Introducing Amazon Marketing Cloud Insights on AWS

Advertisers and agencies often ask how they can use AWS to improve performance and understanding of their campaigns running on Amazon Ads. For example, customers want to use AWS to query and analyze results from Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), Amazon Ads’ cloud-based data clean room that allows advertisers to perform custom campaign analytics with strict safeguards around data privacy and security. Builders seeking to use the AMC API in combination with AWS need to allocate development resources to submit specialized queries to an AMC instance, load AMC output into an AWS account, prepare and catalog datasets for analytics, and connect data tools for Business Intelligence (BI). This also requires customers to provision infrastructure in their AWS account, including deployment and configuration of storage, data processing, ETL, and visualization.

Today we’re excited to launch Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) Insights on AWS, a new AWS Solution that helps advertisers and agencies running campaigns on Amazon Ads to easily deploy AWS services to store, query, analyze, and visualize reporting from the Amazon Marketing Cloud API, reducing development time from weeks to hours. The solution uses a ready-to-deploy DataOps Development Kit (DDK) and a code repository available on GitHub to automatically provision Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight, with services pre-configured to run queries in AMC and visualize reports. With a few clicks, analysts and developers with an active AMC instance can use the solution to run queries and monitor ongoing campaign performance across metrics such as reach and frequency, and dimensions including geographic area, audience segment, and device. As one example, an advertiser can use this solution to combine AMC API results from multiple brand campaigns inside AWS, and surface consumer segments that have a high propensity to purchase products, and prioritize high-performing segments for increased ad spending while reducing wasteful ad spending.

“Customers wanted to make it simple for analysts and business users to visualize AMC campaign reports and audience insights within their own applications and AWS environments, and reduce implementation time when configuring AWS services to run new queries via the AMC API. With this solution, it now takes a matter of hours for customers to see reports across their portfolio of campaigns. Advertisers and agencies can use the solution to analyze datasets on advertising channels such as video, audio, display, and sponsored ads to gain a holistic and in-depth understanding of the customer journey.”

Tim Barnes, director of worldwide solutions for advertising and marketing technology at AWS

AMC Insights on AWS is available today to Amazon Ads customers with an AMC API key and an AWS account. Customers can deploy the solution via the AWS Management Console or the AWS Solution Library. It includes an implementation guide and whitepaper for developers on setup procedures. There are no licensing costs or fees to deploy this solution. You are charged only for the AWS services deployed by the solution.

As shown in Figure 1, the solution sets up the following:

• Three Amazon S3 buckets to store results from AMC queries, prestage data, and poststage data.
• AWS Step Functions for loading and orchestrating data.
• An AWS Lambda function for loading raw data to prestage, partitioning prestage data, and managing S3 file metadata.
• AWS Glue for converting Parquet files and partitioning poststage data.
• An AWS Lake Formation data lake for governance and security.
• Amazon Athena to query the data lake and access the poststage data.
• (Optional) Amazon QuickSight for business-intelligence analytics, interactive dashboards, and visualizations that business stakeholders can use.