Amazon DSP: Features You Need to Know
Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP) allows advertisers to influence shoppers by programmatically buying ad placements at scale. Displayed across multiple mediums, brands can present their products at the right moment in the consumer purchase journey through specific interest-based audience segments. Since Amazon accounts for 40% of all online retail, taking advantage of the retailer’s rich data network is a smart move for those with an online product.
By tracking customer’s purchase journeys, Amazon has created the largest database of shoppers across hundreds of interest categories. Advertisers can also build relevance by leveraging their existing audience sources alongside Amazon’s data to create lookalike audiences and re-engage lost customers. This elaborate data allows advertisers to target the right shoppers with the best ad type efficiently.
“Advertisers have found a lot of value in delivering a follow-up message to audiences who searched for their product or viewed their detail pages on Amazon,” Ryan Mayward of Amazon Advertising said in an interview. With the DSP, you can advertise with desktop and mobile display ads, dynamic e-commerce ads, mobile interstitial ads, and perhaps most engaging, in-stream video ads.
Over time, Amazon has acquired rich demographic and audience data sets based on search history, browsing patterns, and purchasing behaviors. Utilizing Amazon’s rich targeting segments, advertisers can target people’s short-term in-market interests as well as long-term lifestyle purchases.
Why the DSP?
One of the largest misconceptions of the DSP is that you have to be a vendor or seller on Amazon in order to utilize this ad platform. Geared toward demographic and historical data to build targeted campaigns, this advertising network is available for anyone with a product to sell.
If you are selling on the Amazon platform it’s a smart choice to utilize the DSP. Selling on Amazon and using the DSP allows you to advertise with dynamic product ads and because you can ‘shop now’ with these ads, there is a lower barrier to purchase, resulting in higher conversion.
DSP Strategy
The DSP is similar to other programmatic advertising platforms like Google or Facebook ads, however, Amazon’s unique audience segments allow users to specifically target the right groups for their product.
Strategically using the DSP in conjunction with other advertising efforts helps to build a well-rounded advertising strategy with maximized reach and efficiency catered specifically to platform differences and benefits. By reaching customers on multiple points of the customer journey, advertisers encourage brand discovery and loyalty maximizing a customer’s lifetime value.
Behind the [DSP] Scenes
Implementing the DSP requires a strategic budget as well as Amazon-approved creative and the know-how. To improve the user experience, Amazon has recently rolled out four major enhancements to the DSP interface. Users now have improved navigation, bulk editing capabilities, custom reporting and can expect faster turnaround on creative approval.
Once your DSP account is set up, it’s all about the right strategy in order to see the greatest return on this highly valuable advertising platform.
6 Amazon DSP Features You Need to Know
As the DSP rises in popularity, Amazon continues to release more features to better serve advertisers. In this blog post, we highlight the key updates to the DSP over the past year to help you increase your campaign performance.
Recent DSP Developments
Additional New-to-Category Audiences
When new-to-category audiences first launched, there were only 12 available. Now there are 73 to choose from, with little overlap between categories. These additional audiences can give advertisers a more accurate measure of new-to-brand shoppers, with an added layer of efficiency and granularity previously not available.
Responsive Ecommerce Ads
The responsive ecommerce ad type maximizes available inventory by accessing 10 different available ad sizes and up to 20 different promoted ASINs within a single unit. More impressively, out of stock (OOS) ASINs are automatically removed from rotation because the system will automatically show the product most likely to contribute to the campaign’s key performance indicators (KPI), which quickens the optimization process and helps limit ad waste.
Goal and Optimization Targeting
A goal and optimization section has been added to the DSP, integrating the goal KPI selection and all available automated optimization capabilities. This update allows advertisers to choose the “bid optimization models” option; choosing an “optimization type” for every line item is no longer required.
New Reporting Dimensions
New reporting dimensions have been added to product, geography and technology reports. For product reports, advertisers can now measure conversions for a campaign at an ASIN level, providing metrics for both top Promoted and Brand Halo ASINs. Geography reports can now show metrics associated with a region, state, city, designated market area (DMA), or zipcode to help with campaign optimization. Lastly, technology reports now allow for campaign optimization based on attributes such as device type, browser, or operating system.
Budget Flighting
Advertisers can now create multiple budgets for different flight periods within a single order without having to create separate orders or line items to assign different budget amounts per flight. This helps with long term planning and optimization, as advertisers are no longer starting each period from scratch.
Application Programming Interface (API) Reporting
The API Reporting feature lets advertisers retrieve reports on the performance of the DSP campaigns at a global scale. Accessible at the line item, order, and creative level, these metrics help brands and sellers receive campaign reports faster and easier.
These new features help brands reach a large audience of Amazon consumers through effective campaigns. Understanding the key improvements highlighted in this article is essential to maximizing the performance of your DSP campaigns.
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