What are Paid Features in Amazon Marketing Cloud? If you start using Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), Amazon’s powerful new analytics platform, then you will quickly run into a subscription option called “Paid Features.”
Amazon Marketing Cloud is available at no additional cost to all brands and agencies that spend on Amazon DSP. AMC is designed to provide deeper insights into shopper behavior and to help you target new audiences.
Paid Features are essentially a way to supercharge that analysis—you can see shopper behavior at a finer-grained level.
While brands can generally use Amazon Marketing Cloud for free, you can unlock extra insights with monthly subscriptions to Paid Features. Paid Features offer the opportunity to access new datasets that offer opportunities for more granular analysis and targeting.
It also is the only way to compare your non-ad-exposed shoppers to your ad-exposed shoppers. Read on to find out more about how it works.
What are AMC Paid Features?
Let’s start with the basics. First, AMC’s Paid Features are actually a set of three different subscriptions. You can subscribe to all of these features on a monthly basis.
Amazon Insights. Amazon’s most powerful data set is called Amazon Insights. It includes two bundles of data: Amazon Flexible Shopping Insights and Amazon Audience Segment Insights.
Together, these shopping insights let you track shopper events that happen organically on Amazon, in addition to just seeing ad-attributed events. So you can see organic purchases, organic adds to cart, organic Subscribe & Save, and more.
Most of the time, when experts refer to AMC’s Paid Features, they are referring to Flexible Amazon Shopping Insights.
However, AMC offers two other paid data sets that you should know about:
Experian Vehicle Purchase Insights. This data set offers attribution techniques for automakers whose products are not directly sold on Amazon. You can see if the people you targeted with ads through Amazon DSP later bought a car from you.
Foursquare Store Visit Insights. This data set is able to connect digital ads to in-store traffic. If you have a physical store, you can see how your ads on Amazon are translating into actual foot traffic.
What is Amazon Flexible Shopping Insights?
Amazon Marketing Cloud is structured around what Amazon calls shopper “events.” An event is an action like a product purchase or an add-to-gift-list.
Shopper events allow you to track which sets of customers take certain actions related to your products. They also allow you to create a granular audience of shoppers that you can target with DSP ads.
In the free version of AMC, you can track ad-attributed events like:
- Conversions
- Ad clicks
- Detail page views
- Customer reviews page visits
- Subscribe and saves
- Add-to-wish-list
- Add-to-gift-list
- Add-to-registry
But what about non-ad-attributed events? That’s where Amazon Flexible Shopping Insights come in. Amazon’s Flexible Shopping Insights are the only way to receive data about organic sales, organic adds to cart, organic detail page views, and more.
Why are non-ad-attributed events so important?
Ad-attributed shopper events, like adds to cart or adds to gift list, play a vital role in your analysis of customer behavior. But you shouldn’t just stop at ad-attributed events. For a full portrait of your shoppers, you also need to understand how shoppers behave organically.
That’s where Amazon Flexible Shopping Insights come in.
Want to know how many of those ad-attributed customers later repeat their purchase? Or purchase another item in your catalog? These data points give you a better idea of how efficient your ad spend is. Yet you can only get that data if you look at non-ad-attributed events.
Further, if you want to calculate metrics like Customer Lifetime or Repeat Purchase Rate, you’re going to need to subscribe to AMC’s Paid Features.
You can also segment those audiences out. How does CLTV vary based on the first product the customer bought? How does CLTV vary based on whether the shopper was originally ad-exposed or non-ad-exposed? You can only answer these questions by paying for Amazon Flexible Shopping Insights.
What about Amazon Audience Segment Insights?
Amazon Audience Segment Insights is part of the Amazon Insights package.
When you subscribe to Amazon Insights, you receive Audience Segment Insights and Flexible Shopping Insights.
Amazon Audience Segment Insights helps you understand more deeply where your shoppers come from, so you can better target your top-of-funnel campaigns.
For example, let’s say you sell vacuum cleaners, and you want to run a big streaming TV campaign. You might think to target people who recently searched for vacuum cleaners—but that audience is way too narrow for a TV campaign.
Instead, you might look at the Audience Segment Insights report to see that your recent customers were 4x more likely to be in-market for “Pet & Animal” products. Then, add shoppers who are in-market for the “Pet & Animal” category to your targeting.
You can also get more granular from there. Add in other demographic info like household income, location, or life updates, like “Recently Moved” or “New Parents.”
How granular can you get with Amazon Insights?
With the Amazon Insights package, you can compare ad-exposed and non-ad-exposed shopper data sets at highly granular levels.
In its instructional queries, for instance, Amazon offers a data set of all New-To-Brand shoppers that it then breaks down based on ad exposure. You can easily see how your share of NTB differs based on whether or not they were exposed to an ad.
If those NTB rates are roughly similar, it might suggest that your ads aren’t currently driving a lot of new shoppers. If you’re focused on incrementality, it might then be time to rethink your ad strategy.
What is Experian Vehicle Purchase Insights?
Experian’s vehicle purchase data set is tailor-made for brands in the automotive space.
Automobiles are big purchases, and it can therefore be uniquely challenging for auto brands to measure the impact of their ads. That’s especially true on Amazon, which does not directly sell vehicles.
In essence, the Experian database connects shoppers who might view an ad through Amazon Ads with actual vehicle purchases. That way, you can measure how many shoppers who interacted with your Amazon DSP later bought a vehicle from you.
You can also refine these data sets by looking at vehicle type, vehicle class, vehicle condition, and more.
What is Foursquare Store Visit Insights?
Amazon gives you a lot of tools to measure the impact of your ads on digital purchases. But for big brands that also operate physical stores, connecting digital ads to in-person traffic is far more difficult.
Foursquare Store Visit Insights helps you get around this. Foursquare’s data set connects digital shoppers to physical store visits, allowing brands to see how their ads are impacting physical foot traffic.
You can also refine those insights by looking at which shopper groups engage with your brand offline, and which stay offline only.
With Foursquare Store Visit Insights, you can segment groups by age range, income range, and gender, to see if there are notable variations across any of those categories.
How much do Paid Features cost?
(Update: From June 17, 2024 through the end of the year, Amazon Insights will now be available at no charge.)
There are no universal prices associated with Paid Features.
The price of Paid Features is customized to each account. It depends on the characteristics of your instance, and there is no easy way to guess the cost without consulting Amazon.
However, you can find out the cost of Paid Features by logging into your AMC account, navigating to Paid Features, and selecting “Subscribe Now.” On that screen, Amazon should give you a quote for the cost of the subscription.
If you’re not yet sure whether it’s worth the cost, you can also access a free trial for 30 days. Amazon offers a free trial for each of its paid features.
Whether you choose to subscribe or not, your AMC journey won’t be complete without Intentwise. We are experts in Amazon Marketing Cloud, and we built the industry’s most powerful platform for AMC, Intentwise Explore.
Schedule queries to run in the background, choose from our library of custom queries and audiences for AMC, and then graph the results, automatically, in Intentwise Explore.
