Google’s Ads Data Hub & Amazon’s AMC : Apples vs Better Apples!
Apples vs Better Apples !
As the digital marketing ecosystem prepares for a cookie-less future & navigates towards a world of protected data, the beauty of a clean room has been a work of devotion by two of the biggest players in the data clean room game i.e Google and Amazon.
To the end-user of these clean rooms, this comparison between Google’s Ads Data Hub and Amazon’s AMC has to be a choice between apples vs better apples, especially due to the diverse offerings but based on the same idea of privacy-compliant data.
Let’s dig a little deeper into some of the distinctive features & focus areas that have been picked up by them.
But first things first, the three basic emotions for these two amazing products !!!
The WHAT,
The HOW
&
The WOW!
What is the Product?
AMAZON : AMC
A new, holistic measurement and analytics solution enabling more transparency and flexibility in understanding how marketing performs across media channels such as search, display, video, and audio based on event-level Amazon Advertising data.
GOOGLE : ADS DATA HUB
A privacy-safe data warehouse that enables customized analysis, while upholding Google’s high standards of data security.
How does it work?
AMAZON : AMC
AMC is an instanced product — each instance contains data from only a single advertiser. Within the Amazon DSP an advertiser may be represented by one or more “advertiser IDs” or multiple “Entity IDs” within the Advertising Console for Sponsored Ads.
GOOGLE : ADS DATA HUB
Ads Data Hub reads data from a Google-owned Cloud project and writes aggregated Google campaign data to our Cloud project.
What’s the wow feature?
AMAZON : AMC
Availability of amazon in-built behavior segments and the ability to measure cross channel performance ( Display + OTT ) across multiple, pseudonymised data sets to generate aggregated reports.
GOOGLE : ADS DATA HUB
Ability to combine a brand’s own DCM data across multiple buying platforms, such as Display & Video 360, Google Ads, Campaign Manager 360, and YouTube while maintaining end-user privacy.
Let’s have a look at the distinctions grouped into two grades: Fundamental & Moderate distinctions.
What are the fundamental differences between ADH and AMC ?
Data Linkage
AMC : The AMC team is responsible for creating instances — and the typical turnaround for an instance to be created is 3–5 business days.
ADH : In order to have ads data available for querying in Ads Data Hub we need to link from the account associated with the Google ad product used by our team.
Data Availability: Type
AMC : Event-level data includes the impressions and clicks from Amazon DSP advertising and Sponsored Products campaigns.
ADH : Event-level data + First-party data into BigQuery and joining it with Google event-level ad campaign data.
Date Range of Available Data
AMC : The day an instance is created, it’s back-filled with 28 days of advertising data. Advertising data accumulate for up to 12.5 months in your instance.
ADH : Data begins populating in Ads Data Hub after the link is approved. No Historical Data is available.
Data Accessibility
AMC : AMC publishes data into an S3 bucket. AMC provides an AWS Cloud Formation template that creates the S3 bucket within your account, and grants the AWS account within which your AMC instance runs the permission to put data into that S3 bucket.
ADH : Results from the queries we write in Ads Data Hub are written to BigQuery datasets in our Cloud project. Additionally, if we work with CRM or offline data in Ads Data Hub, this is where we will upload that data.
Data Sensitivity
AMC : A low to high sensitivity scale for each of the columns in the dataset.
ADH : Flat hierarchy of sensitive data columns. Eg: user_ids.
What are the other levels that the two products differ ? i.e the moderate differences
Data Dictionary
AMC : In addition to the impressions data, segment level information is available for each of the segments that was either targeted by the campaign or included the user that received the impression.
ADH : Data that is keyed to an identifier that Ads Data Hub tracks can be used as the shared attribute between our data and Google’s, allowing us to link both datasets.
Data Privacy Threshold
AMC : Low : if the row contains at least 2 distinct users. Eg : campaign_id and ad_id. Medium : if the row contains at least a 100 distinct users. Eg : bid_price and winning_bid_cost. High : if the row contains at least a 100 distinct users. Eg : postal_code.
ADH : A minimum of 50 users for data output into Big Query.
Data Usage : Measurement vs Activation
AMC : Cross Channel Measurement & Reaching incremental audiences.
We can use AMC to connect with existing and new audiences at different phases of the marketing funnel to extend the reach of its linear TV campaign to an audience that would have been missed with linear TV alone.
We can surface solutions like Incremental Audience Measurement, Cross Campaign (Display vs Video) Overlap Measurement, Custom Attribution etc. from AMC.
ADH : Activation : Custom Bidding & Custom Audience.
We can use Ads Data Hub to build and manage audiences, which can then be shared with our linked Google Ads and Display & Video 360 accounts.
We can also surface insights like Reach/Frequency , MTA, Markov & Shapley from ADH.
Data Visualisation
AMC : For easier visualisation, Amazon has provided Amazon Quicksight.
It is a scalable, serverless, embeddable, machine learning-powered business intelligence (BI) service built for the cloud.
ADH : For easier visualisation, Google has provided, Google Data Studio.
It is a free tool for creating charts and interactive data visualisations that Ads Data Hub integrates natively with, making it easy to view your results in Data Studio.
API Access
AMC : One of the best ways to connect to AMC APIs is using AWS CLI and SDK as it makes the signing process for us to access AWS services.
ADH : One of the best ways to connect to ADH APIs is using the Google client library that is available in several popular languages like Java or Python.
Workflow Creation
AMC : AMC provides us the feature of scheduling the workflow with the help of AMC Schedules APIs. The scheduled workflow will run the respective queries on the AMC datasets.
ADH : In order to schedule ADH queries, a third-party tool or software needs to be used.
Conclusion ~~ it’s a win-win with a few polite differences
Although there are polite differences that Ads Data Hub & AMC showcases, nevertheless both of these provide a solid refinement in building & offering highly custom data possibilities both in measurement & activation in a cleanest way possible as far as data privacy is concerned.
Glossary : Abbreviations & Definitions
- ADH : Ads Data Hub
- AMC : Amazon Marketing Cloud
- Data Clean Room : A Data Clean Room is a secure, protected environment where PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data is anonymized, processed and stored to be made available for measurement, or data transformations in a privacy-compliant way.
- AWS CLI : The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is a unified tool to manage your AWS services.
Sources :-
[1] https://advertising.amazon.com/blog/introducing-amazon-marketing-cloud
[2] https://developers.google.com/ads-data-hub
[3] https://developers.google.com/ads-data-hub/guides/audience-activation
[4] https://advertising.amazon.com/marketing-cloud/documentation
