Benchmark brand ID is a reporting dimension in Amazon Ads that identifies the brand a benchmark comparison is built around. When an advertiser adds benchmark metrics to a report, Amazon compares the campaign's click-through rate, cost per click or new-to-brand purchase rate with those of a set of competing brands. The comparison only makes sense if the report says which brand and category the peer group was chosen for. Benchmark brand ID carries the first half of that answer as an identifier; its companion field, Benchmark brand name, carries the readable label.

The field exists because one advertiser account often sells several brands in several categories. A detergent brand and a razor brand run from the same account need different rivals, and therefore different benchmarks. Without a brand key on every row, the percentiles in a benchmark report could not be traced to the competitive set that produced them.

Where the field sits

Amazon's dimensions reference for unified reporting, updated on November 11, 2026, lists 156 dimension attributes across 11 categories. One of those categories is Benchmark, with seven attributes:

  • Benchmark brand ID
  • Benchmark brand name
  • Benchmark browse category ID
  • Benchmark browse category path
  • Benchmark browse category level
  • Benchmark browse category marketplace
  • Benchmark campaign goal

All seven carry the markers for DVA+, Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display in that reference, by PPC Land's count. None of them has a former name in the legacy Amazon DSP or sponsored ads consoles, which marks the category as new rather than renamed.

Amazon's benchmark help page, updated on November 11, 2026, names Benchmark brand name, Benchmark browse category path and Benchmark campaign goal as the dimensions that show "the peer group for each comparison". Benchmark brand ID is the machine-readable equivalent of the brand name, the value a data warehouse or an API client would join on.

How the value is populated

Amazon does not publish a field-level definition of how a benchmark brand is selected. The clearest statement comes from PPC Land's reading of the dimensions reference: six of the seven benchmark attributes are derived from the products promoted in the campaign, while Benchmark campaign goal is taken from the campaign's goal and optimisation settings.

That points to a simple chain. Every product on Amazon carries a catalogue brand and sits in a browse node, Amazon's term for a position in its category tree. A campaign inherits both from the products it advertises. The benchmark system takes that brand, finds peers in the same category, and writes the brand's identifier into Benchmark brand ID; the browse category fields record where in the tree, and in which country store, the comparison was made.

The exact format of the identifier is not documented on the public pages. Amazon's advertising API already uses more than one brand key. The Sponsored Brands brands endpoint returns a brandId, a brandEntityId and a brandRegistryName for each brand tied to an advertising profile, according to the documentation of the open-source python-amazon-ad-api client, which shows sample values such as "A387T2Q1UNXHJK" for the brand ID and "ENTITY5ON7M22396H" for the entity ID. Which of these, if either, fills Benchmark brand ID has not been stated by Amazon.

How a campaign promoting two brands is handled, split into rows or assigned to one, is also undocumented.

What the benchmark behind it measures

Amazon's general availability notice of May 18, 2026 lists eight benchmark metrics: percentage of purchases new to brand, new-to-brand purchase rate, new-to-brand cost per purchase, click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), video completion rate, cost per completed view and cost per thousand impressions (CPM). Three of the eight therefore rest on new-to-brand measurement, which counts shoppers who had not bought from the brand in the previous 12 months.

Results are expressed as percentiles. The Support Center page uses p25, p50 and p75 labels, and the direction flips by metric type. For rate metrics, the top 25% means a higher rate. For cost metrics, "Top 25%" means higher cost, so a brand in the top quartile on CPC is paying more than most of its peers, not performing better.

A worked example shows how the dimensions combine. Suppose a coffee brand runs a Sponsored Products campaign in the United States. A benchmark row might read: Benchmark brand name "Acme Coffee", Benchmark browse category path "Grocery > Beverages > Coffee", level 3, marketplace US, campaign goal "conversions", CTR p50 0.45%. The campaign's own CTR of 0.38% then sits below the median of its peers in that category and goal. Change the brand ID, and the peer set and percentile values change with it. The figures are illustrative.

Amazon's launch material refers to "sophisticated peer brand matching" without numbers. A white paper of March 27, 2026, as summarised by PPC Land, describes peer sets built by nearest-neighbour matching on brand revenue and average selling price within a category, supplemented by a large language model judging competitive and customer overlap. Percentiles are spend-weighted, no single brand may exceed 49% of the weight, and at least five peer brands are required before a benchmark is shown.

Origin and evolution

Brand-level comparisons predate unified reporting. Sponsored Brands has its own benchmark endpoints in the Amazon Ads API, GET /benchmarks/brands and POST /benchmarks/brandsAndCategories, which return ACOS, CTR, impressions and ROAS by brand name and category, according to third-party API documentation published by One Systems. Those endpoints identify brands by name only and describe the category ID as "the same as the browse node ID". The new dimension adds an explicit brand identifier across ad products.

The current product arrived in stages. Amazon introduced self-service benchmarks in November 2025, available in the United States through two API report types, dspBenchmarks for the DSP and crossProgramBenchmarks for sponsored ads. Amazon's own notice is dated November 19, 2025; PPC Land reported it on November 18. Eligibility was limited to brand owners and representatives in Amazon Brand Registry, plus endemic advertisers, which anchors every benchmark to a registered brand.

On May 18, 2026, benchmarks reached general availability in 18 markets, from the United States and Brazil to Japan, Turkey and Egypt. Unified reporting itself reached general availability on June 8, 2026. The November 11, 2026 dimensions reference is the first public listing of Benchmark brand ID by name.

Why it matters

Benchmarks change how campaigns are judged. An advertiser used to ask whether a CTR rose month on month; now the question is where it ranks against peers. That reframing is only as sound as the peer set, and the brand ID is the visible record of which peer set was used. Grouping rows by Benchmark brand ID and browse category shows whether a comparison matches a client's own view of its competitors.

The field also matters for data pipelines. Agencies and software vendors pulling unified reports into warehouses need stable keys. Brand names vary in spelling across marketplaces; an identifier does not, which lets benchmark rows be joined to internal brand hierarchies or Sponsored Products performance tables.

The peer set also shapes Amazon's prompts. PPC Land found that none of the 16 recommended benchmark actions suggests reducing spend.

Limitations and disputes

The definition gap is the first problem. Amazon's help page does not say whether Benchmark brand name, and by extension Benchmark brand ID, refers to the advertiser's own brand or to the peer group.

The methodology is opaque. When benchmarks reached general availability, PPC Land noted that Amazon had not published precise details about how peer groups are constructed. The white paper gives no lookback window, refresh cadence or peer list; advertisers see only the brand and category a set was built for.

The statistics are contested. Amazon's help page calls the median "the middle performance level where half of peer brands perform above and half perform below". PPC Land argued that this description does not match a spend-weighted percentile, in which a large spender counts for more than a small one.

Coverage is inconsistent. Amazon's launch and GA notices list Sponsored TV among supported products, while the dimensions reference does not mark benchmark fields for Sponsored TV and says Sponsored TV is not yet supported in unified reporting. PPC Land's summary of the November help page omits Sponsored Display, which the dimensions reference includes.

From January 1, 2027, Amazon will count only on-screen impressions and expects about 63% fewer, so CPM and CTR benchmarks will break with their history.

Benchmark brand ID is not...

Brand ID in Brand Registry. Brand Registry, Amazon's programme for verified brand owners, assigns its own identifiers for brand protection and storefronts. Benchmark brand ID is a reporting key that labels a comparison. They may share an underlying value, but Amazon has not said so.

Advertised product brand. The unified report also has an Advertised product brand dimension, which describes the brand of the specific product that served an ad. Benchmark brand ID describes the brand a peer group was built for, and holds one value for the whole comparison.

Brand entity ID. The brandEntityId used in Sponsored Brands creatives and Stores identifies the brand for ad building and landing pages. It is a campaign-setup key, not a benchmark label.

Recent developments

The benchmark dimensions became visible as a group on November 11, 2026, when Amazon updated both the dimensions reference and the benchmark help page.

The legacy benchmark report remains outside unified reporting for now. A migration page dated November 12, 2026 lists it among ten report types not yet available in the new system, and Amazon's timeline puts the shutdown of legacy reporting pages on January 31, 2027, after earlier stating December 31, 2026. If the old report closes before it migrates, the unified fields, Benchmark brand ID among them, become the main route to benchmark data.

Timeline

  • 2017: Amazon relaunches Brand Registry, later the eligibility gate for benchmarks.
  • November 11, 2025: Unified reporting opens in beta.
  • November 18-19, 2025: Amazon launches self-service benchmarks in beta in the United States, with dspBenchmarks and crossProgramBenchmarks API report types.
  • March 27, 2026: Amazon publishes its white paper describing peer-set construction.
  • May 18, 2026: Benchmarks reach general availability in 18 markets with eight metrics.
  • June 8, 2026: Unified reporting reaches general availability.
  • November 11, 2026: Amazon's dimensions reference lists seven Benchmark attributes, including Benchmark brand ID; the benchmark help page is updated.
  • November 12, 2026: Amazon's migration page lists the benchmark report among ten types not yet in unified reporting.
  • January 1, 2027: On-screen impression counting takes effect, changing CPM and CTR baselines.
  • January 31, 2027: Scheduled shutdown of legacy reporting pages.

Summary

Who: Amazon Ads defines and populates the field. It is available to brand owners and representatives enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, and to endemic advertisers, running DVA+, Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands or Sponsored Display campaigns.

What: Benchmark brand ID is a dimension in Amazon's unified reporting that identifies the brand a benchmark peer group was built around. It sits in a seven-attribute Benchmark category with brand name, four browse category fields and campaign goal, and is derived from the products a campaign promotes.

When: Self-service benchmarks launched in beta in the United States in November 2025 and reached general availability in 18 markets on May 18, 2026. The field appears by name in Amazon's dimensions reference updated on November 11, 2026.

Where: In the Amazon Ads console's unified reporting and in benchmark reports available through the Amazon Ads API, across the 18 marketplaces where benchmarks are generally available.

Why: Benchmarks compare a campaign's CTR, CPC, CPM, video and new-to-brand metrics with peer brands in the same category. The brand ID records which brand anchored that comparison, so multi-brand advertisers and data pipelines can trace each percentile to its peer set.