New data from Skai's Q2 2026 ad spend report, published July 28, shows Amazon DSP had a significant quarter. Clicks increased 127%, cost-per-click fell 35%, and total DSP spend rose 48% year-over-year. Those numbers don't happen when a channel is quietly running in the background. They happen when advertisers are actively shifting budget toward it.
The Prime Day period made the trend even more visible. DSP's share of total Amazon Ads spend jumped from 17.9% to 25.5% during Prime Day alone, and a quarter of advertiser budgets moved into DSP across the four-day event. Blended cost-per-click across all Amazon Ads hit a record low of $1.63, and click-through rates hit a record high.
Prime Day 2026, at least by these efficiency metrics, was the best on record for Amazon advertisers.
What Drove the DSP Shift
Part of the DSP growth came from Amazon's Performance+ automation, which optimizes bids across the full funnel rather than at the keyword or audience level. When automation handles cross-funnel bidding, DSP becomes more accessible to advertisers who don't have a dedicated programmatic team. That lowers the operational barrier, and more budget follows.
The other factor is how advertisers approached Prime Day pacing. In Q2 2026, spend shifted from a Day 1 front-load toward an even distribution across all four days. That smoothed the CPC curve and helped drive the record-low blended cost.
Skai characterized this approach as "a blueprint for Q4's tentpoles," a direct reference to Prime Big Deal Days in October.
What This Means for Brand Sellers Right Now
The data from Q2 creates a useful planning frame for Q4. If a meaningful portion of the advertiser market is already moving DSP budget into tentpole events, and if that shift is driving record-low CPCs and record-high CTRs, then the brands that build a DSP presence before October aren't just experimenting with a new channel. They're positioning for the same efficiency gains the Q2 data describes.
This doesn't mean every brand needs a full DSP campaign in place by August. The managed-service DSP minimum is $50,000, and for many mid-market sellers that isn't the right next move. But the self-service path has no published minimum for most formats, and Performance+ reduces the complexity of managing it. For brands already running Sponsored Products efficiently, DSP is the logical next layer, especially heading into a quarter with two major tentpoles back to back.
There's also a Sponsored Products angle worth noting. When DSP's share of Amazon Ads spend jumped from 17.9% to 25.5% during Prime Day, that shift came at the expense of Sponsored Products' relative share. That doesn't mean Sponsored Products underperformed; Skai's data shows record-low blended CPC across all Amazon Ads.
It does mean that brands relying exclusively on Sponsored Products are now competing in a landscape where their larger competitors are increasingly bidding across the full funnel. You can read more about how we structure Amazon advertising strategy for brands at different spend levels.
One Caveat Worth Naming
Skai is an ad management platform with a commercial interest in showing that ad spend is healthy and growing. Their data reflects the behavior of their client base, which skews toward larger, more sophisticated advertisers. The 127% DSP click increase and the shift in Prime Day budget allocation are real trends within that sample, but they may not reflect what's happening across Amazon advertising as a whole.
That said, the directional signal is consistent with what Amazon's own reporting has shown: DSP is growing faster than Sponsored Products as a share of advertiser spending, and major tentpoles are becoming more multiformat events rather than Sponsored Products-only campaigns. The Q2 data from Skai adds concrete numbers to a trend that's been visible for several quarters.
If you want to look at where DSP fits in your current Amazon advertising mix, or whether your Sponsored Products campaigns are set up to compete well as the channel gets more crowded, schedule a call with the team and we'll work through the numbers together.