What AMC Is
AMC sits at the intersection of Amazon's advertising infrastructure and its first-party data. Rather than giving brands raw user data (which would violate privacy regulations), Amazon provides a walled environment where brands and their agencies can write SQL queries against event-level datasets. The results are aggregated and returned — you see patterns and cohorts, not individual user records.
Think of it as a secure room where Amazon lets you ask sophisticated questions about how shoppers interact with your brand across the full Amazon ecosystem. The room stays locked — the data never leaves — but you get to take the answers with you.
What Data AMC Contains
AMC pulls from multiple Amazon data streams, all pseudonymized at the user level:
- Sponsored Ads data: impressions, clicks, and attributed purchases from Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display
- DSP data: programmatic display and video impressions and clicks
- Amazon purchase data: purchase events tied to users who were exposed to your ads
- Streaming exposure: Prime Video and Twitch ad impressions for brands running video via DSP
- First-party uploads: brands can ingest their own CRM or offline data to run matched analysis
The combination is what makes AMC uniquely powerful — no other platform gives you a single workspace to connect ad exposure, content engagement, and purchase behavior across a walled garden at this scale.
What You Can Do With It
Path-to-purchase analysis. Map how shoppers move from first ad exposure to purchase — how many touchpoints, which ad formats drive first contact versus last-click conversion, how long the consideration window is for your category.
New-to-brand measurement. Standard Amazon Ads reporting shows new-to-brand metrics at the campaign level. AMC lets you query it at the audience level: which segments are generating net-new customers versus re-purchasing existing buyers?
Promo incrementality. Did that Lightning Deal actually drive incremental volume, or did it just pull forward demand from shoppers who would have purchased anyway? AMC can build control and exposed cohorts to measure this properly.
Audience building for DSP. Query any combination of behaviors — page views, add-to-cart events, purchase frequency, category browsing — and push the resulting segment directly to Amazon DSP for targeting.
Overlap analysis. Understand how much audience overlap exists between your Sponsored Ads campaigns and your DSP campaigns — and whether you're reaching different people or just paying twice for the same eyeballs.
Why Most Brands Underuse AMC
The most common failure mode: brands treat AMC as an audience tool and nothing else. They use it to build a retargeting list, declare victory, and move on. That's using a surgical instrument as a spatula.
The deeper mistake is that AMC insights stay inside the media team. Promo teams don't see the incrementality data. The commercial team building the JBP with Amazon isn't looking at new-to-brand rates by audience segment. Content teams aren't using AMC to understand which product page elements convert which cohorts. The data exists in a silo, and silos don't compound.
A second structural problem: AMC requires SQL competency and DSP access. Most Seller Central brands don't have either. Access requires working with an AMC-certified partner or having an Amazon Ads team that has been onboarded directly — which gates the tool behind account scale and agency relationships.
What Good AMC Usage Looks Like
The brands getting the most from AMC connect it to their broader commercial architecture. Concretely, that means:
- Using AMC incrementality data to inform which promotions to commit to in the annual JBP — not just running promos and hoping they work
- Feeding new-to-brand analysis into media budget allocation decisions, not just campaign reporting
- Running pre/post content studies using AMC to validate whether A+ Content or video updates actually changed conversion rates among different audience segments
- Building suppression audiences from recent purchasers to avoid wasted media spend
- Using overlap reports to rationalize media mix between Sponsored Ads and DSP
The through-line: AMC is a decision engine, not a reporting layer. Every query should end with a changed decision — about media, about promo architecture, about content, about commercial terms.