As Amazon becomes not only a shopping platform but an everyday source of information and entertainment for millions of users around the world, the retail giant’s extensive inventory of ad offerings and broad reach should appeal to nearly every industry, not just retailers.
Amazon DSP ads provide the opportunity to connect with audiences nearly everywhere they go online: through traditional Amazon display ads, video ads on Amazon properties, such as Fire TV, or via audio spots on smart speakers.
Want to add another element to your Amazon advertising strategy? Here’s everything you need to know to get started with Amazon DSP ads.
What are Amazon DSP ads?
Amazon DSP is a media buying tool that allows marketers to purchase display, video, audio, and in-app ads both on and off Amazon. Amazon DSP enables brands to target people searching, viewing, or purchasing products on Amazon.
A vitamin brand has a new promotion for California customers. The brand’s marketing team creates a campaign within Amazon DSP to bid $5 whenever an online user in California is detected. Frank, who lives in Los Angeles, is surfing the web and clicks to a page on his favorite news site, an ad inventory source for Amazon DSP.
As the page loads, it detects Frank’s location via his IP address, triggering the brand’s $5 bid. In less than a second, Amazon DSP runs an ad auction, determines the brand’s bid is the winner, and serves up the vitamin brand’s ad to Frank.
Amazon DSP is a complex technology offering a simple solution for finding audiences across devices based on their interests: each time a user loads a new page, this type of ad auction runs, allowing brands to instantly programmatically bid on ads.
Advertisers can also use Amazon resources to better understand shopper interests, demographics, and preferences. Because of Amazon’s large consumer footprint across Prime Video and other owned sites and apps, Amazon DSP ads provide an excellent chance to build highly specific audience segments.
What types of ads are available through Amazon DSP?
The most common types of Amazon DSP ads are display ads. These ads appear on Amazon’s website, either in search results, product recommendations, product details pages, or nearly anywhere else shoppers might browse within Amazon’s website, But they can also appear across the web on Amazon-owned websites, such as Zappos and IMDB, along with a host of others. Two of Amazon’s most popular ad formats are display ads–Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. These are triggered by searches in the site’s search bar.
Amazon video ads spotlight brands viewing content on any of Amazon’s streaming services, including Prime, Twitch, and FireTV. These ads have an incredibly broad reach, with up to 135 million viewers, according to Amazon. The company’s studies have also found a 90% increase in purchase rate among brands that incorporated streaming ads into their campaigns.
Audio ads are an interesting way to reach audiences who have stepped away from their screens. With these ads, brands can deliver 10-30 second ads to audiences who are streaming music or podcasts through their Alexa-enabled smart speakers.
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What are the benefits of Amazon DSP ads?
Optimized Targeting: Amazon has become more than a place to buy goods (though consumers are still doing plenty of that). It’s also been the first touchpoint for many shoppers in the discovery stage of the buyer’s journey. In fact, 62% of shoppers begin their research on Amazon, making the marketplace a critical source of audience insights. These insights can then be used to better segment audiences, customize the content, and create more effective campaigns.
Wide Reach. Advertising with Amazon, of course, doesn’t simply mean advertising on Amazon’s main site. Amazon owns such a wide array of properties and partners with so many others that Amazon DSP ads have the potential to appear in a vast array of diverse spots on the web. Amazon DSP ads run across Amazon-owned and operated pages such as Audible, Buy Office Mojo, Goodreads, IMDb, ShopBop, Twitch.tv, Amazon app, and Zappos. 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.
Easily optimizable campaigns. All too often, campaigns need to be adjusted on the fly to ensure that the right message is reaching the right audience at the right price. Amazon DSP enables advertisers to manually update many aspects of a campaign, from budgets to supply, audiences, bids, and frequency caps, which drives better overall performance.
Advertisers can also have plenty of creative options to choose from no matter what type of campaign they’re running, including standard images, video, third-party, and display ads with ecommerce creative. In many cases, Amazon allows advertisers to either build custom ads or use Amazon’s myriad tools and templates to create content more easily.
If you’re ready to harness the power of Amazon to reach a wider audience, Amazon DSP ads might just be the solution you’re looking for!
Skai helps you maximize your Amazon DSP ads and all of your retail media programs
As part of Skai’s omnichannel marketing platform, our Retail Media solution empowers brands to plan, execute, and measure digital campaigns that meet consumers when and where they shop. Built with best-in-class automation and optimization capabilities, our unified platform allows you to manage campaigns on 30+ retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Instacart all in one place.
Client results include:
- 461% increase in Amazon Ads ROAS and 57% increase in page traffic for Bondi Sands
- 92% increase in share of voice on Amazon for a Fortune 500 CPG brand
- 72% increase in revenue for VTech
- 1,390% year-over-year sales growth for Kamado Joe
For more information, we invite you to schedule a brief demo to see all of our cutting-edge retail innovations for yourself.
