Amazon Ads to Snowflake – Made Easy

If you’ve come here, you are probably looking for a way to transfer data from Amazon Ads to Snowflake quickly. In this article, we talk about why Amazon Ads is essential and how you can get access to this data without having to write any code.

The choice for eCommerce business when it comes to marketing and selling their merchandise is growing every day. eCommerce vendors have to decide on what channels they want to sell on, which channels they want to spend their advertising dollars on, whether the channels include:

• Branded websites
  • In some cases branded eCommerce sites per country
• Marketplaces
  • In many instances, marketplaces per country
• Retail stores
  • To create an omnichannel presence and to engage buyers where the shop

Complexity increases with the addition of every sales channel. For instance, if we consider marketing channels available to support online business, you will find a choice of:

• Social Media ads – Some platforms include Bing Ads, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others
• Digital ads and remarketing – Criteo, Taboola, Outbrain, and others
• PPC – Bing Ads, Bing ads, and others
• Email – Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Hubspot, and others
• Podcasts
• Affiliate – Refersion, CJ Affiliates
• Influencer marketing
• Offline marketing

Choice, while being a great virtue, leads to complexity and this complexity when not managed properly, can, in turn, impact the efficiency of running an eCommerce business. Most eCommerce businesses grapple with this complexity; some well and many not so well.

In a competitive digital landscape that we live in, it has become imperative that eCommerce businesses of all sizes that aspire to grow and stay profitable have to look into their data deeply and leverage this for growth.

With the increase in competition, eCommerce Companies should strive to be more data-driven for various reasons. Some of these reasons include

• Understanding the balance between demand and supply,
• Understanding customer lifetime value (LTV)
• Segmenting customer base for effective marketing
• Finding opportunities to reduce wasteful spend
• Optimizing digital assets to maximize revenue for the same marketing spend,
• Improving ROIs on Ad campaigns and
• Offering an engaging and seamless experience for customers in every channel that the customer engages with the brand.

Businesses these days need to be efficient in terms of their data analysis. They are struggling to make sense of the data generated from various applications and tools used to manage different processes efficiently.

Due to the reasons highlighted above, any eCommerce business typically operates at least 10-15 different software/platforms to deliver on their customer expectations. As a result, data silos are created, which makes it more difficult to consolidate data and use the data for reporting, operations, analysis, and taking informed forward-looking decisions.

Marketing platforms like Amazon Ads generate a substantial amount of data like impressions, user behaviour, clicks, product details, and more. Additionally, eCommerce companies that sell globally often end up having separate ad accounts for each country which in turn creates data silos for each country. Imagine a brand selling on three marketplaces or three countries – They may have three accounts per channel in which they are generating data—consolidation of data from these accounts for effective reporting.

These silos analyze the entire business data comprehensively, challenging. Data Savvy eCommerce businesses try to reduce the effort of reporting and analysis by integrating data from all these channels into a cloud data warehouse like Snowflake. By taking this step, the process of reporting and analysis becomes easy, inexpensive, and consequently done more frequently.

In this post, we will be looking at methods to replicate data from Amazon Ads to Snowflake. Before we start exploring the process involved in data transfer, let us spend some time looking at these individual platforms.

Amazon Ads Overview

Amazon Marketplace is the fastest growing online marketplace with an active customer base of 310 million. This user base and the sellers who are interested in selling to this user base are both growing in double digits every year. Amazon is also on an international expansion spree. Amazon’s global marketplace provides sellers with an excellent opportunity to sell to a worldwide market with relative ease. Amazon Ads provides sellers on the Amazon marketplace, the only avenue to advertise on the world’s largest and most popular online shopping platform. Sellers who intend to get better visibility for their products on Amazon can pay for specific spots on the Amazon marketplace by bidding for certain related keywords. Amazon Ads provides vendors with a higher profile in the Amazon SERP. Advertisers pay for every click made by users. Amazon’s advertising platform is similar to that of Google Adwords; the only difference is that Amazon Ads can be used to advertise on Amazon’s marketplace only. Amazon advertising can publish ads on individual product pages on the Amazon Marketplace.

Snowflake Overview

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse created by three data warehousing experts at Oracle Corporation in 2012. Snowflake Computing, the vendor behind the Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse product, raised over $400 million over the past eight years and acquired thousands of customers. One might wonder if another data warehouse vendor is needed in an already crowded field of traditional data warehousing technologies like Oracle, Teradata, SQL Server, and cloud data warehouses like Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery. Well, the answer is the disruption caused by cloud technologies and cloud opportunities for new technology companies. Public clouds enabled startups to shed past baggage, learn from the past, challenge the status quo, and take a fresh look at cloud opportunities to create a new data warehouse product. You can read this article to understand the core technology components that make up this modern, cloud-built data warehouse for consumers of cloud technologies.

You can register for a $400 free trial of Snowflake within minutes. This credit is sufficient to store a terabyte of data and run a small data warehouse environment for a few days.

Why Do Businesses Need to Replicate Amazon Ads to Snowflake

Let’s take a simple example to illustrate why Amazon Ads data consolidate to Snowflake can be helpful for an eCommerce business.

A seller who is selling in the marketplace can calculate their profits by a simple formula:

Profits/Losses = Sales – Expenses

One component of the expense is the money spent on advertising which resides in Amazon Ads. To calculate sales, they have to retrieve sales data from Seller central reports. For the time being, just to keep things simple, let us ignore the expenses related to shipping, packaging, warehousing, and not to mention, commissions.

For Amazon, the above equation becomes

Profits/Losses = (sales data from seller central – advertising expenses incurred in Amazon Ads).

To perform the above calculation, Amazon Advertising Reports containing ad spend data and campaign performance-related has to be downloaded from Amazon Ads web UI and Amazon product, and sales have to be downloaded from Amazon Seller Central and then the equations processed in an excel. What happens if the seller is selling in more than one Amazon Marketplace? – You guessed it right! Analysts or channel managers have to run the reports every day on every channel and manually perform the calculation every day. The impact of manual work is that analysis infrequently happens, which in turn limits how quickly sellers can respond with improved pricing, discounts, stopping campaigns that are not working, and others. Analysts can automate critical reporting tasks and free up their time for in-depth data analysis by automating the extraction of data from Amazon Ads and Amazon Marketplaces and consolidating the data in Snowflake. Insights from analysts not only enable decision-makers to evaluate the impact of their decision but also helps them in taking better decisions.

Replicate Data from Amazon Ads to Snowflake

There are two board ways to pull data from any source to any destination. The decision is always a build vs buy decision. Let us look at both these options to see which option provides the business with a scalable, reliable, and cost-effective solution for reporting and analysis of Amazon Ads data. Amazon Ads platform comprises a few distinct yet connected advertising products as listed below:

• Sponsored Products
• Sponsored Brands
• Sponsored Display
• Stores
• Display Ads
• Video Ads
• Custom Ads

Advertisers have the choice and the flexibility to choose between any of these advertising channels to promote their products. Amazon Ads has a developer API that can be leveraged cancel to pull data from the Amazon Ads platform. The following data is available from the Amazon Ads for replication to a data warehouse. You can also retrieve the data from Snowflake any time you want.

Build your own Data Pipeline

To build support for extracting data using Amazon APIs, the developer or analyst will have to follow the steps.

• Register with the Amazon Developer Portal
• Create API tokens to pull data from Amazon Ads
• Read and understand API documentation thoroughly
• Handle Amazon API rate limits to avoid getting blocked by Amazon or getting data slowly
• Handle different data types that are used in the KPI’s for efficient data storage
• Schedule the API calls frequently to pull new data that is generated in the platform.
• Handle errors, changes and upgrades to the APIs, which happen quite frequently
• Handle notifications so that you were made aware when the script has failed.
• Handle incremental data extraction and avoid full data extraction with every replication task

Here are links to key APIs that you may need to pull Amazon Advertising reports and other Amazon Ads data using APIs:

Once you have automated the extract of data from Amazon Ads and you manage to save the data as a CSV or a JSON file, you can use the file to load Amazon Ads data into Snowflake. You can leverage Snowflake loading routines to accomplish the task of loading data.

• Loading CSV data
• Loading JSON data

Sounds, tedious? Yes, and it indeed is. Thankfully, there is an alternative, and that is a cloud Data pipeline. A new breed of ETL tools that are designed to accelerate data access for faster insights.

Use a Cloud Data Pipeline

Building support for APIs is not only tedious, but it is also extremely time-consuming, difficult, and expensive. Engaging analysts or developers in writing support for these APIs takes away their time from more revenue-generating endeavours. Leveraging a cloud data pipeline like Daton, significantly simplifies and accelerates the time it takes to build automated reporting. Daton supports automated extraction and loading of Amazon Ads data into cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Oracle. Configuring data replication on Daton on only takes a minute and a few clicks. Analysts do not have to write any code or manage any infrastructure but yet can still get access to their Amazon Ads data in a few hours. Any new data is generated automatically replicated to the data warehouse without any manual intervention.

Daton – The Data Replication Superhero

Daton is a fully-managed, cloud data pipeline that seamlessly extracts relevant data from many data sources for consolidation into a data warehouse for more effective analysis. The best part analysts and developers can put Daton into action without the need to write any code.

Here are more reasons to explore Daton:

• Support for 100+ data sources – In addition to Amazon Ads, Daton can extract data from a varied range of sources such as Sales and Marketing applications, Databases, Analytics platforms, Payment platforms and much more. Daton will ensure that you have a way to bring any data to Snowflake and generate relevant insights.
• Robust scheduling options allow users to schedule jobs based on their requirements using simple configuration steps.
• Support for all major cloud data warehouses including Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, PostgreSQL and more.
• Low Effort & Zero Maintenance – Daton automatically takes care of all the data replication processes and infrastructure once you sign up for a Daton account and configure the data sources. There is no infrastructure to manage or no code to write.
• Flexible loading options allow you to optimize data loading behaviour to maximize storage utilization and also easy of querying.
• Enterprise-grade encryption gives your peace of mind
• Data consistency guarantee and an incredibly friendly customer support team ensure you can leave the data engineering to Daton and focus instead of analysis and insights!

Enterprise-grade data pipeline at an unbeatable price to help every business become data-driven. Get started with a single integration today for just $10 and scale up as your demands increase.

We Saras Analytics, can help with our eCommerce-focused Data pipeline (Daton) and custom ML and AI solutions to ensure you always have the correct data at the right time. Request a demo and envision how reporting is supercharged with a 360° view.