DSP - a new way to reach wider audience

What is DSP?

DSP or Demand Side Platform allows you to programmatically reach audiences across the web on both Amazon sites and apps as well as through our publishing partners and third-party exchanges. This service is available to both advertisers who sell products on Amazon and those who don’t. 

Why should you use DSP?

One of the best reasons to use Amazon DSP is to  reach new and existing customers on and off Amazon. By using DSP you will have access to exclusive Amazon audiences  and improve relevance and results with a single view across devices and formats.  Programmatically reach your audiences across both Amazon-owned sites and apps, like IMDb, and leading publishers’ sites through direct inventory from Amazon Publisher Services and third-party exchanges.

This sounds reasonable? Schedule a meeting with us and dive into the world of possibilities with our DSP service. 

How does DSP work?

DSP allows you to create audiences by their product searches, product views by ASIN (yours or competitors), to create remarketing audiences by your site visits, and also look-alike audiences. Look-a-like audiences are valuable since those users are behaving similarly to your customers but didn’t have opportunity to get to your products.

Demand Side Platform is using CPM advertising model which means that Amazon charges you after one thousand ad impressions. When you start advertising through DSP, don’t be surprised if some types of campaigns have higher cost per click, since it depends on the type of audience that  you are targeting.

Talking about campaigns, you are able to set up different types of campaign strategies, by Click Through Rate, Cost Per Click, Video Completion Rate, Cost Per Video Completion, Detail Page View Rate, Cost Per Detail Page View, Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), or custom.

Amount of investment depends on campaign duration, type of audiences that you want to reach and number of products advertised. Thanks to DSP, you are allowed to drive strong and narrow prospecting campaigns and great remarketing campaigns to users who visited your Amazon product pages or website product pages, or even to target users who visited or bought products from your competitors. 

What do you get from DSP?

DSP or Demand Side Platform is allowing you to increase your reach through a large number of targeting options on Amazon platform or off Amazon.  By using it you will be able to target users by segments, by their affinity to different topics, previous in-market behavior or capture their interaction with competitors products and brands. 

Through Search campaigns on Amazon you can increase sales through pushing ads when users are searching for some product. But this type of strategy means that you are targeting a small portion of users who are already in the Consideration or Purchase phase. In this case,  your investments are low and you have plantfull ways to optimize the campaigns in order to minimize the ad costs and maximize the sales. After months and months of optimization you finally target mostly converting keywords, and reach the users with Purchase intent.

The best strategy to reach your audience with DSP

How to build the right advertising approach?

Pull marketing strategy

Encounter intent group of users is a large group where we can find our new customers. This group of people is recognized by their historical behavior, by what they search for, content consumption, their previous purchases.  How can we find them and pick them by quality? If there is some group of users with strong affinity or behavior, we cannot reach them with PPC campaigns if they don’t search for products that we are selling. This means that these users are staying somewhere in the dark till they do the search and click on our ad that leads them to our products.  This is the “Pull marketing strategy” and it is related to all types of search campaigns which means that we are pushing the ad when someone is pulling the information by its search query.

Push marketing strategy

Another option is  “Push marketing strategy”. This is what is giving us the option to reach new customers all around the country that are recognized as users with specific affinity or online behavior. They are in the Encounter phase, which means that they don’t search, they just do or like some activities or products, and that is the point where we have an opportunity to build the contact and reach the first touch point. By using the push strategy we can push the ads to them, and create the connection with these groups of users only through Programmatic or Display ad platforms. 

Secure a stable growth with DSP by knowing your audience intent

To set things straight with DSP from the very beginning, you should filter your potential and current audiences based on their intentions and build up a strategy upon them since Amazon DSP allows you to reach the customers by their affinity and in-market behaviour.

EXAMPLE: Imagine that you are selling unique sport socks for running . You are new in the market, working only a few months but have all the assets, Amazon brand store and Web shop. You succeeded to sell some number of units, you started investing in Search campaigns and that is what improved your sales when you target users by their search term “black sport socks for running” and all the variations. But what about the hundreds of thousands of people who are doing sport activities everyday. They are running every morning and they wear socks, but their feet are sweating or having some other uncomfort. Well, if they don’t do the search, your ad will not be pulled to rank, and they might not have an opportunity to find out about great running socks that are helping to resolve some everyday issues. That is where the DSP campaign is starting!

Encounter intent

Reach users by their Lifestyle

From this point you will have the option to choose the best performing audiences from your campaign, and after a few weeks leave only the best performing.

Of course exclude users who already did the purchase or seen your product page from both, Amazon store and Web shop. Now we are reaching the users who don't have in mind that our socks are existing. This performance will bring higher costs than over the PPC, but new customers are always more expensive and this is an advanced way to reach them.

Why advanced? Programmatic system is allowing your DSP ads to cover large ad inventory across the Amazon platform, and a large number of websites where your potential customers may be. Imagine that your Amazon ad is having  the power to reach users when they are reading a news. That is a large benefit, where your ad is working awareness building any time when it’s shown. Any impression is having some influence, and your product will be kept in users mind for a while, while he is traveling to Consideration intent.

Consideration intent

Now the users who have seen your ads are starting to consider buying some new sport socks. What if they’ve seen the competitors' socks on Amazon last few weeks? Well, now we have the power to add competitors ASIN’s to audience segments and set up the rules that will allow us to target users who are searching and have already seen some of the competitors brands. They will see the ads when they are searching something on Amazon platform, or when they are surfing on the internet. These users are now more important to us, and we have to create great ad copies and make our product unique and worth buying. In this phase you have to think about your competitors' offers, pricing and all benefits that your product can offer in comparison. 

Create image or video ads to reach new users to your product pages. Create great copies and creatives that are gonna be catchy and communicate with customers in order to make them want your product. Make them consider your offer.

Purchase intent

Now your PPC campaigns are reaching the customers, users are searching intensively and you are going to recognize two types of searches - Brand and Non Brand search terms. How much your traffic is capturing the brand searches is meaning that you did a great job in your brand awareness campaigns, and now you have users who already know who you are and what you are selling. At this point we can expect the rise of purchases and your campaigns from PPC and DSP are getting in touch. 

That is why the DSP needed 14 days to capture whole sales data in order to populate all attribution metrics that happened. Yes, DSP is capturing attributed purchases as well, and from this you can measure your campaign success.

Loyalty intent

Now you have satisfied customers, and your product is not something that lasts forever. They are satisfied and now you will capture returning users that are buying more same or different models after some time. 

What is your opportunity? Create campaigns as remarketing for users who already purchased some products to push the ads when you want to promote new products or product lines. You will have the opportunity to keep these users close, and they will be your long term source of income.

DSP is a complex platform that allows us to create different paths in finding customers and leading them to purchase. We cannot control them for sure, but the influence that we are building around them is strong and the final goal is long term satisfaction.

To conclude

Targeting opportunities with Amazon's Demand Side Platform (DSP) are endless! You can create audiences based on their behavior on Amazon, by their affinity to different topics, or even involve data from your website and decide which group of people should see your ads. DSP is an amazing platform that provides a lot of metrics and options and it really helps you move from Encounter over Consideration and Purchase phases to Loyal customers.

However, DSP doesn't come cheap compared to the other advertising platforms. They are charging on a CPM base and spend may vary depending on the audience you pick. Sales data can be delayed up to 14 days since DSP is capturing attributed purchases as well. With DSP it's all about testing endless combinations of ads and targeting. Don't miss the opportunity to improve your brand awareness and advanced marketing strategies!

If you got this far, now you certainly understand unlimited possibilities that DSP offers. Lets schedule a meeting and see how we can scale your business with DSP!

About the author

Stevan is a PPC and Analytics specialist, with almost 4 years of experience in digital marketing, covering PPC, Analytics data analysis & implementation and SEO. Google and Amazon advertising certified. Loves to share his knowledge with younger colleagues.