Amazon PPC Statistics (2026): 29 Sourced Figures

This page collects figures on Amazon advertising, the sellers who buy it and what clicks cost. Every number links to the document that first published it. Most come from Amazon itself: its quarterly results, its annual report on Form 10-K, its seller report and its advertising product pages. Cost figures come from a named advertising software vendor and are labeled as vendor-reported. Brands that want outside help running these campaigns can compare service scope and published pricing on the StatWharf page for Amazon PPC management agencies.

Method

The data window runs from January 2023 to June 2026. Amazon’s own figures cover fiscal years 2023 to 2025 and the first two quarters of 2026. StatWharf used primary sources only. That means Amazon’s SEC filings, Amazon news and Amazon Ads pages, the US Census Bureau, and the original publisher of each survey or benchmark. Statistics aggregators and blogs that re-quote other sources were excluded. Each figure was checked against its source in October 2026. StatWharf dropped each figure that did not appear on its primary source. No value on this page is modeled, estimated or calculated by StatWharf.

Amazon reports advertising as one line, “advertising services”. The Amazon 10-K for 2025, filed February 2026, describes it as sponsored ads, display and video advertising. Amazon sells it to sellers, vendors, publishers, authors and others. Amazon does not report Sponsored Products revenue separately. The advertising totals below therefore include display, video and streaming TV ads as well as pay-per-click search ads.

Amazon advertising revenue

Amazon’s advertising line has grown every year in the period covered. The quarterly figures come from the second quarter 2026 earnings release. The annual figures come from the 2025 annual report.

The fourth quarter is the largest advertising quarter in this series. Q4 2025 reached US$21,317 million. The next quarter, Q1 2026, reached US$17,243 million. Sellers who plan budgets by quarter can use this holiday pattern as a guide. In the Q2 2026 release, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy described advertising as having “another strong quarter”.

Sellers who buy Amazon ads

Third-party sellers are the main buyers of Sponsored Products ads. Amazon reports their scale in two ways. The earnings release reports the fees Amazon earns from them and their share of units sold. The seller report reports their sales results.

Amazon defines a seller unit as a unit sold by a third-party seller in its stores. Its share of paid units was 61% in Q2 2026. The US average sales figure is a mean. A small number of very large sellers can raise a mean well above what a typical seller earns, and Amazon does not publish a median.

Ad formats and Amazon tools

Amazon Ads publishes performance figures for its own products. These are Amazon’s internal measurements of its own advertisers. They are not independent audits. Amazon states that past results do not guarantee future performance. Each row names the data period that Amazon gives in its footnote.

Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands are pay-per-click ads that appear in Amazon shopping results. Ads Agent is Amazon’s AI tool for planning, launching and managing campaigns. The Q2 2026 release says Amazon expanded it to new countries during 2026. The Prime Video reach figure matters to PPC buyers in a different way. Amazon sells streaming and display inventory through the same advertising business as search ads.

Costs and benchmarks

Amazon does not publish average cost per click. The figures below are vendor-reported by Skai, an advertising software company, from activity on its own platform. They describe Skai’s client base, not all Amazon advertisers. The Q1 2026 sample was 900 billion impressions, 8 billion clicks and US$8.42 billion of platform activity. It covered retail media, paid search and paid social. The Q2 2026 sample was nearly 1 trillion impressions, 10 billion clicks and US$10 billion of platform activity across the same channels.

In Skai’s Q1 2026 data, Amazon DSP cost less per click than Sponsored Products for the first time in its dataset. Skai reports a record-low blended cost per click of US$1.63 for Prime Day 2026. That figure is still well above the quarter-long Sponsored Products average of US$0.96 in Q1, which reflects the higher competition of a sales event. The two figures cover different periods. They do not form a single trend.

Market context and seller concerns

Amazon ads sit inside a wider shift of US retail to online channels. The Census Bureau publishes the official quarterly series. The seller survey row comes from Jungle Scout, which ran the survey and published it.

The Jungle Scout survey ran from January 10 to January 27, 2025. It covered nearly 1,500 Amazon sellers and businesses, including prospective and former sellers. Jungle Scout sells software to sellers. Its respondents are not a random sample of all Amazon sellers. In the same survey, higher shipping costs and the rising cost of goods were each cited more often than advertising expenses.

What the figures show

Three points stand out. First, Amazon’s advertising line grew from US$46,906 million in 2023 to US$68,635 million in 2025, and growth reached 26% in Q2 2026. More advertising money means more competition for the same search placements.

Second, the buyers are mostly independent sellers. They account for more than 60% of sales in Amazon’s store. Amazon says most of them are small and medium-sized businesses.

Third, there is no official public benchmark for Amazon cost per click. The only recent figures come from vendors measuring their own clients. A seller who compares agency proposals can ask three questions about any benchmark. Which data does it use? Which period does it cover? How large is the sample?

Where to go next

Sellers deciding whether to manage campaigns in house or hire an agency can review the Amazon PPC management agencies comparison. It sets out service scope, marketplace coverage and published pricing for each agency. It does not name a single best agency.

The next update follows two releases: Amazon’s third quarter 2026 results and the next quarterly Census e-commerce estimate. Corrections to any figure can be sent to the editorial address below.

Factual corrections are free: editorial@statwharf.com.