Amazon Demand Side Platform (DSP): Way to Boosting Sales and Achieving Success

Setting goals for your Amazon demand side platform campaign

Before setting up your campaign, it’s essential to have a clear objective.

This is true because you can use Amazon Demand Side Platform to target any area of ​​your funnel or multiple locations simultaneously and because specific build, inventory, and targeting types are better suited to particular goals than others.

For the purpose of simplicity, here are three objectives that can guide your decision-making when setting up an Amazon DSP advertising campaign:

Brand Awareness: Brand awareness aims to introduce people to your company and its products and ensure that your brand comes first throughout the buying process.

Consideration: A consideration campaign is designed to address an issue, highlight an interest, or answer a question from a consumer so the advertiser can show how your product will meet a buyer’s needs.

Conversion: This is the ultimate goal of every marketer – the sale. You have introduced yourself and informed your audience about your offer. 

In the next section, we’ll give you more tips on structuring and optimizing your campaigns around the goals above.

Campaign setup

When creating Amazon advertising DSP campaigns, it’s essential to understand the key settings.

There are two options to consider: managed service and self-service.

With managed service, someone else handles the campaign strategy, execution, and optimization.

This suits advertiser needing more expertise or time to develop their advertising strategy.

On the other hand, self-service requires advertisers to possess the knowledge and time to implement and fine-tune their campaigns regularly.

Understanding the DSP Console Views

The Amazon DSP Hierarchy: The Amazon Demand Side Platform consists of different levels, identifiable on the campaign manager page’s top left-hand side. Each group provides specific information, such as advertiser name, order name, line item name, and creative name.

Best Practices for Order Setup

Order Naming Convention: A consistent naming convention for orders helps with navigation and performance analysis. Recommended format: Product_Tactic_GoalKPI_LevelOfFunnel (e.g., Playstation5_Retargeting_ROAS_BOF).

Selecting an Order Goal and KPI: Choose the appropriate goal and key performance indicator (KPI) that align with your creative. Refer to a table provided to assist in selecting the proper KPI.

Order Budget and Delivery

Flight Segmentation: Flights allow budget segmentation by date. It’s recommended to create one flight per month.

Budget Cap: Setting a monthly budget cap ensures optimal pacing and full budget utilization.

Best Practices for Line Item Setup

Create separate line items for each inventory type (Amazon-owned sites, Amazon Publisher Services, and 3rd party exchanges) to gain control over bidding strategies.

Line Item Settings: Specify the creative type, name, category, and inventory for each line item.

Targeting: Choose device type, mobile environment (web vs. app), region, and other relevant targeting options.

Audiences: Utilize pre-built Amazon audiences or create custom audiences based on shopping interactions, demographics, devices, in-market behavior, interests, life events, lifestyle, lookalikes, or third-party data.

Campaign Setup Best Practices

Run Cross-Device Campaigns: Extend reach by targeting shoppers across sites, apps, and devices.

Segment Line Items: Consider breaking down line items by supply source, device, and audience type for better performance measurement and optimization.

Diverse Inventory and Supply Sources: Incorporate a variety of inventory and supply sources to maximize the chances of reaching relevant audiences.

Analyzing Amazon Demand Side Platform campaign performance: Before editing your campaigns, you must understand what works and what doesn’t.

Amazon Demand Side Platform takes time to collect ad performance data due to the platform’s 14-day attribution window.

Below we explain the attribution model, key KPIs, and reports to help you measure performance.

Amazon platform demand-side attribution model

Models determine which ad a conversion event is attributed to. In Amazon Demand Side Platform, conversion events include purchases and other events, such as viewing a product detail page or adding a product to a cart.

The attribution model also determines the duration of the “analysis window,” the length of time an ad can be viewed to be attributed as a conversion event. Therefore, understanding how the Amazon advertising DSP attribution model works are vital to interpreting metrics in Amazon Demand Side Platform reports.

Console reports

Example of an advertising display

Console reports provide all the basic information about the performance of your Amazon DSP advertising campaigns.

Here you can evaluate campaign metrics at the order, line item, and creative level, with over 100 metrics.

Recipient information

Amazon Demand-Side Platform (DSP) Ad Console – Sample Audience Insights report.

Audience Insights lets advertisers see detailed data about customer purchases and views.

For example, you can see the time between a customer looking at a product page and making a purchase (image above).

Browsing and purchase data can also be broken down by demographic status (e.g.age, gender, household income) and time (time of day, day of the week, weeks/months of the year).

Purchase frequency metrics such as repeat purchase rate, number of repeat purchases, and time between purchases are also available through Audience Insights.

Overlapping Reports

Sample Overlap Ratio With overlay reports, you can discover other audiences that your audience belongs to. This is a great way to gather opportunities to expand your business reach and introduce your brand and product portfolio to new customers.

The Affinity Score measures the similarities between your audience and overlapping audiences.

The higher the similarity value, the more similar the target group is.

Size measures the size of your audience relative to Amazon’s total audience. For example, a length of 6 would mean that the audience represents more than 60% of all Amazon audiences.

In summary, size and similarity scores help identify key complementary audiences interested in your products, opening up opportunities to attract new customers to your brand.

Segmentation reports

Sample Amazon Demand Side Platform ad segmentation report with the segmentation report, you can assess the performance of directly targeted segments and discover new features that still need to be addressed.

This report can be a great way to identify potential audiences you have yet to reach.

Using the example above, you can quickly sort by click-through rate (CTR) to see that the 50+ active and healthy line items have a CTR of 12.6%.

Amazon DSP ad segmentation report

That’s a good start, but you can also use a PivotTable to group line items by segment and analyze segment-level performance.

Our example shows that the part with the best overall DPVR consists of more than 50 active and healthy products, with a detail page view rate (DPVR) of 26.1%, making them an ideal target audience.

Optimizing your Amazon demand side platform (DSP) campaigns

Once you’ve assessed campaign performance and identified areas for improvement, you can optimize your campaigns using various manual levers and strategies.

Audiences: Ensure the audience aligns with the promoted product. Use overlap reports to analyze audience performance from an advertiser or Amazon-created audiences.

Bids: Set the desired cost per thousand impressions (CPM) an advertiser is willing to pay. Adjust base and maximum bids, allocate more budget to high-performing line items, and increase bids incrementally to scale without overpaying.

Budget: Shift the funding from underperforming to top-performing line items that are also scaling.

Creatives: Optimize by prioritizing high-performing creatives and removing underperforming ones.

Frequency and Frequency Cap: Monitor the number of ad impressions seen within a given period. Adjust the frequency cap to serve more images to under-delivering line items meeting or exceeding campaign goals.

Supply: Consider enabling additional supply sources if a campaign is under-delivering.

Viewability: Measure the visibility of ad impressions based on the MRC definition of viewability.

Viewability Tiers: Adjust viewability settings to serve more impressions to well-performing line items under-delivering by relaxing the viewability threshold.

Final words:

The Amazon Demand-Side Platform (DSP) is a powerful advertising platform that enables advertisers to access high-quality inventory at a lower cost than other digital advertising platforms. 

It also provides access to Amazon’s proprietary data sets, which can be used to gain valuable insights into consumer behavior. 

Additionally, Amazon Demand Side Platform’s powerful analytics allow advertisers to track their performance in real time and optimize their campaigns for maximum ROI.