Inside Amazon DSP: The 9 Types of Amazon DSP Audience Targeting

A demand-side platform (DSP) enables marketers to buy digital advertising at reach and scale “programmatically,” which means they can do this through automation with minimal friction. In addition, advertisers can choose to access publisher inventory through direct integrations, supply-side platforms (SSPs), and ad exchanges. 

Today, one of the most used DSPs by marketers is one of the youngest on the market. 

Which one? Nearly 4 out of 10 US marketers have recently used Amazon DSP. That’s just behind Google’s well-known tool and ahead of The Trade Desk, which many marketers cite as the most prominent independent DSP.

And, according to eMarketer, a study from H1 2021 shows that “the share of US demand-side platform users electing to use Amazon’s self-serve option jumped 19 percentage points year over year to 60%.” 

What is Amazon DSP?

Amazon DSP is a media buying tool that enables marketers to buy display, video, audio, and in-app ads both on and off Amazon. 

An example campaign in Amazon DSP

The reason why this platform has become so popular is because of its four key benefits:

Unique Supply. Amazon DSP’s impressive inventory is available via Amazon-owned and operated pages such as Audible, Buy Office Mojo, Goodreads, IMDb, ShopBop, Twitch.tv, Amazon app, and Zappos. In addition, there’s also inventory from third-party exchanges, Amazon Publisher Services, and targeted marketplaces that can help advertisers reach Amazon shoppers anywhere they consume content.

Brand Safety. Amazon DSP users can expect the highest quality standards and brand safety. It uses both its own and third-party solutions to monitor everything from real-time bids to site reviews for brand safety, traffic quality, third-party supply quality, and viewability. 

Optimized Campaigns. Amazon DSP adjusts bids to serve ads through the best sites using the best formats and dynamically updates budgets according to a campaign goal. The feature also automatically analyzes every impression against a set goal, applying up to 500,000 predictors based on data around Amazon customers’ shopping patterns.

Advanced audiences. ​​While marketers can use just about any DSP to target ads to users by geolocation, devices they use, and other common audience attributes, Amazon’s rich product research, browse, and purchase data are valuable signals for marketers to leverage for DSP targeting—and this dataset is only available through the Amazon DSP.

What are some of those audience targeting options?

Amazon DSP audience targeting screen

The nine types of Amazon DSP audience targeting

The following are the myriad targeting types that Amazon DSP marketers can use to promote ads to consumers.

In-Market

Target ads relevant to people who habitually buy from a particular category such as consumer electronics, kitchen goods, or women’s clothing.

Lifestyle

Target ads relevant to a particular stage of life, i.e., college, new homeowners, expecting mothers, etc.

Behavioral

Target consumers who have carried out activities such as browsing or clicking.

Another example of the types of behavior you can target audiences with on Amazon DSP includes video completion targeting. Imagine if you have a new, unique product in the market that requires a bit of explaining to understand its value entirely. It would be great to target ads to users who have watched all or some of your explainer videos. 

As explained on the Amazon Ads blog:

Amazon Advertising’s video completion targeting is based on machine learning model predictions and allows you to select a decile-level video completion rate tier. Higher completion tiers may limit overall reach/scale. You can also edit video completion targeting across multiple ad lines using the bulk edit feature.

Demographic

Target consumers that fall into specific age groups or characteristics including age, gender, children in the home, household income, education level, etc. 

Device

Target consumers at specific user devices such as make, OS, and type. This, of course, is important if you’re selling particular accessories or peripherals to specific devices. 

You can even edit your device targeting in bulk.

Contextual

Target consumers based on what the type of content they are browsing—in real-time—when the ad is served. For example, maybe a user is on Twitch and watching a rap-music influencers talk about the latest release in that genre. 

Retargeting

Target ads to people who have search for, viewed, or purchased your products—or even a list of ASIN which they’ve previously engaged. Amazon even suggests the products you should be targeting, which you can add to your campaigns with a single click.

Products are suggested based on the number of detail page views they have received to ensure maximum audience reach. You can create a campaign with all suggested products in one click, or download a CSV file to further evaluate the product recommendations.

Once you select Views in the audience selector, you’ll see an option to add all suggested products. You will also see a link to download a list of the suggested products if you would like to review which products will be added to your campaign in advance. If you don’t see any suggested products, you may not have any products with a high enough detail page view count to trigger the feature.

Advertiser Audiences

Create custom audiences using your first-party data. Just like with Google Ads or Facebook Ads, marketers can upload customer lists that Amazon will match to their users. This way you can use offline identifiers to reach your best audiences via Amazon DSP.

Audience Lookalikes

Create lookalike audiences across the platform to expand your reach beyond the finite size of an audience you target.. These audiences share affinities and other characteristics to whatever audience you choose.

Skai’s Retail Media solution + Amazon DSP

Our mission is to empower businesses with data they can trust, insights they can use, and impact they can measure. As the channels by which advertisers can reach their customers evolve, so does the Skai platform, giving you the flexibility and expertise of an individual channel point solution while providing the platform you need to effectively manage media across regions, retailers and channels.

With the addition of Amazon DSP, you can now programmatically reach your target audiences and enable activation across your customer’s journey, from one platform solution. Skai has created valuable functionality on top of the Amazon native solution such as automation, bulk editing, experiments, and custom reporting options to help customers work more efficiently and effectively.

For more information, check out Skai’s Amazon Ads capabilities.

Or better yet, schedule a quick demo to see all of the cutting-edge features of Skai for yourself.

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