#710 – Amazon’s AMC Updates + AI Personas

What if you could turn Amazon’s endless data into real customer understanding and use AI to speak directly to what shoppers feel?

In this special episode recorded live at Amazon Accelerate in Seattle, host Bradley Sutton sits down with two Amazonians who reveal how sellers can combine AI-driven customer insights and AMC’s advanced advertising analytics to supercharge growth.
First up, Isaac Quiros, Senior Customer Success Manager at Amazon, breaks down how sellers can escape what he calls the “operational trap”, getting so caught up in logistics that they lose sight of their customers. He demonstrates how to transform Seller Central data into human stories using tools like Market Basket Analysis and Demographics Dashboards, revealing why customers make purchases, not just what they buy. Isaac shares how AI can analyze reviews, surface emotional triggers, and even help sellers build “AI personas” that mirror their real buyers. Then use those insights to craft A+ content that truly connects.

Then we’re joined by Alan Lewis, Director of Product for Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), who pulls back the curtain on one of the biggest announcements from Accelerate: AMC is now available to every Sponsored Ads advertiser, no SQL required. Alan explains how this powerful tool enables you to track the entire shopper journey, discover which campaigns drive conversions, and build high-performing custom audiences, such as retargeting shoppers who have already added your products to their cart.

Together, these conversations reveal the future of selling on Amazon: where data meets emotion, and where tools like AI and AMC work hand in hand to help you understand, reach, and retain your ideal customers. Whether you’re refining your A+ content, building your first audience segment, or simply learning to “talk to your data,” this episode delivers actionable insights to help you grow smarter and faster in the evolving world of selling on Amazon.

In episode 710 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Isaac, and Alan discuss:

• 42:55 – Enhancing Advertising With Helium 10
• 00:00 – Harnessing AI for Customer Growth
• 08:38 – Customer-Centric Sales Strategy
• 14:14 – Customer Personas Through Market Basket Analysis
• 17:07 – Getting Started With AI in Amazon
• 21:44 – Utilizing Data for Customer Insights
• 25:22 – Understanding Amazon Marketing Cloud for Advertisers
• 29:09 – Audience Targeting for Sponsored Ads
• 32:49 – Empowering Sellers With Unique Insights
• 36:16 – Utilizing Audience Insights for Amazon Advertising Success
• 39:15 – Successful Coffin Shelf Case Study

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we are at Amazon Accelerate and we have two very interesting conversations one about AMC and what was released, and also all about your customer journey with the help of AI. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We are still here in Seattle at Accelerate. We’ve got a couple of great guests today, and our first one here is Isaac from Amazon. How’s it going?

Isaac:

So good. Thank you so much for having me.

Bradley Sutton:

I always like to ask a few questions about where you grew up, university things like that. So where were you born and raised?

Isaac:

So I actually come from San Jose, Costa Rica and Central America.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice, nice. Until what age were you there?

Isaac:

So, I still live there. You still live there. Yeah, Amazon has a lot of employees there, so I’m one part of them, so I kind of live in paradise, but it’s great.

Bradley Sutton:

I love that. Yeah, a lot of people go there to retire and have a nice life, but you’re living la pura vida, right over there this whole time.

Isaac:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, so did you attend university down there?

Isaac:

Yeah, so I actually got a master’s degree in analytics innovation technology in INCAE Business School, which is a major business school in Central America.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, nice, nice, okay, and so how long have you been at Amazon now?

Isaac:

So I’ve been in Amazon for about two and a half years. I’ve been working as a senior customer success manager, so I have a portfolio of sellers that I help them in order to get a strategic recommendations for growth, recommendations for advertising and pretty much to understand their business, see what Amazon has to offer and connect them with specialists in order to get growth where we want to.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. I love it. I never met somebody in the. I didn’t even know there was customer success department here. So that’s great, yeah, so we’re talking about customers and so you know, being in customer success, you know, obviously your customers are Amazon sellers, but we Amazon sellers, our customers, are our customers. And so what have you seen with your customers, about the struggles they have with their customers, about their knowledge of them and things like that?

Isaac:

So, what I’ve seen in my experience, it’s mainly that sellers tend to have something that I call the operational trap, right? So they’re so into solving issues regarding inventory, accounting or logistics, and that’s fine, right, you have to make sure that your company is going to still sell for the next couple months, so you have to solve issues. And sometimes you have so much data, so much information and so little time to think ahead when you have your house kind of burning, right? So you have to focus on that. So that operational trap is mainly the main issue they have.

Isaac:

Second one will be around not to understand the potential of growth that you have in data. There’s so many numbers, so many dashboards, and you know that they’re useful for some things, but sometimes you don’t know how to use it right and maybe you don’t have the time, so thinking that the data is too complex to take it into your hands. It’s like the second main issue, right? And the third one will be mainly thinking that the product that you created at the first time is for one customer and it’s not going to change over time. So customers are complex, they change and if you don’t get along with the change with your customers, maybe the value offered you started with the beginning in the day that you created your listing. Maybe it’s not useful anymore for your new customers. Trends change, customers change and we have to get along with that.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so you talk about data. I think a lot of Amazon sellers, when they think of data, of course they’re like hey, well, they use we use Helium 10 to look for, you know, keyword research and my advertising data and the profits but a lot of sellers they forget to use data to actually get some insights into the customer. So what kind of data is available in Seller Central that can help this problem?

Isaac:

So there are mainly four sources of information. Sellers have access since the very first day they joined Amazon. So, first of all, it’s a demographics dashboard that tells us a little bit more about who the customer is, how much money they’re making, if they’re married or not, and something right, we have repeated customer behavior, so there we can find and identify specifically which are the items that customers like the most. The market basket analysis tells us more about what is the purpose of purchasing your product, right? So that tells us a lot of information regarding customers and why are they purchasing from us. And order reports can help us to actually know the zip code of the orders, right? So if we know where the product is going to, if you know who is buying from us and we know what are the patterns and mainly the reason they’re purchasing from us, then we can build a customer persona and also, using that information, and put it into an AI. Right, we’ll tell you a lot more about psychographics of this person.

Bradley Sutton:

So you mentioned AI LLMs. How can sellers use that? You know like, maybe somebody doesn’t use a lot of AI, they’re not very familiar with it. Hey, I know how to get the data from Helium 10 about, you know, like you mentioned, where’s the zip codes and where people are buying. I know how to look at what keywords they’re converting for in advertising, but they don’t see the bridge to get to the part where. Where does AI come into this picture?

Isaac:

So I have several prompts I like to use with my clients, so let’s go over some of them. So, first of all, first step is identify your competitor’s value offer so you can use AI, so you can say hey, dear LLM whatever you would like to use please analyze 1,000 reviews from my competitors and let me know what is the value offer they’re delivering to the customer. Another example hey, LLM, please analyze these 1,000 reviews from my competitors and let me know what are the top three questions our customers are making right before they open the box. When we understand the value our competitors are offering, we understand what is valuable to the customer, and the idea is not to copy our competitors but identify how can our value offer can be put it into A-plus content, for example. Right, to solve the customer questions.

Isaac:

Number two will be to go ahead, download the data all these reports I was mentioning and then, with AI, ask to create a psychographics report. What is that? It’s mainly to understand, based on where this person lives, how much does he or she earns? Please let me know what are the values, aspirations, routines, maybe, what keeps them up at night? What does my customer persona smells like? Right, what, maybe brand of car does she or he uses?

Isaac:

If we can understand how my brand logo fits into their life, then I’ll understand better my persona. Sure, and from there right, I always tell my sellers look for a picture on the internet that resembles your customer persona, print it, paste it in your office and every day that you enter to your office, say, hey, let’s call it Josh. Hey, Josh, I’m building something from you. Hey, Josh, the next that I’m going to create, you’re going to love it. Now that you have the data from Center Central, analyzed with AI, and you have committed to this persona, just change it and then try it. So start creating value to your customer and then, from there, just start experimenting a lot.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, I think there’s a lot of spouses of our listeners out there who are going to get mad at me. They’re like my husband or wife is now talking to pictures on his wall every day and talking to them more than me. But hey guys, it’s for a reason. All right, listen to him, he knows what he’s talking about. Now I think you mentioned A-plus content a few minutes ago product listings. So all this data, you know we have it. Josh is telling you some data that you want to have for your listings. How do you now what’s the best practice for incorporating some of this into A-plus content product images, product listing, et cetera.

Isaac:

Straightforward answer is you have to help your customer make the purchase decision and you have to make your customer think, think, this is exactly what I need, without explicitly saying it right? What do I mean by this? I mean that if you know who your customer is, if you know their routine in their normal day, from them, right, you know what they’re looking for and understand how he makes the decision of purchasing something right. More very specific, if you’re talking about a company of sports equipment, for example, if you know they’re a customer drives a high value car, right, maybe just saying, hey, did you know that our product fits your trunk and the texture is so soft it will not damage your trunk in any way. That is just you offering value to the customer and solving a question they might have in the future, and you’re saying it in your A-plus content. So, including A-plus content, information that matches your customer’s persona, aspirations, needs and questions, that is helping the customer make the purchase decision.

Bradley Sutton:

And I think using AI sometimes you can get insights. Like maybe I’ve never had a fancy car, so I don’t know what somebody with a fancy car might want, but I could see how, again, we can leverage stuff. These are conversations we never would have had five, six years ago. It was like how would you know? Oh, you just got to go do some market research or something, but now we can have it in seconds, so that’s pretty interesting. Okay, so now let’s talk about this in action. These are just words, but I’m sure you’re saying this because you’ve had experience, or some of your customers have had experience, so can you give some real world examples?

Isaac:

Yeah, so I’ve been managing sellers for more than a couple of years and I have several success stories, but this is one of the ones that I love the most. So I used to have a seller that sells seeds from plants flowers, right, vegetables, okay. So they have the listing complete. They have A-plus content, brand story, some videos and some information. So technically it was complete, right, but was it good? That is something difficult to tell, right? So you can just use that model of RAMS that I’m using. So the A-plus content tells you about where the seats were produced, the certifications regarding TMO if they were not right, and maybe this was complete and good.

Isaac:

We start using this model. We analyze the reviews as the AI sell me which is the most unexpected value the customer is finding into our products, and then we discover that actually, customers were feeling happy about seeing the first sprout of a plant growing in their kitchen under the light of the window, and they were so happy to be able to brag about a basket full of vegetables they were able to grow in their backyard. So customers were telling us the value they were feeling about our product and maybe the A-plus content, though it was complete, it was not able to showcase that value, right, we change it. So, based in that information understanding the customer and what is she or he feeling, the value we’re offering through the product we need some changes. What we need is actually to change all our A-plus content. Maybe the information of about where the seats are produced it’s important, but in this case it was not important for the customer is who is going to purchase from us.

Isaac:

What we did is actually put some emotions to it, so he we tell the customer hey, this is how you will feel once you have that first flower in your kitchen. This is how you will feel when you give these flowers to your mom, right? So, talking about how people feel through the process of growing a plant, maybe you don’t know, maybe you haven’t ever planted something and you can now do it now with our high quality seats right. So through the A-plus content, we were able to teach and show the customer how will they feel through the process, solving many questions and addressing emotions. And there was a big increase in the first part of the funnel, right. So we were able to see how the increase between consideration and then totally up to cards, right. So that’s one of the stories I love and it was so emotional to see the transformation of this A-plus content.

Bradley Sutton:

So I imagine their conversion rate increased, because when you’re talking about optimizing for A-plus content, you know that’s going to help. So conversion rate increases. Click-through rate is not going to increase based on the main image, but this is important because conversion rate overall is pretty low across the board. Just because Amazon is such a great catalog. I’m an Amazon customer. I’ll usually click on five, six, seven, eight things you know before I actually make the decision. That’s normal. It doesn’t mean I’m not. I’m not even a picky person. My mom probably would spend even more time looking through stuff. But then the more you can get that emotional connection you know with them you know it’s not a keyword Like sure you have to have the right keywords in your listing because otherwise they would have never found you in the first place or seen your ad. But then when you get them on the page, if you can hook them with that emotional connection, that’s definitely going to help things. Let’s go back to the beginning when we talked about building that Josh or that customer persona and what specific tools in Seller Central or tool would sellers go to, to start getting the data that would help build that persona?

Isaac:

Market basket analysis is one of the dashboards that I love the most. So what you will find here is information regarding how many times a customer from you pick two or three things together, either from your brand or from someone else’s right. So this gives us information regarding why is he or she buying the product. What do I mean? If I’m selling lamps, for example, it’s very different just to say, hey, this customer purchased just one lamp, but maybe they purchased the lamp and some books, so I know they might be needing a solution in order to create an environment when they can happily enjoy their hobby of reading. Right? That’s something that we’re looking for. What is the intent of purchasing If we’re able to predict that?

Isaac:

We can use AI to analyze tons of information at the same time. So you can ask the AI hey, ai, look at these results of what people are buying with my products and someone else’s, what are your suggestions regarding using? And once you know that, then you can just showcase it in your A-plus content, right? Why don’t you tell Josh in your A-plus content? Did you know that this is the perfect light that reflects your pages and the ideas of your book into your mind? How do you feel about that, right, and if you are able to make Josh see himself into the A-plus content, that would be great. Also, now that we know why are they using the products, why don’t we use normal people, right?

Isaac:

I always tell my sellers you can use your mom, your siblings, integrate some images. Please create A-plus content with real people. You don’t need models, right? You can use it with AI, but very simple, realistic pictures of real people using it. It will be more relatable to Josh, right? We humans are just wired to be able to feel comfortable if we see someone looks like us using something, and that’s going to drive a lot of clicks through the page.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent, excellent. So here at Accelerate, I think AI was definitely the theme of this year. I mean, they talked about AI last year. Were you at Accelerate last year? No, I wasn’t Okay. So, trust me, they talked a little bit about AI this year. You were here. You saw how much they talked about. It was a lot more, exponentially more, and I think that’s a new world that we live into. So this is very actionable and timely information. But maybe some closing thoughts for you from your viewpoint of what sellers can do, how they can leverage AI to help them expand how they deal with customers. What do you suggest people start getting into? Like me, I’m actually a little bit new to AI. I didn’t even use ChatGPT on my phone until maybe three or four weeks ago. I was still doing old school Google and stuff. I’ve been a late adopter a little bit. So what would you tell people like me, sellers out there who haven’t adopted too much AI yet?

Isaac:

What I would say is actually try to do it with the very basic stuff, right? If you’re saying that you were not very used to use it, why don’t you try to use it in your morning routine, maybe your breakfast? Say hey for tomorrow. Just take a picture of your breakfast and say how can I improve my breakfast for tomorrow? Start getting alongside and comfortable with ideas that will not be able, or maybe that you were not able to create by yourself. What do I mean by this? You have to start making yourself feel comfortable with different ideas, right, because AI will not tell you, maybe, what you want to hear, because maybe you have a persona in your mind of maybe who was purchasing from you and maybe the data is telling you something else. So you have to, first of all, feel comfortable with downloading data and feel comfortable with actually triggering your ideas. Yeah, right, in the past you were not able to understand stories through numbers. Now you can do it with AI, right, and the more you get into it and more comfortable with the suggestions and being able to say let’s try it out, right, I may not agree with it, but data’s telling me this, let’s try it out. And actually, this is just the tip of the iceberg, right? So every single day, we’re walking through having more automated dashboards that will tell us a lot of information, maybe summarized, maybe some raw information, but from here we can learn and just be ready for that changes, right?

Isaac:

And also, you have to be ready to see others doing it. So you might be thinking, as a seller, well, yeah, it’s funny, it’s too complex, we might do it later. Okay, you’re gonna start seeing your competitors doing it. You’re going to start seeing more of your competitors having AI generated pictures and images and delivering value to the customer. Sellers are going to start giving more value, more keywords, specifically where the customers are looking for it. And now it’s time for you to prepare for what’s going on, right? So that’s mainly the main idea that I want you guys to understand where the customers are looking for it. And now it’s time for you to prepare for what’s going on. So that’s mainly the main idea that I want you guys to understand. This is the moment to start.

Bradley Sutton:

So then, now I’ve started getting a little bit more into AI, I leverage some of the things that you mentioned, like looking at reviews and customer persona and market basket analysis. Any other Amazon-specific tips that sellers can do that you haven’t mentioned yet about how they can leverage AI. 

Isaac:

So there’s no big um science to it, more than just go do it right. So there’s two categories, right, we have the sections of seller central that have their broad data, that are the dashboard that I mentioned, and there’s the other section of Seller Central that are the data analyzed, right, regarding dashboard and so. So my suggestion is go to start conversations, right. So what I’m telling you today is that actually, this information with AI, with customer persona and understanding that, Josh, customer is just the conversation starter. Remember the picture in the wall of your office? For your customer, it’s just to commit to be able to deliver more value to them, because I know that every single seller has a lot of value to offer to their customer, and maybe they are not thinking that the competitor is going to go up and up and up again, right, so we got to get ready. So we have to start taking these conversations, making sure that, using the right raw data and comparing it to the dashboard, that they are already analyzed for that, if we align that information, the actions and the conversations, I think you’re going to be in the right path.

Bradley Sutton:

And guys out there, a lot of you have Helium 10, so you are going to be able to do some of this stuff pretty easily. He mentioned looking at keyword data and bringing that in. Publish or print your search term reports or download your search term reports from what has converted for you in advertising. Download your search career performance. You can do that, like over a big period of time in Helium 10. What are the keywords that people use that Amazon is saying you got sales for?

 Bradley Sutton:

We have in Helium 10 something called inventory heat maps. It gives you a heat map of where all your customers are. So, geographically, that’s something you’re like. That’s not the reason for it. The reason we have that tool is just so you can see where your customers are. So, geographically, that’s something like. That’s not the reason for it. The reason we have that tool is just so you can see where your customers are and maybe you need to send more inventory to a certain place. But when he mentioned that, hey, the geography of where your customers are might tell a story behind it.

Bradley Sutton:

So take a picture of that and then now put all of these things into an LLM or any kind of AI that you’re using and start seeing, start playing with it, see what kind of insights you can get by combining all the data that Helium 10 has that Amazon has and build your own Josh, or let’s call it Sally it might be a Sally there and this also helps even later when you start polling.

Bradley Sutton:

We have that polling tool in Helium 10 called Helium 10 Audience, where I can actually choose certain cohorts of people real people to give a poll like hey, prime members, but then maybe Josh we find is a 40 to 50-year-old male who has this kind of salary based on what we found from Amazon’s data to an audience, so that when you are trying to actually say, hey, which image is the best, which A-plus content is the best, or which product should I launch more, you’re almost speaking to 50 different Joshes or Sallys. And so, guys, data is the key and I think sellers sometimes think too much about just the analytics side of data for, like, SEO or listing, optimization and things like that, which is important, but they don’t realize that you can actually use a lot of this data to get in the customer persona and what’s the word you taught me. Psycho something.

Isaac:

Psychographic.

Bradley Sutton:

Psychographic, psychographic data. We all learned a new vocabulary word today. So, Isaac, thank you so much for this. I’m going to have to see you. Know you probably. I know you don’t know this, but one strategy that sometimes one of our trainers has said for years when you have trouble getting customer support, sometimes if you speak Spanish, he says, ask for the Spanish customer support, because it reroutes you to the Costa Rica team and they have a really high level of support. So it must’ve been you over there supporting the team that allowed for that. But your reputation precedes you. Maybe you’ll be my customer success manager one of these days for my account.

Isaac:

Awesome, we’d love to see it.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, all right. Well, this was your first Accelerate. I hope to see you next year and let’s see what’s new in this aspect there.

0:24:11 – Isaac:

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.

0:24:14 – Bradley Sutton:

All right. So we’re here in the Amazon ads content studio. I feel like we’re in like a little dome here almost, and people are watching us from the outside here.

 Alan:

I love it. A little awkward.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, we got Alan here, alan first time on the show, so I’d like to get a little bit of your background first before we get into it. You based here in Seattle, or where you based?

Alan:

Actually based in Colorado.

Alan:

Colorado. Okay, so my name is Alan Lewis. I’m a director of product for the Amazon Marketing Cloud team, which we started that team in Colorado about seven years ago.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, interesting. Is that where you were born and raised.

Alan:

No, I was actually born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, where did you go to college?

Alan:

At UC Santa Barbara. So it was in California.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s not the Gauchos.

Alan:

That is the Gauchos.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh yes, I got it. I always try to think of the mascots of different colleges. Okay, UC. Santa Barbara Gauchos. You’re the first Gaucho I think we’ve had.

Alan:

All right.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, and then, how long have you been at Amazon?

Alan:

For just under seven years, so I came in as the first product manager working on Amazon Marketing Cloud and then before then I’ve worked in tech, now total for over 25 years.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, awesome, awesome. Now I’ve got some questions here from users who have heard about the announcements that we talked about here at Accelerate, about AMC. That I’m going to get to. But I want to take a couple steps back because I think, like a lot of the audience myself, I don’t have too much experience with AMC, because that’s kind of like the announcement is like hey, now it’s kind of democratized, yeah, more people get it. So you already said what it stands for Amazon Marketing Cloud and how long it’s been around. Previous to right now, what has advertisers been utilizing AMC for?

Alan:

So just to try to explain a little bit about what it does I think that’s the best way to get a sense of it. It’s a tool, it’s a software tool that you can use to better understand all the dynamics of your ad campaigns. Now, what kind of dynamics? Well, it’s certain things like going deeper than you would get from the out of the box reports. So it’s, and it’s probably best to illustrate by example. So let’s say, you have, like, multiple different campaigns. So if you just have a single ASIN, a very simple keyword based campaign, there’s some insights that you can get out of that.

Alan:

But, especially as you grow, or if you want to grow and you have multiple campaigns, you have different products. Maybe you have a product that is where people start off with your brand, but you might try to upsell them to other products. Well, understanding, like how people move or are exposed to different campaigns over time, what products they might purchase first from your brand and then move up to other products, these are some of the kinds of dynamics that we haven’t had ways especially not ways out of the box to help people get those kinds of insights. And then, once you have those insights, it’s the next part of it is about turning that into action. So, once you know something, how can you adjust your bidding? How can you if you’re using the DSP craft audiences that really help you take those insights and then use them to get more customers to reach the people that are most likely to purchase your product?

Bradley Sutton:

Absolutely. And then, historically, one of the reasons why I hadn’t used it before, or most doesn’t, or didn’t before. Didn’t you have to know, like programming or SQL and like different things like that, that the common person is? You know, like you said, it wasn’t just available there in your advertising console and Seller Central.

Alan:

Yeah, so with AMC it started out like when we started the product it didn’t even have a graphical UI. It was just a set of APIs, and over time we’ve built more and more tools to help people use the powerful features of the product, because it started with that power, that customization building, sequel support, which is a language for doing analytics it’s very commonly used, but it takes specialized skills and so we’ve built templates. Over time, we’ve built what we call the no-code kinds of tools built into AMC that they don’t strip away the power, but they bring that into the hands of a lot more people and make that power a lot more accessible.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, now one of the first things that even before Accelerate that I guess was launched a few months ago and we actually even ingested that in the Helium 10 is the ability to look at like custom audiences and how powerful that can be, and already I’ve seen a little bit of that. You know where some advertisers are able to advertise to audiences that are more likely to buy and their ROAS really gets really great. Can you talk about that aspect of things, about the custom audiences part of AMC?

Alan:

Yeah. So as we were building AMC first, we focused on the DSP, so it was a much smaller cohort of advertisers people doing video campaigns, display ad campaigns. We then opened it up to include both sponsored ads advertisers too. We first launched audience support for the DSP and this was an announcement we made last year of bringing that audience targeting for bidding on sponsored ads so that you know, with the huge seller community with a huge set of sponsored ads, advertisers has provided some of those tools in ways that were not really possible before to get once you identify a cohort of customers, then either you know to reach that segment of customers on the DSP or increase your bid amount so that when those customers are exposed to your products or when they’re eligible, when they’re searching on them, that your ads and thus your products are more likely to get in front of those high propensity customers.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s an example of like one of those cohorts?

Alan:

One of the just this is both easy to understand and quite popular is people who’ve added your product to their cart. So it’s a kind of a free marketing activity of like okay, how do we get people who are clearly interested over the line? How do we get them to purchase? Well, part of that is just reminding them that you know that there’s there’s products that might be of interest to them and, especially if they’re searching again for the product or on that keyword, getting your product in front of them that’s already in their cart. That’s going to be a pretty effective way to make sure that anybody who, in fact, can be compelled to purchase that they have that reminder through your ads.

Bradley Sutton:

So I just think those of you out there, you might have a keyword you’re targeting and you’re just opening it up to the world, which is fine. It’s going to have a conversion rate. Maybe that conversion rate, let’s say, is 2% or 3%. You’re happy with that as long as you’re profitable. Well, that’s going to everybody, and not everybody is equal as far as, like, the chances that they’re going to buy. But now, all of a sudden you’re targeting that same keyword. But now the ones who are seeing your ad or this particular you know, maybe you’re boosting your bid based on this audience.

Bradley Sutton:

There are people who have added your product to the cart. Imagine exponentially how much more likely they are to actually go through with it as opposed to just, you know, going after the whole entire world. You know that 3%, you know could be 15%. You know even fight, you know five x, whatever your conversion rate was before. And so it makes sense to like have a modifier on there to you’d be willing to pay double almost if you’re going to get. You know five X the likelihood, so that definitely was a game changer. And my first question here, just from somebody who saw the announcement, was like all right. Well, what does this mean for me that this announcement? First of all, talk about the announcement, and then how is this going to kind of like change the game for the average advertiser out there who hasn’t dabbled in AMC?

Alan:

So what we announced here at Accelerate this week is that AMC is now open to every sponsored ads advertiser. It’s present in Ad Console. So if you log in, as long as you have an Ad Console account. You log in on the left nav, go under measurement reporting and then right there you’ll see a link to Amazon Marketing Cloud. Click that link and then things are set up in about under a minute and you’re ready to go and you get a really friendly homepage with a lot of widgets that help you see what kind of the insights you can get from AMC, Because that’s really the best starting point.

Alan:

As for what people can do with it, well, one of the things to emphasize is this is a tool. We have templates, we have some things that we’ve built up, especially that, once we see what customers are most interested in, this can help other people do those kinds of very common use cases. But a lot of what’s exciting about it and a lot of what makes it unique is it’s not just about the features or the particular use cases that we identify. It’s providing customers those raw materials so that they can build whatever they want, which is what you want. You want to get some unique insight. You probably already have a unique insight about whatever your business is, whatever you’re selling, and about what kinds of customers you think might be best or what kinds of marketing strategies might give you an edge. This is a way to help both find those kind of unique insights and then take action against them. That’s what I think is most exciting about AMC.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. What are some more of those different insights that you’re able to glean from AMC?

Alan:

Just drawing from a lot of the pre-built templates that we have, again just to help illustrate what some of the more basic capabilities are. Obviously, sponsored ads is keyword-based and it’s click-based. As you look at the funnel, as you think about a marketing funnel, understanding how often you’re reaching people at the top of the funnel, though, as you think about a marketing funnel, understanding how often you’re reaching people at the top of the funnel, so when you’re trying to build awareness, given the way that you’ve set up your campaigns, how often are you reaching them? How often are you reaching them over time? Where are their pockets of different segments of customers who you’re reaching in certain ways? So, really understanding those broader dynamics where, if you’re a brand advertiser, that might be your main metric that you’re optimizing for is things around reach. But giving a lot of those kinds of insights for marketers who are focused on the lower funnel too, yeah, so this gives them a lot of those, just an understanding of the more complete funnel.

Alan:

Another just kind of insight I think is around a lot of the e-commerce dynamics. This is it’s an average AMC is a product from Amazon ads, but of course, with Amazon, it’s like our ad business is very closely tied to the Amazon store and how people find your product through search, through upgrading from one product like a gateway product to another. So one of the other templates that we have just illustrates how to set up analysis around gateway ASINs. So what are starting points for people when they first interact with your brand, versus what they convert to? Just a couple of specific ideas, but really we have 100 plus templates and our partners, including folks like Helium 10, have built fantastic things on AMC that have even more diversity and for a lot of customers still provide a great way to get a lot of the benefit from AMC, no matter what their skill level is. So it provides you that starting point but really lets you implement all sorts of things unique to you.

Bradley Sutton:

I had a question here about different kinds of audiences. You talked about like an audience that has added your product to cart. What are some other examples or common use cases that you see advertisers using out there with success?

Alan:

Yeah, I think another one is. So I talked about the funnel. So obviously, like if you added a product to your cart, you’re often very, very, very low in the funnel. But as you gain insights about different stages, that people are at different ways, that they might first be introduced to your product, those audiences are giving you many different ways to try to move people down the funnel. So that’s, I think, just a general sort of pattern that we’ve seen is that you can. You know it’s one thing if you get an insight about where somebody’s at in the funnel or that you might change your investment strategy about how much you’re allocating to one kind of ad versus another, something like that, but you can use audiences to actually affect the funnel in certain ways too, to try to just get more people to the ultimate goal of purchase.

Bradley Sutton:

There is a vocabulary word from like well, the press release that was not familiar to me.

Alan:

Which one’s that?

Bradley Sutton:

Automated signal curation. So I was like we need to first of all. Like at Amazon, we make acronyms about everything, so maybe we can call that ASC or something like that

Alan:

Oh, watch out, I’m full up on acronyms. I don’t know if I can handle one.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ll try. But give me the TLDR on automated signal curation.

Alan:

What that I think is referring to is you don’t have to do the work to get all the signals. So signals is is, I think, a term used especially in ads to refer to just all kinds of data points that might originate on Amazon, from off Amazon, like it’s these, these things about, like what? What customers are exposed to your ads? What? What have they previously purchased? What’s their purchase history? What do you know about your customer base? Who are your most loyal customers? Where you have email signups for your newsletter or something like that?

Alan:

These are all signals that you can bring into an environment like AMC. One of the things that’s great about it is it’s automated, especially the signals from Amazon. All you have to do is start using the product and, just by virtue of you having set up and run a campaign on Amazon ads, the signals related to that campaign whether it’s the impression events, people that saw your ad, the click events, or the product detail page views, the purchases these are all different signals that are brought into AMC without you having to do that work.  

Bradley Sutton:

All right. A scenario. A lot of our podcast listeners know about a case study that we did a while back where we started a product from scratch. It’s a coffin shelf, A shelf shaped like a coffin. We’ve sold probably like 500 grand of that in the last year.

Alan:

Is it for a coffin?

Bradley Sutton:

No, it’s not for a coffin. It’s like a shelf that you would hang on a wall, but it has the shape of a coffin.

Alan:

All right.

Bradley Sutton:

It was amazing. It was a great case study because it just shows you can sell almost anything on Amazon. We still sell a lot of people. People see it on Amazon, but anyways, this product is not a huge winner these days. It still does. You know, low six figures.

Alan:

Halloween’s coming up.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s our busiest time of the year.

Alan:

Reaching peak coffin shelf market penetration.

Bradley Sutton:

For this is going to be very key here in October. So for this product, $100,000 a year product. So you understand the level. Never done AMC on it. What would you suggest to me should be my first steps as I start dabbling into this?

Alan:

I think step one is so you know the sales numbers. You know at least the basics, and probably a lot more based on what is coming out of the tools that you have access to already, whether those are Amazon provided tools or something from one of our partners. So, before you start using AMC, you can do you don’t have to but you can just think big about, like, what are things I’d love to know? What are things about how my product is doing, about how my marketing, how effective it is, and just think big about what are things I’d love to know, if just a lot more, just as an example, about why did customers buy this product? How did they find it in the first place? What are they using it for? Maybe there’s differences there.

Alan:

Now, not all these things are gonna be, I think, possible, but really the point of this is not to constrain yourself upfront by just what you happen to get access to through the pre-built reports. So then, using AMC, starting with the things that are very easy, where you can, with a couple of button clicks, you know, find, like, if you have multiple different campaigns, well, how are my sponsor brands and sponsor products campaigns working together.

Alan:

You know what, like I get the raw numbers on those. I see, like where is a, what purchases are attributed to? Somebody saw a sponsor brands you know banner for my product last. But how did they, how did they reinforce each other, those two different campaigns? You mentioned the product and it’s funny. I met a customer a couple years ago that sells bespoke funeral urns.

Bradley Sutton:

I need to collab with this person.

Alan:

Exactly so you know, there’s a brand collaboration potential right there.

Bradley Sutton:

I can put that urn in the coffin shelf.

Alan:

On the shelf. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

There you go.

Alan:

So, but let’s say that your business actually had both of those products or something like that you might find a sort of insight that affects what products you actually source or manufacture or sell, based on those insights about how people came in what other things they’re interested in. So those are things that you would uncover from starting to use the product and then seeing insights that didn’t occur to you up front. A mix of those two, both what you came up with on your own and what you found from the exploration. I’ve seen that usually sparks some great ideas to then pursue.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Well, guys, I have my homework cut out for me. You guys have your homework cut out for you. It’s available right now in your ads console. The audience is already available in Helium 10. More features are going to come to Helium 10 to help you with AMC. But we need to hear from you as you start dabbling into AMC and playing with it and the advertising console. How can Helium 10 help you? Let us know what you would like to integrate into Helium 10 ads and we’d definitely like to help you guys out. But thank you so much for first of all bringing this cool tool to the masses. It’s so important and we look forward maybe I’d like to have you back next year at Accelerate and I’m sure you probably have a few more things to announce that you’ve worked on.

Alan:

Look forward to it.

Bradley Sutton:

Thanks a lot.

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