What's new in Amazon advertising for 2026?

Main strategies and tips for running successful campaigns:

1. Use AMC (Amazon Marketing Cloud) to build better audiences and see what's driving conversions.

2. Run sponsored video ads. Now, they are available in more placements, including Prime Video and Twitch advertising.

3. Try Amazon's AI bidding tools. They can help you save time and cut ad spend waste. 

4. Test Sponsored Brands with video. This can help you stand out in the search. 

5. Match portfolios to customer types (e.g., "fitness enthusiasts") rather than just match types.

6. Track your ads better. New conversion analytics and cross-channel insights can help you with that. Advanced eCommerce performance analytics is crucial for improving your ad campaigns and maximizing ROI through data-driven optimization, audience targeting, and real-time performance adjustments.

7. Shift your budget up to 40% toward targeting complementary ASINs to "teach" Amazon's AI who your buyers are.

8. Stop looking at one-time sales. Use the new break-even formula that includes 12-month repeat revenue.

In this article, we’re going to learn the fundamental shift in Amazon Advertising for 2026. Forget everything you knew about simple keyword matching; success now depends on training Amazon’s AI to understand your customer personas. 

We’ll also look at the new Complete TV capability and Rufus-integrated ads toimprove your Amazon Advertising and turn your campaigns into ROI.

Amazon Advertising, formerly called Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), is a service that resembles pay-per-click ads on Google. In a nutshell, it is a service that allows businesses to promote their products on Amazon marketplaces. There are various ad formats and placements to choose from, which makes Amazon Ads fit for any business size. Both new and professional sellers can advertise unique and new products, helping customers discover the right fits and driving more sales through sponsored ad campaigns.

Amazon is one of the largest marketplaces in the world. It is fair to say that in many countries, customers look no further than Amazon to get everything and anything they need. So, no wonder Amazon Ads is all the rage right now, and the competition among the sellers is fierce. Amazon sellers use Amazon Advertising to advertise their products and gain more visibility in a crowded market, using different ad types and targeting options to stand out. Getting noticed on such a massive platform is a dream that comes true only for the sellers who master the art of effective advertising and product positioning. Only those who combine data-driven decisions with compelling creatives can turn their listings into top-selling ones and thrive in such a competitive marketplace. 

The reach of Amazon Ads is massive. Amazon Ads helped advertisers reach over 275 million ad-supported viewers each month in the U.S in 2025. through exclusive platforms like Prime Video and Twitch, as well as tens of millions more via direct integrations with premium streaming publishers.

In 2026, the reach of Amazon Ads will take a new "Complete TV" peak. This industry-first tool allows advertisers to plan and manage streaming buys across Prime Video, Netflix, and Paramount+ directly via Amazon DSP.

Plus, interactive ad formats are officially mainstream. Interactive pause ads now allow viewers to "add to cart" or "learn more" via remote control or voice command without leaving their show – turning passive viewing into active shopping.

The rules of profitable PPC were rewritten in early 2026. Amazon’s algorithm has transformed from a keyword-matching engine into a customer-matching recommendation engine.

• The old way: "Water bottle" (keyword) → ad shows.
• The 2026 new way: AI analyzes customer browsing habits, demographics, and interests → ad shows the right persona, even if they didn't search for that exact keyword.

By 2026, an estimated 35-40% of purchases involve AI-assisted discovery via Rufus – the conversational shopping AI.

Amazon Ads supports every marketing goal with tailored products and solutions. If you are new to advertising, Amazon recommends starting with sponsored ads.

Amazon Sponsored Ads help advertisers of all ranges to reach out to their target audience effectively and get a lot of benefits.

The main advantages of Amazon PPC ads are:

• High-quality and brand-safe environment.
• Short and efficient sales cycles.
• Better product visibility and more sales.
• More people are recognizing and remembering your brand. 
• Helpful insights into how customer habits are changing that help you improve your ads.
• Extensive customer data for precise persona mapping.
• Finding the best ways to get new customers at the right time. 
• Tracking what's working and making intelligent data-driven decisions via AMC.

With all the benefits, from better visibility to smart decision-making, it’s clear that Amazon Advertising can help your business grow and flourish. 

Let’s take a look at the evolution of Amazon Ads in 2026. These updates reflect Amazon Advertising's ongoing innovation in the digital advertising space.

Sponsored Products are still the top way to get sales on Amazon, but they have changed a lot. Sponsored Products are especially effective for a successful product launch, helping sellers quickly reach relevant audiences from day one. They are not simply better looking in 2026; they work better, too. Sponsored Products function as a "customer matching" engine: 

• Sponsored Products now adjust where and how your ads appear based on real-time intent signals and shopper behavior, rather than just keyword strings.
• Your products can now appear as recommendations within conversational shopping Rufus AI, capturing customers during their discovery phase.
• You can now use generative AI to create goal-optimized landing pages and high-impact video headers that capture attention in the search results.
• Sponsored Display now helps at every step of the buying journey, reaching audiences both on and off Amazon with improved "predictive pacing" to maximize evening conversion spikes.
• Amazon DSP is now easier to use for mid-size brands, offering direct access to premium inventory including Netflix, Disney+, and Paramount+.
• In-store screens at Amazon Fresh and smart grocery carts provide new ways to connect with shoppers during their physical shopping journeys.

All in all, instead of using just one ad type, brands are combining them to guide shoppers from first look to final purchase. 

Amazon’s data tools have moved from "keyword matching" to "persona-based matching." It’s no longer just for big brands with massive budgets.

Now, you can:

• Target audiences based on their lifestyle and habits, not just recent searches.

• Instead of just targeting keywords, you can structure campaigns by customer type (e.g., “the brand loyalist” vs. “the window shopper”) using AMC behavioral signals.
• Reach people earlier in their journey by targeting complementary products (e.g., targeting gym bags to sell water bottles) to "train" the algorithm on your ideal buyer profile.
• Use Amazon’s own retail data and optimized targeting to recapture interest from shoppers who viewed your product but didn't convert.
• Automatically boost bids or increase budget during high-conversion hours (like the 6 pm-10 pm rush) to ensure your ads are visible when it matters most.
• Go after competitor audiences in a smarter way by teaching the algorithm which competitor ASINs your customers also browse.

These advanced targeting options help sellers reach consumers who are most likely to be interested in their products. So, smarter targeting is now available for everyone. If you're not using it, you're missing big opportunities.

Video ads on Amazon used to be something only big brands could do. In 2025, smaller brands could get the most out of them as well. In 2026, video ads are the cornerstone of an "interactive-first" strategy. They are a requirement for high conversion rates.

 New advantages of video ads include:

• Your videos now live everywhere, from high-intent search results and product pages to premium streaming inventory on Prime Video, Netflix, and Paramount+ via the new Complete TV toolset.
• Viewers can now take action without leaving their show. Interactive pause ads allow customers to "add to cart" or "learn more" via remote, voice command, or mobile scan the moment they hit pause.
• During streaming ad breaks, viewers can scroll through a curated carousel of your products and instantly sync their favorites to their Amazon mobile app for a seamless checkout.
• You can now plan, manage, and measure your entire streaming buy across the open web and Prime Video in one place, ensuring your video ad types focus on actual sales, not just vanity views.
• Production hurdles are a thing of the past. New AI creative agents can automatically generate campaign-ready video ads from a simple product page or ASIN in just hours, making high-production value accessible for brands of any size.
• Detailed product videos continue to be the best way to help shoppers "test drive" your product before they buy, drastically reducing return rates and boosting trust.

It all means that videos are not simply a part of a brand image anymore - they help brands to sell their products. 

In 2026, the trio of Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display remained the engine of Amazon sales. However, the game has changed: you need to train Amazon’s AI (Rufus and Cosmo) to understand your ideal customer persona rather than just add the right keywords.

Selecting high-LTV products is crucial. In 2026, we look for products that anchor a customer into your brand's ecosystem.

Sponsored Products is still the #1 way to drive volume, especially for product launches. In 2026, the focus has moved from "controlling spend" to "guiding the algorithm."

Here are the updated tips for a 2026 Sponsored Products strategy:

• Instead of one campaign for "water bottle," create portfolios for "the fitness enthusiast" vs. "the office professional." This teaches the AI which audiences convert best for you.
• In 2026, product targeting > keyword targeting. By targeting complementary ASINs (e.g., targeting gym bags to sell your water bottle), you train the recommendation engine to show your product organically on those pages.
• Move beyond simple "time-of-day" controls. Use Amazon's automated rules to boost bids during your persona’s peak conversion hours (e.g., 6 pm-10 pm for B2C shoppers).
• Use automatic campaigns as your "R&D lab." Weekly, move high-performing search terms into manual exact-match campaigns to "lock in" your ranking.
• This is still the best way to stop the "bleed." Regularly prune irrelevant terms to ensure your budget is only training the AI on high-intent traffic.

Sponsored Brands has evolved into the united "discovery engine" for your brand on Amazon. In 2026, it is used to grab audience attention with rich display and video creatives that put your brand front and center. Create your store-centric journey that turns one-time shoppers into long-term brand advocates.

Some of the best strategies you can use:

• Use the new AI-powered image generation (available at no cost in the dashboard) to produce branded creatives. It lets you test multiple lifestyle backgrounds for the same product without a photography budget.
• Sponsored brand video is now a powerful storytelling tool. Use autoplay content that initiates a relationship with the shopper immediately. In 2026, these videos should link directly to your brand store to support deep-funnel discovery.
• For high-stakes product launches, use the "reserve share of voice" feature to guarantee your brand stays at the very top of search results during your peak traffic windows.
• Audit your reports for the new-to-brand metric. In 2026, successful Sponsored Brands campaigns often drive up more sales from customers who have never interacted with your brand before.
• Check if your branded headlines and store page copy use natural, conversational language. Natural language helps Rufus, Amazon’s AI assistant, understand and recommend your brand during conversational shopping sessions.

Even with a small budget, the low-cost AI creative tools and targeted video placements make Sponsored Brands a "must-have" for any competitive seller in 2026.

In 2026, Sponsored Displays officially turned into a unified Display Ads offering. It’s a structural merger that brings sponsored ads and Amazon DSP workflows into a single, centralized workspace.

If you’re looking to create new campaigns, you’ll no longer find a separate "Sponsored Display" button. Instead, you navigate to "Campaigns" → "Create Campaign" → "Display."

Why this centralized hub is cool for 2026:

• Existing Sponsored Display campaigns haven't disappeared. They continue to run and are manageable via the Campaign Manager, but all new architecture is built for the 2026 AI-matching era.
• You can now manage your high-intent sponsored display hits and your broad-reach programmatic DSP plays in one place. It brings you better cross-channel data syncing.
• The new Display Ads format allows for even more flexibility, letting you use either Amazon-generated creatives or your own custom-built assets to reach audiences wherever they spend their time.
• By unifying with DSP signals, these Display Ads have even more "nerdy" data at their disposal to identify your ideal customer persona across the open web.

Amazon Advertising cost is one of the biggest concerns of businesses considering starting advertising on the platform.

To avoid any possible confusion, let's start with how Amazon Ad spend and billing work. First, billing is based on valid events only. It means that you are charged only for valid ad clicks or viewable impressions. If Amazon notices any invalid activity, it will automatically adjust your charges. 

Another thing to note is that credit limits start small and grow after successful payments. It increases in stages: $10, $25, $50, $150, $200, $350, up to $500. You get charged when you reach your credit limit. You also get charged on the 3rd of each month if you have a balance, even if you haven’t reached your credit limit. If your spending exceeds your limit, you get charged multiple times per month. 

Most campaigns on Amazon use a cost-per-click (CPC) model. However, Sponsored Display and some Sponsored Brands campaigns use the vCPM model (cost per 1,000 viewable impressions). When setting up your campaign, you can specify the maximum amount you are willing to pay per click or impression. This maximum amount directly influences your ad placement and cost efficiency, as Amazon will not charge you more than your set limit. 

Now, let’s get to how Amazon sponsored ads cost in real-life cases. In 2026, the market has matured significantly, and average CPC across the platform has climbed past the $1.00 mark. While the actual price depends on the type of ad you pick and the competitive level of your keywords, the baseline for entry has shifted.

2026 cost benchmarks:

• Sponsored Products. Remains the most cost-effective entry point, with an average CPC ranging between $1.05 and $1.65. It is the primary tool for driving conversion and training the AI via product targeting.
• Sponsored Brands. Expect an average CPC of $1.40 – $3.25. The higher cost reflects premium "top of search" placements. It’s important to remember that these ads now leverage AI-powered image generation at no extra cost, though custom video production can still range from hundreds to thousands of dollars.

• Display Ads in a unified workspace. The average CPC cost is now $0.95 – $2.10. Because these ads now integrate with Amazon DSP workflows, the price varies based on whether you are doing simple on-Amazon retargeting or broader off-Amazon prospecting.

As a high-level strategy for 2026, you should now budget for a higher ACoS around 35-50% in the "discovery" phase. While this might seem high, these campaigns are critical because they train the recommendation engine and fuel your organic growth. For long-term success, focus on the LTV-adjusted break-even, where a higher initial acquisition cost is justified by 12 months of repeat customer revenue.

To display Amazon Ads on your website, you can use either Amazon Associates or Amazon Publisher Services (APS), depending on your traffic and business model:

• Amazon Associates is Amazon’s affiliate program. After signing up at
• Amazon Publisher Services is designed for mid-to-large-scale publishers. It provides direct and cloud-based access to Amazon’s massive ad demand. APS uses Transparent Ad Marketplace (TAM) and Unified Ad Marketplace (UAM) for header bidding and server-side integration. Helpful to keeping your site fast while maximizing your revenue by letting Amazon bid alongside other global ad exchanges.

Select the option that aligns with your website’s scale: If you are a content creator or blogger, Amazon Associates is your go-to. If you are a high-traffic media owner looking to optimize your ad stack via server-side technology, APS is the professional choice.

Amazon product ads can be highly effective. However, they are not a one-size-fits-all solution. Let's take a quick look at the pros and cons of Amazon Advertising solutions to determine whether they are a good idea for your business.

Sponsored ad formats allow Amazon sellers to advertise new products and help customers discover them, making it easier to reach a wider audience and boost sales. 

Let's start on the bright side and knock things off with the pros. 

• Shoppers are ready to buy. People on Amazon are not simply browsing; they are looking for a product to purchase. 
• A considerable number of shoppers. Amazon has millions of active users every day. This means that your ads can reach a massive audience. 
• Smart targeting with real data. Amazon uses its own data to help show your ads to the right people who are most likely to be interested in your product. 
• Different types of ads. With Amazon, you can choose from simple product ads, banner ads, or videos based on what represents your product best. 
• Clear stats. With Amazon, you can track precisely how many people see, click, and buy from your ads. You can also improve your ads based on the real results you get.

Now, what are the possible drawbacks of Amazon Advertising?

• Cost. As millions of people shop on Amazon every day and countless vendors try to push through with their products, the competition for the customer becomes fierce. Amazon Ads clicks are getting more costly, especially in popular categories. 
• There's a learning curve. Setting up and running ads on Amazon can be tricky at first. You will need to learn and adjust to the system yourself or get assistance. 
• Strict rules and templates. Some might consider that there's not much room for creativity compared to social media. 
• Hard to grow without ads. It's getting progressively more challenging to get your products noticed on Amazon without advertising, even if your product is excellent. So, in a way, if you want to sell on Amazon, you can't avoid the Ad part of it. 

So, is Amazon Advertising worth it in 2026? Yes, but only if you move beyond tactics and embrace structure. The brands that treat their campaign architecture as a way to "teach" the algorithm will win – who has the best customer signals.

Here's a step-by-step overview of how to get started with advertising on Amazon.

By following these steps, you can launch and optimize effective Amazon ad campaigns to grow your brand and reach more customers.

Speaking of targeting, Amazon Ads allow targeting based on user behavior, demographics, and interests in shopping. 

Amazon's target audience is: 

• Amazon shoppers – people browsing or buying products on Amazon.
• Repeat buyers – customers who have already bought something and may buy again.
• People who are still thinking – shoppers looking at products (or competitor products) but haven’t bought yet.
• Off-Amazon users – people visiting other websites or apps who’ve used Amazon before (reached via unified Display Ads).
• Viewers & listeners – people using Prime Video (including shoppable interactive ads), Twitch, Fire TV, Alexa, or Amazon Music.
• Lookalike audiences – users who act like your current customers based on AI behavioral modeling.

Amazon uses shopping and browsing data to show the right ads to the right people.

Read more about Spotify advertising cost if you're considering audio as an additional channel to reach listeners beyond Amazon Music.

If you wonder how to monitor Amazon Ads, worry not - Amazon Ads offers advertisers a comprehensive measurement ecosystem built on real-world data and case study insights to empower precise optimization, performance tracking, and making optimal data-driven decisions. 

Key features of Amazon Ads analytics.

Together, these linked tools let brands track real shopper behavior, measure multi-channel impact, run custom attribution models, and validate upper-funnel effects, all in a privacy-safe environment.

By early 2026, data showed that combining Display Ads with Streaming TV (STV) video (like Prime Video and Twitch) doubled brand awareness and led to a 3.5x boost in brand favorability compared to single-channel campaigns. For example, brands using AMC to coordinate their streaming ads saw an average 35% increase in total ROI by identifying and retargeting high-intent viewers who engaged with their TV spots.

Together, all of these features help brands see what is working, understand their audience better, and improve their advertising strategies for better ROI.

Stape has developed the Amazon Conversions API tag for server GTM to make it possible to implement server-side tracking for this platform.

The tag supports the same event types and parameters as the Amazon Ad Tag (solution for client-side tracking). Beyond that, Stape’s tag also allows you to set up multiple event types, advanced user identity enrichment, compliance with regional consent frameworks, and detailed logging to both the Console and BigQuery.

We have prepared a detailed guide on how to set up Amazon CAPI and how it differs from Amazon Ad tag.

• More accurate tracking, less ad blocker data loss.
• Longer attribution windows.
• You control what gets sent to Amazon.

Using Amazon Ads with sGTM helps you track things like purchases more accurately and safely. It sends data from your website to Amazon through your own server, so it works better with ad blockers and gives you more control over what information is shared.

Also, by using sGTM to send accurate conversion data back to Amazon (via the Amazon Advertising Tag), you are providing the "fuel" the AI needs to find your customers faster.

It's a smart choice if you want better tracking, faster pages, and stronger privacy for your users.