The customer shopping journey is more complex than ever, requiring eCommerce advertisers to serve and measure the impact of ads to their target audiences across more channels. Thankfully, Amazon Marketing Cloud helps brands get a clearer picture of the customer journey and provides meaningful insights into ad performance.
We’ll cover how brands can utilize AMC to implement a multi-touch attribution model and measure the impact of their ad spend throughout the customer journey.
What is Amazon Marketing Cloud?
Launched in 2021, Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is an innovative, walled-garden analytics solution that allows brands to track shoppers throughout their customer journey.
AMC provides advertisers with customizable reporting capabilities across multiple data sets at the event level. These data sets can combine brand and first-party Amazon data to give advertisers a comprehensive view of campaign performance. As a result, AMC allows brands to make informed decisions about advertising efforts withouct identifying individual shoppers.
What Campaign Data is Available in AMC?
AMC enables brands to blend their data with Amazon event data for enhanced cross-channel analytics and custom attribution. Both user and advertiser data are hashed at entry, safeguarding all parties from concerns around personal data privacy.
The campaign data available in AMC by default includes:
Sponsored Ad Console and Amazon DSP Campaign Data
All campaign metrics from Sponsored Ads and Amazon’s Demand Side Platform (DSP) campaigns are automatically collected in your AMC account. This includes campaign impressions, clicks, video views, orders, and sales. You can view this data by keyword, ad group, order, line item, by day, ad type, and more.
Audience Segment Data
For Amazon DSP data, you can also pull reports by audience segment to understand audience performance. These audiences can include:
- In-market: In-market audiences allow you to engage audiences who are “in the aisle” and have been recently shopping for products in a specific category.
- Lifestyle: These audiences represent a mix of compiled shopping and viewing behaviors. These behaviors indicate common preferences and align with lifestyle segments such as “foodies,” “sports fans,” “tech enthusiasts,” and others.
These data points can converge to deliver several significant insights, such as:
- Media Overlap Analysis: Allowing brands to identify which combination of ad types results in the highest conversion rates.
- Gateway ASIN Analysis: The New-To-Brand Gateway ASIN query lets you discover the top ASINs that attract New
- Path to Purchase Analysis: Monitor the steps customers take, from the initial discovery of a product to the final purchase. This will allow you to pinpoint the various touchpoints along the way.
- Audience Analysis: Gain insights into your current customer demographic and behavior to uncover potential new customer segments with similar characteristics.
- Geographic Analysis: Enables brands to identify the locations where campaigns yield the highest conversion rates and expand strategically based on this data.
How Pacvue Translates AMC Data into Valuable Audience Insights
Sifting through this data to gain insights into ad performance and attribution can be time-consuming due to the need for complex queries to extract relevant information from Amazon’s SQL database. Pacvue’s AMC dashboard solves this problem. Users can access a library of prebuilt reports and visualizations of queries, enabling your team to easily understand this complex data, with automated and tailored insights. Curious to learn more about how Pacvue can help your team get the most out of Amazon Marketing Cloud? Chat with an AMC expert.
Why Understanding Multi-Touch Attribution is Essential for Advertisers
To better evaluate advertising performance, brands must move beyond simply measuring last-touch Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), as it does not provide a holistic overview of campaign performance. While ROAS is an important performance metric, relying solely on this number can result in inaccuracies, especially for top-of-funnel placements.
An advertiser can see significantly fewer impressions, clicks, and sales but still see an increase in ROAS. This doesn’t mean that your program is growing. It just means that the dollars you spend are getting a slightly higher return. Additionally, last-touch ROAS doesn’t have any weighted attribution. Any advertising efforts falling before the final click or view in a customer’s journey get 0% of the credit for the sale. This makes it difficult to accurately measure tactics like upper funnel display or video because these rarely see any return when measured this way. These tactics introduce your brand or product to the consumer, arguably the most valuable moment in the journey to a conversion.
Obtaining a more accurate measurement of the success of these tactics requires a more holistic measurement approach, which can be achieved by utilizing AMC and made actionable with Pacvue.
How to Utilize Amazon Marketing Cloud to Measure the Full Funnel
AMC provides excellent data and queries for measuring the full marketing funnel. Along with this data, Pacvue has layered on a proprietary machine-learning algorithm to provide budget recommendations to maximize total advertising sales. Add these tools and queries to supercharge your Amazon advertising strategy:
Path to Purchase Query
This AMC data set allows advertisers to see how users engage with ads across different ad types. Which ads do they click on? And in which order? How frequent is this specific path to purchase, and how successful is it in pushing sales?
Advertisers are often surprised that their customers engage with so many touchpoints before making a purchase. Understanding and actioning against this data gives your team a competitive edge on deploying future ad budgets.
Assisted Conversion Analysis
Understand what combination of ad types delivers the highest conversion rates. Combining AMC’s data on each customer journey with Pacvue’s Assisted Conversion Analysis allows you to attribute partial value to touchpoints earlier in the customer journey. So, when looking at the Path to Purchase query, the upper funnel views like video and display will be credited for part of the final conversion value.
This analysis assigns a more accurate value to each advertising touchpoint, enabling you to make more informed budget decisions. Ultimately, if assisted conversions go up, so will last-touch conversions, and measuring this way can encourage sustainable long-term growth. In many cases, we see that tactics previously viewed as inefficient are more effective than their lower funnel counterparts when using multi-touch attribution. Since you know all the paths to purchase and the propensity of a user interacting with each type of ad, you can build a robust model of which paths and ad types to support with additional budget.
As retail media and Amazon advertising expand exponentially, advertising programs are becoming more complex and mature. Measurement and attribution need to follow suit. Otherwise, actual growth will be just out of reach.
You can learn more about Amazon Marketing Cloud and how your team can harness AMC data with Pacvue. Book a call with our AMC experts today.
Amazon Marketing Cloud Frequently Asked Questions
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a secure, privacy-safe, and cloud-based data clean room solution provided by Amazon. It allows advertisers to perform analytics and measurement on their marketing and advertising data without exposing individual-level data. AMC enables marketers to analyze the effectiveness of their campaigns by combining data from Amazon’s advertising services with their own data. This can include insights into audience behavior, campaign performance, and other valuable metrics. AMC uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure, ensuring scalability, reliability, and security.
A “walled garden” refers to a closed ecosystem where the platform owner controls all aspects of the environment, including the data and the technology used. Companies like Google, Meta , and Amazon operate walled gardens because they control and restrict the flow of data in and out of their platforms. These environments offer advertisers access to a large and engaged audience but limit the transparency and flexibility of data usage and analytics. The benefits of walled gardens include high-quality data, sophisticated targeting options, and brand safety, while the drawbacks include limited interoperability and challenges in measuring cross-platform performance.
To register for Amazon Marketing Cloud, follow these steps:
Eligibility Check: Ensure that you meet the eligibility criteria. Typically, AMC is available to advertisers and agencies that are already using Amazon Advertising products and have significant campaign activity.
Contact Amazon Advertising or Pacvue Representative: If you have an Amazon Advertising account, you should reach out to your Amazon Advertising account representative. They can provide information on eligibility and the registration process. If you are a Pacvue customer, reach out to our team and we will assist you with the set-up.
Request Access: If you don’t have a direct contact, you can reach out through the Amazon Advertising support or help center to request access to AMC. This can often be done through the Amazon Advertising console or through specific support channels. AMC can be set-up for Pacvue users by reaching out to your Customer Success Manager.
