With the holiday season on the horizon, to be as high volume and competitive as ever, advertisers need to understand their customers at every stage of the buying journey. However, standard methods simply measure short-term return on ad spend, or ROAS, without distinguishing between new and existing users. As such, crucial data on the true success of a campaign becomes unaccounted for and advertisers have no actionable results to build off of.
Unbeknownst to many are useful solutions like Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) that can be leveraged to maximize ad spend on Amazon Ads. AMC helps brands analyze customer data to refine their marketing strategy and make better, data-driven decisions. It offers brands unparalleled access to insights on their customers that can help drive smarter advertising strategies. With the in-house expertise to understand the raw data, brands can maximize the value they get from AMC to boost ad performance and ROAS, but the problem is that AMC isn’t readily available to every user.
What is Amazon Marketing Cloud?
AMC, according to its website, is “a secure, privacy-safe, and cloud-based clean room solution in which advertisers can easily perform analytics and build audiences across pseudonymized signals, including Amazon Ads signals as well as their own inputs.”
In simpler terms, the solution tracks users anonymously across Amazon, advertisers, and third party sites. This data allows advertisers to query the data generated and use the insights gained to optimize their campaigns and make better marketing decisions. AMC is available to advertisers with advanced campaigns and a higher level of marketing investment.
The Benefits of AMC
AMC offers advertisers a more holistic view of their customers and where they are buying, while maintaining the privacy of their customers in accordance with Amazon’s privacy policies and legal mandates. It offers advertisers powerful insights, beyond basic metrics, that help them better understand their customers’ behaviors, preferences and purchasing patterns. Using data from AMC, advertisers can create campaigns that target ever more specific customer groups and demographics.
Since AMC combines data from across not only Amazon’s advertising program but from external channels, advertisers can see how different formats and placements complement each other, and realize greater ROAS.
More importantly, AMC allows brands to more accurately track a customer’s lifetime value (LTV), giving them a clearer picture of what drives conversions and repeat purchases. An advertiser can see which ads are effective in generating a new purchase, and how the customer got there, enabling them to optimize their advertising budgets.
How Third-Party Providers Help Advertisers Maximize AMC’s Potential
AMC provides a wealth of data, but brands without the right expertise in-house may struggle to gain actionable insights and can be easily overwhelmed by the volume of data provided. On top of that, this problem only exists if the user has access to AMC in the first place, which most do not.
Fortunately, Amazon allows third-party integration with AMC through software vendors who can provide greater depth of insight than AMC can alone. Using third-party tools can greatly simplify leveraging AMC and offer brands a greater return by evaluating metrics such as LTV for the all-important new customer.
The important thing for brands is not just to look at the data but to leverage that data to create a clear strategy to generate higher LTV. When using AMC, advertisers should think “if we use this kind of data in this manner, it will yield actionable results,” and then come up with a strategy to acquire the necessary data. This is where third-party providers are most helpful. They can help simplify the data and deliver clear insights and recommendations, driving long-term ROAS. With third-party software providers, advertisers can better leverage AMC’s power.
While AMC offers valuable insights to help advertisers maximize their ad spend, unlocking its full potential requires the right expertise. This can be accomplished by a number of third party software providers who integrate with AMC, making it easier to understand the great deal of data that AMC provides and leverage it for stronger LTV.
https://advertising.amazon.com/solutions/products/amazon-marketing-cloud
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mitsunaga Kikuchi , founder and CEO of Shirofune
Mitsunaga Kikuchi is founder and CEO of Shirofune, the digital advertising management tool that automates ad campaigns through an easy-to-use interface for management, budgeting, monitoring and analytics.