Amazon ad types compared: Sponsored Products, Brands, Display and DSP

What are the four types of Amazon ads?

A lot of published guides still say there are three. There are four, and the fourth — Amazon DSP — is the one taking the most spend growth right now. Here is the whole picture before we go through them one at a time.

The useful way to hold these in your head is not by format but by where the shopper already is. Sponsored Products meets someone who has typed what they want. Sponsored Brands meets someone who has typed a category but not chosen. Sponsored Display meets someone who came and left. DSP meets someone who was not shopping at all.

That ordering matters more than any feature comparison, because it tells you what happens when you add each one. Adding Sponsored Products to an account with none is usually immediately profitable, because you are intercepting purchase intent. Adding DSP to an account with weak listings is usually expensive, because you are manufacturing intent and then sending it somewhere that does not convert.

Sponsored Products: the one everybody should run first

Sponsored Products is a cost-per-click ad for one product. It appears at the top of, alongside and within shopping results, on product detail pages, and on third-party destinations. It is open to professional sellers, vendors, book vendors and KDP authors, and there is no monthly or upfront fee — and the minimum daily budget is $1.00.

There is one eligibility rule that catches people out. The product has to be eligible for the Featured Offer — what sellers still call the Buy Box. If you are not winning the Featured Offer, your ad will not serve, no matter what you bid. Adult products, used and refurbished items and closed categories are excluded outright, and listings have to be in new condition.

Automatic and manual targeting are not two strategies

Automatic targeting lets Amazon match your ad to searches it thinks are relevant. Manual targeting lets you name keywords or specific products. The common mistake is treating these as alternatives and picking one. They are a pipeline: automatic campaigns are a research instrument that happens to make sales, and the search term report they produce is where your manual keyword list comes from.

Run automatic at a modest budget permanently. Harvest the terms that convert into exact-match manual campaigns, and add the ones that never convert as negatives so the automatic campaign stops paying for them. That loop is most of what good Sponsored Products management is, and it is also where your keyword research gets validated against real money rather than a tool's estimate.

Video is now the default expectation

Amazon reports that video creatives in Sponsored Products deliver a 67% higher click-through rate and a 9% higher conversion rate than non-video creatives, attributed to its own US data from June 2026. Treat that as directional rather than as a promise about your account — it is Amazon measuring Amazon — but the direction is consistent enough that a category with video-heavy competitors is a category where a static-only ad is losing ground it does not need to lose.

Sponsored Brands: the banner at the top of search

Sponsored Brands shows your logo, a custom headline and several products, usually in the banner above search results. It is available to vendors, book vendors, KDP authors, agencies and professional sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry. If you are not brand-registered, this ad type does not exist for you, and that alone is a reason to finish Brand Registry before you worry about ad strategy.

It bills in one of two ways: cost per click if you want visits, or cost per thousand viewable impressions if you are buying impression share. There is a third, less-discussed option — fixed upfront pricing through reserve share of voice for top-of-search placement on branded keywords, which is worth knowing exists if your brand terms are being bid on by resellers or competitors.

What it is actually good at

Two jobs, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first is category acquisition. Broad terms like "electric toothbrush" convert badly for a single product because the shopper has not decided what kind they want. A Sponsored Brands unit showing three variants at three price points answers that question inside the ad, which is why the format tolerates head terms that would bankrupt a Sponsored Products campaign.

The second is brand defense. When someone searches your brand name, the results page will show competitors. Bidding on your own name looks like paying for traffic you would have had anyway, and sometimes it is — but the click is cheap, the conversion rate is high, and the alternative is a rival buying the top of your own branded search. Measure it separately from everything else, because blending branded and non-branded performance into one number hides both.

Formats are static image, video, and collections or product showcase. The case studies on Amazon's own page are individual brands, not benchmarks — one cited ACoS of 17.68% belongs to a single advertiser in 2022 and should not be read as a target.

Sponsored Display, and the 2026 change nobody dated

Sponsored Display reaches shoppers with product creative both on Amazon — detail pages, review pages, search results, the homepage — and off it, across Prime Video, Twitch, Fire TV, Echo Show, and third-party sites and apps. It bills either per click or per thousand viewable impressions, with no minimum campaign spend and no management fee. Amazon does not publish default bid figures on the product page, so treat any specific number you are quoted as coming from somewhere other than Amazon.

Its most valuable use is the least glamorous one: retargeting. Someone viewed your product page and left. Bringing that person back is cheaper than acquiring a new one, and Sponsored Display is the only sponsored ad type that can do it. If you are going to run one campaign in this format, run views remarketing on your best-converting ASINs and leave the rest alone until that is working.

Two things Amazon has not made clear

First, the product is being folded into something larger. Amazon's Sponsored Display page now reads "Now part of Amazon Ads display ads offering", describing a single workspace that combines sponsored ads and Amazon DSP workflows. Existing campaigns "will continue to run uninterrupted". Amazon publishes no date for this transition. Anyone telling you when Sponsored Display goes away is guessing.

Second, the eligibility rules contradict each other across two Amazon pages. The display ads guide says you need to be a vendor or professional seller enrolled in Brand Registry. The Amazon Ads FAQ says display ads are available to advertisers of any size, regardless of whether they sell products on Amazon. The likely reconciliation is that the endemic Sponsored Display product needs Brand Registry while the broader DSP-backed display offering does not, but Amazon has not said so plainly. If your eligibility is marginal, check in the console rather than trusting either page.

Amazon DSP: the one that is not really about Amazon

Amazon DSP is a demand-side platform. It buys display, video, audio and streaming TV inventory programmatically — Prime Video, Twitch, Fire TV, Kindle, Alexa, and thousands of third-party sites and apps through Amazon Publisher Direct and external exchanges. Amazon describes it as being for "brand advertisers, ad agencies, and tool providers", and states plainly that you do not need to sell on Amazon to use it.

That last point is the thing to understand. The other three ad types are retail media: they work because Amazon knows what the shopper is shopping for. DSP is an advertising business that happens to be attached to a retailer, and its value is the purchase data, not the placement. You use it to reach people who have bought from your category, or from a competitor, or who have viewed your products across a year — audiences the sponsored formats cannot construct.

What it costs, honestly

DSP has two service models. Self-service carries no management fees. Managed service, where Amazon's team runs the buying, "typically requires a minimum spend of $50,000 USD", and Amazon notes the minimum varies by country.

You will find other numbers quoted. Thirty-five thousand appears in older agency articles; some 2026 sources argue the floor has gone entirely for self-service. These cannot all be right, and Amazon publishes only the one figure above. The practical answer is that the self-service and managed-service distinction matters more than any single threshold: ask what service model you are being sold before you ask what the minimum is.

Pricing is not a simple percentage either. Amazon's pricing transparency guide lists a DSP technology fee as a percentage of media cost, audience fees charged on a CPM basis, a managed-service fee, and third-party targeting fees. The same page confirms that sponsored ads carry no demand-side fees at all — which is a real cost difference between DSP and the other three, and one that rarely appears in comparisons.

What Amazon calls things now

Two naming changes trip up anyone reading older material.

AMS no longer exists as a product name. Amazon Marketing Services was folded into Amazon Advertising years ago, and the sponsored formats above are what replaced it. If an article is still explaining "AMS versus DSP", it is old enough that its tactical advice should be checked rather than followed.

Rufus is now Alexa for Shopping. On 13 May 2026 Amazon introduced Alexa for Shopping, which in Amazon's own words "brings together Rufus's product expertise and Amazon shopping history with the personalized knowledge and context of Alexa+". Amazon does not use the words "renamed" or "retired"; the reporting that Rufus is gone from the shopping interface comes from GeekWire, not from Amazon.

For advertisers the practical consequence is small but worth knowing: Amazon states that existing sponsored ads campaigns automatically serve in Alexa for Shopping with no additional setup, and that prompt placements bill through your existing cost-per-click bids rather than as a separate product. You are already advertising inside the assistant whether or not you decided to.

Which Amazon ad type should you use?

Match the ad type to the problem, not to the budget.

If you are new to Amazon advertising

Run Sponsored Products only, for at least sixty days, with automatic and exact-match manual campaigns running together. That is not conservatism; it is that the other three formats are hard to judge without a baseline, and the search term data from this period is what makes every later decision cheaper.

If you are launching a product

Sponsored Products from day one on tightly matched terms, because the goal of launch advertising is rank and relevance rather than immediate profit. Sponsored Brands once you have two or more products worth showing together. Expect the ratio to look bad early and read it against total sales rather than advertised sales — the difference between ACoS and TACoS matters more during a launch than at any other time. Our launch process treats the first thirty days as data collection, not as a profit window.

If you already spend five figures a month

This is where Sponsored Display retargeting and then DSP start to earn their place, and where the measurement question gets harder. Turn on Amazon's Benchmarks reporting, which went generally available worldwide on 18 May 2026 and covers eight metrics for Brand Registry advertisers. Its Sponsored Brands companion reports your performance against the category median, the bottom quartile and the top quartile. That is a far better reference point than any published industry average, because it is your category and your window rather than someone else's platform data.

The order to add them

If you do nothing else from this article, do it in this sequence.

One. Fix the listing first. Every ad type above sends traffic to a product page. Amazon cut product titles to 75 characters in all categories except media on 27 July 2026, with a new 125-character Item Highlights field displaying beneath the title from 10 August. Amazon states both are inputs for search and neither is prioritized. If your listing has not been rewritten since, your ads are paying to send traffic to a page Amazon may have rewritten on your behalf.

Two. Sponsored Products, properly, for sixty days. Automatic plus exact manual, harvesting search terms weekly, negatives applied weekly.

Three. Brand Registry, then Sponsored Brands. Brand defense first because it is the cheapest conversion you will buy, category terms second.

Four. Sponsored Display retargeting, on your best converters only.

Five. DSP, when the question has changed from "who is searching for this" to "who else should be".

Most accounts that come to us for a PPC rebuild have skipped straight from step two to step five, and the fix is almost always to go back rather than forward. If you want a read on which step yours is actually at, our PPC audit tool is free and takes about a minute, and a written audit comes back within 48 hours.

Questions people also ask