Amazon New-to-Brand (NTB): Measuring Sponsored Brands Right
Grade Sponsored Brands on ACoS alone and you’ll cut your best acquisition campaigns for looking “inefficient.” New-to-brand is the metric that tells you the truth.
New-to-Brand (NTB) shows the share of your orders that came from customers who haven’t bought your brand in the past 12 months. Because Sponsored Brands is an acquisition format, NTB — not ACoS — is how you judge it. A campaign with a mediocre ACoS but a high NTB rate can be a genuine win, because you’re buying new customers with lifetime value, not just single sales.
01What new-to-brand is
New-to-Brand is an Amazon metric that flags whether an order came from a customer who is new to your brand — specifically, someone who hasn’t purchased from you in the previous 12 months. It comes in a few flavours: NTB orders, NTB sales, and the NTB order rate (the percentage of a campaign’s orders that were new customers). Unique to Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and DSP, it’s the closest Amazon gets to handing you a customer-acquisition scoreboard. And as of 2026, it’s reported down to the SKU level, so you can see exactly which products win you new customers.
02Why ACoS misjudges Sponsored Brands
ACoS measures short-term efficiency: spend against sales, right now. That’s the right lens for a bottom-funnel Sponsored Products campaign harvesting ready-to-buy demand. But Sponsored Brands often works higher in the funnel, introducing your brand to people who’ve never heard of it. Judged on first-order ACoS, that introduction always looks expensive — because you’re paying to acquire a relationship, not to close a single transaction. Using ACoS to grade acquisition is like judging a first date by whether it immediately turned a profit.
03How to read NTB
The NTB rate tells you what a campaign is actually doing. A high NTB rate means the campaign is genuinely pulling in new customers — valuable even at a higher ACoS. A low NTB rate means you’re mostly re-reaching people who already know you. That’s not automatically bad: a branded-defense campaign should have low NTB, because its job is to hold your own terms, not find newcomers. The number only makes sense against the campaign’s goal — which is the whole point of the next section.
04The value of a new customer
Here’s why a “bad ACoS” can be a good buy. A new customer isn’t worth one order — they’re worth their lifetime value: repeat purchases, reviews, and referrals over months or years. If your target ACoS on a single sale is 30% but a new customer typically buys three more times, an acquisition campaign running at 60% first-order ACoS may be highly profitable once you account for those repeats. This is why acquisition is best tracked at the whole-business level through TACoS and repeat-rate, not through one campaign’s ACoS in isolation.
05The blended-ACoS mistake
The costliest measurement error is running branded, category, and competitor terms in one campaign and reading a single blended ACoS. That number is meaningless — it averages a cheap defensive win with an expensive acquisition play and hides both. Separate campaigns by goal, and judge each on the metric that fits:
| Campaign type | Primary goal | Judge it on |
|---|---|---|
| Branded defense | Hold your own brand terms | Low ACoS / efficiency |
| Category (non-branded) | Acquire new customers | NTB rate |
| Competitor conquest | Win rivals’ customers | NTB rate + CTR |
One blended number for all three is how brands make the wrong call every quarter — cutting the acquisition campaign that was quietly building the business.
06Beyond NTB: the measurement stack
NTB is the headline, but a full read on Sponsored Brands uses a small stack of signals: TACoS for overall business health, branded-search lift (are more shoppers searching your name?), Brand Store metrics like visits and dwell time from your Store, the 5-second view rate for video, and detail-page view rate. Attribution windows matter too, since upper-funnel effects show up over days, not seconds — the mechanics of which are covered in Amazon attribution.
07Using SKU-level NTB to reallocate
The 2026 upgrade to SKU-level NTB turns this from theory into action. Instead of knowing only that a campaign acquired customers, you can now see which products did the heavy lifting. Use it to reallocate: put more creative and budget behind the SKUs with the highest NTB rates, since those are your best front doors for new customers, and stop over-investing acquisition budget in products that mostly sell to existing buyers. That’s how you turn a measurement metric into a growth lever. Next, we’ll put all of this together into how and when to scale Sponsored Brands.
- NTB measures the share of orders from customers new to your brand in the past 12 months.
- Sponsored Brands is an acquisition format — judge it on NTB, not first-order ACoS.
- A new customer is worth their lifetime value, so a high-ACoS acquisition campaign can still pay.
- Never read one blended ACoS — separate defense, category, and conquest, each with its own KPI.
- Use 2026’s SKU-level NTB to shift budget to the products that acquire the most new customers.
Frequently asked questions
What is new-to-brand on Amazon?
It’s a metric showing whether an order came from a customer who hasn’t bought your brand in the previous 12 months. It’s available on Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and DSP, and it measures how well your ads acquire new customers rather than re-reaching existing ones.
How is new-to-brand calculated?
Amazon checks whether the purchasing customer has bought from your brand in the trailing 12 months. If not, the order counts as new-to-brand. The NTB order rate is simply the percentage of a campaign’s total orders that were from these new customers.
What is a good new-to-brand percentage?
It depends on the campaign’s goal. Acquisition campaigns on category or competitor terms should show a high NTB rate, while branded-defense campaigns naturally show a low one because they re-reach existing customers. Compare NTB against the campaign’s purpose, not a universal benchmark.
Why is ACoS not enough for Sponsored Brands?
Because Sponsored Brands often works higher in the funnel, acquiring new customers rather than closing immediate sales. First-order ACoS makes acquisition look expensive, so relying on it alone leads sellers to cut campaigns that are profitably building the customer base over time.
What is new-to-brand order rate?
It’s the percentage of a campaign’s orders that came from customers new to your brand. A higher rate means the campaign is doing more customer acquisition; a lower rate means it’s mostly reaching people who already buy from you.
Or return to Module 4: Sponsored Brands or the course hub.