Amazon New-to-Brand Strategy: Scale Without Killing Margins

What New-to-Brand (NTB) Actually Measures (And Why Most PPC Accounts Ignore It)

New-to-brand (NTB) orders on Amazon track customers who haven’t bought from the brand over the past 365 days. It’s the only Amazon Ads measurement that separates actual customer acquisition from existing customers’ repeat purchases.

Amazon’s 365-day window draws from purchase history across all of Seller Central, not just the advertised ASIN. A customer who has purchased any other product from the same brand in the last 365 days won’t be considered NTB on a new ASIN purchase.

When measuring NTB, you can also track:

• NTB order rate: The percentage of total orders that are NTB orders
• NTB sales: Revenue generated from those NTB orders
• NTB cost per order: Ad spend for a campaign divided by the NTB orders it generated

For example, an account with a 20% NTB rate is running significantly on repeat buyers. By contrast, an account with a 65% NTB rate is actively growing a new customer base.

However accurate the data may be, most accounts never set a target for the metric. Most agency reporting stacks revolve around advertising cost of sales (ACoS) and ROAS. In ACoS-first environments, NTB-optimized campaigns look expensive by ACoS standards and are cut. NTB columns are also hidden by default in the Campaign Manager.

💡Pro Tip: Prior to viewing any SBV or Sponsored Brands performance data, add NTB columns to the Campaign Manager. Then, go to any campaign view, click on "Columns" and select "New-to-Brand Orders", "New-to-Brand Order Rate", and "New-to-Brand Cost Per Order". Without them, every SBV campaign looks expensive automatically.

The Acquisition vs Profitability Tension: Why ACoS-Only Reporting Misfunds Growth

How ACoS-Optimized Accounts Systematically Underfund Acquisition

Branded Sponsored Products campaigns convert well and have ACoS well below break-even because they’re capturing buyers who already know the brand and were going to buy it anyway. These campaigns receive a larger budget during each bid optimization cycle because they have the best ACoS performance.

Sponsored Brands Video campaigns, on the other hand, target buyers who’ve never heard of the brand before. They convert at a lower rate and have a much higher ACoS than branded SP. Yet, about 55% of their orders come from new customers, compared to just 25% for Sponsored Products in general.

As a consequence, all optimization cycles are penalizing SBV campaigns, although they happen to be the more efficient format for actually acquiring new customers.

When you compare both formats side by side, the difference is clear:

Acquisition Campaign (SBV)

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The system will always select a branded SP. The result is an account that looks very efficient on paper, but is becoming more dependent on its existing customer base to generate revenues over time.

💡Pro Tip: Before your next budget review, calculate your NTB cost per new customer for your top three Sponsored Products campaigns and compare it with your SBV campaigns. Most accounts show SP campaigns to be less efficient in terms of cost per new customer acquired, but the lower ACoS often is enough to justify a budget rebalance when comparing the two.

The Hidden Cost: What a Low NTB Rate Actually Means for Revenue Trajectory

A low NTB rate is a leading indicator of revenue trajectory, not an efficiency win.

The decline sequence is predictable. The account ACoS improves, so the branded campaigns get more budget. Then, the NTB rate drops, the new customer pipeline diminishes and six to 12 months later your total revenue stands still, even though it appears to be a well-managed PPC strategy.

The early signal is the NTB rate going down for three or more months in a row. The lagging confirmation is ACoS improving while total advertising cost of sales (TACoS) goes flat. The account looks more efficient while the new customer pipeline empties.

The LTV Argument: Why NTB Customers Are Worth More Than First-Purchase ACoS Suggests

The real value of a new customer rarely shows up in their first purchase. In categories where people buy on a regular basis, a customer you acquire through SBV might seem expensive at the point of that very first sale. However, if they return to buy four, five, or six more times over the course of the following year, you paid that acquisition cost once.

The true cost of winning that customer is spread across everything they go on to buy. It ends up being a small fraction of what the first purchase ACoS suggested.

While the math is less dramatic for categories where people buy infrequently, new customers still have value that a first-purchase ACoS never captures. Every new buyer can review and help your organic ranking, making every future sale that much easier to win.

At Olifant Digital, we judge acquisition campaigns on what a customer is worth to us over their lifetime, not on whether a single order clears a break-even ACoS.

💡Pro Tip: For repeat purchase categories, use average order frequency from Brand Analytics under Repeat Purchase Behavior. Multiply average order frequency by average order value and contribution margin to get a minimum lifetime value estimate before you set your new-to-brand cost per acquisition target.

Where to Find NTB Data in Amazon Ads (And What to Pull)

There are three important data locations from where you need to pull:

• At the campaign level in the Campaign Manager, add the Columns drop-down and select New-to-Brand Orders, New-to-Brand Order Rate, New-to-Brand Sales and New-to-Brand Cost Per Order. Brand Registry enrollment is required for Sponsored Products (SP), Sponsored Brands (SB), and Sponsored Brands Video (SBV).

• Go to a specific campaign at the keyword or ASIN level, go to the Targeting tab, and add the same columns to see what exact search terms are driving high vs low NTB rates.

• At Repeat Purchase Behavior, you can see what percentage of your buyers have purchased from the brand in the past 12 months. This should align with the NTB picture your campaigns are showing.

For example, Olifant Digital pulls NTB on a weekly basis by campaign, and monthly by keyword. The NTB rate is reported as a co-equal metric alongside TACoS in every weekly client report.

NTB Performance by Ad Format: What the Data Actually Shows

The NTB order rate ranges below are directional benchmarks, taken from Olifant Digital’s managed account data. They vary by category and are just examples to get you started on your own account and shouldn’t be read as industry standards.

Sponsored Products: The Recapture Engine

There’s no single NTB profile for Sponsored Products. How many new customers it will bring in is very dependent on how you’re targeting.

Exact match branded campaigns are the least effective at attracting new customers, usually between 10 and 25%. This is because you’re targeting people who already know your brand and are looking for it by name.

Non-branded category campaigns are somewhere in between, usually between 35 and 55%. These shoppers are looking for a solution in your category, not you specifically.

In general, competitor targeting is the winner in terms of new customers. It usually generates a rate between 55 and 70%, because it targets people who are thinking about a competitor at the exact moment they’re deciding what to buy.

Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Brands Video: The Acquisition Engine

Sponsored Brands Video has the highest NTB order rate of any Amazon advertising format.

The median NTB order rate for SBV campaigns is approximately 55%, compared to about 25% for Sponsored Products overall, based on Olifant Digital’s data for accounts we manage.

That’s because SBV puts you in front of buyers who are still in a research mode and haven’t developed a preference for a particular brand yet. By design, it’s a natural format for acquisition.

Sponsored Brands headline ads sit in the middle and will typically produce an NTB order rate of 35-45% on non-branded queries.

Olifant Digital primarily sees SBV as the format for customer acquisition in accounts that already have Brand Registry in place and are demonstrating strong performance with Sponsored Products.

We allocate 8-15% of the total ad budget to it and measure its success by how many new customers it brings in, rather than ACoS. You must be enrolled in Brand Registry to run SBV. If you aren’t yet enrolled, this step is a prerequisite for any SBV budget allocation.

Sponsored Display: The Audience-Dependent Variable

The audience you choose to target is almost entirely what dictates the new customers you get with Sponsored Display.

Retargeting typically results in the fewest new customers, generally between 5 and 15%. This is because you’re targeting people who’ve already seen your products or purchased from you recently. As such, they’re already familiar with your brand.

Category audience targeting performs much better, around 50 to 65%. It reaches shoppers browsing your category who’ve had no prior contact with your brand.

Targeting competitor product pages falls in a similar range, about 55 to 70%. Those shoppers are considering an alternative as they’re deciding what to purchase.

Olifant Digital does not retarget recent purchasers for 30 days, unless the goal is to drive repeat purchases on a subscription or consumable product.

Amazon DSP: The Upper-Funnel Acquisition Play

Amazon DSP can reach customers before they even start looking on Amazon, which is why it generates very high NTB rates of 70-85+%.

These shoppers haven’t yet shown an interest in your brand. As such, virtually every person a DSP touches is a new customer.

DSP doesn’t replace Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands Video, but complements them. It’s meant to build early brand awareness that eventually turns into sales as those shoppers start searching for that product on Amazon.

That said, for accounts spending less than $50K a month, DSP is typically not the place to put your money. SBV gives you better NTB rates with a lot less to manage.

NTB Cost Per New Customer: The Metric That Replaces Standalone ACoS for Acquisition Campaigns

The NTB Cost Per New Customer Formula

NTB cost per new customer is simple. Instead of thinking of campaign cost per total sales, you think of the cost of acquiring each truly new customer.

To calculate it, take the dollar amount you spent on a campaign and divide it by the number of new-to-brand orders it generated.

A short comparison shows the importance of this metric.

Let’s say you have an SBV campaign that costs you $8,000 a month and brings in 320 new customers. That’s about $25 to acquire a new customer.

Now, contrast this scenario with a branded Sponsored Products campaign that spends $6,000 per month. It looks efficient on paper, but since most of its orders are repeat purchases, it only gets about 86 new customers.

That's around $70 per new customer, almost three times higher than the SBV campaign, despite the latter having a much better ACoS.

That’s why acquisition campaigns should be measured by two metrics simultaneously. ACoS to protect your profitability, and NTB cost per new customer to show the efficiency of the actual customer base growth.

Setting an NTB CPA Target: How Much a New Customer Is Worth

Once you know what your cost per new customer is, the next question is how much you can afford to pay.

The answer is based on the lifetime value of a customer, not just the initial order.

For example, let’s take a supplement brand where the average customer spends $42 on the first order and comes back about four times over the next year.

That first order is worth a lot more than you might think when you factor in your profit margin.

A brand in this position can comfortably justify spending about $45 to acquire each new customer and still be profitable. So, an SBV campaign that acquires customers at $25 each is well within a healthy range, even if the first-purchase ACoS looks expensive at first glance.

💡Pro Tip: If you don’t have detailed lifetime value data yet, a safe assumption for repeat-purchase categories is that a customer is worth at least two times the value of their first order.

NTB ROAS vs Blended ROAS: The Reporting Split That Changes Budget Decisions

When you report all of your acquisition and efficiency campaigns together as one number, the acquisition side almost always disappears.

Acquisition campaigns, of course, have a lower return. They're spending money to get brand-new customers. By contrast, efficiency campaigns re-engage people who already know you.

When you combine the two, the overall picture looks healthy. However, your acquisition spend is being compared to your most profitable repeat-buyer campaigns, which it was never going to match.

You can solve this issue by reporting them separately. The return on the acquisition portfolio appears poor in the blended view, but it suddenly makes sense when viewed in isolation because you measure it against the cost of a new customer instead of campaigns that were always going to do well.

Of course, when you look at the lifetime value of a new customer, the acquisition spend is clearly worth it. When you view the two independently, you can see the differences more clearly. This approach makes budgeting an informed decision rather than a guess.

NTB Targets by Category and Brand Stage

Category Baseline: NTB Order Rate Benchmarks Across Accounts Managed by Olifant Digital

As mentioned earlier, there’s no single NTB rate that qualifies as “good” across all brands. What looks healthy is very dependent on the category you sell in.

Lower NTB rates are totally normal in categories such as supplements or beauty consumables, where people buy again and again. Because a significant number of orders in these categories are from repeat customers replenishing supplies, the percentage of new buyers will be lower. It’s not a cause for concern.

In categories with low frequency, such as accessories, home goods, and sporting equipment, the new buyer is the key growth engine. Existing customers don't usually come back immediately after the first purchase.

A brand in one of these categories should have a much higher NTB rate. If that number starts to slip, it's a leading indicator that revenue growth is about to plateau.

The practical takeaway is to benchmark your NTB rate to the buying behavior of your category, not the industry average. That same 30% NTB rate that’s perfectly fine for a supplement brand could be a red flag for an accessories brand that needs new customers to grow.

💡Pro Tip: Don’t rely on a single blended number for the whole account. Instead, extract your NTB order rate for the past 90 days, segmented by campaign type. If you have an account that averages 35% overall, you could actually be running at 12% on branded Sponsored Products, which is healthy for an established brand, and 50% on SBV, meaning your acquisition campaigns are working exactly as they should.

Brand Stage Targets: Early Growth vs Established vs Market Leader

Where your brand sits in its journey on Amazon should also shape the NTB rate you’re targeting.

Early Growth

If you're a new brand (meaning you've been on Amazon for less than two years and your best product has fewer than 500 reviews), almost every sale should be to a brand-new customer.

At this point, you simply haven’t had time to build a repeat buyer base. As such, you’ll want to aim for an NTB rate of 60-75% (or even higher). If your rate is sitting below 50% at this stage, it typically means you’re not reaching enough new buyers to grow.

Established

A healthy target, once you’ve become an established brand that’s been operating for two to five years, is 40-60%.

At this point, you have a solid base of repeat customers. The goal is to keep bringing in enough new buyers to replace those who naturally drop off while still growing beyond what your repeat purchases alone would deliver.

Market Leader

For market leaders in the top three of their category, a 30-50% target is realistic. This, of course, depends on how often customers in that category repurchase.

At this level, you’re already capturing most of the obvious demand and the focus turns to winning over shoppers who’ve tried a competitor but not yet switched. SBV campaigns for competitor keywords are the best way to reach those buyers.

The Warning Signal: When NTB Rate Drops Below Category Baseline

If you find that your NTB rate is below the healthy range for your category for two months in a row, it’s worth taking a moment to understand why. There are three common causes that should best be checked in the following sequence.

The most likely culprit is that your budget has slipped away from acquisition. As you optimize your campaigns for a lower ACoS, the spend often migrates over time from formats like SBV and non-branded campaigns to branded campaigns that are recapturing existing buyers.

The fix is to move the budget back towards acquisition formats, even if your overall ACoS increases a bit over the short term.

The second possibility is that you’re just running out of easy new customers to reach in your category. The concern is that your cost to acquire each new customer is still increasing as you allocate more of your budget to SBV.

When this happens, the answer is usually moving into related categories or using DSP to find new audiences outside your current reach.

The third problem is not with your campaigns but with your product listing. If new buyers are clicking on your acquisition campaigns, but very few of them are actually buying while your existing customers convert just fine, your listing isn’t winning over first-time visitors. Audit and optimize the listing before you spend any campaign budgets.

💡Pro Tip: A flat total revenue with a high NTB rate is another issue. You’re adding new customers but losing the same amount. This is a product or retention problem and not a PPC problem. No amount of SBV budget will fix it.

The Budget Split: How to Allocate Between Acquisition and Retention Campaigns

The Two-Portfolio Model: Separate Acquisition and Retention Budgets

Olifant Digital sets up an account in such a way that it’s divided into two separate budgets, with each one judged by totally different standards.

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The first is the acquisition budget. This includes campaigns responsible for acquiring new customers like SBV, non-branded category campaigns, competitor targeting, and category Sponsored Display.

These campaigns are measured by the cost to acquire each new customer, with ACoS acting only as a safety limit to ensure that spending doesn’t run away.

The second is the efficiency budget. This includes campaigns that capture demand you’ve already earned, such as branded Sponsored Products, keywords where you already rank well organically, and retargeting.

These are measured in the traditional way, against ACoS and your break-even point, with NTB rate used as a check to ensure they’re not disappearing.

Keeping the two separate also makes it much easier to converse with stakeholders.

Instead of a vague explanation that ACoS increased, you can point to something concrete. For example, the percentage of budget allocated to acquisition increased from 20 to 30%. As a result, ACoS increased from 18 to 22%, while the cost to acquire each new customer actually decreased from $42 to $31.

This is the story of a committed investment in growth, not evidence that something has gone amiss.

Olifant Digital's 8-15% SBV Rule and When to Override It

We generally allocate 8-15% of the total ad budget for SBV for accounts that are already successful with Sponsored Products and are Brand Registered. We determine that spend based on the number of new customers coming in, not just ACoS.

We use 8% as the floor because anything less doesn’t produce enough data to optimize the campaigns correctly. Most categories experience diminishing returns for each additional dollar spent after 15%, hence why we cap it here.

That said, it’s a starting point, not a set of fixed rules.

We’ll push a brand higher to 20-25% when:

• It’s in its early growth stage and needs to acquire customers quickly.
• A new product launch needs reviews and ranking momentum fast.
• The brand sells in a category where shoppers respond strongly to video, such as wellness, fitness, or beauty.

We’ll also bring it below 8% in the reverse situations. For example, we back off when:

• The cost of acquiring new customers is more than a customer is worth for two months in a row.
• Creative changes haven’t solved the problem.
• A brand has deliberately chosen to put profit ahead of growth for a while.

Scaling Acquisition Without Destroying Account ACoS

Spending more on acquisition raises your overall ACoS, which can be concerning for anyone focused on that one number. Three simple habits prevent that from being a problem.

Separate Your Acquisition and Efficiency Campaigns

If you explain the two-budget approach after the blended ACoS moves, it sounds like damage control. By setting the expectation early, a rising ACoS is seen as a planned investment, not a problem.

Fix your acquisition budget as a dollar amount, not a percentage of total spend

This is more significant than it sounds. If acquisition is a percentage, a growing efficiency budget can slowly squeeze out acquisition without anyone ever deciding to cut it. This investment has a set dollar amount that protects it, regardless of how the rest of the account grows.

Base any increases to your acquisition budget on efficiency in acquiring new customers, not ACoS

If your cost of acquiring a new customer is far less than what the customer is worth, it makes sense to spend more. If that cost is too high, fix your creative and targeting before adding any budget.

💡Pro Tip: Using the Campaign Manager’s portfolio budget cap feature, set the acquisition portfolio budget as a fixed dollar amount. By fixing it in dollars, the efficiency portfolio doesn’t slowly crowd out the acquisition portfolio over time, which is how most accounts end up with low NTB.

How Olifant Digital Manages the NTB vs Profitability Balance

Olifant Digital is a full-service Amazon agency that manages over 50 accounts generating more than $100M per year in client revenue. Every account is managed by senior specialists with over seven years of experience and no work is ever delegated below senior level.

We show the NTB rate right next to TACoS in every weekly report our clients receive because these two numbers together provide a complete picture. TACoS tells us if the ad spend we’re doing is growing the brand organically over time, whereas NTB tells us if the growth is coming from a steady stream of new customers or just the same customers coming back.

If both numbers are falling simultaneously, it means the account is improving while losing new customers slowly. This is a problem an ACoS-only report would never show.

What’s more, both metrics are surfaced through Olifant AI, our proprietary Amazon PPC and account management platform that tracks NTB rate, TACoS trajectory, and keyword-level acquisition efficiency daily across every managed account. This way, shifts in the acquisition versus recapture balance are caught before they can cause a revenue plateau.

For example, when MatchaBar came to us, it had an account that looked good on paper but was almost completely built on existing buyers. We turned its SBV campaigns into a dedicated acquisition budget, tracking the cost of bringing in new customers instead of ACoS. We also overhauled the whole account with our 1-1-1-1 campaign structure so we could finally see performance clearly at the keyword level.

It’s this method of tracking NTB that created sustainable growth and added an extra $114,305 in Amazon revenue monthly.

If you don’t know your current NTB order rate by campaign type or haven’t set an NTB CPA target based on customer lifetime value, your Amazon PPC strategy is managing acquisition without the metric that measures it.

In this case, get a free marketing plan from Olifant Digital and we’ll extract the full NTB analysis for your account and show you exactly what your acquisition vs recapture ratio looks like today.

We also offer a 60-day money-back guarantee. So, if we don’t improve your Amazon results after your free marketing plan, you don’t pay.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is New-to-Brand on Amazon?

New-to-brand (NTB) on Amazon measures orders from customers who haven’t purchased from the brand on Amazon in the past 365 days. This is the only metric in Amazon Ads that separates true customer acquisition from the recapture of existing buyers.

What Is a Good NTB Order Rate on Amazon?

Your NTB order rate depends on your category and how established your brand is. Products that are purchased frequently, such as supplements, need to have low healthy rates, and products that are purchased infrequently, such as accessories, need to have high rates because most of their growth comes from new customers. The best warning sign is when your NTB order rate is below your category’s normal rate for two consecutive months.

How Do I Increase NTB Orders on Amazon?

The best move is to increase the budget for Sponsored Brands Video on non-branded category keywords. Video is a much more effective way to bring in new customers because it’s available to shoppers when they’re still in research mode. You can also target competitor product pages with both Sponsored Display and Sponsored Products. This puts you in front of buyers who’re actively comparing options.

What Is the Difference Between NTB and ACoS?

NTB tells you whether your ad spend is generating new customers. ACoS tells you how efficient your ad spend is. ACoS treats a sale to a brand-new buyer the same as a sale to a loyal repeat customer. You’re naturally going to have a higher ACoS on acquisition campaigns.

Does Sponsored Brands Video Improve NTB Rate?

Yes, Sponsored Brands Video always drives the highest share of new customers of any Amazon ad format. It works because video hits shoppers when they’re still exploring a category, before they’ve decided on a brand, which is the perfect time to win someone new. This is why Olifant Digital considers SBV a core acquisition tool and dedicates 8-15% of the total ad budget to it.

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