What's a Good CPM for Amazon DSP in 2026?

Amazon DSP's average CPM was $7.82 in 2025, up 47% from $5.30 in 2024 — the sharpest year-over-year cost increase of any major digital ad channel measured — according to SellerApp's "State of Amazon Advertising 2026" benchmark report. Category matters too: Pets averaged $11.66 CPM in 2025 while Toys & Games ran as low as $4.30, the cheapest reach category in the report.

Why DSP Got So Much More Expensive So Fast

SellerApp's report, built on more than $3 billion in managed ad spend across 33,000+ brands, ties the price jump to demand: DSP's share of total Amazon ad spend rose from 17.7% to 23.4% over the year, DSP-driven clicks grew 156% year-over-year, and 36.5% of DSP-attributed purchases came from customers new to the brand. Advertisers kept bidding up the same inventory because it was delivering something Sponsored Ads struggle to reach on their own: net-new customers, not just shoppers already searching for the brand by name.

CPM by Category

• Pets: $11.66, the most expensive category SellerApp measured
• Health: $11.13, close behind Pets
• Toys & Games: $4.30, the cheapest reach category in the dataset

Categories competing for a smaller, higher-intent shopper base command a premium the same way finance and legal keywords do on search — Pets and Health both skew toward repeat, higher-lifetime-value purchases, which makes advertisers willing to pay more per thousand impressions to stay in front of that audience.

CPM Isn't Steady Quarter to Quarter

Tinuiti's quarterly Digital Ads Benchmark Report shows real swings underneath that annual average: DSP CPM fell 10% year-over-year in Q2 2025, then rose 11% in Q3 2025 — the first quarter of positive CPM growth since Q3 2023 — before dipping 4% again over the Thanksgiving-to-Cyber-Monday 2025 stretch, even as Prime Video ad impressions on DSP grew 650% in that same window. Budgeting off a single annual number will miss quarter-to-quarter shifts of 10% or more in either direction.

Rising Impressions Don't Always Mean Rising CPM

The BFCM 2025 window is a useful illustration of why a single average can mislead: Prime Video ad impressions on DSP grew 650% year-over-year during that stretch, yet CPM actually fell 4% over the same period. More inventory volume and higher CPM don't move together automatically — it depends on whether advertiser demand is growing as fast as the impression supply Amazon is adding.

Budgeting Around These Numbers

Use $7.82 as a 2026 planning baseline for blended DSP CPM, adjust up meaningfully if Pets or Health is your category, and build in room for the kind of double-digit quarterly swings Tinuiti's tracker has shown over the past year rather than assuming a flat rate across every quarter.

Bottom Line

Expect to pay somewhere around $8 CPM on Amazon DSP heading into 2026, more in Pets and Health, less in categories like Toys & Games, and treat that number as a moving target rather than a fixed price given how much CPM has swung quarter to quarter over the past year.

Sources: SellerApp, "State of Amazon Advertising 2026" benchmark report; Tinuiti, Digital Ads Benchmark Report (Q2 2025, Q3 2025, and Q4 2025/BFCM editions).