Five tips to localize your Amazon Ads strategy across the globe

Global brands have spent decades refining how they localize traditional media, adapting TV spots and adjusting messaging by marketplace. Then they create their strategy for Amazon, and many run a single campaign architecture across every locale, just swapping the language and adjusting the currency.

The assumption is understandable: Amazon Ads offers a consistent advertising experience across many locales, so a consistent strategy should work. But in our experience working with brands across North America, EMEA, and APAC, the performance gap between a genuinely localized strategy and one simply translated into the local language is rarely marginal. It's structural, and it hides inside blended reporting that smooths over variation by locale. In reality, retail signals and audience insights available through Amazon Ads give brands a locale-level view of shopping behaviors that can inform creative strategy.

If your brand wants to do things differently, here are five things to keep in mind:

Tip 1: Run a marketplace signal audit first

Before deploying any campaign into a new locale, pull category-level browse and purchase insights to understand how shoppers in that locale navigate your category. Category maturity varies significantly across Amazon stores. The path from discovery to purchase in the U.S. may look completely different in Germany, Australia, or Japan.

For Colgate-Palmolive in Australia, category insights from Amazon Ads revealed that 73% of dental category browsers in Australia had zero exposure to the brand's products in the preceding 12 months, despite Colgate-Palmolive being a household name offline.¹ That single insight reframed their entire campaign strategy: the problem wasn't conversion, it was awareness.

Tip 2: Prioritize products locally, not globally

Global campaign architectures typically standardize on hero Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (ASINs), the products performing best in the largest or most mature stores. In practice, the product driving conversion domestically may have weak review equity, limited category presence, or a different competitive position in a secondary country. Spending media budget to drive traffic to a listing that can't convert it is one of the most common, and most avoidable, mistakes in the management of a multi-locale Amazon Ads campaign.

Before scaling a campaign, build a localization matrix that maps each locale’s top-converting ASINs. This analysis frequently reveals that the right entry product in a locale looks different from the global playbook. Establishing local share around the right product first creates a stronger foundation for scaling the broader portfolio.

Tip 3: Match formats to locale maturity

The ad formats that drive performance in a developed locale don't automatically translate to developing ones. In mature locales, mid-to-upper-funnel investment in online video, streaming TV, and display advertising can help deliver incremental reach and new-to-brand growth.

When we rebuilt Dr. Scholl's presence across Amazon channels in five European locales, one of the first decisions was to map each locale to the right format mix based on its maturity stage. Locales with established search presence received Amazon DSP and Sponsored Brands campaigns layered on top. Locales starting from a lower base had a foundation built through Sponsored Products first. The outcome was +31% revenue growth year-over-year during Black Friday/Cyber Monday across all five locales,² driven not just by more investment, but by the right investment for the maturity level of each locale.

Tip 4: Map local competitive dynamics

Global competitive analysis tends to focus on global competitors. But Amazon Ads category dynamics at the store level frequently include strong local or regional players that don't appear in global visibility reporting, and whose strategies reflect local shopping behaviors and trust signals.

The local dynamics are where Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and category browse insights become essential, surfacing competitive patterns at the store level before they become performance problems. The signal to look for isn't just who ranks above you, but which competitor ASINs are capturing browse traffic from shoppers who are exploring related products. That analysis helps show you whether you're facing a visibility problem, a conversion problem, or a creative relevance problem, as these three different diagnoses require three different strategic responses.

Tip 5: Brief for culture, not just language

Translation is not localization. The product benefit that resonates most strongly in one locale may be irrelevant in another. The creative format that drives engagement in the U.S.—a direct product demonstration, a lifestyle aesthetic, a specific type of social proof—may underperform significantly in locales where different trust signals or visual conventions govern the purchase decision.

This is where AI creative tools can become a genuine operational advantage that helps teams scale localization efforts more efficiently. Amazon Ads Creative Agent allows teams to rapidly generate and adapt locale-specific assets, transforming a single global creative into locally relevant variants without the production timelines and costs that have historically made true creative localization impractical at scale. 

For OluKai in North America, an audience analysis in AMC identified high-intent segments whose motivations differed from the brand's general messaging. Purpose-built creative assets developed specifically for those audiences, rather than adaptations of general brand assets, delivered a 225% improvement in click-through rate and a 99% improvement in detail page view rate versus standard creative shown to the same audiences.³ The creative wasn't more expensive, but it was more specifically briefed to drive impact.

The bottom line: Let local signals shape your creative strategy

Blended global reporting conceals the variation that localization is designed to address. By accessing locale-specific KPI reporting, such as ROAS, new-to-brand rate, and Sponsored Brands uplift by country, you can use that granularity to identify where localization is working and where to go deeper. But measurement is only part of the equation. The brands pulling ahead in international locales are adapting their entire strategy to local signals, down to creative relevance. Tools like Creative Agent make that increasingly practical, helping teams generate and adapt locale-specific creative without the production timelines that have historically made true localization impractical at scale.

Sources

¹ Advertiser-provided data, Australia, 2025 — oral care category browser exposure statistic (Colgate-Palmolive AU)

² Advertiser-provided data, EMEA, 2025 — BFCM revenue uplift across EU5 (Dr. Scholl's Europe)

³ Advertiser-provided data, North America, 2025 — CTR and DPVR improvement, purpose-built creative vs. standard REC (OluKai)

About the author

Danielle Waller is the Chief Media Officer of Podean, where she leads the agency's global media practice across Amazon Ads and the broader retail media landscape. She began her career at Merkle, rising from analyst to Director of Amazon & eRetail, before joining Podean and scaling its media capabilities from Global Head of Media to CMO. With deep expertise across Amazon DSP, sponsored ads, and performance measurement, Danielle is one of the most knowledgeable practitioners working at the intersection of retail and media today.