Amazon advertisers have been stuck with a frustrating blind spot: Amazon’s last-touch attribution has made it hard to prove whether upper-funnel and display investments actually create demand. Amazon Marketing Cloud was supposed to fix that when it launched in 2021, but the data still came with a major limit: a rolling 13-month lookback window.
That changed with Amazon Retail Purchases. First introduced in 2025 as a paid monthly subscription, the dataset was made free in June 2026 through the end of 2026. It gives advertisers up to five years, or 60 months, of shopping events inside AMC.
Why five years changes the math
With a 13-month window, long purchase cycles make metrics unreliable. A customer who bought a laptop 14 months ago and returns today looks like a new-to-brand shopper. Their previous revenue disappears from lifetime value calculations.
The longer lookback lets brands measure true customer acquisition and long-term value. That is particularly important for consumer electronics, luxury goods and CPG products where shoppers often start with a low-priced SKU and later trade up to bundles or premium items.
Six use cases to build now
- Lifetime value: Understand LTV down to the product level, then set cost-per-acquisition targets that reflect the real long-term revenue a buyer will generate.
- New-to-brand: Replace the 13-month default with a customized window up to 60 months, so long-repurchase categories see which products and tactics truly bring in net-new customers.
- Repeat purchase windows: Identify when customers actually come back, then retarget past buyers inside that window across Amazon display, Prime Video, sponsored ads and more.
- Gateway products: Find the entry-level SKUs that lead shoppers to higher-priced purchases, then invest ad dollars behind them for net-new acquisition.
- Lapsed customer winback: Build lookback windows beyond 365 days, set a minimum LTV threshold and reacquire high-value buyers who disappeared over a year ago.
- First-party data joins: Upload hashed DTC or email purchase history into AMC, match it against Amazon shopper data and see how Amazon and DTC purchases influence each other.
Activate, not just analyze
The retail purchase data is not only for dashboards. Brands can turn these insights into AMC audiences and activate them across Amazon’s growing inventory, including Amazon.com, Prime Video with live NBA and NFL content, Twitch, Whole Foods, plus third-party supply such as Roku and Netflix.
Amazon is also lowering the barrier to entry with pre-built queries and audiences. Work that used to require SQL expertise is becoming more accessible, and Amazon Ads Agent is bringing agentic functionality into the picture.
The strategic play is clear: if you sell on Amazon, use this free window to build LTV and new-to-brand measurement now. Then connect those signals to acquisition and winback audiences before the dataset returns to a paid subscription.
Source: Search Engine Journal
