At some point in any Amazon seller’s journey, they’ll ask, ‘How can I get my product in front of the right customers?’ Advertising is often the answer, but it frequently targets casual browsers rather than ready-to-buy shoppers primed for conversion. That’s why Amazon’s Marketing Cloud (AMC) is essential in 2025, as it tackles attribution blind spots, cutting wasted ad spend through AI-powered AMC insights and cross-channel tracking.
While basic marketing metrics show you last-click conversions and surface-level performance data, they miss the crucial customer journey that leads to those sales. AMC (not to be confused with the movie theater) fills this gap by revealing how your different campaigns work together, showing you which ad sequence actually drives conversions and which touchpoints you’re currently overlooking in your Amazon advertising attribution analysis.
In this post, I’ll break down how sellers can utilize AMC advertising insights to make informed, profitable decisions, which tools facilitate this process, and practical workflows to help you integrate it into your data-driven Amazon advertising mix. Let’s dig into it!
What AMC Is & Why Sellers Should Care
The digital advertising landscape has undergone a fundamental shift over the past few years. Where advertisers once relied on third-party cookies to track customer behavior across channels, privacy regulations and browser changes have rendered this approach obsolete, leaving sellers with fragmented data and incomplete attribution models.
Amazon recognized this challenge and launched Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) in 2021 as a comprehensive Amazon advertising clean room. AMC is a secure, privacy-safe cloud-based analytics platform that enables advertisers to perform cross-channel analysis and understand complete customer shopping journeys both on and off Amazon. Think of it like a laboratory where different ingredients (data sets) can be safely combined and analyzed to create new insights, but the original ingredients remain protected and separate.
In short, this approach has become essential as third-party cookies disappear and privacy regulations increase, making clean rooms the new standard for cross-platform advertising analysis. Beyond its security and intended purpose, here’s what makes AMC a game-changer:
- Better attribution – Go beyond last-click reporting and map the entire shopper journey (Sponsored Brands → DSP → Purchase, for example) with multi-touch attribution on Amazon.
- Cross-channel measurement: Track how Amazon ads, Store visits, and even off-Amazon traffic influence conversions.
- Audience insights – Understand overlap, incrementality, and build smarter segments.
- Activation into DSP – Feed your custom audiences back into Amazon DSP analytics for retargeting or lookalike expansion.
What Sellers Need to Understand
The Amazon Marketing Cloud is powerful, but its value lies in knowing what to look for and how to apply the insights effectively. Fortunately, sellers don’t need to become data scientists to benefit, but they do need to understand the key concepts that AMC brings to the table:
- Path-to-conversion sequencing: This is where AMC shines brightest. Instead of crediting just the last ad a customer clicked, AMC reveals the entire sequence that led to the purchase. You might discover that a Sponsored Brands video ad, followed by DSP retargeting, drives 3 times more conversions than Sponsored Products alone.
- Audience overlap and incrementality: Here’s a costly mistake we frequently see from sellers and as shoppers: sellers running multiple campaigns that target the same customers repeatedly. AMC shows you whether your campaigns are reaching genuinely new audiences or just creating expensive echo chambers. When you understand audience overlap, you can eliminate redundant spend and focus on truly incremental growth.
- Frequency and reach optimization: There’s a sweet spot between too little exposure (customers don’t notice) and too much (ad fatigue kills performance). AMC reveals how often your ads are shown to the same person and at what point additional impressions become counterproductive, reducing cost and increasing effectiveness in one fell swoop.
- Basket analysis and lifetime value: Beyond single conversions, AMC uncovers which products customers buy together and how valuable different audience segments become over time, allowing you to offer bundles and target sponsored products with precision.
Pro Tip: New to AMC? Check out this comprehensive Amazon Marketing Cloud tutorial to get up to speed on setup and basic query templates.
Tool Stack to Supercharge AMC Insights
AMC’s raw power comes with a steep learning curve. Unless you’re comfortable writing SQL queries and interpreting complex datasets, the platform can feel overwhelming. That’s where third-party tools help make AMC insights both accessible and actionable.
Bidx – AMC Insights Without SQL
BidX is an Amazon Ads Advanced Partner trusted by more than 2,000 advertisers, brands, and agencies. What makes it indispensable for Amazon Marketing Cloud users is how it translates AMC’s complex data into visual, actionable dashboards without requiring any technical expertise.
The BidX AMC dashboard is especially helpful with:
- Visualizing customer journeys without the need for SQL or manual Excel exports.
- Using AI-driven rules to adjust campaigns and cut wasted spend automatically.
- Extracting conversion timelines that show how long it takes a shopper to purchase after ad exposure.
For sellers who want AMC’s sophisticated insights without the technical barrier, BidX provides a direct path to smarter advertising decisions.
Pro Tip: Want to see what BidX can uncover in your campaigns? Get started with a free advertising audit to identify wasted spend and optimization opportunities.
DataHawk – Complementary Marketplace Analytics (No Native AMC Integration)
DataHawk marketplace analytics doesn’t connect directly to AMC, but it complements AMC by providing marketplace intelligence that puts AMC insights into a wider context. While AMC (and BidX) focus on how ads influence the customer journey, DataHawk connects these ad-driven behaviors to your overall marketplace performance. This distinction makes DataHawk helpful for bridging the gap between advertising activity and business outcomes.
- Unified dashboards that merge Amazon and Walmart ad KPIs for side-by-side ROAS and TACoS comparison.
- Business intelligence integrations (BigQuery, Snowflake, Sheets) allow you to merge AMC exports with keyword rankings, pricing history, reviews, and profitability metrics.
- AI-powered alerts highlight unexpected ad spend spikes, sales dips, or changes in keyword performance before they become costly.
- Daily monitoring of Buy Box share, keyword rank, and review velocity helps you understand whether campaign performance shifts are caused by ad fatigue or marketplace dynamics.
Combined, BidX and DataHawk offer a comprehensive solution: BidX specializes in translating AMC data into clear, actionable insights for ad campaigns, while DataHawk provides contextual analysis by linking these advertising insights to broader marketplace performance. This clear division of strengths ensures that sellers benefit from both in-depth ad journey analysis and an understanding of the entire marketplace ecosystem.
When executed with intent and strategy, sellers can utilize BidX and DataHawk together to create a comprehensive system that maximizes the value of AMC insights while mitigating risks such as wasted ad spend, performance blind spots, and missed opportunities.
Pro Tip: Book a demo with DataHawk and walk through their suite of tools with a knowledgeable team member to see how they can benefit your Amazon business.
Practical Workflow for Sellers
Here’s how sellers can put AMC into practice with BidX and DataHawk:
- Run AMC queries (or use BidX’s ready-made templates) to uncover high-value ad sequences and weak touchpoints.
- Visualize in BidX: Adjust budgets, set frequency caps, and refine DSP retargeting campaigns based on customer-journey data.
- Export AMC outputs and merge them into DataHawk, layering in organic rank, pricing, and review data for an all-encompassing view.
- Refine strategy: Confirm whether ads, pricing, Buy Box volatility, or organic competition are causing performance changes.
- Iterate and scale: once insights prove consistent, expand workflows to additional markets and product lines.
This step-by-step approach ensures that AMC insights directly lead to smarter decisions, which in turn improve both advertising efficiency and overall business performance. However, the real power becomes clear when you see how these insights are applied to specific business scenarios.
The BidX and DataHawk Connection
Here’s how this integrated approach works in practice, with real scenarios showing how AMC insights from BidX combine with DataHawk’s marketplace data to drive smarter decisions.
| AMC Insight (via BidX) | DataHawk Augmentation | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Sponsored Brands → DSP → Purchase path converts 3x better than direct Sponsored Products | Layer in keyword rank movement and review velocity trends | Confirms advertising flywheel effect is driving organic growth; guides timing for content refresh and inventory expansion |
| High frequency audience showing declining ROAS after 8+ impressions | Monitor price volatility and Buy Box win rate fluctuations | Distinguishes between ad fatigue (reduce frequency) vs. pricing pressure (adjust bids or promotions) |
| CPC spike of 40% on branded search terms over 3 days | AI alert surfaces category-wide promotional activity from competitors | Prevents margin erosion by revealing external market forces; informs defensive coupon strategy |
| Video Sponsored Brands show strong awareness lift but weak direct conversions | Overlay organic ranking improvements and assisted conversion data | Reveals upper-funnel campaigns are building long-term brand equity; justifies continued investment despite low direct ROAS |
This integrated approach ensures that your AMC insights drive real improvements backed by data, leading to smarter decisions, increased advertising efficiency, and improved business performance.
Best Practices for Sellers
- Reuse SQL templates and keep them version-controlled to maintain consistency.
- Validate data freshness daily, as DataHawk’s AI alerts can flag anomalies in real time.
- Start small before scaling: focus on one region or campaign type before rolling out globally.
- Avoid over-segmentation by testing incrementality before slicing audiences too thin.
- Cross-check AMC findings with marketplace KPIs, such as Buy Box share, keyword rank, and profit margins, to gain a comprehensive view.
These best practices help sellers avoid common issues while extracting maximum value from AMC insights.
Final Thoughts on AMC
Based on our work with Amazon sellers across various experience levels, a clear pattern has emerged. Most sellers start with Sponsored Products campaigns and gradually expand their advertising mix as they gain confidence. However, at a certain point, traditional campaign optimization reaches its limits. You can refine bids, polish keywords, and optimize listings endlessly—but without visibility into the why behind campaign performance, growth plateaus.
That’s where AMC changes the game. By revealing the complete customer journey, AMC shifts your strategy from reactive to predictive. And when paired with the right tools, BidX simplifies AMC insights and DataHawk ties those insights into broader performance, providing comprehensive coverage that minimizes risks and maximizes growth opportunities.
Integrating these third-party tools may seem daunting, but that’s precisely why we recommend these two solutions—they make a complex process remarkably easy for sellers and advertisers of all levels. Start small today: implement AMC with BidX and DataHawk, and watch your growth accelerate step by step.
Amazon advertising is a wild ride. But with curiosity, the right tools, and a willingness to poke around in the data, AMC turns confusion into clarity. And when you can see the data clearly, you can eliminate the guesswork often involved with ad campaigns and grow your business with pinpoint precision.
