Introduction
You should run Amazon retargeting promotions for shoppers who viewed your product but didn’t buy, but it’s not a simple add-on. For retargeting to work, you need to see what it costs you.
That means running the promotion as its own test, and giving remarketing ads their own campaign and budget when the costs are justified.
We manage $100M+ in annual client revenue across 50+ brands, and we still see many brands skip Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions and default to flat sitewide discounts. This guide covers when Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions beat a flat discount, how to price the discount before launch, how to keep remarketing visible, and when to judge the result.
What is an Amazon Brand Tailored Promotion?
An Amazon Brand Tailored Promotion is a discount Amazon shows only to an audience you pick. Per Amazon's Brand Tailored Promotions guide (January 2026), brands can offer anything from 10% to 50% off their catalog or specific products, allowing each eligible customer to redeem it on a single purchase.
Audiences are built around four goals, with a minimum audience of 1,000 shoppers:
- New customer acquisition
- Re-engagement
- Retention
- Cross-selling within your brand
Most brands start with the acquisition audience. It covers shoppers who clicked on your brand or added a product to their cart in the last 90 days, but haven't bought yet.
Eligible shoppers see the offer on various places including:
- Search and detail pages
- The promotion shopping page
- Your Brand Stores page, with a green badge
Before you plan anything, first check that you have access. Currently, the tool is open to Brand Representatives enrolled in Brand Registry in the US, UK, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan. For example, in August 2026, one beverage brand we work with already had coupons and Subscribe and Save running, but Brand Tailored Promotion wasn’t available in its account yet.
How Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions compare with your other options
Here’s how Brand Tailored Promotions compare to Sponsored Display remarketing and flat discounts. Sponsored Display ads bring the shopper back, and the promotion gives them a reason to buy. A flat discount, on the other hand, rewards every shopper, including those who would have paid full price.
| Option | Brand Tailored Promotion | Sponsored Display remarketing | Flat discount for everyone |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it costs | The discount on each redemption | Ad spend | The discount on every unit sold |
| Who sees it | The audience you pick | Shoppers who viewed your products | Every shopper |
| What to measure | Redemptions and sales on promoted products | Ad sales and advertising cost of sales (ACoS) on settled data | Units and margin per unit against your normal week |
Why a flat discount isn't the same as tailored retargeting
A brand that came to us gave flat discounts whenever a sale came up and wasn’t running Tailored Promotions at all. About once a quarter it would drop the price to $99, and that’s when most of its sales happened. Every one of those orders carried the discount, regardless of who the buyer was.
So, we suggested testing Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions for brand cart abandoners. These shoppers already showed intent, so the discount goes where it can change the outcome instead of to every buyer.
Should you run Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions? What our accounts show
Most Brand Registry brands with steady detail page traffic should run Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions. As these shoppers already looked at your product, even a small discount has a real chance of ending in a conversion.
However, if your margin can't cover 10% off (the lowest discount Amazon allows) or the same product already runs frequent deals, it’s better to skip Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions. The same goes for a product that is low on stock, because a promotion that sells you out can cost you organic rank, as we explain in our guide to Amazon rank drops after a stockout.
Mike Todorov, our Director of Amazon Growth, runs them on a schedule: "We run Brand Tailored Promotions for two to four weeks every quarter, as that audience is very easy to run through."
A short run only captures the shoppers who were close to buying. Letting the offer run all year mostly discounts the purchases of customers who would’ve returned anyway.
Dreamfarm, a kitchen tools brand we work with, followed the same pattern in September 2026. It set a 10% offer for brand cart abandoners from the last 90 days which worked out to an audience of about 86,000 shoppers. Then, it ended the discount the day before Prime Big Deal Days started. By the brand's own numbers, its earlier Tailored Promotions converted at 8% to 11%.
When we audited a UK personal care brand's account, a past cart abandoner promotion at 20% off all products had brought in about 9.7x its cost in sales. A second campaign, labeled "repeat customers", had pointed at a different audience and barely ran. So, check which audience a promotion actually targets before you judge it.
How to set up your first Amazon Brand Tailored Promotion
The Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions setup takes just a few steps. Here’s how we go about creating Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions:
Step 1: Confirm you have access
Make sure your brand is in Brand Registry and the tool shows up in your account. As mentioned earlier, it’s currently available only to brands enrolled in Brand Registry in the US, UK, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan.
Step 2: Select a secondary product
We suggest that you don’t use your bestseller to run the first test. This way, a weak result will cost you little.
Step 3: Choose the acquisition audience
As this guide focuses on using Amazon Brand Tailored Promotions to win back Amazon shoppers who almost bought from you, you’ll pick “New Customer Acquisition” as your goal. This covers recent clicks and cart abandoners.
Step 4: Start at 10%
We recommend that you start with 10%, the lowest discount that Amazon allows. Raise the discount only if your data shows few redemptions at that level.
Step 5: Set an end date
Our recommendation is to let the promotion run for two to four weeks. Just double-check that you end the promotion before any other big deal event so the offers don't overlap.
Step 6: Write down the worst-case price
Amazon allows customers to stack a Tailored Promotion on top of other promotions like coupons. That said, Amazon's seller promotions guide warns against unintended "discount stacking", where a coupon is applied to a product that already has a discount.
So, check your Promotions and Coupons pages before you add a new offer on top of a running one, add up every active discount, and check that the final price still clears your margin floor.
Pricing the discount before launching it
Every promotion you fund has a ceiling you can work out in advance. Mike explains it to clients like this: when you run a Price Discount, you fund the amount off each unit and commit a number of units, so the most it can cost is the two multiplied.
Example: $5 off x 100 units = $500
For an Amazon Brand Tailored Promotion, you can estimate the expected units as redemptions multiplied by units per order, since each eligible customer can redeem it only once.
Stacking Subscribe and Save with a coupon
Per Amazon's Subscribe and Save guide, Subscribe and Save coupons apply to the first delivery of a new subscription. This is separate from the base subscription discount sellers fund, which is 0%, 5%, or 10% for most orders.
On one account, we combined a 15% Subscribe and Save discount with a 15% coupon for the first subscription order. Stacking the discount with the coupon in this way meant that the first payment was 30% less, with the $39.99 list price lowered to $27.99.
There’s one catch, though. Shoppers only see the Subscribe and Save price after they pick that option on the product page. Search results show the one-time price by default.
Within days of moving to subscription-only discounts, that brand asked us to add a visible discount because sales had dropped, so we switched it to a Price Discount. If you need the discount to bring shoppers in from search, it has to show on the one-time price.
Isolating a remarketing campaign from blended spend
Across the 17 accounts for which we ran Sponsored Display in September 2026, a median 78% of Sponsored Display sales came from new-to-brand (NTB) customers, at a median ACoS of 21%. This is why isolating Sponsored Display remarketing spend matters for seeing true incremental performance.
Most Sponsored Display money goes to winning new customers. Now, if your remarketing sits inside the same campaigns, its results remain invisible as they get averaged in with prospecting.
One restructure plan we wrote for a client shows what separating it looks like. The account cut its cold Sponsored Brands video campaigns, pointed product targeting ads at a kit offer, and launched a separate Sponsored Display remarketing campaign with a 14-day audience.
Here’s what we suggest:
- Give remarketing its own campaign and budget, with its ACoS only readable on its own line.
- Limit it to the promoted products.
- Separate Google remarketing too. If you send Google traffic to your Amazon listings, give it its own campaign for the same reason.
- Check the new-to-brand share (you can use our new-to-brand advertising strategy to read it).
- Measure lift (you can follow our Amazon PPC incrementality method to check that the sales wouldn't have happened anyway).
Judging the remarketing test
The first week of remarketing proves nothing. For example, one of our client's new Sponsored Display remarketing campaigns spent about $296 across three products in the first week and received 253 clicks and 0 sales. On clicks alone, it looked busy. However, when measured on sales alone, it looked broken, which is why clicks alone can't be the signal for whether retargeting is working.
Also, during the first week, the reality is that neither number tells you much yet. This is because Amazon credits ad sales for days after the click (seven days for product ads and 14 days for brand ads), as per its ads FAQ document.
So, the most recent days in your report will keep changing for a while. In other words, a zero in week one can either be a result of the data that hasn't arrived yet or, worse, a real problem.
As such, leave bids alone for the first 14 days unless your spend passes your daily cap. Then, review once a week, but only score the days that are at least 14 days old and compare the campaign's ACoS with your breakeven ACoS.
That same restructure plan put the rule this way: “Re-judge every change weekly on 14-day-complete data, not the first week's numbers.”
If you need to touch a bid, first check the following:
- Audience: Confirm the clicks come from the viewer or cart audience you built. A loose audience behaves like cold traffic.
- Detail page: Compare the promoted product's conversion rate with its normal rate. A weak page can sink any ad.
- Price and Buy Box: Check whether the price or Buy Box ownership changed that week. Either can zero out sales.
Remarketing data summary from our accounts
Here is a summary of the cases in this guide, taken from the accounts we manage and audit.
| Case | What we saw | Takeaway |
|---|---|---|
| Dreamfarm (Sep 2026) | 10% for 90-day cart abandoners offered to about 86,000 shoppers with the deal ending before Prime Big Deal Days | Run 2 to 4 weeks and avoid deal events |
| Audit of a UK personal care brand | Cart abandoner promotion at 20% off returned about 9.7x its cost | Check the audience before you judge |
| Prospective client | Most sales came at a quarterly $99 price drop | Test a Tailored Promotion before the next flat sale |
| New Sponsored Display remarketing | 253 clicks and 0 sales in week one | Wait for 14-day-complete data |
| Subscribe and Save + first order coupon | First payment 30% below list price | Make sure the discount shows in search |
How we run promotions and remarketing at Olifant
At Olifant Digital, senior specialists with at least 7 years of experience run this type of work as part of our Amazon PPC management service, with execution being supported by our in-house AI platform, Olifant AI.
Here’s how our team typically approaches promotions and remarketing:
- We audit your blended spend to identify any remarketing hidden inside prospecting campaigns so that we can move it into its own campaign.
- Then, we create your first Amazon Brand Tailored Promotion for a secondary product, limiting the discount to 10%.
- Before any promotion goes live, we calculate the exposure by multiplying the discount per unit by the expected units.
- Once we have 14 days of complete data, we review the results weekly and compare them with your break-even ACoS.
- Only if we have complete data that proves this setup holds do we roll it out to your bestseller.
If your remarketing spend is buried inside blended campaigns and you can’t tell what it’s actually returning, this is the kind of gap our 60-day guarantee on management fees covers. Get your free marketing plan and we’ll show you how we can help you reach your revenue goals.
Frequently asked questions
What is an Amazon Brand Tailored Promotion?
An Amazon Brand Tailored Promotion is a discount from 10% to 50% off that Amazon shows only to an audience you choose. It’s redeemable only once per eligible customer and open to Brand Registry brands in the US, UK, Spain, France, Italy, Germany and Japan.
How long should a Tailored Promotion run?
At Olifant Digital, we run them for two to four weeks each quarter. We avoid running it as a constant offer as this typically subsidizes shoppers who don’t need a discount to come back.
How long should I run a retargeting test before judging it?
Amazon brands should run retargeting tests for at least 14 days. After that, review weekly, scoring only the days that are at least 14 days old. A first week of clicks with no sales is a reason to check your audience, page, and price, but it isn’t enough evidence that retargeting has failed.
Can you stack Subscribe and Save with a coupon?
Yes. A Subscribe and Save discount and first-order coupon were combined in one of our accounts. However, remember the Subscribe and Save price only shows once a shopper selects that option.
Is a price discount the same as a Lightning Deal?
No. Both cost you margin, but you control the timing of a Price Discount, while Lightning Deals are limited to select products, get extra deal placements, and may carry a fee.
How much does Amazon PPC management cost?
Our Amazon PPC management services start from $2,000 per month and are custom for each brand, based on the complexity and workload required. Every engagement is run by senior specialists with at least seven years of experience, each running five to six accounts. All new engagements are backed by our 60-day guarantee on management fees.
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Alex is the founder and CEO of Olifant Digital, where his team manages over $100M in annual client revenue across 50+ e-commerce brands. He sets the agency's strategy and methodology, audits client accounts, and reviews the team's work to make sure every brand is on track to hit its growth and profitability goals. He also leads team training, so the performance data and lessons from across all accounts shape how every account manager runs their clients.
