See the customer journey Amazon's dashboards hide.
Clean-room analysis across Sponsored Ads, DSP and organic, and the custom audiences that come out of it, pushed straight back into DSP to be spent against.
What Amazon Marketing Cloud is
Amazon Marketing Cloud is a secure, privacy-safe clean room built by Amazon Ads. It holds pseudonymised, event-level signal from your advertising: individual impressions, clicks, detail page views, add-to-carts and purchases, with anything that could identify a person replaced by a code. You query it with SQL and only ever receive aggregated output.
The difference from standard Amazon Ads reporting comes down to four things. Amazon Ads gives you pre-aggregated data at campaign or keyword level; AMC works from raw event signal. Amazon Ads gives fixed reports; AMC reports are fully customisable. Amazon Ads looks at each ad product in isolation, so DSP and Sponsored Ads never meet; AMC combines them, and can take in your own first-party data too. And where Amazon Ads tracks sales, ROAS and clicks, AMC measures reach and frequency, path to conversion, new-to-brand behaviour and lifetime value.
In practice that means you can finally answer questions the dashboards can't: which sequence of ad types actually leads to a purchase, how much of your reach is duplicated across campaigns, which products genuinely bring in new customers rather than repeat buyers, and whether your top-of-funnel spend moved anyone down the funnel. Amazon's expanded measurement window now allows a five-year retail lookback, so those answers cover real purchase cycles rather than a 30-day snapshot.
AMC has a second half that gets skipped far more often than the first. Any segment a query can define, it can also turn into an addressable audience and push back into Amazon DSP. That is the difference between a clean room that produces reports and a clean room that changes where money goes: the analysis finds the segment, the audience build makes it spendable.
AMC explains what happened, then builds audiences nobody else can reach.
Most AMC engagements stop at the first half and hand over a deck. The analysis only earns its fee when it comes back out of the clean room as an audience you can spend against.
Analysis
Event-level querying that answers what campaign reporting structurally cannot, because standard reports never put Sponsored Ads and DSP in the same table.
Path to conversion
Which sequences of ad types actually precede a purchase, and which formats only ever appear at the end of one. This is the analysis that tells you whether top-of-funnel spend moved anyone down the funnel, or just got credited for people already on their way.
- Sponsored Ads
- DSP
- Organic search
Reach, frequency and overlap
How much of your reach is duplicated across campaigns, and the frequency band where one more impression stops adding anything and starts costing you. Usually the first place we find budget without asking for more.
- Duplicated reach
- Frequency capping
- Cross-campaign overlap
New-to-brand and gateway ASINs
Which products bring genuinely new customers into the brand, set against repeat purchase behaviour, so you can separate the ranges that acquire from the ranges that sell once and are never bought again.
- New-to-brand
- ASIN level
- Repeat purchase
Lifetime value and demographics
Cohort analysis across the five-year retail lookback: on one client cohort, repeat purchase rate grew from 22% in the first month to 54% by month eleven. Demographic splits then show who engages with the advertising against who actually buys, and where those diverge it usually points straight at new creative.
- Five-year lookback
- LTV cohorts
- Engaged vs purchasing
Unique audience creation
Query results do not have to stay as a report. AMC can turn any segment it finds into an addressable audience and activate it in Amazon DSP, which is where the analysis starts paying for itself.
Custom audiences from any query
If a query can define it, AMC can build it: shoppers who viewed three times and never bought, buyers of the entry SKU who never bought the range, people exposed to Streaming TV but never to search. These are audiences no off-the-shelf segment offers, because they only exist in your own event data.
- Built in AMC
- Activated in DSP
Suppression and negation audiences
Stop paying to re-reach people who have already bought, or segments the data says will not convert whatever you spend. Unglamorous, and usually the fastest efficiency gain available in a DSP account.
- Recent purchasers
- Non-converting segments
Look-alikes off real purchase behaviour
Expansion audiences modelled on your actual high-value and repeat customers rather than a platform interest category, so prospecting starts from who buys rather than from who Amazon guesses might.
- High-value seeds
- Purchase-based modelling
Activation we can show the numbers on
On a UK supplements account, adding AMC-built audiences to an activation drove 2,138 incremental purchases and lifted new-to-brand purchases by 22% against the same activation run without them. Same media, same budget, better audience.
- UK supplements brand
- Covered in Toucan Talks
Amazon's own introduction to AMC
This short overview from Amazon Ads explains what Amazon Marketing Cloud is and how the clean room works, straight from the source.
For what it looks like applied to real accounts, our Toucan Talks session on using AMC for smarter growth covers three client use cases in detail: path-to-conversion analysis for a beauty brand, marketing funnel analysis for a grocery brand, and new-to-brand gateway ASIN analysis for a UK supplements brand, where AMC audience integration drove 2,138 incremental purchases and lifted new-to-brand purchases by 22%.
We write the queries, you get the decision
AMC output is raw SQL results. We translate it into a plain-English monthly narrative with a specific recommended action, not a data export for someone on your team to interpret.
Insight gets activated, not filed
Every analysis ends in a change to the account: a custom audience pushed back into DSP, a bid adjustment, a hero ASIN swap in top-of-funnel media. Analysis that doesn't change a campaign isn't finished.
You don't need SQL or a data team
AMC is built on SQL, but you don't need to know it. Our advertising team runs both custom queries and Amazon's pre-built library on your behalf.
First-party data can be layered in
If you hold your own customer data, we can bring it into AMC alongside Amazon's event signal for deeper lifetime value and multi-channel purchase analysis.
What's included
Cross-channel path-to-purchase
See how Sponsored Ads, DSP and organic search work together across a real customer journey, not in isolated reports.
Overlap and reach analysis
Understand duplicated reach across campaigns and where budget is working twice as hard as it needs to.
New-to-brand deep dives
Identify exactly which campaigns and audiences bring genuinely new customers, not repeat buyers.
Custom audience building
Build and activate custom audiences from AMC query results directly back into DSP.
5-year retail lookback
Longitudinal analysis using Amazon's expanded measurement window, not just a 30-day snapshot.
Plain-English reporting
SQL-based clean-room output translated into a monthly narrative your team can act on.
How Amazon Marketing Cloud fits into a Toucan account
Amazon Marketing Cloud rarely works in isolation. It's one part of a connected system that includes account management, advertising, measurement and creative. Our team runs it alongside the rest of your account, not as a siloed hand-off.
That's the difference between a media-buying vendor and an agency that's accountable for the commercial outcome.
Connect the clean room
Sponsored Ads, DSP and organic search data are joined inside AMC's clean room, so the customer journey can be seen as one path, not three separate reports.
Analyse, then build the audience
SQL queries find the overlap, new-to-brand behaviour and path-to-purchase patterns, and every finding worth acting on becomes a custom audience pushed straight back into DSP.
Translate to action
Clean-room output becomes a plain-English monthly narrative your team can act on, not a raw data export nobody has time to interpret.
Amazon Marketing Cloud: your questions answered
What is Amazon Marketing Cloud?
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a privacy-safe clean room from Amazon Ads. It holds pseudonymised, event-level records of your advertising (individual impressions, clicks, detail page views, add-to-carts and purchases) with anything identifying a person replaced by a code. You query it in SQL and receive aggregated results, never individual records.
What can AMC tell me that Amazon Ads reporting can't?
Amazon Ads reports each ad product in isolation, pre-aggregated at campaign or keyword level. AMC works from raw events and combines Sponsored Ads, DSP and organic into one view, so it can answer questions the dashboards structurally cannot: which sequence of ad types leads to a purchase, how much reach is duplicated across campaigns, and which products genuinely bring in new customers.
Do I need to know SQL to use Amazon Marketing Cloud?
No. AMC is queried in SQL, but you don't have to write it. Our advertising team runs both custom queries and Amazon's pre-built library on your behalf, and the output comes back as a plain-English narrative with a recommended action rather than a data export for someone on your team to interpret.
Who is eligible for Amazon Marketing Cloud?
AMC access is tied to running Amazon Ads, and instances are provisioned through Amazon Ads rather than bought separately. It gets most useful once there is enough campaign volume for event-level analysis to be meaningful, and once DSP is running alongside Sponsored Ads, because combining the two is the point. We can check whether your account qualifies before you plan around it.
Can AMC build audiences, or is it only reporting?
Both, and the audience half is the half that changes results. Any segment a query can define can be turned into an addressable audience and activated in Amazon DSP: three-time viewers who never bought, entry-SKU buyers who never bought the range, purchasers to suppress so you stop paying to re-reach them, or look-alikes modelled on your real high-value customers. On one UK supplements activation, adding AMC-built audiences drove 2,138 incremental purchases and lifted new-to-brand purchases by 22% against the same activation without them.
How far back does Amazon Marketing Cloud data go?
Amazon's expanded measurement window supports a retail lookback of up to five years, so analysis can cover real purchase and repeat-buying cycles rather than a 30-day snapshot. That's what makes lifetime value and new-to-brand questions answerable, particularly in categories where people replenish every few months.
What do you actually do with AMC insight?
Every analysis ends in a change to the account. A custom audience built from a query gets pushed back into DSP, a bid or budget shifts, a hero ASIN gets swapped in top-of-funnel media. Analysis that doesn't change a campaign isn't finished, and a clean-room report nobody acts on is an expensive PDF.
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