Amazon Continues to Lower Barriers to Valuable AMC Insights
5 June 2026
Robert McGovern – Director of Advertising
Amazon Expands Access to Advanced Measurement Tools
Launched in 2019, Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a secure, privacy-safe clean room solution that lets advertisers analyze pseudonymized signals, to more deeply understand their advertising across the funnel. AMC allows advertisers to uncover actionable insights, measure campaigns and build custom audiences. Amazon has repeatedly been lowering the barrier to entry on AMC, in recent years, removing the restriction of DSP only advertisers, building and expanding its pre-built template queries and making it easier than ever before to create AMC instances.
Now Amazon has continued this pattern with one of its biggest changes to AMC in recent years – Amazon’s own 1P Paid Features signals are now available at no additional cost through the end of 2026. For advertisers and agencies that have yet to fully embrace AMC, this significantly lowers the barrier to accessing some of Amazon’s most powerful audience and measurement capabilities.
Unlocking Richer Customer and Retail Insights
Some of the most insightful datasets have sat behind AMC’s Paid Features subscriptions. These premium signals unlock deeper audience analysis, retail purchase insights, incrementality measurement opportunities, and the ability to understand behaviors beyond ad-exposed audiences, as well as significantly longer historical data. In practice, this meant brands could better answer questions such as: Which audiences are most valuable? What would customers have done without advertising exposure? Which products are frequently purchased together? And understanding long term shifts in performance.
Now, Amazon has removed the cost barrier for its first-party Paid Features signals. Advertisers can access datasets such as Audience Segment Insights and Amazon Retail Purchases for both measurement and audience creation without paying an additional subscription fee. Third-party datasets remain paid, but Amazon’s own premium signals are now available to all eligible AMC users.
Why This Matters for Advertisers and Agencies
The immediate benefit is obvious: more advertisers can access richer insights without needing additional budget approval. Smaller brands, emerging advertisers, and agencies managing multiple clients can now experiment with advanced AMC use cases that were previously reserved for organizations willing to invest in premium subscriptions. This democratizes access to sophisticated measurement, audience planning, and activation strategies.
The Bigger Picture: Amazon’s First-Party Data Strategy
But the bigger story is what this signals about Amazon’s direction. By making these datasets free, Amazon is encouraging broader adoption of AMC as the central hub for measurement and audience intelligence. As privacy regulations continue to reshape digital advertising, first-party data has become the industry’s most valuable asset. Amazon appears to be betting that the more advertisers rely on its proprietary signals for planning, measurement, and optimization, the more indispensable its advertising ecosystem becomes.
For advertisers, this is powerful access to deeper customer insights, stronger audience strategies, and more advanced measurement capabilities without additional cost in a time when budgets are more crucial than ever. The brands that move quickly to leverage these newly free signals will likely gain an advantage in understanding customer behavior and improving advertising performance across Amazon’s growing media ecosystem