Amazon Marketing Cloud, or AMC, is a powerful data clean room that can provide unique insights into your business—but only if you know how to access the shopper insights contained within. Nowadays, you don’t need to be an SQL expert in order to utilize the insights within AMC (though it would certainly help!).
If you understand how to make the information within AMC work for your business, you’ll really be able to utilize it to transform your advertising and selling strategy both on- and off-Amazon.
If you’re new to AMC, check out Part 1 of our series. In this Part 2, we’ll explain the most common ways brands access AMC, as well as explain some common use cases for AMC!
How Brands Can Access Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)
Writing Custom SQL Code
Whether you’re using AMC for insights, or to build audiences, you are pulling these customer insights via SQL. Regardless of what you’re trying to do in AMC, you usually need to use SQL to do it.
Because SQL is a skill that many brands, especially smaller ones, don’t already have, it can (and has) created obstacles for accessing the value that AMC has to offer.
SQL (Structured Query Language) is how you access data within a database. It’s a complicated programming language that requires specific knowledge of the datasets to pull information correctly. But Amazon has its own specific variations of SQL to interact with AMC—so even if you’re a traditional SQL expert, you will need to learn Amazon’s specific syntax and database structures for it to work correctly.
If you’re not an SQL expert, there are a few ways to work around needing to know this language but still utilize the insights in AMC.
In-Amazon Templates
Amazon is introducing non-SQL ways to pull AMC insights. They’ve started to release automated queries in the form of template analytics and audiences (such as path to conversion by campaign groups).
Amazon is standardizing queries that they think would be helpful. Now, instead of writing code, you can just click a button—and you’ll receive a standardized visualization so the output is consistent.
SQL is still the main way to interface with AMC, and is a required skill if you want to maximize value of AMC with custom queries, but Amazon is definitely making moves to make it less SQL-heavy and easier to access for the average seller.
Even if you don’t have someone with a deep knowledge of SQL, you’ll still be able to make AMC work for you!
Kapoq or Third-Party Software
The final way to utilize Amazon Marketing Cloud is to find a software partner that can automatically pull queries for you. Currently, Kapoq features five automated AMC queries with more being released constantly:
- Path to Conversion
- New-to-Brand Customers
- New-to-Brand Purchases
- New-to-Brand Gateway ASINs
- Time to Conversion
Within each of these queries, you can choose a lookback period of 30, 90, or 365 days, giving you the exact insights your business needs—whether you want to see how a tentpole day affected these insights or learn more about your business over the past year.
For example, new-to-brand purchases qualify if a customer purchased a specific ASIN for the first time during the previous 365 day period on Amazon. These insights can help you understand the impact of campaigns in generating these new customers.
Lastly, within Kapoq, there’s no middle ground—you automatically get the visualization of the data, making the entire process easier. You don’t have to get a CSV of numbers and then format it visually to understand it.
AMC Use Cases: Audiences and Insights
There are two main ways to use AMC: audiences and insights. When you’re utilizing AMC, you’re doing one of two things:
- Building an audience that you’ll spend against or exclude from campaigns
- Analyzing campaigns and product sales data
Insights give you information about Amazon customers on Amazon and from your first-party data (insights on- and off-amazon). Audiences, on the other hand, allow you to build lists to include or exclude certain groups of user IDs from ads.
Let’s dive into more specifics about audiences and insights.
Insights
Insights allow you to pull data and reports to better understand your customers’ behavior. Amazon has historically kept these shopper insights close to the vest, but with AMC, you can access more insights, which allows you to optimize your advertising efforts.
Kapoq currently features five automated AMC queries (with more being released often):
- Path to Conversion
- New-to-Brand Customers
- New-to-Brand Purchases
- New to Brand Gateway ASINs
- Time to Conversion
The best insights will, of course, be the ones that are specific to your business (more on that later), but these five queries give you insights into a few areas that give you a good starting point for understanding AMC data and how to interpret it.
For example, the new-to-brand queries can help you understand new-to-brand sales numbers for Sponsored Products campaigns, which isn’t available anywhere else.
Viewing the path to conversion could help you better understand your customer journey on Amazon—for example, you can see in what order purchasers saw your different ads (e.g., SD → SBP → DSP) and learn which combination of ad types, in which order, drives the highest return for your business.
Audiences
The insights you gather from AMC should inform the specific audiences you want to create. By using queries to group users together, you can better advertise to them based on their previous behaviors. AMC created audiences can be activated in Sponsored Ads or DSP.
The list of possible audiences you could create is endless! You can create any grouping of user IDs as long as there are more than 2,000 user IDs total (Amazon’s aggregation threshold for an audience is 2,000 user_IDs).
Here are some ideas for how your business might use audiences:
- Build an audience of people who have searched your brand name but have not purchased, and then target them with ads
- Create an audience to exclude people who clicked on an ad 20 times or more and never purchased
- Exclude website visitors from getting Amazon DSP ads
The best strategy for using AMC audiences is to come up with audiences that are specific to your business and the insights you learned from AMC about how your customers shop.
Powerful AMC Use Case: Uploading First-Party Data
You can upload first-party data from your website or other customer list to AMC and combine it with AMC data. This is one of AMC’s most powerful use cases, as it allows you to take your own customer data (from your website, for example), encrypt it, upload it to AMC, and do overlap analyses to see whether your Amazon customers are also buying on your website, vice versa, and more.
AMC has rigorous privacy controls in place to protect customer information. AMC’s encryption process, called hashing, ensures that nobody will be able to see its contents—including Amazon. It’s genuinely impossible for Amazon to read the data you upload into this report, so it’s safe to upload your first-party data to AMC, without any repercussions.
Here are some potential use cases for how you might use this first-party data:
- Better understand a customer’s behavior across both on- and off-Amazon
- See that a customer who viewed an ad on Facebook for your owned website viewed your product page there, and then eventually purchased it on Amazon.
- Better understand the cannibalization of your website sales on your Amazon business.
- Measure how many people that initially bought on your website now buy on Amazon
- Measure your LTV based on your website and Amazon customers
- Understand your customer retention rate based on where they purchased first
- Exclude customers from your ads—for example, not serving Amazon DSP ads to users who are getting Facebook ads to shop on your website
Conclusion
While there are more options than ever to access AMC, most require significant time and effort investments from the brand. Kapoq is your fastest path to easy AMC insights.
Additionally, there is no clear winner in terms of which AMC insight or audience is best. Each brand has unique attributes that require them to get creative to extract maximum value from AMC. The queries in Kapoq are good starting points, but they might not represent the full opportunity AMC presents to your brand; as you fully begin to understand the specificity and depth of AMC, you’ll figure out what custom queries will best serve your business.
When you make the insights with AMC work for your specific business, you’ll be able to apply it to help you better understand your overall Amazon business. There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution!
AMC is most valuable when you’re asking it questions specific to your business, not just using templates. The options are truly limitless, and Kapoq is working to continuously improve our users ability to access the rich insights from AMC.
Get started with AMC with a free demo of Kapoq.
