The Release of Retail Data in the Amazon Marketing Cloud Unlocks the Future of Amazon Attribution Capabilities

Amazon has been focusing on building out the Amazon Marketing Cloud rapidly over the past two years by adding new features, usage documentation, a User Interface and most importantly, data!

And for advertisers, the more data, the better.

To truly be able to understand the full picture of a user journey, we need access to several datasets across Amazon. While Amazon Demand Side Platform data was released first, this was limiting due to the little amount of cross Advertising Unit analysis one could do on an event level with user traffic. One could only visualize how users move down the funnel within the Amazon DSP but not know if the users purchased through a native Amazon Sponsored Ad, an organic listing or on an Advertiser’s website.

The next piece of data released was Sponsored Products, followed by being able to upload an Advertiser’s own data and most recently in June 2022, Sponsored Display data! Now one is able to build insights that combine all these different purchase avenues and see which advertisements influenced a purchase and how the purchase happened. This now unlocks being able to calculate an idea of a custom attribution model and estimates of customer acquisition cost, repurchase cohorts and lifetime value of a customer.

Why just an idea and estimates? Because we do not have all the data for the full picture quite yet. A dataset that is needed for these insights to be reliant is retail data, the purchases that happen after the attribution window and are deemed not to be attributed to an advertisement, otherwise known as an organic sale.

And Amazon has just released this data for advertisers in Beta at a monthly cost. This data is very valuable and is needed to analyze the holistic Amazon purchase journey and attribution calculations. Now an advertiser can really tell if Brand Awareness tactics, such as video Ads, worked successfully since one is able to know if the users purchased beyond the 28-day attribution period, which are seen as organic.

The last piece of data we are missing to truly see the full journey is Sponsored Brands data, which is rumoured to land in Q1 of 2023. At Perpetua, we're excited to expand our query library continuously as these new datasets get added in order to provide even more granular insights for advertisers, agencies and more.

To learn more about how to access these datasets with the Amazon Marketing Cloud, email us at bi@perpetua.io.