If you’re currently building your First-Party Data Strategy (absolutely essential) and AMC isn’t a part of it yet, then it might be time to reconsider.

What Exactly is AMC? 

Basically, what AMC boils down to is Audiences and Retargeting. 

More specifically, Amazon defines AMC as a secure, privacy-safe, and cloud-based clean room solution. It allows advertisers to more easily perform analytics and build audiences across anonymized signals, including Amazon Ads signals as well as other inputs.

Signals can be derived from various sources such as purchase history, browsing behavior, demographic information, device data, etc.

Recommended Reading: Why Is “Retail Media” Is Blowing Up and What Is a Data Clean Room?

What this means is that AMC is a data clean room solution that helps organizations build relevant audiences that comply with modern privacy regulations.

What is a Data Clean Room?

As Incubeta’s Director of Retail Media and Publishers Boj Holslag explains, “with a data clean room, organizations can share insights with each other, learn more about their target audiences, enrich customer segments, and – if identifiers can be matched – get even broader insights for conversion – all without a single cookie involved, and without that data being traceable back to individuals.”

Fig 1: How a Data Clean Room Works – An Overview

Whether you sell on Amazon or not, or whether you have B2C products or not (e.g., banking or insurance services, etc.), you can take advantage of Amazon Marketing Cloud. It is also for deriving traffic from your site outside of Amazon.

Fig 2: AMC – Amazon Sites vs 3P Sites

Three Key Opportunities for Advertisers

I. Data Analysis and Insights

As a data clean room, AMC helps organizations collaborate with each other and access advanced data analyses without compromising user privacy. The most common use cases include:

• Performance deep dive: Obtain more in-depth findings about a particular campaign.
• Audience insights: Find connections between engagement and audience characteristics, and highlight your most effective segments.
• Journey analysis: Illustrate customer shopping journeys in terms of media exposure, frequency, timing, etc.
• Media mix analysis: Understand how all your different types of media affect your outcomes, and figure out specifically how much extra impact one type of media has.
• Omnichannel impact analysis: Assess how Amazon media contributes to sales across various Amazon store types and direct-to-consumer channels.
• Custom attribution: Assign credits to various touchpoints on customers’ path to conversion.

Fig 3: AMC – Marketplace Data vs Other Online Data

II. Audience Building

You can generate audiences in AMC in two ways:

• Use AMC’s provided templates (Fig 4)
• Customize your own using SQL queries (Fig 5)

Fig 4: AMC Audience Templates

Fig 5: Preview of AMC Custom Audience Builder (SQL)

Overall, AMC lets you create impactful audiences by using signals from various sources: Amazon Sponsored Ads, Amazon DSP Ads, Amazon Shopping Insights (Beta – Subscription), as well as advertisers’ own first-party and DMP (data management platform).

Examples of Audiences You Can Build with AMC:

• Audience of shoppers with multiple detail page views
• Audience that clicked Sponsored Products ads but have not purchased
• Audience that added to cart but did not purchase
• Lookalike Audiences (AMC finds people on Amazon DSP who are similar to the audiences you’ve made and then creates audiences of new potential customers who are like your existing ones)

Fig 6: The Relationship Between ADSP and AMC

III. Media Efficiency

Using clean rooms like AMC can greatly improve how effectively you spend money on advertising. By securely combining data from different sources, companies can better and more holistic understanding of relevant audiences. Here are a few examples of how AMC specifically benefits Media Efficiency:

• Relevant Audiences: As mentioned above, you can build a variety of relevant audiences either by using the provided templates or by writing your own custom SQL codes.
• Ad Serving: Relevant media signals from various sources like social media, search and display-channels can be fed into the AMC and used for a variety of use cases. 

• First-Party Data: You can integrate your first-party data with AMC to analyze the signals you own, alongside other marketplace signals. This gives you a better view of customer behavior, trends, and preferences, yet without compromising data privacy.

AMC: Worth a Try?

Overall, Amazon Marketing Cloud is a powerful tool for advertisers, especially those operating within the Amazon ecosystem. While it does primarily focus on Amazon advertising data, its future may hold broader functionalities. The capabilities of AMC are continually evolving. 

For now, we can say that in this increasingly data- and privacy-driven world, understanding and mastering platforms like AMC can provide companies with the capabilities they need to thrive long-term. 

To learn more about whether or not AMC is for you, you can always get in touch with our team at marketplaces@incubeta.com for a free initial discovery session.

Want to learn more? Here are some related readings:

• Blog – Why Is “Retail Media” Is Blowing Up and What Is a Data Clean Room?
• Whitepaper – Navigating Digital Success for 2024: A Guide to the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Audiences in the New Age of Advertising