Amazon Marketing Cloud for brands

Amazon Marketing Cloud is a clean room. Advertisers query pseudonymized signals, including Amazon Ads events and inputs they bring themselves, and they get aggregated answers back. They do not get a file of customers. Amazon’s product page says your own signals cannot be exported, and that Amazon does not get to wander off with them either. The outputs you can take are aggregated and anonymous.

That is a measurement and audience tool. It is not a second ad console, and it is not a place the brand’s positioning gets decided. If the page, the price, and the stock are wrong, a cleaner report will say so more precisely. It will not fix them.

Who can open it

Amazon’s product page says AMC is available at no cost to eligible advertisers, in a browser and through an API. Sponsored-ads advertisers can reach it self-serve. On 18 September 2025 Amazon announced that any advertiser running Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, or Sponsored TV would see AMC in the ads console under Measurement and Reporting. The same announcement describes no-code templates on the homepage, low-code templates for people who want to go further, and a query editor for custom SQL.

Partners on the Amazon Ads Partner Network can also run AMC for clients. Display, video, and audio with the more advanced settings are a conversation with Amazon, not the self-serve button. If you do not see AMC in the console, you are not “missing a secret.” You are either ineligible or looking in the wrong menu. The announcement says where it lives.

AMC is not Amazon Web Services with a new name, and it is not an email platform. Some pages on the wider web describe it that way and are wrong. Use the product page and the September 2025 announcement. Ignore a guide that tells you to enable AMC inside the AWS billing console.

What it will answer, and what it will not

Useful questions, the ones Amazon’s own description points at:

Which campaigns and which sequences show up on the path before a purchase, across Sponsored Products and the other Amazon Ads products you run.
Whether a group of shoppers who bought once came back, described as an audience you can build, not as a list of names you can download.
How your own inputs, if you are willing to upload them in the form AMC accepts, sit next to Amazon’s ad events. The combination is the point of a clean room. The price of it is that you only see aggregates.

Not useful, or not possible:

A row per customer, an email, or a phone number. The product is built so you cannot have that.
Your cost of goods, your duty, or your true contribution, unless you brought those numbers. AMC does not know your factory invoice.
A replacement for ACoS. ACoS remains the campaign ratio in the ad console. TACoS remains the ratio you compute from total sales. Both are explained in ACoS vs TACoS. AMC is what you open when those two ratios are no longer the question.
A fix for a suppressed listing, a lost Featured Offer, or a gated category. Those are operational. Featured Offer, compliance, gated categories.

Amazon markets the size of the signal set. We will not repeat a superlative. The practical test is whether a question you already have can be answered with an aggregate the templates expose. If you do not have the question, do not hire a SQL project to go and find one.

When a brand should bother

Bother when you are spending on more than one Amazon Ads product, the searches that convert are understood, and the argument inside the company is about path, frequency, or new-to-brand versus repeat. The templates are the right first hour. Custom SQL is the right second month, if the templates were not enough. Amazon’s announcement is explicit that the homepage was designed so a smaller advertiser does not need a specialist on day one.

Do not bother when the account is a single Sponsored Products campaign, the titles are still translated badly, or the hero ASIN stocks out. Spend the same hour on the listing and the inbound. The advertising essay is the order of operations: page, price, stock, then spend, then the fancier measurement.

Do not bother when what you wanted was Google Analytics with Amazon’s customers stapled to it. You will not get the staple. You will get an aggregate that you are allowed to see. If that is disappointing, the disappointment is the privacy design working.

A 1P vendor and a 3P seller do not bring the same events. A vendor does not set the retail price the ads are buying. Be careful about comparing an AMC view of a vendor campaign with an AMC view of a seller campaign as if the dollars were the same. They are not. The models are Vendor Central vs Seller Central.

How to start without a project

Confirm the ad account can see Measurement and Reporting, then AMC. If a partner runs your ads, ask whether they already have an instance. Two instances and no owner is the failure mode.
Run the no-code templates against the last full month. Write down one finding in a sentence a merchant can argue with.
Only if that finding changes a bid, a budget split, or a creative decision, go further. An insight that cannot change an action is a tour of the tool.
Keep the owner of the Amazon Ads account as the owner of the AMC instance. An agency-only clean room is the same trap as an agency-only Brand Registry login.

Ongoing brand growth is the meeting where an AMC finding should show up, next to contribution and stock. It should not be a separate meeting with its own religion.

Questions

Does AMC cost a monthly fee?

Amazon’s product page says it is available at no cost to eligible advertisers. You still pay for the media you are measuring. If a partner charges you to query it, that is the partner’s fee, not an Amazon invoice. Ask which is which.

Can we upload our Shopify customers and email them from AMC?

You can bring inputs AMC is willing to accept, in pseudonymized form, and you can build audiences for use inside Amazon’s ad products. You cannot export the joined customer file, and AMC is not your email platform. If a vendor offers that export, they are not describing this product.

We have no SQL. Is the tool closed to us?

No. The September 2025 announcement says the new homepage leads with no-code templates, and that SQL is there for people who want a custom query. Start with the template. Hire the query when you have a question the template cannot ask.

Sources

Amazon Marketing Cloud. Clean room, pseudonymized inputs, aggregated outputs, no cost to eligible advertisers, self-serve for sponsored ads.
AMC for sponsored-ads advertisers, 18 September 2025. Where it appears in the console, which ad products qualify, and the no-code templates.
ACoS, defined by Amazon Ads. The campaign metric AMC does not replace.

Book a strategy call

If the media reports are thick and the brand still cannot say who came back, send a brief or Book a strategy call.