Unleash the Power of Amazon Marketing Cloud

In the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape, audiences are the key to success, and retail media networks play a pivotal role. Recently, we sat down with representatives from our partners at Amazon Ads and Pacvue to discuss our collaborative efforts in harnessing the power of Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to create targetable audiences and drive brand incrementality across diverse verticals and industries. Plus, we shared a Rise case study showcasing the proven results of this approach. If you missed the live webinar, don’t worry, we have a recap for you below!

Meet the Panelists and their Brands 

David Setbon Head of NA Ad Tech Solutions	Kelsey Illuzzi-Koval Customer Success Manager	Blake Kidd Group Media Director
Moderator: Mina Salami Director of Strategic Partnerships, Rise Interactive

1. Amazon Ads: Signals

Amazon Ads provides ad solutions to help brands reach Amazon customers whether they advertise products directly on Amazon or want to reach audiences on and off Amazon through the Amazon DSP. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is part of this ad tech suite.

2. Pacvue: Tools

Pacvue's technology automates and manages ad campaigns at scale across all Amazon Ads products, lowering costs, increasing sales, and giving advertisers advanced levers.

3. Rise Interactive: Strategy

Rise Interactive, A Quad Company uses all of that advanced technology to discover, execute, and optimize audience-first marketing strategies, powered by data-driven insights.

Allocate Budget Using Advanced Analytics

Moderator Mina Salami, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Rise, set the stage with a discussion around incrementality. The reality of digital marketing today is that finding the most effective places to allocate full-funnel media dollars is nothing short of a quest. As Blake Kidd from Rise Interactive aptly put it, "The consumer decision journey is complex and nearly always involves more than one interaction and exposure." He continued, "Understanding the true value of each channel and tactic becomes paramount to crafting a comprehensive media plan that spans the entire customer journey, all while nurturing demand and engaging with your audience.” This is where incrementality comes into play, the indispensable advanced analytics tool that unlocks the full potential of your marketing investments, going beyond the last touch and guiding the path to success. The right tools and partners can help determine this incrementality and how various paid media is impacting your brand’s goals. 

Holistic Customer Pathing with Amazon Marketing Cloud

Within the Amazon properties, many customer signals provide valuable insights for data deep divers like Rise to determine incrementality and optimizations. David Setbon, Head of NA Ad Tech Solutions at Amazon Ads, explained that they were hearing customer feedback and trends indicating that advertisers needed solutions to stay relevant and competitive. They saw a need for advertisers to deepen their understanding of the engagement lifecycle, using a secure way to measure and inform insight-driven decision-making. Welcome, Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC).

In short, AMC allows advertisers to gain a holistic view of their audiences, enabling data-driven decision-making. It gives advertisers the option to help build more relevant audiences based off richer inputs on and off Amazon. Advertisers can configure custom queries or leverage query templates to build audiences utilizing all eligible signals in their AMC instance, as well as the advertisers’ own signals they choose to bring to AMC. They also can set the frequency of an audience refresh, allowing the audiences created to stay timely and relevant.

From Signals to Strategy

At Rise, we have trained experts in writing SQL queries who can harness the power of AMC to decode audience behavior and fast-track data-driven solutions, unlocking retail media insights that drive engagement and conversions. Here are some examples of the learnings we’ve generated that form the bedrock of our retail media strategies: 

• Number of impressions needed for a likely purchase, and the impression threshold to engage new shoppers effectively
• Touchpoints required to convert new-to-brand shoppers
• Full-funnel interaction sequence, including the specific ad types, that supercharge conversion rates and purchase likelihood
• Strategic investments across the Amazon ad suite, from sponsored ads to display, video, audio, and streaming television
• Ideal frequency caps using pathing reports to more efficiently reallocate underused budgets

AMC also helps Rise optimize upper-funnel and lower-funnel interactions across Amazon properties like Amazon.com, Freevee, Twitch, Thursday Night Football on Prime Video, or off Amazon inventory purchased through the Amazon DSP. 

Kelsey Illuzzi-Koval, Customer Success Manager at Pacvue, explained how Pacvue's query technology further enables marketers to deploy AMC at scale. Pacvue's AMC dashboard streamlines the process of pulling insights from AMC and generates reports more frequently, allowing advertisers to take action faster. These reports can be as granular as looking at one product category or as broad as viewing your entire Amazon Ads. Through Pacvue, you can view this data more frequently due to the streamlined, user-friendly report set-up. 

Beyond this, Pacvue built in actionable ways to use the data available within AMC throughout your DSP programs including automation based on AMC and audiences through the recently released AMC Audiences.

Amazon DSP Targeting with AMC Audiences

With the launch of AMC Audiences, audience insights can now go one step further and create tailored audiences that can be activated in the Amazon DSP. Marketers can use SQL queries to build audiences, or leverage Amazon-authored instructional queries, typically called IQs, to accelerate audience building. 

Eligible signals in your AMC instance can be used across sponsored ads and the Amazon DSP as well as bring in your own first-party (1P) data into AMC. The 1P data could be inclusive of things like sales information, audience segmentation, product adoption, or even subscriptions. These can then be joined to ad engagement signals such as impressions, clicks, and conversions across your Amazon Ads media investments to enable unique outreach objectives. Finally, created audiences are directly pushed to your DSP entity for activation.

Blake Kidd followed up on the introduction of AMC Audiences with how Rise quickly activated on this new Amazon tool. “AMC gives Rise very detailed recommendations of who to target, where to reach them, and how to best engage with them,” Kidd explained. “AMC Audiences answers what to do with all that audience information, for example, video viewers. We worked with our Pacvue team to create audiences using their API built on entirely new datasets, and then tested these recommendations with our clients.”  Pacvue’s templatized AMC audience types, such as keyword-based audiences and new-to-brand purchaser remarketing, also facilitated Rise's testing of AMC tactics at scale.

Prime Day Case Study

Rise unleashed the power of Amazon Marketing Cloud this year for an American supercenter chain brand on Prime Day. Using AMC signals, Rise determined four high-value audiences to target with DSP campaigns during the most important part of any marketplace retailer’s year. 

The results prove that the Rise strategy, informed by AMC signals, and supported by Pacvue tools paid off. They gave a clear view into how consumers moved throughout the Prime Day shopping journey, from searching for products to Add to Cart.

1. Informed Incrementality. Determining incrementality is crucial to maximizing the value of marketing investments, beyond last-click measurement.

2. Privacy-first solutions. Advertisers need privacy-forward solutions like AMC, leveraged by Rise, and scaled by Pacvue, to stay relevant and competitive.

3. Decisive Activation. AMC and Amazon Audiences provide new and effective ways to action on robust signals to help targeting.

4. Strategic Insights. Use tech to parse out data more accurately to attribute the impact of upper-funnel investment and foster strategic insights. 

Webinar FAQs

1. Through your AMC analyses at Rise, have you found that upper-funnel tactics tend to have an incremental impact on average?

Absolutely. One of the AMC queries Rise recently ran showed that searchers coming through sponsored product campaigns were around four times more likely to convert if they had previously interacted with a DSP ad.

2. You mentioned 1P audience integrations, are those the only audience integrations available within AMC? 

No, that is just the start of the available integrations. Yes, AMC does help advertisers upload 1P data to conduct advanced analytics for audience activation. For example, advertisers can upload direct-to-customer sales information into your AMC instance, helping you to quantify the contribution of Amazon media to off-Amazon conversions. AMC also has Amazon and 3P signals such as Amazon Flexible Shopping Insights, Experian Vehicle Purchase Insights, and Foursquare Store visits that allow for advanced use cases and measurement. For example, you can use Flexible Shopping Insights to gain a richer perspective on shopping trends or obtain a more holistic view of brand engagement, and with Foursquare store visits advertisers can measure the impact of your advertising at brick-and-mortar site visits.

AMC also has integrations with a few customer data platforms. These integrations help advertisers seamlessly and directly utilize first-party data streamed into their AMC instance from their CDPs. 

3. What are the differences between AMC and Amazon DSP audiences?

Amazon DSP offers three primary types of audiences: Amazon audiences, Advertiser audiences, and Third-party audiences. Amazon audiences are pre-built audiences that are available to advertisers based on Amazon shopping and streaming signals and can be filtered by channel, demo, interest, lifestyle, and in-market. Advertiser audiences are based on signals provided by first and third-party sources. These audiences are brand-exclusive and are built by advertisers to reach in-market shoppers. Third-party audiences are sourced from third-party providers via LiveRamp and Oracle and reflect events that occurred off Amazon. AMC audiences help advertisers expand and tailor audience options on top of using the Amazon DSP audiences. Advertisers can use the cross-source and cross-media signals, such as ad engagement signals and advertisers’ own signals, over a lookback window of up to 12.5 months, to build audiences in AMC. Users have control over how to construct relevant queries, and the flexibility to generate audiences that meet their advertising needs and business goals.

4. How many AMC audience templates does Pacvue offer? 

Pacvue currently offers 7 prebuilt AMC Audience templates such as ‘Cart Abandoners,’ ‘NTB Purchasers’ ‘Engaged with Ad, but did not purchase’ and many more! Plus you have the option to build an audience of your own and save it to your Pacvue interface.

5. If I wanted to leverage some of these new insights within AMC, how would I go about doing that? 

It’s super easy. Within your AMC instance, there is a Paid Features tab. Here you will see all available listings you can subscribe to. Amazon Ads also offers free trials for some signals allowing you to test out the power of the insights that can be generated.