Amazon Removes the Paywall on its Most Powerful AMC Datasets

Amazon Makes Key AMC Datasets Free Until End of 2026

Amazon has removed the paywall on several of its most powerful Amazon Marketing Cloud datasets, making them available at no cost through the end of 2026.

Advertisers can now access datasets including Audience Segment Insights and Amazon Retail Purchases for both measurement and audience creation - without the additional data licensing fees that previously applied.

For brands already investing in Amazon Ads, this is a meaningful change.

What Is Amazon Marketing Cloud?

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is Amazon's cloud-based, privacy-safe data clean room. It allows advertisers to run custom SQL-based analyses across Amazon Ads signals, combining impression data, clicks, purchases, and streaming behaviour to build a more complete picture of the customer journey.

Until now, some of AMC's most valuable datasets sat behind an additional paywall — limiting access to larger advertisers or those with dedicated analytics resource. This update changes that dynamic.

Which AMC Datasets Are Now Free?

Amazon has made the following datasets available at no additional cost until 31 December 2026:

Audience Segment Insights: Understand how your audiences are defined, how they overlap, and where you can build more precise targeting strategies.

Amazon Retail Purchases: Gain visibility into actual purchase behaviour on Amazon, enabling deeper analysis of conversion paths, category trends, and customer lifetime value signals.

Both datasets can be used for measurement and audience creation, opening up use cases that were previously cost-prohibitive for many brands.

Why This Matters for Amazon Advertisers

For years, AMC was treated as a premium layer - a sophisticated tool for enterprise advertisers with the budget and technical resource to unlock it fully. This update lowers the barrier meaningfully.

Brands that have been running Sponsored Ads or DSP campaigns but haven't yet activated AMC now have a stronger reason to start. The ability to analyse cross-channel attribution, build custom audience segments and measure incrementality is no longer gated by additional data costs.

This is particularly relevant for brands focused on:

Incrementality measurement: Understanding which sales are genuinely driven by advertising, rather than what would have happened anyway.

Customer lifetime value: Moving beyond last-click metrics to model long-term customer value and identify your highest-quality audience segments.

Full-funnel attribution: Connecting upper-funnel awareness activity (DSP, Streaming TV) to downstream purchase outcomes in a way that standard reporting simply cannot.

What Brands Should Do Now

Access alone doesn't create competitive advantage. What matters is asking better questions of the data.

The brands that will benefit most from this update aren't necessarily those with the largest budgets - they're the ones that approach AMC with clear hypotheses, structured analyses and a willingness to act on what they find.

If you're already active on AMC, this is the moment to subscribe to these datasets and run analyses that were previously out of reach. If you haven't started with AMC yet, this is a strong prompt to begin.

Practical starting points include:

Path to conversion analysis: How many touchpoints does a customer typically need before purchasing, and which ad types are playing the most influential role?

Audience overlap and suppression: Are you paying to reach customers who were already going to convert? Suppression audiences built from AMC data can materially improve media efficiency.

New-to-brand measurement: Which campaigns are genuinely growing your customer base versus re-engaging existing buyers?

Our View

For brands serious about growing on Amazon in 2026, this is one of the most impactful AMC updates in recent years. The data has always been there. The question is whether you're set up to use it.

If you want to understand what this means for your specific Amazon strategy - whether you're already using AMC or just getting started - get in touch with the Toucan team.