Amazon Publisher Cloud drives brand sales by connecting customers with deals for products they love

Built on AWS Clean Rooms, APC is the first and only service enabling leading publishers to optimize their supply via exclusive signal collaboration with Amazon Ads. This means that publishers can analyze their first-party data with insights from Amazon Ads signals to create programmatic deals that drive more efficient campaign reach and relevancy, without relying on historic or eroding identifiers. With this capability, advertisers on Amazon DSP can now activate deals based on how proprietary publisher signals overlap against in-market and affinity segments from Amazon Ads (pet food shoppers, health and fitness enthusiasts, to name a few), to reach high-intent audiences at scale.

Amazon.com recently ran a beta campaign across 12 web publishers and found that APC-enabled deals drove a 50% uplift in incremental sales on Amazon against an internal benchmark.¹ And while incremental sales was the primary KPI for this campaign, APC-optimized supply also yielded 36% more efficient cost per action among audiences that were new to Amazon.² These indicators quickly made it clear that APC was able to deliver significantly more relevant advertising, when introducing audiences to deals for products they love. Moreover, Safari delivered 35% of the APC-enriched campaign to their audiences, which represents traditionally unaddressable supply by conventional activation tactics (e.g., third-party cookies).³ And importantly, APC also drove 7% lower CPMs than comparable cookie-based buys.⁴ This highlights the cost efficiencies that APC is able to generate across high-value inventory, in addition to its proven ability to produce more efficient campaign reach, relevancy, and outcomes.

“Campaigns enabled through APC exceeded challenging performance benchmarks,” said Thomas Wilson, director of Amazon digital advertising. “This activation improved the relevancy of our advertising, which translated into better, more relevant offers for our customers—establishing APC as a core pillar of our ongoing activation strategy.”

Overall, the beta testing yielded positive results by demonstrating APC’s capacity to drive durable campaign addressability, without relying on traditional advertising identifiers.

“We are delighted by the positive results APC has been able to drive,” said Sharmilan Rayer, general manager of APC. “We believe that secure collaboration, powered by first party signals, is a key pillar of any durable addressability strategy.”

Dotdash Meredith—a leading U.S. digital and print publisher with a broad portfolio of household names like People, Entertainment Weekly, Investopedia, Allrecipes, Food & Wine, and Martha Stewart—was one of APC’s first integrated publishers. When Dotdash Meredith tested APC during open beta, they were able to prove that content beats cookies. By using insights to run a cookieless back-to-school campaign through Amazon DSP, the campaign reached 1.5x the desired audience compared to an unoptimized campaign, while also delivering 8x the number of relevant impressions on iOS and a 19% more efficient cost-per-click (CPC).⁵ Since then, Dotdash Meredith has been a vocal advocate for APC, encouraging their advertisers to consider testing and activating APC-enriched supply.

“By analyzing our first-party signals with Amazon Ads audience insights through Amazon Publisher Cloud, we’re able to map intent-to-buy signals to our more than 1.5 million articles across Dotdash Meredith, making the content you read a stronger and more durable predictor of what you are likely to buy than any cookie signal,” said Dr. Jon Roberts, chief innovation officer at Dotdash Meredith. “We’re excited to deepen the collaboration with Amazon Publisher Services and build a robust future that unlocks previously unaddressable audiences, drives advertiser performance, and enhances the consumer experience.”

With the launch of APC, advertisers now also have the ability to choose the audience segments they would like publishers to plan deals around, via a new audience collaboration workflow. This represents a big step forward on the Amazon Ads vision to bring advertisers and publishers closer together through secure and collaborative technologies. APC is used by several leading publishers, and we are continually expanding it to more. If you are interested in learning more about how APC is powering the next generation of programmatic advertising, please get in touch with an account executive today.