Amazon Ads now reaches Walmart and Sephora shoppers – targeting beyond store boundaries

Amazon Ads is expanding its audiences beyond its own marketplace. According to an ADWEEK report from 4 November 2026, advertisers can now serve display and video ads to Amazon users who shop at US retailers such as Walmart, Dollar General, Kroger, Walgreens or Sephora. For brands working with several sales partners, this opens up a new perspective: audiences can be planned not only by Amazon interests, but also along their wider everyday shopping habits.

One audience, several checkouts

Picture a cosmetics brand that sells through Amazon and Sephora. Until now it could use Amazon's shopping and streaming signals for its advertising; according to ADWEEK, shopping behaviour at Sephora now also becomes a reference point for audience targeting. The ad therefore does not necessarily have to aim at a purchase on Amazon. It can make a brand visible to people who search for and buy products elsewhere.

This distinction is crucial for retail media. Anyone evaluating a national campaign wants to know whether it strengthens all sales channels – not just the shop where the ad space was booked. Amazon's offer is increasingly competing for budgets that were previously split between individual retailer networks and conventional video or display campaigns.

Amazon has been collecting signals beyond its own store for some time

The groundwork for this step has existed for years. The Amazon Shopper Panel is a voluntary, invitation-based programme in which participants can, among other things, share receipts from purchases made outside Amazon and answer surveys. Amazon uses such information for retail insights and advertising measurement.

Already in July, 2026 the omnichannel metrics reporting in the US became more granular: brands can see at retailer level where sales take place after an Amazon advertising campaign. The current report concerns a different step – selecting audiences before the ad is served, rather than evaluating the effect only afterwards.

Amazon describes its programmatic offering, now bundled under the Amazon Ads Agent, as a platform for display, video, audio and streaming TV on its own and external inventory. The new retailer signals make this infrastructure especially interesting for consumer goods brands whose revenue does not come from Amazon alone.

Three questions for media planning

1. Where should the sale take place? A good audience segment does not replace a sales strategy. Before a campaign launches, brands should clarify whether they want to drive visits to physical stores, acquire new customers or boost direct online purchases.

2. What is being measured? Reach, video views and attributed revenue answer different questions. For multichannel campaigns, a measurement setup that reports Amazon purchases and sales at retail partners separately is recommended. Our overview of how Amazon wants to calculate advertising impact over longer periods fits here.

3. Which segments are available in your own market? The retailers named come from the US. Whether, and to what extent, comparable cross-retail audiences can be bought for German Amazon Ads accounts does not emerge from the current reporting. For local campaigns, it is worth looking at the existing audience types in Amazon's German documentation.

Why this matters for brands in Germany

Retail is no longer competing only for the last click. It is competing for who gets to use the customer relationship as an advertising signal. Especially for brands selling through Amazon, drugstores and their own shops, the next budget decision may therefore look different than it would for a pure marketplace campaign.

Other providers show the same trend: Lowe’s is tying TikTok, Reddit and other media to retail-media measurement, while Amazon is increasingly automating its ad planning with AI. The combination of data, video inventory and measurable sales is becoming ever more important for large advertising platforms.

Sources: ADWEEK, 4. November 2026; Amazon Ads – Measurement & Analytics; Amazon Ads – Audiences; Amazon Ads – Programmatic platform; PPC Land – Retailer-level measurement, 21. July 2026.