How does Amazon Sponsored Display targeting work?
Amazon Sponsored Display targets pages or people, never keywords: products and categories, remarketing and Amazon audiences, or Amazon's own choice.
Amazon Sponsored Display targets pages or people, never keywords. Contextual targeting shows your ad on the product pages and categories you choose, or on products similar to yours. Audience targeting reaches shoppers by what they viewed, bought or are interested in. Optimized targeting lets Amazon choose for you. Contextual and remarketing targeting are only for advertisers who sell on Amazon.
Checked against Amazon's help pages in October 2026. New to Display? Start with what Sponsored Display is.
The options at a glance
| Option | Who sees your ad |
|---|---|
| Products | Shoppers on the product pages you pick |
| Categories | Shoppers browsing a category |
| Remarketing | Shoppers who viewed or bought products you choose |
| Amazon audiences | Shoppers by interest, lifestyle, life event or recent shopping |
| Custom audiences | Audiences you built in Amazon Marketing Cloud |
| Optimized | Shoppers Amazon picks for you |
Contextual targeting: products and categories
- Products: specific ASINs, including your own pages (to cross-sell) and pages outside your category. Amazon keeps the ads relevant with its own guardrails.
- Categories: whole categories, refined by brand, price, rating or Prime delivery.
- "Similar to advertised products": Amazon picks the products for you.
- Where it shows: specific products and refined categories stay on Amazon; "similar to advertised products" and unrefined categories also reach off Amazon. Where Display ads appear.
Amazon's tip: add at least 10 products that already sell well.
Audience targeting
- Remarketing: shoppers who viewed (up to 90 days back) or bought (up to 365 days back) products you choose. How retargeting works.
- Amazon audiences: thousands of ready-made segments in four families: in-market (recently shopped a category), lifestyle, interests and life events.
- Custom audiences from Amazon Marketing Cloud, built from rules or as lookalikes.
Three rules apply to every audience campaign:
- Recent buyers are left out: shoppers who bought the advertised product, or a similar one, in the last 30 days.
- Several audiences widen the reach: Amazon adds them up, it does not keep only the overlap.
- Each audience has its own bid, unless the campaign uses cost control.
Optimized targeting
With the conversions strategy, you can let Amazon choose the audiences. Amazon suggests it when you are new to Display or unsure whom to target, and it is required when you set a cost control (a target cost per order). Choose manual targeting when past campaigns show you which audiences sell.
One campaign per product and per targeting
Amazon asks for one contextual campaign and one audience campaign per product, for images and for video, and no more: at most four Display campaigns per product.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use keywords in Sponsored Display?
No. Display targets pages and audiences only. Keywords are for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. Sponsored Products vs Sponsored Display.
Sources
- Understand targeting in Display campaigns, Amazon Ads
- Understand contextual targeting in Display, Amazon Ads
- Understand remarketing audience segments, Amazon Ads
- Understand audiences on Amazon, Amazon Ads
- Create a Display campaign, Amazon Ads
- Display set-up, Amazon Ads
Gloriads is an Amazon Ads automation platform that creates, monitors and optimizes Sponsored Products campaigns for sellers, brands, authors and agencies, by rules you control. See how it works.