Amazon Marketing Stream: A Guide to the Real-Time Advertising Future

Amazon Marketing Stream: A Guide to the Real-Time Advertising Future

By Soraya Danica Dimayuga, Content Writer, AMZ Pathfinder

What is Amazon Marketing Stream?

Amazon Marketing Stream (AMS) is a new data-streaming service that has recently emerged in the world of Amazon advertising. AMS allows advertisers to access new Amazon data sets in near real-time, discover detailed intraday insights, receive notifications on campaign state changes, and use this data to develop better solutions for ongoing campaign optimizations.

But while everything about AMS is exciting, it is essential to note that Amazon Marketing Stream is still pretty new. It is currently only available as a beta in North America, including the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

While you’re keeping an eye on this emerging tool, here are more details to help you explore its benefits for your advertising efforts.

 

How does Amazon Marketing Stream work?

Amazon Marketing Stream provides advertisers and partners with real-time delivery of data to their own AWS destinations, eliminating the need to repeatedly call the Advertising API throughout the day. Unlike the current method of “pulling” report snapshots, Amazon Marketing Stream “pushes” updates in real-time, providing you with more frequent and accurate insights into your campaign’s performance. Think of it like a push notification to your phone vs an API requesting data from a server.

Using Amazon Marketing Stream enables you to quickly obtain and process these new advertising data dimensions. It also helps save time and makes things run smoother by allowing users to make far fewer API calls to get up-to-date information on their advertising efforts.

 

Benefits of Amazon Marketing Stream

Using Amazon Marketing Stream for your advertising campaigns can provide some cutting-edge benefits to your business:

• Hourly performance metrics: Traffic and conversion data for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display are summarized on an hourly basis, as opposed to daily granularity. This means that you’ll finally be able to understand how your campaigns perform based on the time of day, and with the right tools make changes based on that data to improve your KPIs.
• Real-time insights: Provides greater transparency into your ad campaigns’ With real-time data insights, you can quickly identify which campaigns are within budget, those that have gone out of budget, or are nearing that threshold, which enables you to make data-driven decisions to allocate your ad spend and maximize your impact.
• Minimized API calls: Eliminates the need for frequent API calls for intra-day updates, which can prevent throttling and inaccurate This means that you can receive more frequent updates on your campaign’s performance without having to worry about being limited by the number of API calls.

 

Amazon Marketing Stream Datasets

Currently, AMS comprises two data categories: reporting and messaging.

The messaging component of Amazon Marketing Stream enables near real-time notifications about entity state changes and other events. Currently, messaging includes updates on budget consumption, and sends a notification whenever a budget allotment changes by 5% or more. In the future, messaging will likely expand to include notifications about product eligibility, bid recommendations, and other key events. While important to understand, the messaging feature is not as immediately useful as the reporting feature.

Amazon Marketing Stream reporting contains an advertiser’s summarized, processed performance data, including hourly updates on traffic and conversions, along with the required data dimensions for analytics. The data provided is not raw, but instead processed to provide a more organized and condensed view of campaign performance.

 

Sponsored Products Traffic and Conversion Data

For Sponsored Products campaigns, sp-conversion data are reported based on the hour in which the attributed click took place. Daily, weekly, and monthly reports are available for conversion data, with revisions to conversion data possible up to sixty days after the initial click.

The sp-traffic dataset consists of click, impression, and cost data associated with Sponsored Products campaigns. You can access initial click data within 12 hours of the ad click. During the 72 hours following the initial report, clicks may be invalidated as part of the traffic validation process. Any adjustments made to the data will be automatically delivered to your queue through Amazon Marketing Stream, so you don’t have to worry about revising old data manually.

 

Sponsored Display Signals

For Sponsored Display sd-traffic is integrated worldwide to enable partners and advertisers to access performance metrics and updates on campaign modifications every hour in almost real-time. This means you can now acquire Sponsored Display KPIs such as orders, clicks,

new-to-brand sales, and attributable sales by each hour of the day. Hourly views and clicks (vCPM) can even be identified to generate more conversions.

The sd-traffic dataset consists of the click, cost data, and impression data related to Sponsored Display campaigns.

 

Amazon Marketing Stream Use Cases

Having an understanding of the data that’s accessible through AMS, here are the ways you can utilize AMS to improve your advertising efforts:

 

Adjusting bids

With Amazon Marketing Stream, you can use historical hourly traffic data to adjust your bidding strategy by the hour rather than once a day. For instance, if you observe high traffic for a specific keyword during a particular day and time window, you can bid more aggressively during that time to maximize your campaign’s performance. You can capitalize on high conversion rates during select times of day by increasing your CPC bid.

 

Adjusting budgets

AMS allows you to understand campaign budgets more accurately based on ad spend to prevent budget depletion. Before AMS, it was still possible to adjust budgets anytime but without the knowledge of the best time to do it. Conversely, if ad spend has been lower than your budget allocation, you can increase your bids to be more aggressive. Amazon Marketing Stream provides insights on critical hours for your business, such as times of day when conversions are high and cost-per-click is low, enabling you to manage your campaigns within your budget effectively. These detailed insights can help you ensure that your campaigns remain within your available budget.

Determining the best high-converting ad placement/hour combinations

AMS offers the ability to determine the best ad placements for their products. One of the ways it achieves this is by analyzing hourly performance data to identify which ad placements perform best at specific times of the day.

AMS goes even further by examining what placement/hour combinations work best through day-parting, allowing advertisers to intelligently modify bids with the same budget by placement feature to create more impact. Doing this then creates more efficient ads with reduced ACoS % and helps advertisers reach consumers who are more receptive to their campaigns at the right place and time.

 

Enhancing campaign performance

Utilize hourly performance metrics to gain real-time insights for advanced optimization strategies. For instance, when conversion rates are high during specific hours, consider increasing bid amounts or managing campaign spending to stay within budget during those times. Amazon Marketing Stream’s Sponsored Products performance metrics offer additional opportunities to optimize campaigns, including targeting expression and ad placement combinations, allowing for keyword optimization not only by phrase but also by placement.

 

How to Set Up Amazon Marketing Stream

To use Amazon Marketing Stream (AMS), you need to meet certain requirements. Here are the main requirements:

1. You must have the necessary access to Amazon accounts: To use AMS, you must be a registered seller on com and have an AWS account in which to store the data.

2. Gain access to developer resources: AMS users need to have access to Amazon Ads API as well and other important resources needed by developers

3. Have products to promote: AMS is designed for promoting products on You’ll need to have at least one product listed for sale on Amazon to use AMS.

4. Establish a valid payment method: To use AMS, you’ll need to provide a valid credit card or bank account information for billing purposes.

5. Meet the minimum budget requirement: The minimum budget for a Sponsored Products campaign is $1 per day, and the minimum budget for a Sponsored Brands campaign is $100 per campaign.

6. Comply with Amazon’s advertising policies: Amazon has straightforward advertising policies that you must comply These policies cover things like prohibited content, trademark violations, and intellectual property rights.

Once you meet these requirements, you can sign up for an Amazon Advertising account and start using AMS to understand your advertising data on a higher level.

Another way to utilize AMS is by working with a tool or an agency that integrates this data for you. This option can be more convenient and less time-consuming than building your own integration with AMS. Integration tools like Intentwise help analyze AMS data and provide insights to improve your advertising campaigns. Some Amazon sellers partner with agencies like us that use similar tools to integrate AMS data to help save time and resources while still gaining valuable insights into their advertising performance on Amazon.

 

Challenges of Using Amazon Marketing Stream

While Amazon Marketing Stream provides a powerful advertising service, it also comes with its own set of challenges that businesses need to be aware of.

Here are some of the challenges you may face when using Amazon Marketing Stream:

 

Insufficient data for making informed decisions

Relying on a small amount of data may lead to incorrect assumptions about the performance of your campaign, which can lead to ineffective strategies. For instance, if you only analyze data from two Wednesdays, it may not provide a comprehensive understanding of the behavior of your target audience, and may not be enough to determine what actions to take for future Wednesdays. In order to obtain reliable insights and make appropriate adjustments, it is recommended to aggregate data over a longer period of time, such as 4, 6, or even 10 Wednesdays, to help identify trends, patterns, and behaviors that can help refine your marketing strategy and achieve better results.

 

Technical complexities and requirements

Amazon Marketing Stream’s advertising platform can be complex and difficult to set up and navigate, especially for those who are new to advertising on Amazon. You may need to spend time learning how to use the platform effectively and efficiently. Developer and data engineering skills may be required.

 

Ongoing beta testing

As the platform is still in its early stages, it is expected that the platform will experience its fair share of bugs and that you will be needing the help of software to gather some data that are currently unavailable to it. Amazon will continue to make improvements and introduce new features to enhance its capabilities.

 

Quality and misuse of data

The quality of your data is crucial to the success of your campaigns. You need to ensure that your data is accurate and up-to-date and that you are using it effectively to make informed decisions. Experience handling large datasets and using analytics software to properly extract actionable insights from that data is required.

 

Other tools are still needed

Businesses still need to use keyword research tools, analytics platforms, and bid management software to optimize their campaigns and achieve their advertising goals. Additionally, businesses that operate on multiple channels may need to integrate their Amazon Marketing Stream campaigns with other advertising tools and platforms, which can add complexity to their advertising strategy. While using other software can be helpful, it can also add costs and require additional time and resources to manage. AMS by itself is not a complete solution.

 

Best Practices for Using Amazon Marketing Stream

To help you create effective campaigns and achieve your advertising goals on Amazon, here are some best practices for using Amazon Marketing Stream:

 

Set clear goals

It is essential to define your marketing objectives and identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be used to measure success. The KPIs you set should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). It is also important to establish realistic expectations for your campaign, taking into account your budget, competition, and the performance of similar products. Once your goals are defined, it is recommended to regularly review and analyze the hourly data you’ve taken from AMS to ensure that your campaign is on track to achieve your goals.

 

Set a budget and bidding strategy

Begin by researching the average cost-per-click (CPC) for your product category and set a budget that is realistic and aligns with your goals. It is also recommended to set a daily budget limit to ensure that you do not exceed your budget. When determining your bidding strategy, consider the bid amount, the relevance of your keywords, and your conversion rate. It is recommended to bid aggressively on high-performing keywords and to regularly review and adjust your bids to optimize your campaign’s performance.

By setting a clear budget and bidding strategy that aligns with your goals and regularly optimizing your campaign, you can create a successful Amazon marketing stream that effectively promotes your products and drives sales.

 

Choose the right campaign type

Amazon Marketing Stream provides a powerful set of tools and features that can help you effectively choose the right campaign type for your business. There are several campaign types, including sponsored products, sponsored brands, and sponsored display. To choose the right campaign type, consider your advertising objectives, target audience, and product category. It is recommended to test different campaign types and analyze the performance of each to determine which type is most effective for achieving your goals.

 

Measure your results

AMS provides real-time campaign metrics and analytics, including click-through rates, conversion rates, sales data, and ad spend. Additionally, Amazon offers reporting tools and dashboards that provide comprehensive insights into your campaign performance, allowing you to analyze and optimize your campaigns based on data-driven insights. The platform also offers features such as automatic bidding and dynamic ads, which can help optimize your campaigns and maximize your return on investment.

 

Integration with other advertising tools and platforms

Amazon Marketing Stream provides an API that enables you to integrate with third-party tools and platforms. This integration allows you to track and analyze data across multiple channels, providing a more comprehensive view of your overall marketing strategy.

Additionally, Amazon Marketing Stream provides integration with Amazon’s own suite of advertising tools, including Amazon Attribution, which allows you to measure the impact of your Amazon advertising on your other marketing channels, and Amazon DSP, which enables you to run programmatic advertising campaigns across multiple platforms.

In conclusion, Amazon Marketing Stream provides a powerful advertising platform for businesses looking to increase their visibility and sales on Amazon. With its advanced targeting options, flexible ad formats, and robust reporting features, businesses can create effective campaigns that reach the right audience and drive results. However, as with any advertising platform, there are also challenges to consider, such as competition, budget management, and data quality.

To overcome these challenges, businesses need to be strategic in their approach, leverage automation, and machine learning, and consider integrating with other tools and platforms to create a comprehensive advertising strategy. By doing so, businesses can unlock the full potential of Amazon Marketing Stream and achieve their advertising goals.