Amazon Ads on October 2, 2026 added pre-built brand penetration indices to Geographic Insights and Activation, letting self-service advertisers and tech providers in nine countries map where their brand under- or over-indexes against its category and steer campaigns accordingly, without first building a model in Amazon Marketing Cloud.

In Short

Amazon now gives advertisers a ready-made map showing where their brand sells well or poorly compared with similar products, built from Amazon's own shopping data. Before, getting that map meant building it yourself inside Amazon's data analysis tool, which takes skills and time many advertisers do not have. Now an advertiser can pick the map, choose to push ads harder in weak or strong areas, and the map updates itself every week.

What Amazon released on October 2

The launch notice, published on the Amazon Ads site and dated October 2, 2026, describes a narrow but practical change to a product that has existed for more than a year. Geographic Insights and Activation, known as GIA, "now offers pre-built penetration indices directly in the location widget of DVA+ with advanced settings, allowing advertisers to visualise brand penetration and activate geographic optimisation without Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) set-up," according to Amazon.

The indices are "powered by Amazon's first-party retail data," according to the company, and "are generated from the advertiser's tracked product ASINs and compare brand penetration against the broader product category." Three elements in that sentence matter. The data source is Amazon's retail business, not anything the advertiser uploads. The brand is defined by the products the advertiser already tracks in its account. And the measure is relative: a region scores high or low not on absolute sales but on how the brand performs compared with the category it competes in.

The workflow, as Amazon describes it, has three steps. An advertiser views an interactive map, selects a pre-built index and chooses an optimisation strategy, "such as reaching audiences in markets with low or high brand penetration, all from the ad group level." Screenshots in the announcement carry two captions: "Search and select from available pre-built brand penetration indices" and "Select a pre-built index and choose penetration-based optimisation strategies."

The indices also change over time. "Indices refresh weekly, helping campaigns continuously adapt to changing conditions without manual intervention," according to Amazon.

The problem Amazon says it is solving

Amazon frames the release around a complaint from its customers. "Advertisers have told us that building geographic strategies is time-consuming, requiring them to source fragmented regional data, build custom models in AMC and manually translate those insights into campaign parameters," the announcement states.

Its claimed answer is speed. "Pre-built indices help eliminate this burden, giving advertisers instant access to brand-vs-category penetration insights and reducing the path from geographic intelligence to campaign activation from days to minutes," according to Amazon. The "days to minutes" figure is the company's own characterisation. The notice cites no study, sample of advertisers or baseline workflow behind it, and no performance data on campaigns that used the indices.

The burden being described is real enough for anyone who has worked with AMC. The service, an Amazon-run clean room, returns only aggregated query results, and building a location index there involves writing SQL against pseudonymised retail and advertising data, exporting the outputs and then formatting them into postal-code values that the campaign tools can read. That is analyst work. For a self-service advertiser without a data team, the pre-built route removes the whole sequence.

How this fits into GIA's sixteen-month history

GIA did not begin as a no-code tool. Amazon first presented it on June 23, 2025, when Amazon launched a geographic insights feature to identify untapped markets inside Amazon DSP. That version used sales index visualisations to show where products over- or under-indexed against their category, surfaced in the same location widget, with one-click activation applying geo-modifiers to campaigns. It was built with WPP Media and Choreograph during a 2024 concept phase.

Four months later, the programmatic route arrived. In October 2025, Amazon released a geographic optimization API for DSP advertisers in beta, with six endpoints operating at postal-code level. The prerequisites listed then were an Amazon DSP account, AMC access and active ad groups. Advertisers uploaded index versions either as direct values, scored from 0 to 100 per postal code, or as constituent values calculated from brand sales and category sales per postal code. Bid multipliers were expressed as decimals, with 2.0 meaning plus 100% and 0.2 meaning minus 80%.

That API reached general availability on May 4, 2026, as covered in Amazon Ads' May 2026 roundup in which benchmarks went global, MMM exited beta and GIA reached GA. The GA version simplified the workflow: location indexes began accepting postal-code data inline at creation, the separate version step disappeared, and smart locations moved to a new create endpoint before being attached to ad groups through the Campaign Management Targets API.

What the October release changes is the source of the index. Until now, the brand-versus-category comparison had to come from the advertiser, typically assembled in AMC. With pre-built indices, Amazon computes the comparison itself from its retail data and the advertiser's tracked ASINs, then hands back a selectable index. The constituent-value logic described in the 2025 API documentation, brand sales against category sales, maps closely onto what Amazon now says the pre-built indices measure. The difference is who does the arithmetic.

Where the feature works, and where it does not

Amazon lists nine countries across three regions:

  • North America: United States, Canada
  • Europe: Germany, Spain, France, Italy, United Kingdom
  • Asia Pacific: Australia, Japan

That list is shorter than other recent Amazon Ads footprints. In August, PPC Land reported that Amazon DSP advertisers gained a single global account across 34 countries. Brand+ and Performance+, the automated campaign products, run in roughly 34 markets. Mexico and Brazil, both of which Amazon added to zip-code TV ad targeting in July, nine months after the US, are absent from the pre-built indices list, as are the Middle East markets, the Netherlands, Sweden and Turkey.

The nine countries correspond closely to the regions where AMC was described as available in October 2025: North America, Europe, Japan and Australia. Amazon does not explain the selection in the notice. A plausible reading, which the company has not confirmed, is that the indices depend on retail data volumes or postal-code infrastructure already in place for AMC-based GIA in those marketplaces.

Who can use it, and the question of DVA+

According to Amazon, "pre-built indices are available to self-service advertisers and tech providers via the DVA+ with advanced settings UI and public API." For automated buyers, the API route is spelled out separately: "Pre-built indices can be activated programmatically via the public API at the ad group level, enabling tech providers and advertisers with automated workflows to integrate geographic optimisation into their existing campaign management processes."

Managed-service advertisers, those whose campaigns are run by Amazon's own account teams, are not mentioned.

The interface reference raises a question the notice does not answer. DVA+ is a Display, Video and Audio campaign flow that runs inside Amazon Ads Agent. Three days before the GIA notice, on September 29, PPC Land reported that Amazon Ads put the 4-step DVA+ campaign builder in US closed beta, with an open beta expected in late October 2026, international expansion through the fourth quarter and general availability in 35 markets targeted for the first quarter of 2027. In that structure, "advanced settings" is the optional second tier exposing manual programmatic controls such as audience targeting, bid strategies, publisher lists, frequency caps and multiple ad groups per format.

The October 2 notice, by contrast, lists the pre-built indices as available in nine countries, six of them outside the United States, through a UI that the earlier reporting placed in a US-only closed beta. Amazon does not reconcile the two. The API route does not depend on DVA+, so tech providers in the eight non-US markets may be able to use the indices programmatically regardless. Whether a self-service advertiser in Germany or Japan can reach the location widget in DVA+ with advanced settings at present is not stated in the announcement.

What the notice leaves out

Several technical details that a buyer would need to evaluate the indices are missing from the launch material.

Geographic granularity. The notice speaks of "markets" and an "interactive map." It does not say whether the pre-built indices are computed at postal-code level, as the GIA API is, or at a coarser unit such as a region, a metro area or a designated market area. The difference is significant: postal-code scores in a sparse category can swing on a handful of orders.

Index methodology. "Brand penetration" is not defined. It could mean the share of category buyers in an area who bought the brand, the brand's share of category sales value, or something else. The notice does not say which category is used when an advertiser's tracked ASINs span several, how thresholds are set for low-volume areas, or whether a minimum number of orders is required before an area receives a score.

What the strategies actually do. Choosing "low" or "high" penetration as a strategy implies bid adjustments by area, as in the original GIA and the API. The size of those adjustments, whether they can be customised, and whether the low-penetration option excludes or merely deprioritises high-penetration areas are not described.

Weekly refresh behaviour. A weekly refresh means an ad group's geographic weighting can change without an advertiser touching the campaign. The notice does not say whether advertisers are notified of changes, whether historical index versions are kept for comparison, or how a refresh interacts with campaign reporting.

Measurement. No incrementality data, case study or comparison against AMC-built indices accompanies the release.

None of these gaps makes the feature unusable, but they define the trade an advertiser accepts. A custom AMC index is transparent to the person who wrote the query. A pre-built index is quicker to reach and maintained automatically, and its construction is visible only to Amazon.

Why it matters for advertisers and agencies

For the marketing community, the significance sits less in the map than in who can now use it. Geographic optimisation on Amazon has, until this release, been gated by AMC competence. That made it a tool for large brands and the agency groups that built it with Amazon, such as WPP Media and Choreograph. A self-service advertiser selling across several categories now has access to the same type of signal through a dropdown.

The change also continues a pattern visible across Amazon Ads in 2026: insights that previously required AMC queries being packaged into default products. In June, Amazon let AMC users query first-party paid features for free until the end of 2026, removing a cost barrier on signals such as Amazon Retail Purchases and Amazon Audience Segment Insights through December 31, 2026. In July, Amazon added 10 AI features across Brand+ and Performance+, including default-on changes that took manual configuration out of advertisers' hands. Pre-built indices apply the same logic to location: Amazon computes the signal, the advertiser picks an option.

There is a competitive reading too. Amazon's retail data is the input no other demand-side platform can offer, and brand-versus-category sales by area is exactly the kind of insight a brand would otherwise buy from a syndicated panel provider or build from its own sell-out data. Placing that signal one click away inside a campaign tool, refreshed weekly at no stated extra cost, strengthens the case for running geographic budgets through Amazon DSP rather than through a rival platform that would need the data imported.

It also concentrates more of the decision inside Amazon. The retailer that sells the products also scores where those products underperform and then sells the advertising to fix it. The notice does not say whether the indices draw only on Amazon store sales or on any wider signals, and a brand whose distribution is strong in physical stores but weak on Amazon in a given area is likely to see that area scored as low-penetration, whatever its total market share. Does that matter? For brands with significant offline or direct-to-consumer sales, an Amazon-only penetration map measures Amazon performance, not market performance. That distinction was easier to manage when the advertiser built the index in AMC and could blend in its own sales data, an option the original GIA was explicitly designed to support.

Agencies running geographic tests across platforms face a further consideration. A first-party data signal that refreshes weekly, on a methodology the buyer cannot inspect, is harder to use as a stable control in a holdout or matched-market design than a fixed custom index.

What happens next

Several questions remain open after October 2. It is unclear when the pre-built indices will reach markets beyond the nine listed, and whether the DVA+ interface availability described in the notice matches the beta status reported in late September. Amazon has not published methodology documentation for the indices on the launch page. Nor has it said whether the custom AMC route and the pre-built route can be combined, for instance by using an Amazon-built index as one input alongside an advertiser's own regional sales data.

DVA+ is scheduled for open beta in late October 2026 and general availability across 35 markets in the first quarter of 2027, according to the timeline PPC Land reported on September 29. If that schedule holds, the location widget carrying the pre-built indices will reach a much wider pool of self-service advertisers over the coming two quarters, and the nine-country list may change with it. The AMC free-access window for first-party paid features closes on December 31, 2026, and Amazon has not said whether pricing returns afterwards. Advertisers deciding between custom AMC indices and the pre-built version will be making that choice with those dates in view.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Amazon Ads, and the self-service advertisers and tech providers that buy through Amazon DSP's DVA+ campaign flow with advanced settings or through the Amazon Ads public API. Managed-service advertisers are not mentioned.

What: Pre-built brand penetration indices inside Geographic Insights and Activation. Generated from Amazon's first-party retail data and an advertiser's tracked ASINs, the indices compare brand penetration against the wider product category, are shown on an interactive map, refresh weekly and can be activated at ad group level with strategies that target low- or high-penetration markets, all without building a model in Amazon Marketing Cloud.

When: The launch notice is dated October 2, 2026. GIA itself first appeared on June 23, 2025, and its API reached general availability on May 4, 2026.

Where: Nine countries: the United States and Canada; Germany, Spain, France, Italy and the United Kingdom; and Australia and Japan.

Why: Amazon says advertisers found geographic strategies time-consuming because they had to gather fragmented regional data, build custom AMC models and translate the results into campaign settings, and claims the pre-built indices cut that path "from days to minutes." The release extends geographic optimisation to advertisers without AMC skills, while leaving index methodology, geographic granularity and the DVA+ availability question unaddressed in the launch material.