Amazon DSP advertising targets the buyers you missed and keeps your brand in front of shoppers everywhere.
Amazon sellers who’ve mastered PPC know its power of bringing in shoppers ready to buy. But now, there’s buzz about Amazon DSP Advertising, and many sellers are wondering: Is it worth the time, money, and effort?
The problem? PPC only works when shoppers are actively searching. It doesn’t reach those who showed interest but didn’t buy, or potential customers who don’t yet know your brand. That’s a huge missed opportunity.
That’s why more sellers are adding Amazon DSP to their ad strategy. And the results speak for themselves. In a Fall 2023 survey of U.S. marketers using Amazon DSP, 49% rated its targeting as excellent or very good, while 42% reported strong ROI.
DSP allows you to retarget past visitors, reach new audiences based on behavior and interests, and keep your brand in front of shoppers, even when they’re not on Amazon.
If you’re serious about scaling, it’s time to combine both for maximum growth. Let’s break down how to do it.
Table of Contents
What is Amazon demand-side platform advertising?
Amazon Demand-Side Platform (DSP) is a programmatic advertising tool that allows brands to run display and video ads both on and off Amazon. It’s ideal for branding and remarketing, enabling you to retarget shoppers across third-party sites like Yahoo, Facebook, and other online retailers.
Programmatic advertising is a way to automatically buy and place digital ads—no need to manually negotiate with websites or publishers. It helps advertisers reach the right people at the right time, using real-time data and dynamic bidding.
If an Amazon seller only uses Amazon PPC, they’re limited to ads inside Amazon like Sponsored Products or Brands. That means they miss out on reaching shoppers who’ve shown interest but left Amazon. For example, if someone clicks your product on Amazon but doesn’t buy, DSP can show them your ad again later on Facebook or a news site that PPC can’t.
By skipping programmatic ads like Amazon DSP, sellers lose the chance to:
Retarget potential buyers off Amazon
Scale ads more efficiently
Optimize spending with dynamic pricing
Build brand visibility beyond search results
In short: no DSP = lost traffic, fewer sales, and less control over your full-funnel ad strategy.
Using Amazon DSP advertising to overcome tariff impacts
Tariffs can increase product costs and reduce profit margins, but Amazon DSP advertising can help mitigate these effects by boosting visibility and driving sales. Here’s how:
Targeting the Right Audience
Use Amazon DSP’s audience insights to target high-intent shoppers who are more likely to convert, helping offset higher product prices caused by tariffs.
Retargeting
Implement retargeting strategies to re-engage previous visitors and push them to purchase despite increased prices.
Custom Creatives
Create ads that emphasize value propositions, such as product quality or unique features, to justify price increases and maintain consumer interest.
Optimize Campaigns
Continuously monitor campaign performance and adjust bids, frequency caps, and targeting to ensure the best return on ad spend (ROAS), helping to balance out the tariff impact.
Discover how Amazon DSP can help ease your worries about tariffs by driving targeted traffic and optimizing sales strategies to maintain profitability despite rising costs.
Smarter Ads, Bigger Results with Amazon DSP!
Work with the pros to create a powerful ad strategy that works for you.
Amazon DSP Creatives
Amazon DSP offers several types of ads to help advertisers reach their audience effectively:
Display Advertisements
These ads use responsive eCommerce creatives (REC) that can generate ads for up to 20 ASINs per creative. They can appear across all five Amazon DSP inventory sources, with reporting on various creative sizes to identify the best-performing placements.
Video Ads
Streaming TV (STV) Ads – Non-skippable video ads that play before or during content on streaming platforms like IMDb TV, Fire TV, and other on-demand services.
Online Video (OLV) Ads – Clickable video ads that appear on web browsers and apps, leading viewers to Amazon product pages or external websites.
Audio Ads
These ads reach listeners through platforms like Amazon Music, delivering audio messages to target audiences.
Over-the-Top (OTT) Ads
Video ads on streaming TV platforms, including Amazon Fire TV, designed to reach audiences who have moved away from traditional TV.
When to combine Amazon DSP campaign with PPC
Amazon DSP is a powerful tool for targeting audiences with display ads both on and off Amazon, offering capabilities like video targeting and even streaming TV ads. However, it is most effective when paired with a strong Amazon PPC strategy.
The right time to start using DSP, as discussed in this video from Mina Elias, is after you’ve optimized your PPC campaigns and established consistent sales. Typically, brands should have at least one product with over 100 reviews and a solid PPC budget (around $10,000 to $20,000) before considering DSP.
Since PPC targets warm traffic actively searching for products on Amazon, DSP should be used once your PPC efforts convert and generate sales. At this point, DSP can help you retarget shoppers who viewed your products but didn’t purchase, expand to competitor targeting, and tap into complementary product markets, driving new customers and increasing overall brand reach.
What can you expect when combining Amazon DSP with PPC
When Amazon sellers combine DSP advertising with PPC, they gain several key benefits that can lead to better results:
DSP uses Amazon’s first-party data, helping sellers target the right audience based on shopping habits, interests, and demographics. This makes ads more relevant and effective.
DSP ads aren’t limited to Amazon. Sellers can place ads across third-party websites and apps, expanding their brand’s visibility to a wider audience online.
With DSP, sellers can focus on specific audience segments, ensuring their ads reach the most likely buyers, which improves campaign performance.
DSP provides detailed reports on how ads are performing, so sellers can make informed adjustments to improve results and maximize return on investment.
Starting with Amazon demand side platform advertising
Set your goals for the Amazon ad campaign
Clear goals are key to making Amazon DSP campaigns effective. They help:
Maximize reach and frequency by controlling how often users see your ads.
Improve budget efficiency by aligning spending with your objectives.
Boost performance by optimizing toward specific KPIs like awareness, consideration, or conversions.
Prevent ad waste by avoiding overexposure or under-delivery.
Without goals, your campaign risks overspending or missing your audience. Most campaigns focus on one of three primary goals:
Focus: Introducing your brand and products to new audiences.
Best for: Upper-funnel targeting with broad reach.
Questions to ask yourself:
Who is my target audience, and have they heard of my brand before?
What message do I want people to associate with my brand?
Which platforms and placements will maximize visibility?
Product Consideration
Focus: Engaging interested shoppers by highlighting product benefits and solving pain points.
Best for: Mid-funnel targeting to build interest and intent.
Be specific about:
What specific problems does my product solve?
How does my offer compare to similar products?
What type of content will build trust and interest?
Conversion
Focus: Driving purchases by standing out against competitors.
Best for: Lower-funnel targeting with strong calls to action.
Ask yourself:
Are shoppers ready to buy, or do they need an extra push?
What makes my product stand out from competitors?
Do I have strong product pages and reviews to support sales?
Decide on Your Amazon DSP Advertising Budget
Your Amazon DSP budget depends on your goals, product type, and competition. There are three ways to get started:
Managed Services by Amazon – Requires a minimum spend of $15,000/month but only covers ad management.
Self-Service – A DIY option with no set minimum, but requires time and expertise to optimize campaigns.
Amazon Agency Management (e.g., My Amazon Guy) – A full-service approach that includes Amazon DSP ads along with SEO, design, catalog management, and catalog troubleshooting for a well-rounded strategy.
A recommended starting budget is $10,000–$15,000 per month, and funds can be allocated across multiple products to maximize results.
Choose and customize Amazon DSP ad types
One of the key benefits of working with professionals is having expert support to guide your ad strategy from setup to optimization. Amazon DSP ads are highly customizable, allowing you to create branded ads with custom headlines, logos, and images that reflect your unique identity.
The three main DSP ad types to choose from are:
Responsive Ads – Use Amazon’s templates that automatically pull product images and titles from your ASIN. These ads adjust to fit various placements across sites and apps.
Static Image Ads – Fully custom ads that direct traffic to your brand store or external site. Great for improving brand visibility and boosting click-through rates.
Video Ads (STV/OLV) – Short video formats for Streaming TV (non-clickable) and Online Video (clickable). These offer a powerful way to engage shoppers and drive traffic to your brand assets.
Choosing the right mix of these ad types—and customizing them effectively—can improve visibility, drive traffic, and increase conversions.
Utilize Amazon Marketing Cloud for attribution
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) provides a powerful tool for brands to optimize their advertising strategies and better understand the full impact of their ad spend. With the introduction of Custom Audiences in May 2023, AMC enables advertisers to tap into in-depth shopper data, allowing them to create highly targeted campaigns aimed at users who have already engaged with their product.
By utilizing AMC’s multi-touch attribution model, brands can evaluate the effectiveness of their ads across the entire customer journey, from initial awareness to conversion and repeat purchases. The platform combines Amazon’s first-party data with extensive attribution modeling to offer valuable insights that help reduce waste and maximize conversion rates.
AMC empowers advertisers to make data-driven decisions, track customer behaviors, and refine cross-channel campaigns, ultimately ensuring more efficient ad spend and higher returns on investment.
Campaign Data Available in Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) blends Amazon event data with custom analytics to provide detailed insights while ensuring privacy through data hashing. Key campaign data includes:
Sponsored Ads and DSP Data
Metrics like impressions, clicks, video views, orders, and sales, viewable by keyword, ad group, and more.
Audience Segment Data
For Amazon DSP, includes segments like:
In-market Audiences: Shoppers actively browsing within a category.
Lifestyle Audiences: Based on behaviors of specific interest groups (e.g., foodies, tech enthusiasts).
AMC also provides insights such as:
The best ad combinations for conversions.
The ASINs that attract new-to-brand customers.
Customer journey from discovery to purchase, revealing key touchpoints.
New potential customer segments by analyzing current audience demographics.
- Locations yielding the highest conversion rates for targeted expansion.
Monitor and analyze Amazon DSP campaign performance
Amazon DSP provides valuable performance metrics that help advertisers track their campaigns through each stage of the customer journey. Keep in mind that results can take up to 14 days to fully reflect due to the DSP’s attribution window.
Understanding your DSP metrics by funnel stage helps you identify where your ads succeed or struggle, whether it’s building awareness, driving interest, or closing sales. This lets you optimize spend and creative at the right points in the customer journey, instead of guessing.
Awareness stage
Goal: Get noticed
Impressions: Total number of ad views.
Why it matters: Tells you how many people are seeing your ads—essential for top-of-funnel reach.Click-Through Rate (CTR) = clicks ÷ impressions
Why it matters: Measures how compelling your ad is. Low CTR? Time to tweak your creative or targeting.
Product consideration stage
Goal: Spark interest and engagement
Detail Page View Rate (DPVR) = detail page views ÷ impressions
Why it matters: Shows how many viewers are interested enough to learn more—key for evaluating product appeal.Video Completion Rate (VCR) = video completes ÷ video starts
Why it matters: Gauges the effectiveness of your video. If people don’t watch it all, it may not be engaging.Effective Cost per 1,000 Impressions = total cost ÷ impressions × 1,000
Why it matters: Helps compare cost efficiency across campaigns.Cost per Add to Cart = total cost ÷ adds to cart
Why it matters: Indicates how much it costs to move someone closer to buying.Cost per Purchase = total cost ÷ purchases
Why it matters: Shows how efficiently you’re converting interest into sales.Cost per Video Completion = total cost ÷ video completes
Why it matters: Helps assess ROI on video content.
Purchase Stage
Goal: Drive conversions
Add to Cart: Total add-to-cart actions.
Why it matters: A strong indicator of buying intent; watch for drop-off between add to cart and actual purchases.Units Sold: Quantity purchased.
Why it matters: A direct measure of performance.Attributed Sales: Revenue linked to your ads.
Why it matters: A core metric to prove ad effectiveness.Purchase Rate = number purchases ÷ impressions (ad views)
Why it matters: Tracks conversion from exposure to sale. Low rate? Reevaluate targeting or creative.ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) = attributed sales ÷ spend
Why it matters: Shows profitability. This is your bottom-line metric.
Loyalty Stage
Goal: Build long-term value
Subscribe & Save Subscriptions: New subs from ads.
Why it matters: Indicates recurring revenue potential from campaigns.Subscribe & Save Rate = Subscribe & Save Subscriptions ÷ impressions
Why it matters: Measures ad impact on loyalty-building actions.
Tracking each of these tells you where buyers drop off, how much you’re paying for actions, and where to refine. Without analysis, you’re flying blind—spending money without knowing what’s working.
Analyze data from Amazon DSP advertising reports
Amazon DSP provides robust reporting tools that offer deep insights into campaign performance. These reports help advertisers track progress and optimize strategies to meet specific goals. Here’s an overview of the key reports available:
Console data
Console reporting gives a comprehensive view of campaign performance at the order, line item, and creative levels. With over 100 metrics available, this report allows you to evaluate all aspects of your Amazon DSP campaigns.
Audience data
Audience analytics offer granular data on customer behaviors, including the time between product views and purchases. It also provides demographic breakdowns (age, gender, income) and timing insights (day of the week, time of day). You can track repeat purchase rates and time between repeat purchases, helping refine targeting strategies.
Audience overlap
Overlap reports show other audiences your target audience may belong to, opening opportunities for reaching new customers. By using affinity and size scores, you can identify complementary audiences with the highest potential for conversion, increasing your brand’s reach.
Segmentation data
Segmentation reports help assess the performance of directly targeted segments and uncover high-potential segments you might have overlooked. You can drill down by metrics like CTR and DPVR to find the most engaged audiences, guiding future campaign targeting.
Retail Insights data
The retail insights report helps assess the impact of your advertising efforts on shopping activity. It tracks metrics like search impressions, glance views, conversion rates, orders shipped, reviews, and ratings. This report is particularly useful for measuring the success of video ads and understanding how they influence shopping behavior before, during, and after the campaign.
Optimize Amazon DSP Ads Using Data from Reports
To improve your Amazon DSP campaigns, use data from reports to fine-tune key areas:
Audiences
Use overlap reports to identify high-performing audiences before and after launch. Adjust targeting based on audience performance insights.
Bids
Adjust base and max bids to allocate more budget to high-performing line items. Use incremental increases to scale without overpaying.
Budget
Reallocate budget from underperforming line items to those performing well and scaling.
Creatives
Focus on top-performing creatives and remove underperforming ones.
Frequency & Frequency Cap
Increase the frequency cap to boost impressions for high-performing line items that are under-delivering.
Supply
Select additional supply sources if your campaign is under-delivering to expand reach.
Viewability
Relax viewability settings for line items performing well but under-delivering to increase impressions.
By optimizing these elements, you can maximize the effectiveness of your Amazon DSP campaigns.
Amazon DSP Advertising for Non-Amazon Sellers
DSP is available not only to sellers on the platform but also to brands that don’t sell on Amazon. Unlike Amazon Sponsored Ads, which direct traffic to Amazon pages, DSP ads can send users to external websites, making it perfect for brands in industries like insurance or hospitality that aren’t on Amazon.
Non-Amazon brands can use DSP to access Amazon’s audience data and targeting features. Additionally, DSP is the only way for these brands to advertise on Amazon’s own platforms, like Twitch, Prime Video, and IMDb, expanding their reach across Amazon’s network.
How does Amazon DSP compare with other Demand-Side Platforms
Amazon DSP, Google DV360, and The Trade Desk (TTD) are key players in the demand-side platform (DSP) space, but each offers unique features and advantages.
DSP ad placement
Google DV360 excels with access to YouTube video ad placements, while Amazon DSP offers exclusive placements on Amazon’s own properties. TTD provides broad inventory across multiple exchanges but lacks first-party owned placements.
Data source
Google DV360 leverages powerful first-party data from Google’s search and other services for advanced targeting. Amazon DSP uses shopping and purchase data from Amazon users, making it ideal for advertisers focused on e-commerce. TTD doesn’t have first-party data but provides a wide range of inventory.
Platform integrations
TTD integrates well with third-party ad tech providers, while Google DV360 seamlessly connects with Google Analytics and other Google tools. Amazon DSP works best for brands on Amazon, offering strong integration within Amazon’s ecosystem.
Works best for closed-loop systems or open internet
Closed Loop
A closed-loop system operates within a single platform or ecosystem, where tracking, data collection, and ad performance analysis are all managed by the platform. This ensures precise tracking and better optimization.
Examples:
Amazon DSP and Google DV360 are closed-loop systems that control the data and tools for ad targeting and tracking within their respective ecosystems.
Advantages:
Accurate data tracking and seamless integration.
Better optimization since the platform controls all aspects.
Open Internet
An open internet system allows integration with multiple platforms and third-party ad tech providers, offering flexibility but potentially less precise tracking.
Example:
The Trade Desk (TTD) integrates with a wide range of third-party providers, allowing ads across various websites and exchanges.
Advantages:
Flexibility and broader reach across different platforms.
Access to third-party tools and technologies.
Boost your sales with Amazon DSP & PPC Integration
Unlock new growth by combining Amazon DSP and PPC. Here’s how My Amazon Guy can help:
Increase Visibility
Reach new audiences and retarget previous visitors.
Expert Management
We handle setup, optimization, and goal-setting for maximum ROI.
Tailored Strategies
Custom ad creatives and strategies for your brand.
Data-Driven Optimization
Leverage first-party data to improve performance.
Full-Service Approach
From DSP ads to SEO, design, and catalog management.
Contact our full service Amazon agency today to start boosting your Amazon sales!
