Introducing Amazon Marketing Stream (Beta)
21 June 2022
What’s launched?
We are excited to launch Amazon Marketing Stream (Beta), a product that delivers Amazon Ads campaign metrics and information to advertisers’ or integrators’ AWS accounts via a push-based model in near real-time. You can subscribe to campaign data sets available on Amazon Marketing Stream using your existing Amazon Ads API token and by providing your AWS account details. Once subscribed, Amazon Marketing Stream will deliver hourly performance metrics, with details such as targeting expression performance by placement and budget consumption messages in near real-time. Other campaign data sets will be available for subscription in the coming months.
Why is it important?
In the past, access to scaled campaign reporting was limited to pull-based Amazon Ads API calls that provided daily performance, and on-demand access to other campaign information. API users who desired more real-time, intra-day campaign insights have manually pulled this information by calling Amazon Ads API multiple times a day, which creates other API usage challenges. Besides the need for API users to manage API throttling, which limits the number of API calls they can make, the approach puts the burden on them to compare new information with the existing to understand changes. Such API usage patterns highlighted the need to build a product that better addresses our customers’ evolving use cases.
Amazon Marketing Stream can help in the following ways:
- Optimise campaigns more effectively: Hourly performance metrics provide intra-day insights for advanced campaign optimisation. For example, during certain hours of the day when your conversion rate is high, you may want to increase bid amounts or make sure your campaign stays in budget during that time. 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 optimise on your keywords but keywords by placement.
- Respond quickly to campaign changes: Near real-time information such as budget consumption can help advanced API users write responsive applications for further optimization. For example, they may want to increase the campaign budget before it runs out.
- Improve operational efficiency: Push-based information delivery eliminates API throttling. Moreover, Amazon Marketing Stream sends you performance metric and campaign information changes in near real-time, instead of aggregated over a period of time. You can simplify complex technical operations — which, today, may entail comparing new aggregated API metrics with the metrics an integrator or advertiser has previously pulled and stored in its own systems, to understand the delta between the two. Instead, Amazon Marketing Stream delivers that delta to you.
While above are some common ways in which we believe our customers – agencies, tool providers and advertisers – will find Amazon Marketing Stream valuable, their ingenuity in using our products to solve problems in unimagined ways has been inspiring. We look forward to learning from our customers and continuing to evolve the product.
Here’s what some of the beta participants have to say about Amazon Marketing Stream:
“Amazon Marketing Stream has helped us to understand how conversion rates for specific products and sub-categories fluctuate by time of day, allowing us to increase bids and budget by hour of day to match trends in signals such as purchase conversion rates. By utilising Amazon Marketing Stream to inform our hourly bidding adjustments, we’ve seen an average increase in conversion rate of 15%, and a reduction in ACOS of 10% across our customer base.”
– Daniel Knijnik, CEO, Quartile
“We have long observed differences in placement performance by targeting expression throughout the day. Amazon Marketing Stream now gives us the ability to adapt quickly, shifting investments to ad placements in near real-time, to optimise for incremental growth for the brands we manage and fine tune the digital shelf. We expect this improved performance will lead to delighted clients.”
– Patrick Miller, Co-President, Ascential Digital Commerce
“Digital advertising has long benefited from real-time information, and now Amazon Marketing Stream unlocks our ability to make our own software applications for Sponsored Products more responsive. These rapid performance metrics allow for quicker feedback and optimisation to help drive profitable growth in digital retail.”
– Rosco Hill, CEO Perpetua Labs
Where is the feature available?
- North America: United States, Canada, Mexico
Who can use it?
- Agencies
- Tool providers
- Direct advertisers including vendors and sellers
Where do I access it?
- Amazon Ads API
When you’re ready to get started, visit our Amazon Marketing Stream onboarding guide that will walk through the process of getting API access, integrating with AWS, and subscribing to campaign datasets using the Amazon Marketing Stream API.