Amazon Marketing Cloud offers expanded measurement capabilities with 5 year retail lookback

At CES 2025, Amazon Ads today announced they are offering brands the ability to query up to five years of their Amazon store purchase signals within Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) for measurement use cases – significantly increasing the current lookback window of 13 months. AMC is a secure, privacy-safe, cloud-based clean room solution that provides a suite of sophisticated planning and measurement capabilities for Amazon advertisers of all sizes. The expanded purchase signal history increases the fidelity of key advertising metrics such as customer lifetime value and new-to-brand, enabling a more complete view of the customer journey for brands that sell longer lifecycle and seasonal products in particular.

“We’re continually expanding AMC’s robust full-funnel planning, measurement, and optimization capabilities – while also making it increasingly simpler to use,” said Paula Despins, Vice President, Ads Measurement. “Extending a brand’s available lookback window from 13 months of their Amazon purchase signals to five years enables advertisers to more deeply understand key customer journey metrics, such as customer lifetime value or the percentage of customers buying the brand for the first time, by analyzing a broader timeframe based on a product’s lifecycle or their customers’ engagement with their brand portfolio over time.”

Customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value enables brands to estimate the total, forward-looking revenue from customers across their product portfolio, with the additional historical data informing a more holistic analysis. For example, brands that sell products in multiple related categories – such as laundry and house cleaning supplies – can measure how customer lifetime value increases as customers purchase across product lines over an extended period of time. These additional insights provide brands a more complete view of their customer relationships.

New-to-brand

New-to-brand measures the percentage of customers who buy a brand for the first time in a specified time period. For longer lifecycle products like laptops, which may be purchased in three-to-five-year intervals, this broader purchase history window enables them to realize more efficiency across their marketing tactics as they seek to drive awareness, consideration, new customer acquisition, and loyalty.

Seasonal categories

Seasonal categories including allergy medicine, lawn and garden supplies, back-to-school, and holiday decor, benefit from longer lookback windows as the increased signals provide advertisers with multiple year-over-year comparisons.

“Amazon Marketing Cloud is revolutionary in decoding the consumer path to purchase and giving an estimated long-term value, but its 13-month lookback window may not capture its true potential, especially for brands with longer purchase cycles,” said Patrick Miller, co-founder, Flywheel. “The five-year lookback of AMC purchase data allows manufacturers to more clearly understand when, where, and how consumers grow within their entire product portfolio, identifying which products establish the best entry point to deliver the greatest downstream impact for the company at large. With this release, manufacturers no longer need to assume this halo effect but can execute on it with clarity and confidence.”

The five-year retail lookback is currently available in a limited beta, as an AMC Paid Feature, with several customers already using the capability.

At unBoxed 2024, Amazon Ads announced several new AMC capabilities that simplify product, optimization, and measurement solutions for customers – further extending its sophisticated full-funnel measurement and optimization capabilities in the hands of all advertisers. AMC enables advertisers to join their first-party data with Amazon Ads signals to understand the customer journey and build and activate audiences.