Most brands use Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to answer familiar questions. Which campaigns drove conversions? Which audiences performed best? What path did shoppers take before they bought?
Those are useful answers, but they’re also just the starting point.
The brands getting the most out of AMC are using it for something bigger. They’re using it to make sharper decisions about who to target, where to spend, and which shoppers are actually worth winning.
Amazon keeps adding new ways to reach shoppers across Sponsored Ads, Amazon DSP, and Amazon Streaming TV. At the same time, shoppers are moving across more touchpoints before they buy. If you’re only using AMC to explain what already happened, you’re missing where it becomes most useful: helping your team decide what to do next.
Here are three of the most undervalued ways brands can use AMC today and how each one can lead to better commerce decisions.
1. Using AMC to build more precise audiences
A lot of brands still target too broadly on Amazon. They know who their core shopper is, but they are less clear on which adjacent audiences are worth reaching, and which ones are most likely to drive incremental growth.
This is where AMC insights become more useful, helping your team build audiences based on behavior and not just assumptions.
For example, instead of targeting a broad category audience and hoping efficiency holds, your team can use AMC to find smaller segments that convert at a higher rate or drive a stronger basket.
This matters even more as audience strategies get more expensive and more fragmented. Precision matters, but so does knowing which precision is worth paying for.
Case study: We found that AMC-informed lifestyle and in-market segments delivered +23% more traffic and +67% more NTB traffic versus other tactics in the same campaign for a brand. This broadened the high-value reach outside the product category, outperforming standard targeting approaches.
Most teams should start narrower. Begin with the segments that show the strongest intent and relevance, pressure-test them against conversion and purchase value, and then widen the audience once you know what quality looks like.
Used well, AMC turns audience planning from a media assumption into a behavioral strategy.
With Flywheel’s Consumer Long-Term Value (CLTV) dashboard, brands can move beyond lifestyle and demographic views to build audiences grounded in shopping behavior, purchase value, and conversion patterns.
Going even further, a custom AMC analysis can weave in in-market segments, lifestyle cohorts, and other behavioral groups that help you understand not just who is reachable, but who is likely to matter the most over time.
2. Using path-to-purchase insights to optimize the full funnel
Many brands also still plan and measure Amazon media one channel at a time.
Search gets judged on direct efficiency. Amazon DSP gets judged on awareness or reach. Amazon Streaming TV gets evaluated separately again. But shoppers do not move that way. Their journeys are fragmented, and they rarely convert after a single touchpoint.
AMC insights, combined with Flywheel’s Path to Purchase dashboard, help brands look at the journey instead of the tactic. Many brands are still overvaluing the last touch and undervaluing the role that awareness and mid-funnel activity play in conversion.
An in-depth path-to-purchase analysis gives you a clearer view of how different formats work together, which touchpoints introduce shoppers to the brand, and which combinations are most likely to drive purchases. AMC, combined with Flywheel’s Path to Purchase report, gives your team a better set of questions to work from:
Which paths lead to the highest conversion rate?
Which paths drive the most volume?
Which ad types are best at product introduction versus closing the sale?
Where does Amazon DSP or video actually strengthen search performance?
Once you can see which touchpoints introduce demand and which ones close it, budget decisions usually change fast.
Case study: Applying path-to-purchase insights for a brand enabled a shift from a siloed channel approach where each channel operated independently to a coordinated full-funnel strategy. Search (lower-funnel) was integrated with upper-funnel campaigns, using audiences across channels to link touchpoints and retarget shoppers effectively. The overlap of shoppers who experienced both upper- and lower-funnel media through retargeting and AMC custom audiences drove conversion rates up to 6x higher than using search alone.
In many cases, the most effective path is not search alone. It is a sequence of touchpoints across formats, with awareness and re-engagement helping search convert more efficiently later. That is especially important around tentpole events, when teams are tempted to over-concentrate spend at the bottom of the funnel.
AMC gives brands a way to see where upper-funnel investment is truly helping and where it is not, making it easier to build full-funnel strategies based on proven shopper behavior. The best teams use these insights to:
Shift spend toward higher-performing journeys
Sync audiences across Amazon DSP and search
Separate acquisition paths from repeat-purchase paths
Adjust budget based on how formats work together, not how they perform in isolation
AMC should act as more than just a reporting tool for your brand. It should be helping shape your full funnel media strategy.
3. Using longer retail lookback windows to make better growth decisions
Most Amazon teams still operate on short-term signals: weekly performance, campaign ROAS, event results, monthly sales. Those views matter, but they do not tell you much about the health of the business underneath them.
That is why one of the most undervalued AMC use cases is the longer retail purchase lookback. When your team uses AMC to look at cohorts over time, you can answer questions that matter far more than campaign performance alone. You can see how first-time purchasers behave after acquisition. You can track repeat rates, time between purchases, cross-buying across the portfolio, and where churn starts to show up.
In other words, you move from campaign reporting to shopper understanding. This is especially useful for brands trying to answer questions like:
Are we too dependent on repeat purchasers for growth?
Are our new-to-brand cohorts healthy over time?
Do we understand the repurchase cycles of our products and the LTV of those shoppers over time?
Which SKUs drive trade-up or cross-sell later?
Are we investing in tentpole events at the level that we should be, and are we acquiring high-value shoppers during these events?
How much should we invest in acquisition versus retention?
These are portfolio and investment-defining questions.
Short-term performance can hide long-term weakness. A brand can look healthy on paper while new-to-brand acquisition quietly slows and future growth starts to plateau. AMC insights help teams catch that earlier.
This use case also helps brands make stronger internal business cases. It is one thing to ask for more Amazon investment based on recent performance. It is much more compelling to show the long-term value of the cohorts you are acquiring, or to prove that certain products act as stronger entry points into your portfolio over time.
Case study: Leveraging AMC’s five-year lookback, we built custom and lookalike audiences across the traditional 1-year and extended 5-year segments. The 5-year segment outperformed baseline audiences, and delivered a purchase rate five times higher than other Amazon DSP audiences. This helped achieve the brand’s highest Amazon DSP purchase rate on Prime Day and significantly boosted overall ROAS.
What the best AMC users do differently
These use cases look different on the surface, but they all point to the same mindset shift. AMC is most valuable when it helps brands make better decisions across the full lifecycle of commerce:
Who to target
How to structure the funnel
Where to place budget
Which shoppers and products drive long-term value
The brands with the most mature AMC initiatives use it to answer real business questions and to move faster on the decisions that matter. For some brands, that means sharpening audience strategy or refining your digital merchandising strategy. For others, it means understanding how search and Amazon DSP work together. For others, it means looking beyond campaign windows and getting a clearer view of lifetime value and cohort health.
The data matters, but the bigger value is what it changes in your planning, targeting, and investment decisions.
Where brands should start
AMC maturity is a journey, and speed matters. Brands need to turn their early insights into action and organizations must align to treat AMC as a test and learn environment.
If you are still early in your AMC journey, do not try to do everything at once. Start with the question your team is under the most pressure to answer. If it is efficiency, focus on audience precision. If it is media mix, start with path-to-purchase analysis. If it is long-term growth, begin with cohort and purchase lookback work.
The goal is to build an AMC engine that continuously improves decisions and is ready to work with new data sets as they are released, and that is where the most undervalued use cases often become the most valuable.
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