Upper-Funnel Measurement Without a Click

Why click-based metrics were never going to work here

A streaming ad plays on a television screen with no clickable surface at all in most environments. A connected-TV or in-stream video ad interrupts a passive viewing experience where the expected action is watching, not tapping. Judging either on click-through rate isn't measuring performance badly; it's measuring the wrong thing, because the format was never built to produce the interaction the metric assumes.

This isn't a problem specific to Amazon. It's why television advertising has always used different measurement than direct-response formats, and the same logic applies once that inventory is bought programmatically through Amazon DSP. If you are new to how DSP and sponsored ads differ, our guide to advertising on Amazon covers the basics first.

What actually is measurable, without a click

Four proxy measures do real work here:

• Video completion rate tells you whether people who started watching stayed through the message. A low completion rate on a 15 or 30-second spot is a creative problem worth fixing before anything else.
• Viewable impressions, measured against Media Rating Council standards, confirm the ad was in view rather than served but never seen.
• Brand Lift studies survey exposed versus control audiences on awareness, favorability and purchase intent. Amazon describes how to request one on its Brand Lift page, and eligibility depends on the campaign.
• Geo-tested branded search lift, run as a matched-market test rather than a before-and-after comparison, checks whether upper-funnel exposure produces the downstream search behaviour it is usually meant to spark.

A checklist you can run before the first impression serves

Most upper-funnel measurement fails because it is decided after the money is spent. Work through this list at the planning stage:

• Name the job of the line item: reach, new-to-brand customers, or demand creation. Retargeting and streaming do different jobs.
• Write down a separate return target for each job, instead of one blended target for the account.
• Pick the primary proxy for each line: completion rate for video and streaming, viewability for display, branded search lift for the whole upper-funnel group.
• Decide who designs and computes any lift test, and put it in writing in the statement of work. That question applies to every vendor, including us.
• Pick the test window and the baseline period before launch, so the comparison is not chosen after you have seen the results.
• Agree what result would make you cut the line, and what would make you scale it.

A worked example of what this looks like together

Here is an illustration, not a result. Suppose a streaming flight shows a ROAS of 0.8x in the dashboard next to a retargeting line at several times that. Read on ROAS alone, the streaming line looks like the first thing to cut. Now read it through the proxy stack: completion rate is strong, viewability is clean, a Brand Lift study shows a measurable awareness gain, and a geo-tested branded search comparison shows lift in test markets versus control.

That is four independent signals, none of them a click-based sale, all pointing the same direction. It is a stronger case for the spend than a same-session ROAS number was ever going to provide, because the format was never built to earn one.

For context on scale, across 30 advertisers in July 2026 our DSP book ran 78.4 million impressions at a $4.00 CPM, and 20.1% of the 57,137 attributed purchases came from shoppers new to the brand. Reach and new customers are exactly what a click-only view cannot see.

Why our own DSP practice sets streaming its own target

Our working rule in our own accounts is to set streaming a return target near 1.0 and judge it primarily on completion rate and branded-search lift, because attribution structurally undercounts it. Amazon's shoppable features on streaming inventory generally only fire for logged-in Prime members, so a meaningful share of streaming-driven demand never generates an attributable click or sale on Amazon at all.

Holding streaming to the same ROAS bar as retargeting, which converts demand that already exists, guarantees the streaming line loses every comparison regardless of how well it is working. That is the trap a shared blended target sets.

The common mistake, including ours

The mistake is defaulting to the same efficiency target across every placement type, then being surprised when upper-funnel formats consistently underperform against it. We have inherited accounts where prior reporting held streaming to the account's blended ROAS target, month after month, and the recommendation every time was to cut streaming spend. No upper-funnel format was going to clear a bar calibrated to same-session retargeting. The spend was not necessarily failing; the target was measuring the wrong thing from the start.

Building the case incrementally, not all at once

None of these four proxy measures needs to run from day one. A reasonable build order:

• Weeks 1 and on: completion rate and viewability, which are available in standard reporting from the first flight and tell you quickly whether the creative is landing.
• Next: a Brand Lift study, once the campaign has run long enough to reach Amazon's eligibility thresholds.
• Last: geo-tested branded search lift, once you have a stable baseline period to match test markets against.

Trying to stand up all four before a single flight has run usually means none of them are done well.

When the proxy signals disagree with each other

If completion rate and viewability look strong but Brand Lift shows minimal movement, treat that as a real signal that the creative or targeting needs work, not as a reason to distrust the survey. If Brand Lift is positive but geo-tested branded search lift comes back flat, check test power before concluding the two genuinely disagree. Branded search volume is often a smaller absolute number than survey responses, and an underpowered geo test can show no lift even when a real one exists.

If you also run sponsored ads, reconcile DSP against them in Amazon Marketing Cloud so the same purchase is not counted twice. Only after checking power and overlap should a disagreement change your read on the channel. reMKTR, our Amazon DSP service, runs this discipline on every account.