Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands run in search. Only Sponsored Display reaches people who did not search.
Most guides on this subject group three Amazon ad formats together and call them display advertising.
Two of them are search ads.
Sponsored Products is keyword-targeted. Somebody typed something, and you bid on the query. Sponsored Brands is a search banner in the same auction with more real estate. Sponsored Display is the only one that targets audiences rather than queries, and the only one that reaches people who were not looking for you.
The distinction decides which budget the money comes from and which number judges it. Search formats get measured on cost per acquisition against live intent. Display gets measured on reach and downstream lift, because nobody asked for it.
This guide covers which format does what, how Sponsored Display targeting works, how to set it up, and what measures it honestly.
At a Glance
Contents
Five things to take away
- Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands run in search. Sponsored Display does not.
- Display targets audiences built from behavior, not keywords typed in a box.
- Retargeting gives the clearest return, because it recovers value search already paid for.
- Creative carries more weight in display, because you are interrupting rather than answering.
- Judging display on last click makes it look expensive. It is the wrong instrument.
Quick Answer:
Amazon offers three Sponsored ad formats and only one of them is display advertising. Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands appear in search results, target keywords, and capture demand that already exists. Sponsored Display targets audiences built from browsing and purchase behavior, appears on product detail pages and off Amazon, and reaches shoppers who did not search for anything. The formats answer different questions, so they need different targets: cost per acquisition for the search formats, reach and downstream lift for display.
Definition
Three formats, and the grouping is where the confusion starts.
Sponsored Products. A keyword-targeted ad in search results and on detail pages, priced per click. The shopper typed a query and you bid on it.
Sponsored Brands. A banner at the top of search carrying a logo, a headline and several products. Same auction, same live intent, more space.
Sponsored Display. An audience-targeted ad appearing on detail pages and on sites Amazon does not own. No query, no typed intent. Amazon assembled the audience from behavior it observed earlier.
Only the third is display, and grouping all three under the word is how brands end up running search spend against a brand-awareness target.
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ONE TARGET, TWO DIFFERENT JOBS Your display campaigns and your search campaigns report into the same dashboard. They are being judged against the same number, and only one of them was built for it.
30 minutes. Bring 90 days of advertising reports. |
1. Which One Is Display
The difference is not the placement. It is where the intent comes from.
Search formats read intent as it happens. A shopper types something, the auction runs, and your ad appears against a query Amazon is watching in real time.
Display infers intent from history. Amazon builds a segment from what people browsed, bought, viewed and abandoned, then shows your ad to that segment somewhere else entirely.
Why the distinction changes the budget question
One is demand capture. The other is demand creation. Both work and they are not interchangeable.
A Sponsored Products campaign that returns a 20% ACoS is doing its job, because the shopper was already looking. A Sponsored Display campaign judged on the same number will look expensive, because it reached somebody who was not.
Run them against one target and you get one of two failures. Display gets cut for underperforming on a metric it was never built for, or search gets praised for efficiency while buying demand you already had.
Our guide to the types of Amazon ads covers the full format set. This page is about the one that behaves differently from the rest.
What to do
- Separate the formats before you set a target. The target follows the format, not the other way round.
- Name which job each campaign is doing. Capture or create. There is no third option.
What to avoid
- Reporting all three under one heading. It hides which one is working.
- Moving budget from display to search because the ACoS looks better. That is the metric choosing for you.
2. What Sponsored Display Targets
Four audience types, and they are not equally useful.
Views remarketing. People who looked at your detail page and did not buy. The highest-return audience in most accounts, because search already paid to get them there.
Purchase remarketing. People who bought, for replenishment or for a complementary product. Narrow and profitable where the catalog supports it.
Interest and lifestyle. People whose browsing suggests a category affinity. Broad, and the results depend heavily on how well the category is defined.
Product and category targeting. Your ad on a competitor’s detail page, or across a category. The one most sellers start with and the one that most often disappoints, because placement next to a competitor is not the same as intent toward you.
The segment is the lever, not the bid. A precise audience at a modest bid outperforms a broad one at a high bid, and that is more true in display than in search, because search has the query doing half the work.
Audience precision is also what separates Sponsored Display from Amazon DSP management, which buys the same kind of inventory with more control and more inventory to choose from.
What to do
- Start with views remarketing. Shortest payback and the easiest to read.
- Define the audience before the creative. The segment decides what the ad has to say.
What to avoid
- Starting with competitor targeting because it feels aggressive. It is the least intent-rich option.
- Running interest targeting before your remarketing pool is large enough to learn from.
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3. Setting It Up
The setup is short. The decisions inside it are not.
Pick the product on evidence. A product that converts from organic and search traffic will convert from display. A product that does not will not start because it got more impressions.
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The page matters more in display than in search, and for a reason worth naming. A shopper who arrives from a keyword has already told Amazon what they want, so the listing only has to confirm a match. A shopper who arrives from a display ad has stated nothing. The page has to do the explaining, the qualifying and the closing in one pass. Amazon listing optimization is what decides whether that traffic was worth buying. |
Match the format to the job. Sponsored Brands for category-level visibility. Sponsored Products for capture. Sponsored Display for the audience that already knows you and left.
Invest in the creative. In search, the query does the persuading and the ad confirms a match. In display, nothing has persuaded anybody yet, so the image and the copy carry the whole weight.
Set the target before the campaign runs, and set it from what the format can deliver rather than from what your search campaigns produce.
The targeting options include demographics alongside behavior, and demographic filters are usually a narrowing tool rather than a starting point.
What to do
- Choose a product with proven conversion. Display amplifies what already works.
- Write the creative for somebody who has never heard of you, because in display some of them have not.
What to avoid
- Using the same creative across search and display. They are answering different situations.
- Setting a display target by copying your Sponsored Products ACoS.
4. Measuring It Honestly
Here is where most display budgets get killed for the wrong reason.
Display conversions arrive later and less traceably than search conversions. A shopper sees an ad on a third-party site, does nothing, and buys three days later through organic search. Amazon attributes some of that and misses some of it.
Which makes last-click the wrong instrument. Judging display on last-click attribution measures the part of the effect that happens to be traceable and ignores the rest.
Read three numbers instead.
Total advertising cost of sales, against total revenue rather than campaign revenue. It shows whether the advertising is lifting the business or just the campaign.
New-to-brand orders. The metric that tells you whether display is doing the job it exists for.
Organic rank and velocity on the advertised products, because display that works shows up there before it shows up in the ad report.
Split testing is how you isolate which creative earned the lift once the measurement is set up correctly.
What to do
- Set the measurement window longer than search. Display effects arrive on a delay.
- Read new-to-brand alongside cost. Cost alone cannot tell you whether it worked.
What to avoid
- Pausing a display campaign after two weeks. You have measured the delay, not the performance.
- Comparing display ACoS to search ACoS. They are not the same measurement.
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THE CHANNEL THAT GETS CUT FIRST Display takes longer to read and somebody wants a number by Friday. It gets paused at week two, which measures the delay rather than the performance.
30 minutes. Bring your last 90 days across both. |
Format grid
What each format targets, where it appears, and what judges it.
Rows one and two share a column that row three does not. That is the whole distinction, and it is why the four formats need three different targets between them.
How Adverio Helps
Adverio is an agency that runs Amazon, Walmart and Target for consumer brands, measured on contribution margin against a baseline set before the work starts.
On advertising formats that means the search budget and the display budget get separate targets set before either campaign runs, and the display target gets read against total sales rather than against its own clicks.
Where display is being judged on last click and losing, the recommendation is to change the measurement before changing the budget. Running that across Amazon PPC management and display together is what keeps one from being funded out of the other by accident.
Frequently asked questions
What is Amazon display advertising?
Advertising that reaches shoppers based on who they are and what they have done, rather than on what they typed. On Amazon that means Sponsored Display and, at larger scale, Amazon DSP.
Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands are search advertising, even though they are often grouped with display.
How is Sponsored Display different from Sponsored Products?
Sponsored Products targets keywords and appears in search results. Sponsored Display targets audiences and appears on detail pages and off Amazon.
The practical difference is the intent. One reaches somebody mid-search, the other reaches somebody who was doing something else.
What targeting options does Sponsored Display have?
Views remarketing, purchase remarketing, interest and lifestyle segments, and product or category targeting.
Views remarketing usually returns fastest, because those shoppers already reached your page once.
What should you measure on a display campaign?
Total advertising cost of sales against total revenue, new-to-brand orders, and organic rank on the advertised products.
Not last-click ACoS. It measures the fraction of the effect that happened to be traceable.
When does it make sense to move from Sponsored Display to DSP?
When you need inventory and control Sponsored Display does not offer, and when your conversion volume is large enough for the bidding model to learn from. Our page on how to grow revenue on Amazon covers where paid fits against everything else.
Closing
Set the target from what the format can deliver, because a display campaign judged on a search metric will always look like it failed.
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Four formats, three targets, and every one of them ends at a product page. Nobody has checked which of your products were worth advertising in the first place.
30 minutes. Bring your catalog export and your last 90 days. |
References
Amazon’s ad products and terminology change. Checked on 25 September 2026.
- Amazon Ads, Sponsored Display. https://advertising.amazon.com/solutions/products/sponsored-display
- Amazon Ads, Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. https://advertising.amazon.com/