What Is Amazon DSP? How It Works in 2026

Amazon DSP is the part of Amazon Ads that most brands hear about early and run late. The name sounds enterprise, the minimums used to be, and in 2026 the product changed its name too.

This guide explains what Amazon DSP is today, how the buying works, where the ads run, what it costs and who should use it. It's written from the DSP accounts we manage, with every Amazon change from 2025 and 2026 dated and sourced.

What Is Amazon DSP?

Amazon DSP (demand-side platform) is Amazon's self-serve and managed tool for buying display, video, streaming TV and audio ads programmatically. It reaches audiences on Amazon-owned sites and devices, such as Amazon.com, Prime Video, Fire TV and Twitch, and on thousands of third-party sites, apps and streaming services.

What makes it different from other DSPs is the data behind it. Amazon targets and measures with signals from what people shop, browse and stream, and its Amazon Ads Agent page puts that at over 300 million authenticated customers.

You don't need to sell on Amazon to use it. Auto, finance and travel brands can use it to reach Amazon audiences on other sites, as we cover in our guide to Amazon DSP for non-Amazon sellers.

One naming note, because it trips up a lot of searches. "Amazon DSP" also means Amazon's Delivery Service Partner program, the small businesses that deliver Amazon packages. This post is only about the advertising platform.

Amazon DSP in 2026: Now Part of Amazon Ads Agent

The biggest change is structural. At unBoxed on September 29, 2026, Amazon announced Amazon Ads Agent, "the unified buying experience that brings together what was formerly the DSP and Ads Console."

Amazon's DSP product page now says DSP "has evolved into Amazon Ads Agent." The DSP capabilities you know, such as audiences, frequency caps, deals and custom bidding, run as Display, Video, and Audio (DVA) campaigns.

Two new campaign types sit next to it. DVA+ is a simplified flow where you pick an objective, products, creative and budget, and Amazon's AI chooses the mix of streaming TV, online video, display and audio.

Full-Funnel Campaigns go further and coordinate sponsored ads with streaming, video and display in one campaign. Amazon says beta testers saw 67% higher long-term ROAS and a 29% lower cost to acquire new-to-brand customers.

Nothing you run today breaks. Amazon's FAQ says existing DSP campaigns, audiences, creatives, reporting and certifications carry over, and pricing doesn't change.

Search behavior hasn't caught up with the rename, and neither have most agencies. We use "Amazon DSP" throughout because it's still what everyone calls it.

How Does Amazon DSP Work?

Amazon DSP works by bidding on individual ad impressions in real time. When a page, app or stream has an ad slot to fill, the DSP decides in milliseconds whether that viewer fits your campaign and how much the impression is worth.

Amazon's own guide to demand-side platforms describes it the same way: a DSP buys "across multiple exchanges in real time." Here's what happens behind one impression.

1. You Set Up the Campaign

In classic DSP terms, you create an order (think campaign) with a goal, budget and flight dates. Inside it, line items (think ad groups) hold the audience, inventory, bid, frequency cap and creative.

Our Amazon DSP campaign setup guide walks through every setting.

2. A Viewer Opens a Page, App or Stream

The publisher's supply-side platform (SSP) puts the ad slot up for sale through an exchange or a direct integration. On Amazon-owned inventory, Amazon is the seller too.

Our post on Amazon DSP vs SSP explains how the two sides fit together.

3. Amazon Matches the Viewer to Your Audience

The DSP checks whether this viewer belongs to an audience you're targeting, such as in-market for running shoes or someone who viewed your product last week. It also checks your frequency cap and brand safety rules.

4. The DSP Bids and the Ad Serves

If the viewer fits, the DSP bids based on your goal and bid settings. Win the auction and your ad serves, usually priced per thousand impressions (CPM).

Deals work slightly differently: a programmatic guaranteed deal reserves inventory at a fixed price.

5. Amazon Measures What Happened Next

Amazon connects the impression to what the viewer did afterwards: a detail page view, an add to cart, a purchase or a new-to-brand order. That closed loop between ad and sale is the main reason brands choose Amazon DSP over a general-purpose DSP.

Where Amazon DSP Ads Run: Inventory On and Off Amazon

Amazon DSP buys two kinds of supply: Amazon's own properties and third-party publishers. The third-party side grew more in 2025 than in any year we've seen.

Amazon-Owned Inventory

Amazon's DSP page lists Amazon.com, Prime Video, Thursday Night Football, Fire TV and Twitch. Display ads also run in the Amazon shopping app, and audio ads run on Amazon Music.

Prime Video is the headline. Amazon reported an average monthly ad-supported reach of more than 130 million US viewers at unBoxed 2025, and at its May 2026 Upfront said Prime Video viewers on the ad tier now watch 17% more hours a month than a year earlier.

Our guide to Prime Video ads covers formats and buying options.

Third-Party Inventory: The 2025 and 2026 Partnerships

Amazon spent 2025 signing streaming and audio partners. Each one adds premium supply you can buy from the same seat, with Amazon's audiences attached.

Amazon's January 2026 streaming partnerships review adds iHeartMedia to the list and says the integrations reach 80% of US streaming households.

On top of these, Amazon DSP buys open-exchange display and video across what Amazon describes as "thousands of premium third-party sites and apps." Our Amazon DSP ad types guide shows what each format looks like.

Audiences: How Amazon DSP Uses First-Party Signals

Audiences are the reason to buy Amazon DSP. Other platforms guess at purchase intent from browsing; Amazon sees the purchases.

Every audience is built from Amazon's shopping, browsing and streaming signals, or from your own data. The main types:

• In-market: shoppers who recently browsed or bought in a category, such as "in-market for protein powder."

• Lifestyle and interest: longer-term habits, such as "fitness enthusiasts" or "home cooks."

• Life event and demographic: movers, new parents, age, household income, where available.

• Remarketing: people who viewed, added to cart or bought your products or similar ones. Our Amazon DSP retargeting guide has the lookback windows we use.

• Contextual: the content being viewed rather than the viewer.

• Advertiser audiences: your CRM lists, matched to Amazon customers.

• Lookalikes and AMC audiences: shoppers who resemble a seed list, or custom segments built in Amazon Marketing Cloud, such as cart abandoners or lapsed buyers.

Our Amazon DSP targeting guide covers every option, and our post on AMC custom audiences shows how to build the custom ones.

Excluding audiences matters as much as targeting them. In every prospecting campaign we run, we exclude recent purchasers so new-customer money isn't spent on people who already buy.

Self-Service vs Managed Service: Access and Minimums in 2026

There are three ways in, and the minimum depends on which one you choose.

Amazon's Ads Agent page says Display, Video and Audio campaigns are "available self-service with advertiser-set budgets, or through managed service, which typically requires a minimum spend that varies by country." Its DSP guide puts that managed minimum at $50,000.

That's a real shift from a few years ago, when older posts, including the earlier version of this one, quoted five-figure minimums for self-service too. Several 2026 articles say the self-service floor was dropped at unBoxed 2025. Amazon's own pages don't date the change, so we describe it the way Amazon does today.

No minimum isn't the same as no practical floor. A DSP campaign needs enough impressions and conversions for its bidding to learn, and a $1,000 test spread across four audiences tells you very little.

Our rule of thumb is a single-objective test of at least four to six weeks, with enough budget that each line item buys a few hundred thousand impressions. Below that, start with Sponsored Display.

How Much Does Amazon DSP Cost?

Amazon DSP is mostly priced per thousand impressions (CPM). You pay for the media, plus a technology fee that Amazon's pricing transparency guide describes as "a percent of media cost and disclosed at the time of campaign setup."

Managed service adds a separate percent-based service fee. Open-auction CPMs move with demand, while deals can carry a fixed CPM.

CPMs vary widely by format. Retargeting display is far cheaper per thousand than Prime Video or live sports, so a blended CPM says little until you split it by line item.

What matters is what the impressions turn into. This is how we translate CPM into outcomes when we plan a test.

1. Impressions. $10,000 at an $8 CPM buys 1,250,000 impressions.

2. Reach. At an average frequency of 5, that's about 250,000 people.

3. Detail page views. At a 0.4% detail page view rate, you get 5,000 views, or $2 per view.

4. Purchases. If 10% of those viewers buy, that's 500 purchases.

5. New-to-brand. If 60% are new to your brand, you acquired 300 new customers at about $33 each.

These are example numbers, not benchmarks. The point is the chain: judge DSP on cost per detail page view and cost per new-to-brand customer, then compare that with what a new customer is worth over a year.

Bids, budgets and frequency caps are where most of the cost control happens. Our guide to Amazon DSP frequency capping covers the settings we use.

How to Measure Amazon DSP: AMC, New-to-Brand and Beyond Last Click

DSP ads work earlier in the journey than search ads, so last-click ACOS makes most DSP campaigns look worse than they are. We judge DSP on four things instead.

1. New-to-brand. Amazon counts a shopper as new to brand if they haven't bought from your brand in the previous 12 months. Our new-to-brand metrics guide explains the reports.

2. Long-term sales. Amazon now reports long-term sales, the value of new customers beyond the first order.

3. Halo and branded search. DSP often lifts branded search and sales of products you didn't advertise. AMC shows where it comes from.

4. Amazon Marketing Cloud. AMC is Amazon's clean room. It shows paths to conversion across DSP and sponsored ads, audience overlap and how long new customers take to buy.

Two 2026 details change how you read the numbers. Since January 1, 2026, DSP ads that serve in the Amazon store credit view-based sales under Amazon's "shopping-signal enhanced last-touch" model, so view-driven results can look lower than in 2025.

AMC also got easier to use. Amazon opened it to all sponsored ads advertisers in September 2025 with no-code templates, and at unBoxed 2026 added an AMC Expert Tool that writes AMC SQL from plain-English requests.

Our Amazon DSP reports guide lists the reports and columns we check weekly.

Amazon DSP vs Sponsored Display

Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP overlap more than ever in 2026, because Amazon now files both under Display, Video and Audio inside Ads Agent. The differences are still real.

Most brands start with Sponsored Display, and that's usually right. Our full Amazon DSP vs Sponsored Display comparison covers when to move up, and our Sponsored Display guide covers the 2026 changes on that side.

Who Should Use Amazon DSP?

Amazon DSP pays off for brands that have run out of cheap search demand and need new customers. It rarely fixes a brand that hasn't got search working yet.

Amazon DSP is a good fit when:

• your Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns already cover your core search terms, and more bid gets you little extra volume,

• you want new-to-brand customers in a category where people buy repeatedly,

• you have products with a considered purchase, where shoppers browse for days before buying,

• you want streaming TV or Prime Video reach tied to sales data,

• you sell outside Amazon and want to reach Amazon audiences on other sites.

It's usually a poor fit when listings aren't retail ready, stock is unreliable, or the whole ad budget is a few thousand dollars a month. Fix those first.

For brands that are ready, we use DSP across the funnel, as in our full-funnel DSP strategy.

Mistakes We See in New Amazon DSP Accounts

• Judging DSP on last-click ACOS. Prospecting campaigns will lose that comparison every time. Use new-to-brand, detail page views and AMC paths.

• No frequency cap. Without one, a small audience sees the same ad 20 times and the budget is gone by week two.

• Prospecting to existing customers. Exclude recent purchasers or your "new" reach is mostly people who were going to buy anyway.

• Too many line items for the budget. Ten line items at $500 each never leave the learning phase. Fewer, bigger ones learn faster.

• Running DSP on products that can't convert. Out-of-stock or low-rated products waste every impression you paid for.

• Reading 2026 results against 2025. The January 2026 attribution change lowered view-based credit for ads in the Amazon store, so compare like with like.

Our list of Amazon DSP mistakes to avoid covers these in more depth.

How We Run Amazon DSP in Adbrew

Everything above can be done directly in Amazon Ads Agent. The hard part is doing it alongside Sponsored Ads, AMC and reporting every week, often across several brands.

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

• DSP with no minimum spend. Run Amazon DSP through Adbrew's own seat with no minimum, or connect an existing DSP account you already hold.

• Automation you control. Rules on bids, budgets, audiences and frequency caps, with the thresholds and guardrails you set, and every change logged.

• AMC audiences without SQL. Adbrew's AMC tool builds cart abandoners, repeat viewers and new-to-brand segments in a few clicks and sends them to DSP.

• One view of DSP and Sponsored Ads. See new-to-brand, halo and branded search effects from DSP next to your search campaigns, not in a separate report.

• [Adbrew Intelligence](https://adbrew.io/adbrew-intelligence). Ask for "DSP performance by audience this month against last" and the agent builds it from your data. Through Adbrew MCP, the same work runs from Claude or ChatGPT, with changes applied only after you approve them.

More than 5,000 brands, agencies and aggregators use Adbrew. For mid-size brands, the no-minimum seat is usually what makes DSP possible in the first place.

Start Amazon DSP With a Plan, Not a Minimum

Amazon DSP in 2026 is easier to reach than it has ever been, and harder to judge with the old metrics. Start with one objective, a clean audience and a measurement plan built on new-to-brand and AMC.

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