Amazon Advertising Strategy 2020 Is Outdated. Here's What Replaced It
A 2020 Amazon advertising strategy—Sponsored Products, video ads, Posts, Vine—is now table stakes, not a plan. The real strategy question is how you split budget between sponsored ads and DSP, and whether you can prove DSP added incremental sales instead of just double-counting last-click conversions.
What this looks like in a real account
Why "2020 Amazon Advertising Strategy" Is the Wrong Search Now
Searching a year-stamped query usually means someone is trying to catch up, and the pages that rank for it haven't caught up either. One result still ranking for this query describes "3 new strategies" from 2020: video ads, Amazon Posts, and Vine for Seller Central. Every one of those is now a default setting. Every active seller has access to them. None of the three separates a serious advertiser from a hobbyist anymore.
What actually changed since 2020 is quieter and less exciting to write about: DSP got easier to access, Amazon Marketing Cloud started letting advertisers see whether DSP and sponsored ads were counting the same sale twice, and connected TV inventory became a real line item instead of a novelty. The strategy question worth answering in 2026 isn't "which new ad format should I try." It's "how do I split budget across the funnel, and how do I know any of it actually moved sales that wouldn't have happened anyway."
The Part That Hasn't Changed: Where the Budget Goes
Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands are bottom-funnel. They catch demand that already exists — someone searched, someone browsed a similar product, someone is close to buying. DSP, particularly display and video, is top-and-mid funnel. It builds the audience that eventually searches. Confusing the two is the single most common strategy error we see: brands park 100% of budget in Sponsored Products because it's the easiest thing to measure, then wonder why growth stalls once branded search demand plateaus.
How much should go to DSP versus sponsored ads is a genuinely bad question to ask in the abstract — it depends on catalog size, review count, and how much of your sales are already branded search versus category search. A brand with under 30 reviews on its hero SKU has a review problem to solve before a media-mix problem. A brand with a mature catalog and flat branded search growth is underinvesting in the top of the funnel, full stop.
A Worked Example: What a Mature DSP Program Actually Produces
Numbers help more than percentages here, so here's a real one. Across 30 advertisers we manage, in July 2026, the portfolio delivered 6.04x return on ad spend — measured across the whole book, not cherry-picked from the best line item. That book ran 78.4 million impressions at a $4.00 CPM and a blended $1.42 cost-per-click. The $0.41 CPC that gets quoted for this category in listicles is online-video only, not the whole book, and confusing the two will make any real campaign look expensive by comparison to a number that was never comparable.
Blended cost per acquisition across that same book was $5.49 across 57,137 attributed purchases, and 20.1% of those purchases — one in five — came from a shopper new to the brand. That last figure is the one that actually tells you whether DSP is doing top-of-funnel work or just re-serving ads to people who were going to buy anyway. If your new-to-brand share is low and falling, your media isn't building an audience, it's taxing an existing one.
The Measurement Mistake Almost Everyone Makes
Last-click attribution counts a sale for whichever ad the shopper clicked last, which means a DSP display ad that nudged someone toward a purchase gets zero credit if that shopper later clicked a Sponsored Products ad on the way to checkout. Add the DSP report and the sponsored ads report together and you'll double-count the same sale. This isn't a rounding error at scale — it's the difference between a campaign that looks like it's working and one that is actually proven to work.
We've made this mistake ourselves, early on, running the same last-click dashboards everyone runs before AMC made it possible to reconcile DSP and sponsored ads against each other instead of stacking them. The honest fix is a holdout or matched-control test: show the ad to part of your audience, withhold it from a comparable group, and measure the actual lift. Last-click can tell you a sale happened. It cannot tell you the ad caused it. Those are different questions, and only one of them is worth building a strategy on.
When Your Numbers Look Bad: What to Check First
If ROAS looks worse than last quarter, check the attribution window before you touch the campaign — Amazon has adjusted these more than once and a shortened window will make identical performance look like a decline. If your CPC looks high against a benchmark you found online, confirm that benchmark is blended and not video-only; the two aren't the same number and comparing them will send you chasing a problem that doesn't exist.
If new-to-brand share is dropping while ROAS holds steady, your media is probably re-targeting the same warm audience — good for short-term ROAS, bad for growth. And if you're running DSP through an agency-owned seat rather than one you control, ask who actually owns the audience data and reporting access before you troubleshoot anything else; you may be diagnosing a visibility problem, not a performance one.
Where a Managed DSP Partner Fits, and Where It Doesn't
If your catalog is small, your reviews are thin, or you haven't yet gotten Sponsored Products to a stable target ACOS, a DSP strategy is premature — fix the bottom of the funnel first, and an agency or in-house team can do that without a DSP seat at all. DSP earns its place once you have a catalog and review base that can support top-of-funnel spend and you actually need to prove whether that spend is incremental, not just visible.
reMKTR runs Amazon DSP as a managed service across 109 live advertiser seats, reconciling DSP and sponsored ads in Amazon Marketing Cloud so the two stop double-counting each other, and we measure incrementality with holdouts and matched controls rather than last-click. We're part of the Full Circle group, which has managed more than $500M in Amazon spend across brands including HexClad, Ridge, BK Beauty, Beardbrand, Epic Gardening, The Woobles, and Walkize. None of that makes DSP the right next move for every brand reading this — but if you're trying to answer whether your display spend is doing anything, that's the question we built our reporting to answer.
| Funnel Stage | Primary Amazon Format | What Good Looks Like | Common Mistake |
|---|---|---|---|
| Awareness | DSP display & video, connected TV | New-to-brand share rising, not just impression volume | Buying impressions with no way to check incrementality |
| Consideration | Sponsored Brands, Posts, Store | Click-through to detail page, branded search lift | Treating Posts as a strategy instead of free inventory |
| Conversion | Sponsored Products | Stable ACOS at target margin | Parking all budget here because it's easiest to measure |
| Retention & trust | Vine, subscribe & save, retargeting | Review count past the threshold where conversion stabilizes, repeat purchase rate holding | Enrolling a product in Vine before it's actually ready |
Which one you should actually pick
Small catalogs or thin review counts should fix Sponsored Products and reviews before touching DSP — no agency needed yet. Brands with a mature catalog who need to prove top-funnel spend is working, not just visible, are the ones DSP and incrementality testing genuinely suit. A managed DSP partner earns its place there, not before.
Shortlist on the job, not the feature grid. Pull your search-term report for the last 90 days and total the spend against terms that produced no orders — 33.6% on the account above. Then ask each vendor on your list what they would do about it in week one, and see who answers with a process rather than a screenshot.
Common questions
Do I still need a "2020 Amazon marketing strategy"?
No. The formats that made 2020 content novel — video ads, Posts, Vine for Seller Central — are now default settings available to any advertiser. The real strategy work now is budget allocation across the funnel and proving that spend is incremental, not adopting formats that are already standard.
What's the right budget split between Sponsored Products and DSP?
There's no universal percentage, and any page that gives you one is guessing. It depends on catalog maturity, review count, and how much of your current sales are branded search versus new demand. A brand with under 30 reviews on its hero SKU should fix that before shifting budget to DSP.
Why do some sources quote a $0.41 CPC for Amazon DSP and others quote more than a dollar?
The lower figure is typically online-video only, which is one placement type, not the whole book. A blended CPC across display, video, and other DSP formats runs meaningfully higher — in our book, $1.42 blended against a $4.00 CPM. Compare like against like or the number will mislead you.
How do I prove Amazon ads caused a sale instead of catching a shopper who'd have bought anyway?
Last-click attribution can't answer this — it credits whichever ad was clicked last, regardless of what actually influenced the decision. A holdout test (withholding the ad from a comparable audience group) or a matched-control comparison, reconciled in Amazon Marketing Cloud, is what actually isolates incremental lift.
My Amazon ROAS is worse than last year. What should I check before assuming the strategy failed?
Check whether Amazon changed the attribution window before you touch spend. Then check if you're comparing a blended CPC or CPA against a benchmark that was actually video-only or single-format. Finally, check new-to-brand share — if it dropped, you may be re-targeting the same audience rather than losing performance.
We show the method before the number.
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