Paid advertising
Amazon Ads - the practical guide.
Amazon Ads is Amazon's full advertising stack, spanning Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display inside the marketplace, plus Amazon DSP for off-Amazon programmatic and Amazon Marketing Cloud for measurement. For any brand selling on Amazon, it is effectively non-optional - it is the bottom-of-funnel layer that captures shopper intent at the point of purchase. It also reaches off-Amazon inventory including Prime Video, Twitch, Freevee and IMDb TV.
What Amazon Ads does
Sponsored Products are the workhorse - keyword and product-targeted ads that appear in search results and on product detail pages, paid on CPC. Sponsored Brands add a banner with your logo and multiple products at the top of search. Sponsored Display lets you retarget shoppers on and off Amazon based on product views and purchases.
Amazon DSP is the programmatic layer for video, display and audio across Amazon-owned properties (Prime Video, Twitch) and third-party exchanges. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a clean room that lets advertisers run custom audience and attribution analyses across Amazon's first-party signals.
It sits alongside Google Ads and Meta in the performance stack but is unique in being attached to a closed-loop purchase environment - you can see exactly which ad drove which sale on the marketplace, which most other channels can't offer.
Who it's for
Brands selling physical products through Amazon's marketplace, vendors and 1P sellers, and increasingly any consumer brand wanting to advertise against shopper intent or buy CTV inventory through Amazon DSP. Critical for FMCG, consumer electronics, beauty and household brands. Less relevant for pure B2B SaaS or services that don't sell on Amazon.
Pricing, in rough terms
Sponsored ads are auction-based on CPC with no minimum spend - you can start at a few dollars a day. Realistic Sponsored Products budgets for an active brand usually sit at $2,000+ per month. Amazon DSP traditionally required a $35,000+ managed-service minimum, though self-serve access is opening up via select partners with lower thresholds. No platform fee on sponsored ads.
When Amazon Ads is the right fit
Mandatory if you sell on Amazon and want share of search on your own and competitor terms. A strong pick for any consumer brand wanting closed-loop measurement on shopper purchases, or for accessing Prime Video and Twitch inventory programmatically. Wrong fit if you don't sell on the marketplace and have no plans to use Amazon's CTV or display inventory.
Watch-outs
Sponsored ads cannibalisation - you'll often pay to rank for branded terms you'd win organically; track incrementality. ACOS (ad cost of sale) is reported gross and ignores Amazon's own fees, so it flatters profitability. Amazon DSP managed-service fees can absorb 10-15% of spend on top of media. AMC is powerful but has a real learning curve and requires SQL fluency.