Amazon Ads and the Digital Markets Act

31 January 2024

Woman with specs

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a regulation in the European Union (E.U.) that introduces a range of obligations and comes into effect from 6 March. In September 2023, Amazon was designated as a “gatekeeper”.

Since designation, Amazon Ads has been working constructively with the European Commission and is making modifications for compliance. For example, we are adding more granularity to our pricing reports. Today our advertiser and publisher customers have real-time access to extensive pricing information. From 6 March, advertisers and publishers with campaigns in the EU will have access to new, expanded reports that will provide data on the fees paid by the advertiser and received by the publisher for ads shown on third-party websites and apps. Our advertiser and publisher customers can choose whether they wish to disclose their fee data or simply be included in the default aggregated metrics. The new reports will be available on the Amazon Ads console for advertisers and on the Amazon Publisher Services portal for publishers.

We are also updating how our advertising customers can measure performance. On 6 March, Amazon Ads will introduce a new dedicated secure data environment – or clean room – where advertisers with campaigns running in the EU can independently verify the success and impact of their campaigns in a privacy-safe, cloud-based environment. The new clean room builds on and complements our extensive measurement capabilities that include Amazon Marketing Cloud and the industry-standard campaign reporting available through Amazon DSP and the Amazon Ads console.

In preparation for the DMA, we also recently made changes to the advertising choices available to customers. When customers visit our EU store, we ask them to share consent for use of their personal information from any Amazon service or third party to show them personalised ads. To explain the updates, we’ve introduced a new help page that describes how we are evolving our approach. As always, customers have complete control of their personal information and can update their preferences at any time by visiting our cookies and advertising choices page.

We are thankful to the advertisers, agencies and publishers who have provided helpful feedback on the updates that we are making and we will continue to work with them and the European Commission as we finalise our compliance plans.

Update: 7 March 2024

You can read more details in Amazon’s DMA compliance report here.