Amazon Is Letting Advertisers Analyze 5 Years Worth of Consumers’ Shopping 

Amazon Ads revealed at CES in Las Vegas that brands using its data clean room, Amazon Marketing Cloud, can now query up to five years of purchase signals from the ecommerce giant for measurement use cases.

Amazon Marketing Cloud is Amazon’s privacy-safe, cloud-based clean room that advertisers use to plan and measure ads. Previously, Amazon Marketing Cloud could only query 13 months’ worth of data. The expanded purchase signal history in Amazon Marketing Cloud is aimed at helping brands boost the fidelity of key metrics such as customer lifetime value and a metric called new-to-brand. The feature could be particularly important for advertisers that sell products with longer life cycles or seasonal goods.

Brands that sell products in multiple related categories, such as laundry and house cleaning supplies, can measure how customer lifetime value increases as people make purchases across product lines over an extended time.

The new-to-brand metric refers to the percentage of customers who buy a brand for the first time during a specified period. The broader purchase history window helps brands offering products such as laptops, which are often bought in three-year or five-year intervals, better measure their marketing tactics.

The longer lookback windows provide sellers of seasonal categories such as allergy medicine, back-to-school products, holiday decor, and lawn and garden supplies with multiple year-over-year comparisons.

Amazon Marketing Cloud’s five-year lookback is available in limited beta as part of Amazon Marketing Cloud’s Flexible Shopping Insights feature.

The announcement follows several updates to Amazon Marketing Cloud’s measurement and optimization capabilities that were unveiled at the company’s unBoxed 2024 event in October.

Amazon Marketing Cloud is increasingly playing a bigger role in Amazon’s pitch for ad dollars. The ecommerce giant pitches the measurement tool as a way to prove that its ads can drive more than sales and also influence brand awareness and recall. Amazon Marketing Cloud is built on Amazon Web Services’ technology.