What Is Amazon DSP and How Does it Work?

Tana Cofer

June 24, 2023

 3 minute read time
amazon ad strategy

You’ve tried everything on Amazon. You’ve used all of the ad products offered in Seller Central and still cannot reach your customer acquisition goals.

This happens.

Although Amazon receives over 2 billion visitors a month, your audience may not be looking for you there . . . yet. Amazon has also increased their ad products and placements so much that consumers are often overwhelmed with all of the ads.

If you are hoping to expand your reach and appeal to new customers, Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP) may be the answer. This is an ad platform that is specifically designed to engage off-Amazon audiences and bring them to Amazon.

These ads can be found in many different forms, including mobile banner ads, mobile interstitial ads, desktop display ads, in-stream video ads, image and text ads, and many more. Any vendors and third-party sellers can use Amazon DSP to create brand awareness and retarget potential customers.

What Are the Benefits of Amazon’s DSP?

1. Advanced Targeting Features

We all wish Amazon’s advertising campaigns had more advanced targeting methods like:

  • Geographic location
  • Demographics
  • Date/Time schedules
  • Segmentation capabilities

While sponsored products, sponsored brands, and sponsored display may not have these capabilities, DSP does. Here is a sample list of additional targets you may not have thought of that DSP has:

  • Mobile versus desktop specific ads
  • A/B testing creative
  • Ad frequency per unique visitor
  • Ad placement, above or below the fold
  • Specific domains (can exclude or include)
  • ZIP code
  • In-market audiences

2. Customization Through User-Built Audiences

Ever wanted to build an audience to target customers who bought a product from your brand, but haven’t in the past 9 months? You can do that through Amazon DSP.

Ever wanted to build an audience to target people who buy from your competitors? You can also do that through Amazon DSP.

Would your product be perfect for people who have just recently purchased a winter coat? A baby monitor? Wine glasses? Grab those ASINs and build an audience through Amazon DSP.

Building these audiences on DSP is a newer feature to DSP. Our team at Pattern is highly skilled in building unique audiences for your brands to help increase new customer acquisition.

3. Dynamic Targeting

Data is a powerful thing. Using data to determine where to next advertise your product is extremely effective. However, there are things that you cannot control that can mess with your data or contradict your strategy. Some examples of this are:

  • Influencers/social callouts you didn’t plan for
  • Pandemics (Hello, COVID-19)
  • OOS (Out of Stock)
  • Reformulations (supplement brands especially)
  • Domain algorithms changing

All of these can drastically change your strategy. Using dynamic campaigns are very important because they catch on to shifts in the landscape and tweak the ads accordingly. This can be moving the placement of the ad to the top of the site page in order to increase impressions, it can be focusing spend on different creative sizes that callout discounts, have an ‘add to cart’ button, or move the domains ads are served on to better reach the audiences that are interested in your product. This kind of flexible advertising is a great benefit.

4. Retargeting

Gaining new customers is vital for brand growth. However, maintaining repeat purchasers is a cheaper way to use your ad dollars. While brand awareness campaigns are aimed toward educating consumers on your product, campaigns focused on repeat customers have a much higher immediate return.

You can reach out and re-engage customers who have purchased your brand before by using ASIN and pixel retargeting. Pixel retargeting is when you track potential customers with pixels placed on your website and linked to your Amazon DSP account. This means that you’re “following” those customers so you can show them your product ads.

ASIN retargeting is similar. However, you track from your product page on Amazon instead of your website.

The Amazon DSP retargeting capabilities can help you:

  • Cross-sell complementary products to site visitors or previous customers.
  • Re-engage people who have visited your site to increase brand awareness.
  • Educate previous site visitors or customers about new products they may like.
  • Remind previous customers when they’ll need to repurchase your product.

If you’re hoping to increase sales, new customer acquisition, and exposure, Amazon DSP may be a great option for you. To learn more about how you can grow your ecommerce brand, get in touch today.

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