Amazon today made its first-party paid feature signals in Amazon Marketing Cloud free to query for both audience creation and measurement use cases, with the offer running through December 31, 2026. The announcement removes a financial barrier that had previously limited which advertisers could access Amazon's proprietary data signals within its clean room analytics platform.

Amazon today announced that Amazon 1P paid features signals inside Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) are available at no additional cost, effective immediately through December 31, 2026. According to Eleanor Nadal-Wei, Ad Tech Partnerships at Amazon Ads, advertisers need only subscribe through the Paid Features page to begin running measurement queries and building audiences using these signals. The announcement was shared on LinkedIn on June 2, 2026. One condition applies: third-party paid features signals - such as those from Experian - continue to require a subscription fee.

The move is notable given the scope of what AMC's paid features tier typically covers. According to the Amazon Ads Support Center, paid features represent the premium subscription model for Amazon Marketing Cloud, providing options for deeper analysis of audiences, campaigns, and outcomes. Gaining access previously involved subscribing at the advertiser instance level, agreeing to Amazon Marketing Cloud terms and conditions, and in some cases paying a monthly subscription tied to the billing account. That cost structure, at least for 1P signals, disappears for the remainder of 2026.

What AMC paid features actually provide

Amazon Marketing Cloud is a secure, privacy-safe, cloud-based clean room environment, according to the Amazon Ads Support Center. Within it, advertisers can query across inputs including Amazon DSP and sponsored ads campaign events - impressions, clicks, and relevant conversions - as well as their own inputs, to build aggregated and anonymized analyses.

The paid features tier extends beyond what the standard AMC instance provides. According to Amazon's support documentation, the Paid Features (beta) tab within AMC lists all available premium offerings. Each entry includes a "View example in Use Cases" link, a "Get a 60-day free trial" option, and a "See options" link to review the total monthly price. As of today's announcement, the pricing step becomes irrelevant for 1P signals through the end of the calendar year.

Two paid features are visible within the platform interface: Amazon Audience Segment Insights and Amazon Retail Purchases. The support documentation describes Amazon Audience Segment Insights as combining combined advertising and audience segment insights for measurement, activation, and planning, noting that Amazon Marketing Cloud provides segment insights across Amazon DSP ad traffic sources. The subscription enables contact with audience overlap analysis across sponsored ads and Amazon Advertising traffic events, non-ad-exposed conversion events, and advertiser-uploaded signals. The Amazon Retail Purchases feature provides item-level purchase event records across Amazon retail marketplaces, with an extended data retention policy and access to Amazon Retail Purchases (ARP) data.

According to the documentation, once subscribed, all users associated with the advertiser's AMC instance gain access to the subscribed paid features. Subscription happens at the instance level, not per user. If an administrator subscribes an instance, every user associated with that instance inherits access.

How to subscribe - and what the process looks like

The subscription workflow, as described in the Amazon Ads Support Center's paid features documentation, involves navigating to the Paid Features (beta) tab within AMC, clicking "See options" to review the total monthly price, specifying the billing account for the subscription, accepting the AMC terms and conditions, and clicking "Subscribe." For the free trial path, the process is shorter - clicking "Get a 60-day free trial" activates the feature with a "Free trial in progress" status indicator.

Cancellation remains straightforward. According to the documentation, advertisers can navigate to "Your subscriptions" within the Paid Features tab, locate the relevant feature, select the "Modify subscription" dropdown, and click "Cancel." One limitation applies: re-subscribing to a cancelled paid feature requires a 24-hour wait period.

With 1P signals now free to query, the distinction between the standard free path and the former paid path narrows considerably. Advertisers who had been on the 60-day free trial - and either let it lapse or decided not to convert - can now subscribe with no financial consequence until year-end.

The incrementality angle practitioners are flagging

Within hours of the LinkedIn announcement, practitioners began surfacing specific technical use cases that the free access unlocks. Shuqing Ke, who builds Amazon AMC pipelines and audience activation for software-as-a-service agencies, noted in comments on the announcement: "The activation play is standard practice now -- AMC audiences pushed to DSP. BUT the bigger unlock most teams miss: FSI's exposure_type gives you ad-exposed AND un-exposed conversions, so you can finally measure TRUE incrementality without a holdout test. That's the dataset that answers the CFO question every brand asks. $1-20K/mo per account just went $0 for 6 months -- whoever subscribes first owns the backfill."

The reference to FSI - the Full Shopping Insights paid feature signal - points to a specific data field that captures whether a conversion occurred in the presence or absence of ad exposure. That distinction is fundamental to incrementality measurement. Traditional last-touch or multi-touch attribution models attribute credit based on which ads preceded a conversion. FSI's exposure_type field enables a different calculation: comparing conversion rates among exposed and unexposed populations, which is closer to what a randomized controlled experiment would produce, without requiring one.

Muhammad Sohail, who describes his work as helping Amazon private label FBA brands scale sales, described the update as creating "a significant opportunity for brands to explore AMC's full potential for audience creation, measurement, and DSP optimization." He added that "the ability to test, validate, and scale audience strategies without added cost should encourage broader adoption and more data-driven decision-making."

AMC audiences and how activation works

According to the Amazon Ads Support Center, AMC audiences can be activated and used in Amazon DSP and sponsored ads. The creation process follows the same query-based structure as AMC analytics - advertisers define SQL queries that produce audience lists based on the signals available in their AMC instance. Those audiences can include Amazon DSP and sponsored ads traffic events, ad-relevant conversion events, first-party tables, and the paid features tables that are now free to query through year-end.

Common audience archetypes documented by Amazon include ad engagement audiences - people who have engaged with ads but not yet purchased; cart abandoners - people who added a product to cart without completing a purchase; and high-value lookalikes - audiences similar to high-volume customers. Once created, AMC audiences are sent directly to the corresponding Amazon DSP and sponsored ads accounts. Advertisers select them for relevant ad groups - formerly called Line Items in Amazon DSP - the same way other audiences are selected.

Eleanor Nadal-Wei noted in her announcement that many of her partners "now activate AMC audiences as standard practice when launching DSP campaigns and have seen strong performance outcomes." Beyond activation, she noted that these signals "can be used to discover entirely new audience segments and target them directly on DSP."

What AMC analytics can do with these signals

The analytics capabilities that the paid signals unlock span several distinct measurement categories. According to the Amazon Ads Support Center, AMC analytics can help with campaign measurement, audience refinement, supply optimization, and more. Specific use cases documented in the support center include performance deep dive (in-depth findings about a particular campaign), audience insights (connections between engagement actions and audience attributes), shopping journey analysis (common paths to conversion by media exposure, frequency, timing, and other attributes), media mix analysis (collective impact of Amazon Ads media channels and incremental impact of a particular media usage), omnichannel impact (Amazon media's contribution to sales at various Amazon store types and the advertiser's direct-to-consumer channels), and custom attribution (assigning conversion credit using custom logic on engagement type, lookback windows, and other criteria).

Each of those use cases benefits from richer signal data. With the 1P paid features now accessible at no cost, queries can incorporate Amazon Audience Segment Insights and Amazon Retail Purchases data alongside standard traffic tables, enabling analyses that would previously have required a paid subscription.

Context: how AMC has evolved to reach this point

The free access offer lands against a backdrop of significant AMC infrastructure investment over the past 18 months. Amazon launched direct, self-service access to AMC for sponsored ads advertisers on September 16, 2025, removing the traditional requirement for partner or representative intervention. That change introduced no-code templates and AI-powered assistance, allowing advertisers to analyze campaign performance and create high-intent audiences without SQL expertise or managed-service contracts.

At its annual unBoxed 2025 conference in November, Amazon expanded the AMC ad traffic lookback window from 13 months to 25 months, giving advertisers access to more than two full calendar years of historical advertising data for year-over-year comparisons and long-horizon seasonality analysis. That change launched in open beta in the United States and Canada on November 11, 2025.

In January 2025, Amazon introduced an SQL generator for AMC that allows marketers to generate database queries through natural language inputs rather than manual coding. That capability reduced a longstanding technical barrier - AMC had historically required SQL proficiency, limiting who could operate the platform independently.

Amazon Marketing Cloud launched Prime Video viewership signals in open beta on November 11, 2025, across the United States, Canada, Japan, and Australia, introducing content engagement data from Prime Video into AMC's analytics platform. On December 8, 2025, Nielsen audience segments arrived in Amazon DSP and Marketing Cloud via Zeotap Data Distribution, bringing third-party audience segments into the ecosystem.

More recently, Amazon published a detailed ADM API walkthrough on May 1, 2026, revealing Ads Data Manager as a dedicated infrastructure layer that connects first-party data workflows to Amazon DSP, AMC, and Events Manager. The free 1P signals offer fits within this pattern of lowering activation barriers while expanding the platform's technical depth.

What changes and what does not

Several things remain unchanged. According to the Amazon Ads Support Center, each paid feature within AMC still requires an explicit subscription through the Paid Features tab - simply having an AMC instance does not automatically grant access. The subscription process, including accepting AMC terms and conditions and specifying a billing account, still applies. What changes is that the step involving payment is removed for Amazon's own 1P signals for the duration of the offer period.

Third-party paid features - Experian being the named example in the announcement - continue to require a subscription fee. That distinction matters for advertisers building audience strategies that depend on external data providers. The free offer covers only signals that Amazon itself contributes to the platform.

The paid features documentation notes that trials are available for 60 days. With the free period running from today through December 31, 2026 - approximately seven months - advertisers who subscribe now receive substantially more time than the standard trial. Whether Amazon converts the offer to a paid structure from January 1, 2027, onward, or extends it, has not been disclosed. Jared Brown, who works in retail media, brand strategy, and analytics, asked directly in the comments whether "there any 'catch' as far as a paid subscription kicking on automatically after the time period has elapsed" - the question had not received a direct response in the visible thread at the time of writing.

Why this matters for advertisers and agencies

The practical implication is straightforward. Any advertiser or agency with an AMC instance can now subscribe to Amazon's 1P paid features without financial risk and begin running measurement queries that incorporate premium signal tables. The window is approximately seven months - from today through December 31, 2026.

For brands that have built AMC audiences as a standard component of DSP campaign launch workflows, the free access allows the same activation logic to be extended with richer signal data. For brands that have not yet integrated AMC into campaign planning, the cost barrier to experimentation is now zero for 1P signals. As Andrew Lorence, a senior sales executive focused on strategic brand growth, noted in the comments: "No excuses for brands/agencies to not be leveraging this data at this point."

The self-serve third-party measurement study capability that Amazon DSP added gives additional context: Amazon has been systematically expanding the measurement toolkit accessible without managed-service dependencies. Free 1P paid feature signals through year-end continue that direction.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Amazon Ads, addressing advertisers and agencies with Amazon Marketing Cloud instances. The announcement was communicated by Eleanor Nadal-Wei, Ad Tech Partnerships at Amazon Ads.

What: Amazon 1P paid feature signals within Amazon Marketing Cloud are now free to query for both audience creation and measurement use cases. Advertisers must subscribe through the Paid Features page within their AMC instance. Third-party paid features signals, such as those from Experian, continue to require a subscription fee.

When: The free access period begins today, June 2, 2026, and runs through December 31, 2026 - a window of approximately seven months. No information has been disclosed about pricing structures that may apply from January 1, 2027, onward.

Where: The offer applies within Amazon Marketing Cloud, accessible through the Amazon Ads console. The Paid Features (beta) tab within each advertiser's AMC instance is the entry point for subscribing.

Why: The removal of cost for 1P signals reduces the barrier to adoption for advertisers and agencies that had not yet incorporated AMC paid features into their measurement and audience activation workflows. It also enables existing AMC users to extend their query logic with premium signal tables - including data relevant to incrementality measurement - without incremental budget allocation.