Amazon Marketing Stream is a data feed from Amazon Ads that pushes hourly advertising metrics and notices of campaign changes into an advertiser's or software provider's own Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, rather than waiting for someone to ask for a report. Amazon describes it as "a push-based messaging system that delivers hourly Amazon Ads campaign metrics and information on campaign changes in near real time through the Amazon Ads API," according to its product page. It exists because the standard reporting route is slow and pull-based. A tool that wants to know how a keyword performed between 2pm and 3pm otherwise has to request a report, wait for it to be generated, download it and do the same again an hour later, consuming API quota each time. Marketing Stream turns that around: Amazon sends the numbers as they settle.

The feed carries advertising data only, no retail data, and it is a pipe rather than a dashboard.

How it works

The setup involves three parties: Amazon Ads, which produces the data; an AWS account owned by the advertiser, agency or tool provider, which receives it; and the Amazon Ads API, which links the two. A developer first creates a destination in AWS. Two kinds are supported, according to Amazon: an Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queue, which the receiving application polls, or an Amazon Data Firehose delivery stream, which can write onward into Amazon S3 storage, Redshift, OpenSearch, Splunk, Apache Iceberg tables or a custom HTTP endpoint, according to an AWS blog post published in October 2025. Only standard SQS queues work. First-in-first-out (FIFO) queues are not supported, according to data connector vendor Openbridge.

The developer then calls the Ads API with the same access token used for any other Ads API work, names a dataset and an advertiser profile, and passes the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the destination. With SQS, Amazon sends a confirmation message that must be acknowledged. With Firehose, cross-account Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles handle permission and "you no longer need to confirm your subscription," according to Amazon's reference implementation on GitHub. Each stream sends data to its own AWS region: us-east-1 for North America, eu-west-1 for Europe and us-west-2 for the Far East region that includes Japan and Australia.

Subscriptions are made per dataset. The GitHub reference configuration lists 15, identical across the three regions:

  • Traffic and conversion: sp-traffic, sp-conversion, sb-traffic, sb-conversion, sd-traffic and sd-conversion, covering Sponsored Products (SP), Sponsored Brands (SB) and Sponsored Display (SD).
  • Sponsored Brands extras: sb-clickstream and sb-rich-media, the latter for video and other rich formats.
  • Budget: budget-usage, which fires when a campaign's spend against its daily budget moves by 5% or more.
  • Entity changes: campaigns, adgroups, ads and targets, which send a message only when something in the account changes, such as a bid edit or a paused keyword.
  • Recommendations: sponsored-ads-campaign-diagnostics-recommendations and sp-budget-recommendations.

A traffic message summarises one hour for one entity. Field names visible in vendor documentation include idempotency_id, time_window_start, keyword_id and match_type, according to Openbridge.

The hard part is that an hour is never final when it is first sent. Click data for SP and SD arrives within 12 hours, clicks may be invalidated as invalid traffic for up to 72 hours, and conversions can be revised "up to sixty days after the initial click," according to Openbridge. Amazon therefore sends deltas and restatements for hours that have already been reported. Each logical update carries a unique idempotency_id. Two messages with the same ID are true duplicates; two with different IDs for the same keyword and hour are both valid, and the consumer has to keep the latest by received time rather than add them together. Conversions are tied to the hour of the click, not the hour of the purchase, so a sale on Tuesday can raise Monday's 9am figure. Budget messages can also arrive twice.

A hypothetical example shows why this matters. A seller's keyword spends $40 by 11am and its budget-usage message shows the campaign at 80% of a $50 daily budget. An automated rule reads that message within minutes and lowers the bid for the evening hours, when the account's history shows weaker conversion rates. Under daily reporting, that decision would be made the next morning, after the budget had already run out.

On the buy side, Marketing Stream is consumed mostly by agencies and software vendors that manage bids, budgets and dayparting, the practice of changing bids by hour of day. Amazon says access is "currently limited to agencies, tech providers, and direct advertisers (vendors and sellers)." Amazon is both the media owner and the data source.

Origin and evolution

Amazon announced Amazon Marketing Stream as a beta on June 21, 2022, for the United States, Canada and Mexico. The first datasets were hourly Sponsored Products traffic and conversions, including keyword performance by placement, plus budget consumption messages. Daniel Knijnik, chief executive of Quartile, said in the announcement that "we've seen an average increase in conversion rate of 15%, and a reduction in ACOS of 10% across our customer base."

Rollout to the remaining Ads API countries began in October 2022, according to Pacvue, and India followed in February 2023, according to Amazon release notes compiled by Openbridge. Sponsored Display datasets became available globally on March 7, 2023, across 17 marketplaces. Campaign change messages, which Amazon called campaign signals, arrived in June 2023. In August 2023 Sponsored Brands metrics went global and, in Amazon's wording, the service became "generally available worldwide via the Amazon Ads API." Campaign signals for Amazon DSP, the company's demand-side platform for programmatic display and video, followed in a September 2023 beta.

Firehose delivery was in place by the time PPC Land reported on the service in December 2024. Openbridge refers to the current feeds as "(v2) data feeds" in documentation dated June 2025.

Why it matters for marketers

Hourly data changes what an Amazon advertiser can automate. A campaign that exhausts its daily budget stops serving for the rest of the day, including hours when it may convert best. Marketing Stream is the official route for seeing that happen while there is still time to act. Amazon lists push delivery "with no API throttling" among its benefits, which matters to tool vendors managing thousands of accounts against Ads API rate limits.

PPC Land's December 2024 coverage of Amazon's data streaming service set out the operational case: traffic and conversion data summarised hourly instead of daily, budget alerts at 5% steps, and entity messages for campaigns, ad groups, ads and targeting. It also repeated vendor claims, including a 5% increase in return on ad spend over six months for partner-managed advertisers.

The feed also underpins Amazon's newer reporting. When Amazon launched unified reporting across its advertising products in November 2025, it made the data available through the report builder, the reporting API and Amazon Marketing Stream.

Limitations and disputes

The most persistent complaint is complexity. Marketing Stream requires an AWS account, infrastructure that costs money to run, and engineering skill to handle restatements correctly. Small sellers depend on third-party tools for access, which favours vendors that can afford the engineering.

Coverage is uneven. In June 2025 Openbridge described conversion and traffic data as available for SP and SD only on its connector, and budget usage as available in all marketplaces except India. The product page and the GitHub configuration list Sponsored Brands datasets as well, so availability depends on the integration and the date.

Status is contested on paper. Amazon's August 2023 release note called the service generally available worldwide, while Openbridge still described it as "currently in open beta" in June 2025. PPC Land's November 2025 unified reporting article dates the service's debut to December 2024, the date of its own first story, which conflicts with Amazon's June 2022 launch notice. Amazon's product page lists 22 marketplaces, including China, while its March 2023 Sponsored Display notice listed 17.

The headline performance claims are the weakest part of the record. Every uplift figure in public circulation, from Quartile's 15% conversion rate rise to six-month return on ad spend gains, comes from Amazon or a partner selling Marketing Stream-based tools. None of them separates the effect of hourly data from other changes made at the same time.

Not the same as

  • Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC): a clean room where advertisers run SQL queries on event-level, pseudonymised Amazon signals. AMC answers questions after the fact; Marketing Stream pushes aggregated hourly metrics without queries.
  • Ads API reporting (version 3): the pull-based route. A client requests a report and downloads it later. Granularity is daily or coarser for most report types, and every request counts against rate limits.
  • Unified reporting: Amazon's November 2025 reporting layer across sponsored ads and DSP. It is a set of report definitions; Marketing Stream is one of three delivery routes for them.

Recent developments

The October 2025 AWS post described feeds for Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP covering traffic, conversion, budget usage, recommendations and campaign logs, with data arriving "within minutes of events occurring." In November 2025, at unBoxed, Amazon placed Marketing Stream inside its unified reporting launch, with self-service DSP accounts first and managed-service DSP accounts scheduled for the first quarter of 2026. The same event introduced an AI agent for automated campaign management, the kind of software that depends on fresh hourly data. On February 2, 2026, Amazon opened the Amazon Ads MCP server beta, "available globally in open beta to Amazon Ads partners with active API credentials," giving AI agents a Model Context Protocol (MCP) route into the Ads API.

Timeline

  • June 21, 2022 - Amazon announces Amazon Marketing Stream (beta) for the US, Canada and Mexico, with hourly Sponsored Products traffic, conversion and budget data.
  • October 2022 - Rollout to remaining Amazon Ads API countries begins.
  • February 2023 - Marketing Stream expands to India.
  • March 7, 2023 - Sponsored Display datasets become available globally in 17 marketplaces (beta).
  • June 2023 - Campaign signals (entity change messages) added.
  • August 2023 - Sponsored Brands metrics go global; Amazon calls the service generally available worldwide.
  • September 2023 - Amazon DSP campaign signals enter beta.
  • December 2024 - Firehose delivery to S3, Redshift, Snowflake, Splunk and OpenSearch documented alongside SQS.
  • June 2025 - Openbridge documents "(v2) data feeds" and still labels the service open beta.
  • October 3, 2025 - AWS publishes reference architecture covering sponsored ads and Amazon DSP feeds.
  • November 11, 2025 - Unified reporting launches in open beta, delivered partly through Marketing Stream.
  • February 2, 2026 - Amazon Ads MCP server opens in beta for API partners.

Summary

  • Who: Amazon Ads operates it. Agencies, ad tech vendors and direct sellers and vendors with Ads API access and an AWS account consume it.
  • What: a push-based feed of hourly sponsored ads and DSP metrics, budget usage, recommendations and campaign change messages, delivered as JSON into Amazon SQS or Amazon Data Firehose.
  • When: launched in beta on June 21, 2022, described by Amazon as generally available worldwide in August 2023, and folded into unified reporting from November 2025.
  • Where: through the Amazon Ads API, delivered into AWS regions us-east-1, eu-west-1 and us-west-2, covering about 22 Amazon marketplaces.
  • Why: to replace slow, quota-limited report pulls with near real-time data so that bids and budgets can be changed within the day, at the cost of significant engineering work to handle restated data.