Amazon's ad library drops country reach when an ad ends

Amazon is one of the largest ad sellers in the world, and most of what brands spend there stays invisible: Meta and Google libraries show nothing of Sponsored Products or display ads inside Amazon. Since the EU Digital Services Act, Amazon has to publish an ad library for its EU stores. We added it to AdLib this week and looked at what it actually contains.

What the library shows

For each ad in its stores in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Belgium and Ireland, Amazon publishes:

• Advertiser and payer. Often different: a brand's ads can be paid by its media agency.
• Delivery dates. When delivery started and when it ended.
• The promoted page. Usually a product page, so you can read the ASIN.
• Targeting methods. Whether the ad used search terms, location, audiences or other methods. Not the values themselves.
• Reach. As ranges, in total and per store, and for some ads per country.
• Media. Images, videos and audio of the creative.

There is no US or UK library. The obligation comes from EU law, and the endpoints answer only on the EU stores.

What we found in 200 ads

We pulled 200 ads from the library through the same requests the library's own page makes, across the German and French stores and searches over all stores. 50 of them were affiliate content (creator posts that link to products) and carried no reach at all. Of the 150 real ads:

The pattern was the same in every store. While an ad runs, Amazon lists reach ranges for every EU country, including small ones like Luxembourg or Malta, mostly as "0 to 1,000". Once the ad ends, the per-country breakdown is gone and only the total remains.

It is not the store either: ads on amazon.de had the breakdown too, as long as they were running.

Why it matters

Reach per country is the closest public signal of where a brand pushes a product. If it disappears with the end of the campaign, any analysis after the fact only sees totals. That is the same problem as with ad libraries in general: they show what runs now, not what ran.

There is a practical side for anyone filtering by country. Shoppers in Austria, the Czech Republic or Portugal buy on another country's store. If you ask for ads that reached Austria, you need the breakdown, and for ended ads it is no longer there.

How AdLib handles it

• We keep what we saw. When AdLib records an Amazon ad while it runs, the country breakdown is stored with it. A later lookup without the breakdown no longer overwrites it.
• Countries without a store are searched in the store their shoppers use: Austria and most of Central and Eastern Europe on amazon.de, Portugal on amazon.es, the Nordics on amazon.se. Each hit says whether the country was confirmed by Amazon's breakdown or inferred from the store (extra.country_basis).
• Advertisers match on whole words. A search for Nike does not return the seller "Nikena".

curl "https://api.adlibapi.com/v1/search?advertiser=Samsung&platform=amazon&country=AT" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $ADLIB_API_KEY"

To keep a competitor's country data, put its Amazon advertiser on a watchlist. We check its ads while they run, so the breakdown is recorded before Amazon removes it.

Our sample is small and from one week in October 2026. If Amazon changes the library, we will update this post. The Amazon ads research use case shows the full workflow.