Amazon DSP is Amazon's demand-side platform: software for buying display, video and audio ads programmatically across Amazon's own properties and thousands of third-party sites and apps, using Amazon's first-party shopping data to build the audiences. Ads are bought on a cost-per-thousand-impressions basis rather than per click. Access is through Amazon's managed service, which has historically carried a substantial minimum spend, or through agencies and partners with self-service seats.
Why it matters
DSP is the format that reaches shoppers who are not on Amazon at all, using data about what they have viewed, bought or searched. Its audiences are far more granular than Sponsored Display's: in-market segments, lifestyle segments, lookalikes of your buyers and custom audiences built from your own ASINs' viewers with specific lookback windows. It is also the only route to some inventory, such as Prime Video placements beyond Sponsored TV, and it feeds the richest data into Amazon Marketing Cloud.
The cost side is what keeps most sellers away. Beyond any minimum, DSP is a reach medium, so it needs a brand with enough margin and catalog to benefit from awareness spend, and enough sales volume for the retargeting audiences to be large enough to matter.
What moves it
- Audience construction, which does most of the work.
- Frequency caps and viewability settings, which decide how much of the budget is wasted.
- Creative, which must meet Amazon's display and video specifications and pass moderation.
- Attribution model. DSP reports view-through as well as click-through conversions, and the two should not be read the same way.
How we use it
We put DSP at the end of a sequence, not the start. It comes after Sponsored Products, Brands and Display are stable and after the listing converts at or above category norm, because DSP traffic lands on the same page. When we run it, retargeting audiences of recent viewers come first, and results are read through AMC alongside search spend rather than on a DSP-only dashboard.