In an Amazon ecosystem defined by rapid change, Amerge Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Vitaly Dmitriev remains focused on two things: human-led strategy and technical transparency. From the launch of AMC Pro to the philosophy behind Amerge View, our product roadmap is built to solve for true incremental impact. In this conversation, we explore the rapid evolution of Amazon Ads, the rise of natural language optimization, and why sustainable success requires moving beyond standard attribution to prioritize true incrementality.
1. Looking back at the decision to co-found Amerge, what is the one core principle that has remained unchanged even as the team has grown to over 100 people?
“We always wanted to preserve creativity in advertising by unifying Account Manager and Ad Operations roles into one. In separating these, one would create a barrier between client-facing knowledge and technical knowledge. We are strong believers that these roles need to remain unified if one aims to run functional advertising that is fine-tuned to the client needs. This has been and remains the core principle of our approach to Amazon Ads management since Day 1 of Amerge.”
2. Looking ahead to the landscape in 2026, what do you see as the single biggest challenge for brands on Amazon, and how is Amerge helping them tackle it?
“As Amazon is evolving their approach to organic ranking, necessitating a whole new natural language optimization paradigm and introducing new simplifying concepts to Amazon Ads, it is going to be up to all of us to decide what’s worth immediate attention and what is best to relegate to the time when things have become clearer. The speed of feature release is increasing and smart allocation of resources and focus is going to be paramount to success.”
3. Paul Kotas (SVP of Amazon Ads) recently noted that “understanding and recognizing your audiences is the key to success.” How is Amerge translating this into tactical campaign management today?
“This concept can be expanded on with the fact that – in the Amazon world – who your audience is is very different throughout the year. As customer behaviours change seasonally, it is paramount that one’s targeting does as well. At Amerge, we run dedicated strategies enabling us to catch the ever-changing behavioural signals and continuously feed new targeting into the core setup. In doing so, we understand and recognize our customers’ audiences with data, and use it to adapt to the seasonal changes in shopping and browsing habits.”
4. As Amazon Ads moves to align API technology across Sponsored Ads and DSP, how is Amerge leveraging this to create a more unified, frictionless experience for our clients?
“This unification doesn’t entail direct impact on client experience, but a structure of the technology’s backend. Unification allows for more efficient operation on our end, which reduces time and cost of individual operations. As of now, the Unified API is still in active development by Amazon, and we are testing and migrating features from Legacy to the Unified API as appropriate. Once all operations have been fully migrated, our clients should feel the positive impact in increased cadence or reduced time of automation from the Amerge Tech that helps manage their Amazon Ads.”
5. While many agencies talk about the “ROAS Trap,” how has our reporting evolved to help brands distinguish between simple cannibalization and true incremental impact?
“We see ourselves among market leaders in incrementality practices. Having worked with Amazon Ads and Amazon Attribution for over 12 years, and having seen all possible scenarios where native attribution concepts may work or not, we have been engraining increasingly more advanced incrementality practices into our setups. As to the incrementality measurement, we have a number of experimental approaches we are testing, with an ultimate goal of being able to measure incrementality for an advertiser of any size, in an ongoing manner, and on the most granular level, which is a feat that not just us, but the entire advertising industry has been working to reach for the last decade.”
6. For those who haven’t experienced it yet, what is “Amerge View,” and what are the top three ways it changes the game for a brand’s reporting and strategy?
“Amerge View is a reporting tool focused on portraying dynamics between your Amazon Ads and overall Amazon performance. It is less focused on ad-attributed metrics (even though those are available in full depth) and is more geared towards answering the question: have changes to my Amazon Ads strategy led to an increase in my Amazon performance? We have found a way to roll up most of Amazon Ads spend to individual products, allowing to easily monitor dynamics between ad investment and product sales for each ASIN individually. For our clients not selling on Amazon, we have a whole range of data pipelines enabling feed one’s 1P data with mapping to each level of hierarchy – from campaign to a creative – erasing the barrier between native advertising data and one’s own source of truth for conversions.”
7. What is unique about our AMC (Amazon Marketing Cloud) solution, and how is AI currently unlocking advanced analytics that go beyond standard campaign management?
“Amerge’s AMC Pro solution puts core AMC report settings – grouping and filtering – at the hands of the advertiser, allowing even non-technical users to tailor and run their own AMC reports. The beauty of AMC is in its flexibility, and our approach is to target as many common report use cases as possible, while leaving the ability to tailor core report parameters in the hands of the advertiser.”
8. With the industry’s heavy focus on automation and AI, how does Amerge protect the “Human Element” to ensure our expertise remains key in our strategies and campaign management?
“Our approach to AI is to use it to aid and increase the value of our team members in delivering Amazon managed services, not replace them. No model can be trained to recognize the intricacies of Amazon management (for the lack of a shared universal body of knowledge to train it on) and informed human decision-making based on experience and client requirements will remain a core value of services provided by agencies like Amerge.”
9. Finally, given the scale Amerge has reached as a global team of over 100 experts, what is your #1 recommendation for a brand trying to achieve sustainable success on Amazon (and beyond) today?
“The only way to achieve sustainable success on Amazon is to run an advertising strategy that doesn’t have you pay for your organic sales. We have seen our share of Amazon Ads setups geared to drive high attribution, high ROAS and low ACOS, but having little to no impact on one’s bottom line. It is only when one accepts that ROAS of 40 and ACOS of 2.5% are tell-tale signs of ads cannibalizing their organics and accepts that true incremental advertising performance is break-even at best, that alignment with true incrementality takes shape and paves the way for long-term profitability on Amazon.”
Need help scaling on Amazon and beyond? Reach out to our Amerge experts at hello@amerge.com, or fill out our contact form.
