Link-Out Advertising: Sending Amazon DSP Traffic to Your Own Site
Amazon DSP campaigns can link to a non-Amazon destination — your own website — a pattern Amazon itself calls a link-out campaign. It's real, endorsed, and available to brands who also sell on Amazon, not just non-endemic advertisers. The catch: Amazon requires its own logo on the off-site landing page, and Amazon Attribution won't see what happens on your site once the click lands there.
What this looks like in a real account
What a link-out campaign actually is
Amazon's own DSP creative guidance is explicit that campaigns can link to "an Amazon destination, such as a product detail page on Amazon.com," or to "non-Amazon destinations, such as a brand's website." This isn't a workaround or an edge case — Amazon Ads' own materials describe it as a standard, supported destination type. For a brand selling on both Amazon and its own Shopify store, that means DSP inventory — the same audience data, the same programmatic reach across Amazon-owned and third-party exchange inventory — can be pointed at a Shopify checkout instead of an Amazon listing, on the same platform used to prospect and retarget for the Amazon business.
The policy requirement almost nobody mentions
Amazon's own guide is specific about one branding requirement: advertisers directing traffic to an off-site destination must display the Amazon logo on that page, unaltered and not embedded within a sentence. The stated purpose is to communicate that the product is also available on Amazon — a requirement that makes sense given Amazon's own interest in cross-promoting its marketplace, and one that's easy to overlook when a creative or landing-page team, focused on the Shopify checkout experience, wasn't briefed on Amazon DSP's specific ad policy.
What you can measure, and the boundary that catches most brands off guard
Amazon Attribution — the tool built to measure off-Amazon marketing channels' impact — measures activity on Amazon: detail page views, add-to-cart, purchases, all happening on amazon.com. It was never built to see a conversion that happens entirely off Amazon. If your DSP link-out campaign sends a click straight to your own Shopify checkout and the sale completes there, Amazon Attribution has nothing to report on that specific conversion, because the transaction never touched Amazon's systems at all. Measuring that conversion requires your own site's analytics or conversion pixel — Amazon's own DSP-to-Amazon reporting stack simply doesn't extend past the click for a genuinely off-Amazon destination.
A worked example of the measurement gap
Take a link-out campaign that generates 20,000 clicks to your Shopify site in a month, at a $1.20 CPC, for $24,000 in spend. Your Shopify analytics shows 640 of those sessions converted at an average order value of $68, for $43,520 in revenue — a 1.81x ROAS on the Shopify side. Amazon's own DSP reporting console will show the 20,000 clicks and the spend, but it will not natively show the 640 conversions or the $43,520, because those events happened entirely on your own site's checkout, outside anything Amazon Ads is built to track. Reconciling the two — DSP spend data from Amazon, conversion data from Shopify — is a manual join you have to build yourself, typically on a UTM parameter or a dedicated tracking link.
The common mistake, including ours
The mistake is assuming Amazon's own DSP reporting console will eventually show a ROAS figure for a link-out campaign the way it does for an Amazon-destination campaign, and waiting for a number that structurally isn't coming. We've seen a client's team check their DSP dashboard repeatedly for conversion data on a link-out campaign, increasingly convinced something was broken, when the real issue was that the dashboard was never going to show it — the conversion happened on Shopify, and Shopify's own analytics, not Amazon's, was always where that number lived.
Why founders react differently to this than the acronym suggests
Our own observation across the pipeline is that direct-to-consumer founders often react badly to the letters "DSP" specifically — the acronym carries the memory of a programmatic buy nobody could fully explain or audit. Describing the same product concretely — retargeting the shoppers who looked and didn't buy, plus reaching people who've never heard of the brand through streaming and display, with the option to send either straight to your own checkout — tends to get a materially different reception from the same person than the acronym alone does. Worth knowing before assuming a DTC-first team's hesitation about "DSP" is hesitation about what it actually does.
How to set this up properly before launching
Before spending on a link-out campaign, confirm your own site has a working conversion pixel or UTM-based tracking that can attribute a purchase back to the specific DSP click that drove it, and build the join between Amazon's spend reporting and your site's conversion reporting as a standing process, not a one-off reconciliation. Confirm the Amazon logo requirement is built into the landing page creative before launch — a compliance gap here is a straightforward, avoidable rejection that costs launch time for no strategic reason.
| What happens | Where it's measured | Who sees it natively |
|---|---|---|
| DSP ad served, clicked | Amazon DSP reporting | You, in Amazon Ads console |
| Landing on your own site | Your site's analytics | You, if a pixel or UTM is set up |
| Conversion on your own checkout | Your site's analytics / ecommerce platform | You — not Amazon Attribution |
| Amazon logo on the landing page | Creative compliance requirement | Amazon's ad review, not a reporting metric |
Which one you should actually pick
Any brand with basic site-analytics capability can set up link-out measurement themselves — the technical requirement is a working conversion pixel and a UTM convention, not a specialised platform or an enterprise data stack. reMKTR treats the Amazon-to-Shopify reconciliation as a standing report on managed accounts running link-out spend, having watched a client wait for a number that Amazon's dashboard was never going to show, as part of the discipline behind Full Circle's $500M+ in managed Amazon spend across 100+ brands.
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
Can Amazon DSP send traffic to a Shopify store, not just Amazon?
Yes — Amazon's own DSP guidance explicitly describes campaigns linking to non-Amazon destinations, including a brand's own website, as a standard supported option.
Does Amazon require anything specific on the landing page for a link-out campaign?
Yes — Amazon's own policy requires the Amazon logo to appear on the off-site landing page, unaltered and not embedded in a sentence, to communicate that the product is also available on Amazon.
Will Amazon Attribution show me conversions on my Shopify site from a DSP link-out campaign?
No — Amazon Attribution measures on-Amazon activity resulting from off-Amazon marketing. A conversion that happens entirely on your own site needs to be measured by your own site's analytics or pixel, not Amazon's reporting.
Is link-out advertising only for brands that don't sell on Amazon?
No — link-out and non-endemic campaigns overlap but aren't the same thing. A brand that sells on Amazon can also run link-out campaigns to its own site, as long as the destination meets Amazon's ad policies.
We show the method before the number.
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