Interview: Transforming Amazon into a Profitable Channel
As media budgets grow and fulfillment models face heightened scrutiny, yesterday’s Amazon strategy must evolve at the dynamic pace of this evolving...
4 min read
Podean’s perspective on AMC, use cases, roadmap and how to leverage.
Clients are very aware that of the big publisher groups, Amazon has more granular and verified data than anyone. This is especially true if you’re selling on their platform.
Advertisers have always been keen to get their hands on this information about their consumers and advertising performance but due to strict privacy and customer-centric concerns, Amazon has been reluctant to share any such detailed information.
However, to meet the needs of advertisers, in Q4 2019 Amazon quietly launched the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) which coincided with many job ads posted for Amazon and also by Deloitte, Omnicom and Publicis.
Ad Exchanger wrote one of the first articles about Amazon’s new “clean room” in August 2019 followed by articles across publishers including Retail Dive. AMC would reportedly enable advertisers to analyze Amazon’s vast advertising and retail data at the most granular level – but they’re not permitted to export this sensitive consumer data.
So what is the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)?
While AMC has been operational since late 2019 with select advertisers, there still remains scant little information about it publicly; indeed, a Google search for “Amazon Marketing Cloud” brings up mention of the competitor Salesforce Cloud, and only a couple of articles discuss AMC directly.
This blog post is not sourced from any official or confidential information but as many clients are interested to learn more, we have compiled what has been reported and are sharing this understanding and our hopes for what AMC can provide clients.
AMC can simplistically be seen as Amazon’s version of the Google Ads Data Hub, which Google describes as follows:
“With Ads Data Hub, you can upload your first-party data into BigQuery and join it with Google’s event-level ad campaign data. Combining your data with Google’s event data can unlock insights, improve advertising efficiency, help you achieve data-driven business goals, and yield more effective campaign optimization. Results from Ads Data Hub are aggregated over a group of users, which allows Google to provide more complete data and still maintain end-user privacy.”
In a nutshell, AMC is a similar “clean room” environment where clients can contribute their own data (for example website visitation, CRM program, social channel interaction and search data) and analyze this alongside log-level Amazon data that could be derived from any of their properties. Remember that Amazon is much more than Amazon.com, it’s Prime Video, Prime Music, Kindle, Fire Tablet, FireTV, Ring, Zappos, Whole Foods Market, GoodReads, Go Stores and many others. When aggregated, that’s a lot of customer data. And because of the single sign-on across their properties, Amazon is able to tie all of the user behaviors and information back to a known individual.
AMC is Amazon’s way of giving clients access to more granular data upon which they can perform analysis aimed at improving a brand’s performance and insight. Importantly, all analysis is carried out in a secure and privacy compliant environment. And in a world where cookies will soon disappear, Ad Exchanger wrote that AMC will play a big role in brand’s leveraging 1st party audiences.
Uniquely, with the plethora of assets Amazon owns and the verified shopping data and retail operations, we believe Amazon clients ccould derive insights beyond just media/advertising and impact the breadth of their marketing activities.
Some of the use cases created by Podean are below:
- Campaign analysis – more reporting metrics including clicks, impressions, devices and geography. More advanced reporting can include R&F by channel or specific geo, customized lookback windows and channel incrementality
- Attribution – determine the effectiveness of other channels that drive to Amazon, and vice-versa, determine the impact that advertising on Amazon properties has on other retailers including bricks-and-mortar. Over time this will broaden to include multi-touch attribution (MTA) to really optimize every single channel and acknowledge the inter-relationship between them
- Customer experience optimization – on any given PDP (product detail page) there are more than 30 variables that can be used to optimize the page to increase conversion/sales rates. AMC analysis at the ASIN level can determine prioritization coupled with A/B testing
- Customer insights – map their journey across all touchpoints and media consumed, look at the overlap between audiences and determine your highest-value audiences
- Logistics and supply chain – better predict the volume of product that will be sold, and therefore the level of inventory you need to supply. We can model demand using numerous variables such as competitor pricing and the impact of advertising on sales
- Product design – understand the granular shopping behaviors of customers and determine what products could be bundled together to increase your ‘basket size’ with a specific customer segment, and also which products can be combined to recruit new users into your brand and away from competitors
What AMC isn’t
It’s important to note that AMC isn’t a ready made dashboard or a drop-and-drag visual interface. You can’t just get access to every insight at the touch of a button. Think of it like a massive data dump from multiple sources, and you need experts to analyze, interpret and visualize the findings.
AMC is entirely API-driven and users need familiarity with APIs, querying languages, JSON, and AWS services as well as sophisticated analytics tools.
How to get involved
Amazon is apparently waiving fees for selected advertisers. Podean is working with some of the most accomplished data scientists in the marketing field to develop AMC solutions to clients, ranging from the development of use cases through to setup, analysis, interpretation and application of the findings. More detail about Podean’s capabilities can be found HERE, and please get in CONTACT if we can assist you.
Other “Amazon Explained” articles:
- The Flywheel
- Day One
- “The Narrative”
- Working Backwards
- What is FBA?
- Retail Readiness
- Winning the Buy Box
What’s Next For Amazon In… Advertising
WARNING – This article is NOT about Amazon Sponsored Ads / Search / PPC, but looks into the future of Amazon’s broader advertising offering.
3 min read
A Short History Of Amazon Advertising Part 2: 2017 to Now
In part 2 of this articles, we’ll continue exploring how Amazon has become a powerful advertising giant and is rapidly gaining ground on Google and...