Advertiser’s Guide for Amazon Marketing Stream: Manage Real-Time Ad Campaign Data

Are you an Amazon seller who’s juggling ad campaigns and struggling to make sense of all the data? 

Every Amazon marketplace seller knows that staying ahead in Amazon’s competitive marketplace requires more than just running ad campaigns. It’s about making data-driven decisions to get the most out of your ad spend and move towards achieving good ROAS (Return on Ads Spend). 

But with so much data available, how do you ensure you’re using the right information to optimize your campaigns without having to do the guesswork?

That’s where Amazon Marketing Stream (AMS) comes in. Think of AMS as your personal 24/7 ad performance tracker, giving you hourly insights into your campaign’s performance and bid management. Instead of waiting for daily, weekly or monthly advertising reports, AMS puts real-time data in your hands, so you can make smarter, faster decisions. Whether it’s adjusting bids, tweaking budgets, or spotting trends at the moment, AMS helps you stay ahead of the curve and keep your ad strategy on point. Curious how it works? Let’s dive in!

Quick Guide-

1. What is Amazon marketing stream?
2. Key Benefits of Leveraging Amazon Marketing Stream
3. What Sponsored Ad Reporting Types Does AMS Support?
4. Which ad format can benefit?
5. Who can access Amazon Marketing Stream?
6. How can I set up Amazon Marketing Stream?
7. How do I ensure that I am receiving all Amazon Marketing Stream data?
8. Lastly

What is Amazon Marketing Stream?

Amazon Marketing Stream is an advertising monitoring resource that can make accessing and collecting data quick and easy. It informs you about campaign performance and other key metrics in real time making it convenient to make quicker, more efficient decisions on PPC campaigns. 

With the use of AMS, sellers have seen a 45.6% increase in sales across their Amazon Ads campaigns.

Think of AMS as your all-in-one data stream that delivers crucial metrics like clicks, impressions, sales, and more, directly to your AWS account in near real-time. It’s like having a constant pulse on your ads, helping you make quick, informed decisions that can boost your advertising efficiency and maximize your return on ad spend (ROAS).

AMS eliminates the need for manual, frequent API calls and provides push-based data streams, meaning your campaigns’ performance data is always up-to-date without the lag. Whether you want to optimize bids during peak shopping hours or make sure you don’t blow through your budget too early, AMS offers the insights you need, exactly when you need them.

Key Benefits of Leveraging Amazon Marketing Stream

1. Improved data granularity- Traditional API reports offer daily summaries while Amazon Marketing Stream provides hourly traffic and sales convertion data. 

This data provides a more detailed view of your campaign performance. AMS data is automatically streamed to your AWS accounts so you can effectively optimize your campaigns for an improved ROAS (Return on Ads Spend).

You should know when your audience is most active. If you notice your ads are performing better in the evenings or during specific days through this data, you can adjust your bids and budgets accordingly.

1. Identify Peak Buying Times 

Sometimes, you don’t realize when your target audience is most engaged until after a campaign has ended. 

AMS allows you to spot peak times as they happen, so you can boost your efforts in the moment and maximize your ROI.

2. No more Throttling

Pull-based API often creates a mess with both important and redundant data along with multiple requests coming in at the same time. Amazon Marketing Stream eliminates the need for frequent API calls.

When offered push-based data streaming on AMS, there’s no need to worry about servers breaking due to high load or volume. You can get real-time data without interruptions, ensuring the accuracy of campaign insights.

3. Near Real-Time Messaging

It offers timely notifications about critical things like budget consumption alerts when campaigns are close to exhausting their pre-allocated funds.

AMS immediately notifies you if your campaigns run out of budget. It gets easy to make necessary budget adjustments quickly to ensure your ads run smoothly and effectively, when you receive such feedback.

4. Simplified Workflow

You can access all your advertising data natively from your AWS account. Amazon Marketing Stream pushes changes to your data instead of snapshots, simplifying the extract, transform, and load (ETL) process by clearly showing what has changed when new data arrives.

Types of data

AMS provides 3 types of data, all serving different purposes, ultimately helping you fetch deeper insights on your overall ad performance. Here are the three types given below. 

Reporting data 

Reporting includes the ad performance data, including traffic and conversions sent hourly and data dimensions necessary for analytics. This data is available as raw, unprocessed and unfiltered data and refreshes hourly for users to best configure outputs to their needs or analytics platforms.

Messaging data

Amazon sends real-time notifications and messaging data that includes updates regarding campaign, ad group, ad, and targeting entity changes. 

Messaging data refers to the informative, automated messages Amazon provides to users based on their preferences. This messaging includes budget consumption and will notify you whenever your budget allotment changes by 5% or more. This will help keep you updates on al the minor changes taking place with requests to your ads.

Recommendations

AMS provides Amazon sellers with recommendations and valuable insights to create or optimise ad campaigns. You can enhance ad performance and achieve better results with these recommendations. 

How Can You Use AMS to Boost Your Amazon Business?

Let’s break down a few practical ways to use Amazon Marketing Stream to your advantage.

1. Dayparting Ads for Maximum Impact

Dayparting simply means scheduling your ads to run at certain times of the day. As you receive hourly insights from AMS, it gets easier to pinpoint when your target audience is active and most engaged. With this data, you can focus your ad spend during these high-traffic periods to achieve better results and be mindful of your ad spend. For example, if you notice that shoppers tend to convert more between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m., you can allocate a much bigger portion of your budget to those hours.

2. Real-Time Budget Adjustments

You may have a fixed, limited daily budget, and spending it evenly throughout the day will not be as effective as compared to spending it wisely based on performance data. You can increase your bids during the peak hours when you see the most traffic and likewise, reduce the spend during other times. 

3. Identify and Act on Trends Quickly

You might often see a sales spike suddenly but it’s too late to act on it. AMS lets you see what’s happening right when it is actually happening. You can step up your ad efforts in real-time and keep the momentum going anytime you spot a sudden surge in sales.

4. Dynamic Budget Management

You can monitor ad spend in near real-time and adjust campaign budgets, preventing cases of overspending or underspending. 

5. Performance Trend Analysis

Identify emerging trends in your campaign performance by analyzing delta values that result in more proactive optimizations.

6. High-Traffic Event Optimization

During events like Amazon Prime Day, Black Friday sale, etc use near real-time performance data to rapidly adjust bids and budgets, maximizing your advertising impact.

Last Prime Day 2023, Day 1 had both the strongest sales efficiency and volume. Attributed sales volume peaked during 7 am to 1 pm PST. 

Day 2, however, saw a gradual drop in sales. In addition, ACOS and sales levels were much more spread out across various hours rather than within a consecutive period.

This suggests that most shoppers had already planned Prime Day shopping in advance and were quick to grab the products on Day 1 itself. 

Based on this insight, it is suggested to distribute your budget appropriately over two days. Perhaps, allocating more towards Day 1 as this has historically turned the biggest profits altogether. 

7. Identify shopping behaviors

As an Amazon marketplace seller, you must be curious about when customers will most likely click on your pages. What use of keywords or keyword phrases are the most influential? If you’re using ad campaign spend logically and appropriately? If you’re not sure or think you have more to learn, Amazon Marketing Stream can help. 

8. Capitalize on seasonal trends 

Buyer behavior is something that keeps changing rapidly as well as the shopper activity that fluctuates over time. The information available through Amazon Marketing Stream makes it easier to parse this information almost instantaneously, making it easier to automate ad targeting at times when ad spend will be the most beneficial.

What Sponsored Ad Reporting Types Does AMS Support?

Amazon Marketing Stream (AMS) provides real-time, hourly data across three main Sponsored Ad formats: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display. Each of these ad formats uses similar metrics but serves different purposes, so the data provided can be incorporated uniquely depending on the type of campaign you’re running. Let’s break down the data AMS provides for each Sponsored Ad format:

1. Sponsored Products 

Dayparting: By analyzing hourly performance data, you can schedule ads to show during the most profitable times of the day.

Bid Adjustments: Lower bids during low-conversion hours and increase them when conversions peak to maximize your ad spend.

2. Sponsored Brand

Brand Awareness: Use impressions and CTR to optimize your brand visibility during the hours when potential customers are most active.

Budget Efficiency: Use spend and ROAS data to optimize your ad budget, ensuring you focus spend on periods of high engagement and conversions.

3. Sponsored Display

Retargeting Efficiency: Use hourly conversion and ROAS data to ensure your ads are effectively re-engaging customers at the right time.

Cross-Channel Optimization: Sponsored Display ads can appear both on and off Amazon, so track performance across devices and platforms to fine-tune your strategy.

Metric	Sponsored Brand	Sponsored Product	Sponsored Display
Impression	Yes	Yes	Yes
Clicks	Yes	Yes	Yes
Conversions	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sales	Yes	Yes	Yes
Spends	Yes	Yes	Yes
CPC	Yes	Yes	Yes
ROAS	Yes	Yes	Yes
CTR	Yes	Yes	No
Impressions	No	No	Yes
Video Views	No	Yes(Video ads)	No

Who can access Amazon Marketing Stream?

Amazon Marketing Stream is available to agencies, tech providers, and direct advertisers on Vendor Central and Seller Central who are integrated with the Amazon Ads API. 

To use Amazon Marketing Stream, you need:

• Technical integration: You need to be integrated with the Amazon Ads API. If you already are, you can use the same access token to subscribe to Amazon Marketing Stream metrics.
• AWS account: You need an AWS account to create destinations for Amazon Marketing Stream data.
• Software development resources: You need access to software development resources

How can I set up Amazon Marketing Stream?

Step 1: Create an SQS queue

To receive data using Amazon Marketing Stream, you must first set up a queue using AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS). We recommend your AWS set up be completed by someone familiar with AWS.

You can create a queue by logging in to your AWS account and using the SQS console or by using an AWS CloudFormation template.

When using AWS (both SQS and CloudFormation), its important to make sure that you are logged in to the correct region. Use this table to select the correct region based on the location of the advertiser you are creating a subscription for.
You can select a region using the dropdown in the top right corner of the AWS console.

Step 2: Add a resource-based IAM policy

Amazon’s advanced tool centre says that you must add a valid IAM policy to your queue to receive Amazon Marketing Stream data.

Each combination of dataset and region has a distinct IAM policy. For example, the sp-traffic dataset has different IAM policies for NA, EU, and FE. Make sure you are applying the correct IAM policy based on the dataset and region that you want to subscribe to. To view resourced-based IAM policies for all available datasets and regions, see the Amazon Marketing Stream data guide.

You can add an access policy during queue creation, or edit an existing queue.

Step 3: Subscribe to Amazon Marketing Stream datasets

Before sending a subscription request, make sure you have already applied the IAM policy associated with the dataset to your SQS queue.

After setting up a queue and adding an IAM policy, you can subscribe to advertiser data using the Amazon Marketing Stream subscription APIs. You need to make a separate request for each dataset you want to subscribe to.

Step 4: Confirm your subscription in SQS

Once you have successfully subscribed to Amazon Marketing Stream using the API, you need to confirm the subscription in SQS to start receiving data.

For further details click here

How do I ensure that I am receiving all Amazon Marketing Stream data?

AWS CloudWatch provides a variety of metrics for SQS queues including the number of messages received, the number of messages deleted, and the number of messages in the queue. Partners can monitor these metrics to identify any discrepancies. For example, if the number of messages received is greater than the number of messages deleted plus the number of messages in the queue, then some messages may be missing.

Lastly, 

Now you know that navigating Amazon’s vast and competitive advertising landscape can feel overwhelming without the right tools. Amazon Marketing Stream (AMS) provides Amazon sellers and advertisers with real-time insights to simplify the process of optimizing campaigns and making data-driven decisions. 

With AMS, you can track performance on an hourly basis, identify peak shopping times, adjust budgets dynamically, and ultimately boost your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).

Whether you’re a seasoned seller or just starting out, AMS offers the clarity and precision you need to stay ahead of the competition. To further streamline your workflow, sign up with Sequence Commerce, an e-commerce marketing agency and take the guesswork out of your ad strategies because in the fast-paced world of Amazon advertising, every minute and click counts!