Amazon Ads announced on May 18, 2026, that its benchmarks reporting feature has reached general availability across all supported marketplaces worldwide, ending a period in which the tool was limited to a single beta market. The move marks a significant expansion of competitive intelligence capabilities for brand owners and agencies running campaigns across both Sponsored Ads and Amazon DSP.

The rollout brings benchmarks to 18 markets simultaneously: United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, Japan, India, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Turkey, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Egypt. According to Amazon Ads, the feature was previously in beta and limited to the US market.

What benchmarks reporting actually measures

The feature provides standardized performance comparisons against category peer brands. According to Amazon Ads, the tool allows advertisers to "contextualize performance, evaluate optimization opportunities, and confidently invest" in campaigns. Eight distinct metrics are available through the benchmarks reports.

Four of those metrics relate directly to new-to-brand customer acquisition: percent of purchases new to brand, purchase rate new to brand, cost per purchase new to brand, and - notably absent from many ad platforms - a dedicated cost metric segmented specifically for first-time buyers. That granularity matters for brands trying to understand whether their advertising is growing the customer base or re-engaging existing buyers.

The remaining four metrics cover campaign delivery efficiency. Click-through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC) apply across formats, while completion rate and cost per completed view address video creatives. An eighth metric, cost per thousand impressions (CPM), rounds out the set for display and awareness-focused buying.

Taken together, the eight metrics span the funnel from brand discovery through to purchase, and cover the two dominant buying mechanisms on Amazon's platform: auction-based sponsored ads and programmatic DSP inventory.

How peer matching and methodology work

Peer brand matching is described by Amazon Ads as "sophisticated," though the company has not published precise details about how peer groups are constructed. The methodology uses transparent standards, according to the announcement, meaning advertisers can understand the basis on which comparisons are drawn rather than receiving a black-box score.

The practical implication is significant. A brand manager looking at a CTR figure in isolation has no way to know whether 0.4% represents strong or weak performance. That assessment depends entirely on the category - apparel, electronics, grocery, and consumer health each have distinct norms. Benchmarks provide that category-specific floor and ceiling, so a number that looks unremarkable in the abstract becomes interpretable.

Advertisers can analyze performance across three time intervals: daily, weekly, or monthly. The flexibility allows teams to match reporting cadence to their planning cycle - a weekly operational review can pull weekly data, while a monthly business review can aggregate at the right granularity without manual manipulation.

Filtering is available by ad format and campaign goal. That combination means an advertiser running Sponsored Products alongside a Sponsored TV awareness campaign can isolate the benchmark comparison relevant to each objective, rather than averaging across fundamentally different campaign types.

The API layer: two report types, one framework

The technical delivery mechanism deserves close attention. According to Amazon Ads, benchmarks reports are available through two distinct report types in the Reporting API: crossProgramBenchmarks for Sponsored Ads campaigns, and dspBenchmarks for Amazon DSP. Both sit inside the existing API framework that Amazon has been consolidating since late 2024.

For technology partners and enterprise advertisers building automated reporting pipelines, this architecture is consequential. Rather than requiring a new API integration or separate authentication flow, benchmark data flows through the same endpoints used for standard campaign reporting. The parameters change; the plumbing does not. That reduces the time and cost of connecting benchmark data to existing dashboards and business intelligence tools.

The Ad Console also exposes benchmarks directly, meaning smaller advertisers without API access can pull the data through the standard campaign management interface without writing code or working through a technology partner.

Amazon named this capability as available across Amazon DSP, Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Sponsored TV campaigns. That breadth is notable. Sponsored TV in particular is a newer format - inclusion of TV campaign benchmarks alongside search and display data gives advertisers running full-funnel programs a consistent measurement framework across all format types.

Temporal flexibility and filtering logic

The daily, weekly, and monthly granularity options are worth examining in practical terms. Daily benchmark data allows a media buyer to spot performance divergences quickly - if CTR drops below the category norm mid-campaign, that signal appears within 24 hours rather than only at the end of a reporting period. Weekly data smooths out day-of-week variation, which is common in categories where shopping patterns shift between weekdays and weekends. Monthly aggregation suits planning cycles tied to fiscal months rather than campaign flights.

The ad format filter is equally practical. Amazon's advertising stack now spans search (Sponsored Products), display (Sponsored Display), brand awareness (Sponsored Brands), programmatic (Amazon DSP), and streaming television (Sponsored TV). Each format attracts a different benchmark baseline. A CTR benchmark derived from Sponsored Products - where shoppers are actively searching - would be meaningless if applied to a DSP awareness campaign where the objective is impressions rather than clicks. Filtering by format ensures the comparison is apples-to-apples.

Campaign goal filtering adds another layer of specificity. Within a single format like Sponsored Display, an advertiser might run one campaign with a reach objective and another with a conversion objective. Those campaigns should perform differently on metrics like CTR and purchase rate - and the benchmark comparison should reflect that intentional difference rather than averaging across goals.

Access requirements and geographic scope

Not every Amazon advertiser qualifies. According to Amazon Ads, benchmarks are available to brand owners and representatives registered in Amazon's Brand Registry. The geographic scope for eligibility follows the marketplace list but with one clarification: endemic advertisers - those selling products directly within the Amazon marketplace - are eligible across US, CA, MX, BR, AU, JP, IN, DE, FR, IT, ES, UK, NL, TR, and SE.

Brand Registry registration is a prerequisite that filters out third-party resellers and non-endemic advertisers. This restricts access to brands that have a formal relationship with Amazon's brand protection infrastructure, which in turn means the peer comparison pool is made up of legitimate brand owners rather than arbitrage accounts or unofficial distributors.

The distinction matters when interpreting benchmark data. If the peer group is composed entirely of Brand Registry-registered brand owners - who tend to run more structured, longer-term advertising programs - the resulting benchmarks reflect a relatively sophisticated advertiser population. That context should inform how teams interpret gaps between their own performance and the category average.

From beta to 18 markets: what changed since November 2025

Amazon first introduced benchmarks as a self-service feature on November 18, 2025, when the two API report types - crossProgramBenchmarks and dspBenchmarks - launched in the Offline Reporting API, limited to the US market. That announcement framed the feature as a competitive intelligence tool built on peer brand matching, accessible programmatically through the existing reporting infrastructure.

The May 18, 2026 general availability release completes the global rollout, as covered by PPC Land, expanding from one market to 18 in a single release. The jump is substantial. Benchmark data requires a minimum critical mass of advertisers in each category to generate peer comparisons that are statistically meaningful. Expanding to markets as structurally different as Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, and Japan simultaneously indicates Amazon has reached sufficient advertiser density in those markets to make the peer matching viable.

The timing also places benchmarks alongside a broader pattern of Amazon reporting infrastructure maturation. The unified reporting system launched at unBoxed in November 2025 consolidated interfaces across the entire advertising stack. Cross-account reach and frequency measurement arrived in open beta on April 2, 2026, covering the same 18 marketplaces now receiving benchmarks. The Ads MCP Server opened to public beta on February 2, 2026, enabling AI agents to interact with advertising workflows through natural language. Benchmarks' global availability fits into a sequence of capabilities that, taken together, move Amazon's advertising platform toward a more tightly integrated, data-dense reporting environment.

Why the marketing community should pay attention

For agencies managing multiple client accounts, benchmark data changes the nature of the client conversation. Reporting a CTR figure without context leaves room for interpretation - and misinterpretation. Category benchmarks provide an objective reference point that is harder to dispute than internal historical trends alone. A client whose CTR is 30% below the category average has a specific, actionable problem. One whose new-to-brand purchase rate exceeds the benchmark has a defensible competitive advantage.

That dynamic applies beyond client reporting. Internal marketing teams at large brands face the same challenge justifying budget allocations across format types. If Sponsored TV campaigns are delivering completion rates above the category norm, the case for increasing investment in that format rests on harder ground than intuition.

The inclusion of new-to-brand metrics alongside efficiency metrics is particularly significant in the context of how Amazon's advertising revenue has grown. Amazon's advertising revenue exceeded $70 billion on a trailing twelve-month basis as of early 2026. Much of that growth came from brands seeking not just conversions but customer acquisition. Benchmarks that specifically surface new-to-brand purchase rates give those brands a way to evaluate whether Amazon advertising is actually delivering net-new customers at a competitive cost relative to category peers - a question that raw ROAS figures cannot answer.

The API architecture also carries implications for the growing ecosystem of third-party measurement and campaign management platforms. Any tool that already integrates with Amazon's Reporting API can, in principle, surface benchmark comparisons alongside campaign data. That lowers the barrier to benchmark adoption for advertisers using external platforms, since they do not need to return to Ad Console to access the data.

Beyond the practical mechanics, the global rollout also signals something about the maturity of Amazon's advertiser base outside the US. Generating statistically useful category benchmarks requires a minimum number of advertisers active within each product category in each market. A thin market - few advertisers, narrow category breadth - produces unreliable peer comparisons. The fact that Amazon is now confident enough to make benchmarks generally available across markets as structurally different as Egypt, Sweden, and India suggests the advertiser volume and category diversity in those markets now meets the threshold for meaningful peer matching. That, in itself, is a data point about how far Amazon's advertising footprint has grown internationally.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Brand owners and representatives registered in Amazon's Brand Registry, including endemic advertisers across 15 markets (US, CA, MX, BR, AU, JP, IN, DE, FR, IT, ES, UK, NL, TR, SE), are now eligible to use benchmarks reporting. Amazon DSP buyers also gain access through the dspBenchmarks report type.

What: Benchmarks reporting is a feature within Amazon Ads that provides standardized performance comparisons against category peer brands across eight metrics - percent of purchases new to brand, purchase rate new to brand, cost per purchase new to brand, CTR, CPC, video completion rate, cost per completed view, and CPM. The data is accessible through the Reporting API via crossProgramBenchmarks and dspBenchmarks report types, as well as directly in Ad Console.

When: Amazon Ads announced general availability on May 18, 2026. The feature was first introduced in beta on November 18, 2025, limited to the US market.

Where: Available across 18 markets spanning North America (US, CA, MX), South America (BR), Europe (DE, ES, FR, IT, UK, TR, NL, SE), the Middle East (SA, UAE, EG), and Asia Pacific (AU, IN, JP). Accessible through Amazon DSP, Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Sponsored TV campaign interfaces and the Reporting API.

Why: Category-level performance benchmarks give brand owners objective reference points for evaluating campaign efficiency and customer acquisition effectiveness relative to peer brands. The expansion addresses a structural gap in Amazon advertising measurement - the platform has historically provided absolute performance data without the category context needed to assess whether those numbers are competitive. The global rollout follows a sustained period of reporting infrastructure consolidation that began with the unified reporting system in November 2025.