The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the world’s premier stage for cutting-edge technology, annually brings together industry leaders, tech enthusiasts, and innovators from around the world to Las Vegas to showcase the latest advancements shaping our digital future. This month’s event attracted over 141,000 attendees and more than 4,500 exhibitors.

There were three big product announcements from Amazon Ads this year, two pertaining to Amazon Marketing Cloud and the third to a new product called Amazon Retail Ad Service. Liz Adamson, head of ecommerce at Nile, breaks down exactly what these new products will mean for brand advertisers on Amazon. 

Amazon Retail Ad Service

This service doesn’t necessarily impact Amazon advertisers directly, Adamson says, but if you’ve got a dot-com presence where people and brands can advertise and sell their products, then they will now be able to license Amazon’s technology to advertise on the site. Smaller platforms that do this typically have to build their own platforms. 

“Amazon has been very focused on profitability under Andy Jassy,” Adamson says. “Amazon advertising is a high-margin business, so this is creating another opportunity for them to bring in more dollars. They’ve invested millions of dollars on their advertising platform, and this allows them to monetize it further by licensing it out to other ecommerce companies that don’t necessarily want to build their own advertising platforms.“

The service is designed to help retailers attract more customers while enhancing their on-site experiences and to simplify campaign management throughout retail platforms. Adamson is interested to see how many other retailers will opt to use this new service in light of the fact that it will give Amazon access to their data. 

“There is some skepticism in that regard,” she says. “I’m interested to see what happens. Let’s wait and see if retailers are willing to leverage this technology.”

Expanding Measurement Capabilities to Five Years

When AMC first launched, retailers were only allowed to look back on three months of data. That was then increased to 13 months. The new move to five years of lookback capability for Amazon store purchase data is a true game changer for ecommerce businesses, says Adamson.

“This is something I’m truly excited about,” she says. “Now I’ll be able to see how much money a customer has spent with me over the last five years whereas before I could only measure the last 13 months. This will enable us to measure year-over-year growth for our brands, and we will be able to create better customer lifetime value metrics in the process.”

Adamson notes that this data is especially valuable for tracking customer spending for higher-priced items with a longer purchase cycle. For example, data for the previous 13 months is fine for tracking common consumer packaged goods purchases, such as supplements or groceries. But a longer purchase cycle wouldn’t necessarily accurately reflect more expensive purchases that might only be made every couple of years or longer.

“Having this five years worth of data is going to be huge because if I now understand that a customer is going to spend $5,000 with my company over a five-year period, I know that I can afford to spend $500 to acquire that customer,” Adamson says. “This helps me understand how much I can spend on marketing, how much I can spend on advertising, and how much I can spend to get a new-to-brand customer. So that’s super exciting. We’ll be able to better see and evaluate the lifecycle and seasonal patterns.”

Adamson is one of many agency representatives who have been petitioning for more data availability from Amazon for several years. She thinks the company is now more open to sharing key data because Amazon Marketing Cloud is a privacy-safe environment, with all customer anonymity retained.

“I have been very heartened by the increased data Amazon has been giving advertisers and partners,” she says. “We’ve been pushing for this for the last year. We’re thrilled and grateful that they’re listening to us and taking our feedback. It’s been fantastic.”

The five-year lookback feature is currently available in limited beta as an AMC Paid Feature.

Creating an SQL Generator

Adamson is equally enthusiastic about Amazon Ads’ introduction of its new SQL generator, which will drastically slash back the time it takes advertisers to create queries.

As Adamson explains, Amazon Marketing Cloud is a data room accessed via SQL queries. Up until now, however, those queries have required retailers to either understand the SQL language, hire a programmer who does, or consult an instructional query library and tediously try to match your desired query to a page-worth of code.

“That’s a heavy lift,” she says.

According to the new announcement, queries can be made in regular language, and generative AI will effectively spit out the correct SQL-language code. Not only will this allow agencies to develop complex audience segments without substantial coding knowledge, but it will also provide a more innovative use of customer data and help advertisers optimize their media spend across multiple channels.

“To be able to pull these queries in natural language is huge,” says Adamson. “I think this democratizes, if you will, AMC for the masses, which is exactly what Amazon wants. They want to empower more and more people to use it and, previously, the bar to access it has just been so high. I don’t have a bead on exactly when this will be available, but I think this is huge, and it will just open up access to AMC to so many more people.”

Nile Can Help

As these three new products show, things are continually moving fast in the Amazon advertising space, which can make it extremely difficult for advertisers to stay up to date on everything that affects their business. Nile Commerce provides expert help in navigating today’s ever-changing Amazon online ecommerce market. It’s what we do all day, every day. Please reach out to us for a free phone consultation. Let us help you figure out the best online strategies for your brand.