Our clients ask us one question all the time: What media mix will drive the most marketing impact? Leveraging Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) could help you improve your media mix, among many other benefits.
If you’re considering Amazon Marketing Cloud, this article will highlight the benefits and use cases for brands and marketing.
What Is Amazon Marketing Cloud?
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a cloud-based, secure data clean room platform. A clean room is a secure place where companies (data providers) can share data with partners and analysts while preserving privacy and security.
They can then use that data to:
- Improve audience targeting for marketing campaigns.
- Better analyze advertising performance.
- Enable more sophisticated tracking and attribution (i.e., closed-loop measurement).
AMC acts as a walled garden, so you can manage who has access to what data. You can upload your own company data with no identifying customer information and bring in data from other sources.
It’s privacy-safe because Amazon can’t export or access your data sets — they stay your own. Also, you can only link your data to Amazon’s anonymous and aggregated data to discover impressions, clicks and conversions.
Who Can Use AMC?
You don’t need to sell products on Amazon to use AMC. However, you will need to use some Amazon services, including Amazon Ads and AWS. Here’s who can use AMC right now:
- Sellers who advertise with Amazon Ads.
- Eligible advertisers that have run a campaign in the last 28 days on the Amazon DSP.
- Non-Amazon retailers that have an AWS account and can use the API to access AMC.
If you’ve used Amazon DSP for your programmatic ads, then you’re likely eligible. But to effectively use AMC, you’ll need to know SQL, the programming language for databases. You’ll use that to search, organize and customize data within AMC.
If you don’t know SQL, you can work with an agency like Goodway, which has marketing and data science experts that specialize in SQL and data clean rooms.
How Brands Use Amazon Marketing Cloud
AMC’s applications go beyond selling or advertising on the Amazon marketplace. It tells you how your advertising and marketing efforts are going and what you can do to make them more efficient.
With AMC, brands can do:
- Media mix analysis – Learn how users interact with your ads across different media to determine which performs best.
- Custom attribution – Leverage multi-touch attribution models and identify how much each channel and campaign contributes to leads, conversions and other metrics.
- Customer journey assessment – Analyze the path customers take to purchase and the frequency of their interactions.
- Holistic measurements across channels – By combining their own data sets with the anonymous aggregate data from Amazon, brands derive more complete measurements for different channels and get the big picture.
What Are Amazon Marketing Cloud’s Benefits?
Brands can use AMC to help answer questions like:
- How are ad campaigns performing across channels?
- What types of customers are returning?
- What are the current retail patterns?
- How heavily do you need to target customers before they convert?
Using AMC for your marketing data analytics comes with other benefits like the ability to:
Understand Your Audience
Learn about users who make purchases on Amazon.com and directly reach users exposed to your Amazon campaigns. See the path your consumers take from brand awareness and consideration to purchase by analyzing display, video, audio and search and the different types of audience interactions.
Get Robust Reporting
AMC lets you do more creative and innovative analytics that weren’t possible in the past. You can:
- Dive into event-level data sets.
- Run custom queries and analyses
- Explore trends and patterns.
- Get a full and holistic view of cross-media performance.
Analyze Your Campaigns
Get incredible detail about your marketing and measure the full scope of your efforts throughout the marketing funnel both on Amazon and off. Examine your:
- Audience
- Campaign reach
- Frequency and attribution
- Campaign performance by media channel, audience segment, device, location, etc.
Understand the value of different media channels and how they can work together for the greatest impact to improve your campaign performance and drive business growth.
Amazon Marketing Cloud: Goodway Case Study
SpoonfulONE partnered with Goodway Group to use AMC to improve marketing outcomes. The brand, which prevents food allergies with a line of allergen-introduction-safe products for babies, was sold directly on Amazon.
Our goals were to:
- Understand which channels and tactics drive sales.
- Help SpoonfulONE find the right media mix across Amazon’s media channels to drive more traffic and more sales.
Through AMC, we learned:
- People that viewed Sponsored Product ads and display ads were nearly three times more likely to make a purchase than ones that viewed Sponsored Product ads alone.
- Users who were exposed to both prospecting and retargeting tactics were also 13 times more likely to make a purchase than retargeting alone.
Through Amazon Marketing Cloud, we shifted our strategy to include more upper-funnel tactics. It expanded SpoonfulONE’s reach and conversions among qualified audiences. As a result, they saw better conversion rates and increased ROI.
Getting Started With Amazon Marketing Cloud
At Goodway Group, we work with many data clean room solutions, including AMC.
If you’re curious about what marketing possibilities Amazon Marketing Cloud or another clean room solution can unlock for you, contact us today for a complimentary data clean room assessment or to get started now.
We can help you create an effective holistic marketing strategy to quickly find new prospects and drive more traffic and sales on Amazon.
Megan Crump is a senior director of client services at Goodway Group. Her deepest expertise is helping clients drive and measure leads and sales through all digital media channels. With 20 years of agency experience working with clients across industries, budget sizes and marketing objectives, she feels her day isn’t complete unless she’s exceeded client expectations with exceptional service or quantifiable campaign results.