Retail Media and Amazon Ads in MENA: A Practical Guide for Gulf Brands

A few years ago, retail media in the Gulf meant buying a sponsored slot on a marketplace and hoping it moved stock. That is no longer the full picture. Retailers in the region now sell their shoppers as an audience, across search results, product pages, apps, loyalty programmes and screens inside physical stores. For a brand selling in the UAE or Saudi Arabia, that changes where the media budget should sit and how it should be judged.

This guide covers what retail media looks like in MENA today, which networks matter, how Amazon and noon ads actually work in the region, and the bilingual details that most playbooks written for the US market miss.

What retail media is, and why it is growing fastest in MENA

Retail media is advertising sold by a retailer on its own properties, using its own first-party shopping data. The shopper is already in a buying context, often searching for the exact product category, and the retailer can tie an ad exposure to a purchase in the same system. That closed loop is what separates it from most display and social advertising.

The regional numbers show the shift. IAB MENA's 2025 digital ad spend report, released in June 2026 and the first edition to estimate retail media separately, puts the MENA digital ad market at $8.185 billion with 17.8% growth, and retail media growing by up to 40.5% year on year (IAB MENA, via Campaign Middle East). Retail media is still a small slice of the total, but it is growing at more than twice the pace of the market.

McKinsey describes retail media in MENA as still nascent but picking up momentum, helped by better data management, sharper customer insight and more traffic on e-grocery channels. Its analysis shows that the most advanced retailers running media businesses globally earn margins of 40 to 50% on that business, with incremental revenues of 1 to 3% for the retailer (McKinsey, State of Grocery Retail MENA 2026). That margin is why every large regional retailer now wants a media network, and why brands will be offered more of them every year.

Shopper behaviour supports the case. An Amazon Ads study of CPG shoppers published in September 2025, run with Alter Agents across 1,388 respondents in Saudi Arabia and 1,371 in the UAE, found that 72% buy within 24 hours of identifying a need, and 92% rely on online retail sources such as retailer sites, apps and search tools (Amazon Ads report, via Campaign Middle East). Grocery decisions are the fastest, with 81% buying within a day. When the window between need and purchase is that short, being visible on the retailer's shelf matters more than being remembered from an ad seen last week.

The networks that matter for a Gulf brand

MENA retail media is concentrated. A handful of networks hold most of the shopper traffic, and each one plays a different role.

Amazon Ads is live in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, with the same ad solutions in all three: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, display ads, Brand Stores and streaming TV ads (Amazon Ads: getting started with sponsored ads). Minimum daily budgets are AED 40 in the UAE, SAR 40 in Saudi Arabia and 200 Egyptian pounds in Egypt, which makes a structured test affordable for almost any brand already selling on the marketplace.

noon ads covers the same three markets and says more than 10,000 brands and sellers currently advertise on the platform (noon ads). Its self-serve suite has three formats: Product Ads and Brand Ads, both paid per click, and Display Ads, bought on a cost-per-thousand-impressions basis.

Majid Al Futtaim's Precision Media is the clearest example of where grocery retail media is heading. At launch in November 2024 it covered 450 Carrefour and grocery stores in 13 countries, with access to 600 million annual visitors to the group's physical assets, 270 million online sessions and 20.5 million members across the SHARE loyalty programme and MyClub, and more than 150 brands and agencies already using it (Majid Al Futtaim). For FMCG and grocery brands, this is the network that reaches the weekly basket, including in store.

A simple way to assign roles:

• Amazon. demand capture for brands with real marketplace sales, strongest in electronics, beauty, home and anything shoppers research before buying.
• noon. the second marketplace shelf in the same three markets. Treat it as its own channel with its own search terms, not a copy of your Amazon account.
• Precision Media and other grocery networks. reach and loyalty-based targeting for FMCG, with in-store screens that no marketplace offers.

Amazon Ads in the Gulf: what is different from the US playbook

The campaign structure that scales on Amazon is the same everywhere: automatic campaigns discover search terms, manual exact-match campaigns capture the proven winners, and negative keywords cut waste. We covered that loop in detail in Amazon PPC That Scales. What changes in MENA is the input to that loop.

Amazon's own guidance describes the Middle East as a bilingual marketplace. In the UAE, English is the primary language and brand keywords are limited. In Saudi Arabia, Arabic is the primary language and brand keywords are abundant. Amazon recommends running campaigns in both Arabic and English, using all four automatic match types for discovery, and combining broad and exact match in manual campaigns (Amazon Ads: keyword optimization for non-English marketplaces). The same guide notes that markets like the Middle East have lower keyword search volumes, lower cost per click and fewer long-tail queries than the US.

In practice, that translates into four adjustments:

1. Build Arabic and English ad groups separately. so you can read performance by language. A blended ad group hides whether the Arabic terms are converting or just spending.
2. Weight the language to the market. in Saudi Arabia, expect Arabic queries to carry most of the volume and bid accordingly. In the UAE, English usually leads, but Arabic queries still deserve coverage.
3. Go wide before you go narrow. with fewer long-tail queries, the generic head terms matter more. Use broad match and product targeting to find volume, then tighten with exact match once a term has proven itself.
4. Check indexing before you spend. make sure your listing actually shows for the Arabic terms you care about.

On that last point, Amazon suggests that advertisers who do not read Arabic use manual product targeting to see which ASINs the system considers relevant to their product. If the suggested ASINs look relevant, automatic campaigns can be scaled. If they do not, the product detail page content needs work before the budget goes up (Amazon Ads: Middle East marketplace insights).

Amazon's tools reduce some of the translation work. Its keyword localization feature translates keywords you enter into the local language of the campaign's marketplace, and its text translation service can translate Sponsored Brands headlines, Store copy and A+ content into Arabic within four days (Amazon Ads: international advertising tools). Use both as a first draft, then have a native Gulf speaker review anything a shopper will read.

Machine-translated ad copy is where brands most often sound foreign. Our guide to Arabic-first AI content for Gulf audiences explains why, and how to fix it.

noon ads: same markets, different auction

The most important difference on noon is the auction itself. noon ads uses a first-price auction, which means you pay exactly the bid you set when you win (noon ads: campaign bidding). There is no discount for bidding above the next advertiser. That makes bid discipline more valuable: every bid should be tied to what a click is worth given your conversion rate and margin, not set high to be safe.

The bidding controls look familiar to anyone who runs Amazon campaigns:

• Dynamic bidding. an up-and-down option that can raise bids by up to 2x in high-competition periods (automatic targeting only), and a down-only option that reduces bids when competition is low.
• Placement bidding. top-of-search bids on Product Ads can be raised by up to 900%. Use it only where top placement has proven it converts.
• Recommended bids. shown per target, updated daily from past bidding activity, with a range from the median winning bid to the 90th percentile. A useful sanity check, not a target.

noon builds bilingual creative into the format. Brand Ads ask for a headline in both English and Arabic, and a brand name in both languages, with an optional Arabic logo (noon ads: Brand Ads campaign setup). Write the Arabic headline natively rather than translating the English one. It is the version most Saudi shoppers will read.

Plan the year around the regional calendar

A Western retail calendar does not fit the Gulf. Amazon's Middle East planning calendar highlights Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr, Prime Day, back to school, White Friday in November and Double 11, with Ramadan and Eid dates shifting each year (Amazon Ads: Middle East marketplace insights). The same guide notes that over half of consumers in the UAE and Saudi Arabia report shopping online weekly.

Two planning rules follow. First, because Ramadan moves about eleven days earlier each year, lock its dates into the media plan as soon as they are known and build budgets around them, not around a fixed month. Second, launch new products and new keywords several weeks before a peak, not during it. Campaigns need time to gather data, and peak periods are the most expensive time to learn.

Measure incrementality, not platform ROAS

Every retail media network reports on its own performance, and every network has an incentive to look good. A shopper who searched your brand name on Amazon and bought would often have bought anyway. If that sale is counted as ad-driven, the reported return flatters the channel.

A more honest set of measures:

• Separate branded and non-branded spend. branded search defends demand you already own. Non-branded search is where new customers come from. Report them apart.
• Track total cost of advertising against total sales. per marketplace, so you can see whether paid spend is lifting organic sales or replacing them.
• Run holdout tests where you can. pause a campaign or a region for a set period and compare. It is crude, but it shows what the platform's attribution cannot.
• Judge on contribution margin. after marketplace fees, fulfilment and cost of goods. A high return on a low-margin product can still lose money.

A 90-day starting plan

1. Weeks 1 to 2: fix the shelf. check stock, pricing, images and Arabic and English listing copy on Amazon and noon. Confirm indexing on your core Arabic terms.
2. Weeks 3 to 6: discover. launch automatic campaigns plus separate Arabic and English manual campaigns on Amazon, and Product Ads on noon. Keep budgets near the minimums and let the data build.
3. Weeks 7 to 10: harvest and cut. move converting search terms into exact match, add non-converting ones as negatives, and adjust bids per language and per market.
4. Weeks 11 to 13: scale and test. shift budget to proven terms, add Sponsored Brands or noon Brand Ads with native Arabic headlines, and, for FMCG brands, test a grocery network such as Precision Media against a holdout.

Retail media in the Gulf rewards brands that treat it as a bilingual, marketplace-specific discipline rather than a copy of a US account. Get the shelf right, cover both languages, plan around the regional calendar and measure what is truly incremental. Many competitors still miss at least one of them.

If you want a second view on your marketplace advertising in the UAE or Saudi Arabia, that is the kind of work we do at Gaveau Strategy.