I spent part of this week rebuilding audience segments in Amazon DSP for a brand
By Michael Erickson Facchin · August 11, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I spent part of this week rebuilding audience segments in Amazon DSP for a brand that had one audience: "everyone who viewed a product in the last 30 days."
That's not a strategy. That's a bucket.
Amazon gives you four fundamentally different behavioral signals to build audiences from product views, product purchases, similar product views, and product searches and each one represents a completely different mindset. Someone who viewed your product and left is not the same person as someone who bought a competitor's product last week. Someone searching your category with no click yet is earlier in the journey than someone who viewed your listing twice.
Most brands collapse all of that into one retargeting pool with a 30-day lookback because it's the default setting, not because anyone decided it was right for their sales cycle. A $15 consumable and a $400 durable good do not have the same consideration window. Applying a 30-day lookback to both is just guessing with extra steps.
Here's what I actually think about when I build these:
Product views without purchase, short lookback (7–14 days) - this is your "still deciding" audience. Speak to objections, not awareness.
Product purchases, longer lookback (60–90 days) - this is replenishment or cross-sell territory, not acquisition messaging.
Similar product views - this is genuinely one of the most underused signals in DSP. These are people actively shopping your category who haven't seen you yet. Treat it like prospecting, not retargeting.
Product searches - the earliest, coldest signal you can legally act on inside Amazon's own ecosystem. Most brands ignore it entirely.
The brands getting real efficiency out of DSP right now aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones treating each audience as a different conversation, not one message blasted at everyone who came within ten feet of their listing.
If your DSP strategy still looks like one audience and one creative, that's not automation. That's just spend with extra reporting.
What's your lookback window logic, and be honest, did you actually choose it, or did you leave it on default?