Amazon DSP Targeting in 2026: Every Option Explained

Amazon DSP targeting is the set of controls that decide who sees your programmatic ads: Amazon's shopping-based audiences, remarketing, contextual and product targeting, AMC and CRM audiences, plus location, device, time and supply settings.

This guide covers every option as it works in late October 2026, after Amazon folded the DSP into Amazon Ads Agent. You'll get what each option does, which funnel stage it fits, how to layer and exclude, and how to tell whether it worked.

What Is Amazon DSP Targeting?

Amazon DSP is Amazon's demand-side platform for buying display, video, audio and streaming TV ads programmatically. Targeting is what makes it worth buying: the audiences are built from what people shop, browse and stream on Amazon, not from cookies.

Every DSP line item combines three kinds of targeting. Treating them as one flat list is how campaigns end up with the right people in the wrong place.

One shift since 2025 matters for all three. Since February 2026, Amazon's newest tactics blend audience and contextual signals into one line item, so the old "audience line vs contextual line" split is now a choice, not a requirement.

What Changed in Amazon DSP Targeting in 2025 and 2026

If your DSP playbook dates from 2024, these are the changes to catch up on. Each one is dated from Amazon's own announcement.

• August 2025: Keyword targeting expanded beyond English to 13 more locales, including Germany, France, Japan, India and Brazil.

• November 2025: Keyword targeting became generally available, and Amazon rebuilt the audience picker around include and exclude groups.

• Q4 2025: Radius targeting entered open beta worldwide.

• February 20, 2026: Amazon launched Product and In-market categories targeting, which mix behavioral and contextual signals in one tactic.

• July 6, 2026: Programmatic podcast and streaming audio inventory opened to self-service buyers, from Spotify Ad Exchange, SiriusXM Media/AdsWizz and iHeartMedia/Triton.

• July 22, 2026: In Brand+ and Performance+, the audiences you add became "Audience Signals", not hard limits. Exclusions still work as hard limits.

• September 29, 2026: Amazon renamed its platform Amazon Ads Agent, introduced DVA+ and Full-Funnel Campaigns, and announced AI targeting that recommends audiences from a plain-language brief.

The inventory behind these audiences grew too. Amazon now sells supply from Roku, Disney, Netflix, Spotify, SiriusXM, iHeartMedia and Microsoft, and says those partnerships reach 80% of US streaming households.

In practice, an in-market audience you build once can now run on Netflix and Spotify as well as Prime Video.

Amazon Audiences: In-Market, Lifestyle, Interest and Life Event

Amazon audiences are pre-built segments Amazon creates from first-party shopping, browsing and streaming activity. They're the default prospecting tool, and they're free to use.

1. In-Market Audiences

In-market audiences are shoppers who have recently browsed or bought in a product category, such as "IM - Running Shoes". They're the closest thing to search intent outside the search bar.

We use them for consideration and late-stage prospecting. They're narrower than lifestyle segments and convert better, so they're where most new DSP advertisers should start.

2. Lifestyle Audiences

Lifestyle audiences group people by sustained behavior over time, such as "foodies", "fitness enthusiasts" or pet owners. Amazon names them with an "LS -" prefix.

They're broader than in-market and best for awareness. A camping brand might use "LS - Outdoor Enthusiasts" to reach people months before they shop for a tent.

3. Interest Audiences

Interest audiences reflect what someone browses and buys over time, including entertainment and streaming interests.

A Marvel-licensed hoodie brand can target people interested in Marvel films. These work best when your product has a clear cultural hook.

4. Life Event Audiences

Life event audiences reach people going through a change that shifts what they buy: moving house, expecting a baby, a wedding, travelling soon.

The window is short and the intent is high. A baby gear brand reaching expecting parents is the textbook case, and we pair it with in-market baby segments to tighten it.

5. Demographic Audiences

Demographic segments filter by attributes such as age and gender. Use them to narrow, not as the only signal.

Amazon's own analysis of 710 DSP campaigns found that pairing age-based with interest-based audiences gave conversion rates up to 2.2x higher than age alone. Note that Amazon removed non-age-and-gender demographic segments in Germany, France, Italy and Spain after December 31, 2023.

6. Lookalike and Similar Audiences

Similar audiences extend any line item that already uses custom-built Amazon shopping audiences. You tick "Reach similar audiences" and Amazon's AI finds people who behave like your seed, without cookies or ad identifiers.

Lookalikes are only as good as their seed. Seed them on purchasers or high-value buyers, not on detail page viewers, or you'll scale browsers rather than customers.

Remarketing: Views, Purchases and Brand Halo

Remarketing targets people who have already interacted with your products or close substitutes. It's the most efficient DSP tactic on paper, and the most likely to claim sales you'd have made anyway.

Amazon's remarketing options split by the action and by whose products it involves:

Each of these takes a lookback window: the period in which the action must have happened. Amazon's remarketing guide recommends setting the window by your own purchase cycle, and notes shoppers take 6 to 7 days on average to buy after they start shopping.

In the accounts we manage, we start views remarketing at 14 days for fast-moving products and 30 days for considered purchases. For purchases remarketing, we match the window to the replenishment cycle, so a 45-day consumable gets a 30 to 60-day window.

Our Amazon DSP retargeting guide covers creative and bidding for each type.

Contextual and Product Targeting

Contextual targeting places your ad next to relevant content or products, regardless of who the viewer is. It was the weak spot of DSP for years. The 2025 and 2026 launches changed that.

1. Product Targeting

Product targeting, launched in February 2026, reaches shoppers in-market for specific products: people who viewed or searched for them, plus the pages themselves.

It includes Complements, which reaches people in-market for products often bought with yours, and Product exclusions, which keep you off pages you don't want. We use Complements for cross-category growth, such as a coffee grinder brand reaching espresso machine shoppers.

2. In-Market Categories

In-market categories combines several audience signals to find people most likely to buy in a chosen category. There's a checkbox, "Only use contextual signals", for when you want pure contextual delivery.

Amazon positions both tactics as replacing separate audience and contextual line items. We still test the contextual-only box on one line, because it's the cleanest way to see what the audience signal adds.

3. Keyword Targeting

Keyword targeting places ads alongside content that matches free-form keywords and phrases, on Amazon and third-party supply. It runs on standard display, online video and third-party mobile apps.

It's the best way to reach a topic that has no Amazon category, such as "home espresso latte art". Since August 2025 it supports 13 more languages than English.

4. Category and Contextual Placements

Classic category contextual targeting still puts your ad on detail and browse pages in a category you pick. For non-Amazon pages, Proximic by Comscore added its contextual and ID-free predictive segments to Amazon DSP in June 2026, covering CTV, web and mobile.

AMC Audiences

AMC (Amazon Marketing Cloud) audiences are custom segments built from your own event-level ad and shopping data, then sent to Amazon DSP for targeting or exclusion. They're the most precise option on the platform.

Typical builds include:

• shoppers who added to cart but didn't buy in 14 days,

• viewers of your streaming TV ad who never visited a detail page,

• high-value buyers, ranked by spend over 12 months,

• buyers of product A who never bought product B.

You can build them with SQL, or without code in AMC's high-value audiences solution, which routes the audience to your DSP account automatically.

Since unBoxed 2024, the same AMC audiences also work in Sponsored Ads, as Sponsored Display targets and as bid boosts in Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. Our guide to AMC custom audiences walks through the builds we use most.

Advertiser Audiences and Third-Party Data

1. Hashed CRM Audiences

Advertiser audiences let you bring your own customer lists into Amazon Ads. You hash emails or other identifiers, upload them, and Amazon matches them to its users. Amazon says hashed audiences cost nothing extra and work in any Amazon Ads campaign.

Use them three ways: target existing customers, build a lookalike from them, or exclude them from prospecting. For brands with a large DTC base, the exclusion is often the most valuable of the three.

Amazon's Ads data manager, launched at unBoxed 2024, lets you onboard that first-party data once and reuse it in both the DSP and AMC.

2. Pixel Audiences

The Amazon Ad Tag on your website builds audiences of site visitors, which you can retarget on and off Amazon. It's essential for brands that sell elsewhere. Our guide on using Amazon DSP if you don't sell on Amazon covers the setup.

3. Third-Party Audiences

Third-party audiences come from branded data providers listed inside the DSP's audience picker. They add signals from outside Amazon. We use them sparingly: they often carry a data fee on top of media, and they're rarely better than an Amazon in-market segment for a product Amazon sells.

Location, Device, Dayparting and Supply Targeting

These controls don't choose people. They choose which impressions you're willing to buy, which makes them the first lever for cutting waste.

1. Location and Radius

Location targeting covers country, region, city, DMA and postal code. Radius targeting, in open beta since late 2025, lets you draw areas of 2 to 100 miles or kilometers around up to 1,000 locations per line item, and combine them with Amazon's shopping audiences.

Radius is for brands with physical distribution. A beverage brand launching in 400 grocery stores can reach in-market shoppers within 5 miles of each one.

2. Device and Operating System

You can target or exclude device types and operating systems. We split device mainly to control creative: a 300x250 banner is useless on a TV, and a 30-second spot is wasted on a mobile web page.

3. Dayparting

Dayparting restricts delivery to set hours and days. It matters most for audio, streaming TV and local brands with opening hours. For most consumer products we leave display running all day.

4. Supply, Deals and Placement

Supply targeting chooses where ads run: Amazon-owned properties, Amazon Publisher Direct, third-party exchanges, or specific deals. Domain allow and block lists add brand safety. Since December 2024 you can also target above or below the fold for display and online video.

Deals now also reach partner inventory such as Netflix and Spotify, and podcasts through private marketplace and programmatic guaranteed deals. Our Amazon DSP deals guide explains each deal type.

5. Frequency Caps

A frequency cap limits how often one person sees your ad. It's a targeting control in disguise: without one, a small remarketing audience gets 20 impressions while new shoppers get none. Our frequency capping guide has the caps we start from by funnel stage.

AI Targeting: Performance+, Brand+, DVA+ and Full-Funnel Campaigns

Amazon now offers to do the targeting for you. Knowing what you give up is part of targeting well in 2026.

• Performance+ builds prospecting, consideration, remarketing and retention line items for you and optimizes toward sales. Amazon's Performance+ guide keeps device, operating system, dayparting, location, domain lists and line item exclusions under your control.

• Brand+ does the same for awareness goals, finding people likely to see the ad and act on it.

• Audience Signals (since July 2026): audiences you add to Brand+ and Performance+ guide the AI but don't fence it in. It can reach people outside them. Exclusions remain strict.

• DVA+ (Display, Video, and Audio), rolling out from late October 2026, replaces separate DSP, Sponsored Display and Sponsored TV campaigns. Its advanced settings restore manual targeting, deals, supply sources and frequency caps.

• Full-Funnel Campaigns went into open beta on September 29, 2026 for US advertisers who sell on Amazon. You supply products, budget and an optional ROAS threshold, and Amazon's AI picks formats and audiences.

• AI targeting in Amazon Ads Agent recommends audiences, products, categories and keywords from a plain-language description. Amazon reports advertisers who applied these recommendations reached more than 25% additional unique customers.

Our view: use the AI for reach and keep control of exclusions. An AI line that can't see your CRM list will happily "find" your existing customers and report them as acquisitions. Our guide to Amazon DSP ad types covers DVA+ from the format side.

A Funnel-Stage Framework for Amazon DSP Targeting

The rule we follow in every account: one funnel stage per line item, each with its own audiences, lookback window, exclusions and KPI. Mixing stages in one line lets the cheapest audience, almost always remarketing, take the budget.

The windows above are where we start, not Amazon rules. Tune them to your category's purchase cycle.

Budget follows the funnel too. A brand that spends 90% on remarketing will see great ROAS for a quarter, then a shrinking audience, rising CPMs and frequency of 15 or more. Our full-funnel DSP strategy covers the split, and Amazon DSP campaign goals covers which goal to set on each line.

How to Layer and Exclude Audiences

Layering narrows an audience by requiring two signals at once. Excluding removes people you don't want to pay for. Amazon's November 2025 audience builder makes both explicit.

1. Use Include Groups for "Or" and the AND Connector for "And"

Each line item supports up to ten include groups and one exclude group, with up to 500 audience segments. Segments inside an include group combine with OR logic. Amazon's guide recommends starting with your broadest relevant audience, then using the AND connector to narrow it.

2. Layer Only When Both Signals Matter

Every AND shrinks reach. "In-market for running shoes" AND "LS - Marathon runners" is precise, but it may leave too few people to deliver a monthly budget.

Check the forecast after each layer. If an awareness line forecasts under a few hundred thousand reachable people, remove a layer rather than raising bids.

3. Exclude Recent Buyers Everywhere Except Loyalty

Buyers are the most expensive people to keep showing prospecting ads to. Exclude purchasers of the advertised products from every prospecting and consideration line, using a window that matches your repurchase cycle.

4. Exclude Lower Stages From Upper Stages

Your awareness line shouldn't serve people already in your remarketing pool. Exclude detail page viewers from prospecting, and they'll get the right message from the conversion line instead.

5. Do the Arithmetic Before You Launch

Here's an illustrative remarketing line. You have 40,000 detail page viewers in 30 days, of whom 6,000 bought, so the line targets 34,000 people.

At a cap of three impressions a week over four weeks, that's up to 408,000 impressions. At an $8 CPM, the line can spend about $3,264 a month before it starts paying for impressions beyond the cap. Budget above that is wasted.

Our post on excluding audiences in Amazon DSP campaigns has more exclusion builds, including AMC-based ones.

How to Measure Amazon DSP Targeting

Targeting decides who you pay for. Measurement has to tell you whether paying for them changed anything.

1. Report by Tactic, Not by Campaign

Split reporting so each line item maps to one tactic: in-market, lookalike, views remarketing and so on. A blended campaign ROAS hides that remarketing is carrying prospecting, or the reverse. Our Amazon DSP reports guide lists which reports to pull.

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 12 months. A prospecting line with 10% new-to-brand is not prospecting; check its exclusions.

3. Give Upper-Funnel Tactics Long-Term Credit

Long-term sales estimates the 12-month value of the detail page views, searches and add-to-carts an ad drives. It's the fair way to compare an awareness line with remarketing.

Know the attribution rules too. Since January 1, 2026, DSP ads served in Amazon's store use a shopping-signal enhanced last-touch model with a shorter window, while "all views" metrics keep the 14-day view window.

4. Test Incrementality With a Holdout

The only proof a tactic works is a comparison with people who didn't see it. In AMC, split an audience, withhold ads from one part, and compare conversion rates.

In the illustrative example above, the exposed group converts at 2.4% and the holdout at 1.8%. Only 0.6 points, or 25%, of the exposed conversions were caused by the ads. An attributed ROAS of 8.0 becomes an incremental ROAS of 2.0.

5. Use AMC to See the Path

AMC overlap and path-to-conversion queries show whether people reached by awareness lines later convert through Sponsored Products or remarketing. That's how you prove the top of the funnel feeds the bottom.

Mistakes We See With Amazon DSP Targeting

• Remarketing with no prospecting. The pool shrinks every week, and frequency climbs until the same people see you daily.

• No purchaser exclusions on prospecting. Amazon will report those sales as wins, and new-to-brand share will tell you otherwise.

• Stacking too many AND layers. The line can't deliver, so someone raises the bid and pays more for the same small group.

• Lookalikes seeded on viewers. You scale browsing, not buying.

• Assuming audiences fence in Performance+. Since July 2026 they're signals; only exclusions are hard limits.

• Judging awareness lines on 14-day ROAS. They'll lose to remarketing every time. Use reach, new-to-brand and long-term sales.

How We Run Amazon DSP Targeting in Adbrew

Everything above can be done in Amazon Ads Agent directly. The work is keeping dozens of audiences, windows and exclusions consistent across many line items and brands.

Adbrew is an agentic retail media management platform for Amazon and Walmart, and DSP runs in it alongside Sponsored Ads, AMC and Walmart Connect:

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

• AMC audiences without SQL. Build AMC audiences such as cart abandoners, repeat viewers, high-value and new-to-brand buyers in a few clicks, then use them to target or exclude in DSP and for audience bid boosting in Sponsored Ads.

• Automation you can read. Rules on bid, budget, audience and frequency cap, with the thresholds and lookback windows you set.

• Adbrew Intelligence. Ask for "new-to-brand share by DSP tactic, last 30 days" or "which audiences overlap most with my purchasers", and an agent builds the report from your data.

Brands on Adbrew cut ACOS by 46% on average, and more than 5,000 brands, agencies and aggregators use it today.

Target the Shopper, Then Prove It

Amazon DSP in 2026 gives you more targeting and more automation than ever. The work that still pays is the same: one job per line, clean exclusions, and a measurement plan that separates the sales you caused from the ones you claimed.

Want to see DSP audiences, AMC exclusions and Sponsored Ads managed side by side on your account? Book a demo with our team and we'll map your targeting by funnel stage.