This guide covers what AMC gives you that the ads console cannot, how access works now, which analyses to run first, how to turn a finding into a live audience, and where the tool runs out of road.
How this was put together:
- Access rules, market coverage and lookback windows checked against Amazon Ads product announcements, not recycled from other blog posts
- Query behaviour and privacy limits described the way they show up in the console, including what makes rows disappear without an error
- Priority order taken from accounts where AMC outputs became live audiences and budget changes, not slide decks
Disclosure: Xneeti manages Amazon advertising and reads AMC signals into that work. Everything here applies whether you run it yourself or hand it over.
By the end you will know whether AMC deserves your time this quarter, and what to run first if it does.
What Amazon Marketing Cloud actually is
AMC is a query environment sitting on top of your own Amazon advertising events. It lets you join data that the ads console reports in separate boxes that never talk to each other.
It is a clean room. You can analyse individual behaviour inside a query, but only aggregated numbers come out the other side.
Here is the version that makes it click. A shopper sees a Streaming TV spot in March. Three weeks later she clicks a Sponsored Brands ad. The following Tuesday she buys through Sponsored Products. Campaign Manager hands the credit to that last click and the first two touches disappear from your reporting. AMC shows all three and lets you decide how to split it.
What AMC does not do is worth saying plainly, because two of the pages ranking for this term blur it. AMC does not serve ads. It does not manage campaigns. It never shows you an identifiable shopper.
How to get access to AMC in 2026
Most guides still list an Amazon DSP master service agreement, an AWS account and a SQL developer as hard requirements. None of those are gates anymore.
AMC sits in the left navigation of the ads console under Measurement and Reporting. If you have never gone past the campaign screens, the Amazon ads dashboard walkthrough covers the rest of the console layout.
The older routes still work. DSP advertisers can request an instance through their account executive, and agencies run partner instances covering several brands under one login. That is how most managed accounts get there.
Three things to do in your first ten minutes:
- Check which instance you landed in, because a partner instance and your own instance hold different data
- Add the people who decide budgets, not only the analyst who will write the queries
- Confirm your lookback window before planning any year-over-year work, since it varies by market
That last one matters more than it sounds. The ad traffic lookback window expanded from 13 months to 25, but it launched in open beta for the US and Canada first and is still rolling out elsewhere. Check yours before you promise anyone a two-year trend.
The privacy layer, and why your report came back half empty
The privacy rules are not a compliance footnote you can skim. They decide which questions return an answer and which ones quietly return nothing.
The third one causes more confusion than the other two combined. Nothing warns you when it fires. The query runs, the output appears, and rows representing small user groups are simply gone. First-time users read that as a broken query or a dead campaign. It is neither. The threshold varies by query type and signal, so there is no single number to memorise, only the behaviour.
It is also the honest reason small accounts get thin results. Fewer shoppers means more of your segments fall under the line and vanish.
AMC vs the Amazon Ads console: what you actually gain
Standard reporting is not the budget version of AMC. The two answer different questions and you need both.
The console tells you what each campaign did. AMC tells you what your campaigns did together, which is closer to how shoppers actually behave.
Daily bid, keyword and budget work stays in the console, and the Amazon PPC ads guide covers that side properly. AMC is not real time and was never meant to be. Treat it as a monthly habit, not a dashboard you keep open in a tab.
The three AMC analyses worth running first
Most teams open AMC, run every instructional query in the library, build a deck, and change nothing. Three analyses are enough to start. Each one should end in a budget or targeting decision, and if it does not, you have built a report instead of a tool.
1. Path to conversion
This returns the ordered exposure sequences that ended in a purchase, and how each sequence converted. The useful finding is rarely the top sequence. It is the high-converting sequence carrying almost no spend.
- Compare shoppers exposed to Sponsored Products alone against those who also saw Sponsored Brands or Display
- Note the gap between single-touch and multi-touch conversion rates before you move a single dollar
- Watch for sequences where the assisting touch is the cheapest impression in the whole path
- Ignore sequences with very few conversions, since the aggregation threshold has already thinned them
Video is where this usually gets interesting. Sellers who run Amazon video ads often find their video campaigns look mediocre in Campaign Manager and considerably better once AMC shows how many purchase paths they opened.
2. New-to-brand by campaign and ASIN
A campaign with ugly ACoS and eighty percent new-to-brand orders is not failing. It is an acquisition campaign being graded as a closing campaign. If your ACoS targets were set without that split in mind, it is worth going back over how Amazon ads cost breaks down before you cut anything.
The same query surfaces gateway ASINs, meaning the products shoppers buy first before they buy anything else from you. That is the single most actionable output in the whole tool, and it is not available anywhere else in Amazon reporting.
3. Audience overlap and frequency
Two campaigns you assumed were reaching different people are often reaching the same shoppers, at a frequency well past the point where another impression changes anyone's mind. This is the fastest money you will find in AMC, usually in the first week.
The fix is normally exclusions and frequency caps rather than a budget cut. Cut the campaign and you lose the reach along with the waste.
Turning an AMC insight into a live audience
AMC programmes die at the handover. A finding lands in a slide, the slide gets circulated, nobody changes a campaign, and six weeks later somebody asks what happened to the AMC project. Activation is the part that justifies the time.
AMC Audiences let you define a segment from a query result and push it straight into live campaigns.
Three segments cover most of the early value: shoppers who saw ads and did not buy, buyers who are past their usual reorder window, and shoppers reached by upper funnel who were never retargeted. Each one maps to an analysis above, and each one can run through your existing Amazon sponsored ads campaigns rather than needing new ones built from scratch.
- Build the audience the same week you find it, because segment membership decays as shopper behaviour moves on
- Apply bid adjustments before launching new campaigns, since the existing campaign already carries history and ranking
- Give every activated audience a measurement window and a decision date before it goes live
Query, segment, activate, measure, query again. Teams that see returns from AMC run that loop every month. Teams that run it once get a deck. For brands past the point where one person can hold the whole account in their head, this loop is also the clearest argument for treating Amazon ads for scaling brands as an operating process rather than a monthly report.
AMC paid features, and the window that closes at the end of 2026
Paid features are optional signal subscriptions. They extend AMC past your own ad-exposed shoppers into retail purchase behaviour and audience segment data.
Here is the timely part nobody frames as an action. Amazon's own first-party signals, including Amazon Retail Purchases and Amazon Audience Segment Insights, are free to query until the end of 2026. Third-party data from providers like Experian still carries a fee.
If you plan to test them at all, test them now and build the baseline while the query cost is zero.
One caveat so that reads honestly. Free to query is not free to use. Someone still has to turn the output into a decision, and that cost does not change.
Do you need SQL to use AMC?
No, not to start. Yes, the moment you want an answer the instructional query library does not already produce.
Ads Agent turns a plain-language question into a query. It removes the syntax barrier, not the harder problem of knowing which question is worth asking.
There is also a growing set of third-party dashboards that sit on top of AMC and hand you pre-built reports. Useful if you want outputs without the console, and the round-up of Amazon ads software is a reasonable place to compare them. Just be clear about what you are buying, which is presentation rather than new data.
The bottleneck in most AMC programmes has never been SQL. It is that nobody owns the decision the output is supposed to feed.
Who AMC is not for
Access being free does not make AMC worth your week. There are accounts where opening it is the wrong use of the time, and most guides on this topic will not tell you that.
The last row is the one people skip. An AMC report nobody is accountable for is a slower, more expensive version of guessing.
If you land in one of the yes rows, the real question becomes who runs it and how often. Plenty of brands answer that internally. Others hand it to a partner, and if you are weighing that, the comparison of Amazon product ads management companies is a sensible starting point.
How Xneeti uses AMC signals
Xneeti reads AMC signals into decisions that are already running on your account, so halo effects and new-to-brand rates shape bids instead of sitting in a monthly report nobody acts on.
In practice that means the attribution Campaign Manager hides: halo effects across ad types, new-to-brand rates by campaign, and the full path a shopper took before buying. Those feed bid, budget and audience changes rather than a slide.
A dedicated strategist owns the account and reviews everything the AI does, which is the part that turns findings into changes. That is also the practical difference between AMC as a dashboard and AMC inside Amazon ads management services that someone is accountable for.
Amazon Ads Verified Partner and Amazon SPN Partner, built by ex-Amazon and ex-Google teams, currently managing over 80 accounts.
If you want to see what AMC signals look like against your own account rather than a generic example, book a demo and we will walk through the overlap and new-to-brand picture for your campaigns.
