Amazon Ad Hoc Reporting

Executive summary

Standard scheduled reports are dead weight. Amazon ad hoc reporting through the AMC API is how top brands run real-time, multi-touch attribution.
You can execute up to 30 ad hoc workflows per day per AMC instance to query exactly how your DSP and Sponsored Ads overlap.
The big bottleneck is SQL. Writing custom queries for every sudden market shift drains resources, which is why AI automation is replacing manual data pulling.
Having endless custom data is useless if your team can’t act on it within minutes. The real advantage is connecting ad hoc insights directly to automated bidding execution.

You are sitting at your desk on a Tuesday morning. Your biggest competitor just hijacked your top non-branded keyword because they noticed a micro-trend in conversion rates over the last six hours. They adjusted their bids, shifted their DSP budget, and are currently stealing your market share. You? You are waiting for your scheduled weekly spreadsheet to arrive on Friday. This is the brutal reality of Amazon advertising today. If you run a brand and your team still relies on standard console reports, you are driving while staring strictly at the rearview mirror. The auction is a bloodbath. Amazon’s advertising division generated $56.2 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $67 billion by the end of 2025. Every single one of those dollars represents a brand fighting for the exact same pixel of screen space you want. To survive, you don’t need a summary of what happened last week. You need absolute, uncompromised visibility into what is happening right now. You need Amazon ad hoc reporting.

The hidden cost of scheduled blindness

For years, brands built their entire operations around periodic reporting. You set up a campaign, you wait seven days, you download a CSV, and you make adjustments. That works fine in a vacuum. It fails spectacularly when retail dynamics change by the hour. Think about a sudden inventory stockout from a rival. Or a viral TikTok video that unexpectedly spikes demand for a specific sub-category of your product line. Standard reporting won’t catch this until the opportunity has already passed. This is precisely why Amazon sellers watch margins ahead of Prime Day with extreme anxiety. They know that a rigid, scheduled reporting structure leaves them vulnerable during high-traffic events. Enter the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and its ad hoc API workflows. Instead of waiting for Amazon to hand you pre-packaged data, an ad hoc execution allows you to run custom SQL queries on pseudonymized event-level data exactly when you need it. You ask a specific question. You get a specific answer.

56%

of enterprise brands had fully adopted Amazon Marketing Cloud by early 2026, driven entirely by the need for custom attribution.

Source: Skai 2026 State of Retail Media

Standard Console vs. AMC Ad Hoc Reporting

What actually changes when you move from the traditional interface to custom API calls? Everything related to how you attribute success. The standard console gives you last-click attribution. It tells you that a customer clicked a Sponsored Product ad and bought your item. What it hides is the customer journey. It doesn’t tell you that the same customer saw a streaming TV ad on Thursday, clicked a Sponsored Display ad on Saturday, and only converted on the Sponsored Product ad the following Tuesday. Ad hoc queries expose the overlap.

Feature	Standard Console	AMC Ad Hoc Workflow
Attribution Model	Last-touch only	Multi-touch (fractional credit across channels)
Data Frequency	Fixed daily/weekly schedules	On-demand (Up to 30 executions per day)
Audience Overlap	Blind to DSP vs. Search overlap	Full visibility into media mix synergy
Query Flexibility	Pre-defined metrics only	Custom SQL for highly specific scenarios

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How the ad hoc landscape mutated in 2025-2026

The tools available to brand managers right now look nothing like what we had even 24 months ago. The shift has been aggressive.

January 2025: The multi-touch mandate

Early last year, brands realized that scaling DSP campaigns without understanding the downstream impact on Sponsored Products was burning cash. AMC became non-negotiable. To even get access to this ecosystem, you needed your brand fundamentals locked down. If you don’t know how to use Amazon Seller Central Brand Registry properly, you are essentially locked out of the advanced data clean rooms that make ad hoc queries possible.

November 2025: API limits and flexibility expand

Amazon recognized the demand for real-time querying. They expanded the capabilities of the AMC API, allowing advertisers to run up to 30 ad hoc workflow executions per instance per day. This meant you could test a hypothesis in the morning, refine the SQL query at noon, and deploy a new bidding strategy by the afternoon based entirely on fresh, custom data.

March 2026: AI replaces the SQL bottleneck

This was the breaking point. The problem with ad hoc reporting was that you needed a data scientist to write complex SQL statements. Marketing teams were paralyzed by syntax errors. In 2026, AI platforms bridged the gap. Now, you ask a natural language question, the system translates it to an API request, executes the ad hoc workflow, and adjusts your bids automatically.

Epinium data

Internal data shows that brands shifting from weekly scheduled reports to automated ad hoc API executions see a 19% drop in wasted ad spend within the first 14 days of implementation.

The ugly truth: More data is probably killing your ROAS

Here is where most get it wrong. The industry is obsessed with “more data”. Everyone wants access to the AMC API. Everyone wants to run custom queries. But giving your team infinite ability to run ad hoc SQL queries is usually a disaster. If you aren’t careful, your marketing team will spend six hours a day pulling data, formatting spreadsheets, and debating attribution models, leaving zero hours to actually build a strategy. Data without an execution layer is just expensive noise. A senior Amazon brand manager shouldn’t be writing SQL or manually deciphering JSON responses from an API. They should be defining the brand’s trajectory. The goal isn’t to run 30 ad hoc reports a day manually. The goal is to have a system that runs those queries in the background, identifies that your Sponsored Brands video ads perform 40% better when the customer previously saw a DSP ad, and automatically funnels budget into that specific overlap. If your ad hoc strategy requires human hands to move the sliders every time a report finishes, your competitors using AI will always outbid you.

Navigating the technical setup

To actually make this work, you need to understand the architecture. An ad hoc workflow execution via the Amazon Ads API requires an AMC instance. You send a POST request with your custom SQL query in the body. The system processes it. Here are the strict parameters you must manage:

You must define the exact time window (the lookback period can now go up to 25 months for certain traffic).
You must ensure your query doesn’t violate Amazon’s aggregation thresholds. If you try to isolate a single user’s behavior, the API will reject the query to protect privacy.
You have to handle the output, which is delivered to a secure AWS S3 bucket, not a pretty dashboard.

This raw output is useless to a marketing director. It has to be ingested, parsed, and visualized. That is the exact gap AI platforms fill. They take the raw, privacy-safe outputs from the S3 bucket and turn them into immediate, actionable bidding rules.

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly is an Amazon ad hoc report?

It is a custom, on-demand data query run through the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) API. Unlike standard reports that run on a fixed schedule with predefined metrics, ad hoc reports let you ask specific, custom questions about your advertising performance using SQL.

How does the AMC API handle these queries?

You send a POST request containing your SQL statement to the AMC reporting endpoint. The system processes the query against its clean room data and outputs the results to an AWS S3 bucket, provided the query meets privacy and aggregation thresholds.

How many ad hoc workflows can I execute daily?

Amazon currently allows up to 30 ad hoc workflow executions per day, per AMC instance. If you need more frequent data, you should set up periodic scheduled executions instead.

Do I need to know SQL to pull these reports?

If you are interacting directly with the AMC console or raw API, yes, you need SQL expertise. However, modern AI tools and platforms provide a no-code interface that translates your requests into the required SQL automatically.

Can I mix my own DTC data with Amazon’s data?

Yes. One of the biggest advantages of AMC is the ability to upload your own first-party data (like Shopify sales or CRM lists) and run ad hoc queries to see how your off-Amazon customers interact with your Amazon ads.

What is the difference between periodic and ad hoc executions?

Periodic executions run automatically on a set schedule (e.g., daily or weekly) and are great for ongoing dashboards. Ad hoc executions are triggered manually for one-off analyses, troubleshooting, or testing a new hypothesis immediately.

How fast can I get the data after running an ad hoc query?

The execution time depends on the complexity of your SQL query and the date range you are analyzing. Simple queries can return in minutes, while complex multi-touch attribution models spanning a year of data will take longer to process.

Does ad hoc reporting cover Amazon DSP?

Absolutely. In fact, analyzing the overlap between Amazon DSP campaigns and Sponsored Ads is the primary reason most brands adopt AMC and run custom ad hoc queries in the first place.

Is the Amazon Marketing Cloud free to use?

The AMC instance itself is free for eligible advertisers, but you must meet certain spend thresholds, particularly with Amazon DSP. Additionally, managing the AWS infrastructure (like S3 buckets) to store the output data may incur separate cloud costs.

The execution gap

Data is no longer a competitive advantage on its own. Everyone has data. Your competitors have access to the same APIs, the same clean rooms, and the same metrics. The only thing that separates a brand that scales profitably from a brand that slowly bleeds margin is the speed of execution. Ad hoc reporting bridges the gap between what happened and why it happened. But AI is what closes the gap between knowing why it happened and actually doing something about it. Stop downloading spreadsheets. Start building automated loops.

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