Amazon Display Advertising: Reach Buyers Before They Search

Amazon display advertising puts your brand in front of shoppers who are actively browsing, comparing, and buying, not just searching. Unlike sponsored search ads that capture existing intent, display placements on Amazon work further up the funnel, reaching audiences based on shopping behaviour, product category interest, and purchase history across Amazon’s ecosystem and beyond.

Used well, it is one of the few advertising channels where you can connect audience data of genuine commercial quality to display inventory at scale. Used poorly, it becomes another line item that looks busy in a dashboard but does very little for actual growth.

I spent a large portion of my agency career watching brands pour budget into lower-funnel performance channels and declare victory every quarter. The numbers looked clean. ROAS was strong. Everyone was happy. But when I started asking harder questions, it became clear that much of what performance was being credited for was going to happen anyway. The customer was already in market. The ad just happened to be the last thing they saw. Amazon display, when it is working properly, does something different. It creates the conditions for purchase rather than simply intercepting it.

What Is Amazon Display Advertising, and How Does It Differ From Search?

Search advertising on Amazon is intent-driven. Someone types “protein powder” or “noise cancelling headphones” and your ad appears. The intent is explicit. The audience self-selects. Display advertising works differently. You are choosing the audience, not waiting for them to raise their hand.

Amazon offers two main display products. Sponsored Display is the self-service option, accessible through Seller Central and Vendor Central. It is relatively straightforward to set up, uses Amazon’s own audience segments, and can run ads on Amazon itself as well as on third-party sites and apps. Amazon DSP (Demand-Side Platform) is the programmatic option, offering much broader reach, more granular audience controls, and access to premium inventory across the web. DSP typically requires a minimum spend commitment and is often managed through Amazon’s own team or a certified agency partner.

The practical difference matters. Sponsored Display is accessible to most brands and works well for retargeting shoppers who have viewed your product pages or similar category pages. DSP is more powerful but requires more investment, more strategic thinking, and more patience. You do not measure DSP success the same way you measure a sponsored search campaign, and if you try to, you will almost certainly pull the budget before it has had a chance to work.

Who Should Be Using Amazon Display Advertising?

Not everyone. That is worth saying plainly because the default in digital advertising is to assume that more channels equals more growth. It does not. It usually equals more complexity and thinner margins.

Amazon display makes most sense for brands that already have a meaningful presence on Amazon, either in terms of sales volume or product catalogue depth. If you are selling one SKU with a thin margin and a small review count, display advertising is unlikely to be your highest-priority investment. Get your listing fundamentals right first. Build your review base. Make sure your product page actually converts before you spend money driving traffic to it.

For brands with established Amazon presence, display becomes genuinely interesting. It can help you defend your category against competitors. It can help you reach shoppers who have browsed your product but not purchased. It can help you introduce your brand to audiences who are in-market for adjacent products. And if you are using DSP, it can extend your reach well beyond Amazon’s own properties, targeting audiences based on Amazon’s purchase data across the broader web.

Amazon’s audience data is one of the most commercially relevant datasets available in digital advertising. It is built on what people actually buy, not just what they click on or search for. That is a meaningful distinction. I have managed media strategies across more than 30 industries and the signal quality from Amazon’s behavioural data consistently outperforms what you get from third-party audience providers who are inferring intent rather than observing it.

If you are thinking about how display fits into your broader growth architecture, it helps to have a clear framework for how channels interact. The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers how to sequence channel investment as part of a structured market entry and expansion plan, which is the right context for evaluating Amazon display rather than treating it as an isolated media decision.

How Do Amazon Display Targeting Options Actually Work?

This is where most marketers underinvest in thinking. The targeting interface looks simple. The underlying logic is not.

Sponsored Display offers two core targeting modes. Product targeting lets you show ads on specific product detail pages or across a product category. Audience targeting lets you reach shoppers based on their browsing and purchase behaviour, including people who have viewed your products, viewed competitor products, or shown interest in relevant categories.

Product targeting is useful for competitive defence and conquest. If a shopper is looking at a competitor’s listing, you can place your ad directly on that page. It is also useful for cross-sell, placing your products in front of people browsing complementary categories. A brand selling running shoes might target pages for running socks, fitness trackers, or sports nutrition.

Audience targeting is more nuanced. Amazon builds its audience segments from actual purchase and browse behaviour, which means the “in-market for athletic footwear” segment contains people who have demonstrably shown interest through their actions on the platform, not just people who fit a demographic profile. That is a materially better signal than most display networks can offer.

DSP extends this further, allowing you to build custom audience segments, layer in third-party data, apply frequency caps, and run sequential messaging strategies. If you want to show one creative to someone who has never interacted with your brand, then a different creative to someone who has viewed your product page, DSP gives you the architecture to do that. Sponsored Display does not.

Understanding market penetration strategy is useful context here. Semrush’s breakdown of market penetration is a good reference point for thinking about how display fits into a broader strategy of reaching new buyers versus deepening relationships with existing ones. The two require different targeting approaches and different creative strategies.

What Creative Works in Amazon Display?

Amazon display creative is not where most brands shine. The format constraints are real, the placements are competitive, and the temptation is to default to a product image with a price and a logo. That approach rarely moves anyone.

The brands that perform well in display treat the creative as a genuine communication problem. What does this person know about us? What stage of consideration are they at? What would make them stop and look rather than scroll past?

For retargeting audiences, the creative can be more product-specific. Someone who has already viewed your product page does not need brand education. They need a reason to come back. A strong customer rating, a limited-time offer, or a clear value proposition that addresses the likely objection can do real work here.

For upper-funnel audiences who have not yet engaged with your brand, the creative needs to earn attention first. That means a clear visual hierarchy, a message that is relevant to the category they are browsing, and a call to action that is proportionate to where they are in the consideration process. Asking someone who has never heard of you to “Buy Now” is optimistic at best.

I have sat in enough creative reviews to know that the brief is almost always the problem when display creative underperforms. The targeting strategy determines who sees the ad. The creative determines what happens next. Both deserve serious attention.

For campaigns that extend beyond Amazon into broader digital channels, creator-led content is increasingly worth considering as a creative input. Later’s research on creator-led go-to-market campaigns is a useful reference for how brands are integrating creator content into performance-oriented strategies, including display.

How Should You Measure Amazon Display Performance?

Attribution is where Amazon display gets genuinely complicated, and where a lot of marketers either overclaim or give up entirely.

Amazon’s default attribution model for display includes a 14-day view-through window, meaning a sale is credited to a display ad if the shopper saw it within 14 days before purchasing, even if they never clicked on it. That is a generous window. It will make your display campaigns look more effective than they might actually be, particularly for products with short consideration cycles where the purchase was probably going to happen regardless.

I have seen this play out many times. A brand runs a display campaign, sees strong attributed sales, celebrates, then cuts the budget to test incrementality, and the sales barely move. The display was riding the wave of existing demand, not creating new demand. That is not a failure of the channel. It is a failure of measurement strategy.

The more honest approach is to use Amazon’s Brand Metrics tool alongside your campaign reporting. Brand Metrics gives you data on new-to-brand purchases, which is a better indicator of whether your display activity is genuinely expanding your customer base rather than just capturing shoppers who were already on their way to buying. If your new-to-brand percentage is low, your display spend is likely doing more retargeting than prospecting, which may or may not be the right use of the budget.

For DSP campaigns, incrementality testing is worth the effort. Running holdout groups, even informally, gives you a much cleaner read on what the campaign is actually contributing. It is more work. It is also more honest.

Tools like Hotjar’s growth loop frameworks offer useful thinking on how to build feedback mechanisms into your marketing measurement approach, particularly when attribution is ambiguous. The principle of building systematic feedback into your measurement process, rather than relying on platform-reported numbers alone, applies directly to Amazon display.

How Does Amazon Display Fit Into a Broader Go-To-Market Strategy?

This is the question that most Amazon advertising guides skip, and it is the most important one.

Amazon display does not exist in isolation. It sits within a broader media ecosystem, and its value depends significantly on what else is happening around it. A brand running strong upper-funnel activity through video or social, building awareness and consideration before shoppers reach Amazon, will typically see better results from display retargeting than a brand relying on Amazon display to do all the heavy lifting from awareness through to purchase.

The analogy I keep coming back to is the clothes shop. Someone who has tried something on is significantly more likely to buy than someone who has not. Amazon display, at its best, is the equivalent of getting someone into the fitting room. But if the product is wrong, the price is wrong, or the listing does not do its job, the display spend is wasted. The channel cannot fix those problems.

When I was running agency teams, the brands that got the most from display were the ones who treated it as part of a sequenced strategy. They used upper-funnel channels to build familiarity, used search to capture the intent that familiarity created, and used display to stay present with high-value audiences throughout the consideration window. Each channel had a defined role. The measurement was calibrated accordingly.

BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy and pricing is a useful reference for thinking about how channel decisions connect to broader commercial strategy. The principle that channel investment should follow commercial logic rather than media availability applies directly to decisions about where Amazon display sits in your budget allocation.

For a more complete view of how display fits within a structured growth strategy, the articles across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub cover channel sequencing, market penetration, and the commercial frameworks that should sit underneath any media investment decision.

What Are the Most Common Mistakes Brands Make With Amazon Display?

Running display before the listing is ready. This is the most common and most avoidable mistake. If your product page has weak images, no A-plus content, and a handful of reviews, display advertising will drive traffic to a page that does not convert. Fix the listing first. The marginal improvement in conversion rate from a well-optimised product page will almost always outperform the marginal improvement from additional traffic.

Treating Sponsored Display and DSP as interchangeable. They are not. Sponsored Display is a retargeting and category conquest tool. DSP is a full-funnel programmatic platform. Using DSP with a retargeting mindset, or expecting Sponsored Display to deliver the reach and sequencing of DSP, will produce disappointing results from both.

Measuring display with search metrics. ROAS benchmarks that work for sponsored search do not translate to display. Display campaigns, particularly upper-funnel DSP activity, will show lower direct ROAS because they are reaching audiences earlier in the consideration process. If you apply the same ROAS threshold to both, you will cut display budget that is doing genuine work and redirect it to search, which will then take credit for the demand that display created.

Ignoring frequency. Amazon display, like all display advertising, can become annoying very quickly if frequency is not managed. Showing the same ad to the same person twelve times in a week does not build affinity. It builds irritation. DSP gives you frequency controls. Use them.

Not testing creative. The creative testing discipline that most brands apply to social advertising rarely makes it to Amazon display. That is a missed opportunity. Even within the constraints of Amazon’s ad formats, there is meaningful variation possible in messaging, imagery, and call to action. Systematic testing, even at modest scale, will improve performance over time.

Growth hacking frameworks from channels like social and search sometimes get applied wholesale to Amazon. CrazyEgg’s overview of growth hacking principles is a reasonable starting point for understanding the underlying logic, but the application to Amazon display requires adjusting for the platform’s specific attribution model and audience data structure.

What Budget Should You Allocate to Amazon Display?

There is no universal answer, and anyone who gives you a specific percentage without knowing your category, your competitive set, and your current funnel performance is guessing.

What I can say is that display should not be your first Amazon investment. Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, the search-based formats, should typically come first. They capture existing demand, are easier to measure, and give you baseline data on what your category looks like before you start investing in audience-based approaches.

Once your search campaigns are performing consistently and your listing fundamentals are strong, display becomes a logical next step. Sponsored Display can be tested at relatively modest budgets. DSP requires more commitment, both financially and in terms of management time, but it also opens up capabilities that Sponsored Display cannot match.

For brands with significant Amazon revenue, a common approach is to allocate a portion of total Amazon advertising budget to display, with the split depending on how much of the strategy is focused on new customer acquisition versus defending existing market share. New customer acquisition requires more upper-funnel investment. Defence and retargeting can often be done efficiently at lower spend levels.

BCG’s work on scaling agile approaches offers a useful mental model here. The principle of starting with a focused, testable investment, learning quickly, and scaling what works is directly applicable to Amazon display. Commit enough to get meaningful data. Do not over-invest before you understand what the channel is actually doing for your business.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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