The only breakdown of AMC Audiences you’ll need

What are AMC Audiences?  

By now, advertisers know that the Amazon Marketing Cloud has transformed retail media management within the Amazon ecosystem, as Amazon is one of the only retailers that has provided advertisers with a clean room environment designed to help connect spend to sales at a one-to-one level. We'll talk more about the industry shift that needs to happen as retailers provide more insights on consumer behavior data over the next few weeks, but for now we encourage you to read the following blog breaking down why connecting purchase data to behavioral data is so important.

When AMC first launched, it was a clean room environment where advertisers could look at their ad-attributed data at a new level of granularity to discover what media strategies were working (or not working) throughout the funnel. Fast forward to today with organic purchase data available, and we now have the beautiful mix of insights into who is purchasing what and when, and what media efforts led to that point. And here's where AMC Audiences come in. When Amazon launched the capability to build custom audiences within AMC, this allowed us to take the behavioral insights we've covered above and build audiences based on those behaviors. AMC Audiences let us target more precisely, at scale, which helps us drive real, measurable results for our clients.

As a pioneer of AMC Audience-building, the key groupings of audiences that Flywheel has developed have now become table stakes across the advertising industry. The room given to code and extract these audiences hasn’t been large within the AMC console (i.e. 2 lines to input SQL queries), so it’s no surprise that most agencies and even brands are building similar types of audiences for now.  

There may be saturation through the similarity of AMC Audience creation across the industry, but keep in mind that even a templated audience will still provide custom insights for your brand because the audience is built based on shopper behavior specific to your brand. An AMC Audience can be so granularly built with layers of behaviors and even exclusions of behaviors that no other brand has queried it in – but for the most part, there’s a core group of audiences and audience types that we’ll get into below.  

Where the true secret sauce of AMC Audiences is in the ability to correctly utilize them to achieve specific goals. AMC can help analyze more data than ever before, but if you don’t know what to look for, that data isn’t valuable and sits as an opportunity waiting on the sidelines. We still want every brand to look at AMC as a tool for uncovering every insight it can, but specific inquiries and goals help maximize AMC’s outputs.  More on AMC Audience use cases and stories of AMC in action is coming soon in this series.

How do AMC Audiences differ from DSP Audiences?  

Back to AMC Audiences specifically, you might be wondering how AMC Audiences differ from ADSP Audiences.  

While AMC Audiences will not necessarily replace all of your regular DSP audiences, they can be used to achieve specific goals and get more precise with your audience marketing thanks to additional features and levers that are not currently supported via Amazon’s standard DSP audience builder. Some of these enhanced AMC levers are the ability to:  

• Isolate advanced event types (i.e. add-to-cart events)  

• Pinpoint specific dates to market to vs a rolling lookback window (i.e. market to July Prime Day users for re-engagement during BFCM)  

• Leverage search data (i.e. searched keywords)  

• Create both model-based (i.e. lookalikes) and rule-based audiences  

Paid vs. included AMC data sets  

AMC and Audience-building is available to all advertisers that spend on Amazon, but not every feature and insight is included in this access. AMC can already be a daunting concept, so here we’ll break down if investing in AMC Paid Features makes sense for your brand.  

AMC’s Paid Features are data sets offered at a cost via a monthly subscription and can provide an even finer level of insights than the standard access. These data sets are called Flexible Shopping Insights (FSI) and Audience Segment Insights.  

Standard access to AMC only lets advertisers look at ad-attributed events, such as add-to-cart, conversions, SnS subscriptions, ad clicks, add-to-wish lists, etc. These are all great things to measure, but layering in organic purchasing data is where brands can begin to unlock the full scope of AMC’s capabilities, and that data is part of the Flexible Shopping Insights subscription.  

To calculate a key metric like the lifetime value of a customer, you need to be able to see repeat purchase data, and an FSI subscription allows just that. Or maybe you want to understand the behaviors of shoppers who haven’t been exposed to your ads or haven’t interacted with your ads – FSI holds the unlock here as well. By working with Flywheel, you can gain access to 5 years of AMC purchase data (vs. The standard 12.5-month lookback window), which is another critical investment required in uncovering these valuable insights.  

AMC’s Audience Segment Insights give you a more thorough view into where your shoppers are coming from, which can help with upper funnel awareness campaign building where audiences need to be relatively broader.

Overall, our stance is that subscribing to these paid features is critical for enterprise brands with large catalogs and large investments on Amazon because, without the organic data piece, the puzzle of your holistic performance will never be complete.  

What types of AMC Audiences should I be using throughout the funnel?  

A consumer’s path to purchase doesn’t always follow standard marketing funnel structure, so we like to push brands to think about the path to purchase in the stages of: opportunity, awareness, interest, purchase, and loyalty. Here’s an overview of how to think about AMC Audiences for each of these stages:  

Opportunity: Focus on broader audience targeting that emphasizes brand building within adjacent or partnering categories by building lookalike-based audiences.

Awareness: Focus on lookalike-based audiences and segments within general brand categories.

Interest: Build audiences based on relevant popular keywords within a category while assessing the competition - these audiences could be lookalike or rule-based.

Purchase: Build rule-based audiences of shoppers familiar with the brand (such as those who have viewed DSP ads) and utilize bid multipliers to reach high-intent shoppers close to the point of conversion. More on this in our next blog.

Loyalty: Create audiences based on repeat purchase behaviours, purchasing cycles, tentpole event behaviors, basket-building behaviors, SnS willingness, etc. These audiences are generally rule-based and aim to build long-term customer value after the first NTB purchase.

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Now that you have a better understanding of AMC Audiences, stay tuned for more insights coming soon on AMC Audiences for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, as well as case studies and use cases to showcase AMC fully in action.