Using AMC for Smarter Growth on Amazon: What Amazon Marketing Cloud Actually Tells You

The reporting most brands rely on only tells half the story

Standard Amazon Ads reporting is good at answering "how did this campaign do?". It is far weaker at answering the questions that actually shape strategy: which combination of ad types moved someone from never having heard of you to buying, whether your top-of-funnel spend is doing anything for your bottom line, and which products bring new customers in versus which keep them coming back.

Amazon Marketing Cloud, or AMC, is built for exactly those questions. It is where full-funnel decisions stop being educated guesses. In this session, Curtis Fu walked through what AMC is, how it differs from the reporting you already have, and three real ways Toucan uses it to grow brands. This is a fair summary of that.

Watch the full session (29 mins)

What is Amazon Marketing Cloud?

AMC is a secure, privacy-safe, cloud-based clean room built by Amazon Ads. It lets advertisers run custom analytics and build audiences using pseudonymised, event-level signals from Amazon Ads.

Two bits of jargon are worth unpacking, because they matter. Pseudonymised means anything that could directly identify a person, a name, email or phone number, is replaced with a code, so no personal data changes hands. Event signals are the records of what actually happened on a shopper's journey: an impression, a click, a product page view, a brand search, an add to cart, a purchase, a subscription.

In plain terms, AMC is a data tool that shows you how people really interact with your ads, across a much broader range of actions than a standard report captures, and it does it privately. That breadth is the point. It sees viewing a video or display ad, visiting a promoted product page, searching your brand name, browsing your Store, clicking, and every conversion behaviour after that.

How AMC differs from standard Amazon Ads reporting

These are not competing tools. They complement each other, and they should never be read in isolation. But they answer different questions, and the differences come down to four things.

1. Data granularity. Amazon Ads gives you pre-aggregated data at campaign, ad group, keyword or placement level. AMC works from the underlying event signals, impressions, clicks and conversions, aggregated only enough to protect privacy.
2. Flexibility. Amazon Ads gives you fixed reports with limited customisation. AMC gives you fully customisable reporting through SQL queries, so you can ask your own questions rather than the ones the template allows.
3. Scope. Amazon Ads looks at each ad product separately, so DSP and Sponsored Ads sit in their own silos. AMC combines channels, so you can see DSP and Sponsored Ads together, and layer in your own first-party data for deeper analysis.
4. Use cases. Amazon Ads tracks campaign performance: sales, ROAS, clicks, impressions. AMC unlocks more advanced measurement: reach and frequency, path to conversion, new-to-brand, lifetime value and more.

The one-line summary: AMC goes a step further and adds the context standard reporting can't, showing not just what happened but how it happened.

Three ways brands actually use AMC

1. Path to conversion: seeing which ad combinations really convert

For a beauty brand running DSP burst campaigns alongside always-on Sponsored Ads in Q4, Toucan used AMC to map the multi-touchpoint paths shoppers actually took.

The most common paths were Sponsored Products into Sponsored Brands or Sponsored Brand Video, and top-of-funnel DSP into bottom-of-funnel DSP. The second path was telling: it had 70,000 more occurrences than the first despite being 38% cheaper, which showed that prioritising DSP drove more efficient, scalable reach than Sponsored Ads alone.

Looking at the strongest converting paths, every one had Sponsored Products as the first touchpoint, and Sponsored Brands or Sponsored Brand Video appeared throughout. The best paths blended Sponsored Ads and DSP together, proof that the two work harder in concert than apart. And the strongest new-to-brand paths all had three touchpoints, underlining how important multiple touches are to winning genuinely new customers.

The action that followed was concrete: build custom audiences from the people who engaged with each ad type, then retarget them through Sponsored Display and bottom-of-funnel DSP.

2. Marketing funnel analysis: proving whether top-of-funnel spend pays off

A grocery brand wanted to know whether its top-of-funnel streaming TV activation was actually worth it, and how it affected lower-funnel performance. It had unlocked incremental budget for a Prime Video awareness campaign, layered with display DSP for consideration, on top of its ongoing Sponsored Ads.

Standard reporting delivered the campaign KPIs, but only an aggregated view could show the volume of people at each funnel stage and how they moved between stages. AMC provided it.

The results were clear. Awareness users grew 197% month on month in September when Prime Video launched. When the campaign ended in October and awareness predictably fell, consideration, conversion and loyalty users all peaked to their highest point in six months. The transition rates told the real story: after DSP was heavily integrated, consideration-to-conversion jumped 56% and conversion-to-loyalty a striking 70%. Because the volume of people at those stages was also at a six-month high, that movement was significant, not a rounding artefact. The top-of-funnel spend was doing real work down the funnel, and now the brand could prove it.

3. New-to-brand gateway ASINs: knowing which products acquire versus retain

For a UK vitamins and supplements brand, Toucan ran a new-to-brand gateway ASIN analysis over a 13-month window, ranking products by their influence on bringing in new customers. Fibre, magnesium and sleep variants came out as the new-to-brand drivers.

A follow-up SQL query then asked a sharper question: of those acquisition drivers, which actually earn repeat purchases? The answer reshaped the strategy. The sleep variant drove volume but had poor repeat purchase against the brand average. Fibre and magnesium drove both acquisition and strong repeat purchases. Apple cider and probiotic variants drove lower volume but excellent repeat rates.

Each finding led to a different move. Sleep variants got purchase remarketing timed just before the product lifecycle ends, to lift repeat rates. Fibre and magnesium stayed as heroes in top-of-funnel media, driving both new customers and lifetime value. And the low-volume, high-loyalty apple cider and probiotic variants were added to top-of-funnel DSP to build awareness. One data set, three tailored decisions.

Turning AMC insight into AMC audiences

The analysis is only half of it. AMC also lets you build custom audiences and align them to each funnel stage, then activate them across Sponsored Ads (for bid boosting on search and targeting on display) and DSP (for targeting and negative audiences).

Upper-funnel audiences might include people who searched relevant keywords but never bought, lookalikes of your buyers, or your own first-party data. AMC can even identify the optimal frequency at which people engage before purchase, so you can spot both underserved and oversaturated audiences. Lower down, you can target cart abandoners, high-lifetime-value shoppers, lapsed customers, and people who engaged with ads or product pages but haven't yet converted.

You can go further still and turn path-to-conversion insight into audiences. If Sponsored Products followed by Sponsored Brands is a proven purchase driver, you can build and retarget exactly that audience to push conversion.

The proof it works: for a confectionery brand in Q4, integrating a wide range of AMC audiences across the funnel drove 2,138 incremental purchases, a 24% lift in total purchases and a 22% lift in new-to-brand purchases against the same activity with no AMC integration.

Key takeaways

AMC and standard Amazon Ads reporting answer different questions and belong side by side, not in place of each other. AMC's value is context: it shows the paths, the funnel movement and the product-level behaviour that ordinary reporting can't. It turns insight into action through custom audiences activated across Sponsored Ads and DSP. And the case studies show it moving real numbers, from a 70% conversion-to-loyalty jump to a 24% purchase uplift.

Frequently asked questions

• How far back does the AMC look-back window go? It used to be 13 months, but it has been extended to five years through a now-free feature called Amazon Retail Purchases (previously paid). That longer window makes it far easier to analyse customer lifetime value, purchase cycles and year-on-year repeat behaviour.
• Can I upload first-party data to enhance my AMC analysis? Yes. Combining your first-party data with Amazon's event signals unlocks deeper custom analytics, including a fuller view of customer lifetime value, multi-channel purchase tracking, and more granular audience building.
• Do I need to know SQL to use AMC? It helps, but it isn't required. AMC is built on SQL, but Amazon now provides an extensive pre-built query library and point-and-click tools that can generate audiences for you.

Curtis Fu is a Senior Advertising Manager at Toucan, an Amazon Ads Advanced Partner. To explore what AMC could uncover for your brand, get in touch at curtis.fu@toucanecommerce.com.