Amazon Fresh Display Ads: The Complete Guide for Grocery and CPG Brands

Most Amazon advertisers treat Amazon Fresh as an afterthought. It sits in the background of their ad account, vaguely connected to grocery, and gets ignored in favor of sponsored products and DSP retargeting on core Amazon. That mistake is becoming more expensive every quarter.

As of Q2 2026, Amazon's grocery business has surpassed $100 billion in gross merchandise value, with Amazon capturing roughly 22.6% of the online grocery market, according to eMarketer data. Same-day delivery for fresh perishables is expanding aggressively, and the advertising infrastructure inside the Fresh environment has matured into a proper, multi-format ad channel. If your brand sells into grocery, whether you're a CPG household name or a mid-size food brand building an Amazon channel, Amazon Fresh display ads are now a legitimate, measurable part of your media plan.

Over 10 years managing Amazon Ads for 7-figure brands, I have watched the Fresh advertising environment evolve from a half-built side feature into a genuinely distinct walled garden with its own placement types, creative specs, targeting logic, and access tiers. In this post I am going to break down every Amazon Fresh display ad format that exists today: what it is, how it works, who can access it, what the specs are, and how to think about it strategically. This is not a surface-level overview. This is what you need to know before briefing your creative studio or speaking with your Amazon account team.

What Is the Amazon Fresh Advertising Environment and Why Does It Operate as a Walled Garden?

Amazon Fresh is Amazon's dedicated online grocery channel. When a customer shops on the Fresh pages, whether on desktop or mobile, they are in a contained environment that Amazon controls end-to-end: the product catalog, the delivery infrastructure, the pricing, and the advertising. That containment is what makes it a walled garden in the advertising sense.

The practical consequence for advertisers is that ad placements, creatives, and landing destinations in the Fresh environment operate under separate rules from the rest of Amazon. A standard DSP banner you run on Amazon.com or a third-party supply, does not automatically run in Fresh. Your sponsored products campaigns on core Amazon do not translate to Fresh unless your ASINs are specifically listed as Fresh offers. According to Amazon Ads' official Fresh display ad specs, Fresh DSP display ads outside the walled garden must use a pre-approved Fresh logo lockup. Static banners cannot link to a standard product detail page; they must drive to a Fresh landing page, a search string within Fresh, or a brand store. The destination rules alone tell you this is a separate channel, not a checkbox on your existing campaigns.

Why does this matter strategically? Because the Fresh-walled garden captures a specific type of shopper behavior that is different from core Amazon. Someone on Amazon Fresh is in grocery mode. They are building a basket. They have a weekly replenishment intent. According to eMarketer's January 2026 analysis of digital grocery trends, 32.6% of shoppers are likely to let AI automatically reorder staple items, and 45.8% would use an in-app tool that suggests meals and fills their cart. That is a fundamentally different mindset from someone browsing Amazon for electronics or home goods. Your ads in this environment reach people who are already in buying mode for food and household products. If your category fits that context, the attention you are buying is worth more per impression than standard Amazon display inventory.

JPMorgan analysts noted in August 2025 that more grocery customers also means more opportunities for Amazon to sell ads, with advertising revenue growing 22% year over year in Q2 2025. The expansion of same-day delivery for fresh, perishable groceries to 2,300 cities by the end of 2025 was expected to further accelerate grocery customer acquisition and, with it, the value of Fresh's ad inventory.

What Are Fresh DSP Display Banners and How Are the Creative Specs Structured?

Fresh DSP display banners are standard programmatic display units that run on Amazon DSP and are targeted to the Fresh online environment. These are the most accessible formats in the Fresh ecosystem and the starting point for most brands running programmatic on Amazon who want to extend into grocery.

The specs are defined clearly. On desktop, the supported sizes are 160x600 px, 300x250 px, 300x600 px, 728x90 px, and 970x250 px. File weight limits range from 40 KB for most sizes up to 200 KB for the 970x250 px unit. The accepted formats are JPG and PNG-8 only. On mobile, the supported sizes are 320x50 px, 414x125 px, 300x250 px, and 728x90 px, and all mobile assets must be exported at 2x resolution. The 320x50 mobile unit requires a 640x100 px @2X asset, the 414x125 unit requires 828x250 px @2X, and so on. Amazon also allows assets to be automatically upscaled using generative AI directly within the DSP UI, which is useful if your studio only has standard-resolution exports.

There are two important compliance rules that trip up many creative teams. First, every banner needs a 1-pixel color border around the entire ad. If your background is white or light-colored, the border must be black, dark gray, or a dark color so the ad is visually distinct from non-sponsored content on the page. This is not optional; ads will be rejected without it. Second, when running DSP banners on third-party supply or Amazon-owned and operated inventory outside the Fresh environment, you must use the pre-approved Amazon Fresh logo lockup. This is the "Shop now on Amazon Fresh" branded treatment that Amazon provides, and you cannot modify the CTA wording or line breaks. You can adjust its position and color.

In practice, the 300x250 and 970x250 desktop units tend to deliver the most impression volume in our accounts. The 300x250 is the workhorse of display advertising everywhere, and Fresh is no different. The 970x250 runs in a premium billboard position and is the most visually impactful static unit in the format set. On mobile, the 414x125 unit is a distinctive size you will not find in most standard display campaigns, and it occupies a prominent banner position within the Fresh mobile interface. If you are briefing a studio for the first time, prioritize those three plus the 320x50 mobile unit, and you will cover the highest-reach placements.

One tactical note from what I see in accounts: the destination restrictions matter more than many advertisers realize. Because static Fresh DSP banners cannot link to a standard product detail page (PDP), you need either a brand store that includes your Fresh-listed products or a curated Fresh landing page. If your account does not have an active brand store set up for Fresh, you will be forced into search-string destinations, which work but offer less control over the brand experience post-click. Build the brand store first, then activate the display.

What Are Amazon Fresh Responsive Ecommerce Ads (REC) and How Do They Differ from Standard DSP RECs?

Responsive ecommerce creatives (REC) on Amazon Fresh are a distinct variant of the standard DSP REC format, specifically designed for the grocery environment. They are retail-aware, meaning they pull live pricing, deal information, and star ratings directly from your Fresh product listings. They are also out-of-stock aware: if all ASINs in a Fresh REC campaign go out of stock, the campaign stops bidding automatically until inventory is restored. That behavior alone makes Fresh REC more operationally relevant for brands managing fluctuating grocery inventory than a standard banner campaign, where you can accidentally serve ads to products that are unavailable.

According to Amazon Ads' Fresh ad specs, a single Fresh REC ad can include up to 20 associated ASINs, and the system automatically optimizes across the selected ad variations and ASINs to drive the best campaign performance. The ad variations available for Fresh REC are coupon, customer review, and shop now. An "add to cart" variation is listed as coming soon in Amazon's current documentation. The coupon and shop now variations are particularly relevant for grocery brands running promotional pricing or offering first-purchase discounts, since those signals surface directly in the ad unit alongside the product image and live pricing.

The eligibility requirement for Fresh REC is worth understanding precisely: your brand needs to be endemic to grocery, meaning you must have active Amazon Fresh offers on your ASINs for the Fresh-specific grocery REC to show. If your product has both a Fresh offer and a core Amazon.com offer, the Fresh offer will appear on Fresh pages, and the core offer will continue to run on Amazon.com and third-party sites as usual. The two are handled independently. 

This is actually useful because it means your standard DSP REC campaigns on core Amazon do not interfere with your Fresh REC campaigns, but it also means you need to maintain both offer types to achieve full coverage.

The Fresh logo guidance for REC is specific: Amazon recommends manually uploading the Fresh logo only for Fresh-exclusive ASINs. If an ASIN has both a Fresh offer and a core Amazon offer (a shared ASIN), do not add the Fresh logo to that ad unit. The logic is sound: shared ASINs serve ads across both environments, and attaching the Fresh logo to a shared ASIN would result in Fresh-branded creative showing in non-Fresh placements, which violates Amazon's brand usage guidelines.

On the creative side, Fresh REC supports both auto-generated creatives (which pull images directly from your PDP) and custom images. For custom images, Amazon supports two approaches. Responsive sizing custom images require just three uploads: a square at 1200x1200 px (1:1 ratio), a tall at 900x1600 px (9:16 ratio), and a wide at 1200x628 px (1.91:1 ratio). Of those three, Amazon automatically generates 12 ad sizes

. Size-specific custom images require six uploads and generate up to 10 different sizes. Amazon's August 2025 guidance on responsive ecommerce creatives also notes that you can upload up to 15 images and 15 headlines to enable dynamic creative optimization, where Amazon's models select the best combination for each audience and placement. For most grocery brands, the three-image responsive approach is the right starting point: minimal production lift, maximum size coverage, and Amazon's optimization layer handling the rest.

What Is Fresh Share of Voice (SOV) and Who Can Access It?

Fresh share of voice (SOV) is the premium placement tier within the Fresh advertising ecosystem. SOV placements receive priority placement and run throughout the entire Amazon Fresh online environment, which Amazon refers to as the "walled garden." This means your ads appear across all Fresh pages, not just in specific placements you bid for. It is closer to a sponsorship or takeover package than a standard programmatic campaign.

The access model is the first thing to understand: Fresh SOV is only available through Amazon Managed Services. You cannot buy it through a self-service DSP. If you are a self-service advertiser, this format is not available to you without directly engaging Amazon's managed service team.

The creative specs for Fresh SOV overlap significantly with DSP display, but with some additions. On desktop, supported sizes are 160x600 px, 300x250 px, 980x55 px, 728x90 px, and 970x250 px. The 980x55 px is unique to SOV and does not appear in the standard DSP format set. On mobile, only the 414x125 px size is supported, exported at 828x250 px @2X resolution.

The rules differ depending on whether you are an endemic or non-endemic advertiser. Endemic advertisers (brands whose products are sold on Amazon Fresh) must feature Amazon Fresh ASINs in their SOV creative, use the pre-approved Fresh logo lockup and the "Shop now on Amazon Fresh" CTA, and link to a Fresh landing page, a search string, or a brand store. The same no-PDP destination restriction applies here as with DSP banners.

Non-endemic advertisers (brands that do not sell products on Amazon Fresh) have a separate and more restricted set of rules. Non-endemic advertisers need explicit approval to run in the Fresh walled garden at all, and managed service advertisers must work with their dedicated Amazon account team to pursue that approval. The approved CTAs for non-endemic SOV are limited to two options: "Learn More" and "Find an Event Near You." Non-endemic ads are permitted to link out from Fresh to either an Amazon.com landing page or the advertiser's own website, but only in accordance with Amazon's worldwide advertising policies for link-out.

From what I see in accounts, the non-endemic SOV opportunity is genuinely underused.

A financial services brand, a streaming service, or a CPG brand in an adjacent category (personal care products sold alongside grocery, for example) can reach a contextually relevant audience inside Fresh without competing for grocery ASIN visibility. The "Find an Event Near You" CTA is an interesting vehicle for local or regional brands running awareness campaigns. The approval process adds friction, but the format's exclusivity means there is less competition once you are in.

What Is the Amazon Fresh Top Center Graphic (TCG) Banner and When Should You Use It?

The top center graphic (TCG) is a wide banner that appears at the very top of Amazon Fresh landing pages on both desktop and mobile. It is the first thing a shopper sees when they land on an Amazon Fresh page, making it the highest-visibility brand real estate in the Fresh online environment.

The specs for TCG are straightforward. Desktop units are 1500x300 px, with a maximum file weight of 200 KB in JPG or PNG-8 format. Mobile units are 870x300 px, with a maximum file weight of 100 KB. Minimum font sizes are specified as 40 px for desktop and 24 px for mobile. A CTA is not required, and the Amazon Fresh logo lockup is not required either. This is a purely brand-led format: there is no ecommerce element, no live pricing, no ASIN carousel. It is a visual statement at the top of the page.

The workflow for TCG is slightly different from the other Fresh formats. Amazon Fresh landing pages are built through managed services, meaning you cannot simply upload a TCG banner in a self-service DSP and assign it to a campaign. Instead, you design the TCG creative and provide the finished asset to your Amazon account team, who then add it to the landing page on your behalf. Advertisers have full creative control over the TCG design, which is refreshing given how constrained the SOV format is in terms of logo and CTA usage.

Strategically, TCG makes most sense in two scenarios. The first is seasonal or promotional moments when you want high-impact awareness within Fresh, such as a major product launch, a Prime Day deal, or a new product range introduction. Because it sits above everything else on the page, it carries brand authority that a banner in the content area cannot match. The second scenario is when you are already running SOV or REC campaigns in Fresh, and you want to reinforce brand presence across the full page experience. Running TCG alongside REC in the content area creates a coherent brand surround that feels more like a sponsored store experience than a scattered ad buy.

How Should Grocery and CPG Brands Structure an Amazon Fresh Display Strategy Across These Formats?

The mistake most brands make when they first activate in Fresh is treating it like a single campaign type. They either run basic DSP retargeting into Fresh pages as an afterthought to a core Amazon DSP campaign, or they hear about SOV, get excited, and throw budget at managed services without building the foundation first. Neither approach works well.

Here is how we at Rocketise think about the Amazon Fresh display stack for CPG brands that are serious about the channel.

The foundation layer is Fresh REC. It has the lowest setup friction, the widest reach within the Fresh environment, and the most direct conversion path because the ad includes live pricing, deals, and star ratings pulled automatically from your Fresh listings. If you have Fresh offers on your ASINs and are enrolled in self-service DSP, there is no reason not to run Fresh REC. Start with the auto-generated creative to establish baseline performance, then layer in custom images once you have a few weeks of data to understand which ASIN variations and ad copy combinations are working.

The amplification layer is Fresh DSP display banners. These run across the Fresh environment and give you more creative control than REC for brand storytelling and awareness. Use the 300x250 and 970x250 units on desktop and the 414x125 unit on mobile as your core placements. Run a brand awareness objective with these, not a direct conversion objective. The REC campaigns handle conversion; the display banners build brand salience in the environment.

Regarding audience strategy in Fresh DSP, practitioners at Acadia have noted that targeting zip codes where Amazon Fresh stores are located delivers stronger performance for Fresh DSP campaigns than standard audience segments. That geographic layer adds relevance because you are reaching people in areas where Fresh is an active part of their daily lives, not just people who have browsed grocery pages once.

For brands with managed service access and meaningful Fresh budgets (we are typically talking about $50,000 or more monthly before SOV makes financial sense for most categories), the SOV package is the next layer. Priority placement throughout the walled garden means your brand is visible to every Fresh shopper during the campaign period, regardless of what they are searching for. Amazon's testing with Kraft Heinz CPG brands showed a 40% increase in sales for select products when using DSP-driven grocery advertising with omnichannel metrics. That is not a guaranteed outcome for every brand, but it signals the scale of impact that is possible when you commit to the channel rather than treating it as an add-on.

The top of the brand experience pyramid is the TCG banner, used selectively for high-impact moments. Do not run it year-round; the per-impression cost relative to reach does not justify that for most brands. Run it during your two or three most important promotional periods each year, and make sure your creative team treats it as brand-campaign territory, not a conversion ad.

One operational issue that is easy to miss: the ASIN separation problem

 As practitioners who manage CPG brand advertising have noted, Amazon's system defaults to advertising the Amazon.com destination when an ASIN has both a core offer and a Fresh offer. The most reliable workaround is to create a unique set of ASINs listed exclusively as Fresh inventory. This allows you to run sponsored product and display campaigns that route specifically to Fresh, without the system pulling traffic toward the core Amazon destination by default. It adds complexity to catalog management, but for brands where Fresh is a meaningful revenue channel, the cleaner attribution and tighter targeting control justify it.

What Are the Technical Requirements and Common Rejection Reasons for Amazon Fresh Display Ad Creative?

Creative rejections in Amazon Fresh are more common than in standard DSP because the Fresh environment has additional rules layered on top of Amazon's standard ad acceptance policies. Here is what causes most of the problems.

Missing the 1-pixel border is the most frequent rejection trigger. Every static banner in the Fresh environment requires a 1-pixel color border. For light-background creatives, that border must be a dark color. Many studios that produce display creatives for Amazon are unaware of this rule because it is specific to Fresh and not part of the standard Amazon display guidelines. Brief your studio explicitly.

Using the wrong Fresh logo treatment is the second most common issue. Amazon provides pre-approved Fresh logo lockups with the "Shop now on Amazon Fresh" CTA. The line breaks and the CTA size cannot be changed. You can modify position and color, and nothing else. If your designer has adjusted the spacing, split the CTA across multiple lines, or used a logo downloaded from outside Amazon's official toolkit, the creative will be rejected.

Incorrect mobile resolution is the third common problem. All mobile Fresh display banners must be exported at 2x resolution. The 320x50 mobile unit must be delivered as a 640x100 px asset. The 414x125 unit must be delivered as 828x250 px. If your studio exports at standard 1x resolution for mobile, every mobile unit will need to be re-exported. Build this into your brief and your QA checklist before submitting to Amazon.

Incorrect landing destination is the fourth issue and the one that causes the most campaign delays, as it is not caught during creative review but during campaign setup. Static Fresh DSP and SOV banners cannot link to a standard product detail page. Destination must be a Fresh landing page, a search string, or a brand store. If you are in a self-service DSP and you try to assign a PDP destination to a Fresh banner, the system will either reject the creative or the campaign will not deliver. Audit your landing destinations during campaign setup, not after launch.

On lead times, Amazon's production timelines for managed service formats like SOV and TCG are longer than those of self-service DSP. If you are planning a campaign tied to a specific promotional period or a major product launch, build in at least two to three weeks from creative submission to go-live for managed service formats. Attempting to run Fresh SOV for a Prime Day campaign with a one-week lead time is a reliable way to miss the moment entirely.

What Locales and Markets Are Amazon Fresh Display Ads Available In?

As of the current Amazon Ads specification documentation, Amazon Fresh display advertising is available in the following markets: the United States in North America; Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom in Europe; and Japan and Singapore in the Asia Pacific. That is a smaller footprint than standard Amazon DSP, which reflects the fact that Amazon Fresh as an online grocery channel, is still in rollout mode in many international markets.

For advertisers running multi-market CPG campaigns, this means your Fresh display strategy is currently US-first by default, with the UK and a small number of European markets as secondary options. The JP and SG markets are relevant for brands with active Japan and Singapore Fresh presence, but those require separate creative and campaign setups under local ad specs and brand guidelines.

The US market is where the strategic opportunity is largest right now. eMarketer data for 2025 puts Amazon at 22.6% of the US online grocery market, second only to Walmart's 31.6%. With same-day delivery for fresh perishables expanding to thousands of cities and Amazon investing aggressively in its grocery infrastructure, the Fresh ad inventory pool in the US is growing. Running now, before the channel matures and competition drives up CPMs, is the right timing decision for brands that sell in grocery categories.

Conclusion

Amazon Fresh display advertising has moved past the experimental phase. With Amazon's grocery business at over $100 billion in GMV, a growing same-day delivery footprint, and an advertising infrastructure that now includes purpose-built display formats for the Fresh environment, this channel deserves a line item in your media plan, not a footnote. Start with Fresh REC to establish performance baselines, layer in DSP display banners to build brand awareness, and engage your Amazon account team on SOV when your Fresh revenue justifies the investment. The brands that build expertise in this channel now will have a meaningful head start when Fresh ad inventory becomes as competitive as core Amazon sponsored placements.