What is Amazon DSP?

Demand Side Platform from Amazon is a software that provides centralized media buying from multiple sources. Media buying is the process of finding the ideal location, placement, time, and audience to run the ads. It's also programmatic since the process is automated. To understand Amazon DSP better, I’ll make a comparison with the Amazon advertising Sponsored products ad type. With SP ads we are targeting “What” are people are looking for, with DSP we are targeting “Who”. In SP we are selecting keywords, competitor products, or categories to target. In DSP we are selecting “people” or audiences that fit in certain criteria, behavioral or demographics, and target them on or off Amazon.

Creating Audiences in DSP

First step is creating audiences, who you are going to target. There are several ways to build out audiences in DSP and Amazon is constantly updating this.

From Products ASIN’s

The most common way to start building an audience is by uploading at least one or a group of ASIN’s and letting Amazon create an audience based on four key criteria:

• People who purchased the products

• People who viewed the products

• People who viewed similar products

• And finally, people who are searching on Amazon with keywords that indicate interest in the products we uploaded - short “Product searches”.

Depending on the product type and your strategy you can set different lookback periods. For example, you are selling heart supplements, and one package with average consumption lasts 30 days. For remarketing purposes, you will create an audience from people who purchased your ASIN’s within the last 30 days. 

Pro Tip: Create an audience from your direct competitor ASIN’s and target their customers.

Create an audience from Brands

The second way is to find your competitor brand and select the category of products they are in and create the four audiences mention earlier based on the people's interactions with that specific brand

Lifestyle and In-Market audiences

This is where DSP and Sponsored Display overlap. Before these targeting options were available to SD ads they were offered on DSP. Lifestyle audiences are people who are profiled by Amazon based on their shopping habits, their interests, or life stages and put in different categories. In-market audiences are shoppers whose browsing behavior indicated that they are in the market for a specific product.

Other options for audience creation

In addition to the main two options mentioned above, Amazon on DSP offers many other ways of creating audiences. Audience similar to your website visitors, people who watched certain videos on “Twitch”, people who viewed a movie on Amazon Prime or played a game. There are many other custom audiences available that can be produced from a combination of all these mentioned before.

DSP Creatives and placements

There basically two types of ad creatives: 

• Banner type of ads

• Video, in-stream or out-stream

Display banner ads have many subgroups but for sake of space I’m going to describe the top 3 used:

• eCommerce display creatives

  • Dynamic eCommerce, creatives automatically optimize ad formats to line item goal, such as click-through rate, purchase rate, or detail page view rate. Creative are optimized via machine learning and selected line item goal. Both creatives utilize the primary product image found on the Amazon detail page and can include a custom background.

• Static image banners provide complete creative freedom as long as it follows Amazon creative guidelines

ad placements: Homepage Above the Fold (ATF), Homepage Below the Fold (BTF), Search Skyscraper, Read All Reviews (RAR), Detail Page, and Thank You Page. Available in the following 970x250 and 980x55 ad placements: Homepage Below the Fold (BTF), Detail Page Below the Fold (BTF), Deals Page (ATF), Offer Listings Page (ATF), Detail page Inline Messaging (ILM).