Amazon Marketing Cloud’s 5-Year Dataset: 6 Use Cases Worth Building Now

Use Amazon Marketing Cloud's five-year purchase history to refine acquisition budgets, measure customer value, and win back shoppers lost over a year ago. 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 again