Amazon DSP: A First-Mover Advantage for Private Label Brands

Since the early days of Google search ads, a series of digital marketing innovations have created a first-mover advantage for brands willing to jump in. The Amazon DSP (and its targeting capabilities) is the latest example.

James Thomson, Chief Strategy Officer at Buy Box Experts, has this to say: “There's no other form of advertising that allows you to do this level of targeting, to go after shoppers who have already declared they are in the market to buy these very products.”

James and his colleague Dave Vermeulen, explain Amazon DSP opportunities and how you and your brand can gain a competitive advantage in 2021.

Watch the webinar and you will learn:

What it takes to conquest your competitor traffic on Amazon, including how smaller brands can leverage larger brands’ off-Amazon advertising campaigns
How to retarget your own Amazon shoppers that don’t buy the first time around
How the Amazon DSP advertising accelerates the performance of your existing Amazon AMS efforts
How Amazon DSP advertising can become more important than Facebook or Google advertising

Don't miss out on these expert insights! Watch the webinar now.

Webinar Recap

The digital marketing landscape continues to evolve with brands embracing the first-mover advantage. Naturally, the biggest online marketplace has launched its own platform, Amazon DSP, which comes with powerful targeting capabilities.

In this informative hour-long webinar, Buy Box Experts’ Chief Strategy Officer, James Thomson, and Director of DSP Advertising, Dave Vermeulen, provide invaluable insight into how to leverage this tool to boost traffic and stay a step ahead of the competition.

What is Amazon DSP?

As Vermeulen explained, DSP stands for Demand Side Platform. Amazon DSP uses a variety of data points to place ads both on and off the platform. “It’s great for driving traffic into new product launches as well as revitalizing products that have been running efficiently for a long time but have seen their CPCs go up, or products that have lost efficiency,” he noted.

By using Amazon DSP, you can even target specific audiences by ASIN based on people who might have viewed your products or even your competitors’ shoppers. You’ll still have access to the same ad inventory and Data Management Platforms (DMPs), but with the added power of exclusive Amazon data. Additionally, the reporting on the attribution and audiences can really help you build a strategy for making your Amazon sales as strong as possible.

Who Uses Amazon DSP?

Is Amazon DSP right for your business? Before you dive into it, it’s a good idea to review your specific needs and goals. To help you get started, Thomson shared some insights into the types of brands that are using and getting the most from the platform. Here are some ways Amazon DSP can help:

Re-target shoppers who recently browsed but did not buy your products
Launch a new product without broad-based external awareness efforts
Target traffic from competitors and showcase new lines of products
Protect new Amazon traffic driven by external national advertising
Re-target past customers to upsell, cross-sell, or repeat-sell products

Vermeulen added that Amazon DSP helps brands “capture a new audience and get them to know about and engage in their brands. It really pushes traffic and boosts the Amazon algorithm and allows you to be more successful in increasing organic rankings and getting on that first page.” With more and more businesses joining Amazon every day, conquering that algorithm is more important than ever.

How to Learn More About Customers

“Amazon is seeing a shift in how they’re allowing brands to access customer data,” Vermeulen explained. “With the Storefront posts and with Amazon Live there are opportunities and you can use the DSP to drive traffic into those specific areas so that you can have more engagement with the shoppers who are browsing your brand.”

You can also create custom audiences based on customer interactions with product ASINS. In the webinar, Vermeulen provided an excellent overview of how to do this based on searches, views, purchases, and subscriptions. He also covered how sellers can use exclusive Amazon audiences to reach potential customers based on demographics, lifestyle, and more.

How Do Brands Get Ready for DSP?

What do brands have to do to get started on Amazon DSP? It’s natural to feel overwhelmed about trying something new. The reality is that selling on Amazon is getting more competitive, and businesses need to revise their strategies. What worked three years ago may not be working today — or tomorrow.

Fortunately, Thomson shared a detailed overview of the steps you should take to begin using the platform. Here are some of his suggestions:

Know your competitors’ key listing on Amazon
Audit and optimize Amazon listings for customer conversion
Define and understand your customers and target audience(s)
Determine your Amazon DSP budget

Putting more money into an Amazon business can be tricky, but the payoff may be worth the sacrifice. Vermeulen explained that creating a DSP budget comes down to “just finding a test budget in the couch cushions. Sometimes you’ve just got to find it and test it. Then you’ll see the returns from it and it becomes a no-brainer part of your execution.”

This webinar is absolutely packed with guidance on the actionable steps you can take to get started with Amazon DSP. You’ll also hear an in-depth discussion of where it fits on the sales funnel. You absolutely cannot afford to miss this if you want to gain and maintain a competitive advantage in 2021 and beyond.

Recommended Resources From This Webinar

Article: What is Amazon DSP Advertising?
Article: How Any Brand Can Leverage Amazon DSP Targeting
Webinar: How to Actually Increase Your Amazon Traffic

Colleen: Okay, welcome everybody. Thanks so much for joining us today. It is August 18th. We are excited to have you here for our webinar with Buy Box Experts. I'll introduce myself. I'm Colleen Quattlebaum and I'm the marketing manager here at eComEngine. I've been in the e-commerce space for about 10 years, but here at eComEngine for almost seven years. Our friends at Buy Box Experts, we're really excited to have them here on the call, this webinar today. If you're not familiar with Buy Box Experts, they are a managed services agency and they support brands that sell online as well as they're also private equity investors that evaluate brands sold on Amazon. They are one of our favorite partners in the industry. Many of our clients actually use Buy Box Experts to help them grow their business and have had wonderful results. They are an awesome team, are extremely knowledgeable about all things Amazon.

Colleen: And so I highly recommend them, but they've been a great partner to us over the years and we're fortunate to have two of their executive team members here with us today to talk about Amazon DSP opportunities and how DSP can create a competitive advantage for your brand. So I will go ahead and introduce them. We have James Thompson. He's a partner at Buy Box Experts and a former Amazonian. He served as the business head of Amazon Services, which is the division of Amazon responsible for recruiting tens of thousands of sellers annually to the Amazon marketplace. And he also served as the very first FBA account manager. So those are some fun facts about James and his Amazon experience back in the day, but he's also the co-founder of the Prosper Show. He co-founded that awesome conference back in 2015, and he's also published several books related to selling on Amazon.

Colleen: In addition to James, we have Dave Vermeulen and he is the director of DSP at Buy Box Experts and he's been involved in DSP since the very early days before it was even called DSP. Before he joined the Buy Box Experts last year, he was actually the founder of Seattle Ad Force, which was a full-service agency. He spent about 20 years supporting mid to large advertisers, their advertising strategies, and specifically their DSP strategy. And like I said, he joined Buy Box Experts last year and he actually built out the DSP platform that Buy Box Experts uses today with their clients. He was at the Prosper Show last month. And so many sellers wanted to hear him speak on DSP and there was just great feedback and a lot of awesome information.

Colleen: So we wanted to make sure to give this opportunity to anyone who was not able to attend the Prosper Show to be able to hear the topic that they spoke about there. And even if you heard it there, there's new information, there's constantly things changing. So stick around. I'll turn it over to James and Dave in just a second. I just want to mention that this is being recorded. So I'll be sure to send you an email later tonight with the recording as well as some resources that are helpful. And if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to put them in the Q&A. We do plan to answer questions live. And so we want to make this very engaging. So please put your questions in the Q&A section and we will get to them as soon as we can. All right. The floor is yours, James.

James: Colleen, eComEngine, thank you both for having us today. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to chat with you a little bit more about Amazon DSP. It is a recently launched advertising platform that unfortunately is not democratically available to all sellers, but we're going to talk about what this platform can do for you and how you can get access to the platform. It has functionality that is second to none compared to anything else that we see today on Amazon. And quite frankly, it's really the next new thing. It's very exciting. And so I'm glad to have the opportunity to chat and share aspects of this platform with you.

James: Dave Vermeulen and I, delighted to be able to talk about this particular tool. There are some complicated aspects to this tool and there are some aspects that the value in the tool will become quite apparent. So let's get started so that we can talk through what we're here to talk about today. As Colleen had mentioned just briefly, Buy Box Experts, we're over 200 folks helping brands to manage first party and third party capabilities on Amazon. We've worked with brands of all different sizes both here in Amazon US as well as in about 15 international marketplaces that are part of the Amazon platform.

James: Let's start with the question of the day is, what are some of these marketing questions that you as brand owners may be faced with today where there aren't necessarily good answers through your traditional Amazon PPC? How do you leverage customer information on Amazon? Obviously, there are terms of services that prevent us from doing certain types of remarketing, but how do we learn more about our customers and how do we follow them around so that if they don't necessarily purchase from us the first time they see a product detail page, can we come back and communicate with them again? Is there a way to get them to come back and look at our products?

James: If we're launching new products on Amazon, what can we do to be able to say, "Listen, we're small and new, but there are lots of existing competitors in the Amazon space." Can we attract those shoppers or our competitors and bring them to our product pages so that they can see our newly launched products? There are questions around how do we stay ahead of the game when there's so many new brands popping up every day. If we launch new products, how do we make sure that we still have some visibility when potentially being drowned out by hundreds of other competitors in the same space? Questions around what happens in that Amazon customer journey when customers start learning about products outside of Amazon. Yes, we can see what kind of traffic and conversion exist within Amazon, but customers don't spend all their time just on Amazon. So what can we do to follow them around the web when they might be learning or shopping elsewhere about products like the ones that we're trying to sell them.

James: And then for those of us that are doing social media advertising on places like Google and Facebook, costs are going up there as well, the level of competition is increasing. Are there ways and additional avenues that we could potentially be attracting customers without having to deal with some of those so high expenses on some of these social media platforms? So, very general types of questions that you as a brand owner may be faced with. Let's talk about where Amazon DSP fits into this. And with that, I'm going to turn things over to Dave Vermeulen who can take us through what exactly is DSP and what exactly is Amazon's flavor of DSP. Dave.

Dave: Yeah. Thanks, James. To start off, DSP stands for demand-side platform, basically, it just allows the brands to control the pricing and the bidding, and that's the demand-side portion of it. But the Amazon DSP, it actually gives brands an opportunity to look at data and build audiences and then be able to show their advertising both on and off of the Amazon platform. The Amazon DSP, one of the real strengths of it is that it's what they call like a walled garden. So it's an e-commerce site. Purchases are made on-site and Amazon has all of their own 1P data, which we get access to through the DSP in order to build those audiences and show that kind of robust targeting. And it's that customer data that really provides the strength, the backbone of why the DSP performs so well.

Dave: It's great for both launching new products, driving tons of traffic into new product launches, as well as revitalizing products that maybe have been running efficiently for a long time but have seen their CPCs go up or they lose efficiency as they try to capture more purchasers. So the DSP is a very efficient way of driving traffic onto the platform into the PDPs or brand store. You're able to target, by ASIN, specific audiences based on people that might have viewed your products or your competitor shoppers as well once you have viewed their products.

Dave: And then one of the big strengths for the Amazon DSP again is that walled garden type of conversation where we, through the Amazon DSP, have access to all the open exchanges and other DSPs off of Amazon, but they do not have access to the inventory that is on Amazon that's only accessed through the Amazon DSP. And then really just the reporting on the attribution and on all the audiences can really help influence how you build a strategy for how to make your Amazon sales as strong as possible.

James: I know the first time I heard about Amazon DSP, admittedly I didn't really understand what this was all about. So I want to take a moment and provide more context around what exactly are we doing when we spend money on Amazon DSP. What problems are we ultimately going to be able to solve? If we look at the use cases that are primarily in play for brands that have products that are being sold today on Amazon, the first and most obvious one is a brand wants to retarget shoppers. Let's say you've got a bunch of people looking at your product detail pages and only 3%, 5%, 10% of them actually buy your product.

James: Do I get a second chance to go back to those customers and say, "Hey, come on back and buy my product. Don't go look at somebody else's product. Don't go look somewhere else for the product. Come back to my product detail page and please learn more and potentially add that product to your shopping cart." So the straight-up retargeting makes a lot of sense because we don't obviously have 100% conversion on our traffic. So let's look for ways that we can get Amazon shoppers to come back and learn more about our product on a second or a third visit.

James: Potentially, we're a brand and we're launching new products and we don't have big budgets but we know the kinds of customers that we want to go after. And it isn't necessarily just customers that search for a particular keyword, it may be customer characteristics, and we'll get into some of the characteristics of customers that we can actually slice and dice by. But we want to get very specific about finding all those needles in the haystack to be able to track just the right kind of customers to our products so that we can be much more efficient about the traffic that we bring to the products.

James: We may be in a situation where just as we retargeted traffic that came and looked at our product detail pages, we could do the same thing and go and retarget our competitor shoppers. So folks that went and looked at specific ASINs of our competitors that we've identified and those people that didn't actually make the purchases of our competitor products, wouldn't we like to be able to try to pull them over to our products and say, "Come and have a look at us, come and look at our products." And this can all be done within the timeframe necessary to avoid attracting customers who might have actually purchased. We can retarget just those people that didn't purchase our product or didn't purchase our competitor's products but may still very much be in the shopping aisle looking at options before they make their final decision. Dave, anything you want to mention on these three before we move on to some other use cases?

Dave: Yeah. I just think with the competitor ones, because it's such an imperative part of your DSP strategy, to just understand the level of hyper-targeting that we can do. So we can build audiences based on specific ASIN, your competitor ASIN, and then really refine that and make sure we're targeting products that have a similar amount of review, less stars, and maybe a higher price point. Something along that so we can make it as efficient as possible as we're really trying to capture that competitive business.

James: And if you happen to be a premium price product and you're in a category that's full of much, much lower price products, you may all be bidding on PPC for the same keywords, but with DSP you can say, listen, there's only three or four competitors and their specific ASINs that are relevant to the audience that we're looking for who want premium price products. Let's go and target just those types of shoppers versus going after everybody and anybody who might otherwise be looking for that generic PPC term.

James: Now, let's go back to number three where we're targeting competitor traffic. What happens if one of our competitors does a big national ad campaign and drives a whole bunch of traffic to Amazon? And so you've got this quick climb of lots of new customers showing up. Many of them are learning about your competitor's products for the first time. Conversion may not necessarily be high, but an awful lot of new customers have come and looked at your competitor's products. Well, guess what? That's all product traffic that we can go and scoop up by retargeting.

James: And so quite frankly, if you think of the David and Goliath concept, you can be the small brand with small budgets and your competitors have big national ad budgets that they're spending that may drive a lot of traffic to Amazon. Well, we don't necessarily have to have the budget to be able to do big national campaigns, but we can benefit from our competitors doing that advertising and driving it to their listings for us to then come around and retarget their shoppers. Likewise, if we are fortunate enough to have the kinds of budgets necessary to do national campaigns, it's important to protect all that incremental traffic that's going to come and see our product pages and make sure that our competitors aren't doing DSP to retarget our traffic.

James: And so in both situations, whether it's our competitors doing the national ad campaigns or ourselves doing the national ad campaigns, we want to make sure that we protect the retargeting opportunity by leveraging DSP and being able to get a second or a third chance to communicate our message to the kinds of shoppers that we think will be interested in our products. Dave, have you seen anything else with this concept of national advertising?

Dave: I just really want to highlight that last part that you mentioned. The DSP is growing explosively. And as we see more and more just even over the last 18 months, 12 months, six months, if you're not protecting the traffic that you are driving onto your PDPs or on platform, you can be pretty sure that your competitors are actively engaged in doing that at this time.

James: Yep. Let's look at the fifth use case here that's useful for brands that are already selling products on Amazon. This is kind of fascinating. Normally, Amazon terms of service say you can't remarket to your customers. That's true, but it turns out with DSP, you are allowed to retarget. So through DSP, you are allowed to do an ad campaign that targets the very people that bought your products in the past. Maybe you're trying to resell them a product, upsell them a product, introduce products that would be complementary to the products they've purchased in the past. But by being able to target the very customers that have not only expressed interest in your products but actually demonstrated by purchasing your products, you're able to refine your message and put it in front of the very people that you think you're going to have the highest likelihood of being able to convert. When you look at these five types of use cases, Dave, thoughts on what you can do with PPC versus what you can now do with DSP?

Dave: As far as like the relationship between PPC and DSP?

James: Yes, yes.

Dave: I mean, this is an ever-changing landscape to be honest and there's a lot of conversation about PPC sponsored ads and how the cost per clicks have been rising pretty continuously. What DSP has really shown a high level of efficiency at is driving lower CPCs traffic into those product detail pages at a cheaper rate. So it's allowing for brands to be able to capture a new audience, reach people who are in category and get them to know about their brands, get them engaged in their brands. And then we can retarget them. The relationship between DSP and PPC, I would take up the rest of our time if I just went down that path. But the reality is the DSP is there to help really the PPC side grow. Again, Amazon becoming like a pay-per-play type of platform, it's harder and harder to get organic listings on the first page of searches. The DSP really pushes traffic. It boosts that Amazon algorithm and allows you to be more successful in increasing your organic rankings and getting on that first page of searches.

James: Okay, Dave. Let's talk about where does DSP fit in with all those other forms of advertising? Take us through the sales funnel and where PVC and DSP and where all the stuff ends up overlapping and where it supports the different other formats.

Dave: Yeah. And so the DSP within itself, it actually covers the full sales funnel. We've actually touched a lot about the retargeting of past purchasers, the retention type of executions. Maybe you're really trying to drive a subscribe and save execution that you're running. So that's at the very bottom of the funnel, the purchase area, as well as people who have viewed your product detail pages but maybe you exclude people who've viewed them in the last two weeks or you exclude people who've purchased in the past. But that retargeting of the PDPs, it's still going to be low funnel in that purchase experience area.

Dave: But then when you start looking a little bit more mid-funnel, that's where the DSP really provides a great amount of value. Again, I use the term hyper-targeting, but we can find audiences that have a high level of engagement with your DSPs ads that you're currently doing with your retargeting based on purchase data and we can identify those audiences, but then run ads to them while excluding people who've ever purchased from you before. So it's identifying a unique audience to your brand, but we know that they're in the consideration side of the funnel or the stage of the funnel. We know that they're in your category and looking to purchase. And so therefore we're really trying to build up that unique reach and capture that unique user, all designed to increase your overall new-to-brand percent of sales.

James: In a few minutes, we're actually going to go through a very specific example where we're going to build an audience and show you just how granular you can get, just to provide more context on that. Please keep going, Dave.

Colleen: Yeah. And actually, if you don't mind, I'm going to just jump in since we're talking about sales. We do have a question about increasing sales. Is it necessary to do brand registry to increase sales? What are your thoughts on brand registry?

James: I think a brand registry is an effective tool for helping to lock down your content on Amazon. So making sure your product listings are describing your products the way you want them to be described versus the way a random seller might actually set up the listing. You can do DSP with or without having brand registry. At the end of the day, we're going to drive traffic to your products. And so if we effectively drive the right audience to your listings and your listings aren't properly optimized, your listings aren't locked down with the kind of content you want, then you're basically tying one arm behind your back. So get your listings optimized, get them locked down with brand registry, then start spending money on PPC and DSP and any other form of advertising to drive additional traffic to your listings. That's the way I would think about where brand registry fits into the overall branding and brand consistency. And are we even ready to have all this new traffic come and look at our products? Anything else, Dave, you would add on that?

Dave: Yeah, just again that idea, the relationship between the DSP and the PPC. The DSP is going to find great inventory. It's going to find people in category. It's going to drive them on platform to the PDPs or through the form of branded searches where GSP really facilitates a higher level of branded searches. So if you're not protecting all that inventory that's being driven onto the platform, then that's going to be a miss. You want to make sure you're really capturing all of that traffic with a well built out like branded sponsored ad execution. Again, you want all your listings optimized. You want to have like sponsored display on your PDPs to make sure your competitors aren't taking over that inventory. We're going to drive great traffic. You want to make sure that you're capturing it and turning them into sales for your brand.

James: Yep. Dave, let's keep going. I want to talk about on the sales funnel, there are other types of non-Amazon advertising. Take us through where they fit in. As brands evaluate whether DSP makes sense for them, there are going to be some budgetary issues here around, gosh, we already spent a bunch of money elsewhere. Help me think about Google, Facebook, Amazon, where does this all fit in because there's only so much budget to go around? Tell us a little bit about Buy Box Experts philosophy on how to think about the sales funnel.

Dave: Yeah. So it's an overall philosophy. We value all off Amazon marketing executions as well as what we do through the DSP. We understand that growing that brand awareness, driving traffic onto the platform, onto the Amazon platform, doesn't just have to be through the DSP. There's many other ways to do it. It is an ever-changing landscape in the programmatic world right now. We see that with Apple and the changing of their terms as far as privacy, we know that Google Chrome is going to be shifting in a little bit over the year and not using cookies anymore. And what it's really doing is forcing the industry to scramble a little bit to be able to draw a line between the actual ad being served and purchases where, again, I've mentioned the wall garden already, but the 1P data from Amazon, that's all 1P data. So we have that data. We don't have to bring in a third party to draw that correlation.

Dave: I think Facebook in all honesty has probably been hit the hardest because they need to go through a 3P service in order to draw that purchase correlation to what they're doing. So we have seen people shifting some of their budget from there. Google is kind of both sides of it with the search and the Google shopping as well. I think they're positioned a little better, but we see on the Google searches that even when somebody's searching for a product like a water cooler, like the second most searched term will be water cooler on Amazon. So it's still effectively ending up driving the traffic onto Amazon already.

Dave: And then the one other thing I just wanted to make a quick note of, even though our core focus is bottom of funnel build upwards approach, there are opportunities for brands that can tap into the upper part of the funnel through OTT or Fire TV. There's Twitch now that Amazon acquired and a lot of that type of inventory that's more focused just on brand awareness is accessible. But again, that's something that it's for a very specific brand partner.

Colleen: Dave, sorry, is there any way to capture customer information? That's a question that we have here from Lena? Obviously there's a lot of retargeting, but how do you capture customer information or is there a way to do that?

Dave: I can let James kind of speak on the specifics of capturing customer data. We don't have access to individual customer data. It's all based on audiences now that those audiences are very refined, they're expansive what we have access to with the data, but we cannot capture individual's data or customer data.

James: I would view it as Amazon has this massive database on its customers. They know what they've purchased, what they've looked at. They've been able to append other types of data to get demographic information. Dave will go into some of the other additional variables that Amazon has on its customers. I can't actually say, oh, we want to go and not only find all the people that have these six or seven characteristics, but I want Amazon to reveal to me who those customers actually are. That last stage of revealing who they actually are so they can say, oh, I'm talking to Bob over here and Mary over here. I don't know who those people actually are, I just know that Amazon has very clear motivation to allow us to be very specific about who we go after so that we can ultimately end up having a high return on investment from the DSP dollars that we put into the campaign.

James: Let me get to that in a minute by showing you examples of how well we get to know our customers as a group, but I can tell you, we will never get to know our customers as individuals, we'll only get to know them as a collective group by way of the targeting that's available through DSP. Let's talk a little bit here, Dave, about how do I actually build these custom audiences and what are the kinds of data that Amazon has on customers that allows me to say, show me everybody that has this, this, and this characteristic.

Dave: Yeah. I'd really quickly want to just touch on how Amazon is seeing a little bit of a shift in how they're allowing brands to access customer data. Now, with like the storefront posts and with Amazon live, there are opportunities there and you can use the DSP to drive traffic into those specific areas so that you can have more engagement with the people or with the individuals that are engaging with your brand, but it's just we can't actually collect those data points through the DSP.

Dave: So getting into the audiences, searches are... We can build an audience on the DSP that's based off of specific searches that are related to your products, views. We've spent a good time talking about that. People who have viewed your product detail pages, we can retarget them as well and the purchases, and then subscriptions. This is really typically we use like the SMS or subscribe and save subscriptions as an exclusion audience. So if you want to promote a specific product or a variation of a product but you don't want to reach somebody who's already signed up for SNS, you can actually build that in as one of your exclusions. And any audience that we build, whether it's around your views, your purchases, your competitors, complementary, we can use any audience as an exclusion as well.

James: Inclusion, exclusion, maybe we do a DSP campaign to grab everybody who recently bought your product for the first time and we try to get them to sign up for subscribe and save. There's a lot of things we can do here with DSP that are simply not possible with PPC. Dave can take us through some examples in a few minutes of how people have used the campaigns, but quite frankly, I don't know that we've actually come to every type of possibility available. And you as a brand may have very specific and possibly unusual business objectives that you're trying to accomplish through different types of targeting. These are all things that we can do by taking all these different ingredients and either combining them or excluding some with other combinations and being in a position to talk to just those people we want to talk to. Take us through, Dave, more of the Amazon-specific types of data that we can leverage, information that Amazon does have about individual customers but will not share directly with us but nonetheless allows us to talk with those customers in an aggregate manner.

Dave: Yeah. So it's all based on those audiences that are built up. Lifestyle is basically life events or interests. So it could be a new parent or someone who enjoys outdoor backpacking. In market is based on specific ASIN views. So that would be people that are in market to make a purchase. So it could be individuals who are in market for mountain bikes. So based on their ASINs that they've been viewing or off of other purchase behavior from comparable products, we know that they're in market to make a purchase. ASIN based. We've spoken about that already and how powerful that is, building audiences around specific ASIN traffic or purchases. Demographic is pretty standard. It could be age, income, anything along those lines. So we're able to... Oh, the last one, contextual. And that's based off of actual shopping behavior like current shopping, like what products are being purchased at the same time that another product is being purchased as well.

Dave: But the great thing with all of these things is we can, again, use them as inclusion or exclusion and actually pair them up so we can reach people who are just 50 and above that are in market for mountain bikes that have an active lifestyle. And then I think the other part of this that I'd like to speak to is after you run the DSP for a set amount of time, we collect enough data where we can do a full analysis of it and actually identify other strong audiences that have a high correlation with your product or purchases of your product, as well as audiences that just don't perform, and then we'll exclude that audience from future executions.

James: When you think about DSP, while we can create audiences like this, when we first start working with a brand, we may create 5, 6, 10 different audiences, each one trying to test different hypotheses around how parts of our catalog that we're advertising may be more interesting to different groups or different groups at different times. And so when you think about line item campaigns, each campaign you run can have a different target audience. And so you can test different things out and see, do left-handed people in New York, I'm making this up, but as you get more and more esoteric with your targeting, do we believe that there may be particular variables that are more likely to allow us to be better targeted towards the customers that may be interested in our products?

James: So we can try out all sorts of different targeting and we can see what actually works and for what does work, we can put more of the budget into those campaigns and take less budget or have less budget for the ones that don't work out. But we're constantly hypothesis testing. We're constantly looking for, how well do we actually understand the Amazon customer? The good news is there's a lot of Amazon customers out there. And even for a product that may not necessarily be of broad appeal, we can still find a lot of people who are going to be net new shoppers to our product and be able to see, does our product resonate with them? Does the message we use for the product that we're putting in front of them, does it resonate with them? So a lot of exciting experimentation that is available through DSP that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do with a PPC campaign.

James: Dave, take us through, where does all this traffic come from? You talked about some of the Amazon traffic that it has through some of the properties it owns. Take us through some of the other areas where we can put Amazon DSP ads.

Dave: Yeah. Like you said, we've touched on this, and we have the ability to target what percent of inventory we want to go to each one of these supply sources. But it is either on Amazon proper or Amazon-owned and operated. We can run through the APS, which is Amazon Publisher Services. But I typically actually refer to it as Amazon's preferred sites because it's more intuitive. It's their vetted list of top 100 sites that they... I mean, they have thousands of sites, but they really work within the top-performing sites and it's vetted. They bring new sites and get rid of the lowest performers and it's very high performing as far as that audience that you're able to reach there. And then we spoke also about being able to reach the other DSPs and open exchanges, and that's more of an outreach program. We don't use it as often, but if you're looking to move up the funnel and do more brand awareness, then we do have access into that inventory as well.

James: With the Amazon Publisher Services, you've got a shopper coming onto Amazon. He or she may look at your product detail page, but then they're going to leave Amazon and they're going to go around the web and they're going to look at their favorite news site and their favorite entertainment site and sports site. And assuming those sites are all part of the APS that Amazon uses, we'll be in a position that we can place ads wherever that customer might logically be going next to gobble up content on the internet. And so by being able to put our products in places that the customers already would be shopping at, we're in a better position to be able to say, "Hey, remember me? Come on back and look at my product again." Or, "Remember that product you looked at? Come and look at a competitor product, which is my product."

James: Those types of opportunities to follow people and do it within a time-bound basis where we know that they looked at our product or we know that they looked at our competitor product within five days, 10 days, it's still well within the purchase window, we can grab them in other parts of the internet. This is exciting. We don't have to rely on them coming back to Amazon. We can continue to be relevant in all those situations where they're going around the web looking at other types of sites.

Dave: Yeah. And it's important to know with the APS that we have the tools and the best practices to make sure that we are getting the highest level of performance and the placements on these ad sizes that are running. We can control the viewability, how frequently somebody sees it, whether it's above the fold, the size of the ad, and then obviously optimize based on levels of engagement.

James: All right. Let's do an example. You're a private label brand. You're launching a new beauty brand on Amazon. You are trying to figure out, how do I use all this amazing targeting of DSP to get the right kind of consumers, right kind of shoppers in front of my product? Okay. What you see here in the middle of the page, let's assume that you've decided that the kinds of people that are going to be interested in your product have looked at specific competitor ASINs in the last 30 days. For whatever reason, you're saying, listen, we're looking at people in certain geographies, we're looking at college educated females of a certain age range or a certain income range.

James: Again, those are going to be hypotheses that you as the brand will bring to bear when you identify what kinds of custom campaigns you want to put in place but you can test out, is this the right audience? Do I need to, in fact, expand the age range? Do I need to expand the geographic coverage? All of that can be done through creating different campaigns for DSP. Now you've identified who you want to go after. Now the question is, okay, I've got to put my ad in places where we think that these shoppers are going to be on the internet when they're not on Amazon.

James: And so we can place our ad on various sites, like the APS sites that they've talked about earlier, and we can make that ad not just a standard product listing ad like a sponsored product ad looks like, we can actually customize all of the display. There can be other types of messaging. It doesn't have to be just a generic bottle of beauty product that's on the image. It could actually be a much more robust product description. It could even be a video. And so the opportunity to integrate our content into the ad to make it consistent with the types of sites where we might be placing the ads, Amazon's giving us a lot more flexibility than we would otherwise be doing if we were just spending the dollars advertising within the Amazon ecosystem. Dave, thoughts around this whole process of creating designs and putting products in different websites?

Dave: Yeah. Just the idea that it's very customizable. This shows like an image ad, like you said, with that seamlessly kind of fit into this content, but we can run e-commerce static ads that pull in the stars and reviews, actual customer reviews, onset as well as coupons and discounts. So it can be a little bit more robust on the e-commerce side. And then there's fully custom creative where brands can control all of the content and then the online video opportunities as well.

James: Fantastic. Any questions Colleen, that we can answer before we move on to more examples?

Colleen: We do have one question. I was going to hold it to the end, but I'll go ahead and ask it. Recommendations given by Amazon on bids and keywords, are those worth going with or no? Again, recommendations given by Amazon on how much to bid or what keywords, would you go with those or no? And if not, then how do you get a perfect idea on how much to spend on advertising?

Dave: I mean, I can jump in on this first too, and James, you can jump in after if you want. DSP isn't based around keywords, it's based on audiences, it's based on ASINs and behavior. Now, I am very familiar, I've worked with the PPC side of things as well. I will say just as a general statement for Amazon recommendations, I believe that the person speaking specifically to, they'll send regularly out emails with recommendations on their bidding practices for PPC campaigns. I would look at all of that and analyze and see if there's opportunities for optimization within those. But many times, the data that they're presenting is a little bit delayed. It might be based on keyword campaigns that you have diminished efforts into or recently started up.

Dave: So I would always make sure if you're using a 3P software, if you're doing it manually, just to double-check. I would not just abstractly accept those recommendations. Then as far as specific DSP is concerned, keyword research is very important to us though. So understanding highly effective keywords gives us an opportunity to identify audiences and traffic based on those keywords. And we can still build an audience based on product searches that are related to those keywords. So that's still important data to have and we absolutely analyze it for our DSP audiences as well.

James: Let's jump into a particular use case that we work through with a client where COVID changed the dynamics around how the brand could promote its products and how they could launch new products and get visibility. This particular outdoor furniture brand recognized that as it launched new products, they could leverage DSP by going after competitor shoppers. And for something like outdoor furniture, which wasn't necessarily a spontaneous purchase, there was a window of opportunity where we could say, go and find all the relevant ASINs from competitors, the shoppers that are going to those ASINs, and let's show them our products during a timeframe that is still relevant when those customers have not yet purchased, let's show them our products.

James: Well, lo and behold, with this particular brand, not only was that effective but they were able to create a lot of net new customer purchases, grow their business significantly, all the while doing this with completely new products. So the opportunity in this case to use retargeting of competitor traffic proved to be rather efficient. That is only one form of targeting that DSP offers. There are other types of targeting that could have been done. Had this brand been, for example, a well-established brand with well-established products, they could have said, listen, we want to go and we want to retarget shoppers that looked at our established products but didn't purchase. Let's retarget them and try to bring them back to make a purchase.

James: And we could have gotten creative with all sorts of other types of campaigns, but in this particular case I'm trying to point out that there is enough traffic from competitors that we can create a rather robust campaign and put our products in front of the very shoppers that have demonstrated interest in those types of products at those types of price points during those particularly relevant timeframes. So, exciting to see DSP allow us to do things that we couldn't otherwise do through a traditional PPC effort.

Dave: Yeah. And with this brand in particular, just speaking to the size of the audience that we get through competitor retargeting, we're able to do a lot of AB testing as well to see what execution really performs the best. And so we'll layer in things like not only are we retargeting their competitor traffic but we're also looking at people who might have been recent movers. There's one that I know we layered in on this campaign in particular. So then you're reaching people who've recently moved, but at the same time they're looking at competitors. So there's a lot of testing back and forth to see what's going to perform the best and then optimizing to that level of performance. But you want to make sure that you're always building multiple audiences to really test that.

James: Okay. Let's cycle back through what the main advantages here are of DSP. I'm going to start with what may seem a little bit counterintuitive, but because this type of advertising platform is not available to everybody, the companies that do participate in this have an advantage. I think back in 2014 when Amazon started actively pushing PPC, pre-2014 there really wasn't any advertising, and the first few companies that got in and started doing PPC advertising found that, oh gosh, there's not much competition yet on this. We can actually gain a lot more eyeballs by way of spending some money on PPC.

James: Some of the same dynamics are here in play with DSP where you may be thinking about DSP but not all your competitors are. Think of a category today where everybody isn't actively thinking about PPC. Well, DSP, most brands don't even have access to it because it's not available in Seller Central or Amazon hasn't approached a brand specifically and said, would you like us to manage?

James: There are two main ways to do DSP today. One is you have Amazon manage the DSP budget for you where they will have a person within Amazon that will set up the campaigns and actually manage the day-to-day activities. Or you can work with an agency, like a firm like ours that is actually going to do what's called self-service DSP. It's self-service but through an agency versus managed service through Amazon. Amazon today is requiring brands to spend somewhere between 30 and $35,000 a month to access the DSP platform. We can help brands if they're willing to commit to $10,000 a month because our economics are different than Amazon. In either case, the ability to do hyper-specific targeting is available that wouldn't otherwise be available through some of the PPC platforms. I'm going to have Dave talk about number four because this is a big deal about how as an agency we differ from Amazon when it comes to managing DSP.

Dave: Yeah. And just really quickly one other thing. We do have access not just to the United States DSP but all the other marketplaces as well like the EU, Canada, Mexico-

James: Good point. Good point.

Dave: But yeah, so number four is really important. Four and five actually. By not having any line item minimums, it allows us to run much more robust orders and line items really using that hyper-targeting. Whereas on Amazon Managed Services, there's that barrier upfront on the amount you have to commit monthly, but they also limit the amount of orders or line items you're able to use. So we can actually run like single ASIN targeted testing with variation pages, again, with the different audience combinations. We actually run up to six different supply source inventories for all different line items. So we can really identify, use all the data that's available to us and actually capture it, identify your top-performing audiences, orders, line items, and optimize towards those.

Dave: So we really see that come back as far as whatever KPIs have been identified, whether it's you'd want to see a really strong new to brand percentage or if it's all about that individual ASIN return on ad spend or your brand halo ad spend. Whatever that KPI is, we can drive that highest level of performance possible.

Dave: And then I would just also mention that we're very nimble as far as budgets. So in the event that if something goes out of stock or you lose the Buy Box, we can shift budgets between other orders or even just look to push into the upcoming month. We're always obviously going to do what's best for the brands that we work with.

Dave: And then daily optimization. That's a real strength of ours. I feel like I've probably touched on that enough, but the reporting is extremely important. Amazon is providing us with more and more data all the time. I've talked about identifying specific audiences. That's through an audience segmentation report that shows levels of engagement with ads and purchases on ads based on the different audiences that are getting access to those to really use that for hyper-targeting.

Dave: But then also there's like retail brand analysis that we can do where it shows once the DSP started and throughout the term of the DSP, how much has it influenced your brand? How much have you seen an increase in reviews? How do you compare to your specific competitors, to your category on all these different areas. Again, it could be based on reviews, it could be based off of PDP views. So it gives you much more full transparency into how your brand is comparing within your category.

James: Okay. The other thing I want to note here is that we have a little bit of an unusual relationship with Amazon where Amazon is actually encouraging us to take some of the brands that they have been managing DSP for and they're okay if we turn around and then our agency starts managing those. And what we found is in part, because of our difference in philosophy around spending more money at the bottom of the funnel and working our way up, whereas Amazon likes to spread the dollars across the whole funnel right away, we found that our returns for our clients are typically better than what the clients have experienced when Amazon was managing the same DSP budgets.

James: Again, a difference in philosophy about how to spend the dollars. We like to help our clients make money right away. So let's start at the bottom of the funnel. And if there's enough traffic at the bottom of the funnel that we can leverage DSP, let's keep spending at the bottom of the funnel. And as the budgets increase, then we can start to move up the funnel. But in many cases, there's so much traffic at the bottom of the funnel that it may make sense for us to continue to focus at the bottom of the funnel. I do want to pay one special note to an important distinction between what happens if you're a new brand versus you're an established brand. Dave, do you want to talk about that around what we do with DSP?

Dave: Yeah. First, I think it's all about setting and identifying goals and KPIs and getting a long-term strategy in place whether you are a new brand or you're a smaller brand that has been in this space for a long time, or if you kind of dominate your category. There's a lot of different executions that can be the best fit for you. If it's a product release type of a situation, we're going to set those KPIs around driving traffic, about getting reviews, and really trying to drive customers that haven't heard about your brand to the PDPs or to the brand store.

Dave: Whereas conversely, if you're a very established brand, we're going to really focus on kind of dominating the category, but then there's that area right in between the small to mid-size brands that really tend to, I'm not going to say struggle, but they're looking for advantages on the Amazon platform where it becomes harder and harder to be efficient through just PPC. Other brands are spending big dollars in their category and it's making really difficult for them. Those are the brands that we have the most success really winning on Amazon through the DSP. And again, it's by driving efficient new users to their PDPs, it's by maximizing and protecting the traffic that is being sent on platform. And that's where the real opportunity to protect your brand and to grow your brand really lies.

James: Let's talk about what does it mean to actually get started on DSP? What do you have to do? Well, if you're going to do any competitor retargeting, we need to know exactly which listings, which ASINs of your competitors you want to target. So for every one of your products that you want to run DSP on, what are the matching competitor ASINs that we should know about so that we can properly target specific ASINs. Secondly, and this came up in an earlier question, how do we make sure that we're driving traffic to listings that are properly set up for conversion? Do they have high-quality content, the right kind of images, and video? Do they have brand registry in place to lock down the content so we don't get any crazy surprises? All of that needs to be in place before you spend a dollar on any of this kind of advertising.

James: We need to understand or at least hypothesize, what are the most relevant audiences that we're trying to target? Maybe you have well-established customer data that says we need to go after this exact combination of customers. One of the beautiful things about DSP, because we can do different types of line items, we can test out whether we need to increase the range of some of those characteristics to see if in fact our product might also have a spillover effect into other types of groups.

James: And then finally, someone's got to pay for all this. And so the question around where are you going to get the money to do DSP advertising? Dave talked earlier about companies starting to take some of their Google and some of their Facebook advertising dollars and moving that into DSP. One of the things that we are very much against is brands saying we're going to dump all of our Amazon PPC and move it into DSP. No, no, no, no, no. PPC and DSP are complementary and there are a lot of benefits by way of having at least some of both, but please don't go all in on one type of advertising versus another. DSP is very effective but it's very effective in a world where Amazon PPC is already robustly in place supporting your brand. Dave, any more thoughts on this last issue about budgets?

Dave: No, it was very well said. I mean, sometimes we've talked with many brands that, I mean, I think you've used the term before, just finding a test budget in the couch cushions. I mean, sometimes you just got to find it and test it and you see the returns from it, and then it becomes a no-brainer part of your execution.

James: All right. Well, we want to thank you for spending time with us today. Two takeaways. Number one, if you're interested in learning more about DSP through Buy Box Experts, please send us an email at dsp@buyboxexperts.com. Also, if you are interested in getting a free Amazon business assessment, you can see on the right-hand side, we will look at your business and look for ways to increase sales, boost your traffic, help you with reviews and find better ways to get customers interested in your products. We will text out the Bitly link here where you can actually click the link and you can go down the path of filling in information that we can use to evaluate and provide you with a business assessment. I want to thank you all for joining us today. I want to thank our hosts at eComEngine and we still have a few minutes left. If you've got questions on DSP, we open the floor to questions at this time. Thank you.

Colleen: Yes. Thank you. Great information. We do have a few questions. One is, is there any fee to register DSP or any requirements?

Dave: There's no fee to register DSP. They call it a seat, but it's really just an account. So agencies like ourselves, the self-serve agency have direct access onto that DSP seat. There's many fees involved with DSP in any platform and that has to do with how Amazon captures their inventory. Amazon's obviously going to want to make money off of anything they do. So they're going to charge a fee. There's the inventory fee. There's a bidding fee. There's fees involved with it, but it's all pre-baked into your overall cost. And then through best practices and like world-class optimizations, it's actually mitigated with the performance that you see.

James: We ask our clients to spend at least $10,000 a month over a three-month commitment in order to try out DSP and for us to be able to collect enough data to be able to provide results around how well the hypotheses on what the target audiences are, how well those match the products. That's the starting point we ask for. There's no fees over and above what you commit in terms of your ad budget and certainly worth exploring if you're in a position to be able to support that level of budget.

Colleen: So another question here, I think this is referring more to like the audiences, but it's asking what kind of data providers offer their data on Amazon DSP? What's available off the shelf, for instance, Polk's auto segments, shopper data, et cetera?

Dave: Yeah. So there's a number there. Amazon has obviously the 1P data, they may have a ton of 3P data as well that they get. One example, that would be like through Oracle, but they have access to all of those 3P audiences. I'll be really honest, unless that audience, because there's, again, an additional cost if you're using a 3P data source, it would have to be so much more refined than what Amazon's already providing through the data that they have access to to make it worthwhile to take on the additional fee with it, but in any situation like that, we can always run like an analysis, look up audiences and identify what the perfect fit is for any brand.

Dave: I think that's the question. I do want to kind of jump into something really quick. If you have your own data and you have like a huge list of emails or if we can draw pixels on websites and collect data that way, we can build hashed audiences, or if you work with another DMP, which is a data managed provider or management provider, but we can work with all of that data to create audiences as well.

James: We can make lookalike audiences of email addresses that you have from your own website. We could do all sorts of creative things on that front. It's pretty amazing what Amazon data is being made available through this DSP platform. So the more information that you can come to us with either in terms of hypotheses on your desired target audience or customer information that you already have collected through legitimate means, in both those situations, we can leverage that to refine our audience or to find more people like those very people that you've had success with in the past.

Colleen: Great. Well, that's it for the questions. So I think that was a very thorough explanation of DSP and all of the advantages and how to get started. Great content overall. It looks like Pat from DataHawk, our buddy over there, he just said it was very good as well. So thanks Pat for joining us. All right. So thanks, again, James and Dave. We love the team at Buy Box Experts. Everybody who's on this call, I highly recommend you take advantage of the free assessment. Fill out that form. It's about $3,000 value that audit. They'll spend about an hour talking with you, consulting with you, and doing a deep dive onto your business. It's a great opportunity, so take advantage of that. And we will be sure to send an email out later tonight with a recording as well as a link to that assessment. Thanks again for joining us. Have a great day, everyone.

James: All right. Take care.

Dave: Thank you.

James: Bye-bye.

Colleen: Thanks.