cloud helps you see the bigger picture of a customer’s journey, from where they saw your ad to the actions they took after seeing it.

What is the Query Editor?

Query Editor is part of the Amazon Marketing Cloud console that lets you build queries regarding your ads. Let’s explore how to make the most of the Query Editor.

On the left column of the Query Editor, you have a Schema Explorer that helps you find the variables to put in the Query Editor. Query editor let’s you input an SQL code to pull specific insights from Amazon Marketing Cloud.

You can use pre-set parameters for your query, such as timezone and date range, but you can only query one account at a time. If you were to build a query on conversions, you’d get an avalanche of data; you can then narrow it down with parameters like timeframe to find conversions that happened within your preferred time frame.

What Kind of Reports Can You Create With Amazon Marketing Cloud?

Amazon Marketing Cloud has various reporting capabilities, including: campaign deep-dive for reach and frequency report, media mix analysis report, audience insights, custom attribution, and omnichannel impact. Let’s look at these more closely.

Campaign Deep-Dive for Reach and Frequency Report

The campaign deep-dive for reach and frequency report gives insight into how many people your campaigns reach and how many times these people see your ads.

For example, with display ads, someone can see your ad 14 times. If your audience sees your ads frequently without adding anything to your campaign funnel, you should reconsider spending money on more impressions. Basically, you can get data into conversion by frequency at the campaign level.

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Media Mix Analysis Report

This report is also known as conversion rate analysis by incremental ad exposure mix. (It’s quite a mouthful.)

It helps you identify the most effective combination of different ad types, formats, and bidding and the conversion rate you get by combining them and in what sequence. Remember, this report extends beyond Amazon PPC ads, so it’ll also cover DSP ads.

For example, a classic ad exposure mix sequence is where someone first sees a DSP ad, then they’ll see a Sponsored Brands ad, but they’ll end up clicking on a Sponsored Product ad, and that’s where they’ll convert.

Without Amazon Marketing Cloud, you wouldn’t have this bird’s eye view of the customer journey and would only get insights into the one type of ad to which the sale is attributed.

Audience Insights

There’s an audience insights tab inside Amazon Marketing Cloud, which gives you access to data on who’s viewing your ads.

However, you can only get this information in the aggregate since Amazon is big on Privacy and wouldn’t give the individual information on each person who viewed your ads. But you can get insight into general audience attributes on DSP, like estimated income, smartphone vs. desktop users, and geographic location. You can also run an audience query on AMC and then use the query results to build an audience in DSP.

Custom Attribution

Attribution is all about who gets the credit for the sale. In conventional ad reporting, the attribution goes to the last touchpoint in the customer journey. So, if a shopper sees your DSP and Sponsored Brands ads but clicks on your Sponsored Products ad to buy, the Sponsored Product ad gets all the credit.

AMC allows you to change your attribution model to change the ad that gets credit for the sale. You can use first-touch attribution so the credit for the sale goes to the first ad the shopper sees. Or you can choose linear attribution to allocate attribution equally to all touch points. Even better yet, you can set up custom attribution and allocate different percentages to each ad.

Omnichannel Impact

Omnichannel impact highlights the potential advertising channels within the Amazon ecosystem and their impact on your advertising efforts. You can have an overview of each advertising channel’s performance and contribution to your overall marketing strategy.

How Do I Register and Get Started with Amazon Marketing Cloud?

Before we get into registering for AMC, we need to outline who can use it.

Amazon Marketing Cloud is accessible to advertisers spending a substantial amount of money on Amazon DSP — more than $10k a month.

If you fulfill all the requirements, begin your application here.

To register with AMC, you should contact your Amazon rep or agency and get an AMC instance. AMC instance is free; the cost is in getting team members with the right skills to query properly and analyze the raw data.

Will You Try Amazon Marketing Cloud?

Amazon Marketing Cloud is a handy tool for Amazon advertisers who use different advertising channels within the Amazon ecosystem. Although it can come off as a complex analytical tool, it gives you a fresh perspective on your customer journey and the overall channel impact on your advertising efforts.

Have you given Amazon Marketing Cloud a test drive yet? What’s your experience with it?