Guide
Optimizing your ads campaigns: When to use HAQM Marketing Stream vs. HAQM Marketing Cloud
Start using HAQM Ads to display your products and create campaigns.
Use the HAQM Ads API to automate, scale, and optimize advertising activities and reporting.
Use the HAQM Ads partner directory to find a partner to onboard you to HAQM Marketing Stream or AMC.
If you’d like support, get in touch to request services managed by HAQM Ads. Budget minimums apply.
Selecting the ideal reporting or analytics tool for your HAQM Ads campaigns can be challenging. Which option will give you the insights needed to identify your most effective ads and better connect with customers?
Among these options, HAQM Marketing Stream and HAQM Marketing Cloud (AMC) stand out as powerful tools for advertisers seeking to maximize their campaign performance. While HAQM Marketing Stream delivers real-time data for immediate optimization opportunities, AMC provides comprehensive analytics capabilities for understanding historical performance patterns and customer journey insights. Using one or both products provides flexibility to analyze your campaigns at different levels of detail and across various timeframes. In this guide, we will dive into the benefits of using HAQM Marketing Stream and AMC, highlight when to use them, and showcase a few customer success stories.
Understanding HAQM Marketing Stream and AMC
The key to maximizing your advertising performance is understanding these two tools and how they work—HAQM Marketing Stream as a reporting tool and AMC as an analytics tool. Let’s dive deeper into how each serves different customer needs:
HAQM Marketing Stream delivers hourly updates through a push-based messaging system via the HAQM Ads API, enabling near real-time campaign monitoring. It provides aggregated hourly reports about campaign changes, allowing advertisers to closely monitor budget usage and HAQM Standard Identification Number (ASIN) eligibility throughout the day. With detailed performance tracking at both placement and ad levels, along with actionable optimization recommendations, HAQM Marketing Stream helps advertisers make swift intra-day adjustments to maintain campaign efficiency.
AMC provides historical analysis capabilities in a secure, privacy-safe clean room environment where you can perform analysis over longer time frames. It analyzes event-level inputs such as impressions, clicks, and purchases, while enabling advertisers to run custom queries across HAQM Ads signals. By integrating first-party insights and providing the ability to create deployable custom audiences, AMC helps advertisers develop and execute more sophisticated, data-driven marketing strategies. This holistic approach to analysis supports long-term campaign optimization and audience understanding.
Think of HAQM Marketing Stream like an airplane’s cockpit instruments—giving you immediate data to optimize your current journey or campaign. AMC is more like an airline’s operation center, where you study patterns across thousands of flights to optimize routes long-term, and make strategic decisions about multiple layers of your business like fuel consumption, fleet expansion, and so on. In an advertising context, this could be your campaigns, brands, ads, marketing mix, etc.
When to use AMC and HAQM Marketing Stream?
Determining when to use AMC vs. HAQM Marketing Stream, or both, depends on your specific use case.
Let’s go through a few scenarios to illustrate this further.
Scenario #1: HAQM Marketing Cloud
Say you are an advertiser looking to optimize your advertising strategy for the upcoming spring season. You’ve been running campaigns across HAQM Ads, social media, and your website. To analyze how these channels interact and influence customer behavior, you import your first-party insights from your website and social media, along with HAQM Ads signals into AMC’s privacy-safe clean room. Using SQL queries, you analyze the customer journey across channels to determine how your social media ads affect both HAQM Ads and direct sales. You can then segment customers based on purchase history to create custom audiences for advertising.
Scenario #2: HAQM Marketing Stream
You are an electronics company that has launched a new product and are running a 24-hour flash sale on HAQM to promote the release. You need to monitor and adjust your advertising in real-time to help maximize sales during this short window. Using HAQM Marketing Stream, you can monitor click-through rates (CTRs) and conversion rates by the hour, set up alerts for when your budget usage falls below a certain threshold, use real-time insights to apply bid modifiers or budget allocations based on intra-day performance, and push these changes live in bulk via the HAQM Ads API.
Scenario #3: Combined
You are a fitness company launching a new line of smart fitness equipment. You want to ensure a successful launch and establish long-term marketing strategies for the product line. Using HAQM Marketing Stream, you monitor the launch performance in real-time, setting up rules to adjust bids and allocate budget based on performance across sponsored ads campaigns. Post launch, you import those signals into AMC to conduct deeper analysis—refining your audience targeting and segmentation, creating new custom audiences for upper-funnel campaigns on Sponsored Display or HAQM DSP, and crafting a full-funnel marketing strategy. You then use these new segments and insights in your advertising campaigns. Optimizing in real-time using HAQM Marketing Stream, and doing periodic deep dives with AMC to uncover long-term trends and opportunities.
To get started, check out the onboarding guides below: