Amazon Marketing Cloud Explained: How AMC Powers Smarter Ad Strategy

Most brands running ads on Amazon are flying with half the instrument panel lit up. Sponsored Products reporting tells you what happened inside that campaign. DSP reporting tells you what happened inside that one. Neither tells you what happened when a shopper saw a Sponsored Brands ad on Monday, a Streaming TV ad on Wednesday, and converted on Saturday after searching your brand name directly. That's the gap Amazon Marketing Cloud was built to close, and it's why AMC has become one of the most important tools in a serious Amazon advertiser's stack.

This guide breaks down what AMC actually is, how it differs from the reporting you already get in Seller Central and the Ads console, and how to put it to work building a smarter, more profitable ad strategy.

What is Amazon Marketing Cloud?

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a secure, privacy-safe data clean room where advertisers can query pseudonymized, event-level signals from across Amazon's advertising ecosystem to answer questions standard reporting can't. Amazon describes it as “a holistic measurement solution that helps advertisers perform custom analytics and generate cross-media insights”.

That's a mouthful, so here's the plain-English version. AMC pulls together the raw, granular data behind your Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Amazon DSP campaigns, then lets you (or your agency partner) write queries against it. Rather than looking at pre-built metrics like ACoS or ROAS in isolation, you can ask cross-channel, cross-format questions: How many customers saw a Sponsored Display ad and a DSP video ad before converting? What's the actual incremental lift from retargeting versus prospecting? Which audience segments drive repeat purchases versus one-and-done sales?

Amazon first introduced AMC as a beta product to help brands understand the total impact of their media campaigns across the full marketing funnel, from awareness through conversion, using metrics like median purchase and detail page view rates for audiences that were shown different combinations of ad formats. It's since expanded well beyond that original scope, but the core idea hasn't changed: give advertisers a privacy-safe way to see the whole customer journey, not just the last click.

How Does AMC Differ from Amazon Ads Reporting?

Standard Amazon Ads reporting gives you pre-aggregated, campaign-level metrics, while AMC gives you queryable, event-level data you can customize and combine across sources. Standard reporting provides a wide range of pre-defined metrics, but AMC enables deeper analytical flexibility in a privacy-safe clean room environment.

Think about the difference this way:

• Standard reporting answers questions Amazon has already anticipated: impressions, clicks, spend, ACoS, ROAS, by campaign or by day. It's fast, familiar, and it's what most sellers live in day to day for PPC management.
• AMC answers questions you define yourself. Through AMC, advertisers can query event-level and user-level signals across sources using custom metrics and attributes of their choice, with built-in aggregation thresholds ensuring user privacy. That means you can build a query that traces a shopper's path across Sponsored Ads and DSP, something no standard report is built to show.

The privacy architecture is what makes this possible without compromising customer trust. AMC combines Amazon Ads data with your own first-party inputs, such as CRM records or customer lists, while keeping personal identifiers pseudonymized. Aggregation thresholds mean you can't drill down to an individual shopper; insights only surface once enough users fall into a given segment. It's the same clean-room logic used across the broader retail media industry, and it's a big part of why AMC has earned advertiser trust as third-party cookies continue to erode elsewhere on the web.

Event-level data in AMC is also retained for a meaningfully longer window than standard reports. Multiple industry sources note that AMC can store event-level signals for extended lookback periods, which matters for brands with longer consideration cycles where the path to purchase spans weeks or months rather than a single session.

How Does AMC Actually Work?

AMC works by ingesting advertising signals into a secure clean room, then giving advertisers tools to query, visualize, and act on that data. At a high level, the workflow looks like this:

1. Signal collection. AMC aggregates event-level data from Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Amazon DSP, along with relevant shopper engagement signals like ad views, clicks, detail page visits, and purchases.
2. First-party integration. Advertisers can upload or connect their own data, like a CRM list or customer loyalty segment, so it can be analyzed alongside Amazon's signals without either party seeing the other's raw, identifiable data.
3. Querying. Historically, this meant writing SQL against Amazon's data tables. That's still an option for teams with strong analytics resources, and it's flexible enough to answer highly specific business questions.
4. Insight generation. Query results surface as reports, dashboards, or audience segments that can be activated directly in DSP or Sponsored Ads campaigns.

That SQL requirement used to be the biggest barrier to entry, and it's the reason AMC spent years being treated as a specialist tool reserved for data teams and agency partners. That's changed significantly. Amazon has rolled out no-code and low-code templates in the AMC interface, so advertisers who are new to AMC can access insights like campaign performance and audience insights with just a few clicks, while users with SQL expertise can use the same templates for quick insights or go deeper through the query editor for advanced, custom-query creation.

Amazon has also introduced Ads Agent, a natural-language assistant built on within the console. Instead of writing a query line by line, advertisers can describe what they want to know and Ads Agent helps generate it. Ads Agent helps teams reduce the time required to develop complex queries in AMC from hours to minutes, which is a meaningful shift for teams that understand their business questions but don't have a dedicated analyst on staff.

Who Should Use AMC?

AMC is most useful for Amazon advertisers who run campaigns across more than one ad type or who have first-party customer data they want to bring into the picture, though access has expanded to make it usable at nearly every spend level. For years, AMC access leaned toward larger advertisers running Amazon DSP alongside Sponsored Ads, since DSP is where cross-format attribution questions get complicated fastest. That's no longer the dividing line it used to be.

Amazon extended self-service AMC access to all Sponsored Ads advertisers, not just DSP spenders. "With this update, we're making Amazon Marketing Cloud available to all sponsored ads advertisers," said Aby Angilivelil, Director of Amazon Marketing Cloud at Amazon Ads, adding that advertisers would be able to easily access practical insights powered by AMC to drive measurable growth and build stronger connections with their most valuable customers. Access now lives directly inside the Ads console under Measurement & Reporting, with instant access that removes the need for partner or account representative intervention.

That said, AMC delivers the most value to advertisers who fit a few patterns:

• You're running Sponsored Ads and DSP together and want to understand overlap, sequencing, and incremental lift rather than treating each channel as its own silo.
• You have first-party customer data (CRM lists, loyalty segments, past purchasers) you want to activate as custom audiences.
• Your sales cycle isn't a single-session, last-click story. Considered purchases, higher price points, and repeat-purchase categories benefit most from AMC's longer lookback windows and path-to-conversion queries.
• You're spending enough to generate meaningful data volume. AMC's privacy thresholds mean very low-volume advertisers may not have enough signal for granular segment-level insights to surface.

If you're earlier stage and running Sponsored Products only, AMC is worth understanding conceptually, but your time is likely better spent nailing campaign structure, keyword strategy, and account foundations first. AMC is a magnifying glass. It's most powerful once there's something substantial to look at.

What Can You Actually Do With AMC?

AMC's two biggest use cases are custom performance measurement and custom audience building, both of which go well beyond what standard Amazon Ads reporting supports.

Cross-channel & Multi-touch Measurement

This is the use case AMC was originally built to solve. Instead of evaluating Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and DSP as separate silos, AMC lets you trace how they interact along a single customer journey. A brand can use AMC to answer questions like:

• How many customers who ultimately purchased were exposed to more than one ad format, and how much did that overlap actually contribute versus double-counting the same conversion in two reports?
• What's the real incremental impact of retargeting, once you account for shoppers who would have converted anyway?
• How does reach and frequency across formats correlate with purchase behavior, so you can find the point where more impressions stop adding value?

This matters because last-click attribution, the default lens in most standard reporting, tends to overcredit the touchpoint closest to conversion and undercredit the awareness and consideration activity that got the shopper there in the first place. AMC gives you a way to correct for that distortion, which directly informs DSP strategy and budget allocation decisions.

Custom Audience Building

AMC also functions as an audience-building engine, letting advertisers construct segments based on combinations of signals that standard targeting options don't support. AMC allows advertisers to expand and customize audience options beyond standard Amazon Ads audiences, using cross-source and cross-media signals over a multi-year lookback window. Advertisers have control over how to construct custom queries, supported by Ads Agent, to generate audiences that best meet their advertising needs and business goals.

In practice, that could mean building a segment of shoppers who viewed a high-margin ASIN but didn't purchase, or a lookalike audience modeled on your highest-LTV repeat customers. Once built, those segments can be activated directly through Sponsored Ads or DSP campaigns, turning an analytical insight into a live targeting strategy without leaving the AMC environment.

Machine Learning & Custom Modeling

For advertisers with more advanced analytics needs, AMC now supports building proprietary models directly on top of its data. Amazon has introduced the ability to create machine learning models with AMC Custom Models, training and deploying proprietary modeling algorithms using Amazon Marketing Cloud signals in a privacy-safe environment. This is a more advanced capability best suited to brands with dedicated data science resources or a specialized agency partner, but it signals where AMC is headed: from a reporting tool into a genuine analytics and modeling platform.

Get Started with AMC

Getting started with AMC means confirming eligibility, connecting your data sources, and choosing between no-code templates, low-code templates, or custom SQL queries based on your team's technical depth.

1. Check your access. If you're running Sponsored Ads, you likely already have direct access inside your Ads console under Measurement & Reporting. DSP advertisers have historically had more established access paths, and Amazon has been extending the same streamlined experience there as well.

2. Get your foundation in order first. AMC surfaces insight from data you're already generating, so the quality of what it tells you is only as good as the campaign structure and first-party data feeding it. Before diving into AMC queries, make sure your Amazon foundation, meaning listings, pricing, inventory, and PPC structure, is solid enough to generate clean signal. AMC will amplify problems in a messy account just as readily as it reveals opportunities in a healthy one.

3. Start with templates, not raw SQL. Unless you have a dedicated analyst, start with the no-code and low-code templates in the AMC use case library. These are pre-built for common questions like campaign overlap, path-to-conversion, and new-to-brand analysis, and they'll get you real insight without requiring a SQL background.

4. Bring in Ads Agent for custom questions. When a template doesn't quite answer the question you're asking, use Ads Agent's natural-language query generation before jumping straight to manual SQL. It narrows the gap between "I have a business question" and "I have a working query" considerably.

5. Consider a partner for advanced use cases. For incrementality testing, custom modeling, or building multi-touch attribution frameworks from scratch, working with a certified Amazon Ads partner (like AO2) that specializes in AMC can shortcut months of trial and error. This is especially true for brands spending seriously on Amazon DSP, where the complexity, and the potential upside, is highest.

What Are the Limitations of AMC?

AMC is powerful, but it isn't a substitute for a healthy Amazon account, and it has real constraints worth understanding before you invest heavily in it.

• Data thresholds limit granularity. Privacy-safe aggregation means AMC won't surface insights on very small audience segments. If your account doesn't generate enough volume, some of the more granular queries simply won't return usable results.
• It's an analytics layer, not a media buying tool. AMC doesn't serve ads itself. It informs strategy and can activate audiences into DSP or Sponsored Ads, but the actual campaign execution still happens in those platforms. Treat AMC as the map, not the vehicle.
• Insight without action is wasted spend. AMC can tell you that retargeting isn't driving much incremental lift, but that insight is only valuable if your team is set up to actually reallocate budget in response. Brands get the most value from AMC when they pair it with an execution team that can turn findings into campaign changes quickly.
• There's still a learning curve. Even with no-code templates and Ads Agent narrowing the gap, interpreting AMC's output correctly, and knowing which questions are worth asking in the first place, takes advertising expertise. This is where a lot of brands choose to bring in outside support rather than build the capability from scratch.

Turning AMC Insight into Ad Strategy

AMC's real value shows up when its insights actually change what you do. A brand that discovers its DSP retargeting is mostly reaching shoppers who would have converted anyway can shift that budget toward prospecting and new-to-brand audiences. A brand that sees a specific creative-and-audience combination driving outsized detail page views can double down on it in Sponsored Brands. A brand that finds a gateway ASIN quietly driving basket size across the catalog can build a campaign strategy around it rather than optimizing that one product in isolation.

That loop, insight to decision to execution to remeasurement, is where AMC earns its place in an advertiser's stack. It's not a replacement for strong full-funnel DSP management or disciplined PPC strategy.

Building an AMC-informed Ad Strategy

Amazon Marketing Cloud represents a real shift in how advertisers can understand performance on Amazon: less last-click, more full picture. As access expands and the tooling gets easier to use, AMC is becoming less of a specialist's playground and more of a standard part of a mature Amazon advertising program.

The brands getting the most out of it aren't necessarily the ones with the most technical resources. They're the ones asking sharp business questions, backed by clean data and a team ready to act on what AMC reveals. That combination, more than any single dashboard or query, is what turns fragmented ad data into a genuinely smarter ad strategy.

If you're evaluating whether AMC makes sense for your brand, or you want a partner who already lives in it daily, AO2's advertising and DSP team can help you figure out where the opportunity actually is.