It’s no secret that Amazon’s marketplace is maturing quickly. Competition is fiercer than ever. Just one example: A decade ago, you could ascend Amazon’s organic rankings without advertising at all. Those days are gone.
Whether you’re a brand or an agency, that means the name of the game these days is differentiation. Everyone’s asking: How do I stand out in a crowded marketplace?
The fundamental desire to stand out is the same, but exactly what differentiation looks like depends on who you are.
For agencies, differentiation is about offering your clients access to unique insights and strategies that others cannot.
For brands, maybe it’s about building and discovering new audiences, and finding new ways to reach customers before your competitors.
There are many ways to differentiate yourself on Amazon, whether that’s leveraging Amazon’s new analytics tools, or figuring out how to supercharge performance from Brand Tailored Promotions.
For brands, consider dayparting with Amazon Marketing Stream to capture sales at specific times when your competitors aren’t. The list goes on and on.
Then, of course, there’s Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC).
Why AMC is the great differentiator
If you’ve subscribed to this newsletter for a while, you know we’ve been talking a lot about AMC lately. That’s for two reasons:
First, we believe that AMC can be a powerful differentiator for both brands and agencies.
Understanding your New-to-Brand metrics through AMC, for example, means you can identify overlooked products or ad campaigns that drive incremental growth.
Life-Time Value metrics, meanwhile, allow you to run smarter ad campaigns. What if you could set all of your ad campaigns to exclude people who are likely to have low LTV? AMC helps you do it.
The second reason we’ve been talking a lot about AMC is that we’ve been in the trenches, understanding all of the nuances of how it works.
Why? Because we recognized the value its signals offer to brands and agencies. And we heard from our customers that they needed a better way to work with AMC.
That brings us to the announcement portion of this newsletter. Intentwise is introducing a new product that we believe will help you stand out on Amazon’s marketplace by utilizing the rich insights from Amazon Marketing Cloud.
In essence, we wanted to make AMC far more accessible to advertisers without SQL skills or a deep bench of data engineers on their team.
For brands, AMC is probably a little daunting. You want to enhance your ad campaigns with insights about path to conversion, New-to-Brand metrics, and more. Plus, you’re hoping to create new custom audiences that you can target with DSP ads.
What if you could leverage all of AMC’s insights—and differentiate yourself from your competitors—without needing any specialist knowledge? No need for SQL, and no need for a background in building sophisticated graphs and dashboards?
For agencies, what if you could offer AMC services to your clients at a much greater scale? Instead of getting mired in the technical and manual labor of writing and running queries across so many instances at once, what if you could automate the process?
To all of the above, we say this:
Meet Intentwise Explore.
Here’s how Intentwise Explore can help you differentiate yourself
We built Intentwise Explore, our newest addition to the Intentwise Ecommerce Cloud suite of solutions, to assist with:
Query and audience discovery
Writing queries and creating custom audiences in AMC is a pain. First, you have to know SQL. Second, even if you do, you have to spend hours envisioning, writing, and validating each new query.
We took the guesswork out of the process. We built a full library of queries and audiences, with dozens available with only a single click.
Say you want to see how many of your ad-exposed shoppers are New-To-Brand. You can’t see those numbers across all ad types in the Ad Console.
When you use Intentwise Explore, all you have to do is select our pre-validated NTB query, schedule it, and let our platform run the query and load the results for you.
Want to create a query or custom audience that’s not in our library? Let our expert team construct and validate any custom query you want in a matter of days.
Query execution at scale
Wrangling results from AMC is a major challenge. Queries have to be activated manually, one by one. If you’re an agency, you have to repeat this process for every instance you manage.
Let’s say you want to run the same query every week or every month. In Intentwise Explore, you can schedule a query to run every Monday at 1 a.m., across as many instances as you want.
That way, the results are always there when you need them, and you can focus on more pressing work instead.
Store and visualize your results
Running a query in AMC is only half the battle. Next, you have to download every query result as a .CSV file, then stitch it together by hand.
Intentwise Explore will automatically pipe that output into an industry-standard warehouse for you.
But what if you want to graph or visualize those results? AMC outputs can be massive, especially when you are mapping out, say, shopper paths to purchase. How can you more easily showcase and understand these outputs?
We created a number of embedded dashboards, which are built specifically for AMC and can be customized to your specific needs.
You can access these dashboards instantly, without leaving the Intentwise platform, making the validation and analysis of your data a breeze.
Or, if you want to use your own visualization tools, you can create your own custom dashboards and choose from our suite of pre-built templates for PowerBI, Tableau, etc, and showcase the AMC outputs however you want.
Organize your results at a granular level
Let’s say you’re a company that has multiple distinct product lines, or “sub-brands.” Maybe you’re a furniture company with a line of home office chairs and a line of home office desks.
The ad performance of the desks brand will be different from performance of the chair brand. The problem is, in AMC, you can only get results at the account level natively.
Want to disentangle the performance of your desk brand from your chair brand? You have to extract the data on your sub-brands from the result of that account-level query manually.
You might already be doing this by maintaining a strict naming convention for campaigns. But that can get messy quickly, especially with the complexities of AMC.
We simplified the process. We maintain a map of ad campaigns to your sub-brands behind the scenes. All you have to do is run a single query for your account, and we’ll display the results by sub-brand for you.
Want to see Intentwise Explore for yourself?
All of this is just a small taste of what we’ve built, but we hope it’s enough to pique your interest.
If you want to learn more about Amazon Marketing Cloud check out our newly launched AMC learning hub here.
Or book a demo with our team, so you can be one of the first to get a demo of Intentwise Explore.
We couldn’t be more excited about it.
