“It all comes down to advertising” is a useful mantra for any retail enterprise.
After all, advertising is what drives interest in your products. It’s what keeps customers coming back. In short, it’s where sales begin.
In a fast-paced world with rapid advertising innovation, the demand-side platform (DSP) is a relative newcomer. But with Amazon DSP offering quite possibly the broadest reach of any ad-placement method, it’s sure to change the game.
Demand-side platforms allow advertising buyers to reach multiple ad outlets through a single interface. DSPs can automatically place bids for ad resources from a variety of publishers.
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In other words, a DSP gives you one place to manage your ads. The platform then delivers those ads across a variety of digital outlets, streamers, and websites, using AI-powered real-time bidding (RTB) to maximize results.
Amazon’s version works similarly to standard DSPs — but with a little Amazon flare.
For starters, Amazon DSP enables advertisers to leverage the retail giant’s massive data trove. First-party insights based on billions of observed shopping patterns across the customer decision journey give Amazon DSP a huge advantage.
With this data, Amazon DSP can provide sellers with a host of benefits, such as:
Amazon DSP is purpose-built for Amazon sellers, and provides a number of sales-boosting additional features, including audience solutions, campaign optimizations, and brand safeguards. But how do these functions work, exactly?
Reaching the most relevant audience is key to Amazon sales success. Fortunately, Amazon DSP lets advertisers tap into not only Amazon’s audiences, but their own as well.
Audience insights and robust pre-, mid-, and post-campaign performance analytics give sellers more tools for tweaking and improving audience reach.
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Amazon Ads’ deep reporting analytics include key metrics, such as add-to-cart rate, total purchases, and product units sold, for brands that sell in Amazon's store. They also give sellers unique metrics like pixel conversion rate and video completion rate for off-Amazon brands.
There are two ways sellers can use Amazon DSP to optimize their campaigns:
With DSP, sellers can enjoy the same protections they do from other areas of Amazon.
Amazon DSP uses both Amazon's own and third-party solutions — including manual site reviews and real-time bid evaluation — to uphold quality standards and brand safety.
The platform also monitors usage for traffic quality, viewability, and third-party supply standards.
What’s the best thing about a DSP? Its ability to help you scale.
Amazon DSP doesn’t restrict sellers to Amazon. It places bids in real time across multiple platforms, optimizing your ads to targeted audiences. That means your ads get directly in front of those most likely to buy your products — wherever they are.
Sellers can use two campaign types to get results:
From creating campaigns to managing myriad delivery possibilities, Amazon DSP gives you the most comprehensive way to scale your Amazon business. As with any advertising, best practices for PPC apply.
Before figuring out if Amazon DSP is right for you, as a seller, you first have to understand its different management models, and its cost relative to your production. In that, Amazon DSP comes in two flavors:
Amazon DSP has a big reach that often gets fantastic results — and that reach comes at a premium. The managed-service model minimum, for instance, costs around $50,000 and is designed for companies that want access to Amazon DSP inventory, those that want consulting, or those with limited advertising experience. Given the hefty price tag, it might be out of reach for some sellers.
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Regardless, advertising is a must-do activity for your Amazon business. When you’re ready for DSP, start by speaking to your Amazon Ads representative.
If you’re an Amazon seller or agency looking for a cost-effective way to manage your PPC campaigns, check out the fantastic Carbon6 tools PPC Entourage and ZonTools. While you’re there, discover all the other ways Carbon6’s tool suite can help simplify your success, from inventory management to listing optimization to Amazon reimbursements.
Amazon has DSP some pretty great stuff on the horizon, including:
And that's only a selection of recent improvements and new features. Expect Amazon to keep adding to and improving its DSP to meet the needs of an ever-growing and increasingly complex advertising landscape.