“As part of Amazon’s Partner Development Program, Amerge is at the forefront of product development for AMC betas, features, and customisations.”
At Amerge, we are proud to have a remarkable team of individuals who continually inspire us with their knowledge and hard work. Today, we are thrilled to interview our US Client Strategy Lead, Kurt Dikeman. As an Amazon Ads AE from 2019-2024, Kurt worked with hundreds of brands in the Beauty and Hardlines category while AMC launched and evolved. Let’s delve into Kurt’s captivating journey in this insightful interview, where he will reveal some of his Amazon Marketing Cloud expertise.
Understanding Customer Journey
In a privacy-focused advertising landscape, how is the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) helping brands gain deeper insights into their customer journeys on Amazon? What advanced reporting capabilities does AMC offer, and how can these insights be used to optimize advertising campaigns across Amazon Ads products?
“As the advertising industry continues to evolve and browsers phase out third-party cookies, brands are seeking new ways to measure attribution and campaign performance across channels. Amazon addresses this with Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), a data clean room that combines search, display, retail, and third-party data that can be utilized for custom reporting, audience-building, and advanced analysis.
AMC aggregates customer interactions across different ad types that have traditionally lived in separate silos. This advanced reporting provides advertisers with a holistic view of the customer journey and how different campaigns contribute to conversion. Examples of key AMC reports include:
🔹Path to Conversion: Identify how users move between campaign groups at different phases of the funnel. This report helps advertisers better understand the optimal customer journey and can influence both media mix and targeting strategy.
🔹Multi-Touch Attribution: Amazon’s default attribution model utilizes last touch attribution, which can often inflate metrics of lower-funnel media. AMC provides multiple attribution models that can provide a clear picture of media impact at all phases of the advertising funnel.
🔹Advertising Channel Overlap: Informs advertisers of lift when customers engage with multiple ad types (i.e. Search & Display Ads) v. exposure to only one.
🔹Impression Frequency: Identify the optimal number of impressions to drive purchase before reaching diminishing returns. This can direct frequency caps and ultimately cut down wasted spend.”
Unique Targeting & Attribution
What unique targeting capabilities do AMC Audiences offer compared to standard Amazon Ads options? How does multi-touch attribution within AMC help brands understand the complete customer journey across different touchpoints?
“Amazon’s DSP allows brands to access retail data such as searches, detail page views, and purchases to target relevant shoppers across a full suite of display and video inventory. AMC takes this a step further by unlocking additional customer behaviours, such as add-to-cart, subscribe-and-save, frequency and more. This allows brands to build a more comprehensive targeting strategy by utilizing not only customer actions, but volume and frequency of those actions as well.
Example 1:
🔹Amazon DSP: Visited detail page in the last 30 days, but not purchased.
🔹Amazon DSP w/ AMC: Visited detail page 3 times in last 30 days, added item to cart, but did not purchase.
Frequency caps are an effective way to minimize wasted spend by controlling the amount of times a single user is exposed to an ad. With traditional DSP campaigns, however, advertisers are limited to daily/hourly caps. With AMC, brands can identify optimal frequency for purchase using the Impression Frequency report, and add negative targeting to campaigns to ensure shoppers who have not taken action after multiple ad exposures are detargeted from the campaign.
Example 2:
🔹Amazon DSP: Don’t show this ad more than 3 times in 1 days per user
🔹Amazon DSP w/ AMC: Don’t show this ad more than 3 times in 1 days per user, and exclude users who have seen the ad 5 total times.
AMC also allows brands to build audiences based on ad types a customer has been exposed to (i.e. Sponsored Brand views). This can be combined with the previously mentioned path-to-conversion report to bring AMC data-driven insights into DSP targeting.
Example 3:
🔹Amerge utilized this strategy with a popular magazine brand seeking to increase conversion among new-to-brand customers. Path-to-conversion reporting showed one path that drove significantly higher returns than others, but accounted for a low volume of overall purchases:
🔹SB Video > Sponsored Brands > Sponsored Products > DSP
To test this insight, Amerge created an audience of customers that had followed the same path (excluding DSP) and added this audience to DSP targeting. Within 3 weeks, the audience has reached the highest NTB ROAS performance on the plan, with NTB ROAS being 62% higher than the second-best performer.”
Amerge’s Value Proposition
How does Amerge leverage the proprietary reporting dashboard Amerge View to provide value to advertisers? (and) Can you tell us more about Amerge’s AMC-related custom solutions?
“While AMC reporting and audiences alone are effective in providing a deeper understanding of a brands ad performance, Amerge can take this a step further in offering customizations to AMC dashboards. As part of Amazon’s Partner Development Program, Amerge is at the forefront of product development for AMC betas, features, and customisations.
One such example is Amerge’s custom grouping options within Amerge View. For reasons of user privacy, AMC has thresholds in place that prevent one from obtaining data that is too granular. Amerge solves for this by allowing brands to group similar campaigns, significantly increasing the amount of campaign data that can be accessed through AMC. The user has full customization in how they want to structure these groupings to answer key business questions.
Further, Amerge is always exploring new ways to innovate on our client’s behalf. We’re always open to hearing new ideas from partner brands and exploring new reporting options within AMC.”
Benefits Beyond AMC Expertise
Beyond Amerge’s AMC expertise, what additional benefits do brands gain by partnering with Amerge?
“AMC is just one of the services in Amerge’s robust portfolio. As a full-service Amazon agency with 170+ years of ex-Amazonian experience, Amerge is suited to support brands in all facets of their Amazon business. Our four key pillars are below.
Our award-winning proprietary software automates campaign optimizations. The true backbone of the company, however, is our people. With over 170+ years of ex-Amazon experience across numerous departments, we have tackled Amazon challenges from both inside and out, developing a full understanding of what it takes to succeed in the e-commerce environment.”
Challenges & Solutions
What are the most common challenges faced by brands who have previously worked with other Amazon agencies and how Amerge tackles these challenges?
“As an Amazon Ads AE from 2019-2024, I worked with hundreds of brands in the Beauty and Hardlines category while AMC launched and evolved. The biggest issue I saw brands encounter with AMC agency partnerships was the lack of a true human element. They just didn’t listen.
Every brand selling on Amazon faces unique challenges that they are attempting to solve with data. While there are certainly similarities in how you can tackle these problems, there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution as it pertains to reporting. I’ve seen too many agencies (and salespeople for that matter) who develop canned responses and recommendations without truly listening to what their clients are telling them.
This is where Amerge shines. We have custom solutions in place to answer actual business questions that brands are asking us. If for some reason our custom solutions can’t answer those questions, then let’s see if we can build something new that will.”
Eligibility & Awareness
Do brands need to meet any requirements to access AMC features? From your point of view, what is the awareness of AMC’s possibilities among clients who are selling on Amazon?
“AMC is eligible for any brand who is actively utilizing Amazon’s advertising services. All it takes is setting up an initial AMC “instance” through your Amazon AE or through a third party, such as Amerge. I feel as though the majority of Amazon vendors and sellers are aware of AMC, but don’t truly understand the vast amount of insights that are possible, and we have only scratched the surface.”
How can brands willing to explore their AMC opportunities get in touch with you?
“They can always reach out at kurt.dikeman@amerge.com or send me a DM via LinkedIn.”
