Measurement is a critical challenge for marketers, impacting every strategic decision in performance marketing. As budgets grow and retail media becomes a key part of digital advertising, transparency and accurate customer journey assessments are vital for brands.
In response to these challenges, Amazon introduced the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) in 2021. AMC is a secure and centralized data clean room that enables advertisers to store anonymized inputs from various sources, access transparent cross-channel data, and make informed business decisions.
This report explores AMC’s capabilities, its applicability to different advertisers, and its potential to unlock customized insights and analytics for achieving specific brand objectives.
Amazon Marketing Cloud
Connecting the Dots with Deni Petrova Strategy Director, Retail Media
Index
- What is the AMC?
- Who is AMC for?
- What do we love about AMC?
- AMC the Brainlabs way
- Conclusion
Introduction
One of the most common themes at the core of any marketer’s biggest challenges can be summed up in one word – measurement.
Every strategic decision in modern performance marketing from budget allocation to testing plans is underpinned by performance – and performance measurement often comes from many disparate sources of truth. This challenge is only multiplied when advertisers need to measure cross-channel impact across the conversion funnel using attribution methodologies.
Additionally, as advertising budgets continue to grow and retail media takes its place as the “third wave” of digital advertising, transparency and accurate customer journey assessments – albeit hard to achieve – are becoming a must for brands.
Though, with every great challenge often comes an even greater opportunity…
In 2021, to help deal with attribution uncertainties and supercharge strategy planning, Amazon introduced Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) as a closed beta, and released it to all advertisers in 2022.
What is the AMC?
Simply put, AMC is a secure and centralized data clean room where advertisers can store anonymized inputs from various sources, including their own first-party data and Amazon advertising data (Sponsored Ads and DSP). It enables brands to access the transparent, cross-channel data needed to make more informed business and marketing decisions and better understand their audiences.
One of the most significant advantages of AMC is its privacy-safe design. The platform is engineered to protect end-customer privacy, and it does so by implementing strict controls over data access. For example, advertisers cannot download raw Amazon data, and Amazon cannot access the advertiser’s first party data.
All the magic happens within AMC and the result is clean datasets used to create game-changing analytics capable of answering very specific brand objectives.
Who is AMC for?
AMC is available to all advertisers that utilize the Amazon DSP, regardless of whether they sell products on Amazon or not. All that’s needed is at least one active or planned campaign (in the previous 28 days) and the ability to manipulate and translate the data using SQL queries.
Amazon DSP is becoming an essential part of more and more brand strategies regardless of industry, due to its unique targeting capabilities, inventories and wealth of audience insights. By pairing Amazon advertising data with AMC and having the option to layer their brand’s first party data on top, advertisers can generate custom insights and analytics that the standard reports do not offer.
This powerful suite of tools enables businesses to move beyond last-click attribution and gain deeper insights into what’s really driving product sales and commercial outcomes.
What do we love about AMC?
Every brand has different objectives and this means standard reporting is unlikely to give all the answers. Having the ability to create fully customized analysis that securely incorporates a variety of datasets, can unlock new ideas and out-of-the-box strategies.
Customer purchase behaviour is not linear, and so marketers need an approach to data that gives us that same level of agility as our customer journeys.
Customizable, unique insights and seamless reporting
Falsely assuming linear purchase cycle Current attribution model
In reality a user’s journey is complex spanning multiple touchpoints Multi-touch attribution
Expectation Reality
Sample reporting visualization Reach and cost efficiency by device path Sample reporting visualization
Rediscover your audience, and keep it
AMC is very robust when it comes to performance analysis, but it can also aid brand strategy decisions.
By utilizing it, we can uncover the makeup and traits of audiences exposed to our ads, and gauge their response to our efforts. Through this, we can see how various media channels impact audience discovery, research, and purchase behavior. This information can then be used by Brand Managers to make informed decisions about how to engage each potential customer group, understand the true ROI of their investment, and communicate confidently across their organisation.
Sample reporting visualization
| Male | Female | |
|---|---|---|
| IM – Home Furniture | 12.7% | 10.1% |
| IM – Children’s Animal Book | 13.8% | 8.8% |
| IM – Dog Supplies | 7.9% | 8.2% |
| IM – TV Shows | 9.0% | 7.6% |
| LS – Animation Fans | 11.1% | 4.3% |
| LS – Movie Streamers | 6.7% | 7.5% |
| LS – Home Kitchen | 15.2% | 9.6% |
| LS – Household | 8.7% | 4.3% |
Engagement rate:
- >10%
- 5% – 10%
- < 5%
Target segments with high engagement level
Sample reporting visualization
Northeast Midwest South West
0.00% 2.00% 4.00% 6.00% 8.00% 10.00% 12.00%
Purchase rate
Site visitation (in thousand)
Sample reporting visualization
Sample reporting visualization
Reach and performance by campaign type
Sample reporting visualization
Discover your brand’s unique marketing funnel
We all know the theory behind the 4-stage marketing funnel, but do we know how long it takes for a specific audience segment to go through each of the stages? AMC can help us answer these questions and analyze audience interactions leading up to conversions, including the sequence, frequency, and types of touchpoints.
Converted users by days to conversion Credit distribution by attribution model
STV campaign A Display campaign B Sponsored Products campaign C
First-touch Linear Last touch
Sample reporting visualization
D2C channel impact
Sample reporting visualization
It’s not only for brands that sell on Amazon
Advertisers can upload aggregated direct-to-consumer sales information to their AMC instance to measure the impact of Amazon media on off-Amazon conversions.
By uploading owned event tables, advertisers can have greater visibility into cross-channel marketing effectiveness and efficiency. They can gain an understanding of the overlap between their audience and those engaged with their Amazon Ads campaigns.
By gaining these insights, advertisers can streamline their media and audience-based decision-making processes and optimize between channels that deliver the strongest business performance.
Total unique reach: 38M
| Campaign | Unique Reach |
|---|---|
| A | 29.5M |
| B | 13M |
| A & B | 38M |
Funnel Steps with Counts (as presented in text):
- 150,000 Site Visits
- 99,000 Product View
- 34,000 Add to cart
- 10,010 Enter checkout
- 7,500 Purchase
Continued innovation
In true Amazon fashion, new tools are added frequently to strengthen cross-channel analytics capabilities. Most recently, Amazon added a new paid feature, Foursquare Store Visit Insights, which will allow advertisers to better understand the path to purchase between online and offline and what role their retail media plays. Measuring the time between ad exposure and in-store purchase, or the connection between the in-store campaign and uplift in branded search volumes, could be compelling information for further optimizing the media mix, and bringing the retail and marketing teams’ strategies closer together.
These are only a few of the ways marketers can use Amazon Marketing Cloud to drive insights. The opportunities are vast and the more data is fed into AMC, the more strategic learnings can be discovered.
Our team of data specialists and strategists discover new ways to use AMC every day, and help solve the most complex advertising challenges.
AMC the Brainlabs way
We have no doubt that AMC is a strong tool and can completely change the way brands analyze campaign performance. So it’s surprising to learn just how under-utilized the platform still is.
It requires certain technical abilities and SQL knowledge which is not always available within the in-house brand teams. This is something Brainlabs specializes in.
As an Advanced Amazon Partner, Brainlabs had the chance to test AMC early and learn its powerful capabilities.
Experimentation is at the heart of everything we do at Brainlabs because it’s the only way to push past tedious and industry standard best practice, and truly pioneer what is best for our client’s businesses. In its nature, AMC gives us a perfect opportunity to go further with the same data and be sure what we are delivering is driving incremental impact on our clients’ sales.
Enter Hippocampus
From the insights we’ve gathered, Brainlabs has built the world’s largest testing database – Hippocampus. Our powerful repository contains thousands of test results, including Amazon Marketing Cloud anonymized experiments, acting as a pool of knowledge from which tailored account optimizations can be drawn, to predict winning tests across channel, vertical and tactic.
Hippocampus is built to rank which tests have been most impactful for similar businesses, elevating strategies beyond channel silos by looking holistically at the whole customer experience.
This means that when we create plans with our partners, they are already ahead of competitors, because their plans will be supported by actual data on what is likely to work for them.
Conclusion
In today’s hyper-competitive marketplace, businesses that can effectively connect with customers and optimize their advertising strategies are poised for success.
Regardless of whether brands sell on Amazon or only use Amazon advertising to access unique audiences and inventories, AMC allows advertisers to truly connect the dots and combine Amazon data with first-party data in a privacy-safe clean room environment. This creates unique, compelling reporting that supports very specific objectives.
Understanding what the customer journey truly looks like, the impact of upper funnel investment, and what the real ROI is will give valuable answers to everyone across the organization – from Brand Managers to CFOs – and supercharge growth strategies.
Get in touch
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Gyn Ang APAC SVP gyn.ang@brainlabsdigital.com
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Leo Jennings UK SVP, GROWTH leo@brainlabsdigital.com
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Rachelle Risner VP, NEW BUSINESS rachelle.risner@brainlabsdigital.com
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