✍️ About the Author: Pat Petriello is the Director of Retail Marketplace Strategy at Acadia
When this article was first written in 2024, advertisers faced a persistent challenge: proving the incremental value of Amazon DSP campaigns.
While Amazon’s demand-side platform provided sophisticated targeting and the ability to engage audiences across the funnel, its impact was often difficult to measure with precision.
Brands were left asking: Did my DSP investment truly drive new-to-brand customers, or would those conversions have happened anyway?
A year later, the landscape looks very different.
With major advances in Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and Amazon DSP’s Open Internet ambitions, advertisers can now measure and optimize incrementality with unprecedented accuracy.
What was once theoretical has become actionable, transforming how brands plan, buy, and measure media across Amazon’s ecosystem and beyond.
Measurement Has Evolved: From Estimation to Full Visibility
For years, incrementality on Amazon DSP relied on modeled lift tests, holdout studies, or inferred correlations. Those approaches offered helpful signals but lacked full visibility into how DSP impressions contributed across the broader customer journey.
In 2025, that has fundamentally changed. Thanks to AMC’s Customer Path Reporting, brands can now trace and quantify every touchpoint in a shopper’s journey, from the first impression to conversion.
This includes Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, Sponsored TV, and Amazon DSP, giving advertisers a unified view of how each ad type contributes to the path to purchase.
This shift means brands no longer have to guess if DSP campaigns assisted a conversion. They can see, in clear data, how DSP interacts with other formats to build awareness, consideration, and conversion over time.
It’s a holistic view that connects upper-funnel visibility with lower-funnel outcomes, proving that Amazon DSP doesn’t just retarget, but truly drives incremental demand.
Extended Lookback Windows, Deeper Customer Insights
AMC has also expanded its lookback window from 1 to 5 years, enabling a much more comprehensive understanding of customer behavior.
Brands can now analyze how long-term purchase cycles play out, identifying replenishment patterns, cross-category exploration, and repeat purchase behavior unique to their product lifecycle.
This flexibility empowers brands to define “new-to-brand” customers on their own terms.
Whether it’s a seasonal item, a high-consideration purchase, or a consumable product, AMC’s expanded horizon ensures that each brand can customize analysis to its specific business rhythm.
From Quantity to Quality: Measuring True Customer Value
The new measurement capabilities go beyond sales attribution.
Brands can now assess not only the quantity of sales driven by DSP, but the quality of those sales as defined by Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV).
Through AMC, advertisers can create audience cohorts of their highest-value customers, analyze their behaviors, and then use Amazon DSP to target lookalike audiences who most resemble those top performers.
This strategy shifts the focus from short-term conversions to long-term loyalty, from transaction to relationship.
In essence, AMC’s evolution has turned DSP incrementality into a strategic lever for customer acquisition, retention, and lifetime value growth.
This represents true brand building and incrementality: the ability to reach shoppers who are most likely not only to make a single purchase from a brand, but who are most likely to become loyal brand advocates.
Amazon DSP and the Open Internet: One Platform, Unprecedented Reach
At the same time, Amazon DSP has rapidly expanded its reach and efficiency through new Open Internet integrations, particularly across Connected TV (CTV).
With partnerships now spanning Roku, Disney, and Netflix, Amazon DSP reaches approximately 80 million authenticated CTV households per month: more than 80% of all U.S. CTV households.
This expansion means brands can now access premium streaming environments such as Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery, Pluto, Tubi, Disney, Roku, Fubo, or Sling directly through Amazon DSP.
This represents a seismic shift for media buying across both traditional programmatic platforms and linear TV, because all of this audience inventory is available through Amazon DSP.
What once required multiple programmatic buys across different platforms can now be managed and measured through a single, unified system.
Unified Frequency Capping: Efficiency Without Waste
Perhaps even more transformative is Amazon DSP’s ability to apply universal household frequency capping across all of these publishers.
In traditional programmatic environments, a lack of cross-platform visibility often meant overexposure: The same viewer seeing the same ad repeatedly across different DSPs.
Amazon’s unified approach solves that problem. With centralized frequency management, brands can ensure their audiences are reached efficiently without wasted impressions or ad fatigue.
The result? A better user experience, stronger campaign performance, and more efficient media spend.
The New Standard for Incremental Reach
This combination of expanded premium inventory, cross-platform measurement, and frequency optimization positions Amazon DSP as one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal.
Advertisers can now reach high-value audiences both on and off Amazon, drive incremental reach, and measure precisely how those exposures contribute to short-term sales and long-term brand growth.
Conclusion: Incrementality, Fully Realized
The conversation around Amazon DSP incrementality has evolved from “Can we measure it?” to “How do we maximize it?”
Between AMC’s advanced customer path reporting and Amazon DSP’s expanded Open Internet capabilities, brands can now see with clarity how every impression and interaction contributes to incremental value.
For the first time, advertisers can connect awareness, engagement, and conversion data across the entire Amazon Ads ecosystem and beyond.
Incrementality is no longer theoretical. It’s measurable, actionable, and transformative, helping brands move from isolated campaign insights to a unified, customer-centric growth strategy.
Related Resources
*Editor’s note: This article was originally published on February 1, 2024. Although the information is no longer current, it offers valuable context on the developments within the Amazon ecosystem.
It makes me feel old to say that Amazon’s DSP (demand side platform) has been around for over 10 years now. As the platform matures over the years, Amazon has added many new features to help brands understand the impact that this impression-based advertising format has on overall sales.
But the reality is, tying actual sales performance back to Amazon DSP campaigns is still challenging. That’s because the majority of DSP sales attributed through views and we cannot be 100% sure that my ad was seen and influenced a sales.
To be fair, measuring advertising effectiveness is not a challenge that’s unique to Amazon DSP. While media mix modeling and other media measurement capabilities get us close, it’s not possible to know exactly how many ads on different channels a customer saw before purchasing a product.
I might first see a product advertised on a billboard, then on TV, and then walk past an in-store display at my local grocery store. But if I click on an Amazon ad for the product a few weeks later, it's the Amazon ad that gets all the “credit” for the sale.
Still, from tens of thousands of hours spent managing Amazon ad campaigns for clients in various categories, the Acadia retail media team has seen such strong results from Amazon DSP campaigns that we believe that Amazon DSP advertising can drive ‘incremental’ sales - that is, sales that would not have been registered without those ad campaigns.
We were recently able to test our conviction when a client - a multinational house of brands - decided to take 2 different approaches to Amazon DSP among 4 of their brands in the personal care category.
The outcome?
2 brands took a “dip a toe in” approach and saw minimal outcome.
Brand A had between a $2.5k and $16k/week budget. It didn't move the total sales needle very much, but we added about 7-9k glance views per week. Average total sales went from $93k to $103k/week.
The approach: Because they had a lower budget, we opted for lower and mid funnel goals of purchase and consideration. Our KPIs were total ROAS, detail page views, and new to brand sales. When budgets are smaller, we recommend focusing on a smaller number of goals over a full funnel approach. This helps brands get the most out of their investment and not spread themselves too thin.
Brand B had $3k-$5k/week in DSP budget. Their weekly total sales went from $344k to $375k/week over the course of about 4 months. Average weekly glance views went from 67k to 84k.
The approach: We used the same strategic approach as above to limit the number of goals we utilized to align with this budget. Another pillar of our strategy is to limit our product focus so that we can measure the incremental impact to a smaller subset of products from our ads and scale that up when we show success.
2 brands took a “dive head-first” approach and saw a big swing in sales that couldn’t be attributed to other efforts.
Brand C had about $19k/week in DSP budget. Their weekly total sales went from $262k to $330k. Glance views went from 57k to 86k per week. Our full funnel approach was leveraged here for the brands top 20 products. Loyalty, purchase, consideration, and awareness with a mix of REC and custom image ads.
Brand D spends about $19k/week in DSP. Their total sales went from $580k/week to $770k/week. Glance views increased from 121k to 169k. The approach here again was a ‘full funnel’ targeting strategy across the brand’s top 20 products.
Worth noting: Each brand has a slightly different value proposition, but sells more or less the same type of products.
The takeaway? Driving incremental growth with Amazon DSP is more than possible, but results are going to be underwhelming (or impossible to reliably discern) if only a minimal budget is applied to test. In cases where a brand is unable to invest more than $5K per week, I would candidly recommend just spending this budget in Amazon PPC advertising where it will likely make a good impact.
Using the right metrics to measure success is also key. DSP metrics should be based on your brand’s overall goals, maturity, repurchase frequency. My colleagues produced an amazing resource on this topic, named Fit For Purpose: Next-generation metrics for Amazon DSP.
And if you’re looking for help maximizing your Amazon advertising investment, Acadia is an award-winning agency with Amazon Advertising ‘advanced partner’ status, that has been working with medium and large consumer brands on Amazon since 2015. Reach out to us for a consultation today.
Ross Walker, Senior Paid Media Manager at Acadia