Mastering the new Amazon Marketing Cloud Features

but when you add an audience to boost a bid on say people who abandon their cart those people also have a top of search rest of search and product page performance when you say subscribe and

save are you talking about like current subscribe and save people or it's people who frequently subscribe and save is this available to everybody now or um is it just going to be the people who are set up on

bsp what's up everybody welcome back to another episode of that Amazon ads podcast kicking off the new year with a bang we're going to be talking about all

things AMC and today we are joined by a guest who's been on the podcast before but it seems like a lot has changed since then we've got a new president- elect uh but more importantly we've got

new features being rolled out on Amazon specifically Amazon marketing Cloud so we're joined today by Dustin wner from BTR media better media

how you doing today Dustin I'm doing good Andrew thank you for having me on again it's always a pleasure yeah for sure it's great to have you back first things first we've never talked about AMC on the podcast before people may

have never heard of it don't really know what it is do you mind giving us just like a 30,000 foot view of AMC its applications and just kind of what it is at this point I feel like it's one of the biggest fomo features that we have

in the space right now A lot of people are talking about it and if I had to give a 30,000 foot view of exactly what it is it I break it out mentally into two different areas it gives you

Advanced reporting so you can see things like overlap of AD types versus DSP time between last click and conversion path to purchase reports Etc that's a really

useful part of AMC if you're doing more of a full funnel or multi-click strategy approach the other end is building custom audiences and um that is when you can actually build custom audiences that

meet certain criteria like if they've placed say three orders in the 60 days and haven't done a subscrib and save yet or if they've abandoned their cart or an infinite number of criteria and that's

what really prompted me to reach out to you guys because of this whole new feature that I'm sure we'll get into later in the episode if anyone doesn't know Dustin go back and watch our episode Advanced bidding strategies with

Dustin wner that was episode 53 really good topic there and Dustin has done a great job establishing himself as the

lead Authority on the Amazon API and AMC and things associated with it so the reason why he's the authority is because number one just a lot of people don't make content about that it's a it's a

pretty Niche topic and secondly he's just really smart and really good at educating and making super informed posts with graphics and illustrations and everything like that so really

phenomenal I'm excited to dive into this and Dustin you've made like two or three posts uh on this topic in like the last week I think we should probably start start with that because I think that those are kind of contain your biggest

highlights and call outs from from this new update that Amazon released at the unbox conference so yeah walk us through like those critical findings it's funny you say that because I I've I've made

probably three posts in the last few weeks and I think by now the first one is actually outdated already because of the features that Amazon has already rolled out on top of this so and that

was my concern that this episode might be outdated by the time it gets aired so we might have to do a new one yeah yeah we we'll see I mean the weight that they're rolling things out for AMC is is

really impressive at unboxed I didn't attend I think you guys were there um I was only looking at the release notes from the API and I saw this new feature where you could do these bid boosts so I thought you know this would be a great

opportunity not really fully understanding exactly what was capable of that but as we're getting more and more into it at BTR what we're finding is that we can create custom audiences

for clients that are using AMC for examples that like I gave earlier with the Subscribe and save or add to cart or any kind of criteria and then you can add those to a new sponsored ads

campaign and apply a boost to that audience so last few posts that I made were just explaining the process how to find out the details of the performance

of essentially the audience versus the non- audience if you will and how to differentiate between those how to pull those metrics out of the API as of a few

days ago November 12ish they just released the update to the UI for the ad console to now be able to differentiate actually see the performance because like I said before

my original posts were about how to pull the details from the API which are now obsolete because you can actually change the bid boost amount and see all the performance per audience so this

screenshot is from Dustin's post on LinkedIn and I went through all of my accounts Andrew went through all of his accounts uh our PPC managers went through all of their accounts nobody has

this yet I'm guessing because you need to be connected to the to the AMC the AMC is a separate API right from the advertising API the AMC has its own

endpoints within the ads API they pushed all of it in under the ads API and you will not see that tab show up until you add an audience to that campaign or

rather once you build a campaign with an audience attached to it then I think it was placement modifiers or something like that MH and then it turns into

to I don't remember what it is but it breaks out the two between placement modifiers and the audience boosts it's very interesting that well you said this is this is only

for new campaigns so like if you have an existing campaign you can't can can you retroactively add these audiences and these adjustments or you have to create a an entirely new campaign admittedly I

haven't tried to add an audience to an existing I've only launched new ones I believe that you could add an audience because in the same way you could update a campaign with that endpoint you can

you can update the bid boost amount so I would imagine you can also update the audience but haven't tried it yet I do think it's it's interesting because that tab uh used to be called placements I think campaign placements and then they

Chang it to bid adjustments and I was like that's weird I wonder why they would make it more generic bid adjustments and then that's the reason why is because they're making it that within the bid adjustments you have multiple tabs it could be for placements

or it could be for audiences I'm really looking forward to the day when they finally release devices because there's a big difference in performance between Mobile versus desktop tell us more about these audiences so once you create the

audiences you'll see all of the audiences that you added to that campaign in that tab is that how it works well you can only add one audience per campaign but say that we for instance take our AB to card audience

that we talked about we add it to it and where I kind of mechanically in my head go with this is you know if you remember back in the day when they rolled out the placement modifiers everybody was

running 20 cent bids and 9900 top of search modifiers they wanted to push everything top of search only little bit tricky to do that because Amazon only respects the placement boost based on

likeliness of a conversion so you're still going to get things bleeding in but I would imagine approaching this in a similar fashion where you are going to

run a low bid with a huge modifier and trying to basically isolate that campaign to have all of the performance flow through that audience one of the things that I find really interesting about this and this is where you two

kind of popped into my head with this because I know you guys really one of your big differentiators with Adlabs is incorporating the placement modifiers into bti Ops and that's really something that you guys are passionate about so when I'm breaking this out of my head

I'm kind of envisioning a matrix in a way because when you add an audience you're essentially adding two audiences you're adding the audience and then the non- audience if you will but when you

add an audience to boost a bid on say people who abandon their cart those people also have a top of search rest of search and product page performance so now you actually have a

grid of six squares you have all of your placements on the top and you have the two audiences because each of those audiences still has a certain placement on the page whether they meet the

criteria of that audience or not so just overall a lot more granularity and a lot more levers to pull that we're finding um that we can use in bit Ops walk us through this really quickly so we're

looking at it now and we have the bid adjustment here set to 900% increase uh as you were saying now you gray out the audience can can you uh tell us like a

little bit generically what that audience was that that you pulled in was that like a add to cart thing or or also why is it block blocked out name in it I I I really don't remember which one it

was I went into the iql iql are the instructional queries for AMC so when you go to into the the AMC editor you can see all these like pre-built

templates for audiences that Amazon has created there's maybe 15 of them or so and so my intention of building this initial audience out was not to get any kind of performance or do like a case

study it was really just to understand the internal Plumbing of how this works what it looks like on the UI the reason that I grayed out the audience honestly is because I just in AMC I named the audience something that really didn't

make sense and I didn't really want to display that there's really nothing more to it I didn't want to embarrass myself with having such a goofy audience name yeah test two three yeah exactly yeah and I didn't want to have that because

it just looked kind of lame but um so I just decided Well there's actually there's two here that say audience from AMC P the post up right now that's the

non audience so you've got the audience and then I think it's the non audience is it not well say I see two from audience from AMC and then a third says all shoppers right so so I assumed all

shoppers was the non- audience so all shoppers is is just that it's all performance of the entire campaign the second row is the audience's performance

and the top row is essentially the bid boost for that audience so if you double click on that 900% you can actually change that from anything from zero to 900 so that's not really a performance

row per se it's just a placeholder as is classic with Amazon they only let you increase you can't decrease that's right which basically yeah so the the

solution here is because you can't decrease for any other like modifier you have to reduce the base bids for all the keywords in that campaign and then increase to everything else that does

start running into some problems because if topa search is worth 900% increase and this unique audience is worth a 900% increase well then you can only decrease the base bids by so much before you just end up with like 2 cent bids across the

board so you we run into some limitations there when we can't actually decrease for a specific place but yeah very very interesting I don't know yet

how those stack if they stack I don't know how much is incorporated with relevance in the ad auction when you're bringing this audience component in there's still a lot of unknowns that I I

don't think anybody in our space has really tested yet and I would give the caveat too that when you're looking at audiences when you build an audience in AMC you need to have at least an

audience size of 2,000 people otherwise the audience generation will fail so they tell you to shoot for 2500 but even then you're a little bit on the low side I mean I think the one that I have in my screenshot here was

like 50,000 people and you can see the amount of performance difference between the two rows so if you're not if you're going for a high granularity of an audience you're probably going to serve a pretty small number of Impressions and

spend through it so just kind of a caveat I I'm actually confused here so there's three rows you're saying all shoppers is everything like that is basically the total row yeah and if

that's the total Row the audience row above that is showing you how what the traffic is for that one specific audience so the non- audience would you subtract that value from all shoppers to

find everything else basically yeah so the middle row is the audience the AMC audience the remaining part the non AMC audience is the difference between Row

three and two usually they put the totals at the top right in like the header row well and also they don't put a bid boost in its own row that's should just be something off to the side I think that this is a little bit MVP for

them I mean it's only been out for a few days so I would expect it over time to get an upgrade yeah so you're saying both of those audience from AMC rows should technically be on the same row they could be they're Incorporated with the same thing and then that change

audience button what does that do if you click it what I would guess it means is that you're adding a brand new audience that you built in AMC to this instead but there is no function yeah you can only have one at least at this point now

for most people that are used to building audiences they're doing it through DSP um and people who have access to AMC usually have a seat a DSP seat running DSP campaigns but uh is

this available to everybody now or um is it just going to be the people who are set up on DSP and running there well that's one of the great rollout components with this that was announced

it unboxed as well is that you no longer need to be running DSP to have access to AMC everyone who's running sponsored ads only can use this now and I think this is really powerful and what the other

neat part about the audience is is if you build an audience you can add that same audience the same audience that I added to a sponsor products campaign here can be added to a DSP order or line

item there's no differentiator between the two you can do this for sponsor products and sponsored Brands sponsored display is a little bit different because instead of adding an audience like this with a bid boost you add that

audience as a Target so this is available to everybody now uh if if I'm a seller and I don't run DSP at all and I'm just running sponsored ads what would that process look like of me

actually getting access to this sort of capability so at this point you need to reach out to Amazon reach out to an ad rep if you have one and ask them to generate your excuse me AMC instance

which will give you access to that query editor where you can then create the audiences okay and then the audience creation is is that all done with like SQL or is there a little bit better

process for that now on the back end with Amazon's career editor is there a dumb person version yeah well yeah so a uh a non-sql user you know I've never done any of the templated

audiences I do use the iql because they're very convenient but the way that they have built these out it really is pretty simple to use you just pick on the audience that you want to create

click on that box it brings you to a query that's already pre-built you click the copy button you can actually have it paste right into the query editor for you you run it very easy to do you don't

need to actually do any coding at all they put comments in the sections of the SQL query so that if you want to add any kind of additional filtering like if you

wanted to do a path to purchase with just specific campaigns or specific asens they have in the query commented out section saying add your campaigns here separated by commas or something

along those lines so it really is friendly to to non-developers where it does get a little bit tricky is if you start with the iql and you're like well I like this but I want this additional little part to it then you have to get

into customizing those queries a little bit more yeah that was my experience when when AMC first came out I was messing around with it I was using those uh templated the the library or templates or whatever and um was running

those and I was just like never sure if they were completely right um but yeah it was pretty simple to copy paste switch out certain details for campaigns or products or whatever you wanted to look at um but yeah never knew for sure

if it was like exporting the the right data if I needed to change more and and all that type of stuff so interesting um now with these audiences that you're building and adding to these campaigns

are they fixed are they just like a fixed batch of users that you're continuously targeting or is that batch of users continuously updated and what's that process like for these so when you create the audience those are details

that you specify and essentially what it does is every time it runs this query in the background for you it deletes the entire contents all the customer IDs

associated with the audience runs it every night populates it with the new people who meet the abandoned C criteria in the last 30 days or whatever your spe specifications are you can set it up in

such a way that it is static it's fixed but for Simplicity I wouldn't recommend that if you're getting started yeah I would think you'd have to go back and change those constantly if you just uh let them fixed so it's good to know that it'll update and you know if if you're

targeting a new to Brand audience and one of those customers purchases they're now excluded from that audience and can focus on the objective that those audiences are going after so that's good

now as an agency when you you know you reach out to the rep you're like can I get access to AMC and then they say yes does that now give you access for all of your clients or you have to make a new

request for every single client well at BTR we have our own seat with with DSP and I believe AMC admittedly this is not

my area of expertise um as far as getting people enrolled in this but from my understanding the ownership of the AMC instance is at the client level and

I think that's actually more ideal to have that because if you acquire new um clients Adlabs takes on some new clients

their AMC instance is not stuck with their old provider so it travels with them but them having to reach out to have this spun up is something that they'll have to do at this point in time I'm hoping that Amazon and they have

they have voiced it that they are going to make this process easier it's already become easier from when AMC first started but I think it will get easier yet yeah so I'm curious for us you know

with with our software if we wanted to integrate this that would require every client going and trying to get in touch with some ad rep and asking for an AMC

instance and then once they are integrated through the software we should be able to to build these like they we should be able to have like a nice userfriendly interface with some

pre-built audiences so for those who are familiar with the API those listeners you'll know the V2 profiles end point that basically make you make a request to this and it gives you with your

client ID ad laabs client ID you make a request to that endpoint it gives you all the Scopes the profile IDs you all the brands in every Marketplace that's

associated with Adlabs client ID there's another endpoint that does the exact same process but for AMC instances so when you call this it will list all the instances of all your clients that you

have access to and that instance ID is really the the connection in all the API requests that allows you to create the audiences attach them Etc and then through the API you should be able to

create these audiences and everything like that you don't need to be you don't have to be working on the actual like SQL AMC interface to build the initial audience you still have at this point in

time you still have to go into the query editor got it okay a lot of it can be reduced if you're willing to do manual steps once you create that initial audience in AMC it gives you the audience ID so typically if you're going

to scale this you'd have to use the API to fetch that then add it to the campaign but there are ways to manually get around this so at this point I really don't think you need to use the ads API to set any of this up get the

performance or adjust the bids it's really just the creation of the audience in the query editor when you click the change audience feature it gives a popup that shows a dropdown that you can

select any of the custom audiences that you have created so at this point I could confirm that if you create the audience using the query editor at that point that audience will populate in

this you can then add this manually adjust the bid boost and see all the performance so there really is no ads API needed for that whole portion interesting I wonder if one day they will change that button to instead of

saying change audience it will just say add audience and you can have multiple in there to confirm based on your comment you just made Stephen if I go into a campaign that does not yet have

an audience Associated it still says change audience but it shows that same table in my post with only one row that says all shoppers so it actually is looking at

all shoppers as an audience of totality of the campaign and so you should in then my assumption is be able to add retroactively to a campaign that's

already existing to add an AMC audience is after you after you get the connection and create custom audiences you can add it to existing campaigns yeah as I'm clicking through this I'm clicking on the popup to change audience

I'm in a campaign that has no audience added I can can pick the AMC audience that was already added to that other campaign and apply the bid boost so it does appear that you can add it retroactively and then does that table

of like the audience performance does that kind of become your primary place to to find reporting and and see the the difference in performance between the non audience versus the audience or are you still doing that through the the SQL

interface so not the SQL interface for that but rather the ads API you can pull the details um but at this point in time I don't

believe that there as a means to create any kind of reporting like you would a bulk file or keyword search term advertised as report I would expect over time that those would show up and

integrate in there but right now all we have is this view that unfortunately isn't even able to be downloaded makes sense that it would continue to progress and get more user friendly but um you know Dustin what's what's the future of

this look like and uh what what kind of big changes are you expecting or or the impact that we can can expect or or foresee with this type of change coming to to us yeah I think that's a really

important question to ask I think people need to ask that themselves as they're trying to integrate this because like if you remember when sponsor brand video was first rolled out it was just fomo

everybody wanted to do it hourly data with marketing stream for bid op or a day party and so looking at these things in my opinion as far as like a cost benefit analysis I think is always

important what it's going to require to implement this and scale it versus what you get out of it at this point in time I don't see this as something that's going to NE necessarily like transform

an account but what I do see 100% is the ability to peel out certain parts of the funnel the customer journey and segment them way way cleaner than we've ever

been able to so now we can now get better performance as we're building things out for you know the Loyalty end for subscribe and save versus the conversion and for abandoned carts and everything in between from awareness

down to loyalty and that directly feeds in especially important for agencies is being able to tell the story breaking out that data more cleanly on reporting

to be able to tell the story to the client and convey what's going on under the hood in a more meaningful way because if you have Auto campaigns you could be serving 20 different audiences

worth of Impressions through there but now that we can peel them out and actually break it into separate line items on a reporting to me that's one of the big value ads of this entire feature yeah I mean it basically allowed you to

take the audience targeting capability of DSP and put it into the best ad type vehicle which is sponsored products that you could push ads to potential Shoppers

with yes and be able to Target specific parts of that customer journey in a way that it's almost like running no placement modifiers and you're just kind of letting them go to whatever placement they want it's the same way where now

this is going to every part of the customer Journey or funnel that it wants and we can harness that in now do you think that is what dynamic up and down has kind of been all along because people have always wondered if if

Dynamic up and down was specifically increasing for you know certain Shoppers who were within a demographic that was more more likely to buy from you I've never thought of it that way honestly I've always just thought of it as a

likelihood to conversion and what Amazon's algorithm sees as that and then applying Dynamic up and down accordingly but there has to be some metrics behind it where they

intuitively say you know we want to apply a higher bid unless they just want to spend more of our money interesting so as we start kind of bringing this to

a close I have a few uh critical action questions or or just trying to get your insights in I know it's still very very new so we we'll certainly have to have you on at a later time to discuss more

but from what you've seen so far and and even though this is new to sponsor products you you guys have been using AMC for a while is there a specific

audience that you think think is just like the best like like for example with placements we would just say yeah top of search in a very general sense is going to be the the best converting is there a specific audience that you really like

that across multiple Brands just seems to get really good performance yeah the add to card abandonment and this the um subscribe and save um are two really good ones where I think people can go

with this is like you can say give me an audience of people who have only clicked on one sponsored ad or have only clicked on a a sponsor Brands ad and you can

really break things out more cleanly like that in a way that we never could before when you say subscribe and save are you talking about like current subscribe and save people or it's people who frequently subscribe and save no I'm

talking about people who meet the criteria of a subscribe and save so if somebody has purchased your product if you have a product that's you know the kind that you'd buy on a monthly basis supplements or whatever and we say okay

give me a list of people who have bought this twice in the last 60 days which is kind of like a subscrib save person but they actually haven't clicked the Subscribe and save button yet then we can go after them specifically a little

bit more aggressively and for our software we have had a massive influx of uh requests feature requests uh comments

people everyone's asking us like can we throw this into the the the bid algorithm which obviously we would love to but it it always comes down to prioritization of different features that we can do right and the big one

that we've had a lot of people requesting for a long time was day parting and that was actually the last topic we were talking about with you so so I'm curious in your estimation and opinion what would you if you were

building Adlabs which would you prioritize that you think is going to be more important to the impact on the the advertising would would you prioritize the day parting functionality or these

custom audiences H that's a really good question because I see a lot of benefits for both and not only that from a marketing standpoint just looking at yourselves internally because I would imagine that sometimes people want things that are not

necessarily the best for their account or like the lowest hanging fruit so if everybody say is crazy about this AMC audience functionality but their accounts really don't lend themselves that well to where it might help but it

might not help nearly as much as dayparting I think a lot of it depends on what kind of clients ad Labs is working with if they are really like full funnel multi click kind of

strategies or if a lot of them are just heavily aggressively focused on here's my a cost goals I don't care what the budget is that you spend as long as you hit the a cost gold and we're good I

feel like it for those kind of clients then doing day parting might hone that goal in a little bit better Taco a cost goals whereas if you're getting into people who have more of a full funnel if

they're incorporating DSP then I probably would lean a little bit more towards the AMC audience integration have you used pack views AMC tool I have

used it but not very much the way they kind of have their interface built out for for how you can create those reports and stuff is that generally how you guys are doing it internally at better Media or do you guys have a whole other

different type of way to visualize those customer Journeys or or whatever insights you're trying to pull it's something that I'm constantly working on how to make it how to improve that how to make it better I can't think of what

theirs looks like off the top of my head but there's only so many ways that you can you know link different ad types different campaign names visually zanky charts or

whatever what is your favorite thing about AMC like what's the single most valuable view or report that that you create for clients that is your favorite

I think everyone loves the most or the path to purchase and the overlap report and the reason that people love the path to purchase so much where initially I was thinking when I got more into studying AMC I think it's been around

now for almost two years is path to purchase would help us see things that are really important like for instance the way that last touch attribution works on Amazon you could have an a DSP

ad start you in the funnel to a sponsor Brands and a sponsor products and then make the purchase but the last ad gets all the attribution which means that your DSP

campaigns orders probably have really terrible row as but because of pth to purchase or because of being able to shift attribution in AMC so we say okay let's

do first touch attribution instead let's give all the sales credit to the first ad clicked that really helps us to see okay this DSP campaign that actually has a terrible row as this thing's actually

like one of the like you know gateway drugs if you will to the rest of the funnel that's actually leading a lot of people in but it never gets any real attributions so initially I liked to

look at it that way but I think what's more helpful at this point for people is going a little bit higher view a little bit more 30,000 foot View and just saying in general okay if I have an OLV

or an STV ad in my path to Pur purchase or if I have an an SD ad in my path to purchase what does that do to my conversion rate in my a cost overall so just looking at it a lot more broadly

and just saying okay if somebody only clicks a sponsor Brands ad what does that look like rather than looking at each specific campaign itself if that makes sense and is every ad type

supported in AMC including like sponsor TV sponsor display video sponsor brand videos everything yep and one of the iql that they have is the path to purchase

so you really if you if you want to get specific like what I'm talking about trying to break out the DSP product types then you do have to little customize the query a little bit but right now they have an iql where you can just copy paste that in and you can get

the path to purchase report awesome and then uh duson I believe you have a list of all the pre-built uh AMC SQL queries that people can just come and copy paste

into their AMC and you're going to share that if we get a bunch of comments asking for if you type SQL then Dustin's gonna share that right let's see did

I I think I did a post on that in the past but let's let's say if if you if we can get more than uh how many people we usually go for 50 comments it's a good

goal let's do that 50 comments and I'll I'll do that yeah 50 comment saying SQL and then Dustin will share his toolkit of pre-built audiences and all you got

to do is email your ad rep say hey we want access to AMC they get the instance and then you take Dustin's cheat sheet codes and you just copy paste those in and then you're downloading a ton of

reports and insights from your audiences and suddenly your sales double that's exactly how it works in Amazon it's that easy all right Andrew concluding

thoughts before we uh we give people the uh the sign off no no concluding thoughts for me I mean AMC very powerful tool Dustin thank you so much for joining and sharing your knowledge with

us giving us insight into something that we don't even have access to yet so this has been super helpful for us as well as the audience and everybody listening so thanks a lot and for you tuning in make

sure to like And subscribe and come back next week for another episode of bamaz on as podcast got 2025 coming down the pike see you guys see y

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