How to Gain a First-Mover Advantage with AMC Even If You’re Late to the Party
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) launched in January of 2021.
In the beginning, it was a highly technical tool that allowed data practitioners to manipulate their Amazon and 1P brand data (the customer data brands collect themselves such as email, demographic data, etc.) in privacy compliant “data clean rooms,” where disparate data sets could be combined and enriched.
To be able to fully leverage AMC, brands needed to have strong data analytic capabilities and SQL experience.
These types of skills are at a premium, which keeps the barrier to entry high. Even the brands that have adopted AMC have rarely been able to use it to its fullest extent without a strong analytic baseline.
In fact, according to a report by Stratably, in February of 2023, over two years after launching, only 33% of brands were using AMC at all, and only 3% of brands described themselves as advanced users.
But that’s changing.
Increasingly, the most common SQL queries are prebuilt and out-of-the-box.
For example, with AMC Audiences, brands can quickly create custom audiences grouped around easy-to-understand goals such as Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, and Loyalty.
A follow-up report by Stratably in March 2024 showed that 77% of brands have now adopted AMC in some fashion, up 130% from February 2023.
Technical skills to build custom reporting are still extremely useful, but the barrier to entry is falling.
Still, the vast majority of those brands are basic users. Only 9% of brands described themselves as advanced users.
For the brands that still want to gain a first-mover advantage, they can’t invest at a surface level. They need to go deep to join the 9%. Here’s what you need to know.
What is AMC?
To quote Amazon itself, “Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a secure, privacy-safe, and cloud-based clean room solution, in which advertisers can easily perform analytics and build audiences across pseudonymized signals, including Amazon Ads signals as well as their own inputs.”
There are several benefits to using AMC:
Even with Google pushing back the death of the cookie for the third time just the other week, it’s clear that 1P data modeling will be the future for brands.
Find a partner like Amazon that has a MASSIVE suite of owned and operated upper funnel media properties such as Prime Video, Thursday Night Football, Freevee, etc., combine that with lower funnel ads data, leverage their similarly massive audience data which represents a majority of American consumers, and then combine your own 1P data with all of that to model conversions across your entire funnel.
Becoming an Advanced User
To become an advanced user of AMC today, you will absolutely need to be able to write your own queries to build customized reporting and audiences.
The prebuilt queries are still mostly in DSP, meaning AMC is where you get to get creative and bespoke. As you uncover more insights, it will empower you to make strategic decisions about your marketing spend.
Here are a few things you can do to sharpen your technical skills:
领英推荐
But it’s also important to understand where the winds are shifting.
A few years ago, it looked like data science was the best skill to learn for Amazon sellers and brands. Today, with more templated queries, it requires fewer technical skills to use AMC well. In fact, in five years, you might not even need to know how to use SQL at all to effectively use AMC.
Of course, brands will always need to be data-literate. They’re always going to need to gather and structure their own data to use it via AMC. But that’s not the most important skill.
AMC is pushing brands to become better at marketing itself.
In the past, sellers simply had to find “winning” products by analyzing search velocity and converting Amazon’s traffic. Competition wasn’t as bad, so they could focus on Amazon exclusively and still succeed.
The brands of tomorrow can’t be Amazon-specific. Rather, they’ll need to build strong brands off of Amazon. They’ll need to drive customers to their own DTC sites, gathering their own 1P data. They’ll need to drive more awareness via upper-funnel ads. And they’ll need to be more strategic about how to action the data they get across these different channels and media.
A power user of AMC isn’t defined by their ability to manipulate data so much as their ability to generate data that is worth manipulating.
Advanced AMC Example: Frequency Caps
As you become more sophisticated with AMC, you can dig deeper into the performance of different ad types and how they interact with your larger marketing funnel.
For example, AMC allows you to set frequency caps for the number of times a specific customer might see a specific ad.
Frequency caps are very important for media like Streaming TV, where people can be hammered with the same ad multiple times while viewing a single program.
That said, your standard assumptions about frequency might lead you astray. Some AMC analysis has shown that higher conversion rates actually begin to happen once someone has seen an ad 10x+.
That feels excessive, but higher frequency is sometimes needed for brands, especially smaller ones that don’t have much brand recognition or have longer purchase cycles.
AMC will help you not only identify whether you want to set that frequency cap to be higher, but also help map the path to purchase from that 11th impression of a Streaming TV ad, to a branded search that took them to your website, where they abandoned their cart, to a retargeting DSP ad that ultimately led to a conversion on Amazon.
Win More Amazon Customers with a Free Brand Audit Report
Discover your quickest path to more Amazon sales with our free brand audit report.
This in-depth analysis pinpoints your current strategy's weaknesses and offers a clear roadmap to greater success. We guarantee you will walk away with a minimum of three actionable insights that will help unlock your true sales potential.
Want to Sell More on Prime Day? Read our Guide:
This comprehensive action plan covers everything you need to know, including:
Co-Founder at Adbrew | Ex-Amazon | Empowering e-commerce brands with technology
10 个月This is 77% of brands which are already running DSP I assume (still seems very high)? I believe a bigger shift will happen if AMC is unlocked for brands not doing DSP currently - there's a ton of insights that can be unlocked from AMC for Sponsored Ads alone.
CEO of btr media | Amazon Advertising, Retail Media
10 个月77% of brands sounds HIGH ??????