The Ultimate Guide to Amazon DSP Advertising in 2026

Competition in e-commerce is fierce. Ad costs on platforms like Google and Facebook are rising every year. Brands are constantly searching for new ways to reach valuable audiences without overspending. Many advertisers overlook a powerful tool in their arsenal: Amazon DSP Advertising.

Amazon DSP is not just for sellers on Amazon. It is a sophisticated programmatic advertising platform. It allows brands to reach customers across Amazon's owned sites and a vast network of third-party exchanges. 

This guide will show you how to leverage Amazon's demand-side platform to drive full-funnel growth and achieve your marketing goals.

Key Takeaways:

• Amazon DSP is a demand-side platform that lets advertisers programmatically buy display, video, and audio ads to reach audiences on Amazon sites and across the web.
• Amazon DSP provides exclusive access to Amazon's vast shopper data, enabling highly precise audience targeting based on real purchase behavior.
• Use Amazon DSP ads to build brand awareness, drive consideration, and convert shoppers at every stage of their journey, on and off Amazon.
• To truly measure Amazon DSP performance, you must integrate its data with all other marketing channels for a complete view of your return on investment.

What Is Amazon DSP (Demand-Side Platform)?

Amazon DSP is Amazon's specific version of demand-side platform. It connects advertisers to a massive supply of ad placements. 

These placements are on Amazon-owned properties like IMDb, Twitch, and Zappos. They also extend to leading third-party publisher websites and apps. It gives you incredible reach powered by Amazon's data.

The platform uses machine learning and real-time bidding (RTB). This helps advertisers find the right audience at the right time for the right price. You are buying audiences, not just ad slots. 

This audience-first approach is what makes the Amazon DSP so powerful for modern marketers.

How DSP Differs from Amazon Sponsored Ads (PPC)

Many advertisers are familiar with Amazon Sponsored Ads. These are the pay-per-click (PPC) ads you see in Amazon search results and on product pages. Amazon DSP is fundamentally different. 

Sponsored Ads primarily target shoppers already on Amazon with high purchase intent. They are great for bottom-of-funnel conversions.

Amazon DSP, however, focuses on the full marketing funnel. You can use it for brand awareness, consideration, and conversion. It reaches audiences both on and off Amazon. 

The pricing model is also different. Sponsored Ads use a cost-per-click (CPC) model, while DSP primarily uses a cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) model.

Who Should Use Amazon DSP? (Sellers vs. Non-Sellers)

A common misconception is that Amazon DSP is only for brands that sell products on Amazon. While Amazon sellers can see immense benefits, the platform is open to everyone. This includes brands that do not sell on Amazon's marketplace.

• For Amazon Sellers: DSP offers powerful retargeting options. You can re-engage users who viewed your products but didn't buy. You can also target shoppers who viewed competitor products. The synergy with your Amazon store is a huge advantage.
• For Non-Sellers: You can still leverage Amazon's rich shopper data. Target audiences based on their browsing and buying habits on Amazon, then direct them to your own website. This allows you to tap into Amazon's audience intelligence for your own e-commerce or lead generation efforts.

Why Amazon DSP Advertising Is a Game-Changer for Brands

The platform offers unique advantages that other advertising channels cannot match. It combines massive scale with unparalleled data precision, creating a powerful engine for growth.

Unlocking Exclusive First-Party Audience Data

This is the single biggest advantage of Amazon DSP. You gain access to Amazon's first-party data. Amazon DSP consolidates first-party data from Amazon.com, Fire TV, Alexa, IMDb, Twitch, and more, covering over 300 million active customers. 

You can target users based on:

• Past purchases on Amazon.
• Products they have viewed.
• Brands they have engaged with.
• Specific product categories they are interested in.
• Lifestyle segments (e.g., "new parents," "homeowners").
• Demographic information.

This data is highly accurate because it's based on actual behavior, not just cookies or inferred interests. It allows for incredibly granular and effective audience targeting.

Expanding Your Reach Beyond the Amazon Marketplace

Your ads are not limited to Amazon.com. The platform gives you access to a huge network of websites, apps, and devices. This network includes Amazon-owned properties and third-party ad exchanges. Your brand can appear on:

• Amazon Owned & Operated: Amazon.com, IMDb, Twitch, Goodreads, Zappos.
• Amazon Devices: Fire TV, Kindle, Echo devices.
• Third-Party Publishers: Thousands of high-quality websites and mobile apps across the internet.

This extensive reach ensures your message finds potential customers wherever they are browsing, streaming, or shopping online.

Securing Premium Ad Placements at Scale

Amazon DSP provides access to high-impact, premium ad inventory. This includes exclusive placements that are not available through other platforms. You can run video ads on Fire TV or during live streams on Twitch. 

These placements help your brand stand out and capture user attention in engaging environments. The ability to buy this inventory programmatically makes it efficient to scale your campaigns across top-tier publishers.

Driving Full-Funnel Marketing Objectives

Amazon DSP is versatile. It supports goals across the entire marketing funnel. You can design campaigns specifically for awareness, consideration, or conversion. For example, you can use OTT video ads to build brand awareness. 

Then, use dynamic e-commerce ads to retarget engaged viewers and drive them to purchase. This holistic approach helps you build a cohesive customer journey.

Getting Started: Access and Requirements for Amazon DSP

Accessing Amazon DSP is different from signing up for a simple ad account. There are specific requirements and two main ways to use the platform. Understanding these options is the first step to launching your first campaign.

Self-Service vs. Managed-Service Options

Advertisers have two primary models for using Amazon DSP:

• Self-Service: With this option, you get direct access to the DSP console. Your team manages all aspects of the campaigns. This includes setup, optimization, and reporting. It offers maximum control but requires significant expertise in programmatic advertising.
• Managed-Service: Here, you work with Amazon's internal team of experts. They manage your campaigns for you based on your goals and budget. This is a good option for brands without in-house expertise or the resources to manage the platform directly.

Understanding the Minimum Ad Spend Requirements

Amazon DSP is designed for larger advertising budgets. There is a minimum spend requirement to use the platform. 

For the managed-service option, this typically starts around $50,000 USD which can vary per country. 

For self-service, the requirements can be more flexible, especially when working through an agency partner. 

However, you should still plan for a significant monthly investment to see meaningful results. The CPM model means that scale is necessary for impact.

Agency Partnerships as an Alternative Access Route

For brands that don't meet the high minimum spend or lack the expertise, an agency partner is a great solution. 

Many advertising agencies have their own self-service seats with Amazon DSP. They can grant their clients access to the platform without the high barrier to entry. This provides the benefit of expert management and access to powerful tools without the direct commitment to Amazon.

Do You Need to Sell Products on Amazon?

As mentioned before, you do not need to be an Amazon seller. Brands without a presence on the marketplace can use Amazon DSP to drive traffic to their own websites. 

You can use an "Amazon pixel" on your site to track conversions and build retargeting audiences. This allows you to leverage Amazon's powerful audience data for your own properties, making it a valuable tool for any large e-commerce brand or advertiser.

Mastering Amazon DSP Targeting Strategies

The core strength of Amazon DSP lies in its sophisticated targeting options. These strategies go far beyond simple keywords or demographics. By mastering them, you can deliver highly relevant ads to shoppers who are most likely to convert.

Audience Targeting: Leveraging Amazon's Shopper Data

This is where you tap into Amazon's first-party data. You can build audiences based on specific behaviors. These include:

• In-Market Audiences: Target users who are actively browsing for products in a specific category.
• Lifestyle Audiences: Reach users based on their interests and life events, such as "fitness enthusiasts" or "new movers."
• Demographic Audiences: Target based on age, income, education, and other demographic factors.

Contextual Targeting: Placing Ads in Relevant Environments

Contextual targeting places your ads on pages that are relevant to your product. Instead of targeting the user, you target the content they are consuming. 

For example, an ad for running shoes could appear on a blog about marathon training. This ensures your ad is seen in a relevant environment, which can increase engagement and brand perception.

Remarketing: Re-engaging Past Visitors and Customers

Remarketing is a powerful strategy for driving conversions. Amazon DSP allows you to re-engage several types of audiences:

• Pixel-Based Remarketing: Target users who have visited your own website (for non-Amazon sellers).
• ASIN Remarketing: Target shoppers on Amazon who have viewed your product's detail page but did not purchase.
• Brand Remarketing: Re-engage users who have previously searched for your brand on Amazon.

A Deep Dive into Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences help you find new customers. You start with a "seed" audience, such as your existing customers or high-value purchasers. 

Amazon DSP then analyzes the characteristics of this seed audience. It finds other shoppers on Amazon with similar browsing and buying patterns. 

This is an effective way to scale your campaigns and reach a larger, yet still relevant, group of potential customers.

Product Targeting (ASINs) to Reach Competitor Audiences

ASIN targeting is a unique and aggressive strategy. You can target shoppers who have viewed or purchased specific ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Numbers). 

This means you can show your ads directly to people who are interested in your competitors' products. 

For example, if you sell a coffee maker, you can target users who have recently viewed the product pages of competing coffee maker brands. It's a direct way to capture market share.

Exploring the Core Amazon DSP Ad Types and Creatives

Amazon DSP supports a wide range of ad formats. This allows you to choose the best creative to match your campaign goals.  

Static Display Ads

These are the most common form of display advertising. They are standard image-based ads that can be created in various sizes. Static ads are excellent for building brand awareness and driving traffic. 

You can easily create them with your brand's logo, a strong call-to-action, and compelling imagery. They work across a wide range of websites and apps in the Amazon network.

Dynamic E-commerce Ads (with reviews and pricing)

Dynamic e-commerce ads are more advanced. They automatically pull information from your product detail pages. This includes the product image, title, price, star rating, and even customer reviews.

These ads are highly effective for retargeting. They can show a user the exact product they were previously viewing, creating a personalized and relevant ad experience that encourages them to complete their purchase.

Video Ads (In-stream and Out-stream)

Video is a powerful medium for storytelling. Amazon DSP supports two main types of video ads:

• In-stream Video Ads: These ads play before, during, or after video content on sites like IMDb or across the web. They are similar to YouTube pre-roll ads.
• Out-stream Video Ads: These ads appear within non-video content, such as in an article or a social feed. They start playing when they become visible on the user's screen.

Video is ideal for top-of-funnel campaigns to capture attention and communicate your brand's value proposition.

Over-the-Top (OTT) Video Ads on Fire TV and Twitch

OTT refers to video content streamed over the internet, bypassing traditional cable. Amazon DSP provides exclusive access to premium OTT inventory on platforms like Amazon Fire TV and Twitch. 

These ads are typically non-skippable and run in a TV-like environment. This is a massive opportunity to reach cord-cutters and a younger demographic with high-impact, full-screen video ads. It's brand advertising for the modern era.

Key Amazon DSP Metrics for Measuring Success

To optimize your campaigns, you need to track the right key performance indicators (KPIs). Amazon DSP provides a wealth of metrics. It's important to focus on the ones that align with your specific campaign goals at each stage of the funnel. Effective measurement requires well-organized KPI dashboards to monitor performance closely.

Top-of-Funnel Metrics (Impressions, Reach, eCPM)

For awareness campaigns, your goal is to reach as many relevant people as possible. Key metrics include:

• Impressions: The total number of times your ad was displayed.
• Reach: The number of unique users who saw your ad.
• eCPM (Effective Cost Per Thousand Impressions): The cost you pay per 1,000 impressions. This is a primary metric for budget efficiency.

Mid-Funnel Metrics (Click-Through Rate, Detail Page View Rate)

For consideration campaigns, you want to measure engagement. Are people interested enough to learn more? Look at:

• CTR (Click-Through Rate): The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click.
• DPVR (Detail Page View Rate): The percentage of ad impressions that led to a view of your product detail page on Amazon.
• Video Completion Rate (VCR): For video ads, the percentage of users who watched your entire video.

Bottom-of-Funnel Metrics (Purchases, ROAS, New-to-Brand)

For conversion campaigns, the focus is on sales and profitability. The most important metrics are:

• Purchases: The number of attributed sales of your product.
• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): The amount of revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising.
• New-to-Brand (NTB): Metrics that show how many purchases came from customers who had not bought from your brand on Amazon in the past year. This is crucial for measuring growth. Accurately calculating ROI requires combining DSP data with your overall marketing performance.

Using Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) for Deeper Insights

For advanced advertisers, Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) offers a deeper level of analysis. AMC is a secure, privacy-safe data clean room. It allows you to combine your own datasets with Amazon Ads campaign data. 

You can perform custom queries to understand the customer journey across different ad types (e.g., Sponsored Ads and DSP) and uncover advanced attribution insights.

Advanced Strategies to Maximize Your Amazon DSP ROI

Once you've mastered the basics, you can implement advanced strategies to get even more value from your Amazon DSP investment. These tactics help you create a more cohesive and effective advertising ecosystem.

Building a Full-Funnel Campaign Structure

Don't run campaigns in isolation. Structure your efforts to guide customers through the funnel. Use broad-reaching OTT and video ads for awareness. 

Then, use display ads to retarget engaged viewers with more product-focused messaging. 

Finally, use dynamic e-commerce ads to retarget detail page viewers and cart abandoners to close the sale. This structured approach ensures you are always delivering the right message at the right time.

Leveraging the Brand Halo Effect

The "brand halo" effect refers to the lift in sales for your entire product catalog, not just the product you advertised. Amazon DSP is excellent at creating this effect. 

By building brand awareness, you can drive an increase in branded searches on Amazon and organic sales for your other products. When measuring success, look beyond the directly attributed ROAS and consider the overall lift in your brand's performance.

Combining DSP with Sponsored Ads for a Synergistic Effect

Amazon DSP and Sponsored Ads work best together. 

Use DSP to drive new traffic and create demand. This fills the top of your funnel. 

As these new shoppers begin searching on Amazon, your Sponsored Ads campaigns will be there to capture that demand. This creates a powerful one-two punch that boosts both platforms' performance. 

It's a holistic approach to Amazon advertising.

Testing Creatives and Audience Segments Rigorously

Never stop testing. Continuously run A/B tests on your ad creatives. Test different headlines, images, and calls-to-action. 

At the same time, test different audience segments. You may find that a lifestyle audience performs better than an in-market audience for a particular product. Constant iteration and optimization are key to long-term success with programmatic advertising.

Common Challenges in Amazon DSP Advertising (And How to Solve Them)

While powerful, Amazon DSP is not without its challenges. The platform's complexity and requirements can be daunting for new users. Being aware of these hurdles is the first step to overcoming them.

Navigating High Minimum Spends

The high cost of entry is the biggest barrier for many brands. If you cannot meet the minimum spend for a managed-service account, the best solution is to partner with an Amazon Ads agency. 

They often have lower spending thresholds and provide the expertise needed to manage your campaigns effectively, offering a more accessible path to entry.

The Complexity of the Platform

The self-service DSP console is a complex tool with a steep learning curve. Without proper training, it's easy to make costly mistakes. 

To solve this, invest in training for your team. Amazon offers an official DSP certification program. 

Alternatively, rely on a managed service or an agency partner to handle the technical aspects of campaign management.

Overcoming Attribution Blind Spots

Attribution can be a major challenge. Amazon DSP often plays a role at the top or middle of the funnel, influencing purchases that get credited to other channels like search or social. Relying solely on Amazon's last-touch attribution can undervalue your DSP efforts. 

A unified attribution layer is required to close these blind spots, and this is where Improvado is commonly used. Instead of relying on channel-level, last-touch reports, Improvado centralizes Amazon DSP data with search, social, site analytics, and conversion data. 

This makes it possible to analyze how upper- and mid-funnel exposure contributes to downstream conversions and revenue.

Improvado supports more accurate attribution by providing:

• Automated data ingestion from Amazon DSP, Google Ads, Meta, analytics tools, and CRMs
• Cross-channel entity and identity mapping to connect impressions, clicks, sessions, and purchases
• Standardized conversion and event schemas to align attribution logic across platforms
• Support for custom attribution models, including multi-touch, time-decay, and position-based approaches
• De-duplication of conversions to prevent double-counting across channels
• Warehouse-ready datasets for scalable attribution analysis
• Governed metric definitions to ensure attribution results remain consistent across teams
• BI and AI enablement to explore customer journeys and attribution outputs at scale

With this foundation, Amazon DSP performance can be evaluated in context. 

Marketers gain a clearer view of incremental impact, understand how DSP supports lower-funnel channels, and make budget decisions based on the full customer journey rather than isolated platform attribution.

Conclusion 

Amazon DSP is more than just another advertising platform. It gives brands direct access to Amazon’s first-party shopper data and premium display, video, and CTV inventory. Its value is not limited to Amazon sellers. Even brands without an Amazon storefront use Amazon DSP to influence demand and conversions across the entire funnel.

The challenge lies in measurement. Amazon DSP reporting is often siloed and heavily last-touch, which makes it difficult to understand true impact. Improvado solves this by centralizing Amazon DSP data with search, social, analytics, and revenue sources. It standardizes metrics, de-duplicates conversions, and enables cross-channel attribution and BI analysis. This allows teams to evaluate Amazon DSP performance in context and make informed budget decisions based on the full customer journey.

If you want more accurate insights from your Amazon DSP campaigns, request a demo of Improvado.