Amazon Marketing Stream Guide 2026

TL;DR — Key takeaways

Amazon Marketing Stream pushes hourly ad metrics to your AWS account — no polling, no throttling, no 24-hour lag
Managed advertisers using Marketing Stream for intraday bid optimization averaged 5% ROAS improvement over six months vs. non-users
One retail brand achieved +273% sales and +570% NTB units during Prime Day using Stream-powered dynamic bidding on 500+ keywords
New-to-Brand metrics moved to hourly reporting in 2026 — you can now see which hours and targeting combos drive new customer acquisition, not just repeat purchases
Access requires Amazon Ads API credentials — most brands access Stream through a tech provider rather than building the integration from scratch

Amazon Marketing Stream is a push-based messaging system that delivers hourly Amazon Ads campaign metrics to your AWS infrastructure in near real-time, without polling the API. It connects via SQS queues or Amazon Data Firehose and sends data as it becomes available — no waiting for end-of-day aggregates, no throttling concerns.

For advertisers running significant Amazon spend, acting on data two hours old rather than 24 hours old is measurable in wasted budget and missed bid windows. This guide covers how the system works, what data it delivers in 2026, who can access it, and how to build the integration.

How Amazon Marketing Stream Works

Traditional Amazon Ads reporting is pull-based: your application calls the API and receives aggregated data with a 12–24 hour lag. Marketing Stream flips the model. Amazon pushes data to your AWS account as events occur — hourly aggregation for performance metrics, near real-time delivery for campaign change events.

Architecture: Amazon Marketing Stream writes to an SNS topic, which fans out to an SQS queue in your AWS account. Your application reads from that queue. Alternatively, route through Amazon Data Firehose into S3, Redshift, or any Firehose destination. Subscription management happens through the Amazon Ads API — register your AWS account ID and Amazon handles cross-account permissions automatically.

Delta Values, Not Aggregates

The implementation detail that matters most: Amazon Marketing Stream delivers delta values — the change in a metric during a given hour — not cumulative totals. If your Sponsored Products campaign generated 50 clicks between 2pm and 3pm, you receive a message with clicks: 50 for that hour. To calculate daily totals, your application sums the deltas. This design lets you optimize intraday without loading full historical datasets on every update.

Datasets Available in Amazon Marketing Stream (2026)

Dataset	Metrics	Availability
Sponsored Products traffic	Impressions, clicks, CTR by keyword and placement	Global
Sponsored Products conversions	Orders, units, revenue, ACOS, ROAS by targeting expression	Global
Sponsored Brands traffic + conversions	Impressions, clicks, attributed sales, NTB metrics	Global
Sponsored Display traffic + conversions	Impressions, clicks, detail page views, attributed sales	Global (since 2025)
Budget consumption	Spend rate; fires at 5% budget increment thresholds	Global

Campaign Management Datasets (Near Real-Time)

Dataset	Events Captured
Campaign changes	Status, budget, name, targeting modifications
Ad group changes	Default bid, status, targeting adjustments
Ad changes	Creative swaps, ASIN eligibility, status updates
Targeting entity changes	Keyword bid updates, negative additions, match type changes

Amazon DSP Datasets

DSP performance data is available for managed service and self-service accounts. Datasets include order-level, line item-level, and creative-level performance — delivered hourly. Managed service DSP accounts gained full unified reporting integration in Q1 2026.

average ROAS improvement for advertisers using Marketing Stream intraday bid optimization over six months

Source: Amazon Advertising case studies

Amazon Marketing Stream in 2025–2026: What Actually Changed

Unified Reporting Experience Launched at unBoxed 2025

Amazon launched a unified reporting experience in late 2025, consolidating reporting interfaces across all Amazon Ads products. Marketing Stream is now a delivery channel for this unified data — filter and combine data across Sponsored Ads, DSP, accounts, countries, and supply and targeting combinations in a single stream. The practical impact: hourly reporting now extends back two weeks, daily and weekly reporting covers 15 months, and monthly/yearly data reaches six years. Cross-product attribution combining Sponsored Ads and DSP attribution windows now arrives in the same stream.

New-to-Brand Metrics Moved to Hourly Reporting (2026)

NTB metrics — orders and sales from customers who had not purchased from the brand in the previous 12 months — were previously only in daily aggregated reports. In 2026, Amazon expanded the Marketing Stream analytics stack to deliver NTB data hourly. Hourly NTB data lets advertisers identify which hours and targeting combinations drive genuine customer acquisition versus repeat purchases. This distinction matters for brands optimizing lifetime value rather than short-term ACOS.

Who Can Access Amazon Marketing Stream

Agencies managing Amazon Ads on behalf of clients, with API access through their agency profile
Technology providers — software platforms integrated with the Amazon Ads API
Direct advertisers: vendors and sellers who have obtained their own Amazon Ads API credentials

Getting API access as a direct advertiser requires applying through the Amazon Ads API developer program. Approval is not automatic. Most sellers access Marketing Stream through a tech provider or agency rather than building the integration from scratch.

Integration: Step-by-Step

Step 1: Register Your Subscription

Call the Marketing Stream subscription API with your AWS account ID and the dataset IDs you want. Amazon creates an SNS topic in its account and grants your SQS queue permission to receive messages from it.

Step 2: Create an SQS Queue

Create a standard SQS queue in your AWS account. Set the queue policy to allow the Amazon SNS topic ARN to send messages. Standard queue works for most implementations — FIFO adds ordering guarantees but is unnecessary for hourly performance data.

Step 3: Process Messages

Messages arrive as JSON via SQS. Each contains: dataset identifier, time window (hour start/end), profile ID, and the metric payload as key-value pairs. Your consumer reads from SQS, parses the JSON, and writes to your data store.

Step 4: Handle Deduplication

Marketing Stream delivers at-least-once — duplicate messages for the same hour window can occur during reprocessing. Build an idempotency check: store the message ID or use time window + profile ID + dataset as a composite deduplication key before writing. Missing this step produces inflated metrics.

Step 5: Handle the Historical Gap

Marketing Stream is forward-looking — no backfill on demand. For periods before your subscription started, use the Amazon Ads Reporting API. Plan for the transition window where you have partial-day Stream data and need the Reporting API to fill gaps.

Use Cases That Move ROAS

Intraday Bid Adjustment

If your category converts better between 7pm and 10pm, raising bids 20–30% during that window and reducing them overnight captures more sales at better efficiency. Amazon data shows managed advertisers using Marketing Stream achieved an average 5% ROAS improvement over six months compared to non-users.

Budget Pacing Alerts

Budget consumption messages fire at 5% spend increments. At 80% consumed by noon, your system raises the budget cap automatically or alerts a campaign manager — preventing early budget exhaustion that leaves ads dark for the second half of the day.

Prime Day Event Management

A retail brand running Sponsored Products during Prime Day used Marketing Stream to monitor hourly share of voice and dynamically adjust bids across a 500+ keyword portfolio. Results vs. prior year: Share of Voice +104%, Impressions +34%, Clicks +73%, Sales +273%, New-to-Brand units +570% (Tinuiti case study). Static bid strategies during high-traffic events leave substantial upside on the table.

Cross-Campaign DSP + Sponsored Attribution

The 2026 unified reporting integration connects DSP impressions to Sponsored Products conversions in the same stream. For brands running both channels, this removes the manual reconciliation step that previously required exporting from two separate reports and joining them offline.

Amazon Marketing Stream vs. Amazon Advertising API Reports

Criterion	Marketing Stream	Advertising API Reports
Latency	Hourly, near real-time	12–48 hours
Delivery model	Push (SNS/SQS)	Pull (request/response)
Historical data	No backfill	60+ days lookback
Granularity	Hourly deltas	Daily or summary
API throttling	None	Rate limits apply
Infrastructure	AWS SQS or Firehose	Standard HTTP client
Best for	Intraday optimization, live dashboards	Historical analysis, audits

Limitations to Know Before You Build

AWS-only delivery: GCP or Azure infrastructure needs a bridge layer.
No backfill: Messages beyond SQS retention (default 4 days, max 14 days) are gone if your consumer fails. Build for resilience from day one.
API access required: No access via the Advertising Console UI. Not suitable for advertisers without engineering resources or a tool provider.
Data freshness by dataset: Campaign management events are near real-time; performance metrics are hourly, available 1–3 hours after the hour closes.

Epinium data

Brands running Epinium’s Marketing Stream-powered bid optimization averaged 5% ROAS improvement in their first six months versus their prior manual-adjustment baseline. The most impactful use case in practice: budget exhaustion prevention — campaigns hitting 80% budget by noon auto-scaled to prevent the 4–6 hour dark window that manual monitoring routinely missed.

How Epinium Uses Amazon Marketing Stream

Epinium’s advertising platform is built on Marketing Stream as the primary data source for bid optimization. Rather than building and maintaining the SQS integration yourself, Epinium handles the AWS infrastructure, message processing, and deduplication — surfacing hourly insights in a dashboard your team can act on without writing code. Automated bid rules use hourly Stream data to adjust bids within your guardrails, not end-of-day summaries that are stale by the time you read them.

FREE SESSION

Running significant Amazon ad spend but still on daily reporting?

In 30 minutes, an Epinium specialist will show you exactly what intraday bid optimization would have changed in your last 30 days of campaigns — using your own data.

Book your free session → ✓ Free ✓ 30 min ✓ No pitch

FAQ: Amazon Marketing Stream

Does Amazon Marketing Stream work for Seller Central accounts?

Yes. Sellers can access Marketing Stream with Amazon Ads API credentials. The API application process is open to sellers who manage their own advertising. Most access it through a tech provider or agency rather than applying for API credentials independently — the integration build requires engineering resources that most seller teams don’t have in-house.

Is Amazon Marketing Stream free?

Amazon does not charge separately for access. You pay standard AWS costs for SQS and data transfer — minimal relative to ad spend at any serious scale. The real cost is engineering time for the integration build: typically 2–4 weeks for a basic consumer, 8–12 weeks for a production-grade system with deduplication, error handling, and a dashboard layer.

How is Amazon Marketing Stream different from Amazon Marketing Cloud?

Different tools for different questions. Marketing Stream delivers operational hourly metrics for campaign management. Amazon Marketing Cloud is a clean room for complex cross-campaign attribution, audience overlap, and path-to-purchase modeling using anonymized event-level data. AMC is for strategic analysis; Stream is for live optimization. Most sophisticated brands use both.

What AWS services do I need for Amazon Marketing Stream?

Minimum: an SQS standard queue and IAM role with read permissions. For production: SQS plus a Lambda or ECS consumer plus a data store (RDS, Redshift, or S3 with Athena). Amazon Data Firehose is an alternative that handles delivery directly to S3 or Redshift without a custom consumer — lower engineering overhead but less flexibility for custom processing.

How long does the Amazon Marketing Stream integration take to build?

A basic proof-of-concept writing to S3 takes 1–2 days. A production system with deduplication, error handling, auto-scaling, and a dashboard layer takes 8–12 weeks for most engineering teams. The SQS consumer itself is straightforward; the hard work is building reliable deduplication and a data model that supports the intraday reporting use cases you actually need.

Can I use Amazon Marketing Stream without AWS infrastructure?

Not directly. Amazon delivers messages to SQS or Amazon Data Firehose — both are AWS services. If your infrastructure is on GCP or Azure, you need a bridge: an AWS account with a simple Lambda that reads from SQS and forwards to your preferred destination. Some third-party tools handle this bridge themselves, which is why most non-AWS brands access Stream through a platform like Epinium rather than building the cross-cloud plumbing.

What happens to Marketing Stream data if my SQS queue goes down?

Messages queue in Amazon’s SNS topic for up to 4 days by default (configurable to 14 days). If your SQS queue or consumer goes down within that window, messages are waiting for you when you recover. Beyond the retention period, those messages are gone — there is no backfill. This is why the skill spec for production deployments is to build a dead-letter queue and monitoring alert for queue depth, not just consumer uptime.

Does Marketing Stream support multiple markets and ad accounts?

Yes. You subscribe per advertising profile (account + marketplace combination). A brand selling in US, DE, and UK has three separate profiles and can subscribe all three to the same SQS queue — the dataset includes a profile ID field to distinguish sources. Agency accounts managing multiple clients use the same pattern: one queue, multiple subscriptions, profile ID as the tenant key in your data model.

EPINIUM PLATFORM

Act on Amazon campaign data in hours, not days

Epinium’s Marketing Stream-powered platform handles the AWS infrastructure, deduplication, and bid automation — you just set the guardrails.

Start free →

Free · 30 min · No commitment

Amazon Marketing Stream: Hourly Ad Data and Intraday Bidding in 2026