Amazon DSP Full Funnel Strategy: 2026 Playbook

Most DSP accounts we audit are not full funnel. They are remarketing campaigns with a streaming TV test bolted on, judged on last-click ROAS until the TV line gets cut.

This is how we build an Amazon DSP full funnel strategy in 2026 for the brands and agencies we work with. It covers what to run at each stage, how sponsored ads fit, how to split the budget, how to measure it, and when Amazon's own Full-Funnel Campaigns are the better choice.

What Is an Amazon DSP Full Funnel Strategy?

An Amazon DSP full funnel strategy is a plan that uses Amazon DSP, alongside sponsored ads, to reach shoppers at every stage of the purchase journey: awareness, consideration, conversion and loyalty. Each stage gets its own formats, audiences, exclusions, budget and success metric.

The point is that the stages feed each other. Streaming TV and online video create the detail page viewers and branded searchers that remarketing and Sponsored Products convert two to six weeks later.

Amazon's own case studies show the effect. In Optibac's UK campaign, shoppers who saw upper-funnel ads and then Sponsored Products purchased at 0.5%, against 0.2% for Sponsored Products alone. New-to-brand purchasers reached 53% of the total.

A separate Amazon analysis of 400+ US brands, published August 18, 2026, found non-CTV DSP ads returned 87% more on days Roku CTV campaigns ran. Both are Amazon's figures, but they match what we see.

If you are new to the platform, start with our guide to what Amazon DSP is and how it works. This post assumes you know the basics.

What Changed in Amazon Full-Funnel Advertising in 2025 and 2026

Two years ago a full-funnel plan meant DSP for the top, sponsored ads for the bottom and a lot of spreadsheets in between. Amazon has since joined the platforms and the measurement.

The naming change matters when you build. DSP orders are now campaigns, line items are ad groups and creatives are ads, and DVA+ rolls out in the US from late October 2026. Outside the US, most DSP users keep the classic flow for now, as our guide to creating an Amazon DSP campaign explains.

Before You Build: Customer Profile, Message and Retail Readiness

DSP targets people, not keywords. So the first job is a clear picture of who buys and why, which most brands only have for their search terms.

We write a one-page customer profile before any campaign:

• Who: age, household, region and device, from your Brand Analytics demographics and your own customer data.

• What they do: the lifestyles, interests and life events that come before a purchase. A dog toy brand looks for new pet owners and dog-related shoppers, not "people aged 25 to 44".

• Where they spend time: Prime Video, Fire TV, Twitch, audio, or the open web through partner supply.

Then write one message per stage. Awareness creative tells the brand story in the first five seconds, and consideration creative shows why the product beats the alternative.

Conversion creative names the price, the rating and the deal.

Retail readiness comes last but matters most. A streaming TV ad that sends shoppers to an out-of-stock ASIN with 3.6 stars is money spent building a competitor's audience.

The Four Stages, and What to Run at Each

The rule we follow in every account is one stage per ad group, each with its own audiences, lookback windows, exclusions and KPI. Mix stages in one ad group and the cheapest audience, almost always remarketing, takes the budget.

1. Awareness: Streaming TV, Prime Video, Online Video and Audio

Awareness reaches people who have never bought from you and may not be shopping yet. The formats are streaming TV (including Prime Video and Fire TV), online video, Twitch and audio, all covered in our guide to Amazon DSP ad types.

Amazon says it reaches over 300 million ad-supported US consumers and 90% of US households with authenticated reach, per its Upfront 2026 recap. Our guide to Prime Video ads covers that inventory in detail.

Set the campaign goal to reach, with a frequency goal you can defend. We start at a cap of two to three per household per week for streaming TV, and raise it only if completion rates hold. Our frequency capping guide has the reasoning.

Audiences: lifestyle, interest, life event and lookalikes of your best buyers. Exclude anyone who bought from the brand in the last 12 months, or you pay TV prices to reach existing customers.

KPIs: reach, completion rate, new-to-brand detail page views and branded search lift. Not ROAS.

2. Consideration: In-Market, Lifestyle and Contextual Audiences

Consideration reaches shoppers who are actively browsing the category. They are comparing, reading reviews and watching videos, but haven't picked a brand.

Run online video and display to in-market audiences, lifestyle audiences close to the category, and contextual targeting on category and competitor product pages. Our guide to Amazon DSP targeting covers every audience type.

The goal here is detail page views. Set the campaign goal to consideration and optimize to detail page view rate or cost per detail page view, not purchases, so the algorithm keeps buying fresh shoppers.

Exclude brand purchasers from the last 90 to 365 days, depending on your purchase cycle. Our campaign goals guide explains which KPI to pick for each goal.

3. Conversion: Remarketing, Lookalikes and AMC Audiences

Conversion turns the shoppers the top of the funnel created into buyers. This is where most DSP budgets start, and where most of them get stuck.

Run display and responsive ecommerce creative (REC) to views remarketing on a 14 to 30 day window, cart abandoners built in Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), and lookalikes of recent purchasers. Our DSP retargeting guide covers the windows.

AMC is what makes this stage precise. You can build audiences such as "viewed twice, added to cart, didn't buy in 14 days" and send them to DSP, as in our guide to AMC custom audiences.

Exclude purchasers from the last 14 to 30 days. KPIs: ROAS, cost per purchase and the new-to-brand share of purchases.

4. Loyalty: Past Purchasers, Subscribe and Save and Cross-Sell

Loyalty is the stage most brands skip, and the cheapest one to run. You already know these shoppers.

Three plays work well:

• Replenishment. Retarget past purchasers just before they would normally run out. A 30-count supplement gets a 25 to 30 day window, not a generic 90 days.

• Subscribe and Save. Target buyers of replenishable ASINs who haven't subscribed, with creative that names the subscription discount. Exclude current subscribers so you don't pay to reach them twice.

• Cross-sell. Use AMC purchase overlap to see which products sell together, then show buyers of product A the product they are most likely to buy next.

With five years of Retail Purchases history in AMC, you can also build lapsed-buyer audiences who bought in 2023 and haven't returned. KPIs: repeat purchase rate and sales per customer.

How Sponsored Ads Fit at Each Stage

DSP doesn't replace sponsored ads in a full-funnel plan. Each sponsored ad type does a job at one or two stages, and the two systems work best when they share audiences.

The most useful link is audience bid boosting. Since AMC audiences came to sponsored ads, Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands can bid higher when the searcher is in an AMC audience, such as people your streaming TV reached.

Display ads (formerly Sponsored Display, as of 2026) overlap with DSP at the bottom of the funnel. Our comparison of Amazon DSP vs Sponsored Display explains which to use when.

How to Split Budget by Stage: A Worked Example

There is no Amazon rule for the split. These are our starting points for DSP spend in an established brand, then adjusted to the brand's situation:

• Awareness: 35%

• Consideration: 30%

• Conversion: 25%

• Loyalty: 10%

Here is how that plays out for an illustrative brand spending $60,000 a month on Amazon ads. Sponsored ads keep $36,000 (60%), and DSP gets $24,000.

The DSP split gives awareness $8,400, consideration $7,200, conversion $6,000 and loyalty $2,400.

At an illustrative $30 CPM, $8,400 of streaming TV buys 280,000 impressions. At an average frequency of six over the month, that reaches about 46,700 households.

That pool is what conversion draws from. If 3% of those households view a detail page, about 1,400 new shoppers enter your 30-day remarketing audience that month, on top of what search delivers.

The split moves with the brand:

Smaller budgets work differently. Under about $15,000 a month in display and video, start at the bottom with remarketing, prove it, then add one upper-funnel line at a time, as in our DSP vs Sponsored Display budget ladder.

Rebalance monthly, on each stage's own KPI. Never move money from awareness to conversion because conversion's ROAS looks better; that comparison is built to make remarketing win.

How to Measure a Full-Funnel Strategy

A full-funnel plan fails in measurement more often than in media. If every stage is judged on 14-day ROAS, the top gets cut and the bottom shrinks a quarter later.

1. Give Each Stage Its Own Scorecard

Report by stage, then by tactic. A blended DSP ROAS hides whether remarketing is carrying prospecting or the reverse.

2. Watch New-to-Brand Share

New-to-brand metrics show what share of purchases came from shoppers who hadn't bought from your brand in the last 12 months. If a prospecting ad group shows 10% new-to-brand, its exclusions are broken.

3. Read the Path in AMC

AMC path-to-conversion queries show the sequence of ad exposures before a purchase: streaming TV, then Sponsored Products, then remarketing, for example. That is how you prove the top of the funnel feeds the bottom.

In the US, the ads console also shows conversion path reporting (beta): your top five ad paths over 30 days across sponsored ads and DSP. It's a quick check before you write a query.

4. Use Long-Term Sales and Multi-Touch Metrics

Long-term sales estimates the 12-month value of the new-to-brand detail page views, searches and add-to-carts an ad drives. It's the fairest single metric for comparing an awareness line with remarketing.

Amazon's multi-touch attribution (US, beta) shares credit across touchpoints instead of giving it all to the last ad. We read it next to last-touch, never instead of it.

5. Prove Incrementality With a Holdout

Attribution tells you who saw an ad before buying. Only a holdout tells you whether the ad caused it.

In AMC, split an audience, withhold ads from one half and compare purchase rates. If the exposed group converts at 2.4% and the holdout at 1.8%, a quarter of attributed sales were incremental. So a line reporting an attributed ROAS of 8.0 has an incremental ROAS of 2.0.

6. Run Brand Lift on Big Upper-Funnel Flights

For a large streaming TV flight, add a brand lift study. Amazon Brand Lift measures awareness, preference, intent and ad recall, and since May 2026 advertisers can set up and fund 50+ third-party measurement products inside DSP in a self-service workflow.

7. Check Total Frequency, Not Campaign Frequency

With de-duplicated reach and frequency across sponsored ads and DSP, check how often the same household sees you across every campaign. A household seeing your brand 25 times a week is a frequency problem no single campaign report would show.

Full-Funnel Campaigns vs Building the Funnel Yourself

Full-Funnel Campaigns are Amazon's single campaign type that runs sponsored ads, display, video and streaming TV on one budget. You supply products, budget, creative and an optional ROAS threshold, and Amazon's AI picks formats and moves budget across funnel stages in real time.

They are available in the US (Amazon still labels them a beta on its product page), for advertisers who sell in the Amazon store. A brand that doesn't sell on Amazon can't use them, and should build the funnel with DSP, as in our guide to DSP for non-Amazon sellers.

Amazon's launch announcement reports 67% higher long-term ROAS and 29% lower cost per new-to-brand purchase for beta advertisers. Those figures compare against "the blended average of other campaign performance across beta advertisers" from June to August 2026.

Read that footnote carefully. A blend of all other campaigns includes untuned and upper-funnel ones, so the comparison flatters any campaign that optimizes to long-term sales.

The product page adds two practical details: a minimum daily budget applies, and the AI optimizes over a learning period of about two weeks.

Our view: test Full-Funnel Campaigns beside your own structure, not instead of it. Give the test its own products or its own budget, run it for at least six weeks, and compare total sales, TACOS and new-to-brand customers for the period against your self-built funnel.

Mistakes We See in Full-Funnel Accounts

• Calling remarketing a strategy. A DSP account that is 80% remarketing has great ROAS for a quarter, then a shrinking audience and frequency above 15.

• Judging awareness on ROAS. Streaming TV on a 14-day ROAS target always loses. Use reach, branded search lift and long-term sales.

• Mixing stages in one ad group. The cheapest audience takes the budget and the top of the funnel never runs.

• Forgetting exclusions. Prospecting that doesn't exclude recent buyers pays TV prices for existing customers.

• Skipping loyalty. Past purchasers are your cheapest audience, and replenishment timing is usually the easiest DSP win.

• Cutting the top after four weeks. The halo on branded search and remarketing pools takes two to six weeks to show.

How We Run a Full-Funnel Strategy in Adbrew

Everything above can be done in Amazon Ads Agent and AMC directly. The hard part is keeping four stages, their audiences and exclusions, sponsored ads and measurement consistent every week, often across many brands.

Adbrew is an agentic retail media management platform for Amazon and Walmart, and a full-funnel plan runs inside it next to Sponsored Ads, AMC and Marketing Stream:

• DSP without the seat minimum. Run Amazon DSP through Adbrew's seat with no minimum spend, or connect the DSP account you already have.

• AMC audiences without SQL. Adbrew's AMC tool builds cart abandoners, repeat viewers, high-value and new-to-brand audiences in a few clicks, and sends them to DSP or to audience bid boosting in Sponsored Ads.

• Funnel reports, pre-built. Path to conversion, time to conversion, audience overlap, new-to-brand and cost of new customer acquisition, refreshed daily, without writing a query.

• Automation you can read. Rules on bids, budgets, audiences and frequency caps, with the thresholds and guardrails you set.

• [Adbrew Intelligence](https://adbrew.io/adbrew-intelligence). Ask for "new-to-brand share by funnel stage this month against last" and an agent builds it from your data.

K2 Health lifted conversions 20.28% with AMC on Adbrew. More than 5,000 brands, agencies and aggregators use the platform today.

Build the Funnel, Then Prove It

A full-funnel strategy is four simple campaigns with discipline around them: separate budgets, clean exclusions and a fair scorecard for each stage. The brands that hold that discipline for a quarter are the ones whose search and remarketing keep growing.

Want to see how a full-funnel plan would run on your account, with no DSP minimum? Book a demo with our team and we'll map out your first quarter with you.