Amazon Marketing Cloud in 2027: A Practical Guide for Sellers

What is Amazon Marketing Cloud?

Amazon Marketing Cloud is a clean room where you run custom analysis on pseudonymized ad and shopping signals, plus any first-party data you upload. You get back aggregated results and can turn query logic into audiences for your campaigns. It reports on your own advertising, and it does not serve ads.

Amazon's product page names AWS Clean Rooms as the underlying technology and offers AMC through both a web interface and an API. The practical difference from your usual reports is the unit of analysis. A campaign report adds up clicks and orders by campaign. AMC holds the sequence of events behind those totals, so you can ask what a group of shoppers saw before buying, in what order, and on which ad types.

You never see an individual shopper. Amazon says only aggregated, anonymous outputs leave the instance, and anything you upload stays inside your dedicated instance, where Amazon itself cannot access or export it.

Who can get Amazon Marketing Cloud access as of November 2026?

As of November 2026, any advertiser running sponsored ads can open AMC through self-service at no cost, with no partner or Amazon rep involved. Amazon's own pages are less settled on DSP-only advertisers, and much of what you will read online still describes the older rule that required an Amazon DSP relationship.

The conflict you may have seen has a simple cause: the rule changed twice. Amazon says DSP usage was once a mandatory prerequisite. In October 2024 it opened AMC to sponsored ads advertisers, but only through partners. Then in September 2025 it removed the partner step. Amazon's launch note is dated September 16 and its news post September 18. That post promised the same streamlined access to DSP advertisers in early 2026.

Guides written before that still list a DSP agreement as a requirement. Tinuiti's guide does, for example, along with live or planned DSP campaigns in the last 28 days. For a sponsored-ads-only brand, that is out of date.

The only condition Amazon names for self-service is running sponsored ads. Its announcements state no spend floor. Availability covers the US, UK and India among other markets, though the market list on the launch note is longer than the one in the product FAQ, so smaller marketplaces should check inside the console.

What does AMC answer that the normal console cannot?

AMC answers questions that span ad types and time: which sequence of ads came before a purchase, how much two channels reach the same people, which products bring in first-time buyers, and who to target next. Standard reports give fixed metrics per campaign or ad type, so they cannot join those events across one shopper's journey.

Path to conversion

Your console can show that Sponsored Products earned the last click. It cannot show that many of those buyers saw a Sponsored Brands ad first. Amazon lists path to conversion among its Sponsored Brands analysis examples, and AMC also supports custom attribution models such as first touch, last touch and equal weight. For brands cutting Sponsored Brands because its ACOS looks poor, this is the first report to pull.

Audience overlap

Overlap tells you whether a new channel reaches new people or the same shoppers again. Amazon's library guide reports a Flywheel analysis for Netgear, covering November 2023 to February 2024, in which streaming TV ads had 67% incremental reach compared with audiences seeing Amazon DSP ads. That is one partner-reported case, and your number will differ. The method is what carries over to any account running several channels.

New-to-brand, in more depth

Amazon's Sponsored Brands page describes console new-to-brand metrics as first-time orders and sales within a 12-month look-back. That gives you a count per campaign. In AMC you can ask which campaign or product started the journey. Tinuiti describes a custom gateway ASIN query that looks for the product most often bought first by new customers. If that product is a low-margin bundle, your acquisition math changes.

Custom audiences

Query logic can become a target list. Amazon's own examples include shoppers who added to cart without buying, people who viewed a detail page several times after seeing an ad, and past buyers from last year with no recent engagement. Activation depends on the ad type. Amazon's announcement lists Sponsored Display targeting plus bid boosts on Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. Display, video and DSP buying can use these audiences too. If you run Sponsored Display conquesting, an exclusion audience of recent buyers is a sensible first test.

Which AMC questions should an operator run first?

Start with questions tied to a budget decision you already have to make, such as whether to keep funding Sponsored Brands or add display. Each query below ends in an action. If you cannot name what you would change based on the answer, skip that query, because AMC will happily produce interesting tables nobody uses.

1. Do buyers who saw Sponsored Brands before Sponsored Products convert at a higher rate than those who saw Sponsored Products alone? If yes, stop judging Sponsored Brands on last-click ACOS.
2. How many shoppers reached by display were also reached by sponsored ads, and how do the groups compare on purchase rate? Heavy overlap with no lift argues for cutting display or changing who it targets.
3. Which ASIN do new-to-brand buyers purchase first? Put acquisition budget behind products that lead to repeat orders.
4. At what impression frequency does conversion stop rising? Use the answer to set frequency caps, or to build the over-exposed exclusion audience Amazon mentions.
5. How many days pass between first ad exposure and purchase? A long lag means your weekly ACOS check is judging upper-funnel spend before its orders arrive.
6. Which shoppers searched relevant keywords after seeing an ad and then did not buy? Amazon cites a Perpetua segment for Beekeeper's Naturals built on keyword exploration after ad exposure, and the non-buyers in a group like that are a natural candidate for a bid boost.

Amazon's Instructional Query Library covers common cases such as path to conversion, with notes on reading the results. We have not checked every entry against this list, so expect to adapt a template for questions 4 and 5.

Is your account big enough for AMC to be useful?

Amazon's AMC pages name no minimum spend, so account size comes down to whether your queries return usable rows. Practitioners put the usual floor near 100 unique users per row. Accounts with a few hundred ad-attributed buyers per quarter lose most of a path report to that floor, while accounts with a few thousand keep most of it.

The table is an illustration with invented numbers, using the 100-user figure reported by Tinuiti (the Amazon pages we reviewed give no figure). It takes one path report over 90 days at two account sizes, with the same mix of paths.

The smaller account gets one row, and that row says Sponsored Products works. It already knew that. Stretching to a full year at the same pace gives 1,200 buyers and four surviving rows (496, 328, 192 and 104), at the cost of mixing seasons, price changes and old campaigns into one answer.

Now convert buyers to ad spend, again as an illustration: a $30 average order, one order per buyer and 30% ACOS. The smaller account has 100 buyers a month, or $3,000 in ad sales on $900 of spend. The larger one has 500 buyers a month, or $15,000 in ad sales on $4,500 of spend. Run your own figures through our ACOS and TACOS calculator. A $100 product would need far more spend to reach the same buyer count.

Our judgment, and it is only that: around $5,000 a month in ad spend across at least two ad types is where the no-code templates start paying for the hours they take. Regular custom queries make sense once you run sponsored ads and DSP or DVA+ together and the split between them is a real budget argument. Tinuiti's guide shows a much higher guideline of $50,000 a month in Amazon Ads investment, but it sits beside the old DSP requirements, so we would not treat it as a limit today.

Who should skip AMC for now?

Skip AMC for now if you run Sponsored Products alone, have a thin flow of ad-attributed buyers, or still have unfixed basics such as wasted search terms and weak listings. Opening it costs nothing, but the hours do cost something, and those accounts will usually earn more from spending that time on ordinary campaign work.

A single-channel account has no sequence to study, since every path is the same ad type. The first real AMC question for that brand is whether to add a second ad type, and a small test budget answers that faster than a query can. Our free search term audit will usually find money to redirect before that point.

Also wait if nobody can act on the results. A brand whose agency reports monthly and never moves budget between ad types will collect findings and change nothing. New launches should wait too, since a product with a few weeks of history cannot show a repeat purchase pattern yet.

Do you need SQL to use AMC?

You do not need SQL to start, because Amazon's AMC homepage offers no-code templates with charts for campaign performance and audience insights. You do need SQL, or a person or tool that writes it well, once your question goes beyond a template and you must check that a generated query counts what you think it counts.

There are roughly four levels, and most brands should climb them in order. No-code templates come first. The use case library's low-code templates and the Instructional Query Library come next, and Amazon says those queries can be run as written or customized. The query editor is for full custom work.

The fourth is AI assistance. Amazon's product page lists Ads Agent in AMC, and a later update added controls in the query editor to edit, explain and fix SQL. At unBoxed 2026 Amazon also announced an AMC Expert Tool that turns plain language into queries, without giving a rollout date in that recap. We cover where it fits in our unBoxed 2026 summary.

What are the limits of AMC?

AMC's main limits are aggregation thresholds that hide small groups, attributed data that cannot prove incrementality, separate lookback windows by signal type, and audience size restrictions. Amazon confirms the thresholds exist but the pages we reviewed give no figure, so plan on losing detail whenever you slice results too finely.

Aggregation thresholds

Amazon's FAQ says thresholds are built in and stops there. The numbers come from others. Tinuiti says aggregations need at least 100 users. Intentwise describes tiers from Low to Very High, with Low needing 2 unique users and High needing 100, applied to certain columns such as campaign name and postal code. They also differ on the effect: Intentwise says columns may come back blank, and PPC Land says rows are dropped silently, so a missing row looks the same as zero activity. Treat every gap as unknown, and never read it as "nobody did this." Removing a dimension or widening the dates is the usual fix.

Attribution is still attribution

A path report shows correlation. People who see more of your ads are often already more interested, so a higher conversion rate after three touchpoints does not prove the extra ads caused the sale. Back any large budget move with a holdout test, as we describe in our DSP guide.

Lookback depends on the signal

Amazon extended ad traffic lookback from 13 to 25 months, with open beta in the US and Canada from November 11, 2025 and six EMEA locales plus Japan listed for Q1 2026. India is absent from that list, so India-based teams should confirm their window. A five-year purchase history was announced in January 2025 as a limited beta paid feature, separately from this.

Audience size and where audiences go

Amazon says its usual audience policies and size rules apply to anything built in AMC. The announcements we reviewed give no number, so confirm the current minimum in your account's help documentation before planning around a narrow segment. Results stay in the clean room as aggregates, so you cannot export a customer list for email or social.

What will AMC cost in 2027?

Core AMC is free to eligible advertisers as of November 2026, and we found no Amazon announcement changing that for 2027. The uncertainty sits in Paid Features: PPC Land reports that Amazon's first-party signals cost nothing to query until December 31, 2026, and pricing from January 1, 2027 has not been disclosed in anything we read.

Amazon's product page lists Paid Features (beta), supplied by Amazon Ads and by outside providers, naming Experian and NCS. PPC Land's report dates the free window to June 2, 2026, sourced to a LinkedIn post by an Amazon Ads employee and to Amazon's support pages, and says signals from outside providers such as Experian still cost money. We have not confirmed those dates on an Amazon page, so treat them as reported.

For an idea of scale, Intentwise lists Amazon Retail Purchases at $500 a month for queries and free for audience creation. That is a vendor's figure, and it may not hold in 2027. If you build a regular report on a first-party paid signal this quarter, add a line to your 2027 budget for it and check the price in the Paid Features tab in January.

What should a first month in AMC look like?

Keep the first month small: open the instance, run the no-code templates, pick one budget question, and adapt one instructional query to answer it. At the end, make one change based on the result and write down what you expect to happen.

Spend week one on the templates alone and note which rows come back empty. That tells you how much breakdown your volume can support. In week two, run a path query on a wide date range, using the sanity check from the tip above. In week three, take the finding to whoever owns the budget. A team that manages DSP with an agency should ask that agency for its AMC queries and how results have changed spend, since a good answer will be concrete.

Build an audience in week four only if the path work points at one. Compare it against a control campaign instead of judging it on ROAS alone, because a list of past visitors will usually post a strong ROAS whether or not it adds sales.

Sources and data notes

Facts in this article were checked against the sources below on November 6, 2026. Amazon and agencies change programs and prices often, so confirm details before you act.

• Amazon Ads: Amazon Marketing Cloud product page and FAQ
• Amazon Ads: Sponsored ads advertisers can now access Amazon Marketing Cloud
• Amazon Ads: Direct access to AMC for sponsored ads advertisers
• Amazon Ads: AMC eligibility expanded to sponsored ads advertisers through partners
• Amazon Ads: AMC Audiences for sponsored ads
• Amazon Ads: AMC custom audience creation and activation
• Amazon Ads: Instructional Queries now available in AMC
• Amazon Ads: Sponsored Brands signals now available in AMC
• Amazon Ads: AMC custom attribution analysis
• Amazon Ads: AMC expanded ad traffic lookback window
• Amazon Ads: AMC offers expanded measurement capabilities
• Amazon Ads: Enhanced Ads Agent interactivity for AMC
• Amazon Ads: unBoxed 2026 news and announcements
• Amazon Ads: Sponsored Brands product page
• Amazon Ads: A complete guide to Amazon Marketing Cloud
• PPC Land: Amazon now lets AMC users query 1P paid features for free until end of 2026
• PPC Land: Amazon DSP gets one global login
• PPC Land: What is AMC
• Tinuiti: Amazon Marketing Cloud guide
• Intentwise: Amazon Marketing Cloud learning hub

Frequently Asked Questions