Brands advertising on Amazon often struggle to get the full picture of their performance across ad tactics. This stems from Amazon’s last-touch attribution model, which limits visibility into the impact of upper-funnel tactics such as display ads via Amazon DSP.
To solve this problem, Amazon launched Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) in 2021. AMC is a data clean room of Amazon advertising events, allowing advertisers to generate insights past the last click into their performance. AMC has allowed brands to get insights into the incrementality of upper-funnel advertising, new-to-brand performance, lifetime value, and much more.
However, one issue that continued to persist until late 2025 was the time grain AMC data provided. Historically, AMC has been limited to a 13-month rolling lookback when looking at performance. This means key metrics such as new-to-brand or lifetime value only took into account whether a shopper had a purchase event in the prior 13 months, with earlier purchases and revenue being missed in AMC queries.
To address this issue, Amazon released a new dataset called Amazon Retail Purchases in 2025, which required a monthly subscription, giving advertisers up to five years of purchase data in AMC. In June 2026, this dataset was made free through the end of 2026 (as of the time of this article).
This means key data points such as new-to-brand, lifetime value, and gateway products were now able to take into account a full customer history, providing a much more accurate picture of advertising performance around both customer acquisition and the long-term value of these customers.
Also read: 3 Ways AI Is Changing PPC Reporting (With Examples To Streamline Your Reporting)
The Use Cases That Retail Purchase Data Unlocks
Lifetime Value
If you sell as a Vendor on Amazon, you previously had no way to understand the LTV of your customers. With the five-year dataset unlocked, you can now start to understand this all the way down to the product level.
When you understand LTV, you can better make decisions about where your CAC needs to fall on a product level. For example, several CPG brands may find they have high LTV after a shopper purchases a lower-priced SKU, eventually converting into higher-priced SKUs like multi-packs. This could lead to a decision to take a loss on the initial purchase, increasing available advertising allocation, knowing the shoppers will bring additional revenue over the longer term.
New-To-Brand
AMC was previously limited to a 13-month rolling lookback period of shopping data. That meant when calculating the new-to-brand rates of both a brand’s advertising campaigns and individual products. That meant for brands with longer repurchase cycles, like consumer electronics, it was difficult to actually understand which products and advertising tactics were successfully acquiring net-new customers.
With the five-year shopping dataset, brands can access 60 months of rolling shopping events, giving a more true new-to-brand rate. However, several brands find that the entire five years is too long of a lookback period for NTB datasets. The retail purchase dataset is very flexible, allowing brands to customize their NTB window based on their exact specifications up to the full five-year period.
Repeat Purchase Windows
Before the retail purchase dataset was made available, understanding repeat purchase cycles was nearly impossible for several categories with extended customer lifecycles such as consumer electronics or luxury goods. With only 13 months of data available, brands in these categories missed key insights, and the ability to retarget past purchasers, simply because their repeat purchase window exceeded 13 months.
With the five-year lookback availability, these brands can now not only understand their ideal repeat purchase windows, but create and activate audiences that target shoppers within the post-purchase time window. This activation extends across Amazon display network, Prime Video, sponsored ads, and everything in between.
Gateway Products
Once you understand metrics such as lifetime value or new-to-brand rates by product, one of the natural next questions is which products are driving entry of customers who eventually purchase higher-priced SKUs.
For CPG brands, this could mean purchases of bulk products or multipacks. For consumer electronics, it may be an upgraded model.
No matter the scenario, the retail purchase dataset enables brands to look across the extended time period and understand the customer lifecycle across SKUs. This drives key decisions about which products they should be pushing to net-new shoppers in advertising campaigns, putting on promotion, or which past purchasers they should focus retargeting efforts against.
Reacquiring Lapsed Customers
Amazon advertising offers several methods of targeting past purchasers of your products. Using Amazon DSP, advertisers can create custom audiences with flexible lookback windows up to 365 days that can be activated across their campaigns. Using AMC, advertisers could also create purchase segments to be activated across Amazon inventories.
However, none of these methods have historically provided the method to target purchasers past 13 months of their last purchase. Meaning if a brand lost a customer for over a year, they had no means to attempt to reacquire this customer, no matter what their previous lifetime value may have been.
Since the retail purchase dataset is available not only for queries, but also for activating audiences, brands can now activate strategies to reacquire customers they have lost. With AMC’s advanced segmentation abilities, brands can customize the lookback window of these purchases, set a minimum LTV threshold, focus on certain product purchasers, and much more in their winback strategies.
Bonus: Combine With First-Party Data
One of the most underleveraged features of AMC is the ability to upload first-party shopper data to be joined with Amazon shopper data. If a brand has access to shopper-level purchase history via a direct-to-consumer website, or an email list built across channels, this dataset can be securely hashed and uploaded into AMC.
This data can then be joined with other AMC datasets using privacy-safe shopper ids. Brands can then understand the lifecycle of their shoppers across platforms, understanding how Amazon affects direct-to-consumer purchasing, and vice versa.
In Summary
Amazon Marketing Cloud unlocks some of the most valuable, and often underutilized, datasets across Amazon’s advertising network.
This network continues to expand, allowing advertisers to reach shoppers across Amazon-owned inventory such as Amazon.com, Prime Video (including live sports such as the NBA and NFL), Twitch, Whole Foods, and more, as well as third-party supply such as Roku and Netflix.
With the five-year purchase dataset via AMC, brands can not only generate deeper insights across extended time grains, but also create audience segments with much more precision when activating across Amazon’s expanding ad inventory.
Amazon continues to make AMC more accessible to brands. What previously required SQL expertise, now is accessible via a library of pre-built queries and audiences. Paid datasets such as the five-year lookback are now available without cost, and agentic functionality is being brought into the picture via Amazon Ads Agent.
Now is the time to activate AMC data if you advertise on Amazon.
More Resources:
- 10 Remarketing Lists To Boost PPC Performance
- Amazon Left US Google Shopping A Year Ago & Never Came Back
- Amazon Sellers: Inventory Management Tips For 2025
Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
