How brands are measuring value across the entire customer journey

“There are measures like brand lift, reach, frequency analysis and other KPIs that advertisers use to ground the success of brand-building campaigns,” said Lily Tong, director of brand and cross-channel measurement at Amazon Ads. “But one limitation of these KPIs is translating them into monetary value — it can be difficult for advertisers to understand how these campaigns impact future sales.”

Connecting shopper actions to future growth

Many marketing activities create value beyond short attribution windows, but advertisers do not have reliable ways to measure these longer-term effects with the same confidence as short-term metrics.

This measurement gap creates more than just uncertainty — it fundamentally shapes how budgets are allocated. Without visibility into how channels like CTV, online video and upper-funnel media drive brand awareness and long-term purchases, budget optimization gravitates toward tactics such as retargeting. While valuable, this approach indexes toward audiences already intending to purchase at the expense of new customer acquisition and long-term brand growth. 

“The challenge isn’t simply extending the attribution window,” Tong said. “It’s identifying which customer actions drive long-term results for a brand. CMOs know intuitively that new customer acquisition and new brand engagements drive long-term brand growth. By connecting advertising exposure to these brand engagements and long-term purchase outcomes, we can determine which touchpoints truly drive future conversions.”

Unlocking the complete picture with long-term sales

For advertisers on Amazon, long-term sales (LTS) is an industry-first metric that captures the total ad-attributed value of the customer journey.

Amazon’s unique vantage point comes from capturing shopper signals across the complete customer journey — from initial ad interaction through shopping behaviors on Amazon — using its authenticated identity graph. Unlike pixel-based attribution systems that rely on limited conversion signals, this end-to-end visibility reveals which touchpoints truly drive future purchases, unlocking measurement capabilities that were previously impossible.

Long-term sales is a metric grounded in a brand’s shopper journeys. New-to-brand shoppers have key brand engagements — such as brand searches, product views and add-to-cart actions — that indicate likelihood to purchase and repurchase over time. Using a brand’s own historical shopper signals over the past 12 months, LTS assigns monetary value to shoppers progressing through each stage of the journey for the first time. This enables advertisers to measure how media investments drive purchases and long-term business growth. Advertisers can also validate LTS performance against historical data in Amazon Marketing Cloud, ensuring confidence in every optimization decision.

“Long-term sales combines the short-term sales component that advertisers are already familiar with and integrates the dollar value of upper-funnel activities that drive future purchases,” Tong said. “By optimizing for long-term sales or utilizing long-term sales measurement to drive decisions, advertisers balance long-term brand effects with short-term sales in a comparable way.”

How one CPG brand validated its full-funnel approach with long-term sales

Through the lens of short-term KPIs, consideration campaigns may seemingly underperform. For example, a CPG brand’s consideration campaigns — part of a growth strategy to attract new category shoppers — delivered ROAS 34% lower than purchase campaigns.

“You may see large movements in awareness and early consideration behaviors that haven’t yet translated to downstream purchasing,” Tong said. “This is especially true for products with longer consideration cycles, where customers are very intentional about the product and brand.”

However, with Amazon Ads’ long-term sales, the brand was able to analyze its campaigns and understand the monetary value of key outcomes that moved shoppers closer to a purchase. The analysis revealed that consideration campaigns generated 70% more sales when accounting for long-term effects beyond the initial 14-day window, with more than half (51%) of this incremental value coming from new-to-brand engagements. When including estimated future sales, the consideration campaigns (January 2024–March 2025) achieved a 1.7x higher ROAS compared to the standard 14-day measurement, validating the brand’s strategy.

Without this visibility, the team might have abandoned an approach that was actually building sustainable growth. As one advertiser noted, “LTS can measure the value created from campaign ad spend on mid- and upper-funnel outcomes — that’s the holy grail of ad measurement.”

“Shopping journeys, especially on Amazon, are highly non-linear,” Tong said. “With long-term sales, you can see which new-to-brand interactions drive future sales growth — something brand managers intuitively understand is important but now can quantify. 

“LTS does this homework on behalf of the brand — contextualizing the customer journey and ascribing value in a flexible framework using a data-driven, rigorously validated methodology,” she said. “As advertisers embrace this metric, they’re discovering they can confidently optimize their Amazon Ads media spend and build strategies that drive both immediate results and lasting brand value.”

Partner insights from Amazon Ads