📆 Intraday Optimisation

Dashboard link: https://app.emax-digital.com/intraday-optimisation-from-amc

Overview

The Intraday Optimisation dashboard uses Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) data to answer a deceptively simple question: when during the day — and on which days of the week — are your ads actually driving purchases? By cross-tabulating impressions and purchases against hour of day and day of week, the dashboard surfaces the time windows where your audience is most receptive, and the windows where ad spend is delivering impressions without conversions. It is designed to support dayparting decisions for Sponsored Ads and DSP campaign managers — i.e. shifting budget toward the hours and days where it works hardest.

This dashboard requires an active Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) integration.

What You Can See on This Dashboard

The dashboard always reports on a rolling 28-day window ending on the selected Report Date. For example, choosing 15 May 2025 returns data from 18 April 2025 through 15 May 2025.

Section: Impressions by Ad Product Type

A breakdown of where your ad impressions were delivered during the 28-day window, split by ad product type (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Brands Video, Sponsored Display, DSP, etc.).

Key metrics:

• Impressions — Total number of ad impressions served, grouped by ad product type.

Visualizations: Pie chart showing impression share across ad product types.

Note on Sponsored Brands Video classification: Sponsored Brands campaigns are classified as Sponsored Brands Video (SBV) if the campaign name contains "video" (case-insensitive) or the abbreviation "SBV". Make sure your naming convention follows this rule, otherwise SBV impressions will appear lumped into regular Sponsored Brands.

Section: Total Purchases per Ad Product Type

The conversion counterpart of the impressions pie chart — which ad product types are actually driving purchases in the same 28-day window.

Key metrics:

• Total Purchases — Advertised Product Sales + Brand Halo Sales (i.e. purchases of the advertised ASIN plus purchases of other ASINs from the same brand attributable to the ad exposure).

Visualizations: Pie chart showing the share of total purchases by ad product type.

Section: Impressions — Day of Week vs Hour of Day Heatmap

The first of two intraday heatmaps. Shows where your impression delivery is concentrated across the 7 × 24 grid of weekday and hour.

Key metrics: Impressions by Impression Hour (0–23, UTC) and Day of Week (Monday–Sunday).

Visualizations: Pivot/heatmap table with hour of day on one axis and day of week on the other. Use this to see whether Amazon is delivering your impressions evenly across the day, or concentrating them at specific times.

Section: Purchases — Day of Week vs Hour of Day Heatmap

The most actionable view on the dashboard: when do purchases actually happen?

Key metrics: Total Purchases by Impression Hour and Day of Week (purchases are attributed to the hour in which the corresponding ad impression was served).

Visualizations: Pivot/heatmap table mirroring the impressions heatmap. Compare side-by-side with the impressions heatmap to identify hour-of-day / day-of-week cells where impressions are high but purchases are not — your dayparting optimisation candidates.

Available Filters

Filter interaction notes

• Report Date defines the 28-day window. Data shown is always the 28 days ending on (and including) the selected date. Changing the date shifts the whole window — it does not show a single day in isolation.

• Ad Product Type scopes the heatmaps so you can run dayparting analysis per channel. The two pie charts at the top show the full mix and respond to Marketplace and Report Date.

• Marketplace is required to interpret the heatmaps correctly — see the time-zone note below.

Use Cases

1. Identify peak conversion hours and apply dayparting — Select your main marketplace and an Ad Product Type (e.g. Sponsored Products). Read the Purchases heatmap to find the 3–5 hour windows that consistently drive the most purchases. Configure dayparting in Amazon Ads (or DSP) to bid up during those windows and down elsewhere.

2. Spot wasted impressions — Compare the Impressions and Purchases heatmaps side by side. Cells where impression volume is high but purchase volume is near-zero are candidates for budget reduction.

3. Weekend vs weekday strategy — Use the Day of Week dimension to see whether your category converts more on weekends (typical for leisure / lifestyle) or weekdays (typical for B2B-adjacent or workday-relevant products). Adjust budget pacing accordingly.

4. Compare DSP vs Sponsored Ads timing patterns — Switch the Ad Product Type filter between DSP and Sponsored Products. DSP often shows broader reach earlier in the day vs. Sponsored Products' concentration around purchase-intent moments. Use the contrast to inform full-funnel scheduling.

5. Validate a new campaign launch's delivery curve — After launching a campaign, check the Impressions heatmap a few weeks in to confirm Amazon is delivering impressions across the day rather than front-loading them.

Limitations & Notes

• AMC privacy thresholds suppress small purchase counts. Amazon Marketing Cloud prohibits identifying individual users' shopping behaviour. For short aggregation buckets like "hour of day," AMC filters out results with fewer than two purchases — meaning low-volume hours will show zero purchases even when one or more actually occurred. This systematically understates Total Purchases in the heatmap relative to the campaign manager. The effect is strongest for smaller brands and niche marketplaces.

• Rolling 28-day window — not a custom range. You cannot pick an arbitrary date range; the dashboard always shows the 28 days ending on the selected Report Date. To compare two periods, take two screenshots with different Report Dates.

• Time zone: UTC. Heatmap hours are shown in UTC, not local marketplace time. Account for your target marketplace's offset when interpreting morning vs. evening peaks (e.g. for amazon.de, add 1–2 hours to read local time), and do not read a single heatmap across marketplaces in different time zones.

• Sponsored Brands Video relies on naming convention. SBV campaigns are detected by the keyword "video" or the suffix "SBV" in the campaign name. If your team does not follow this convention, SBV performance will be reported as regular Sponsored Brands.

• Total Purchases definition. Total Purchases includes Brand Halo Sales (purchases of other ASINs from your brand following ad exposure), not just the advertised ASIN. This is broader than the "Sales" figure shown in the Amazon Ads console.

• Impressions and purchases only. This dashboard does not include click-based metrics (CTR, CPC) or mid-funnel metrics (add-to-cart, detail page views). For a fuller conversion funnel, use the Frequency Optimisation and Exposure Group Analysis dashboards alongside this one.

• AMC integration required. This dashboard requires an active AMC connection. Contact your emax digital account manager if data is missing.

Data Refresh

Data updates daily. Yesterday's data is typically available today — the dashboard does not have the 14-day attribution lag found in some other AMC reports, because impression and purchase timestamps are read directly from AMC's event log (approximately a 1-day lag).