Amazon Marketing Strategy

On June 2, 2026, Amazon announced that most sellers will miss entirely. Amazon's 1P paid feature signals in Amazon Marketing Cloud are now free to query through December 31, 2026, for both audience creation and measurement use cases. Third-party signals such as Experian continue to require a subscription fee. For brands that have been running AMC queries for years, this is a significant expansion of what they can analyze at no additional cost. For brands that have never touched AMC's paid tables — which is most sellers — this is a seven-month window to access data they have never seen before, at no cost. Here is why that matters more than it sounds. What AMC's Free Tier Has Always Done — and What It Missed AMC is free to use by default, but the free version only gives you insight into Amazon advertising-specific metrics. To get organic metrics — sales and purchase behavior of customers who were not ad-exposed — you previously had to subscribe to Amazon Flexible Shopping Insights, a paid feature. That distinction is the entire point. Your ad data was always visible. What you could not see was everything that happened outside your ads — organic purchases, organic adds to cart, Subscribe & Save sign-ups, and the behavior of shoppers who found your product without clicking an ad. Without that data, you were analyzing half the picture. Without the paid subscription, you could only calculate LTV for ad-exposed shoppers. Organic metrics were required for full LTV analysis. For any brand trying to understand true customer lifetime value, the free tier was structurally incomplete. That gap is now closed, temporarily. What You Can Actually Query Now The paid feature that matters most for most advertisers is Amazon Insights — the dataset that gives you full access to both organic and ad-attributed interactions shoppers had with your brand over the last 12.5 months. With that data now free to query, the questions you can answer are fundamentally different from what AMC's free tier allowed. Here are the questions worth running first. Full customer lifetime value. What is the actual LTV of a customer acquired through advertising, including all subsequent organic purchases? Not just ad-attributed revenue — total revenue across the full relationship. Most sellers have been running LTV calculations that only captured the ad-exposed portion of shopper behavior. This fills the gap. Organic behavior after an ad-attributed purchase. Does a customer who first buys through a Sponsored Products ad come back organically? How often? How quickly? This tells you whether your ad spend is building a customer base or just renting traffic. Subscribe & Save conversion paths. How many purchase events does a shopper typically have before subscribing? Does your entry-level size act as a trial that leads to subscription, or does it substitute for it? That distinction changes how you should price and advertise your subscription offering. True attribution window. Amazon's default attribution window is 7 days. How many of your actual customers purchased 8, 14, or 30 days after their first ad exposure? If a meaningful share of conversions occurs outside the 7-day window, your campaign performance data understates the true impact of your advertising. Retargeting share of "LTV" spend. What percentage of your ad spend is going to customers you already won? If a large share of your retargeting budget is reaching repeat buyers who would have purchased organically anyway, you are paying for revenue you did not need to pay for. AMC also reveals how Brand Store interactions appear in a shopper's path to purchase — including how many store visits a shopper makes before converting, and whether higher store engagement correlates with higher purchase likelihood. That data has implications for how you structure your store and allocate your brand awareness budget. Who Can Access This and How Since September 2025, Amazon has offered direct, self-service access to AMC for sponsored ads advertisers, removing the traditional requirement for an Amazon representative or partner to provision access. AMC now includes no-code templates and AI-powered SQL assistance, making it more accessible to teams without dedicated data engineering resources. In January 2025, Amazon also introduced a natural-language SQL generator for Marketing Cloud, enabling marketers to create database queries using plain English. The technical barrier that previously made AMC inaccessible to smaller teams has been reduced significantly. You no longer need to write SQL from scratch to get useful output. The free access to paid feature signals runs through December 31, 2026. That is seven months. After that date, the subscription requirement returns. Why This Window Is Worth Acting on Now Most brands on Amazon are optimizing campaigns based on the data that has always been free — ad spend, ACoS, attributed sales within 7 days, and click-through rates. That data tells you whether your ads are working in a narrow, transactional sense. It does not tell you whether your advertising is building a business. The paid feature data — now temporarily free — answers the business-level questions. Are your acquired customers worth acquiring? Are they coming back? Are they converting to a subscription? Are they upgrading to larger sizes? How much of your reported LTV is organic behavior that would have happened anyway? For brands spending $50K or more per month on Amazon advertising, running even three or four of these queries could meaningfully change how you allocate budget — not just between campaigns, but between acquiring new customers and retargeting existing ones. The window opened on June 2. It closes December 31. Seven months is enough time to run the analysis that changes how you see your business. Open your AMC instance and start with one question: what is the actual LTV of a customer acquired through advertising, including everything that happened after? That number will tell you more than your ACOS report ever has. If you want to stay updated on Amazon changes, subscribe to our blog. If you need support with PPC, DSP, AMC, analytics, or a long-term growth strategy, contact the ANavigator team at info@anavigator.co  Book a call to get a FREE AUDIT by the link below:     Book a call – FREE AUDIT   Follow my Weekly Newsletter on LinkedIn:  / amazon-digest-for-brands-7232361008185372672   Follow me on LinkedIn:  / ookovalov  Follow ANavigator on social media:  / anavigator    /@anavigator_official  / anavigator7    / @anavigators     LinkedIn page to contact us:   Author: Oleksandr Kovalov Role: Founder & CEO @ ANavigator — The ANavigator Team

The dates are confirmed. Amazon Prime Day 2026 runs from Tuesday, June 23, through Friday, June 26 — four full days, starting at midnight PT / 3 a.m. ET. Early deals are already live on the site. This year's Prime Day is earlier than usual — the last time Amazon held the event in June was 2021. The four-day format, which debuted in 2025, is continuing after the extended length delivered record-breaking results. Four days of Prime-level traffic across more than 35 categories, starting in three weeks. If you are a brand selling on Amazon, the preparation window is closing fast. Why the June Date Changes the Prep Timeline Most brands calibrate their Prime Day preparations around a mid-July event. That buffer is gone this year. In 2025, Prime Day ran July 8–11. This year it moves to June 23 — nearly three weeks earlier. For brands with overseas supply chains, that difference is already inside minimum replenishment lead times for many categories. For brands planning A+ Content updates or campaign restructures, review and approval windows are compressing. The FBA inbound deadline for guaranteed Prime Day availability has passed for most standard lead times. If inventory is not already in transit or in the warehouse, the focus needs to shift from inventory positioning to maximizing conversion on what is already available. What to Check in the Next Three Weeks There is no universal Prime Day checklist that works for every brand and every category. But there are six areas that consistently separate strong executions from weak ones — and most of them can still be addressed before June 23. Inventory. Know your sell-through risk by ASIN before the event starts. Running out on day one of a four-day event is expensive — not just in lost sales, but in ranking signals that take weeks to rebuild. Know your stock position, your daily velocity assumptions, and the point at which you need to pause advertising to avoid a stockout that would damage organic rank. Deals and pricing. Deal scheduling for Prime Day closed on May 26. If you have submitted your Lightning Deals or Best Deals, confirm their status in Campaign Manager. If you missed the submission window, focus on Prime-Exclusive Price Discounts — Amazon opened Prime-Exclusive Price Discounts on April 6, and they remain active until six hours before the end of the event. The fee structure this year is a $100 upfront fee plus 1.5% of promotional sales, capped at $5,000. Run the margin math before activating. Budgets. CPCs during Prime Day spike 40–80% above normal levels. Brands that set advertising budgets based on regular weekly spend run out of money mid-event or dramatically overpay for traffic. Set daily budgets based on your expected Prime Day traffic multiple, not your average week. Consider dayparting if your category has peak conversion windows. And build a reserve for days two and three — most brands exhaust their budget on day one and watch competitors capture day two traffic at lower CPCs. Listings and content. Prime Day is now four days long — more time for shoppers to compare carefully and read listing details before buying. A listing that looks thin next to a competitor's Premium A+ content will lose conversions it otherwise would have won. With Amazon's Premium A+ now open to all Brand Owners at no cost, and A+ Content reviews taking up to seven business days, content submitted this week should clear approval before June 23. This is the last realistic window. Keywords and campaigns. Prime Day generates significant search volume from intent patterns that do not exist the rest of the year — deal-seeking, category-browsing, gift-buying. Review your keyword coverage for broad and category-level terms, not just your brand and core product terms. Defensive bidding on your own brand terms is non-negotiable during an event where competitors will raise bids specifically to intercept your brand traffic. Alexa for Shopping. With Amazon's AI shopping assistant now operating inside the main search bar and generating recommendations before shoppers see a listing, the quality of your product content feeds directly into AI-mediated discovery during the event. Shoppers using Alexa are 60% more likely to complete a purchase. Listings that answer real buyer questions clearly — not just listings stuffed with keywords — are the ones that perform in that layer. The Preparation Mistake Most Brands Make The most common Prime Day failure is neither a creative nor a budget problem. It is a timing problem. Brands spend the week before the event adjusting bids, even though the decisions that determine Prime Day performance — which SKUs to promote, at what discount depth, with what inventory position, and backed by what listing quality — should have been finalized two weeks earlier. By the time campaigns go live on June 23, those decisions should be settled. The next three weeks are for executing the plan, not building it. The brands that consistently perform better at Prime Day are not the ones that react late with bigger spend. They are the ones who enter the event with a clearer plan, better numbers, and greater control. Three weeks is enough time to close the gaps that matter. There is not enough time to fix everything. Pick the highest-impact items — inventory position, deal activation, budget structure, listing quality on hero ASINs — and work down from there. June 23 is not moving. If you want to stay updated on Amazon changes, subscribe to our blog. If you need support with PPC, DSP, AMC, analytics, or a long-term growth strategy, contact the ANavigator team at info@anavigator.co  Book a call to get a FREE AUDIT by the link below:     Book a call – FREE AUDIT   Follow my Weekly Newsletter on LinkedIn:  / amazon-digest-for-brands-7232361008185372672   Follow me on LinkedIn:  / ookovalov  Follow ANavigator on social media:  / anavigator    /@anavigator_official  / anavigator7    / @anavigators     LinkedIn page to contact us:   Author: Oleksandr Kovalov Role: Founder & CEO @ ANavigator — The ANavigator Team