Using AMC for Smarter Growth on Amazon

Curtis Ritchie: Good afternoon, everyone. I hope everyone's having a nice Wednesday and a nice week so far. We're excited to be hosting you for our webinar today. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to one of our Toucan Talks webinars today. We're super excited that you've all joined us for today's session. Again, if you don't know who I am, I'm Curtis, our marketing lead here at Toucan. And we have our other Curtis, who is Toucan's senior advertising manager, who will be talking about how you can use AMC to unlock smarter growth on Amazon. The session today will run for around 30 minutes, and we will have a live Q&A at the end of the session. So if you do have any questions, please feel free to type them into the Q&A section at any time during the webinar. I'll collect all of these while Curtis is presenting and we will try to get through as many as possible at the end. So I will now hand over to Curtis to take you through today's session.

Curtis Fu: Thanks, Curtis. And yeah, hi everyone. Great to be here and thanks all for joining. Today we have a super exciting session on how we use AMC for smarter growth at Toucan. Before we head into the case studies and detailed analysis, we'll start with a very quick intro of what AMC is, to give you some more context if you're new to AMC.

Curtis Fu: So what is AMC, Amazon Marketing Cloud? AMC is a secure, privacy-safe, cloud-based clean room solution developed by Amazon Ads. It enables advertisers like me and you to perform custom analytics and build audiences using pseudonymised, events-led signal from Amazon ads. Pseudonymised means any information that could directly identify a person - name, email, or phone number - is replaced with a code. Event signals are records of actions or events that happened during a shopper's journey. In more layman's terms, AMC is a powerful data tool that helps advertisers understand how people interact with their ads, in a secure and private way, so no personal data is shared. That includes engagement like viewing a video or static ad, viewing promoted product detail pages, searching for your brand name, visiting your brand store, clicking ads, or conversion-based behaviours like adding to cart, purchasing, or subscribing. AMC considers this broad range of actions for both endemic and non-endemic advertisers.

Curtis Fu: How is it different to Amazon Ads reporting? I'd break it down into four aspects. First, data granularity: Amazon Ads provides pre-aggregated data at the campaign, ad group, keyword, or placement level, whereas AMC works from event signals like impressions, clicks and conversions, aggregated only for privacy. Second, flexibility: Amazon Ads gives fixed reports with limited customisation, whereas AMC provides fully customisable reports using SQL queries. Third, scope: Amazon Ads looks at each ad product separately, so DSP and Sponsored Ads are viewed differently, whereas AMC can combine DSP, Sponsored Ads, and even first-party data for further analysis. Fourth, use cases: Amazon Ads lets you track sales, ROAS, clicks and impressions, whereas AMC allows more advanced measurement like reach and frequency, path to conversion, new-to-brand, and lifetime value. These reports shouldn't be used in silo, but to complement one another - AMC just goes one step further and adds greater context to your advertising performance.

Curtis Fu: The first use case is path to conversion. Looking at a beauty brand we worked with, we assessed conversions in Q4 2024 during a period of multiple DSP burst campaigns layered with always-on Sponsored Ads. Looking at the most common paths to conversion, the two highest-volume paths were Sponsored Products to Sponsored Brand or Sponsored Brand Video, and top-of-funnel DSP to bottom-of-funnel DSP. Interestingly, the DSP path had 70,000 more occurrences than the first path despite being 38% cheaper, showing that prioritising DSP drove more efficient and scalable reach than Sponsored Ads alone. Looking at the strongest converting paths by ROAS, all had Sponsored Products as the first touchpoint, with Sponsored Brand or Sponsored Brand Video present throughout, and the top-converting paths integrated both Sponsored Ads and DSP. And looking at the highest new-to-brand acquisition paths, the top two both had three touchpoints and combined Sponsored Products with DSP, with the final touchpoint typically being Sponsored Display in contextual audience targeting. Off the back of this, we built custom audiences based on people who'd engaged with each ad type, and targeted them through Sponsored Display and bottom-of-funnel DSP.

Curtis Fu: The second use case is marketing funnel analysis. For a grocery brand, the question was whether their top-of-funnel Prime Video activation was actually worth it further down the funnel. They unlocked incremental budget for a Prime Video campaign to drive awareness, layered with display DSP for consideration and to retarget Prime Video engagers, on top of their ongoing Sponsored Ads strategy. Using AMC, we saw that post-Prime Video activation, consideration, conversion and loyalty all improved. The Prime Video campaign launched in early September for a month, with DSP display launching in late September for a similar period. Awareness users grew 197% month on month in September, and while awareness naturally declined in October once Prime Video ended, consideration, conversion and loyalty users all peaked at their highest point in six months, significantly outperforming July. Consideration-to-conversion spiked 56% and conversion-to-loyalty spiked 70% once DSP was heavily integrated - showing that layering top-of-funnel Prime Video with middle-of-funnel display DSP had a significant impact on the volume of people aware of, engaging with, and repurchasing from the brand.

Curtis Fu: The third use case combines multiple SQL queries to assess new-to-brand gateway ASINs alongside repeat purchase behaviour. For a UK vitamins, minerals and supplements brand, we ran a 13-month look-back new-to-brand gateway ASIN analysis, which ranks ASINs by their new-to-brand influence. We found their fibre, magnesium and sleep variants drove new-to-brand, and suggested AB testing Sponsored Brand campaigns featuring those ASINs as the hero products, alongside DSP creative focused on the free variants for awareness media. We then ran a follow-up query to measure repeat purchase for those same new-to-brand drivers, and found that while the sleep variant drove volume, it had poor repeat purchase versus the brand average, whereas fibre and magnesium drove both new-to-brand and strong repeat purchases. The apple cider and probiotic variants drove a lower volume of orders but strong repeat purchase. This meant we could focus purchase remarketing on the sleep variant just before the product lifecycle ends, keep fibre and magnesium as hero products in top-of-funnel media to drive both new-to-brand orders and lifetime value, and build awareness for the lower-volume, high-repeat apple cider and probiotic variants through top-of-funnel DSP.

Curtis Fu: Finally, on using AMC to build audiences: sponsored ads can use AMC audiences for bid boosting in search and audience targeting in display, and DSP can use AMC audiences for targeting or as negative audiences. In the upper funnel, that might mean people who searched certain keywords but didn't purchase, lookalikes of existing purchasers or subscribers, or optimal frequency audiences that identify under- and over-served shoppers. Lower down the funnel, key audiences include promotional or annuity brand purchasers, cart abandoners, high or lapsed lifetime value shoppers, and people who've engaged with ads or product pages but haven't purchased yet. We can take this further using path-to-conversion analysis to build custom audiences around traffic acquisition and ad type overlap - for example, retargeting people who engaged up-funnel, or identifying that Sponsored Product followed by Sponsored Brand drives purchases and ROAS, then retargeting that exact audience across Sponsored Ads and DSP.

Curtis Fu: To close, a case study testing AMC audience integration for a confectionery brand in Q4 2024. Their DSP campaign was already meeting consumers where they were, but needed AMC audiences layered in to actually guide consumers down the funnel - retargeting organic behaviours and ad interactions across funnel regions. This drove 2,138 incremental purchases, with total purchases up 24% and new-to-brand purchases up 22% versus no AMC integration - concluding that AMC audiences drove real incremental purchases and revenue for the brand. Thank you very much for listening.

Curtis Ritchie: Thanks so much for that, Curtis. That was a really insightful session on how brands and advertisers can use the many elements AMC offers to drive growth on Amazon. First question: how far back does the look-back window go for AMC?

Curtis Fu: Good question. It used to be 13 months, but it's now been extended to five years with the now-free (previously paid) AMC feature called Amazon Retail Purchases. That lets us better analyse customer lifetime value, purchase cycles, and repeat behaviours year on year.

Curtis Ritchie: Great, thank you. Another question: can I upload first-party data to enhance my AMC analysis?

Curtis Fu: Yes, definitely. Combined with Amazon's event signals, that lets us perform even further custom analytics - understanding customer lifetime value, tracking multi-channel purchases, and building more granular audiences for targeted campaigns.

Curtis Ritchie: Brilliant. And I know AMC can seem confusing to a lot of people, but someone's asking: do I need to know SQL to use AMC?

Curtis Fu: Good question. SQL does help, but it's not strictly required. AMC is built on SQL, but Amazon now provides an extensive pre-built query library and point-and-click solutions that can generate custom audiences for you.

Curtis Ritchie: That's great. We do have one more question: could you give some use case examples using Amazon Insights and Amazon Retail Purchases? We might follow up on that one directly. Well, I just want to say a massive thank you to everyone for joining our Toucan Talks webinar today, and we hope today's session was useful for you. If you'd like to get in touch with Curtis regarding today's session, scan the QR code on screen or get in touch via email at curtis.fu@toucanecommerce.com. Thanks again, and we hope to see you at another Toucan Talks event soon.