In June 2022, Amazon released a new product called Amazon Marketing Stream that, among other things, provides campaign performance reports hourly for sellers and vendors.
Customer shopping behavior varies over the time of the day. This is why it makes sense to switch the level of bids depending on the day and time to optimize the performance of Amazon PPC campaigns. Until now, there was no reliable source of hourly data. The data you got through the Amazon Advertising API (AAP) was pull-based. That means you have to request specific data. Amazon Marketing Stream is a new API that provides Amazon Advertising data in almost real-time. This happens in a push-based way, unlike the Advertising API. Amazon sends you the data every hour, and you don't have to request the data.
Also, the data is more detailed than before. Using Amazon Marketing Stream, you get the following information every hour:
- You see the clicks, the total cost of all clicks, and the impressions for a Sponsored Products ad.
- You see the number of conversions, the total number of units ordered, and the total value of sales for a Sponsored Products ad.
- You receive a notification once your budget consumption has increased by 5 percent.
Amazon Marketing Stream is currently available in the US, Canada, and Mexico. Agencies, tool providers, sellers, and vendors can access the campaign sets. To do this, you must have an account on Amazon's cloud platform AWS and use your Amazon Ads API token.
What data is available on Amazon Marketing Stream?
Currently, Amazon Marketing Stream includes three datasets. Each dataset contains different performance metrics and campaign data.
Sponsored Products Traffic (sp-traffic)
The sp-traffic dataset contains information on click, impression, and cost data related to sponsored products campaigns.
You will receive the following information every hour:
- Clicks of the ad
- Impressions of the ad
- Total cost for all clicks of the ad in the respective currency
For example, the data may look like this:
Sponsored Products Conversion (sp-conversion)
The sp-conversion dataset contains the conversion data of a Sponsored Products campaign.
You will receive the following information every hour:
- Number of conversions that occurred within 1/7/14/30 day(s) of an ad click
- Number of conversions that occurred within 1/7/14/30 day(s) of an ad click where the purchased SKU matches the advertised SKU
- Total value of sales that occurred within 1/7/14/30 day(s) of an ad click
- Total value of sales that occurred within 1/7/14/30 day(s) of an ad click where the SKU purchased matches the SKU advertised
- Total number of units ordered within 1/7/14/30 day(s) of an ad click
- Total number of units ordered within 1/7/14/30 day(s) after ad click where the purchased SKU matches the advertised SKU
Sponsored Products Budget (budget-usage)
The budget usage dataset provides the budget status (expense in relation to budget) for Sponsored Products, Sponsored Display, and Sponsored Brands campaigns. Sellers and vendors always receive a notification as soon as the budget usage has increased by 5 percent.
With the sp-traffic and sp-conversion dataset, you receive hourly summarized performance data on your campaigns. Additionally, Amazon notifies them of status changes. Currently, notifications only include budget usage. In the future, Amazon plans to expand notifications to include product entitlements, bid recommendations, and more.
Benefits of Amazon Marketing Stream
Amazon Marketing Stream allows you to understand the performance of Amazon campaigns better. The new service offers several advantages compared to the Amazon Advertising API:
Easy access to Amazon Advertising data
Amazon's PPC campaign reporting has always been minimal. Calls to the Amazon Advertising API were the only way sellers, and vendors could access the daily performance of their campaigns. Advertisers who wanted timely insights into their campaigns had to call the Amazon Advertising API multiple times a day manually. At the same time, they had to compare the new information with the old to conclude. Amazon Marketing Stream automatically aggregates traffic and conversion data and sends it to you every hour. You only need to subscribe to the available campaign records once.
Establish dayparting strategies
Sellers and vendors want to make their ads on Amazon as efficient as possible. The dayparting strategy is one way to make ads more efficient. It involves advertisers switching and pausing their campaigns at specific times of the day. By default, PPC campaigns are set to display ads throughout the day. Marketing Stream's hourly performance metrics allow you to adjust daily bids and budgets. For example, if a campaign generates the most sales at a very low CPC (cost-per-click) on weekends between 10:00 am and 3:00 pm, you can increase the bid during those hours to maximize the conversion rate.
Fast response to campaign changes
With the help of real-time information, you can always keep an eye on the performance of your campaigns and get hourly information about your budget consumption. If the budget is gradually used, you can quickly react and increase it. Conversely, if the ad spend was too low compared to the budget, you can bid higher.
You can also use Amazon Marketing Stream to control and quickly adjust the budget and bids on high-traffic days (e.g., Amazon Prime Day).
Conclusion
The introduction of Amazon Marketing Stream benefits Amazon Sellers and Vendors as they finally get reliable data for their advertising campaigns. With the help of hourly data, they can set dayparting strategies to run campaigns more efficiently. In addition, Marketing Stream can help you identify critical times of the day, such as when conversion is high, and CPC is low. This detailed insight will ensure that your campaigns stay on budget.
You can find more information about Amazon Marketing Stream in the documentation and get step-by-step instructions on how to connect your AWS application to the datasets.
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