Amazon Marketing Cloud is the biggest sea change to your Sponsored Ads strategy in years. We sincerely think that, if used right, it can catapult you ahead of your competitors.
By pairing cutting-edge new insights about your business with scaled audience creation, you’ll be able to get a lot more mileage out of your ad spend.
But how does AMC for Sponsored Ads really work? How do you scale it? And what are the limitations of AMC for Sponsored Ads?
We just published two whitepapers outlining the basics of AMC for Sponsored Ads. We have a whitepaper specifically designed for brands and another specifically designed for agencies.
We highly recommend downloading the whitepaper most relevant to your business. It’s free, and it’ll help your team master AMC for Sponsored Ads before everyone else does.
Now, a quick summary of AMC for Sponsored Ads and what it can do.
The 3-part guide to AMC for Sponsored Ads
Essentially, you can think of AMC for Sponsored Ads in three parts: the business insights you can unlock and the two types of audiences you can create.
Game-changing Sponsored Ads insights. AMC gives every advertiser the ability to unlock powerful new insights about their brand.
You can suddenly track which of your ASINs have the highest and lowest New-To-Brand rates, which sets of ads have the most effective Path to Conversion, how long it takes the typical shopper to make a conversion after seeing one of your ads (Time to Conversion), and so on.
These insights are most useful when they are automated. Ideally, your advertising managers should be able to toggle seamlessly between AMC insights and campaign creation. From AMC, they can see what’s trending and what’s working at a glance, and then factor those learnings into their bidding strategy.
Are there any limitations? AMC only gives you ad-attributed data for free. If you want to factor in organic, non-ad-exposed sales or actions, then you need to buy the Shopping Insights subscription. Shopping Insights is the only way, for instance, to measure Customer Life-Time Value.
Directly targeted Sponsored Display ads. With AMC, you can run a Sponsored Display ad directly to the audience of your dreams. Create any shopper group you want—say, a group of shoppers who previously searched for a specific key term, or who bought from you more than a year ago.
You can run SD ads to this specific audience of shoppers only. This also allows you to get creative with your ads: If you’re going after shoppers who previously searched a certain keyword, for instance, maybe add a mention of that keyword in your ad.
Are there any limitations? Unlike with custom audiences for DSP, you can’t negatively target Sponsored Display audiences.
Bid boosting for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads. You can attach those same custom audiences to your SP and SB campaigns.
While you can’t target only these audiences with SP and SB ads the way you can with SD ads, you can increase your bids when shoppers from your custom audience search your relevant keywords.
So every shopper who searches “cordless vacuum” could potentially see your SP ad, but you’ll bid more for the shoppers who fall into your prized custom audience.
Bid boosting is helpful if you know a certain kind of shopper is highly valuable to you (for instance, a cohort of high-spend shoppers) or if a shopper is particularly close to a sale (for instance, they’ve already seen one of your ads).
Are there any limitations? The big limitation: You can only attach one bid-boosting audience for SP and SB to every ad campaign.
The agency checklist for Amazon Marketing Cloud for Sponsored Ads
Once you have the basics of AMC, then you have to confront the issue of scale. AMC for Sponsored Ads is powerful, but how do you extend its benefits across your whole product portfolio—or, if you’re an agency, across all of your client accounts?
You don’t want to have to hire a giant team to manage AMC for you. Instead, be sure you’ve created nearly automatic systems for:
- Automated instant setup. Don’t get caught creating new instances by hand. Amazon’s new instance API lets you create AMC instances—akin to seats in DSP—by hand. For what it’s worth: Intentwise can also do this for you automatically, for free.
- Scalable query and audience library. Be sure you have access to a ready-made library of queries and audiences that you can run at scale, without wasting time on programming. AMC works best when it’s essentially running in the background of your operations.
- Customizations. You’re inevitably going to need to write a few custom queries or audiences from scratch. This requires a lot of domain knowledge. Make sure you have a programmer who knows the ins and outs of AMC, or you can hire someone who does.
- Reporting. Be sure you’ve built AMC into your existing reporting stack. AMC spits out massive files. Make sure you have a system in place to process and organize these giant outputs without any hassle from you.
Our CEO Sreenath Reddy has a brief video breakdown of the ways in which Intentwise makes this kind of scale easy to achieve with AMC. We’ll automate the audience creation and reporting process, for instance, and help you create custom queries or audiences for your clients within days.
What are some use cases of Amazon Marketing Cloud for Sponsored Ads?
At Intentwise, we’ve already had clients leverage AMC for Sponsored Ads—and their use cases are fascinating.
Incremental sales. The publisher Peter Pauper Press, for instance, wanted to significantly increase its New-To-Brand customer rate. AMC provided an easy outlet to do this.
Using AMC insights, Peter Pauper identified the 7 ASINs with the highest share of New-To-Brand conversions, and then significantly increased spend on those ASINs. The result was a 323% increase in NTB customers.
Identifying content improvements. The agency Motif Digital started using Time to Conversion metrics to measure the success of its client’s images and content.
The agency knew that, unless it was dealing with an expensive product, most conversions should happen within a couple of minutes of an ad click.
If, for a particular product, the Time to Conversion was unexpectedly high—or if it was actually increasing over time—the agency figured this was a sign that the product content wasn’t compelling enough.
Basically: Shoppers were landing on the product page and taking a while to decide whether to make a purchase. For Motif, the Time to Conversion data became a way to identify which ASINs needed a content facelift.
What else is there to know about AMC for Sponsored Ads?
We dive into all things AMC for Sponsored Ads in our new set of whitepapers. Be sure to download them now, and become an expert on AMC for Sponsored Ads before everyone else. Then share with your teams, and keep your whole company ahead of the curve.
Brands should be sure to download our AMC for Sponsored Ads Cheatsheet.
Agencies should download our Agency’s Guide to AMC for Sponsored Ads.
