How to Unlock AMC's Potential

How to Unlock AMC's Potential Speaker 1: Welcome in to the Better Advertising with BTR Media podcast. My name is Justin Knuckles. I'm your host here on the show. Today I am sitting alongside a returning guest of the show, the one who makes all of the tech here at Better Media possible, Dustin Wassner. Welcome in, Dustin. Speaker 2: Thank you, Justin. Good to be back. Speaker 1: We are here today to talk a little bit about AMC. There's been a lot of new or extra rollouts around AMC in the recent 60-90 days, specifically around maybe Sponsored Products, some news that was released on LinkedIn, so we'll kind of start there. What was the big news that was recently announced on LinkedIn? Speaker 2: Yeah, so a few posts that I've seen online are discussing this, that there is now a query I'm a creator that is generated by AI where you can essentially type in the request for the query and it will give you the sequel. I haven't tested this firsthand yet, but it is looking great because as everybody knows in the space, everybody wants access to AMC, everything that it provides. There have been two huge moats around it, though, since its inception, and that was that you had to run DSP and that you had to have some kind of tech experience creating the SQL. Well, a few months ago, we had the moat filled in as far as the requirements for needing to run DSP. Now, you could just run AMC with Sponsored Ads only. And now, finally, it looks like that second moat is beginning to be filled in where you don't quite need the SQL experience. Because you can just type into this AI editor, ChatGPT looking interface, where you would like to have a query for a given report, and it ideally spits out the SQL. Speaker 1: That's incredible. I know that's been a huge barrier to entry is people needing to go find a sequel coder or writer that could craft the query for them in order to get the downloaded data that they wanted. So what are some examples of this that, you know, a brand might want to test or try implementing? Speaker 2: So there are a lot that you could, I mean, the opportunities are infinite. But what I would say is if you look at the IQLs, the instructional queries that Amazon gives you by default, And you see something that's similar to what you want. Like, for instance, you would like a report on the path to purchase, but you want it broken out by specific DSP ad types. You want to see OLV, STV, etc. The instructional query doesn't have that by default. So you're going to have to go in and edit the SQL that they provide to you. So if you go in and say, well, I like the idea of what they're providing me in the instructional query, but I needed to do this additional step beyond. This is a really good starting point to where you can get the ideas and then take the next step to really customize them for your specific needs. Speaker 1: So I imagine this is just now rolling out to the community. So as soon as we start playing around with this, I'm sure we'll follow up and do another podcast episode around this. But let's shift into something I mentioned just a couple minutes ago, the release of AMC around Sponsored Products. So I know a few people on the team here have started playing with this. What have you seen? Are there any early results that we can speak to yet? Or what should the community know about the AMC abilities in Sponsored Products? Speaker 2: It's fantastic. I would agree with a lot of people in the space that it's going to be one of the biggest releases that we've seen in quite some time. Some of the things that I really appreciate about it are that you're going to be able to, for the first time, really fine tune the sales funnel. So if we look at specific audiences that we can target, for instance, ones that haven't even clicked on a sponsored ads ad versus, you know, Mid to upper funnel targeting versus they've clicked on the add to cart or they've added it to cart in the last. One to two weeks haven't made the purchase yet in the consideration stage of the funnel at the bottom. We can now look at the different parts of the funnel, target those specifically and really fine tune in. As myself and some of the other account managers are experimenting with this, creating some of the custom audiences, what we're finding is that audience size is important. It matters a lot. If you get too granular with the customization of really fine-tuning into a specific audience, the audience will fail. You need, I believe, 2,500 or 3,000 members in that audience. And there are a few ways that you can expand that by either being a little less aggressive with how specific of the audience you're targeting or stretching the date range out that you're looking to capture that audience. But at some point, You just have to factor this in that if you're going to get so specific with trying to target a specific ASIN in the last week that added to cart but didn't purchase, more than likely it's going to end up failing. So you have to really factor that in when you're approaching this on how you want to build these things out. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's something we've seen with DSP before as well, is if you try to be too granular or try to create an audience that's too new, such as when you launch a brand new product, it will fail. So you have to be obviously a large enough audience, but continue on. Speaker 2: Yeah, and then for any given campaign that we've added these to, We're seeing anywhere from like 30% or less of the total impressions of a campaign going to that specific audience. So what I'm finding is back in the old days where top of search modifiers came out, people were running 10 cent bids, 900% top of search impression increases. They were trying to force the entire audience, all the impressions from that campaign into top of search. I'm finding that it's a similar approach that I'm liking so far, where if it is the average CPC of the custom audience, say it's $1.80, run at 900%. I run an 18-cent bid. Ideally, you can push all of the traffic out of the non-audience and into the audience. But there are a lot of cases, especially if you set these up in auto campaigns, where you're still going to be getting impressions through that non-audience. And it does give you a good idea of how the performance compares one to the other. But it's just something to keep in mind that the total impressions available without the audience is going to be significantly bigger versus when you put the audience in it. We're seeing anywhere, like I said, from 30% or less of the total impression. So if you have a campaign that would have gotten 100,000 impressions, the total impressions going to that audience might be 20,000, maybe even less, depending on how specific you're targeting them. And then the last point that I will point... The thing to consider when you're doing this is how this incorporates into bid ops because as you're adding modifiers on top of these audiences, especially if you run a top of search modifier and the up and down bidding, all of that stacks on top of itself. You're going to want to factor this into your bid ops. And what we're finding the most successful strategy is just to blacklist these entirely because we're running very specific goals for our clients at specific parts of the funnel. And if bid ops goes in and tries to manipulate these, it really could have the potential of kind of not achieving the goals that we want it to. Speaker 1: Yeah, which doesn't mean that, of course, we're not looking at the campaign. It's just a manual correction and fine tuning of these things. But something you mentioned earlier that I want to really make clear to the audience here is this isn't a target that you can solely isolate in a campaign. This is something you have to layer into, like you said, an auto campaign where it is serving to the quote-unquote non-audience, the non-AMC created audience. And so that is specifically why we want those bids so low so that we're limiting how much delivery is going to those people not in the AMC audience and using those modifiers to really reach the AMC audience. Is that correct? Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And it's not the most convenient thing right now. You can go into the UI and see the performance difference between them in the area that it used to be where the placement modifiers were located. I can't think off the top of my head what that's called right now. There are reports in the API that also allow you to pull that in to get a good comparison of the audience versus the non-audience segment so that you can make an actual real data-driven approach in your decision-making towards those. Speaker 1: So one more question here for you while we wrap up is if someone wants to start playing with these SP AMC audiences, how should they get started? Speaker 2: What I would recommend doing is going into the AMC UI and Let's take a step back. First, you have to get your AMC instance launched. As I've been releasing content about this topic for the last probably month or so, the number one question I get is not what audience should I launch or anything like that. It's how do I even get started? And you have to first ask your Amazon ad rep to spin up an AMC instance for you. That's still probably the biggest barrier is the gateway on how to get started. Well, once you get that started, visit the audience section where you can look at the instructional queries where the audiences are already pre-assembled for you. And from that point, you're going to get a good idea of a lot of parts of the funnel that you can target and fine tune. Create one of those manually. Just click copy in the top right section of the window where it shows all the code. It will open it in the code editor. You can run it. Leave basically all of the settings default. That should be good enough at least to get started. It takes about 24 plus hours for the audience to process and then it will finally show up as a targetable entity. So you're not going to see any activity as far as the audience goes until that process takes place. Once that happens, just launch a Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands campaign or Sponsored Display campaign, all of them just as you normally would. And for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, you'll just have the option to add an audience to it. You have to wait your 24 hours and then for sponsored display, it's going to just be as if you're adding an audience just like we always have. So it's not really like you're adding an audience for a modifier, it's just you're adding a target which is the audience itself. Speaker 1: So assuming all these steps can be done in-house by a brand or potentially by an agency partner, this is something that can all be done more or less directly in Ad Console, correct? Speaker 2: Yeah, at this point, it's not very scalable, but if you want to get your hands dirty and started with this, yes, you can do everything manually in the UI as it sits right now, including all of the performance reporting that you need. Speaker 1: I feel like that phrase was very intentional, unless you want to get your hands dirty, which means reach out to BTR Media to talk about these things, right? Speaker 2: Absolutely. I mean, if you need any input on it, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to respond as quickly as possible to any questions that anyone has in the space concerning any of this stuff. It's extremely passionate to me. Speaker 1: And as we said at the very beginning, this is brand new. This is more or less breaking news. So as we're learning more, as we're testing more, we'll likely talk about this a lot more in the future on LinkedIn, the podcast here. So be sure to subscribe if you haven't already. We'll be back to talk more about this. But Dustin, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it. Speaker 2: It's always a pleasure. Thank you, Justin. Speaker 1: Cheers.