The biggest concern for online sellers today is to reach buyers in one way or another. Though there can be many options claiming to do so, a recent and smart way is through Demand side platform or DSP. Not only if helps in improving the visibility of new products but also produce high conversion rates for sellers. This is why Amazon has also started a DSP as Amazon Demand Side Platform. Let’s discover more about Amazon DSP.
Amazon Demand Side Platform or Amazon DSP is an exclusive platform that allows advertisers to buy display and video placements, programmatically. This type of advertising uses customer targeting data only available through Amazon, and allow brands to choose which digital advertising space is best for them and a tailored cost for it.
One can argue that Amazon DSP is just another display advertising network, like google ad sense- the most popular display ad network today. But it is not as it gives an upper hand in controlling the flow of content to the target audience. In other words, by using Amazon DSP, advertisers can find the segmented audience which can be targeted with relevant ads.
But that is not the only benefit associated with Amazon DSP. Possibly the biggest benefit of using this platform is the cross-channel advertising strategy. As Amazon has a hold over several other digital platforms and devices, it allows brands to advertise their products outside of the Amazon website and let brands receive traffic from several sources directly to their e-commerce site. Plus, Amazon DSP is a platform for anyone, meaning even if a brand or a product is not listed on Amazon, it still can use the Amazon DSP for advertising.
To understand more about Amazon DSP, its capability, reachability, and suitability to help a brand for success, let's jump to the following section.
Where Do You Find Amazon DSP Ads?
As said earlier, Amazon DSP allows brands to reach beyond the amazon website and that is why uses a range of interfaces to reach new and existing customers. These interfaces can be can be
Amazon website
Amazon Prime and Amazon Music
Amazon-owned and operated sites, apps, and devices such as IMDb, Box Office Mojo, Zappos, Goodreads, Twitch and ShopBop
Audible Amazon devices like Amazon Echo, Amazon Kindle, Amazon Fire tablet, Amazon Fire TV
Published Partners and Third-Party Exchanges
So basically, you can find Amazon DSP ads all over the internet. Further, Amazon has a global reach and that is why one can find Amazon DSP ads in five different geographies namely;
North America (Canada, Mexico, USA),
South America (Brazil),
Europe (Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom)
Middle East (Saudi Arabia, UAE)
Asia (Australia, India)
Who Can Use Amazon DSP and How to Benefit From It?
Brands who want to sell products online can use Amazon DSP for advertising and reach potential customers. Whether a brand is selling products on Amazon or not, Amazon DSP allows anyone to advertise their products. That means, Amazon DSP is best provides the best solution for those brands who are looking for:
Connect with relevant Audiences at Scale
Use a smart algorithm to get display and video ads in front of the right people at the right time
Improve reachability by going beyond Advertising Console capabilities.
Leverage Amazon Audiences and data analytics without being an Amazon seller.
Amazon DSP is a truly versatile solution and if used with complete understanding can benefit any brand to go big and better. It has several features that need some consideration for getting the maximum out of its capabilities. Few of them are:
Advanced targeting features: Reaching the right customer is one of the fundamentals of marketing. That is why targeting the right segment for a particular product is important. Fortunately, Amazon DSP provides a series of alternatives to do so. It allows you to sort location, demographics, scheduling, and segmentation capabilities.
Customizing the audience: One of the best things about Amazon DSP is its market intelligence that can help brands in customizing the right audience. For instance, using Amazon DSP a brand can show an advertisement to an existing customer who has not bought any product for a long time or someone who is checking a competitor’s product. Similarly, it allows a brand to display products according to the behavioral attribute of a customer. By tapping on these data and analytics properly, a brand can surely improve the conversion rates of advertisements.
Retargeting: Both new customers and existing customers are important to a brand. That is why, along with tapping on new customers, following the existing ones is also required. By using Amazon USP, brands can even take benefit from its pixel retargeting. It (in one way) helps the brand in keeping an eye on customers who visited certain websites or those who have purchased a specific product from the brand in the past. It can help in cross-selling complementary products, re-engage previous customers and educate them with new products by the brand.
All in all, Amazon DSP benefits a brand the most when a particular brand put their effort and time to set its objective and formulate the right strategy on this impressive platform. Brands also need to keep in mind that the platform has a massive database so using they have a high degree of freedom in customizing their effort.
Brands should also focus on measuring the effectiveness of their effort. Amazon DSP also provides advertisers with retail insights that help to compare the retail activity before, during, and after the campaign. It enables measuring the impact of advertising on the ease of finding, studying, and purchasing the advertised product. That is another area where brands can benefit from Amazon DSP.
Amazon DSP Types
Once the right set of audience is sorted, brands can create target the segmented audience using the following Amazon DSP ad types:
Dynamic Advertisement
Dynamicity is one of the key highlights of the Amazon DSP machine learning offering and helps a great deal in the self-optimization of ads. It automatically picks and updates offers, reviews, or ratings of the advertised product and displays it to the customer. By doing so, this type of ad helps in building confidence about a certain product and thus improving the sales performance.
For instance, for customers who prefer reading reviews, they will be served an ad with a product review. For those who like buying a product without dealing with a lot of clicks, they will be fed an ad with a check-out option.
Static Ads
Unlike dynamic ones, these ads do not update themselves as per the need and rather serve a particular purpose such as a link to a product or its description. These ads are good for the initial brand building and spread awareness about a new product.
Both Static and dynamic ads can run with different objectives over one or more platforms such as desktop/mobile browsers or particular apps.
Video Ads
Videos advertisements have gained a lot of attention to online marketing as they have the ability to explain more and connect better with the audience. They are quite useful in sharing a lot of information in less amount of time. For this reason, Amazon DSP runs enable you to run videos that can provide information or help to guide the audience to reach the target site. And not to forget, these videos are displayed to amazon's audience over a range of platforms to target the right shoppers.
OTT or Over-the-top Video Ads
With Amazon DSP even Over-the-top video ads are possible. These ads are served alongside high-quality content such as the latest movies, news, and live streams, where a large amount of audience is gathered online. Here the scale is massive. For example, using Amazon DSP, one can display video ads on Prime, which has 100 million members across the globe. Moreover, these ads cannot be skipped and ensure complete delivery of information to the target audience.
Audio Ads
Apart from Videos, Amazon DSP allows advertising in audio format as well. It allows brands to connect with the relevant target during off-screen moments. Here customers are served the audio content when they are listening to Amazon Music’s free ad-supported tier.
Amazon DSP Targeting Options
Amazon has one of the largest customer information databases. To get the most out of it, it uses analytics and group customer information in segments for effective marketing. Amazon DSP also uses a way to provide six unique targeting options. These options are:
In-Market: This segment includes those people who have recently browsed or shopped specific products or clicked on a product category at Amazon.com. Targeting this group helps a brand to generate awareness about a new product or brand itself. Moreover, for existing products, this group can even drive sales.
Lifestyle: This category is associated with the stage of life and living approach of a person. For example, they can be teens ready to go to college or someone who has just bought a new home. Brands can study their requirements and feed them an advertisement that can display a relevant product to their lifestyle. By doing so brands can expect a high conversion rate.
Demographic: Amazon DSP also allows a brand to target customer groups on the basis of customer attributes such as age, gender, income, etc. This information can be very useful to the brand as it can help them in positioning the right product to the right group. For example, brands can target women with spending to buy a luxurious beauty care item.
Retargeting: We discussed it earlier, in this segment, a customer who has gone through the brand's website once can be served the advertisement again. By doing so brands can convert the customers who checked the product but did not buy it. They even can reach old customers who bought some products from the brand in the past and update them with recent inclusions.
Advertiser Audiences: There is no doubt that Amazon itself has a large amount of first party data that can be used for marketing. Still, it allows leveraging third party data. Brands can use pixels, CRM data, or DMP audience transfer to upload information about existing customer base on Amazon DSP. By doing so, brands can allow this set of audiences to be part of their marketing campaign via Amazon DSP, in parallel to other target groups.
Additional Custom Audiences: Of course, overlapping and creating unions in the target population is possible in Amazon DSP. Thanks to such an ability, brands can customize their target audience and create a specific group to run an advertisement. These combinations can be new groups created with previously stated categories or can be look-alike audiences which are particularly useful when targeting new customers who may look like your existing ones.
How to Use Amazon DSP
Amazon DSP can be used to support a variety of objectives. Unlike Ad-sense, where retargeting is the only objective, Amazon DSP provides a broader playground to develop as a brand. Here, advertisers can go for anything between creating brand awareness from scratch and converting it into sales. Further, it allows brands to target different groups to improve relevancy as well.
For the purpose, a brand has two options. A self-service option where the brand has complete control over its campaigns and need not pay anything for managing. The other option is taking the help of a consultant for managing your campaign for a fee. The first one is when you are aware of DSP marketing and understand the positioning of the product while the other one is for new players.
Along with setting the equation between objectives and target groups, the quality of content is equally important for getting the right results. Brands can use Amazon DSP service to create content on their behalf or do it by themselves.
That is why Amazon DSP helps brands in creating content as well. Brands can use the DSP’s e-commerce creatives with a new (provided) image or an existing product image found on the product detail page. Other elements for dynamic ads are automatically generated to drive objectified results for e-commerce creativity. Similarly, Amazon DSP provides a video creative builder to create an engaging video free of cost by selecting one of the existing templates and using product images as selected by the brand.
This way, a brand can not only customize the campaign but also customize the level of engagement with Amazon DSP depending on the level of expertise.
Pros & Cons of Investing in Amazon DSP
There is not one but many benefits of using Amazon DSP. The platform acts as a one-point solution that can be used to serve a wide range of marketing purposes. It allows brands to use exclusive databases of Amazon and feature advertisements on various online interfaces including the amazon website, prime, and many more. Further, it allows advertising on specific devices to reach audiences outside of other networks such as Fire TV and Kindle. What makes this DSP impressive is the customized display and video ad spaces it offers which help the brand to pay for what they really want to use.
What makes Amazon DSP a true solution is its openness to anyone. This means sellers who are not associated with amazon previously can also use this selling platform. If a seller is new, they can pick the existing templates to start with and programmatically position their objectives in terms of ads.
It also helps in monitoring the result of campaigns. Thanks to the advanced and detailed reporting system of Amazon DSP, brands can monitor results before and after the campaign. They can also monitor the campaign in progression and take necessary decisions to meet the objectives.
When it comes to drawbacks, there is actually none actually. Still, a brand can find it difficult to manage as it is not a short-term game. When compared to Amazon Sponsored Display Ads or Google Ad-sense, brands can find a high barrier to entry as a brand needs to consider a lot before running a campaign. Plus, Amazon DSP can be expensive for a few brands that have smaller objectives and still prefer traditional ways of online marketing.
Conclusion
Amazon DSP is definitely setting the new trend for digital marketing. It has been introduced at the right time with the right capabilities to help all levels of brands to target customers using unique algorithms and deep knowledge customers. It is perfect for advertisers who intend to increase exposure and sales by positioning their ads in front of the right audience.
Being a platform that is associated with a number of interfaces, this platform really helps a brand to scale their marketing agendas. Plus, it has unmatched targeting features, which makes Amazon DSP a superior display ad network that probably has no other comparison.
Moreover, this is the story of today. As people know, Amazon will keep adding more information to its database and acquiring more interfaces. So being a brand, one can expect an even better channel to reach more specified targets.
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