How to Calculate Customer Acquisition Cost for Amazon Advertising Using AMC Data

Published on January 16, 2026

About this video

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Understanding your customer acquisition cost on Amazon is critical for profitable growth. In this video, I break down how to calculate your true Amazon advertising CAC using Amazon Marketing Cloud data, not just basic campaign manager metrics. You'll learn the difference between blended CAC and attributed new to brand CAC, and why attributed CAC gives you a much more accurate picture of your Amazon ads performance.

When you're running Amazon PPC campaigns, knowing your actual cost per new customer helps you make smarter decisions about scaling your Amazon advertising budget. I show you step by step how to pull new to brand purchase data from Amazon Marketing Cloud, configure the right date ranges, and split your ad spend between new to brand and repeat customers. This approach to Amazon PPC optimization accounts for the actual customer acquisition costs instead of treating all orders the same.

The video covers practical strategies to reduce your customer acquisition cost through better conversion rate optimization, increasing average order value with bundling, and improving your Amazon campaign targeting. I also explain when high CAC might be acceptable, like during product launch phases, and why CAC calculations don't capture brand halo effects. For anyone managing Amazon sponsored products, sponsored brands, or running any Amazon ads campaign, calculating attributed CAC properly is essential to understand if your Amazon advertising spend is actually profitable.

This method requires pulling data beyond standard Amazon campaign manager reports, but the insights are worth it. You'll see real examples comparing blended versus attributed CAC, showing differences that can significantly impact your profitability analysis. Whether you're working with an Amazon advertising agency or managing Amazon PPC in-house, this framework helps you track the true cost of Amazon pay per click advertising.

Contents: 0:00 Introduction to Customer Acquisition Cost on Amazon 0:51 How to Pull Amazon Marketing Cloud Data for New to Brand Customers 1:38 Understanding Blended vs Attributed New to Brand CAC 2:32 Calculating Attributed Spend with Real Numbers 3:42 Three Strategies to Reduce Your Customer Acquisition Cost 4:20 When High CAC is Acceptable and Brand Halo Effects

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Transcript

Hi guys, in today's video I want to talk about customer acquisition costs on Amazon, how to calculate it and how to properly include everything that should be part of the cost to gain new customer. Now for the sake of this video, I'm going to cover only how to calculate cost per acquisition uh using campaign manager. So only the cost of actual ad spend. But you need to factor in all the other costs as for example if you have external traffic if you have additional uh PPC manager or managers you have your creative team. So everything that contributed to the cost to acquire a new customer you need to factor that in. But let's try to keep it simple uh for the sake of I want you to understand how I do it and what are some of the pros and cons of this approach. You need to pull Amazon marketing cloud data about new to brand customers. How to do it? Uh first navigate to your Amazon marketing cloud instance and in the search bar just type new or new to brand. You should from this one new to brand purchases. Click it and configure it like the date range that you want to use like I use monthto date and you know select the date range that you are comfortable with. What you will get would be split per for each of your campaign that you had running in this for example monthto- date period you will have a column for new to brand and non new to brand uh orders you can use that to calculate the proper cost per acquisition now for the sake of the explanation we're going to have something called blended new brand CAC and attributed new brand now blended you can use this like really as a as a rough estimate what is the cost and it's calculated by just your total ad spend divided by new to brand orders and as I said new to brand orders you can pull that that through the Amazon marketing cloud as I just said now I will also cover the the live numbers so you can see difference between blended CAC and attributed CAC attributed new to brand CAC you need to calculate by you need to allocate the spend that went towards new to brand customers versus the ones who are non new to brand this approach is not 100% accurate but It's more accurate than just blending everything in new to new to brand attributed spend. I mean the the whole point is like we assume that out of all the ads spent that you had in in this month you calculate the split of how many orders were new to brand and versus the others and then you uh find out the ratio between those two and then you can also calcate calculate the attributed spend for new to brand and attributed spend for all the others. uh to give a live a live example take a look at this. So uh let's take the new to brand orders and non new to brand orders in month to date and you have the total orders and total cost that we had monthto date. So you can see that the difference is obvious may not sound like big of a difference but it actually is. So so $10 uh dollar per customer versus $12 can make a 1250 can make a big difference and this is only in the in this example. So clearly I suggest that you go to the attributed CAC in order to calculate everything properly. Now what is it that you can do to reduce your CAC? First of all you can work on your conversion rate and I've covered that in the past and many other u colleagues covered that pretty well. So one of the main thing is actually to increase the conversion rate. Second thing increase your average order value if if possible by bundling your products or maybe do some kind of an upsell. And the third option is just focus on your targeting. Maybe you're targeting some of the keywords and products that are not so relevant to your product. Therefore, your CAC is really really high. You know, you need to factor that in. Also, also high customer acquisition cost can be okay at the beginning of a life cycle of a product and then if they are going down over the period of time, you know, that's a that's a good thing. And lastly, CAC doesn't account for brand halo effect for future organic sales. That's something that you also have to factor in, you know, but having a proper um calculated customer acquisition cost is a must in order to see if investing more in growth pays off, you know, is it eating the margin or not. Um I hope you found this useful. Maybe it's a little bit more matte than you are used to, but it definitely pays off. Stay tuned and see you on Monday in the next video. Bye-bye.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between blended CAC and attributed new-to-brand CAC for Amazon advertising?

Blended CAC is the simplest calculation: total ad spend divided by total new-to-brand orders for a given period. It gives a rough estimate but treats all ad spend as equally responsible for acquiring new customers, including spend that went toward remarketing to existing buyers. Attributed new-to-brand CAC is more precise: you pull new-to-brand and repeat order data from Amazon Marketing Cloud, calculate what proportion of total orders came from new customers, and apply that same ratio to total ad spend to estimate how much of your budget was actually spent acquiring new customers. The difference in practice can be meaningful, for example $10 versus $12 per customer, and compounds significantly at scale.

How do you pull new-to-brand customer data from Amazon Marketing Cloud to calculate CAC?

Log in to your AMC instance, search for "new to brand" in the use cases or search bar, and select the "New to Brand Purchases" instructional query. Configure the date range (month-to-date or a custom window) and run the report. The output breaks down orders per campaign into new-to-brand and non-new-to-brand columns. You can then use those figures alongside your total ad spend from Campaign Manager to calculate both blended and attributed CAC for the same period.

What are the main levers for reducing customer acquisition cost on Amazon?

Three practical options are improving your listing's conversion rate so each click is more likely to result in a purchase, increasing average order value through product bundles or upsells so each acquired customer generates more revenue per transaction, and tightening targeting to eliminate keywords and product placements that attract irrelevant clicks at high cost. A high CAC is also acceptable during a product launch when building sales velocity and reviews takes priority over profitability, and it should naturally decrease over time as organic ranking improves and the listing accumulates social proof.