Marketing is one of the keys to success in selling on any eCommerce platform, Amazon included. However, with the massive changes in how third-party cookies are—and, more importantly, aren’t—used, advertisers are left to pivot to more innovative strategies to ensure their ads reach the right people. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a resource to help this happen, providing ways to answer questions about demographics and media mix designed to inform your every advertising ambition. This is what you need to know to make Amazon Marketing Cloud work for your business:
Key takeaways
- Amazon Marketing Cloud is an analytics platform that tracks buying behaviors on a holistic level.
- AMC is intended to replace the former use of third-party cookies by collecting and communicating information through buyer groups.
- Users leveraging Amazon Marketing Cloud can dig into various potential insights, including identifying new-to-you customer bases and analyzing gateway ASINs.
What is Amazon Marketing Cloud?
Amazon Marketing Cloud is a unique analytics platform designed to help sellers leverage transparency in advertising. It allows sellers to follow buying behaviors in the most comprehensive way possible. And, unlike most marketplace-provided tools, Amazon Marketing Cloud extends beyond Amazon, informing on customer activity both on and off the platform.
This is a direct answer to the change in how cookies are used; with a rapid shift in how information about consumers can be obtained, the ability to leverage data to make decisions became significantly more difficult. Amazon Marketing Cloud attempts to overcome this. The platform provides comprehensive information based on Amazon activity that can be aggregated with advertisers’ data sets for a holistic view of a customer’s buying journey.
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How does Amazon Marketing Cloud work?
As a privacy-focused platform, Amazon won’t show user-specific data. Instead, Amazon Marketing Cloud sorts buyers into groups and reports on the aggregate behavior of at least 100 users at a time. This essentially brings together data sources ranging from Amazon’s event-level tracking, Amazon Advertising analytics, and any first-party data collected by an advertiser.
Historically, advertisers have been able to collect more general information about interactions with ads and product pages, like clicks and impressions, but without the ability to track whether the same customers are clicking and browsing. These user groups can go beyond this, helping advertisers map shopper behavior on a more specific level.
How advertisers can use Amazon Marketing Cloud
Amazon Marketing Cloud provides an immense amount of data, to the point that it can be overwhelming for new users in the space. However, with some patience and a strategy based on goals and business objectives, there’s a lot advertisers can learn about how to improve and expand marketing efforts.
Discover your most effective ad sequence
Most advertisers on Amazon run ads in multiple ways in an effort to reach as many shoppers as possible. However, not all of these will be as effective as others. By leveraging information and insights from Amazon Marketing Cloud, you can evaluate not only what ad campaigns are the most valuable but also details on things like effective ad sequences and which arrangement of ads sees the most success.
Since the data AMC provides gets close to accessing individual buyer behavior, it’s easier to map out how buyers are interacting with the material you’re putting forward, including where and how.
Better together
Better together is one of the primary tenets of Amazon advertising, and Amazon Marketing Cloud can truly unite every element of your marketing strategies. By showcasing more in-depth data in a single place, advertisers can create a comprehensive and cohesive approach to advertising spanning all the ad types available for Amazon marketplace sellers. After all, advertising works best when analytics and data use can be brought together into one robust environment.
Reach broad audiences
Reaching broader audiences is easier when you have comprehensive data. Amazon Marketing Cloud can help sellers explore every step of the sales funnel, from first awareness to making purchases, offering an in-depth look at potential avenues you could be overlooking. In addition, you can explore audiences on a more segmented basis, like repeat purchasers or browsing activity, to find out where your automated targeting could be improved.
Get new-to-brand insights
Some old-school marketing tools limit the insights advertisers can glean from raw numbers. On the surface, a campaign may appear to be underperforming, especially if baseline stats look mediocre or below target. However, innovative ways of exploring campaign performance can highlight trends that may be otherwise unavailable. For example, new-to-brand insights can show you how many people are engaging with your ads and buying their first product from your brand. These are valuable details for your campaign as new customers are often the hardest to acquire, so now you can place a premium on the products that generate these sales. These are known as gateway ASINs.
Analyze gateway ASINs
You know your customers love your products, and you know which ones are best sellers, but do you know which products are most likely to convince a customer to make their first purchase with you? Gateway ASINs are the products that lure new customers in and turn them into buyers. By monitoring this kind of information, you can make informed decisions about where to best allocate your ad spend to hook as many people as possible.
Identify Amazon designated market areas (DMA)
Other forms of marketing and advertising analytics can leave you to parse the data based on whatever trends stand out. However, with Amazon Marketing Cloud, you can identify what areas are the most valuable for you as a seller with designated market areas. This can mean both strategizing advertising in current markets and broadening reach to other potentially profitable areas.
Retarget audiences
Audiences who see one of your ads and click through to a product page may not be intrigued enough to go through with a sale. However, when shoppers are exposed to display advertising with reminders of products viewed, some will reconsider and return to their cart to make a purchase. Amazon Marketing Cloud can help explore retargeting opportunities depending on how you choose to leverage the data. Uncover what’s working and what isn’t as you continue to shape your strategy.
Analyze conversion rates
One of the most important aspects of what Amazon Marketing Cloud can do is determine what specifically is driving conversions. Your ads are working to some degree because you’re seeing sales for what you’ve been promoting, but if there are multiple campaigns in use at a time, it’s not always easy to tell which one is leading the way.
Amazon Marketing Cloud can examine which ads are converting and how they do it, so you can make more informed choices when allocating ad spend. It can also help you explore alternative approaches, like dynamic pricing and other ever-fluctuating elements of crafting an effective ad ecosystem.
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Amazon Marketing Cloud and the bigger picture
While some of Amazon Marketing Cloud’s capabilities are available through other tools, the ability to collaboratively optimize Amazon campaigns through various resources makes this platform a game-changer. It combines classic insights and new information only available through Amazon’s buyer groups, giving you a bird’s eye view into what might work for your campaigns.
Amazon Marketing Cloud can help businesses move away from traditional metrics, many of which are siloed or only look at bits and pieces of an advertising strategy. With a more holistic approach to creating campaigns, the breadth and depth of this platform go well beyond what most basic analytics tools can accomplish.
How to get started with Amazon Marketing Cloud
To get started with Amazon Marketing Cloud, sellers can enroll via the Amazon Ads contact page. This allows users to inquire about participating in any number of Amazon’s advertising products. From here, users will be contacted by an Amazon Ads account representative to move forward.
Requirements for Amazon Marketing Cloud
Amazon Marketing Cloud is an industry-leading tool for Amazon sellers, but it isn’t available to just anyone. Sellers need to meet the following minimum requirements to enroll in the program:
- An Amazon DSP service agreement is in place,
- An AWS account,
- Campaigns planned or running within the previous 28 days utilizing DSP,
- Operate in one of the markets Amazon Marketing Cloud operates in, which includes the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.
While not technically required to enroll, a working knowledge of how to use SQL, or a platform you can leverage to run queries for you, is essential for accessing information within the AMC cloud environment.
Amazon Marketing Cloud vs. Amazon DSP
Amazon Marketing Cloud and Amazon DSP work hand-in-hand—after all, you need the complete functionality that Amazon DSP provides to access AMC’s abilities—but they’re not comparable tools.
Amazon DSP is a demand-side platform. Using DSP, participating Amazon sellers can place ads programmatically to reach new and existing audiences beyond Amazon’s usual ad types.
Amazon Marketing Cloud, however, is designed to take the tools available in DSP to the next level. As a reporting resource that can go beyond by leveraging data across the funnel. And, rather than relying solely on manual or API data requests from the DSP dashboard, Amazon Marketing Cloud allows for SQL queries for a broader pre-aggregation view.
Amazon Marketing Cloud paid subscription
The basics of Amazon Marketing Cloud are free to anyone with a DSP master account, which is excellent for sellers on a budget. However, there are subscription options to expand on what’s already available. These Paid Features are the start of a resource suite Amazon plans to develop over time to meet more niche needs.
For example, one of the most notable paid features is Foursquare Store Visit, a way to gauge how sales perform from customers who found products organically rather than by seeing ads. This can be an excellent way to track buying patterns and actions to see how effective ad campaigns are, and where you might have room to improve.
It’s expected that AMC will develop in much the same way, offering more specific resources that cater to segments of the advertising environment rather than more generalized tools.
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In summary
Amazon Marketing Cloud can be a valuable resource for those who put value in insights available on both a granular and holistic level. With insight into how the marketplace operates, there are few better ways to source data from Amazon directly. However, it doesn’t have to stand alone. With a full marketing solution like Trellis, brands and businesses of all sizes can leverage the powerful AI-driven dashboard in conjunction with eventual Amazon Marketing Cloud updates. This can mean consolidating first and third-party data, writing queries to pull data out of Amazon advertising software resources, and helping you monitor performance across KPIs.
Amazon’s resources may be better together, but combined with tools from Trellis, you can make your approach to eCommerce advertising the best it can be.
