Building Audiences in AMC: Key Capabilities & Successful Examples
In today’s data-driven marketing landscape, the ability to ask the right questions is paramount. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) emerges as the magic 8-ball of advertising solutions, offering advertisers a robust platform for precise analytics and strategic decision-making. If you’re new to AMC, it’s a secure, privacy-friendly, dedicated cloud-based measurement and analytics solution introduced in 2021.
Understanding the Value of Amazon Marketing Cloud
Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), AMC provides a flexible environment that empowers advertisers with customizable reporting capabilities based on event-level data across various data sets. These data sets can encompass both advertiser data and Amazon Advertising data, granting advertisers a comprehensive view of campaign performance. In essence, AMC equips advertisers with transparent, cross-channel data essential for making informed marketing decisions, a necessity in today’s marketing landscape.
For a comprehensive understanding of AMC basics, Tinuiti’s AMC overview provides all the essential information about the Amazon Marketing Cloud.
This article is part of a series where we dive into specific AMC use cases. In this installment, we focus on AMC Audiences, guiding you through utilizing audiences to address critical business questions, pinpoint key metrics, and strategically apply derived insights. View another entry in this series here.
What are AMC Audiences?
AMC rule-based audiences is a method of audience creation where SQL-based logic can be applied to signals in AMC to create custom audiences for activation to Amazon DSP. This feature is available to sellers both on and off Amazon, meaning you can leverage insights for DTC targeting as well.
Audiences can be built off of first-party (1P) data and signals present in your AMC instance, including: Amazon DSP and sponsored ads traffic events, ad-relevant conversion events, first-party data, and select paid features tables. Advertisers can use these audiences to optimize KPIs through enhanced strategies, such as delivering tailored creative, scaling reach, or more precise targeting.
Here are some examples of user behaviors that could define an audience segment that aren’t available in ADSP:
- Have engaged with your sponsored ads but not yet purchased
- Have purchased your products in the past but are now lapsed customers
- Have been loyal customers, generating high sales volumes over time
- Customers who put an item in their cart but did not buy it
- AMC lookalike audiences
Lookalike audiences use AMC’s machine learning capabilities to scale a seed audience, the initial group, whose behaviors are matched to potential customers with similar characteristics. This can be valuable to scale high value audiences that may be relatively small in size, such as a brand’s most frequent purchasers.
How to Measure Audience Segment Performance in AMC
To understand how an AMC segment performs, you need to consider what part of the purchase journey the segment behaviors capture. For example, an AMC audience of cart abandoners are lower in the purchase funnel, so KPI goals should focus on measuring conversion (ROAS, ACOS). Whereas, an audience built based on an audience’s engagement with streaming TV campaigns target the top of the funnel, those KPI goals should focus on measuring awareness (clicks, Product Detail Page Views).
Real-World Examples of Custom Audiences Built in AMC
Here are some examples of strategizing with AMC Audiences:
Relevant Creative Targeting
During the summer of 2023, Tinuiti identified a crucial gap in The Honest Company’s sales funnel on Amazon. Based on an analysis from April to July of 2023, almost 25% of customers who added an Honest Company product to their Amazon shopping cart did not complete their purchase.
The Honest Company had no way of targeting these individual customers in order to encourage them to complete their purchases.
To bridge this gap, Tinuiti’s media team partnered with The Honest Company to use AMC’s custom audience-building capabilities. Segmenting by product category, we sought to target cart abandoners from the last 30 days to drive up the conversion rate. Building audiences by category ensured that customers only received ads that were relevant to them. To do this:
- Tinuiti made distinct segments based on The Honest Company’s primary product lines: Diapers, Wipes, and Beauty.
- Product-specific creative was developed for search and display ads and tailored to reach each of these three audiences.
- Subscribe-and-Save options were called out to maximize the potential lifetime value of these conversions.
Results (vs. campaign average):
- +172% ROAS
- -65% New-to-brand CPA
- -55% Subscribe and save CPA
Lookalike Audiences
During Prime Day 2024, Tinuiti faced challenges scaling a high-value audience built from the client’s 1P data that was too small a segment to effectively spend against. The media team created a lookalike audience based on a seed segment of users who subscribe to the brand’s email newsletter, aiming to expand reach while maintaining efficiency by targeting customers with similar behaviors. Leveraging the client’s 1P data, Tinuiti developed a strategy to scale this high-value audience and launched DSP campaigns in the lead-up to Prime Day.
As a result, the lookalike segment was able to expand reach at a lower CPC and an increase on ROAS than the original seed segment performance.
Results from Prime Day (vs. seed segment performance)
- +972% Impressions
- -27% CPC
- +194% ROAS
“Building a lookalike audience with AMC provided scale against a high-value but niche audience that helped us stand out from the noise during Prime Day.”
Jordan Lampi Senior Specialist, Commerce Media at Tinuiti
AMC Audiences: Key Takeaways and Next Steps for Enhanced Conversions
AMC audiences allow advertisers to harness shopping signals to better target Amazon advertising campaigns. Strategies can be refined down to the creative, presenting relevant messaging to the right customers. For smaller customer segments, lookalike audiences offer a solution to increase scale without sacrificing performance. Furthermore, brands can leverage their 1P data to drive marketing performance both on and off Amazon.
Whether it’s help with activating AMC audiences or finding direct actionable insights, we’ve got tools to enhance your advertising strategy. If you’re looking to dive deeper with the help of our experts who understand the unique landscape of AMC, check out our services for Amazon or reach out to Tinuiti today.
This post was authored by Averie Lynch, Specialist of Strategic Services at Tinuiti.
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