_1778744442410.webp?w=256&q=75)
You have a well-optimised Sponsored Products campaign running. You've done the keyword research, built your match types carefully, and your ACoS is finally sitting where you want it. Sales are coming in.
Then one afternoon, you're browsing a competitor's product listing, just checking what they're saying, comparing your listing to theirs, and you spot it. A small rectangular ad, right there below the buy box on their page, promoting a brand that competes directly with yours.
That's a display ad. And if it isn't yours, it belongs to someone else.
Display advertising on Amazon works differently from Sponsored Products. Instead of waiting for shoppers to search for your keywords, display ads find shoppers on competitor listings, on category pages, across Amazon's homepage, and on thousands of third-party websites and apps, based on what they've browsed, what they've bought, and what they've shown interest in buying next.
Before diving into how to set one up, there's a terminology issue worth addressing up front, because it causes real confusion.
Amazon used to offer a product called Product Display Ads (PDAs), a Vendor-only format with limited targeting options. That format has been largely phased out and replaced by Sponsored Display, which is more powerful, available to both Sellers and Vendors, and what this guide covers. When sellers search for 'Amazon Product Display Ads' today, Sponsored Display is almost always what they're looking for.
In Hector AI's cohort analysis of 1,400+ brand pairs in 2025, brands that added Sponsored Display to an existing Sponsored Products strategy generated a 31% higher new-to-brand customer rate, meaning they brought in significantly more first-time buyers than brands relying on search advertising alone (Hector AI Internal Data, Q1–Q4 2025).
This guide walks through how display ads work, how to set up your first campaign step by step, what metrics actually matter, and why scaling past a handful of campaigns requires a different approach to optimisation.
Amazon Product Display Ads: The Terminology You Actually Need
Legacy PDAs vs Sponsored Display: What Changed and What Stayed
Amazon's original Product Display Ads launched in the early days of Amazon Advertising as a Vendor-exclusive format. They let advertisers place ads on product detail pages and category pages, targeting by product interest or specific ASINs. The format was functional but limited, primarily a lower-funnel, on-Amazon-only tool with CPM-based pricing and a relatively narrow audience targeting capability.
In 2019, Amazon launched Sponsored Display, which gradually became Amazon’s primary self-serve display advertising format and expanded significantly on the capabilities of legacy Product Display Ads. Sponsored Display extended access to third-party sellers (not just Vendors), added audience targeting using Amazon's first-party purchase and browsing data, introduced off-Amazon placements through Amazon's publisher network, and offered both CPC and vCPM pricing models. The original PDA format has been almost entirely phased out.
Definition: Sponsored Display in Plain Language
Where Amazon Display Ads Show Up
One of the most common questions from sellers new to display advertising is: where exactly does my ad appear? The answer depends on your targeting type and optimisation goal, but Sponsored Display has a broader footprint than most sellers realise.
On-Amazon Placements: Product Detail Pages, Search Results, Homepage
The highest-intent placement is the product detail page, specifically the section below the buy box and the 'customers who viewed this also viewed' module. This is where your ad appears on a competitor's listing, intercepting shoppers before they add the wrong product to their cart. It's also where your ad can appear on your own listing, promoting related products from your catalogue to shoppers who are already engaged with your brand.
Sponsored Display placements within Amazon browsing environments are dynamic and can extend beyond product detail pages, but unlike Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display is not primarily a search-result-driven format. Unlike SP ads, which are triggered by keywords, display ads here appear for shoppers whose browsing history matches your targeting criteria. And on the Amazon homepage, display ads reach shoppers before they've even typed a search query, purely based on their past behaviour.
Off-Amazon Placements: Apps, Websites, Streaming
Through Amazon's publisher network, Sponsored Display extends to thousands of third-party websites and mobile apps outside Amazon. A shopper who viewed your cookware listing on Amazon might later see your ad on a recipe blog, a weather app, or a news site. Streaming TV inventory, including Fire TV, is primarily accessible through Amazon DSP rather than standard Sponsored Display campaigns.
Off-Amazon placements use Amazon’s aggregated audience signals and are limited to participating inventory within Amazon’s advertising network. While the targeting is informed by Amazon shopping and browsing behaviour, ad delivery outside Amazon depends on available inventory, privacy frameworks, and participating publisher environments.
The Two Targeting Types That Drive Sponsored Display
Every Sponsored Display campaign starts with the same fundamental choice: do you want to target specific products, or do you want to target specific shoppers? These are different questions with different answers, and the strategy behind each is distinct.
Product Targeting, Placing Your Ad on Specific ASINs or Categories
Product targeting works best for two specific objectives:
• Competitive displacement, placing your ad on the detail pages of your top competing ASINs, intercepting their traffic at the moment of decision
• Category conquest, running your ad across an entire product category to capture consideration from shoppers who haven't committed to a specific product yet
Audience Targeting, Following Shoppers Based on Their Behaviour
Amazon's Sponsored Display audience segments include:
• In-market audiences, shoppers actively browsing or recently purchasing in your product category
• Lifestyle audiences, shoppers whose overall Amazon behaviour matches a broader interest profile (e.g., 'outdoor enthusiasts', 'home improvement', 'health-conscious shoppers')
• Purchase retargeting, shoppers who have previously purchased your product and may be due for repurchase
• Views retargeting, shoppers who viewed your ASIN or similar ASINs without making a purchase (covered in detail below)
Views Retargeting, The Most Underrated Tactic for New Display Advertisers
Of all the audience targeting types in Sponsored Display, view retargeting is the one that new display advertisers should start with, and the one most guides undersell or bury.
Views retarget targets shoppers who viewed your ASINs, or similar ASINs, within a recent lookback window (commonly up to 30 days, depending on campaign settings) without converting. They saw your product. They didn't buy. Somewhere between seeing it and leaving, they got distracted, compared prices, or simply weren't ready. Views retargeting puts your ad back in front of them before someone else claims the sale.
The conversion logic is compelling. A shopper with recent unresolved purchase intent, re-engaged by a display ad featuring the exact product they already considered, converts at a meaningfully higher rate than a cold audience encounter. And because views retargeting audiences are built from your own Sponsored Products traffic, every SP click that doesn't convert immediately becomes a potential SD views retargeting audience member; the two formats actively compound each other.
Setting Up Your First Amazon Product Display Ad, Step by Step
Choosing Your Cost Model: CPC vs vCPM
The Six Steps from Campaign Creation to Going Live
The Metrics That Tell You Your Display Ads Are Working
Display advertising and search advertising tell different stories through their data. Measuring Sponsored Display with the same lens you use for Sponsored Products leads to premature campaign shutdowns and missed growth opportunities. Here's what to look at and what each metric actually means.
New-to-Brand Rate, The Number Most Sellers Miss
New-to-brand (NTB) rate measures the percentage of conversions from shoppers who haven't purchased from your brand on Amazon in the past 12 months. For display campaigns with audience targeting, NTB rate is the most important indicator of whether you're doing the job display advertising is built for: reaching shoppers who haven't found you yet.
New-to-brand (NTB) rates vary significantly depending on category, audience targeting, brand maturity, and campaign objective. Rather than relying on universal benchmarks, advertisers should evaluate NTB performance relative to their acquisition goals and historical campaign trends. If NTB growth is lower than expected, advertisers may consider adjusting audience composition by expanding prospecting audiences or reducing reliance on existing-customer retargeting.
Detail Page View Rate and What It Tells You About Your Creative
For vCPM campaigns, the detail page view rate (DPVR), the percentage of impressions that result in a product page visit, is your upper-funnel performance indicator. Detail page view rates (DPVR) vary widely by category, audience quality, placement type, and campaign objective. Rather than relying on universal benchmarks, advertisers should evaluate DPVR trends against their own historical performance and campaign goals.
Improving DPVR often involves refining audience relevance, testing creative variations, or adjusting placement and targeting strategies.
Why Display ROAS Looks Different from SP ROAS
Sponsored Products ROAS is relatively clean: clicks from the ad → product page → purchase, measured within a 14-day click attribution window. The conversion path is direct and visible in Campaign Manager.
Sponsored Display reporting may include both click-attributed and view-attributed conversions. View-attributed conversions occur when shoppers see an ad, do not click immediately, but later return to purchase within the attribution window. Amazon reports view-attributed conversions separately from click-attributed performance metrics. A display campaign with lower click-attributed ROAS than Sponsored Products may still contribute incremental value through view-attributed conversions and assisted exposure effects.
Why Manual Display Campaign Management Breaks at Scale
Running two or three Sponsored Display campaigns manually is manageable. You check performance weekly, adjust bids, and refresh audience segments occasionally. It's tedious but functional.
But display advertising at scale, 10, 20, 30 campaigns across multiple ASINs, targeting types, and cost models, creates an optimisation problem that weekly manual review simply cannot keep up with. And the mechanism by which this breaks is specific to the display's vCPM model.
The vCPM Problem That Weekly Reviews Can't Solve
In a CPC campaign, the optimisation feedback loop is tight: you pay per click, the click either converts or it doesn't, and you adjust your bid to improve the ratio. The data is granular, the signal is clear, and a weekly review catches most of the variance.
In a vCPM campaign, the story is different. You're paying for 1,000 viewable impressions across a mix of audience segments, placements, and devices. The quality of those impressions varies enormously. A $5 vCPM on a high-intent in-market audience browsing product detail pages may generate far better outcomes than a $3 vCPM on a broad lifestyle audience consuming off-Amazon content. Still, your Campaign Manager summary report won't tell you which segment generated which outcome without manually pulling and cross-referencing placement and audience reports.
A seller managing 15 vCPM campaigns manually faces this calculation every week, across every campaign, across multiple audience segments per campaign. The human capacity for that level of granular analysis, done consistently, without errors, across a growing campaign set, simply isn't there.
How Automated Bid Rules Fix Display's Specific Optimisation Challenges
Automated bid rules for Sponsored Display operate on the same principle that makes them effective for Sponsored Products: continuous, data-driven adjustment without human lag. But the specific optimisation problems they solve in display are different from search.
For vCPM campaigns, automated rules can identify which audience segments, placements, and ad creative combinations generate above-average DPVR or conversion rates, then adjust bids up for those combinations and down for underperforming ones, continuously, on a daily or near-daily cycle rather than waiting for a weekly human review.
The goal is not to remove strategic judgment from your display advertising; it's to apply that judgment systematically across every campaign, at a cadence that manual review can't match. Decide the optimisation logic once; let automation execute it continuously.
Building Display Ads Into Your Broader Amazon Strategy
Sponsored Display and Sponsored Products don't compete for the same shopper at the same moment. They work at different stages of the buyer journey, and when deployed in sequence, they create an advertising engine that is meaningfully more effective than either format alone.
The Sequenced Funnel: When to Add Display After Sponsored Products
Sponsored Products captures intent: a shopper searches for your product, your ad appears, they click, and they buy. The feedback loop is fast, and the conversion path is direct.
Sponsored Display catches what SP misses: the shoppers who clicked your SP ad but didn't convert, the shoppers browsing competitor listings before they've decided, the category browsers who don't yet know your product exists. Display ads are the net that catches what the search engine misses.
The right sequence: build a profitable Sponsored Products foundation first. Once your SP campaigns are hitting your target ACoS for four or more consecutive weeks, you have an existing traffic pool that your SD views retargeting campaigns can re-engage. Every shopper who arrives via SP and leaves without buying becomes a warm views retargeting audience for your display campaigns.
Category and Stage: A Practical Decision Framework
The sequence matters because each layer builds on the previous one. Launching a display without a profitable SP foundation means spending on impressions without the retargeting audience that makes the display most effective. Add the layers in order, and each one compounds the one before it.