Amazon DSP | Top Mistakes Brands Make

📚 Lack of Education

Many brands underestimate what Amazon DSP can truly achieve. Misunderstandings about its capabilities often lead to inflated expectations and misplaced trust.

📊Lack of Solid Foundation / Structure

DSP can be as granular as Amazon Advertising.
We segment our orders similar to our PPC campaigns in order to provide incredibly clear reporting around each stage of the funnel, and the core KPI;s for each(NTB, retargeting, competitor targeting, and new customer acquisition..)

- We typically see a lack of granularity can lead to wasted spend across audiences that do not convert and will cause eCPMs and eCPP to inflate (meaning the cost to acquire purchases will go up and the conversion rate will go down)

- That being said, overly granular setup can cause issues with visibility across available inventory placements and issues with spending budgets fully.


🎨 Underwhelming Creative

DSP’s upper-funnel power lies in targeting specific audiences with tailored creatives. This can be a huge advantage over PPC, allowing your ad to drive connection, and a much higher CTR / CVR.

🔬 Lack of Transparency

Amazon DSP comes with an overwhelming amount of date, even more so when you layer in AMC.

Most brands don’t get access to all of this data, whether due to their agency / SAAS partner or just lack of understanding of the platform. This is a huge miss.

This data can REALLY help curate strategy for your brand when shared transparently.

Examples - Path to purchase, ad type overlap, SNS insights, audience insights

Other quick tips from the btr media team -

🔶 Amazon sellers need to embrace Amazon O&O properties and stop jumping into DSP wanting to go straight to 3rd party placements. Amazon O&O properties are powerful with their first party data and trusted by shoppers. Unless you're a nonendemic brand, you should always start with Amazon O&O.

🔶 DSP should be used for products that are retail-ready and not ones that are looking to be picked up off of the ground.
- Audience availability for low selling/trending products will be small compared to retail ready/hero products

🔶 Budgets are also an issue - either over-investing or underinvesting
best practices for budgets are 10-25% of search spend for endemic advertisers

🔶 Remarketing is used to capture traffic that flows through prospecting without converting.
- Proper exclusions and targeting will ensure that no traffic is missed from one funnel step down to the next

Shoutout to Justin Nuckols and Austin Hoggatt for the insights!