The following is a guest post by e-Comas – eCommerce Made Simple.
One of the biggest, most talked-about topics in eCommerce advertising right now is Amazon DSP.
It stands for Demand-Side Platform, and it offers exciting opportunities for Amazon sellers who want to try something different from the pay-per-click (PPC) models – and compete with big brands with impressive display advertising.
It’s view-based advertising rather than click-based, so it can be harder to measure the success of a campaign. But don’t let that put you off.
What is DSP?
Amazon DSP allows centralized, programmatic media buying across the Amazon network. That means your adverts get seen further afield, rather than just on Amazon itself.
These are ‘billboard’ style display adverts, and you can target certain audiences, including audiences you build yourself – whether those are based on views, purchases of your products (or your competitors’ products), or demographics.
It works a little differently from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. For a start, it uses display advertising rather than sponsored products, so there’s more room for creativity and a bigger focus on raising brand awareness, rather than just getting people to click.
In a way, it’s almost a return from click-based advertising to ‘classic’ advertising, traditionally on billboards and in newspapers: the attribution power is less strong, the conversion to sales is a little harder to measure.
So, to ensure you’re getting the most out of DSP, it’s worth knowing how to measure its impact on your sales.
Attribution: Where Your Sales Come From
Attribution is the name for measuring where your sales have come from.
PPC offers easy attribution: you can see when someone has clicked an advert and whether they bought the product.
You can do that with DSP too, but because it’s display advertising, we think there are more sales associated with it, based on the power of your ads to influence buyers – and those are harder to attribute. After all, you can’t track the effect of a person seeing an ad, being influenced by it over time, and buying the product later.
But you can still measure your full DSP attribution rate, particularly if you measure sales before you start your DSP campaign.
Why Should I Use DSP?
Among our clients, we’ve seen typically a 20% increase in sales from using DSP.
DSP is Amazon extending its advertising reach: it’s more or less hit the limit of what it can do with advertising on Amazon itself, so it’s reaching further, and you’ve got the opportunity to reach further with it.
We think it’s especially effective for smaller brands that don’t have the presence of a household name: big brands with their own massive ad campaigns aren’t using DSP as much, so smaller brands are not being pushed out.
Just like with PPC and Sponsored Brand ads, you can use DSP to attack your competitors as well as protect against them doing the same to you.
And we’ve seen that the audience targeting available with DSP is as effective, if not more effective, than Sponsored Display advertising on Amazon.
There’s a powerful ability to retarget customers, plus the ability to segment audiences and tailor the creatives, giving you more freedom and options when optimizing a campaign.
When Should I Use DSP?
We recommend a PPC ad spend of at least 10-15,000 Euros before committing to DSP.
At that budget, we suggest a small product portfolio would work better than a large range of products. If you’re not spending enough, or your spend is stretched too thinly over too many products, your ads can get lost.
And How Can I Measure DSP?
The DSP attribution Amazon gives you, based on clicks, only tells part of the story. If you look at your total sales, you can get a much fuller picture of how well DSP is working. You need to look at all your advertising, against all your total sales.
With Amazon Attribution – currently in beta, but keep an eye on it, this tool is improving fast – you can measure the impact of your PPC, Sponsored Product, Sponsored Brand and Sponsored Display advertising, as well as DSP clicks.
Other forms of advertising – including on social media and search engines – offer their own analytics and insights, so you should have accurate attribution figures for those too.
When you work out the cost of all these against the sales that are generated, especially if you have pre-DSP figures to compare it to, you should be able to see the full effect of DSP.
It may sound obvious – but the only way to see the full effect of DSP is to have a complete picture of your total sales and what you’re spending where.
What’s the Best Way to Use DSP?
We see two major ways of making the most of DSP.
The first is to ‘double-tap’ your proven audience, getting the most out of them via remarketing campaigns.
Target audiences who in the past clicked on your product but did not buy; and audiences who have bought your product before, and sometime later might well wish to buy it again.
This is a sure-fire, high-efficiency method of making money with DSP.
Feeling more ambitious? The second, more growth-friendly way is to build a new audience, based on what you know about your existing customers. You can use DSP to target the demographics that your products appeal to.
This is an exciting way to grow your business: put some really nice display advertising in front of new people and see whether they bite.
Whichever way you use it, Amazon DSP is a great tool to grow your business – not just achieving more sales but stepping up your marketing and competing with bigger players, too.
Want to find out more? Watch e-Comas’s recent webinar on DSP below:
And contact the e-Comas team any time for information and assistance with your eCommerce journey!
