- AMC is a clean room: it combines Amazon advertising data with your own, but only returns aggregated results.
- The most useful analyses cover conversion paths, campaign overlap, frequency and new-to-brand customers.
- Queries can be turned into audiences for DSP and Sponsored Ads.
- It makes sense when ad spend is spread across several formats and someone can actually read the data.
Standard Amazon Ads reports tell you how much each campaign sold, but not how campaigns work together. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) exists to answer exactly that question. Here is what you can really analyse, which audiences you can build and which limits are worth knowing before you start.
What Amazon Marketing Cloud is
AMC is a clean room: a secure environment where Amazon makes advertising events (impressions, clicks) and purchase events available at individual user level, pseudonymised. You never see an individual user. You write a query, AMC runs it on the raw data and returns only the aggregated result.
Queries are written in SQL. For those who don’t use it, Amazon provides sample queries (the so-called instructional queries) and, in recent updates, no-code templates and an assistant that helps you build analyses. Since 2025 Sponsored Ads advertisers can switch on AMC themselves from the advertising console, including in the main European countries, without going through an Amazon contact.
AMC holds data from Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP, plus conversion events on Amazon. You can also upload your own data (from your own online shop, for example), always in a protected form.
The analyses worth doing
AMC can do a lot. In the projects we run, these are the questions that most often lead to real decisions.
Conversion paths
Which combinations of touchpoints come before a purchase? For example: how many customers saw a DSP ad, then searched for the brand, then clicked a Sponsored Brands ad before buying. This shows the role of upper-funnel formats, which often look inefficient in standard reports because they rarely get the last click.
Channel overlap
How many users were exposed to both Sponsored Products and DSP? Does the conversion rate of people who see both differ from those who see only one? If combined exposure converts much better, there’s a case for coordinating budgets and audiences.
New-to-brand customers
New-to-brand metrics are already in the reports, but AMC lets you cross them with timing, formats and products. You can see which campaigns genuinely bring in new customers and which mostly pick up people who would have bought anyway.
Frequency
How many exposures does it take before the likelihood of purchase stops rising? This analysis lets you set more sensible frequency caps in DSP, so you stop spending on users who are already saturated.
Time to conversion
How many days pass between the first ad touchpoint and the purchase? For high-priced or repeat-purchase products, the answer changes how you read a campaign’s results in its first week.
Audiences for DSP and Sponsored Ads
AMC isn’t only for reading data. The same query logic can be turned into audiences you can activate. A few practical examples:
- users who added to basket in the last 30 days without buying;
- customers who bought a consumable product and are close to their repurchase point;
- users exposed to a video who have never visited the product page;
- lookalike audiences based on repeat buyers.
These audiences are used as targets in DSP, as targeting in Sponsored Display and, for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, as a basis for raising bids on the people in them. This is where AMC stops being an analysis exercise and starts affecting the budget.
What AMC doesn’t do
There are clear limits, and knowing them stops you expecting too much.
| Expectation | What actually happens |
|---|---|
| Seeing individual customers | Impossible. Results are always aggregated, and rows below a minimum user threshold are dropped. |
| Analysing very small products or segments | With few users per row, a lot of data disappears because of aggregation thresholds. Group things together. |
| Unlimited history | Available history has a window set by Amazon: check it in your own instance before planning long-range analyses. |
| Real-time data | There’s a delay between the event and the data being available. AMC doesn’t replace daily reports. |
| Seeing competitors’ data | No. AMC only contains events linked to your campaigns and your products. |
| Answers without questions | AMC doesn’t produce insights on its own. Without a clear hypothesis you get tables, not decisions. |
There’s also a practical limit: badly written queries return numbers that look plausible but are wrong. A mistake in the time window or the attribution changes the conclusions. You need someone who can sense-check the results against common sense and the standard reports.
Who should use it
AMC makes sense when there’s enough data and enough formats to compare. In general it’s worth it if:
- you invest in several formats (at least Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, ideally Display or DSP too);
- your volumes are high enough that aggregation thresholds don’t empty out the results;
- you have concrete questions about budget and the role of each channel, not just curiosity;
- you have someone in-house or a partner who can write and check queries (this is the work we do in our Amazon Marketing Cloud analysis projects).
If you only spend on Sponsored Products across a handful of products, the best work is still in campaign structure and the basic reports. AMC comes later, once the picture gets bigger.
How to start without getting lost
The most effective approach is to start from a single business question, not a list of queries. A process that works:
- Pick a decision you need to make, for example whether to increase the DSP budget or move it to Sponsored Brands.
- Turn the decision into a measurable question: do users exposed to DSP convert more when they also see Sponsored Brands?
- Use the sample queries first and adapt them, rather than writing from scratch.
- Compare the totals with the console reports. If they diverge a lot, there’s a mistake to find.
- Turn the result into an action: an audience, a frequency cap, a budget shift.
- Repeat the same analysis a few weeks later to see whether the decision worked.
Example: a brand running DSP and Sponsored Products finds that users exposed to both convert far more often than those who see only one. The resulting decision might be to build an audience of people who saw DSP and raise Sponsored Products bids on those users. The result then has to be checked, not taken for granted.
What to do now
Check whether AMC is already active in your advertising console and look at the sample queries available. Write down the two or three questions about your advertising that you can’t answer today with the standard reports. If at least one is about how different formats interact or about customer value over time, AMC is the right tool for it.
Frequently asked questions
Does Amazon Marketing Cloud cost anything?
Access to AMC for eligible advertisers has no base fee: you switch it on from the advertising console. Some additional data or features may come with different terms, so check in your own console. The real cost is the time of whoever writes and interprets the queries.
Do you need SQL to work with AMC?
Not for basic analyses: there are sample queries and no-code templates. For custom analyses, and to check that results are correct, knowing SQL makes a big difference. Many brands rely on a partner for this part.
Does AMC work for brands selling as a Vendor?
Yes. AMC works on advertising data and purchase events on Amazon, regardless of whether the brand sells as a Seller or a Vendor. What matters is the volume of campaign data, not the selling model.