Takeaways from our Live Session on Advanced Amazon Marketing Cloud

March 13, 2024

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) remains one of the most powerful tools for the modern Amazon practitioner, allowing you to answer a range of questions around how your consumers are finding and buying your products, with common use cases centered around optimizing Amazon ad spend across the funnel and identifying and then targeting high-value customers.

Adoption is growing rapidly – 81% of consumer brands that tuned into the webinar reported leveraging AMC, compared to just 59% about one year ago. However, adoption encompasses a wide range of sophistication levels, with the large majority currently “testing” the tool, and only a small number of brands using advanced tactics.

Thus, we still see a significant competitive advantage for brands that remain on the leading-edge of AMC.

That’s why we partnered with AMC authority Sreenath Reddy of Intentwise to dive deep into advanced tactics and use cases of AMC, as well as shed light on where the tool is headed long-term.

The session covered:

1. New datasets, with a special focus on Audience segments insights
2. Custom uploads, including:
   • How to upload and leverage your first party data in AMC
   • How to use custom meta-data with advertiser uploads for greater scalability and usability
3. Future state of AMC
4. Practical framework to build your AMC roadmap

Insights & Action Items:

1. Competitive Advantage: Amazon continues to make more data available to brands via AMC and the brands that can make the most of all the signals can build a competitive edge. Data-driven brands eager to build their competitive edge think of AMC as a powerful exploration tool versus a tool to develop canned reporting. The ability to ask specific questions about a brand or product and then action on the insights is the true power of AMC.
2. New Ad Inventory Means More Data: As Amazon continually and rapidly expands its inventory Amazon, so too do the datasets and possibilities within AMC expand (as often as monthly; Sponsored TV the latest). Advertisers should continue to stay abreast of these new additions and expect AMC to become the center of all advertising measurement processes in the near future.
3. AMC is Required for DSP: There will essentially be no reasonable way to optimize DSP campaigns without AMC within the next 3-6 months. Thus, brands need to be rapidly diving into advanced AMC usage in order to continue to leverage DSP effectively.
4. Audience Segments: New audience segments within paid subscriptions – including Lifestyle Segments and In Market Segments – allow you to measure your brand penetration within these segments and target unexposed or exclude exposed audiences to fine tune spend and drive incrementality, with some DSP shifting from a heavy focus on remarketing to more of a focus on incremental reach.
5. Amazon Ads Tailwinds: Amazon is ahead of its retail media peers with this granular targeting capability, although others have it on their roadmaps. This is one example of many where Amazon’s advanced measurement and targeting capabilities will serve as a tailwind to its advertising business relative to other retail media networks.
6. Own Your Instance: If working with an agency on AMC, you should ensure the brand has ownership for the instance. The brand should also take responsibility of the roadmap and list of questions to answer via AMC, even if the agency is executing the queries.
7. Internal Ownership: Inside brand organizations, the marketing team is more likely to own AMC efforts today given the immediate use cases are typically centered around marketing spend. However, AMC can be thought of as a broader organizational asset and therefore long-term it could make more sense for IT or BI to own it. Regardless of structure, the key is to get started and have cross-functional support.
8. Create Your AMC Roadmap: If you don’t yet have one, develop a simple AMC roadmap that maps overarching goal (like expanding reach or increasing efficiency) to the Insights and Audiences that can be leveraged in AMC.
9. Internal Skillsets: Brands can accomplish a lot with even just 1-2 team members that know SQL (Intentwise SQL training here). AMC certification is also a highly recommended starting point to understand what’s possible with the tool.
10. Custom Meta-Data Uploads: These custom uploads can be used to maintain custom groupings (like sub-brands, product groupings, or campaign goals) in table form rather than in SQL. This makes the process more scalable and usable and eliminates the risk of the SQL query failing due to large size.

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