AMC Audiences Explained
With Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), you can craft custom audiences to identify different groups of shoppers to target with DSP (Demand-Side Platform) campaigns. Whether you want to identify New-To-Brand customers, delve into multi-touch attribution, or measure Time to Conversion metrics, AMC lets you create audiences with precision.
Picture this: As an advertiser, you aim to launch a campaign targeting first-time buyers or those who took their time before making a purchase. AMC queries enable the creation of audiences tailored to these specific criteria.
Intentwise simplifies the process by handling complex queries. The user-friendly interface streamlines the experience, requiring you only to input your requirements.
Audience Library in Intentwise Explore
The Audience Library gives you audience pools that you can create almost instantly. Examples of audiences in the library:
High customer value (for retargeting)
Low customer value (for exclusion)
High-intent audiences (who have viewed PDPs, added products to cart, added items to wish list, etc.)
Note: If you don't find an audience you're looking for in the Audience Library, you can request a custom audience by filling out the form.
Adding an Audience
After selecting an audience pool, you'll navigate to the audience settings page, where you can further refine your audience details. In this example, let's focus on selecting "High customer value" for retargeting.
You can include these additional details to target an existing audience pool. Next, let's examine the different inputs more closely.
Audience Settings Page
To execute queries using the Intentwise platform, input the following details in the Settings page:
Name: Displayed in your Amazon DSP Console when the audience is created.
Description: Optional field for additional context. This will also be displayed alongside the audience in your Amazon DSP Console.
Date Range: Start and end time for the AMC Audience query.
Audience Refresh Rate: Determines how often the SQL query is re-run.
Auto Adjust Date: Allows incremental adjustments to the date range based on the Audience Refresh Rate.
DSP Advertisers: A drop-down menu listing the available DSP advertiser accounts.
Input Parameters: You can set specific parameters for each audience, and they'll be used when the audience is created.
Some more context on Audience Refresh Rate and Auto Adjust Date:
Audience Refresh Rate
The value determines how frequently the SQL query that generates your audience is re-run. Once the re-run is complete, the existing Amazon DSP audience is wholly overwritten with new data. The default option is No Refresh, meaning the audience from the AMC query will not be re-run after the first creation. Such audiences will deactivate themselves in the Amazon DSP after 30 days.
We can re-run the audience once every day to every 21 days. Setting this option lets you keep the audience active in Amazon DSP and re-run the SQL query at a specified interval. For example, if set to 7, the SQL query will be re-run every seven days, and the audience in Amazon DSP will be updated with the new data.
Auto Adjust Date
This allows you to increment the date range of your Audience SQL query by the value specified in the Audience Refresh Rate.
If the Auto adjust date is set to:
• Yes, when the SQL query is re-run as per the setting in Audience Refresh Rate, the query start and end time are incremented by the value specified in Audience Refresh Rate.
• No, the query start and end time will not change. i.e., when the Audience SQL query is re-run, it will be continually re-run for the original date range.
For example, if you've added a date range of 30 days from June 1 with Auto Refresh set for every 14 days and auto adjust date set to Yes, the query will run from June 1 to June 30. The following query will run from June 15 to July 15.
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What to expect once the Audience setting is created?
Once an Audience setting has been created, Intentwise will submit the Audience query to Amazon for execution. Upon submission, two things need to happen:
Execute the Audience SQL query
Once query execution is successful, an Audience for the exact needs to be created on DSP Advertiser linked to your AMC Instance.
These two steps can take a few hours to complete depending on the time range selected and how complex the query is.
The status on the My Audience page only reflects the status of Step 1. The Audience status would be marked as SUCCEEDED if the query was executed successfully. In case of issues, it will be marked as FAILURE.
Once the query execution is successful, you can search for the created Audience in your Amazon DSP Console. The audiences appear as line items in the DSP Console.
Navigate to the Audiences tab in your DSP console and filter for Custom Built and AMC. This filter should display all rule-based Audiences created via AMC.
Note: Some audiences are free, and for some, there is a charge from Amazon (directly to your account). You'll be able to see the details when you select the audience in targeting your DSP campaigns.
Common Reasons for Audience Creation Failure
An issue with Amazon Audience API
An issue with the Audience query
The query failed to meet a minimum size restriction of 2000 users (there's no way to find this out before running the query)