In May 2023, the release of Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) Custom Audiences broke new ground. AMC adds a whole new dimension of insights for Amazon advertisers who want to cut through the noise, increase conversions, and reduce waste. For the first time, Amazon Marketing Cloud audience data enables you to build highly targeted campaigns aimed at Amazon shoppers who’ve already engaged with your product. Unique shopper journey analysis paired with extensive attribution modeling means you can create optimal cross-channel ad campaigns by activating these audiences with Amazon Demand Side Platform (DSP) ads.
What’s New with Amazon Marketing Cloud Data?
AMC data allows you to create and manage complex media campaigns. Used skillfully, Amazon Marketing Cloud audiences means you can now segment shoppers based on path to purchase data, channel effectiveness, advertising influence, and attribution. For example, you can now group shoppers into those who:
- Searched for your brand keywords
- Added to/abandoned their cart
- Viewed your product detail page (PDP)
- Purchased your product during a promotion
- Are new-to-brand
AMC also tells you precisely how and when you made ad-assisted sales, be they from Amazon Sponsored Brands, Amazon Sponsored Products, Amazon Sponsored Display, DSP or a combination of channels. This gives you the ultimate formula to build your media strategy; this is your secret sauce.
Understanding how your campaigns and channels are successfully overlapping to drive conversions means you can double down on the most effective touch points and reduce wasted spend. It gives you a clear answer to an age-old question: “What mix of ads do I serve — when and to whom — and how should I weight my budget?”
How Pacvue Translates AMC Data into Valuable Audience Insights
AMC doesn’t automatically serve you these nuggets of gold; you have to dig deep for relevant insights with complex queries to interrogate Amazon’s SQL database. The AMC dashboard embedded in the Pacvue platform solves this problem. Now, you can easily tap into this rich and complex data set through the Pacvue lens and automatically generate tailored insights. Our AMC tool is an integral part of Pacvue’s Amazon DSP platform, so you can activate this new AMC intelligence when planning and managing your DSP campaigns.
Let’s take a closer look at how you can use Amazon Marketing Cloud audiences in Pacvue to radically improve your media campaigns, on and off Amazon.
Key Advantages of Using Amazon Marketing Cloud Audiences Data
Incrementality and New-To-Brand (NTB) Customers
Pacvue’s AMC reports and dashboard can help you optimize for NTB sales by building detailed profiles of NTB customers and targeting them via Amazon DSP Ads. This gives you visibility into incrementality, attributing market share growth to specific advertising efforts.
Highly Tailored Strategies
With AMC you can tailor your strategy based on location. This allows you to create campaigns around regional events like concerts, for example, or extreme weather. You can layer demographic data on top to make it hyper-focused. Let’s imagine Taylor Swift is performing in New York City this weekend and you want to target NTB customers for your brand. You might build your audience on the following criteria:
- 20 – 35 age group
- Top 20 zip codes in the NYC area
- Household income over $100k
- With a high propensity to buy, for example, beauty and personal care products
If used to its full extent, AMC provides endless targeting and optimization capabilities, and can make your campaigns significantly smarter and more impactful.
Visualizing the Customer Journey
Advertisers can generate precise and actionable visualizations of the customer journey using AMC data in Pacvue. Not only is this capability unique to AMC, but in the right hands, AMC will also help you build the optimal customer journey, show you when the path to purchase is breaking down, and how to tweak your strategy to prevent cart or product detail page (PDP) abandonment. It optimizes campaign performance and efficiency, and it gives you better results without having to increase your existing budget.
Get More From Your Advertising Budget
As the competition for Share of Voice intensifies in eCommerce, the cost of winning share continues to rise. Accessing AMC data through Pacvue’s dashboards gives you more bang for your buck. For example, some brands are using AMC data to identify the optimal budget allocation between ad types within Sponsored Ads, then choose the appropriate mix between Sponsored Ads and DSP. In some cases, brands have seen sales grow by as much as +40% with no increase in budget. They’ve achieved this solely through better budget allocation and utilization, made possible by AMC insights.
How Does Pacvue Use Amazon Marketing Cloud Data to Build Smarter Campaigns?
Pacvue does the hard and time-consuming work; you don’t need to develop complex queries to get the intel you need from AMC. We’ve made it easy for you to access, use, and take action on the unique insights available in AMC. Embedded in Pacvue’s Amazon DSP tool, the AMC dashboard contains pre-configured reports that we’ve built around the most frequent queries to help you increase ROAS, uplift the purchase rate for new audiences, and adjust DSP spend. You can customize or build your own dashboards and reports too.
A Pacvue and Amazon Marketing Cloud Case Study
eCommerce agency, OneStone, used Pacvue and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to enhance Essentia Water’s Amazon DSP strategy. Initially focusing mainly on search ads, Essentia needed to diversify its advertising to address stagnating growth and increasing competition. Utilizing AMC’s advanced analytics, OneStone justified shifting a significant portion of the budget towards DSP, leading to a more integrated advertising approach. This strategic pivot increased Essentia’s ad spend on DSP from 15% to 55%. With an immediate increase in ROAS, they boosted overall ad spend by 42%. Read the full story here.
How to Use Pacvue’s Integrated AMC and DSP Tools to Develop, Target and Win New Audiences.
- Look for Lifestyle and In-Market audiences with a high purchase rate and low eCPM (Cost Per 1000 Impressions).
- Use Pacvue’s Ad Overlap and Path to Purchase Reports to justify spend on DSP or other channels.
- Explore Pacvue’s Audience Insight Reports to create a smarter targeting strategy. Expand your Upper Funnel targeting and the number of products you’re promoting.
- Activate these new audiences in Amazon Demand Side Platform (DSP) to rapidly improve your campaign, whether your objective is to increase ROAS, drive more sales or improve search.
- Set up Pacvue’s Rules-Based Automations to dynamically manage bids and optimize the budget by automatically adjusting spend based on performance.
How Do I Get Access to AMC?
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) access is restricted to enrolled Amazon advertising program participants who are actively using Amazon’s advertising services such as Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands or the Amazon DSP (Demand Side Platform). They must also meet specific spending thresholds and adhere to Amazon’s policies. Advertisers must apply for AMC access which Amazon may grant based on eligibility criteria.
If you’re looking for support on Amazon Marketing Cloud audiences or DSP, get in touch with our team of experts. We’d be happy to help.
