Best Amazon DSP agencies in 2026: Why cookieless targeting made Amazon's DSP essential in e-commerce

Short answer: Best Amazon DSP agencies in 2026

The best Amazon DSP agencies in 2026 are those who use DSP as another way to reach audiences through Sponsored Ads. Not as a separate and independent programmatic ad buy.

In that context, Olifant Digital is the top recommendation for established brands seeking to extend their programmatic reach through DSP, atop a working Sponsored Ads account. 

Best Amazon DSP agencies in 2026: Our top picks

1. Olifant Digital

Best for: Established e-commerce brands with already performing Sponsored Ads accounts looking to layer senior-led teams on top of DSP rather than bolt them on as an afterthought.

Most agencies mess up how they approach DSP. They sell DSP as if it were a separate product from Sponsored Ads; a line-item with its own report and its own pitch. We don’t do that. That would defeat the purpose of using DSP in the first place.

In order for DSP to be effective, it needs to sit atop a Sponsored Ads foundation that is already producing results. We take care of building the strategy based on that foundation right from day one. 

Every account receives a strategist with at least seven years in the seat. So, the person building your audiences will have made the expensive mistakes somewhere else, on someone else's budget. 

There’s no junior hand-off buried three layers deep. The same person who manages your Sponsored Ads will also manage your DSP audiences. 

We also report on TACoS rather than simply reporting on ACoS. It makes a huge difference in terms of being able to measure the contributions that DSP is making to your bottom line accurately.

Lastly, creative is handled in-house. There’s no need for you to wait on another entity each and every time a campaign requires additional display or video assets.

DSP capabilities: 

• Direct access to the DSP seat
• AMC-driven audience building
• Full-funnel campaigns (display, video, CTV)
• Daily optimization

2. Tinuiti

Best for: Enterprise clients that are spending six figures per month on DSP across more than one retail media network.

Tinuiti is one of the largest independent performance marketing firms in the United States. Plus, Amazon has officially made it an Advanced Partner. 

It earns this badge through measurement. It relies heavily on AMC and couples that with cross-channel media mix modeling. This means you’re not stuck looking at an isolated DSP number that doesn’t talk to anything else in your media mix.

Its DSP runs on MobiusX, a platform they’ve been developing since 2014 with dedicated teams managing DSP, Walmart Connect, and other networks side-by-side. If your budget and complexity match enterprise scale, this is built for that. 

DSP capabilities: 

• Direct access to a DSP seat
• AMC and cross-channel attribution
• Multi-network programmatic management 
• CTV and streaming execution

3. Incrementum Digital

Best for: Mid-market clients that want a growth-partner relationship (not just an execution vendor) with strong DSP and AMC expertise.

Incrementum Digital positions its agency differently than most names on this list, and it shows in how the team talks about results.

It’s selling incrementality. The team wants to know whether DSP drives sales that wouldn’t have happened in any case. This is a harder question to answer, one which agencies usually don’t bother asking.

It folds DSP into a unified strategy with Sponsored Ads and AMC, builds custom audiences off clean room data, and backs it up with real thought leadership.

Creative support is included too. This means display and video aren’t something you have to source separately.

DSP capabilities: 

• Direct access to a DSP seat
• AMC clean-room integration
• Full-funnel strategy 
• In-house creative services 

4. Channel Key

Best for: Mid-market clients that want hands-on account management and a DSP team that knows the category benchmarks.

Channel Key doesn’t run DSP as its own island. It sits inside a fuller offering with Sponsored Ads, listing optimization, and brand management. What’s more, one team owns the whole account instead of handing off the DSP work to another team that never talks to the rest.

The team handles audience strategy, retargeting, and display/video across both Amazon-owned and third-party inventory. They also bring category benchmarks for CPMs and conversions into the planning process instead of guessing.

DSP capabilities: 

• Direct access to a DSP seat
• Full-funnel campaigns
• Category-specific benchmarking
• Integrated Sponsored Ads/DSP strategy

5. Flywheel Digital 

Best for: Global clients that are running DSP across multiple Amazon marketplaces that want serious data and analytics behind targeting.

If your catalog exists on Amazon US, UK, Germany, and Japan at once, agencies often start to strain. Flywheel doesn’t because cross-marketplace coordination is essentially what it does.

It pairs DSP management with proprietary retail analytics that track market share, pricing, and competitive positioning in real time. This data feeds directly into how the team builds audiences and sets bids rather than sitting in a separate dashboard nobody opens.

Its AMC integrations are built for that same scale. As such, reporting remains consistent regardless of whether you’re looking at one marketplace or five. 

DSP capabilities: 

• Direct access to a DSP seat 
• Global marketplace coverage 
• Proprietary retail analytics platform
• AMC integration
• Cross-marketplace DSP strategy

6. Canopy Management

Best for: Growing clients that are generating between $2 million to $20 million and want to use DSP within full-service Amazon management without exceeding enterprise minimums.

Canopy was approved early as an official Amazon DSP provider when that access was limited to only a small group of independents. This headstart still shows in how comfortably the team moves inside the platform.

The practical benefit of using Canopy is a blended self-service model. You get agency-level DSP strategy without first clearing Amazon’s $50,000 managed service threshold.

The two strategies (Sponsored Ads and DSP) are managed by the same team instead of being separate work streams. This means funnel alignment isn't something bolted on after the campaigns go live.

DSP capabilities: 

• Access to the DSP seat
• Integrated Sponsored Ads strategy
• In-house creative services

7. My Amazon Guy

Best for: Clients that want to understand their DSP strategy, not just receive a monthly report on it.

Founder Steven Pope developed one of the largest free educational libraries in Amazon advertising. That same desire to explain things carries straight over into how client accounts are run.

DSP isn’t treated as some side practice bolted onto its main service. It runs as full-funnel campaigns with audience targeting tied directly into Sponsored Ads, and the same openness that defines its content shows up in how they actually explain work week-to-week to clients.

If you want to learn the strategy while someone else handles execution, this is where you need to be.

DSP capabilities: 

• Full-funnel strategy
• Audience targeting
• Sponsored Ads integration

8. Emplicit

Best for: Clients that want to pair DSP with strong creative and brand-building strategies, not just media buying.

Emplicit’s entire angle is that DSP should help build the brand, not just chase short-term conversions.

It manages DSP alongside brand management, creative production, and Sponsored Ads. Then, awareness and consideration campaigns are designed with long-term equity in mind, rather than trying to squeeze out the cheapest possible click.

Where it really stands out is creative. Display banners/videos, and A+ Content all get produced in-house. This means that DSP creative actually matches the rest of the brand's visual identity, rather than being put together by another team that never saw the brand guidelines.

DSP capabilities: 

• In-house creative production 
• Brand-building strategies
• Sponsored Ads integration

Why the depreciation of third-party cookies made Amazon DSP the best ad channel for e-commerce brands

Third-party cookies were able to follow consumers across the web. They could be dropped after visiting a shoe review website, and then retargeted at the consumer later while they’re watching ESPN. This works well in theory.

The problem was that inference isn’t the same as intent. A DSP may use a cookie to guess what someone wants to do next based on where they browsed.

When browsers phased out third-party cookies, DSPs (regardless of whether behavioral or interest-based) suffered loss of targeting precision on a significant percentage of available open web inventory.

As a result, programmatic CPMs on behavioral targeting increased because there was less targeted inventory. ROAS for campaigns using cookie audiences for retargeting also decreased.

For those advertisers who built their programmatic strategy around behavioral data, they now find themselves spending more money on less accurate targeting.

Why Amazon DSP remained unaffected

Amazon DSP uses the data of what customers actually do on Amazon’s platform. That includes: 

• Purchase history
• Search behavior
• Product pages viewed
• Categories browsed
• Subscribe and save status

No matter how many times you visit a website (other than Amazon), none of this information comes from third-party cookies. Instead, it comes from actual purchases made by the customer on Amazon’s platform. So, if a marketer wants to target “customers who purchased joint health supplements within the last 90 days and viewed a competitor product within the last 30 days”, the list is generated from actual purchase receipts, not from inferred behavior from website visits.

💡Pro Tip: Prior to working with any DSP agency ask them to provide an example audience segment that it has developed using Amazon’s first-party data for a brand in your category. Ask the team specifically for examples of “competitor product viewers who didn’t purchase” and “in market for [category]”. Any reputable DSP agency should be able to build both segments routinely and provide examples quickly, typically in under ten minutes. 

The real caveat: The advantages provided by first-party data are real but limited

The cookieless advantage is structural and real. It doesn’t make Amazon DSP the right buy for every advertiser, and we think it's worth being direct about that.

Amazon walked back some cookieless innovation along the way. The PAAPI Privacy Sandbox integration was shelved in 2025 due to low advertiser adoption and Google’s own changes. The first-party data moat is strong. The broader cookieless innovation roadmap is still evolving.

The managed service minimum spend is $50,000 per month. At that threshold, DSP is not the right buy for most accounts. Self-service DSP exists without a spend minimum but requires AMC expertise most brands don't have internally.

And without AMC, DSP's contribution to conversion is materially understated by last-click attribution. AMC is a specialist capability. Most agencies either don't offer it or offer it superficially.

The honest framing: Amazon DSP's first-party data moat is significant for e-commerce targeting. It isn’t a shortcut past the operational work of building a proper SP foundation and AMC measurement capability.

What Amazon DSP is and how it differs from Sponsored Ads

What Amazon DSP does

DSP (demand-side platform) is a programmatic advertising system which allows advertisers to purchase various forms of digital ad inventory (display, video, audio, and streaming TV) through the use of Amazon's first-party audience data. It isn’t a search-engine-based ad buying platform.

When people see DSP ads, they aren’t in the middle of a search. Instead, they’re viewing content somewhere else. So, instead of reaching consumers as they go to the search bar, DSP reaches consumers before they get there. This is the idea behind DSP.

There are two ways to access DSP. There’s a self-serve model where brands run their own DSP campaigns without having to meet a minimum spend. Then, there’s a managed service model with a monthly minimum of $50,000.

Most brands have agencies managing their DSP campaigns due to the complexity of the platform. It requires operational depth that would take internal resources many months to develop.

How Amazon DSP works compared to Sponsored Products

We're often asked, "doesn't DSP compete with Sponsored Ads?" No, it doesn't. Both play roles within a consumer's journey, and both need to be used in conjunction to produce results.

Sponsored ads will capture a buyer while they’re currently actively searching for products on Amazon. In contrast, DSP will capture buyers who don’t intend to shop or search yet.

For example, you may be streaming shows, reading online content etc. While one piece of advertising seeks to catch declared intent (searching), the other will help create that intent over time.

The three Amazon DSP targeting types worth understanding

What differentiates an advanced DSP strategy from a basic retargeting campaign are the decisions made regarding which form of targeting to use when.

Audiences (pre-built): Audiences created by Amazon using its proprietary behavioral data. Examples include shoppers currently researching protein powder, or Prime Video members who’ve previously purchased athletic wear.

These pre-built audiences leverage Amazon’s first-party data. They offer high-scale, broad targeting options, and should be used as part of an awareness campaign or prospecting efforts to reach new-to-brand shoppers.

Advertiser Audiences (first-party retargeting): Created by the advertiser using their own Amazon data. This includes product pages viewed, items added to cart, and previous purchases.

Advertiser Audience represents the most highly-intended audience type since it includes shoppers that have demonstrated a direct interest in purchasing the specific product being advertised. It should be used to target shoppers that have previously interacted with the brand (retargeting), or those that have converted through Subscribe & Save conversions.

Lookalike Audiences: Using the same algorithmic modeling approach that creates lookalike audiences for Facebook advertising, Amazon uses the buyer behavior data associated with a brand’s established purchaser list to identify new prospects that mirror the same behaviors as the brand’s proven customers.

To create a statistically significant lookalike model requires a large enough purchaser seed list.

Amazon DSP inventory: Where your ads actually appear

Where do your ads actually appear? Amazon DSP inventory can be broken down into two categories:

Amazon-owned Properties: This includes Amazon.com, Prime Video, Twitch, IMDb, and Amazon Music. All premium placements with first-party data attribution.

Amazon Publisher Services Network: A third-party network consisting of third-party publisher websites and apps where Amazon has negotiated inventory agreements. It allows brands to reach Amazon audiences outside of Amazon-owned properties. The quality will vary depending on the publisher.

Amazon DSP vs The Trade Desk and Google DV360 in 2026

For an Amazon brand evaluating programmatic spend, the question isn't which DSP is generally better. It's which DSP gives the most accurate targeting signal for reaching e-commerce buyers.

That answer depends on where the audience lives and what data is actually being used to reach them.

For Amazon sellers and e-commerce brands, Amazon DSP's first-party purchase intent data is the strongest targeting signal available in programmatic advertising in 2026.

The Trade Desk and DV360 offer broader open-web reach but without the purchase-confirmation accuracy that Amazon's closed-loop data provides. If the primary audience shops on Amazon, that's where the targeting signal will be most accurate.

The use cases where DSP delivers measurable incremental value

Product page retargeting 

Buyers who viewed a product page on Amazon but didn’t purchase are the highest-value audience for DSP retargeting. They showed an interest in a product and simply didn’t complete the purchase.

DSP retargeting reaches them everywhere they go on Prime Video, Twitch, etc., after they leave Amazon. This is Sponsored Display retargeting behavior extended beyond Amazon and across more inventory types.

Subscribe & Save conversion for repeat-purchase CPG brands 

For repeat-purchase products, DSP targets first-time buyers with Subscribe & Save messaging in the days immediately following their first purchase.

The precision, "first-time buyer of this specific ASIN who hasn’t subscribed", is only possible with Amazon's first-party purchase data. There’s no other DSP that can create this audience based on confirmed purchases.

Competitive conquest using audience lookalikes 

By creating lookalike audiences from established purchasers and then targeting them via DSP, you reach potential buyers with similar behavioral characteristics before they begin searching. 

Launch brand awareness and expand new audiences 

To launch new products or enter new markets, DSP allows you to target active shoppers looking at the category. The best way to achieve high impact for this use case is with interactive connected TV advertising on Prime Video in 2026.

When to skip DSP for now

The following are four instances when you shouldn’t consider investing in DSP. Knowing these will help create trust rather than overpromising what the channel can deliver.

• Less than $10K in SP spend per month: Too little traffic to create an adequate-sized retargeting audience. First fix your SP foundation.
• No measurement capability via Amazon Marketing Cloud: Without AMC, your DSP spend will be significantly understated. If an agency can’t explain how it uses AMC to quantify the view-through contribution of DSP, you can’t evaluate whether the investment is worthwhile.
• High ACoS and stagnant revenue from existing SP campaigns: DSP amplifies your existing funnel. If your SP funnel is damaged, adding DSP will pump more expensive traffic into a broken conversion process.
• Less than 15 reviews in categories where reviews matter: DSP creates awareness traffic. If your product page can't turn that awareness traffic into conversions because it lacks sufficient social proof, you generate impressions with no additional incremental conversion.

Amazon Marketing Cloud: Why investing in DSP without AMC makes you blind

AMC is a secure and privacy-compliant environment for customizing Amazon ads data. Through AMC, advertisers can analyze event-based data across Sponsored Ads, DSP, and Amazon Attribution, providing multi-touch attribution visibility that doesn’t exist in standard campaign manager reporting.

Here's how AMC fixes the issue described above. A buyer sees a DSP ad on Prime Video, but doesn’t click. Three days later he searches for the product on Amazon and buys through Sponsored Products.

The SP campaign gets full credit for the sale while the DSP ad gets zero credit for generating awareness of the product that triggered the search. AMC reassembles the entire purchase path and provides proportional contribution to each touchpoint involved in the purchase path. Without AMC, you won't know the true contribution of DSP.

With good AMC usage, an agency develops queries to answer such questions as: 

• “How many users exposed to DSP ultimately converted to a purchase through Sponsored Ads in 14 days?”
• “What is the incremental purchase rate for users who were exposed to both DSP and SP compared to SP only?” 

Good AMC usage answers these questions and justifies or identifies which audiences are driving incremental revenue.

What to look for in an Amazon DSP agency

Ask every prospective agency the following four questions before signing anything:

1. Do you use DSP as part of a full-funnel marketing strategy that incorporates Sponsored Ads or do you treat it as a standalone programmatic media buy?
2. How do you use AMC to measure and report on DSP performance? Can you walk me through an example of an AMC analysis you've completed for one of your current clients?
3. What's the minimum audience size you require before launching retargeting campaigns and how do you build the audience for a new brand?
4. How do you integrate DSP-derived audience data into your Sponsored Ads bid optimization decisions?

The agency should treat DSP as an audience-awareness layer built upon a solid foundation of Sponsored Ads. Then, ideally, we believe it would take at least 50K-100K monthly product page viewers for DSP retargeting to operate at scalable levels.

💡Pro Tip: When conducting interviews with prospective agencies regarding your potential partnership regarding your Amazon DSP efforts, ask them specifically: "What was the overlap percentage between your DSP-reached audience and your SP-converting customers according to your last AMC analysis for a client?" Our collective experience working with DSP in conjunction with Sponsored Ads has shown us that this overlap tends to fall within the range of 20-40%.

How Olifant approaches Amazon DSP as part of a full-funnel strategy

Olifant Digital is a full-service Amazon agency (and an Amazon PPC agency) focused exclusively on established brands with over $100 million in combined annual client revenue across 50+ active client accounts. Each of these clients has a dedicated senior specialist assigned to its account, each with a minimum of seven years of Amazon experience.

In other words, Olifant never assigns junior professionals or outsourced talent to client accounts.

In terms of our methodical approach to DSP, Olifant Digital doesn’t promote or launch DSP independently. Instead, DSP serves as the audience and awareness layer to expand upon existing Sponsored Ads.

Therefore, DSP is typically recommended only once the Sponsored Products account is properly set up and functioning to create the necessary product page traffic to generate viable DSP retargeting audiences and provide visibility into TACoS per ASIN so that full-funnel measurement is enabled.

The order in which these channels are implemented isn’t a restriction. It's the requirement to enable DSP to function appropriately.

For CPG brands with repetitive purchase patterns, DSP also provides the ability to extend the same audience targeting off-Amazon that retargeting already demonstrates on-Amazon.

For instance, HakaLife's brand tailored promotions (a feature within Sponsored Display) demonstrated that retargeting logic works effectively on-Amazon by targeting product page viewers who didn’t convert.

Similarly, DSP extends that same logic off-Amazon by using Prime Video and publisher inventory to target those same first-time buyers with Subscribe & Save messaging during the most likely period for conversion. As a result of getting the timing and targeting correct, HakaLife experienced an increase in monthly revenue of $75,216.

Another result worth mentioning illustrates the value of evaluating DSP as part of a full-funnel strategy, rather than looking at click-through rate alone. Onsen Secret's profit tripled after we shifted its reporting from ACoS to TACoS. 

This revealed organic decay that had previously been masked by ACoS reporting. Following this transition, Onsen Secret experienced an increase of $95,934 in monthly revenue. The TACoS-first lens we used to measure the full-funnel contributions of DSP via AMC directly correlates with the increased margin seen in this scenario.

Working alongside the senior specialist teams at Olifant Digital is Olifant AI, our proprietary Amazon management platform. Olifant AI identifies potential performance issues early enough that they don’t become compounded into larger problems.

When DSP is driving view-through incremental purchases that don’t appear in the Campaign Manager, AMC reveals them. When this occurs, budget allocations are modified.

The amount of incremental revenue contributed by DSP relative to SP is frequently underestimated due to last-click attribution. For example, when DSP produces 30 to 40% of the conversions received by SP, SP receives full credit for those conversions while DSP receives none.

If you’re evaluating whether DSP represents the right next investment for your account, the first step is an SP audit.

The state of your SP foundation will determine if your current structure supports an effective use of DSP or if DSP merely amplifies a structural issue inherent in your current foundation. We would much prefer to tell you that DSP isn’t yet suitable for your account than commit you to a $50K/month buy without knowing whether or not you’ve established the proper foundational infrastructure to support a high-value DSP ROI.

Schedule a free audit with Olifant Digital today. We’ll examine your SP account's viability for supporting a DSP investment: audience size, TACoS trajectory, and campaign architecture.

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Frequently asked questions

What is Amazon DSP? How does it work?

Amazon DSP is a programmatic advertising platform that enables advertisers to purchase display, video, and streaming television ad inventory using Amazon’s first party shopping and intent data for audience targeting. Amazon DSP uses buyer behavior on Amazon-owned properties and third-party publisher sites as audience targeting based on actual Amazon shopping behavior.

What is the minimum spend required to engage with Amazon DSP?

Amazon DSP has two pricing models: managed service and self-service. The managed service model for Amazon DSP has a minimum monthly spend requirement of $50,000 (one of the largest minimum spend requirements among any large digital advertising platforms). There are no minimum spend requirements for self-service Amazon DSP. However, self-service Amazon DSP requires expertise in using Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) for accurate measurement and deployment.

Is Amazon DSP worth investing in for my brand?

Amazon DSP represents a worthwhile investment for brands when a Sponsored Products account is currently generating sufficient product page traffic, TACoS improvements are evident, and AMC measurement capabilities exist. 

How does Amazon DSP differ from Sponsored Display?

Both Amazon DSP and Sponsored Display use Amazon's audience data. However, they differ significantly in terms of available inventory access, minimum spend and measurement capability. Amazon DSP accesses broader inventory beyond Amazon-owned placements, including third-party publishers, Prime Video, and streaming television. It supports custom creative assets and requires Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) for full measurement.