Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) offers a wealth of data to advertisers seeking to optimize their campaigns and better understand customer behavior. Among the valuable insights AMC provides are "New-to-Brand" (NTB) metrics, which help brands assess their ability to attract new customers. Understanding these metrics is crucial for driving growth and ensuring that advertising investments are targeting the right segments. This article will dive into three key NTB components in AMC:
New-to-Brand Gateway ASINs
New-to-Brand Purchases
New-to-Brand Customers
1. New-to-Brand Gateway ASINs
New-to-Brand Gateway ASINs represent the products that serve as entry points for customers who are new to your brand. These ASINs are the first items a customer buys from your brand, signaling the beginning of their relationship with your product line.
Why It Matters: Identifying the gateway ASINs can help advertisers understand which products have the strongest appeal for new customers. By isolating these ASINs, brands can make informed decisions about where to allocate ad spend, focus on promotions, or optimize their product catalog for maximum new customer acquisition.
How AMC Provides Insights: AMC allows advertisers to break down sales and traffic data by ASINs, making it easier to pinpoint which products are most likely to attract new customers. By creating queries to track first-time customer interactions with specific ASINs, brands can identify their top-performing gateway products. This enables strategic ad placements that focus on boosting awareness of these high-potential ASINs, driving new customers into the brand’s ecosystem.
Key Use Cases of NTB Gateway ASINs
Indentifying ASINs bringing the most NTB Customers
Identifying the ASINs most likely to attract new customers
Identifying ASINs attracting more repeat customers
2. New-to-Brand Purchases
New-to-brand purchases represent the number of transactions made by customers who have never purchased from your brand before. This metric provides a direct look at how well your advertising efforts are converting new customers.
Why It Matters: Tracking NTB Purchases allows brands to evaluate the effectiveness of their acquisition campaigns. It reveals how well your marketing initiatives are resonating with audiences unfamiliar with your brand, offering a clear view of your growth potential. A high number of NTB purchases indicates that your messaging and product offering are successfully attracting new customers.
How AMC Provides Insights: AMC lets you segment purchases by new customers versus repeat customers, enabling precise measurement of NTB purchases. By leveraging custom queries within AMC, advertisers can track these purchases across various advertising touchpoints, such as Sponsored Products or Amazon DSP campaigns. For a deeper understanding of how data influences targeting, explore How to Upload First-Party Data to Amazon Marketing Cloud and learn how to upload and utilize first-party data effectively.
Key Use Cases of NTB Purchases
Identifying new-to-brand purchases including advertised ASINs & halo ASINs
Identifying new-to-brand purchase percentage
Identifying repeat purchases
3. New-to-Brand Customers
New-to-Brand Customers refer to the unique individuals who make their first purchase from your brand. This metric helps you assess how many entirely new customers your advertising is driving, which is essential for long-term growth.
Why It Matters: While NTB purchases indicate overall transaction volume, NTB customers tell the story of how many individual people are joining your brand for the first time. This distinction is important because one customer might make multiple purchases, but NTB customers track unique users. Understanding this metric provides a deeper level of insight into customer acquisition trends and helps brands evaluate customer lifetime value over time.
How AMC Provides Insights: AMC offers granular customer-level data, enabling advertisers to track NTB Customers by creating custom reports that aggregate user behavior. By leveraging the platform's data, you can see exactly which marketing channels and campaigns are driving the highest volume of NTB customers. This allows you to optimize your ad spend for better returns on customer acquisition. If you’re looking to refine your approach to customer journey analysis, check out Understanding Multi-Touch Attribution in Amazon Marketing Cloud to see `how attribution insights can enhance NTB performance.
Understanding the NTB Attribution Window in AMC
When evaluating New to Brand (NTB) metrics on Amazon Marketing Cloud, it is essential to understand how Amazon determines a “new” customer.
NTB is usually measured over a 12-month retail look-back window. This means that a customer is considered New to Brand if they have not made a purchase from your brand on Amazon within the last 12 months.
Key points to consider:
NTB metrics are measured by retail purchase history, not clicks.
A customer can be new to a particular ASIN but not to the brand.
There may be a slight difference in NTB reporting between Sponsored Ads reporting and measurement layers for Amazon DSP.
NTB is measured at the brand level unless custom queries are used.
Clarifying this provides a more factual performance evaluation plus avoids misunderstanding of acquisition metrics.
Key NTB KPIs to Track Beyond Basic Metrics
Although NTB Gateway ASINs, Purchases, as well as Customers are a good starting point, advanced advertisers in 2026 take it a step further by monitoring:
1. NTB Percentage
The percentage of total buys that are new-to-brand. This measures acquisition effectiveness.
2. Cost Per NTB Customer
Total ad spend divided by NTB customers acquired. This aids in calculating customer acquisition cost.
3. NTB ROAS vs Blended ROAS
Comparison of return on ad spend for NTB purchases versus total purchases indicates whether ad spend is optimized for growth or retention.
4. NTB Lifetime Value (LTV) Modeling
Monitoring Repeat purchases through AMC helps to determine whether NTB acquisition is profitable in the long run.
Monitoring these KPIs ensures that acquisition channels are scalable and sustainable.
Activating NTB Audiences in Amazon DSP Using AMC
One of the most compelling strengths of Amazon Marketing Cloud is not only the analysis of NTB insights but the activation of those insights.
Advertisers can build custom audiences in AMC and deliver them directly to Amazon DSP for acquisition campaigns.
Some common ways to activate NTB insights include:
Building audiences of users who viewed Gateway ASINs but did not purchase
Excluding existing customers to acquire new ones
Building high-probability NTB prospecting audiences
Building lookalike audiences from NTB converters
Through the activation of insights, brands can leverage NTB insights to drive scalable growth.
Measuring Incremental NTB and Multi-Touch Impact
In today’s sophisticated advertising environment, it is no longer sufficient to simply monitor the volume of NTBs. Rather, it is necessary to monitor incremental NTB, or customers acquired specifically as a result of advertising exposure.
With AMC’s event-level data, advertisers can:
Assess path-to-conversion for Sponsored Ads and DSP
Detect assisted NTB conversions
Compare exposed vs. non-exposed groups
Monitor upper-funnel impact on NTB lift
This multi-touch strategy allows marketers to assess whether awareness campaigns are driving new customer acquisition or simply harvesting existing demand.
Understanding NTB Halo Impact
NTB Gateway ASINs are not necessarily the most profitable products.
Customers may click on or view one product ASIN but end up buying a different ASIN from the same brand. This is called halo impact.
AMC allows the advertiser to:
Detect NTB sales on non-advertised ASINs
Measure cross-category growth
Understand upsell and bundling behavior
Assess the overall brand impact, not just individual ASIN performance
Analyzing halo impact helps to ensure that brands are not undercounting upper-funnel or awareness campaigns.
Using First-Party Data to Refine NTB Strategy
By integrating first-party data with AMC insights, the accuracy of NTB is improved.
Brands can upload their CRM data to AMC to:
Exclude high-value repeat customers from acquisition campaigns
Identify churned customers separately from actual NTB users
Build reactivation audiences
Optimize bids based on predicted lifetime value
This allows for the optimization of acquisition spend on profitable growth instead of redundant engagement.
How Can Hector Help You?
Hector’s powerful reporting dashboard simplifies accessing AMC insights, eliminating the need for complex SQL queries. With an intuitive interface, it delivers actionable insights that empower you to make timely, informed decisions.
Unlock the potential of AMC with Hector and drive incremental growth for your brand.
If you’re new to AMC, Hector can help you start by setting up your own AMC instance.
Conclusion
Amazon Marketing Cloud’s New-to-Brand insights offer advertisers a powerful way to measure the impact of their marketing strategies on customer acquisition. By tracking New-to-Brand Gateway ASINs, New-to-Brand Purchases, and New-to-Brand Customers, brands can make data-driven decisions that enhance their advertising efforts, optimize their product offerings, and ultimately grow their customer base. These insights enable a deeper understanding of how campaigns resonate with new audiences, allowing advertisers to refine their approach and drive long-term growth.
AMC’s NTB insights give marketers the tools they need to navigate the competitive landscape, ensuring that advertising dollars are spent on the most effective strategies for attracting new customers and expanding their brand’s reach.