Amazon Marketing Stream, an Amazon product which provides advertisers with real-time data via push-based notifications, is giving advertisers the opportunity to level up in a way that hasn't been done before.
If your brand advertises on Amazon, there have likely been times that you’ve wished you had a reliable way to control ad spend on an hourly basis. There have probably been occasions when you wished you had hour by hour information on how your campaigns were performing. The right kind of data is necessary for maximum ad campaign performance, and Amazon hasn’t always made accessing this type of granular data easy.
However, Amazon has now made granular data available. In recent years, Amazon has been on a mission to provide their advertisers with more comprehensive data, and one of the ways in which they’re doing so is with the launch of Amazon Marketing Stream (AMS). The beta program for AMS launched in June of 2022, and has since expanded to all countries except India.
Amazon Marketing Stream, Explained
Amazon Marketing Stream (AMS) is a product that delivers ad campaign metrics in near real-time through push notifications, giving advertisers better insights into traffic, conversions, ad spend, and more. Previously, this type of information was only available on a daily basis. If advertisers wanted hourly data, they had to call the Amazon Ads API numerous times a day, making data collection tedious and creating API throttling, which limits the number of API calls advertisers can make.
With AMS, advertisers can have performance metrics delivered almost instantly, as opposed to aggregating the data over a certain period of time. This makes true dayparting possible on the Amazon Ads API. Dayparting is a strategy many advertisers use on other platforms to schedule or distribute their ad budget at specific times of day, like when conversion is highest, to better ensure campaign success.
How Amazon Marketing Stream works
AMS’s hourly performance metrics provide intraday insights that can be leveraged to better optimize ad campaigns. This helps advertisers in four main ways: budget, ad efficiency, traffic and conversion.
Budget
You can use the real-time budget reporting to increase your ROAS and decrease your ACoS. With real-time budget reporting, you can learn how much of your ad budget has been spent at a given time of day and increase it before the budget runs out. As we mentioned earlier, you can also track when your conversation rate is highest and allocate more ad spend for those specific windows. The budget usage data-set does include reporting on all sponsored ads (sponsored brand, sponsored display, and sponsored product), and will notify you every time that your budget increases by 5%.
Ad Efficiency
Currently, AMS is limited to sponsored product ads (with the only exception being budget reporting), but Amazon has made it easier to create campaigns with more efficiency. According to Amazon, “sponsored products performance metrics from Amazon Marketing Stream enables new dimensions such as the combination of targeting expression and ad placement, so you can not only optimize on your keywords but keywords by placement.”
Conversions and Traffic
Traffic reports contain click, impression, and cost data related to sponsored product campaigns. You can access the click data within 12 hours of the ad click. You can also invalidate clicks within the first 72 hours as part of the traffic validation process, and AMS will automatically deliver any adjustments to your queue. Conversion reports contain conversion data attributed to sponsored product campaigns. Sponsored product campaign conversions are reported based on the hour when the click on the ad occurred. Conversion data is reported daily, weekly, and monthly.
AMS is currently available through the Amazon Ads API. It’s also worth noting that there may be additional costs associated with using AMS because of the amount of data it will push and the fact that you’ll need to have a place to store said data.
Why you should use Amazon Marketing Stream
If you advertise on Amazon, it’s definitely worth considering AMS. The level of data that you’ll receive will enable you to optimize your campaigns in ways you’ve likely never been able to before, saving you both time and money. AMS is a code-free, automated way to ensure that your business is using marketing data and investment to their fullest potential. Leveraging the near real-time insights that AMS delivers will give you a competitive advantage and can only help your brand, in terms of growth and revenue.
If you’re looking for help with Amazon Marketing Stream, Blue Wheel is here to help! We are currently integrating AMS with our proprietary Amazon tool, Companion, which was designed with Search Term Isolation at its core. We developed Companion to power our strategic approach and complement our Amazon advertising services.
If you’d like to talk to an expert about Amazon Marketing Stream or any other Amazon advertising services, simply fill in the form below and we’ll be in touch.
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