5 Amazon Ads features you’re not using — but should be

Amazon Ads. It’s an expansive ecosystem of tools, insights and performance levers, many of which remain underutilized or unknown by brands and marketers. To ensure your brand gets the most from Amazon, let’s highlight the year’s key features, tools and integrations you might have missed — some old, some new and all effective at driving awareness and conversions.

1. Non-endemic advertising on Amazon

Non-endemic advertising allows brands that don’t sell products on a retail site to advertise there, tapping into the platform’s existing audience and data. Retailers like Amazon, Home Depot, Walgreens and Macy’s have years of shopper data and behavioral insights, offering an unparalleled picture of consumer preferences, habits and life events. As third-party cookies disappear and data privacy tightens, the value of this first-party data from retail media networks (RMNs) has surged. 

RMNs present a powerful opportunity for non-retail brands (like insurance companies, streaming services or education providers) to reach their ideal audiences in unexpected but highly relevant environments. For example, shoppers won’t browse Amazon for a new financial advisor. Still, as they shop for other products, they reveal the interests and demographics that may fit the ideal customer profile for a financial advisor lead generation standpoint.

The strength of non-endemic advertising lies in its targeting capabilities. RMNs segment audiences by traits like location, hobbies, life stage or recent purchases, allowing brands to deliver tailored messaging that drives users to their websites and landing pages.

This strategy doesn’t replace search — it complements it by creating demand ahead of need. These capabilities are only made stronger by the measurement tools in their clean-room solution, Amazon Marketing Cloud, which leads the pack in sophistication and measurement. 

It’s the most impactful and exciting thing to happen to a lead generation business since LinkedIn. The ability to find, target and segment retailer first-party data at scale — and at a deeper level of demographics and behavior — is a ridiculously powerful tool. 

2. Amazon Retail Ad Service

Despite the growing excitement around retail media, Amazon’s recent launch of its Retail Ad Service made a relatively quiet entrance. Marketed as a centralized platform to manage campaigns across multiple retailers for identical SKUs, the promise was clear: simplify retail ad execution with the backing of Amazon’s mature tech infrastructure.

However, the initial rollout lacked participation from major retailers, instead leaning heavily on niche and long-tail partners like iHerb and SayWee. That limits both scale and value — especially as the offering only supports digital placements, with no in-store or storefront integration.

Other players like Instacart, with its Carrot Ads product, are already executing similar models across smaller grocery chains like Thrive Market and The Fresh Market — and expanding licensing of their tech, recently (and most notably) to Uber Ads. Microsoft previously introduced a comparable solution with its Advertising Network for Retailers but sunset the program after struggling to build out the initial list of retailers participating.

Amazon’s entry isn’t yet a substantial threat to Criteo, Koddi and Epsilon. While unifying campaign management across retail channels is appealing, Amazon’s version currently falls short on critical factors like retailer scale and omnichannel support. Unless broader retail partnerships and execution improvements follow, its impact will likely remain limited.

Dig deeper: Amazon’s new Retail Ad Service brings RMN to the masses

3. Amazon Attribution

Amazon Attribution is a free measurement and analytics tool (also available via API) that allows brands to track how non-Amazon marketing channels contribute to activity on Amazon. Brands can link product detail page (PDP) views, add-to-carts and purchases to the external sources that drove those actions — like text search ads (via Google and Microsoft), organic and paid social media posts (through Meta, Instagram and TikTok), email and some display ads.

It’s definitely not new — the beta was a couple years long, one of the longest I’ve ever participated in — but it’s still lesser known.

It generates unique tracking URLs (called attribution tags) through the Amazon Attribution platform, which are added to a brand’s external media or campaigns. When shoppers click on those tagged links and visit Amazon, their behavior is tracked, and attribution is assigned to the originating channel.

However, it is only available to vendors, first-party Amazon sellers and third-party sellers enrolled in Amazon’s Brand Registry. 

In its current format, it’s not without limitations. For example, suppose a shopper ultimately changes variants or buys a product that didn’t originate their journey (meaning there’s no product halo or brand halo reporting). In that case, you may lose track of that search’s original product — but not the referring source, Amazon.

I’ve worked with too many brands that spend big bucks to send traffic from Meta to Amazon PDPs, only to receive vague, unhelpful metrics that tell them nothing. If you’re investing in this arena, I’d recommend checking out a third-party partner (like ampd) to help track your customers’ paths. 

4. Social commerce around Amazon Prime Day

Speaking of Meta and social commerce, Prime Day is nearly here — but with a twist! This year’s event will be four days instead of the usual two.

What does that have to do with social commerce? A lot. We’re already seeing a rise in influencer-produced content on Meta and TikTok, commissioned by Amazon sellers and brands (often via the Amazon Influencer Program) to feature a product or exclusive deal linking to their Amazon PDP, deal or brand store.

This isn’t a surprise. Given its perceived authenticity (especially by Gen Z), U.S. influencer marketing spending is expected to surpass $10 billion this year. And with Amazon advertising exceeding $54 billion last year alone, it’s no shock that influencer marketing is taking a bigger piece of the pie and making that alamode with Amazon Prime Day.

Will TikTok Shop do another “Deals for You Days” to compete ahead of Prime Day like they did last year? Probably, assuming no federal government interventions. 

Not to be outdone, other brands will likely follow the same trend to promote their competing sales events during Prime Day on other retailer channels — so expect an inflated amount of sponsored testimonials on your For You Page. And don’t be shy about using your social channels to drive to your Prime Day experiences!

Dig deeper: Ad costs are soaring and retailers are panicking — here’s the fix

5. Prime Video and Live Sports

Amazon is betting big on both Prime Video and Live Sports.

Prime Video is Amazon’s subscription-based streaming service that offers on-demand movies, TV shows and original content. It’s included with Amazon Prime memberships but can also be subscribed to separately and has ad-supported-supported tiers.

With more than 132 million viewers on ad-supported Prime Video, it’s one of Amazon’s fastest-growing ad channels — boasting impressive measurement and tracking capabilities stemming from its publisher owning the content. Plus, membership will only continue to grow as ad-free subscription prices increase (and consumers become more amenable to ad-supported tiers). 

Live Sports is included in the Prime Video suite (unlike some other streaming services) and currently boasts a lineup of Thursday Night Football and other NFL games, the WNBA and, starting this fall for U.S. viewers, the NBA. There are additional opportunities in other countries like the UK and India for soccer, cricket and more big-name sports. 

Earlier, I covered non-endemic advertising on Amazon, so let’s bring it together. Consider the last time you watched Thursday Night Football and the ads you saw. Much more than just brands sold on Amazon, right? There were quite a few from State Farm or Geico. See how powerful this landscape can be?

These offerings give marketers two major places to expand, boasting impressive reach and diversity of interests.

Conclusion

Phew! Alright, consider yourself caught up. There are other programs and features to cover — for instance, as workers return to the office, audio ads are back in a big way. But I’ll get to those at a later date. For now, consider yourself fairly caught up on the newest programs with Amazon Ads.