Navigating the Cookie-less Era with Amazon Marketing Cloud and Compass Audience Builder
Paul Adams
CEO | Tambo | The Global Marketplace Services Platform | Helping businesses grow on Amazon and other marketplaces
Cookies, those digital crumbs that have long fuelled targeted advertising, are gradually vanishing due to evolving privacy concerns and regulatory changes. As these cookies fade away, brands must explore alternative methods to maintain effective advertising strategies.
One such solution gaining traction is clean room technology. Clean room solutions provide a privacy-secure environment where disparate datasets can be collated and analysed without compromising individual user privacy. This technology allows brands to glean insights, create audience segments, and optimise advertising strategies while adhering to stringent privacy regulations.
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) has emerged as one of the leading clean room solutions in 2023 as it enables brands to delve deep into user journey touchpoints once exposed to an advertising communication. Opportunities for brands with AMC include the analysis of diverse data sets, fostering collaboration, and the strategic modelling of unique audience segments.
One of the main reasons AMC has become a focal point for many, is due to its ability to directly link insight to activation via the Amazon Demand Side Platform (ADSP). ADSP empowers advertisers with the ability to programmatically procure and optimise various ad formats—ranging from display to video and audio—across the vast landscape of Amazon's inventory.
Debunking the top 3 AMC myths
Firstly, we often hear that AMC is complex and difficult to use, but the truth is that’s a common misconception. AMC isn't as complex as presumed. If you’re already engaging in ADSP activities, acquiring an AMC instance is easy.
False! In fact, if you already have active involvement in DSP operations, access to AMC instances is entirely free. This seamless integration comes without any additional financial burden, facilitating a more accessible avenue for advertisers to leverage the platform's capabilities.
Finally, worrying about being highly skilled in managing AMC is resolved by realising that while having expertise is helpful, it's not absolutely necessary. Though a good understanding of SQL can enhance AMC’s efficiency, Amazon made efforts to provide templated queries. The platform's evolving nature necessitates a certain level of SQL expertise to harness its full potential effectively.
AMC, the Nike Alphafly of the Amazon Advertising world
Imagine yourself in a prestigious group of elite athletes on the starting line of a marathon. This is similar to being amongst peers leveraging Amazon's tools, exploring the depths of DSP, and wanting to finish in first place.
When you’re running a marathon it's crucial to recognise that you're not running solo. The competitive field is strong, with people who have the same level of commitment, access to resources and trying to utilise similar tools and strategies in order to win. You want to be using the best tools and strategies available to you, to ensure your success. The same is true today for Amazon Advertisers, as the level of competition has never been higher.
In 2021 the Nike's Alphafly trainers were adopted by some elite marathon runners and 31 of 36 podium places were won by athletes wearing these trainers.
Using AMC is like stepping into Nike Alphafly trainers. It’s your competitive advantage and the key that unlocks your ability to build an audience, placing you ahead in the race for visibility and success.
How does putting on ‘AMC shoes’ help me win the marathon?
Adopting advanced audience building capabilities within AMC serves as the compass guiding your journey to the forefront. The platform's unparalleled potential, particularly in audience building, stands as the cutting edge in digital advertising technology.
DSP allows advertisers to refine their strategies, ensuring alignment with brand objectives by identifying and engaging with the most relevant audience segments.
When it comes to Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), the focus shifts to an unparalleled level of customisation. AMC introduces an array of additional tools that provide deeper insights into user behaviour beyond mere product views or purchases.
For instance, AMC offers insights into users who have added items to their baskets but haven't made purchases—a critical low-funnel conversion event not readily available on other platforms.
AMC also presents the advantage of selecting custom date ranges for targeting—a feature absent in DSP, which primarily allows for targeting within specific rolling time frames, such as the past seven or 30 days.
This ability to target custom date ranges within AMC holds significant value, especially during crucial periods like post-Black Friday sales. It allows advertisers to adapt their strategies swiftly, leveraging historical data from specific periods for more effective targeting and campaign optimisation.
In fact, as we emerge from the post-Black Friday period, a compelling discovery emerged—one that highlighted the importance of pre-event engagement on Black Friday. The insight revealed that those exposed to campaigns in the lead-up to the event exhibited notably higher purchase rates.
This learning has reshaped the approach to audience building and strategy formulation, especially leveraging the potential of custom audiences available within AMC.
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Beyond merely targeting customers based on their engagement with campaigns—be it on Amazon or through social platforms—AMC brings forth a distinctive capability: the "off Amazon audience" integration. It enables advertisers to incorporate data from various sources such as other websites, apps, or offline interactions, providing a more holistic view of a user's behaviour and preferences.
The inclusion of off-platform data significantly broadens the horizon of possibilities. One notable advantage is the ability to exclude direct-to-consumer (DTC) customers from Amazon targeting.
This strategic move ensures that ad campaigns are more efficient, precisely reaching out to the desired audience segments.
AMC's prowess extends to constructing lookalike audiences based on the most valuable existing customers—an invaluable feature for enhancing campaign efficiency. This capability enables advertisers to identify potential customers resembling their most engaged and profitable ones, thereby expanding the reach to new segments yet to interact with the brand on Amazon.
AMC also enables the re-engagement of lapsed DTC customers who might have shifted their interactions to Amazon. By leveraging these unique audience capabilities, brands can maintain customer loyalty and rekindle relationships with those who have previously engaged but may have lapsed.
In tests, these audiences have exhibited conversion rates two times higher than those generated by DSP audiences—a significant feat considering the inherent strength of DSP audiences.
However, the challenge remains – How can these custom audiences be created swiftly and seamlessly without relying on complex SQL skills?
Enter the Compass Audience Builder tool. Our AMC audience builder tool holds a pivotal role in transforming audience strategy implementation for Agencies & Enterprise level brands. It’s extremely simple and easy to use.
The tool's intuitive interface not only simplifies the process of audience building but also expedites it, allowing for the simultaneous creation of multiple audiences. This scalability empowers brands to widen their test and learn approach, accelerating the identification of effective audience strategies.
Making the process not only quicker but also more cost-effective. Its user-friendly design eliminates the need for intricate skill sets within a team, enabling audiences to be swiftly generated and seamlessly integrated into DSP campaigns.
How does Audience Builder save you money on SQL hires?
At Tambo, we saw that there were 5 main challenges that brands were facing using AMC, and we set out to solve them all with Compass:
Previously, audiences had to be individually crafted, consuming significant time and effort. The Audience Builder streamlines this process, enabling multiple audiences to be created simultaneously, saving time and effort.
Uncertainty existed regarding the audience's success and its ability to consistently meet the minimum user threshold for effectiveness. The tool ensures a more confident approach to audience creation, guaranteeing audience sizes above the 2000-user threshold for sustained effectiveness.
Creating audiences required intricate SQL knowledge and consumed around 15 minutes per audience. Audience Builder eliminates the need for intricate SQL skills, simplifying the process and reducing the time required for audience creation.
Amazon's query editor was limited to a refresh cadence of seven days, hindering audience refresh rates. Audience Builder offers a more flexible and frequent refresh cadence, allowing for more regular audience updates and integration into campaigns.
Assessing the success of AMC audiences in comparison to other targeted audiences was challenging. A dedicated tool section isolates AMC audience performance, facilitating quick budget decisions and enabling comparison with other DSP-targeted audiences.
The shifting landscape of targeted advertising, marked by the gradual disappearance of cookies due to privacy concerns and evolving regulations, demands innovative solutions. Clean room technology, exemplified by Amazon Marketing Cloud, stands out as a beacon of privacy-secured data collation and analysis.
Embracing tools like AMC and leveraging innovative functionalities like the Compass Audience Builder becomes crucial for advertisers aiming to maintain competitiveness and drive success in their digital campaigns.
Contact us to learn more!