For most of digital advertising’s history, the conversation about where to put your budget came down to two choices. Google owned search — the moment a person typed what they wanted. Meta owned social — the moment you could nudge someone toward wanting something. Every other platform was either a distant third or a rounding error.

That duopoly has a serious challenger now, and it is not a social network or a search engine.

Amazon’s advertising business is on track to generate between $65 and $85 billion in revenue in 2026 — figures that would make it the third-largest advertising platform in the world, behind only Google and Meta. More importantly, Amazon has something neither of its rivals does: it knows what people actually buy. Not what they click on. Not what they search for. What they put in a cart and pay money for. That single data advantage is changing the calculations that brand managers and performance marketers make every day.

What Amazon knows that Google and Meta do not

The difference is easier to understand with a practical example.

When you advertise on Google, you target based on search intent. Someone types “best running shoes under 5000 rupees” and you bid to show your ad in that moment. The intent signal is strong — this person is actively looking. But Google does not know whether that person bought running shoes last week, whether they are loyal to a specific brand, or whether they typically buy running shoes at all. It only knows what they are looking for right now.

When you advertise on Meta, you target based on interests and behaviour. Meta can infer that someone is probably interested in running based on the pages they follow, what they engage with, and a vast web of behavioural signals. But this is still inference — educated guessing based on signals, not actual purchase data.

Amazon knows what you bought. It knows how often you buy running shoes, what brands you typically choose, what price range you shop in, and whether you bought a competitor’s product three months ago. When you search for something on Amazon, you are almost always in buying mode. That combination — purchase history plus active buying intent — is uniquely powerful in a way that Google’s search intent and Meta’s interest targeting simply cannot match.

The industry term for this is “closed-loop attribution.” Unlike Google and Meta, where connecting an ad impression to an actual sale requires stitching together data from multiple systems, Amazon can track the full journey from ad impression to product page view to purchase, entirely within its own ecosystem. For brands selling on Amazon, this closes the measurement gap that has frustrated digital marketers for years.

What changed in 2026

Two things made Amazon advertising significantly more important this year.

The first is Prime Video ads. Amazon turned on advertising for Prime Video subscribers in early 2024, and by 2026 the inventory has scaled considerably. This means brands can now run premium video advertising — the kind that was previously only available on Netflix or broadcast television — within the Amazon DSP, using Amazon’s shopping data to target it. As we explored in our look at how retail media and agentic commerce are reshaping advertising, the Amazon DSP partnership with Netflix takes this further still: brands buying through the Amazon DSP can now reach Netflix audiences and connect those impressions to Amazon purchase outcomes.

The second is AI-powered targeting automation. Amazon has rolled out multi-signal intelligence that automatically combines behavioural and contextual signals without requiring advertisers to manually build out complex audience segments. For smaller brands that do not have dedicated ad operations teams, this lowers the barrier to running sophisticated campaigns.

Who benefits most from Amazon advertising

Not every brand gets the same value from Amazon ads, and understanding the split is important before allocating significant budget.

Brands that sell directly on Amazon get the most out of the platform because the attribution loop is fully closed. You can see precisely which campaign drove a product page view, which product page views led to purchases, and what the average order value and repeat purchase rate of ad-acquired customers looks like. This data quality is genuinely superior to what you get from most digital advertising platforms.

Brands that do not sell on Amazon but want to reach Amazon’s audiences can use the Amazon DSP to buy display, video, and streaming inventory and reach people off Amazon — on third-party websites, in apps, and now on Prime Video and Netflix. Attribution here is less clean because the purchase does not happen within Amazon’s ecosystem. But the targeting quality — based on real purchase behaviour rather than inferred interests — is still meaningfully better than standard programmatic display.

Brands that sell purely through physical retail or their own website and have no Amazon presence at all get the least from the platform. The core targeting advantage is Amazon’s purchase data, and if you are not connected to that ecosystem in some way, you are essentially paying for behavioural targeting that is sophisticated but not uniquely differentiated from what Google or a premium programmatic platform can offer.

What to actually do with this

If you sell on Amazon and you are not advertising there yet, start. The minimum investment to test Sponsored Products ads — the basic search ads that appear in Amazon search results — is genuinely low. You can run a meaningful test for a few hundred pounds or dollars a month and get attribution data that tells you exactly whether the ads are generating incremental revenue.

If you are an established Amazon advertiser, the next step is connecting your Amazon DSP activity to your broader media plan. Many brands run Amazon campaigns in isolation, managed by a separate team or agency from the rest of their digital advertising. This creates gaps: you end up with overlapping audiences, inconsistent messaging, and no ability to see how Amazon advertising complements or cannibalises your Google and Meta spending. Consolidating the data — even imperfectly — into a single view is worth the effort.

The friction you need to prepare for: Amazon’s ad platform is meaningfully harder to use than Google Ads or Meta Business Suite. The Amazon DSP in particular requires either significant internal training or an agency partner with specific Amazon expertise. The reporting interface is less intuitive, the audience building tools work differently from what most digital marketers are used to, and the campaign structures were originally designed for e-commerce retail rather than brand marketing. Budget three to six months to get your team to a point where they are genuinely comfortable with the platform, not just able to launch a basic campaign. The data quality makes the investment worthwhile — but the learning curve is real.

Amazon’s advertising business is not coming for Google’s search dominance or Meta’s social reach. It is carving out something different: the moment when someone is closest to buying. For brands that can connect their products to that moment, it is the most valuable channel in digital advertising right now.