Exploring the potential of Amazon Marketing Cloud [Interview with Amazon]
Understanding how your advertising campaigns perform is vital to building an effective strategy with efficient budget.
Strategy optimization, however, comes from understanding individual campaigns and how they work together to drive brand awareness and conversions. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is the first tool to provide a holistic overview of campaign performance across the customer journey.
Recently, we sat down with Cyrus Zaboli, head of Amazon German Ad Tech Sales, to talk about AMC. This breakthrough data analyses tool can potentially transform advertising strategies for brands that sell on Amazon as well as those that don’t.
The customization opportunities allow advertisers to pinpoint audience segments, interactions, and media mixes, ultimately leading to more conversions. Here are five essential questions to summarize AMC’s usability, possibilities, and benefits to help you determine if you should consider AMC as a tool to bolster your advertising strategies.
DEPT®: What are the features that advertisers and agencies should be aware of when they are considering employing AMC?
Cyrus Zaboli: AMC is a clean room solution based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Amazon’s cloud computing platform. Advertisers can use it to run holistic analyses and generate actionable insights.
AMC combines event-level data sets, like impressions, clicks and conversions from across Amazon-owned and operated properties. From this data, users can explore the answers to their unique questions by connecting custom analytics. This provides a holistic understanding of campaign measurement, audience analysis and media optimization.
DEPT®: What benefits can advertisers gain from incorporating AMC into their strategy?
CZ: AMC enables advertisers and agencies to holistically run marketing campaigns and create unique insights by applying efficient new ways of measuring marketing investments.
The user is in charge of exactly what they want to find out. You can specify what questions you want to answer, what data you want to analyze and what queries to explore. You can also upload your own data sets and make use of the customized insights.
AMC offers the opportunity for close collaboration between marketing data analysts and other stakeholders and creates custom analytics that address specific business objectives.
Advertisers and agencies can use it to carry out:
– Campaign deep dives – delve into unique insights about the total impact across different media activities
– Media mix analysis – AMC also offers robust information on the right frequency and blend of activities
– Unique audience insights – compare audience segments (for example, ad-exposed vs. non ad-exposed)
All of which then lead to more insights about efficiency and effectiveness around media investments.
DEPT®: Sometimes there are so many possibilities of what can be done with AMC that it is hard to determine what to use it for. Can you give us some examples of AMC in action?
CZ: A great example is a CPG brand that used a combination of over-the-top (OTT) streaming TV ads and display ads to promote their flagship products. They wanted to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of the streaming TV campaigns specifically for delivering incremental audience reach. They also wanted to answer the critical question: what is the impact of streaming TV and display ads on lower funnel actions?
With the AMC insights, the brand was able to enrich their advertising measurement and perform custom analytics. They found that adding streaming TV ads to display ad campaigns drove incremental reach and conversions, with a net new audience making up 92% of the audience reached by streaming TV.
In addition, they were able to determine that shoppers were two times more likely to make a purchase when exposed to a combination of both streaming TV and display ads than those exposed to only one. The brand’s media team used these insights to optimize their media mix strategy and budget allocation.
AMC enables a higher level of sophistication for marketing planning, buying, measurement and optimization both on and off Amazon.
DEPT®: Amazon is often viewed as a separate entity from other retail channels and advertising efforts, but how can AMC help brands outside of selling on Amazon?
CZ: This is a very important question, as it is one of our key priorities. Advertisers can analyze performance with first-party audiences across a wide variety of dimensions. By breaking it down by publisher, geography, devices and channels, users can learn what their audiences are shopping for or what they are streaming on Amazon. This data helps users simplify media and audience-based decision making processes, which they can extend beyond selling on Amazon.
It is also very important to note that users can upload their own CM, CDP and 3rd-party identifier data signals, which they can then match and combine with Amazon signals. This helps advertisers and agencies unlock unique takeaways about campaign interactions. AMC enables a higher level of sophistication for marketing planning, buying, measurement and optimization both on and off Amazon.
Therefore, AMC is open to both endemic and non-endemic advertisers.
DEPT®: Let’s wrap up with a three-point summary of what AMC has to offer. Can you give us your “Big 3”?
CZ: Absolutely. I think it all comes down to three elemental parts: choice, control and clarity.
Choice – meaning advertisers and agencies have the flexibility to run analyses that are 100% tailored to their business and specific goals. AMC offers custom analytics that empower users to tackle business objectives on a more granular level than ever before.
Control – with the help of building SQL queries within AMC using a UI or API, advertisers have hands-on control. Everything is completely in the user’s hands in a privacy-safe environment, with the security of AWS technology.
Finally clarity – this is thanks to the multiple insights into efficiency and effectiveness of cross-channel media. Everything is in one place within AMC, providing the ability to holistically view ad-attributed performance. This helps improve the overall engagement between a brand and their audience.
There are, of course, so many possibilities and options for analyzing with AMC, but this is the most comprehensive summary of the key functions this tool brings to the table.
