Amazon

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) continues to be the magic 8-ball of advertising solutions, giving brands a clearer picture of how their campaigns drive meaningful business outcomes. Built for precision and strategy, AMC’s suite of analytics capabilities goes beyond surface-level metrics to help advertisers understand why and how customers engage with their brand.

In this installment of our Amazon Marketing Cloud use case series, we’re diving into one of the most powerful yet underutilized tools: the Customer Long-Term Value (“LTV”) Report. This report reveals which campaigns, products, and audiences are driving value long after the initial purchase.

At its core, this report answers a simple but strategic question: How much is each customer really worth to my brand?

With that insight, advertisers can make smarter decisions about where to invest their media dollars to target audiences with the highest long-term potential.

What is the AMC Customer Long-Term Value Report?

The AMC Customer Long-Term Value Report measures the total revenue a customer generates for a brand over time, typically across a 12-month period. It allows advertisers to evaluate how much the average customer spends and how that value compounds through repeat purchases.

Understanding a customer’s long-term value allows brands to move beyond short-sighted performance metrics and gain a more complete view of their marketing impact. The AMC LTV Report provides visibility into how customer worth evolves over time, offering insights that a traditional ROAS calculation can’t capture alone. By layering in organic data from Amazon Insights, advertisers can better understand the total investment required to acquire and retain new-to-brand customers while uncovering the true drivers of sustained growth.

This broader perspective helps brands make smarter, data-backed decisions about where to allocate budgets and which ad products are most effective at generating meaningful long-term returns. Instead of focusing solely on immediate revenue, advertisers can identify the campaigns and creative strategies that inspire repeat purchases and brand loyalty.

Ultimately, LTV offers a critical complement to ROAS because it bridges the gap between short-term efficiency and long-term profitability. By evaluating both metrics in tandem, marketers can ensure that their investment strategies continue to build brand equity and customer value well into the future.

The Long-Term Value report can be built using different data sources:

• Amazon Insights (formerly Flexible Shopping Insights): includes both paid and organic purchase data for a more holistic view of customer behavior.
• Amazon Retail Purchase Dataset: looks back up to five years of purchase history, but only includes organic transactions and no ad events.

While the Retail Purchase dataset offers depth, it’s not yet part of AMC’s Instructional Query Library (IQL). For this reason, and because it provides a complete story that integrates paid and organic performance, our focus here is on the Amazon Insights dataset. 

Business Questions the Long-Term Value Report Can Answer

Understanding customer LTV can transform the way brands approach campaign planning and optimization. Some of the key questions this report helps answer include:

What is a customer’s overall lifetime value with our brand?

The Long-Term Value Report quantifies the total revenue a customer generates over time, helping advertisers understand the true worth of each shopper beyond the initial purchase. By tracking spending behavior across months, brands can identify which customers deliver the greatest return on acquisition and refine strategies to attract more of them.

Which campaigns or ad types drive the highest LTV?

By comparing LTV across campaigns and audience segments, marketers can pinpoint which strategies and channels yield the most profitable customer relationships. This data empowers smarter budget allocation, moving dollars away from one-time converters toward campaigns that build lasting loyalty and sustained revenue.

Where should we shift budget to reach customers with the strongest long-term potential?

The report provides a clear benchmark for evaluating how much new-to-brand (NTB) customers contribute to long-term revenue. With this insight, brands can assess whether their acquisition efforts are driving valuable, repeat customers or simply short-term wins, informing how they invest in future NTB strategies.

How does LTV differ across product lines or audience segments?

By breaking down customer value by product category, advertisers can see which lines deliver the strongest retention and repeat sales. This enables brands to double down on high-performing products, adjust cross-sell strategies, and better align creative messaging to promote sustained engagement.

What creative strategies inspire repeat purchases?

The Long-Term Value Report highlights how different ad types, such as Sponsored Brands or Sponsored Display, impact long-term customer engagement. These insights help advertisers refine their creative mix and placement strategy to encourage repeat purchases and nurture relationships beyond the first conversion.

By layering LTV on top of ROAS, brands can build a more complete picture of performance that reflects both short-term returns and sustained growth.

Key Metrics Included in the Report

AMC’s Long-Term Value analysis provides a range of metrics to help advertisers assess performance holistically, including:

• Average Sales per User: Total spending per customer during the analysis period
• Repurchase Rate: Percentage of customers who purchased more than once
• ROAS: Return on ad spend, a benchmark for immediate efficiency
• NTB Purchases: Unique shoppers making their first brand purchase within a year
• NTB Rate: The ratio of new-to-brand customers compared to total shoppers reached
• Average Branded Search: How often customers exposed to ads conduct branded searches versus unexposed audiences

Together, these data points illuminate not just who is buying, but who is coming back to make repeat purchases.

Case Study: How Tinuiti Uses LTV Insights to Drive Retention and Growth

A softlines client wanted to understand which apparel brand was most effective at driving long-term customer value beyond immediate conversions.

Tinuiti leveraged AMC’s Long-Term Value Report to evaluate performance by brand. The analysis revealed which tactics were attracting high-value new-to-brand customers and retaining them over time.

As seen in the LTV Analysis sample chart chart, customers acquired by Brand 3 were worth an average of $35.98 over the analysis period, a critical data point to compare against acquisition costs.

By comparing LTV across brands, Tinuiti identified one that not only delivered a strong NTB share but also showed consistent value growth six months post-purchase.

With this insight, the team recommended:

• Invest in Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Brands Video placements targeting in-market audiences
• Testing AMC lookalike audiences based on high-LTV cohorts to improve efficiency and scale
• Using retention trends to fine-tune creative strategy and messaging cadence

“Customer long-term value delivers critical insight into the drivers of brand loyalty. With this information, we can make smarter investment decisions and apply those insights to optimize our advertising strategies for lasting impact.”

Laura Pulgarin, Senior Manager of Commerce at Tinuiti

Key Takeaways

The AMC Customer Long-Term Value Report empowers advertisers to look beyond short-term performance and understand the true, lasting impact of their campaigns. This holistic approach transforms how marketers measure success by shifting focus from immediate ROAS to overall customer value. With these insights, advertisers can make smarter investment decisions that balance efficiency with growth. In today’s landscape where customer retention defines growth, LTV serves as a roadmap for achieving long-term brand success.

If you’re looking to unlock the full potential of your AMC data, reach out to Tinuiti to help you translate insights into growth.