This is a guest post from Lena Einschütz. Lena is the marketing manager at BidX. BidX empowers brands to accelerate their growth and scale their business by automating ads both on and off Amazon through their cutting-edge software. They’re distinguished as the sole global platform capable of automatically creating and optimizing advertising campaigns, encompassing pay-per-click (PPC) as well as demand-side platform (DSP) strategies. BidX also capitalizes on the Amazon Marketing Cloud to mine invaluable insights and leverages AMC Custom Audiences to maximize return on investment (ROI).

Due to how diverse and intricately connected the marketing landscape has become, intimate knowledge of your target audience is paramount. However, this task often proves to be a significant challenge, especially when you advertise across multiple channels. Thankfully, help is available in the form of the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC).

This revolutionary solution delves deep into your consumer base, deciphering their behaviors and analyzing their interactions across a myriad of marketing channels to compose a well-rounded understanding of your followers. In a world where customers engage with brands through various touch points, the AMC emerges as a powerful tool that enables businesses to bridge the gap and gain invaluable insights into their audience’s journey.

What is the Amazon Marketing Cloud?

The AMC is a reporting and analytics solution built on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform. It prioritizes privacy and security, leveraging anonymized customer data from Amazon to provide sellers with rich insights. The AMC operates on a dedicated cloud infrastructure that enables analysis on multiple pseudonymized datasets to generate aggregated reports. An API is available for seamless integration of the data into a company’s own database.

The AMC helps advertisers gain a deeper understanding of how their marketing strategies impact various channels, including search, ads, video, and audio. The platform features a web-based user interface for running ad-hoc SQL queries. Advertisers can access Amazon Advertising campaign metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversions. Armed with this data, advertisers can make well-informed decisions regarding their marketing channels.

Why you should use the Amazon Marketing Cloud

The primary advantage of the Marketing Cloud lies in the quality of its reports and the provision of comprehensive, detailed data. The more you know about how your customers discover your brand, the better you can strategize your marketing efforts and capture leads at these touch points. This enables you to stay ahead of your competition and effectively tailor your messaging to your target audience.

Deeper understanding of your target audience

The AMC assists in determining the stage of the marketing funnel where customers encountered your advertisements. That helps you discern whether your ads reach customers at the awareness stage or just before they make a purchasing decision (purchase intent). Insights from this analysis can inform the creation of future ad campaigns.

Development of attribution models

Advertisers are also able to construct new attribution models, aiding in the identification of the most effective advertising strategies or investments aligned with predefined objectives. For instance, you can develop an AMC model illustrating how each element of your Amazon Advertising investment influences conversions on your company’s website. It also possesses the ability to assess the impact of over-the-top advertising like video ads on customer engagement.

Advanced reporting options

You might already use Amazon Attribution to gauge the impact of your non-Amazon marketing initiatives on the platform. What sets the AMC apart from Amazon Attribution is its greater flexibility in data retrieval, which allows you to grasp the sequence of touch points. This produces a more comprehensive view of how your target audience became aware of your brand and what ultimately drove the purchasing decision.

How does the Amazon Marketing Cloud work?

The AMC operates with instances, each of which contains data from a single advertiser. In the Amazon DSP, advertisers can have one or more “Advertiser IDs” or “Entity IDs” within the Advertising Console for Sponsored Ads. Some advertisers have multiple IDs to represent different business units, brands, or affiliates. However, as long as these IDs are associated with the same company that advertises on Amazon, all this data can be consolidated into the same AMC instance.

Create Custom Audiences with the AMC

With the AMC Custom Audience Creation and Activation feature, you have the ability to craft custom audiences within the AMC and set them in motion for your Amazon DSP campaigns. Through SQL queries, you can construct bespoke audiences founded on diverse indicators. This includes Sponsored ads, Amazon DSP ads, Amazon Shopping Insights (Beta), and even your proprietary data, which can all be harnessed to delineate highly specific target groups. You can then tailor your advertising messages to cater to the unique needs and preferences of your potential customers

How to implement AMC Audiences in practice

The AMC Custom Audience Creation and Activation feature provides numerous avenues for precisely targeting your audiences and enhancing your marketing strategies. Here are two instances demonstrating how you can utilize this feature to optimize the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Craft targeted remarketing for cart abandoners

Imagine you have a cluster of customers who’ve added your product to their shopping carts but, for various reasons, haven’t completed the purchase. This “add to cart” action signifies a strong inclination to make a purchase. With the AMC Audiences feature at your disposal, you can accurately pinpoint these potential customers and guide them toward making that crucial purchase through your remarketing endeavors. Unlike Amazon DSP Audience Builder, AMC Audiences provides specialized tools tailored to cart behavior, delivering essential insights and lucrative prospects.

Pro Tip: Make the most of AMC Audiences’ adaptability by substituting the “add to cart” event with actions like “add to list” to further fine-tune your audience targeting.

Enhance revenue through cross-selling and upselling

Another lucrative application of AMC Audiences is in cross-selling and upselling. Suppose you have a product A that frequently accompanies the purchase of product B. By selectively honing in on consumers who’ve acquired product A within the last three months but haven’t explored product B, you can elevate your conversion rates, boost your average order values, and enrich the overall lifetime value of your customers.

With AMC Audiences, you wield the power to assemble bespoke audience segments aligned with your specific cross-selling and upselling strategies.

Experiment with diverse product pairings that exhibit a strong potential for cross-selling and upselling. Adjust the time frame from “last 3 months” to extend your insights over a broader period, such as “last 6 months” or “last 12 months.”

The benefits of the AMC Custom Audience Creation and Activation feature

The AMC Custom Audience Creation and Activation feature brings several advantages that enable you to align your advertising campaigns precisely and reach your marketing objectives more consistently. These benefits include:

• Precise audience targeting: Utilize custom queries or predefined templates to precisely delineate your target audiences. This allows you to gain insights into your audience’s behavior and interests, facilitating the optimization of your ad messages.
• Adaptability and flexibility: Leverage sponsored ads, Amazon DSP ads, Amazon Shopping Insights (Beta), and your proprietary data for tailored audience targeting. That flexibility enables you to tailor your ad messages to the specific needs and interests of potential customers.
• Timely and relevant audiences: Set the update frequency for your target audiences to ensure they remain current and pertinent. In turn, this contributes to higher campaign effectiveness.
• Seamless integration with BidX’s AMC dashboard: The AMC Custom Audience Creation and Activation Feature seamlessly integrates with BidX’s AMC Dashboard, providing a user-friendly interface for managing and monitoring your AMC campaigns. You can monitor target audience and campaign performance in real time, conduct custom analyses, and continuously optimize for maximum results.

How safe is the Amazon Marketing Cloud?

In the current data-centric business environment, the importance of data privacy and secure analyses cannot be overstated. Enter the concept of the “clean room,” an innovative method that empowers companies to extract data-driven insights while safeguarding the privacy of their customers. The clean room approach provides a secure framework for data analysis, where sensitive customer data is processed within a protected environment that doesn’t grant direct access to personal information. This enables companies to derive valuable insights without infringing on data privacy regulations.

The AMC leverages this cutting-edge technology to provide advertisers with an effective solution that harmonizes data-driven analysis with stringent privacy safeguards. Consequently, the Cloud occupies a pivotal role in data-driven advertising. It functions as a central hub for enterprises seeking to refine their advertising strategies based on informed insights. Through the AMC, businesses can delve deep into the behavioral patterns and preferences of their target audiences while upholding the sanctity of personal data.

Within this protected environment, sensitive customer data undergoes processing, ensuring advertisers can tap into valuable insights without establishing direct connections to personal information. This enables companies to cultivate a comprehensive understanding of their target audiences while adhering to strict data privacy regulations.

In addition to the clean room approach, the AMC possesses other safety measures. Amazon Advertising doesn’t provide direct access to event-level data for advertisers; the AMC exclusively conducts aggregated analyses to safeguard consumer privacy. Individual user information is never accessible to marketers within the Amazon Cloud, which prevents users from exporting data in a manner that might compromise customer privacy.

Furthermore, all aggregated data must encompass a minimum of 100 users. This dual requirement guarantees the reports generated are substantial and useful for advertisers, while simultaneously reinforcing the protection of shoppers’ privacy.

Benefits for advertisers include:

• Secure data analysis: Serving as a clean room, the AMC enables advertisers to glean insights from data without jeopardizing the privacy of their customers.
• Deeper analyses: Despite limited access to sensitive data, the AMC provides robust analytical capabilities that empower advertisers to optimize their advertising campaigns.
• Trusted partnerships: The AMC fosters a trustworthy environment for data-driven advertising by prioritizing data privacy and security.

How can I best use the Amazon Marketing Cloud?

We’ve shown how the AMC is a powerful tool that can yield unprecedented insight into consumer data. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to access that trove of information; you must have a strong grasp of the SQL programming language to make a query through Amazon.

That’s why BidX created their Amazon Marketing Cloud Dashboard. It’s much easier and convenient to use, without requiring a solid grasp of SQL programming to perform queries.

Furthermore, Amazon typically delivers results in Excel format, whereas BidX system presents information in a user-friendly graphic, thus eliminating the need for laborious data analysis and interpretation.

BidX AMC Dashboard

Their dashboard streamlines the process of extracting and automatically analyzing customer information. It leverages data from both Amazon and third-party sources and presents it in a clear and concise manner. Further, the interface offers transparency by displaying precise conversion times and the number of interactions each customer had with their respective ads. Additionally, the BidX platform enables you to distinguish between new and existing customers to produce a detailed assessment of your advertising campaign effectiveness. For those interested in learning more, BidX allows you to book a demo to try their amazing product and see the benefits firsthand.

Wrapping up — See sky-high marketing results by embracing the Amazon Marketing Cloud

The AMC is a powerful tool that uncovers invaluable insights into customer behavior. It gives advertisers a better understanding of their target audiences across various marketing channels and offers the ability to create new attribution models for optimizing advertising strategies. With advanced reporting options, it provides a comprehensive view of the customer journey as well.

To make this tech-heavy tool more accessible, BidX developed their Amazon Marketing Cloud Dashboard, a user-friendly platform that eliminates the need for extensive SQL knowledge. It offers transparency in conversion tracking and customer interactions, making it easier to assess advertising campaign effectiveness. Combined with this comprehensive support, the AMC can help you reach new heights with your marketing activities — no hassle required.