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As privacy becomes a priority in digital marketing, Amazon’s shift toward contextual and privacy-compliant advertising is shaping a new era. 

With third-party cookies fading and data concerns growing, brands are embracing contextual targeting—revitalized by AI and data modeling—to serve relevant ads based on webpage content rather than personal tracking. 

Amazon’s tools like Amazon Marketing Stream and Amazon Marketing Cloud enable near real-time data access and privacy-protected analytics, allowing brands to optimize campaigns with insights on traffic, conversions, and budget usage. 

In 2025, ecommerce sellers can leverage these innovations to create precise, privacy-friendly advertising that builds trust and effectively engages audiences.

Here’s what you need to know.

Cookies: Finished as a Marketing Tool?

Apple’s launch of iOS 14.5 brought with it a new initiative to return to users control over the way their data is aggregated and used by third-parties for advertising. 

Google is following suit and has indicated that it’s looking to entirely phase out the way that marketers can track their users in their Chrome Browser by the end of 2024. 

Advertisers are less enthusiastic about the apparent demise of these capabilities as marketing tools. 

If it’s not clear by now, I’m talking about cookies. Not the delicious kind, but the small files, or snippets of information that a web server generates and sends to a browser. 

For a long time (in internet terms), cookies have helped advertisers better understand browsing and shopping behavior.  Cookies give marketers a glimpse into what users might be thinking, and make it possible for websites to personalize the browsing and shopping experience.

They give a sort of X Ray vision that allows you to see how users move through your websites (or Amazon listings) and ultimately give you a good idea what you should be doing with your advertising campaigns.

A Next-Level Audience Targeting Strategy

If an advertiser is using Behavioral Targeting, they monitor the user’s browsing behavior, then place ads based on their activity.

Cookies are what make that possible. 

However, clever advertisers are sourcing VERY similar information and doing it without cookies. 

Contextual advertising is the practice of placing ads on web pages based on the content of those pages. For example, if someone is browsing a site that advertises running shoes, they might be shown ads that advertise running shorts or a headlamp for those early morning outings.   

Instead of behavioral targeting’s reliance upon cookies, contextual targeting utilizes (accumulated) session data to determine a user’s intent and interest. 

Advances in AI and Data Modeling are Opening the Door to New Contextual Options

Although contextual targeting isn’t a new idea, exponential advances in machine learning, data modeling and artificial intelligence have all combined to supercharge contextual strategies so that they often match those of cookie-based targeting. 

Innovations to image recognition, predictive analytics, natural language processing, and neural networks have made for data sets that dwarf those of previous generations. 

And now, enterprise-scale companies such as Google and Amazon are crafting “data clean rooms,” ecosystems will help marketers distill, and cultivate that data even further. More importantly, they will allow for the continued growth of post-cookie advertising revenue.

What are Data Clean Rooms?

Data clean rooms are technology services, or software that help content platforms keep first-person user data private when interacting with advertising providers. They provide “aggregated” data from “anonymized” user sets. 

That makes it possible for the clean room to furnish advertisers with valuable (non-identifiable) information allowing them to target a specific demographic or audience. 

5 Key Reasons Why Ecommerce Sellers Should Embrace Contextual Advertising in 2025

Contextual advertising has become an essential tool for online sellers navigating a digital landscape where privacy, relevance, and adaptability are increasingly prioritized. 

Here’s why adopting contextual advertising could be a game-changer for your own e-commerce marketing strategy:

1. Privacy-Friendly Targeting

With data privacy regulations growing stricter and third-party cookies gradually being phased out, online sellers need advertising solutions that respect consumer privacy. 

Contextual advertising is inherently privacy-friendly, as it doesn’t rely on personal data to target audiences. Instead, it uses the context of the web page or app content, allowing e-commerce sellers to reach relevant audiences while honoring consumer privacy preferences. 

This makes it possible to maintain effective targeted advertising that aligns with privacy laws and consumers’ data concerns.

2. Improved Ad Relevance and Performance

Thanks to advancements in AI and machine learning, contextual advertising has reached a new level of precision. By analyzing the content surrounding potential ad placements, contextual algorithms can ensure ads appear only alongside highly relevant content. 

For sellers, this precision means your ads are more likely to reach audiences genuinely interested in similar topics or products, which can result in better engagement, higher click-through rates (CTR), and, ultimately, more conversions. 

Highly relevant placements are also less likely to disrupt the user experience, making potential customers more receptive to your brand.

3. Enhanced Brand Safety

Maintaining brand integrity is a top priority for sellers, and contextual advertising provides greater control over ad placements. 

By using contextual targeting, ads are shown only on web pages that align with brand values and in content environments considered safe. 

This control over where ads appear mitigates the risk of ads being placed alongside controversial or inappropriate content, preserving brand reputation and building consumer trust.

4. Expanded Reach Beyond Retargeting

As the limitations on cookie-based targeting continue, e-commerce sellers are increasingly relying on contextual methods to reach broader and more diverse audiences across the web. 

Contextual advertising doesn’t require user tracking, which means you can target niche audiences even if they haven’t previously interacted with your brand. By using content-based targeting, sellers can connect with potential customers at the top of the funnel, expanding their customer base beyond standard retargeting lists. 

This strategy allows for more significant audience growth while staying compliant with privacy standards.

5. Real-Time Adaptability to Current Trends

Want to future proof your Amazon advertising? 

One of the most significant advantages of contextual advertising is its ability to adapt in real-time. Contextual algorithms can analyze content on the fly, enabling e-commerce sellers to adjust their messaging based on current events, trending topics, or seasonal themes. 

This agility ensures that ads remain relevant to the context consumers are engaging with at any given moment. For instance, during major shopping seasons or cultural events, sellers can tailor their messaging to be timely, increasing the likelihood of resonating with potential buyers.

Amazon Marketing Cloud Hints at the Future

Meanwhile, Amazon has been constructing their own proprietary clean room. 

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is a secure, privacy-safe, and cloud-based clean room solution in which advertisers can easily perform anonymous analytics signals, including Amazon Ads signals as well as their own inputs. 

Amazon has constructed this on top of their robust Amazon Web Services platform that provides servers, storage, email, networking, remote computing and security to its users. AWS has quickly become a principal profit stream for the e-commerce giant. For example, Netflix alone pays Amazon 19 million A MONTH in fees to use AWS. 

Amazon’s Marketing Cloud dovetails nicely with their existing Attribution capabilities and offers a complementary and comprehensive view of an advertiser’s overall marketing attribution.

What is Amazon Marketing Stream?

Amazon Marketing Stream is a dynamic data streaming service that offers advertisers (near) real-time insights into their Amazon Ads campaigns. By delivering hourly campaign metrics directly through the Amazon Ads API, Amazon Marketing Stream provides seamless, push-based data updates to advertisers’ AWS accounts. 

This eliminates the need for repeated API calls, dramatically improving efficiency and makes it possible for advertisers, agencies, and tool providers to access updated campaign data more fluidly. 

Currently in beta, Amazon Marketing Stream is accessible to select users who benefit from timely data without facing API throttling limitations.

With Amazon Marketing Stream, advertisers will be able to access granular insights into their campaign performance, including hourly metrics on traffic, conversions, and other key analytics. 

Real-time notifications on budget consumption and campaign changes allow for faster response times to emerging trends, making it easier to optimize bids, adjust budgets, and manage campaigns responsively throughout the day. 

This capability is particularly useful for analyzing seasonal shopping behavior and adjusting strategies accordingly, enabling a more targeted and efficient approach to Amazon Ads management.

Canopy Management’s Amazon Advertising Pros Can Help

One terrific thing about all this new data transparency and leveled-up technology is the accessibility. If there’s a problem with an ad campaign, now Amazon sellers can “lift the hood” of their Amazon PPC advertising, roll up their sleeves and take a good look inside. 

Unfortunately, that first peek under the hood more often than not results in a lot of very puzzled expressions. 

Automobile engines, with their hybrid technology and twin turbos are not at all like a 1973 Volkswagen engine that could be repaired with duct tape and bailing wire. Similarly, Amazon advertising campaigns are a completely different animal than they were even 12 months ago. 

It’s one more reason why reaching out to an Amazon PPC Agency expert at Canopy Management has become the first step for increasing numbers of e-commerce sellers looking to get to the next level. 

Canopy Management is a full-service marketing agency for Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok sellers. Our team consists of multi-million dollar, omni-channel entrepreneurs, industry leaders, and award-winning experts.