Amazon Advertising Glossary — Platform
What is Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)?
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is Amazon's privacy-safe clean-room analytics platform. It allows advertisers to query event-level Amazon Ads data (impressions, clicks, conversions across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and DSP) using SQL, with shopper identifiers anonymized. AMC is the only way to do true cross-channel attribution on Amazon — combining Sponsored Ads + DSP + (in some cases) first-party CRM data — and the only way to build custom audiences from your own conversion patterns. Access is gated to brands running Amazon DSP.
What AMC is used for
Cross-channel attribution
Core use case
Measure the combined impact of Sponsored Products + Sponsored Brands + Sponsored Display + DSP on a single conversion. The only way to see true incremental ROAS across formats.
Custom audience creation
High value
Build audiences based on event-level behavior — e.g. "viewed competitor X but bought my Y in past 30d." Push these audiences back into DSP for retargeting.
Path-to-purchase analysis
Strategic
Understand the sequence of touchpoints leading to a conversion (e.g. DSP impression → SP click → 3 days later → purchase). Informs budget allocation across the funnel.
New-to-brand (NTB) analytics
Foundational
AMC provides per-campaign, per-keyword NTB metrics that the standard Amazon Ads dashboards do not. Critical for brand-acquisition KPIs.
Practical AMC use cases
1. View-through attribution for DSP
Amazon DSP's reported ACoS is click-only by default. AMC reveals the view-through component (impressions that did not click but resulted in a purchase within 14–30 days). DSP true ROAS is typically 2–3x the platform-reported number once view-through is included.
2. Audience overlap analysis
Identify shoppers who saw both your DSP impression and your Sponsored Products ad, vs only one. Quantifies the lift of running the two formats together — almost always higher CVR than either alone.
3. Subscribe & Save lifetime value
Combine AMC ad data with subscribe-and-save downstream revenue to calculate true LTV per acquired customer. Justifies higher CAC tolerance for products with strong repeat-purchase patterns.
4. Competitor co-shopping audiences
Build audiences from shoppers who viewed your top 5 competitors' product pages but did not purchase. Push back into DSP as a retargeting audience. This is one of the highest-ROI custom audiences brands typically run.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who can use Amazon Marketing Cloud?
AMC access is gated to brands actively running Amazon DSP. Sponsored-Ads-only brands (Sponsored Products + Sponsored Brands + Sponsored Display, no DSP) cannot access AMC. Once DSP is active, AMC is provisioned automatically and accessed via the Amazon Ads console or via a dedicated API.
What is the difference between AMC and Amazon DSP?
Amazon DSP is the programmatic ad-buying platform — you use it to run display, video, and audio ads. Amazon Marketing Cloud is the analytics layer that sits on top of DSP (and Sponsored Ads), letting you query event-level data with SQL to do cross-channel attribution and custom audience creation. DSP buys; AMC measures and segments.
Do I need to know SQL to use AMC?
AMC is SQL-based, but Amazon provides a library of pre-built "Instructional Queries" for common analyses (cross-channel attribution, audience overlap, NTB). For custom analyses or audience creation, basic SQL fluency is required. Most brands work with an Amazon-certified agency partner like Headline that has a library of proven AMC queries and can adapt them to specific business questions.
How is AMC privacy-safe?
AMC is a "clean room" — shopper-level data is anonymized at the row level, and queries that would re-identify individuals are blocked by aggregation thresholds (typically minimum-cohort sizes of 100). You can analyze patterns across millions of shoppers but cannot extract individual shopper records. This makes AMC compliant with Amazon's privacy commitments.
What does an AMC implementation cost?
AMC itself is free with active DSP usage — no per-query fee. The cost is the analytics work to extract value from it. Headline includes AMC analysis as a standard part of DSP-active client engagements. For brands wanting just AMC analytics without full agency engagement, project-based AMC audits typically run $3K–$10K depending on scope.
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