At CES 2025, Amazon Ads announced an exciting new Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) capability: a five-year lookback window for measurement.
Previously, AMC’s lookback window was limited to 13 months, limiting trend analysis to short-term performance.
Now, with a five-year window, advertisers can track long-term performance, shifts in customer behavior, and understand the impact of advertising campaigns over an extended period of time.
The Specificity of New-to-Brand Customers
There is one metric that stands to benefit most from this change: New-To-Brand (NTB) analysis.
When it comes to Amazon advertising, few metrics hold as much value as NTB customers.
It’s a vital indicator of growth, yet it's always posed a challenge: Its analysis and calculation are in relation to the type of product you’re selling.
Amazon defines NTB performance as the number of first-time orders for a brand’s products over a year.
However, products have vastly different life cycles. A coffee brand might prioritize NTB performance over a few months, while a treadmill brand might focus on a window of two to three years.
This one-size-fits-all approach has left many advertisers asking: How can I tailor NTB analysis and strategy to better reflect my goals?
AMC’s new five-year lookback window for measurement transforms how we approach NTB, allowing us to tailor it to each advertiser’s specific needs.
Now, for example, a brand selling premium skincare products can prevent inflated NTB metrics – distinguishing truly NTB customers from a customer that purchased their product a year and a half ago but used their product very slowly.
This is critical to segment campaigns appropriately.
Whether it’s shorter cycles for consumables or longer windows for high-ticket items, we can now customize NTB to provide more accurate insights and actionable decisions.
Expanding Customer Lifetime Value
This expansion doesn’t just enhance NTB—it also significantly improves metrics like customer lifetime value (CLTV), making it more reliable as we track performance year to year.
For example, a customer who purchases a $40 supplement every three months over five years is worth more than a customer who buys a $100 bundle of products once per year for just two years. With this expanded lookback, we can now focus campaigns to specifically target that higher value customer and even consider strategies that look to convert customers to Subscribe & Save.
As the success of most strategies is tied directly to the reliability and volume of performance data, this new five-year lookback eliminates guesswork and helps brands make better, data-backed decisions.
The Most Effective Way to Leverage AMC Data
While this is an impactful update for AMC, without the technical know-how to write SQL queries – you'll struggle to extract the required data, let alone leverage it effectively.
For a brand owner that’s wearing many hats, adding data analyst to your job description is daunting.
That’s why thousands of brands work with Quartile to access AMC data and understand how to use it to inform their ad strategy.
Quartile combines our AI-powered ad optimization platform with full-service management, with our team consistently extracting AMC data to inform your strategy – and this 5-year lookback further strengthens that motion.
Interested in learning more? Reach out to our team today.
