Amazon display impressions to drop about 63% in 2027

Amazon will stop counting a display ad as delivered when it starts loading, and will count it only once it appears on a shopper's screen, starting January 1, 2027. Amazon expects impression counts on those Store placements to fall about 63% on average, and its notice doesn't say whether what you pay changes with them.

What changed

The change covers display ads sold through Display, Video & Audio (DVA), the name that replaced Amazon DSP at the end of September. It applies to placements on the Amazon Store: the homepage, product detail pages, search results and order pages. The details come from a notice to advertisers that Saul Jacobs, chief marketing officer at Elevate33, shared on LinkedIn. PPC Land's report covers the notice in full.

Today, Amazon records an impression when the ad starts downloading to the shopper's device. Amazon calls this count-on-download. From January 1, 2027, the impression is counted once the ad appears on screen.

Amazon says placements lower on the page will lose more of their count than those near the top. It also says that in testing, return on ad spend (ROAS, sales divided by spend) rose and cost per action (CPA) fell. The notice gives no figure for the size of that test, the number of advertisers, or the period it covered. It doesn't define "appears," and it doesn't mention invoices.

Google is also tightening its count. Display & Video 360 and Campaign Manager 360 move their billed unit to a stricter count in February 2027, and Google expects only a slight decrease in billed impressions. The contrast with Amazon's 63% is large, though the two changes aren't the same.

What it means for you

If you run display ads through Amazon's DVA tools, this matters. If you only run Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands, the notice doesn't mention them, so no change is announced for you.

Your reports will show far fewer impressions from January 2027. January 2027 will look roughly 63% lower than January 2026 even if delivery stays identical, so year-over-year comparisons will break.

The bigger question is the bill. Amazon's automated DVA+ tier is billed per thousand impressions, with no minimum spend. If that thousand becomes a thousand on-screen impressions, the same price buys a different thing. On PPC Land's arithmetic, a $5.00 cost per thousand impressions with unchanged spend and clicks would report as $13.51 on the new count. That's a calculation, not a figure from Amazon. If billing moves and you don't check, you could pay more per reported impression without seeing it in your reports.

What to do

1. Nothing needs to happen before January 1, 2027. Still, note the date and plan to check your first January invoices.
2. Find your display campaigns in your Amazon Ads account. The notice doesn't give exact menu labels, so look for DVA or display campaigns in your campaign list.
3. Export your December reports for those campaigns now. You'll want a clean before-and-after comparison, not a comparison against last year.
4. Ask your Amazon representative, in writing, three questions: Does billing use the on-screen count from January 1, 2027? Do reports? Does the CPM change?
5. Judge performance on sales and cost per sale, not on impressions, and don't change bids in response to the new numbers until you've seen your first invoices.