Amazon sellers have more advertising options than ever before, but with more choices comes the challenge of understanding which marketing strategies truly drive results. If you’ve explored Amazon Ads, you’ve probably heard of Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC); a powerful tool that promises unparalleled data insights and advertising transparency, and serves as a secure, cloud-based analytics solution for Amazon advertisers.
But what exactly is Amazon Marketing Cloud, and how can sellers leverage it to optimize ad performance, reduce wasted spend, improve return on ad spend (ROAS), and enhance their overall advertising strategy? In this guide, we’ll break down everything you need to know.
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a secure, privacy-safe analytics environment that allows advertisers and sellers to run custom queries on aggregated Amazon data. Simply put, it’s a data clean room where you can analyze shopper behavior, measure advertising effectiveness, and create custom attribution models using pseudonymized signals from Amazon. In addition, AMC serves as a comprehensive data analysis tool, enabling advertisers to leverage advanced analytics capabilities within Amazon's advertising ecosystem.
Unlike the reporting available in Amazon Ads console or Amazon DSP, AMC gives sellers access to granular, event-level data and the ability to run advanced queries using SQL (Structured Query Language). AMC works with aggregated data and various data sets—including Amazon’s proprietary data and advertiser data—to ensure privacy and enable comprehensive analysis. This allows you to uncover patterns and performance insights that standard reports can’t provide.
Modern advertising strategies involve multiple touchpoints across a customer’s journey—search ads, display ads, streaming ads, and more. Traditional reports often attribute conversions to the last click, which doesn’t reflect the full picture. AMC solves this problem by providing multi-touch attribution and customized analytics, enabling you to analyze the entire marketing funnel from awareness to purchase and understand the incremental value of each ad interaction.
With AMC's customized analytics, you can also optimize your media mix by analyzing the distribution of ad spend across channels and campaigns, leading to better overall campaign effectiveness.
AMC works by pooling anonymous, event-level data from Amazon Ads campaigns and combining it with Amazon’s shopping data, including customer data and first party data, all used in a privacy-safe manner. This data includes:
Advertisers access this data through the AMC interface and use SQL queries to generate custom reports. AMC does not expose user level data; instead, it provides aggregated reports that group actions across multiple users, ensuring user privacy. The outputs are aggregated and anonymized, ensuring user privacy.
AMC isn’t just another reporting tool. It’s a comprehensive analytics platform designed for sellers who want deeper insights. With advanced reporting capabilities, advanced analytics, and support for custom analytics, AMC empowers advertisers to generate detailed, tailored reports and uncover actionable insights for strategic decision-making. Here are its standout features:
AMC can analyze attribution data across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Amazon DSP campaigns. This holistic view allows you to see how these advertising campaigns work together, just as Amazon shared in a recent case study.
Unlike pre-set dashboards in Amazon Ads, AMC lets you build custom queries to measure specific KPIs and campaign metrics, enhancing your reporting capabilities. For example, you can analyze:
With AMC, you can uncover which audiences engage with your ads and how they progress toward conversion. AMC helps identify target customers and potential customers by analyzing detailed audience data and customer engagement, allowing you to optimize your advertising strategies for better ROI.
Standard Amazon reports mostly use last-touch attribution. AMC enables you to measure all touchpoints that influence a sale. With AMC, you can analyze conversion rates and purchase history to understand the impact of each ad interaction, helping you identify which campaigns drive purchases and optimize your advertising strategy accordingly.
AMC uses aggregated, pseudonymized data, meaning individual shoppers’ identities are never exposed.
For sellers investing heavily in Amazon Ads, AMC can be a game-changer. It enables sellers to optimize their advertising spend, accurately measure advertising efforts, and enhance overall marketing efforts by providing deep insights into campaign performance and audience behavior. Here’s why:
Understand which channels and advertising campaigns actually drive sales by using AMC to analyze media performance metrics, such as click-through rates and conversion rates, for better budget allocation. This helps you invest in high-performing areas.
AMC reveals the role each ad plays in the customer journey. You can see if DSP ads boost Sponsored Products performance, or if upper-funnel ads lead to more branded searches. By analyzing these insights, AMC helps you to refine your marketing messages at each stage of the marketing funnel, ensuring your communication is tailored to audience needs and campaign goals.
By identifying inefficiencies, you can reduce wasted ad spend and improve advertising profitability.
With AMC, you can dive into key metrics like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) to help you optimize ads and determine if programs like Subscribe and Save are beneficial to reduce churn and increase customer retention.
Do you know your CLV:CAC Ratio? With CLV and CAC calculated you can turn this into a ratio that helps you see your profit per customer.
Go beyond CTR and CPC. AMC offers metrics like new-to-brand conversions, purchase paths, overlap analysis, and detailed sales figures to support comprehensive campaign analysis.
Build custom audiences to drive awareness, consideration, and conversion across every advertising channel.
Currently, AMC is available to advertisers who:
To register for an AMC account, you may need to submit an application and work with an Amazon Ads account executive or an Amazon Marketing Cloud account manager to complete the setup and ensure all eligibility requirements are met.
While AMC was initially designed for large brands and agencies, it’s becoming increasingly accessible to third-party sellers through software integrations and API connections.
Third-party (3P) sellers can use AMC, but access is not automatic. Access to AMC requires the Amazon Demand Side Platform, as AMC is closely tied to Amazon DSP, so here’s what you need to know:
To use AMC, you must have an active Amazon DSP account. The data available for analysis in AMC relies heavily on Amazon DSP data, which provides detailed advertising metrics essential for advanced analytics and campaign performance evaluation.
You will be assigned an AMC instance within your AWS environment, which you use to perform data analysis, create custom audiences, and optimize campaigns. For agencies or advertisers managing multiple clients, handling several AMC instances is important for efficiently scheduling queries and streamlining reporting across client portfolios.
AMC requires:
For most brands and 3P sellers, the easiest way to use AMC is through a partner offering pre-built dashboards and automated queries. These solutions enable advertisers to easily perform analytics and access detailed customer data, allowing them to leverage AMC's capabilities without deep technical knowledge. This approach is especially valuable for enabling advertisers to make data-driven decisions while maintaining data privacy and compliance.
Here’s the step-by-step process to create an Amazon Marketing Cloud account:
You need Amazon DSP access to use AMC. If you only run Sponsored Ads, you’ll need to work with an agency or a partner tool that has AMC access.
Contact your Amazon Ads representative or visit Amazon Ads Help to access AMC.
AMC queries require SQL knowledge. If you’re not comfortable writing queries, you can:
Before diving in, determine what you want to measure:
Start with pre-set queries (Amazon provides templates for path-to-purchase, new-to-brand analysis, etc.), then customize as you gain confidence.
AMC provides event-level advertising data on the following:
With AMC, advertisers can access and analyze data from multiple channels, multiple platforms, and different advertising platforms, enabling a comprehensive view of campaign performance across the Amazon ecosystem.
However, there are some limitations:
Here are practical ways sellers use AMC:
With AMC, sellers can analyze and optimize their Amazon ad campaigns across various advertising platforms, ensuring a cohesive marketing strategy and comprehensive ad performance analysis.
See how customers interact with multiple ad formats before converting. Example:
Determine the optimal ad frequency before a purchase happens.
Identify overlapping audiences between Amazon DSP ads and Sponsored Ads to reduce redundancy.
Measure how long it takes customers to convert after their first ad exposure.
Prove whether DSP ads actually drive incremental conversions or just assist existing customers.
As Amazon continues to prioritize privacy-safe advertising and data transparency, AMC will play an even bigger role in the future. Expect:
Amazon Marketing Cloud is not just another reporting tool—it’s a strategic platform for advanced sellers who want to unlock deeper insights into understanding to entire customer journey and make smarter advertising decisions. To leverage AMC effectively, it requires some technical skill and DSP access, but the payoff is huge: better attribution, higher ROI, and data-driven growth.
If you’re ready to scale your Amazon business and enhance your Amazon Ads strategy, AMC is a must-explore tool.
1. Is Amazon Marketing Cloud free?
Yes, AMC itself is free for eligible advertisers, but you need DSP access, which may involve costs.
2. Do I need to know SQL to use Amazon Marketing Cloud?
Yes, unless you use pre-built templates or work with a partner.
3. Can I use Amazon Marketing Cloud without DSP?
No, AMC requires Amazon DSP advertising campaigns.
4. Does Amazon Marketing Cloud provide real-time data?
No, there’s usually a 24-48 hour delay.
5. Is Amazon Marketing Cloud available in all countries?
No, but most major Amazon marketplaces are supported.
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