Your Comprehensive Guide to the Amazon DSP (2022)

Amazon sellers are always looking for novel and engaging ways to connect with potential customers and increase conversion rates.

The best ways to tell the public about the amazing products you have to offer are through display advertising of the highest calibre and video commercials. The introduction of Sponsored Brand Video Ads has demonstrated this.

Amazon has created its Demand Side Platform(DSP) as a result.

You can purchase video and display ads across Amazon Internet and affiliated websites using the Amazon DSP service. The Amazon DSP has two unique features: first, it is an automated platform for programmatic ad buying across hundreds of websites, and second, it offers sophisticated targeting options based on Amazon’s transaction information.

If you want to increase your reach and attract new customers, Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP) might be the solution. This is a platform for advertising intended to draw non-Amazon audiences and persuade them to go to Amazon.

What Is Amazon DSP?

Unlike sponsored advertising, Amazon’s DSP (demand-side platform) is designed to raise product and brand exposure outside of Amazon’s platform and community, expanding reach to those who may not always buy from the behemoth or who aren’t in the purchasing mindset.

Mobile banner advertisements, mobile interstitial ads, desktop display ads, in-stream video commercials, picture and text ads, and other formats are all examples of these types of ads. 

These Amazon ad solutions are valuable because they allow merchants and providers to retarget potential customers outside of the Amazon network.

Do you know that Amazon currently competes with Google Analytics as one of the biggest virtual advertising platforms, with over $20 billion in ad revenue in 2020 and a 77% year-over-year growth rate? When compared to the combined ad income of Pinterest, Snap, Twitter, and Roku, Amazon’s ad revenue will be more than twice as large.

The trademark of Amazon as an online shopping website, along with its extensive list of subsidiaries, may be linked to its quick expanding expansion as an advertising platform. IMDb TV, Prime Video, Kindle, Twitch, Audible, and third-party providers are just a few of the tools Amazon has at its disposal to ensure that your adverts reach your target clients at every level of the funnel.

Of course, Amazon DSP is simply one of the most effective demand-side platforms available right now. But what sets Facebook apart from the competition is its breadth of reach with the particular demographics you want to reach, thanks to its global user base – yes, even outside the United States. Because so many Canadians use Amazon and its services, DSP is something you should think about.

Amazon now provides DSP advertising to businesses both on and off its marketplace, generating hundreds of millions of impressions every day. DSP, on the other hand, is not inexpensive, with a managed-service option starting at $35,000. Advertisers are then forced to pay every 1,000 persons who view their Sponsored adverts in CPM, which stands for Cost-Per-Mille.

Network and Exchange for Amazon DSP

In essence, Amazon DSP serves as the ad network and exchange for Amazon advertising. This idea of an ad network and exchange allows you to target your adverts outside of Amazon.

Amazon collects its advertising placement on numerous Amazon-owned goods, applications, and websites, together with the Amazon Supply Side Platform (SSP) known as Amazon Publisher Services. Amazon uses their ad network to create the supply (APS).

Amazon DSP can offer advertisers (Amazon Sellers/other DSP participants) adverts from off Amazon and on Amazon properties by inviting non-Amazon-related websites to join their ad network.

The impressions that advertisers may receive through DSP are ad inventory that they cannot obtain through other exchanges due to the unique ad supply provided by their SSP.

This equation’s “ad exchange” component describes how Amazon DSP enables programmatic advertising by using computer software to automatically purchase and sell ad placements. The CPM approach is used in the vast majority of programmatically sold ads. Amazon DSP is priced in CPM (Cost Per Mile) because of this.

To summarise, Amazon DSP is an advertising model that is extremely dissimilar from Sponsored Ads. Amazon DSP uses APS to compile the supply of adverts as an ad network. Then, by enabling CPM bidding from advertisers, act as an ad exchange.

Types Of Ads Available On Amazon’s DSP

Now that you know how to target the right audience, it’s time to develop some advertising.

The following four main ad formats are available to your brand through DSP:

1. Static Ads

Static advertisements should be utilised as mid- and upper-funnel ways to attract buyers and increase brand recognition because they lack dynamic components and require particular calls to action, such as “Shop Now.” These advertisements direct you to a product detail page, an Amazon storefront, or a unique landing page.

2. Dynamic Ads

Amazon’s machine learning offerings are getting better and easier to use every day. Dynamic e-commerce advertising adjust which creatives appear relying on the campaign’s aim. To persuade customers to check out the goods on Amazon, you may include promotional offers or customer reviews in your creative. Dynamic advertising can only be connected from a product detail page.

The following services are now offered by Amazon thanks to machine learning:

• If a consumer is likely to study reviews before making a purchase, they will present a dynamic eCommerce advertisement with a review.
• An add-to-cart button-equipped dynamic e-commerce advertisement will be displayed to customers who are more likely to make impulsive purchases.

3. Video Ads

Video is a fantastic method to share your brand’s narrative and connect with your audience on an emotional level. DSP allows video advertising to run within video content (in-stream video) or as a display ad (out-stream video). You may use DSP to link your video advertising to an Amazon product detail page or your website. When you use a DSP to create video advertising, you can also use Amazon’s audiences to target the relevant customers.

4. OTT Video Ads

Additionally delivered on the DSP platform is OTT advertising. These full-screen, unskippable advertisements are a great way to reach millions of people through connected TV sources (like the Amazon Fire TV Stick). These adverts can be used to target specific Amazon customers, but they cannot be clicked.

How To Optimize Your Marketing Funnel With Amazon DSP

Amazon DSP is built to reach audiences across Amazon sites, apps, and publishing partners such as IMDB, Twitch, and others.

Marketers who are familiar with Amazon’s advertising console often wish that Amazon provided targeting choices that included:

• Geography
• Date and Time
• Segmentation capabilities
• Demographics

Even though sponsored products and brand advertising may not have the same targeting choices, Amazon DSP can provide additional benefits, such as:

• A/B testing creative
• Mobile and desktop-specific ads
• Ad frequency per visitor
• Ad placement, above or below
• Include or exclude specific domains
• ZIP code

Options for Amazon DSP Targeting

The Amazon DSP can assist many of your advertising objectives thanks to its tens of thousands of customer segments and insights into consumer behaviour and intent. Here is a quick overview of the available targeting possibilities.

1. Behavioral Targeting

The ability to specify any number of triggers with behavioural targeting allows you to target customers that are further down the sales funnel. It is frequently used for brand awareness objectives.

2. Lifestyle Targeting

With lifestyle targeting, adverts that are pertinent to the consumer are shown to those who frequently purchase from a given category. You can target customers using this type of targeting if they have qualities in common with your current clients or if they have interests in niche markets that relate to your brand.

3. Demographic Targeting

Advertisements may be targeted based on gender, age, income, or geography.

4. Device Targeting

Use specific end-user devices to target your adverts, such as Android or Apple phones, various operating systems, desktop users, or other specialised devices like the Amazon Fire tablet.

5. In-Market Targeting

You may improve brand recognition and boost sales by utilising in-market targeting. People who are “in-market” are individuals whose intent is high and who are more likely to buy your goods or services.

6. Contextual Targeting

Users should see adverts based on the websites they are now visiting. Contextual targeting is a fantastic tool for promoting impulsive purchases and accelerating conversions.

7. Remarketing Targeting

Remarketing targeting might be useful for customers who aren’t sure whether to buy a product or one that is competing with it. Pixel-based, ASIN, Purchased ASIN, Brand Halo, and Similar Product remarketing are among the several remarketing targets.

8. Audience Lookalike Targeting

Using audience lookalike targeting, you can target potential consumers who are similar to your current clientele. With this choice, you can benefit from Amazon’s distinctive data as well as its collaborative filtering, which can produce thorough customer profiles.

9. Audience for advertisers 

You can use third-party data with Amazon DSP so you won’t have to rely exclusively on the first-party data Amazon offers. You can connect with customers who have previously interacted with your brand by using pixels, CRM data, and/or DMP audience transfers.

Benefits of Amazon DSP

The aforementioned features are useful when using Amazon DSP. Here are a few illustrations of what Amazon DSP can be used for.

Device-to-Device Targeting that is Exact

Amazon DSP advertising appears as display advertisements on websites on both mobile and desktop. Mobile app adverts and banner display ads are available on iOS, Android, and Fire Tablet. For a little period, mobile intermission advertisements run inside mobile apps at logical transition points. The user can dismiss them by clicking the “close” button in the top right corner.

Only Amazon-owned properties, such as Fire TV, which offer a “brand-safe environment,” display video commercials.

Intermediate Audiences

Programmatic practitioners don’t have to worry about reach or scalability because there are so many ad impressions accessible; instead, they just need to develop the best rules-based campaigns to make sure that only the most valuable ad impressions are bought. This can be exceedingly difficult given the potentially billions of ad impressions available per hour.

The rich product research, browse, and purchase data from Amazon are incredibly potent signals for DSP targeting, and this dataset is only accessible through the Amazon DSP. While marketers can target ads to users based on their geolocation, the devices they use, and other common audience attributes with just about any DSP.

Brands can target customers who have looked at, searched for, or bought particular things on Amazon, but Amazon DSP can also utilise this information to learn more about the interests, demographics, and purchasing inclinations of each Amazon user. By utilising its enormous consumer presence across Prime Video and other owned sites and applications, it also creates audience groupings for brands.

Campaigns With Optimised Results

With Amazon DSP, advertisers may more easily manually or automatically optimise their campaigns to achieve certain objectives. Budgets are dynamically adjusted based on campaign objectives, and automatic optimizations change bids to ensure that adverts are displayed on the best sites in the best formats. Using up to 500,000 predictors based on Amazon customers’ purchasing patterns, the gadget also compares each impression to a predetermined target.

Using Amazon DSP, advertisers have a variety of creative options, such as conventional photos, video, third-party, and display advertisements with e-commerce creative, as well as the ability to manually change many aspects of a campaign, such as budgets, supplies, audiences, bids, and frequency caps.

Retargeting

The success of a business depends on both acquiring new customers and maintaining an existing clientele. On the other hand, keeping current customers is a more economical use of advertising resources than acquiring new ones.

By educating your customers about your products using Amazon DSP, you can increase brand recognition. You can, however, retarget potential customers who have already purchased or engaged with your product or related products in the category.

To summarise, you can use Amazon DSP for:

• Top-of-the-funnel conversion – Boost visibility and brand awareness.
• Mid-conversion funnel: Encourage customers to choose your goods over a rival’s
• Low-conversion funnel: Reengage and retarget customers to improve the chances that they will make a purchase.

Is Amazon’s DSP worth it?

The best way to think of Amazon DSP is as the “next step” for an established company, good, or service. A brand-new Amazon seller is not likely to be a good fit for this real-time bidding system.

Amazon DSP can be the best next step for you if your brand is more well-known, you have more financial resources, and you want to extend your advertising beyond Amazon Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands.

Conclusion

Amazon DSP is a great scalable addition to what you’re already doing with Amazon Advertising (PPC), allowing you to target customers using Amazon’s algorithms and vast customer database. It isn’t a magic solution for Amazon advertising, though.