How Amazon Ads enables full funnel measurement

Marketers are caught between how businesses are structured and how success is measured. Organizational incentives and limited attribution tools often trap us at the bottom of the funnel, rewarding short-term efficiency over long-term growth. Amazon Ads is starting to change that. 

With the rise of retail media and Amazon’s expanding measurement capabilities, brands now can see further up the funnel and connect investment to topline outcomes. Sticking with what finance teams are comfortable validating may work if the goal is to capture existing demand. However, for brands seeking new customers and resilient, sustainable growth, the path forward is a full-funnel business model.

Amazon’s advantage in tracking the customer journey

Amazon is in a unique position where most touchpoints have a digital trail that can be tracked at the user level — especially when a shopper:

• Is a Prime member.
• Consumes content.
• Checks out (or doesn’t) within a trusted, closed loop. 

Few other channels offer that level of visibility. Even physical retailers like Walmart or Target struggle with attribution, given the many offline interactions. It’s a particular challenge in categories with high cash transactions, such as CPG, or when loyalty programs aren’t widely adopted or actively growing.

Turning insights into actionable growth opportunities 

Amazon offers a dizzying array of options to drive awareness. By understanding which ad types, content and attribution windows affect your customers, you uncover new insights into how they shop. This allows you to adjust campaigns in real-time, whether they’re already running or about to launch. 

For example, you may find that one product acts as a gateway, prompting shoppers to click on it but ultimately buy a different version (such as a different color or size). Although the immediate ROAS may appear low, its contribution to total product-line revenue is substantial.

Dig deeper: 5 Amazon Ads features you’re not using — but should be

With Amazon’s Marketing Cloud, brands now have access to a clean room like never before — without being charged by gross merchandise volume or ad spend as some other retailers do. The platform provides unprecedented audience data, including:

• Path to purchase (the ad types users interact with before making a purchase).
• Impression frequency.
• New-to-brand (NTB) metrics.
• Behaviors that lead to subscription (such as subscribe and save). 

These insights come via SQL queries, and Amazon offers a library to get you started. While custom questions may require a SQL expert, the ability to see purchase and browsing behavior in detail — and over a long window — is new to the industry.

Because brands can add their own first-party data, these insights can also be applied across other channels, such as DTC sites, other retailers, marketplaces or even emerging social commerce.

For those not ready to go the clean room route, Amazon offers a beta metric called multi-touch attribution (MTA) directly within the platform. Similar to GA4’s reporting across social, search and email, it shows referring sources inside Amazon’s ecosystem. 

MTA enables more granular insight into which ads, creatives, placements, targeting methods, keywords and other levers drive value at different funnel stages — helping advertisers refine strategies, budgets and creatives.

Amazon’s push toward long-term growth measurement

Building long-term business growth requires both strong customer relationships and historical metrics to understand where the business began and where it may be headed. 

Amazon’s new long-term sales (LTS) metric, currently in beta, helps brands plan seasonal events more effectively and adapt to shifts such as Prime Day expanding from two days to four. LTS and long-term sales ROAS estimate the incremental value a brand can expect over the next 12 months from new-to-brand shoppers who engage through detailed page views, branded searches, add-to-carts or purchases — without having converted before.

Dig deeper: Amazon’s new Retail Ad Service brings RMN to the masses

At our agency, we found that while most direct sales during 2025 Prime Day occurred in the first two days, the most significant new-to-brand traction came on days three and four. We’ll continue to track those shoppers to see whether the NTB stickiness holds, while re-engaging them through retargeting campaigns informed by their past shopping behavior.

Also in beta is conversion path reporting, which tracks customer ad interactions over 30 days starting from purchase. Soon available across Sponsored Ads and Amazon DSP, it provides visibility into ad events across formats such as:

• Sponsored Products.
• Sponsored Brands.
• Sponsored Display.
• Sponsored TV.
• DSP. 

For upper-funnel efforts, such as streaming TV, the reporting provides cross-channel insights that help advertisers strike a balance between brand-building and performance.

Balancing short- and long-term growth

The most significant shift requires a leap of faith: treating Amazon’s upper-funnel advertising as a core part of brand strategy. 

Too often, we get stuck at the bottom of the funnel, relying on last-touch attribution because it was once the only provable metric available. That’s no longer the case. 

Today, we can measure topline growth, longevity and frequency — and align strategies more closely with real customer behavior than ever before.

Dig deeper: Retail media moves from the bottom of the funnel to center stage

Committing to change

Amazon Ads is leading the way in in-platform attribution, making data more accessible and actionable. For this holiday season, pick one beta metric you’re not using — MTA, LTS or CPR — and fully lean into it. 

Make the business decision to adapt and commit to a longer-term media strategy tied to a clear goal, whether that’s growth, awareness, efficiency, or average order value. And give it time: more than three weeks, ideally six months, before deciding how effective the data truly is for your business.

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