Amazon’s Demand-Side Platform (DSP) has emerged as a powerful engine for revenue acceleration on and off Amazon.
By leveraging Amazon’s vast audience data and programmatic advertising capabilities, brands can turn browsing behaviors and customer insights into tangible sales growth. In fact, Amazon’s ad business is surging – CEO Andy Jassy recently described Amazon DSP as “fully featured,” with Amazon Ads revenue jumping 24% year-over-year to $17.7 billion in Q3 2025. This growth is fueled by trillions of first-party consumer signals and closed-loop attribution that DSP offers advertisers. Simply put, Amazon DSP enables precision targeting and full-funnel engagement that can convert audience data into sales at scale.
Key Benefits of Amazon DSP
- Unmatched First-Party Data: Amazon DSP taps into Amazon’s first-party shopping data from over 300 million active customers, offering targeting precision that’s hard to match elsewhere. This means you can effectively reach high-intent shoppers and dramatically boost conversion likelihood by using Amazon’s rich insights on purchase history, browsing behavior, and demographics.
- Off-Amazon Reach: Unlike Sponsored Ads that only appear on Amazon, DSP extends your advertising across the web. It places ads on Amazon-owned sites (like Prime Video, IMDb, Twitch) and premium third-party publishers, allowing you to re-engage shoppers beyond Amazon’s marketplace. This omnichannel reach keeps your brand visible at every stage of the customer journey.
- Advanced Audience Targeting: Amazon DSP lets you build precise audience segments and lookalike audiences using shopping and streaming signals. Targeting options include Amazon’s in-market and lifestyle segments, advertiser-defined audiences (e.g. remarketing lists), and even third-party data segments for broader prospecting. Amazon’s first-party data is gold – brands can find new customers who closely resemble their best buyers, turning insights into new sales opportunities.
- Retargeting High-Intent Shoppers: A key strength of DSP is remarketing. For example, you can target shoppers who viewed your product but didn’t purchase, showing them ads as they browse other sites or apps to bring them back to buy. You can also re-engage past customers – for instance, advertise a complementary product or refill to someone who bought from you before – to drive repeat sales and cross-sells. By strategically retargeting these warm audiences, Amazon DSP helps recover potentially lost sales and increase customer lifetime value.
- Full-Funnel Impact: Amazon DSP isn’t just about awareness; it complements your Sponsored Products and other PPC campaigns to accelerate revenue at every funnel stage. Brands integrating DSP with Sponsored Ads often see improved performance – one analysis found Sponsored Product ads had a 19% higher conversion rate and 3% higher ROAS when run alongside DSP campaigns. By covering upper-funnel awareness (via DSP’s display, video, audio ads) and mid-to-lower funnel intent (via Sponsored Ads), sellers can capture more touchpoints and guide customers from discovery to purchase more effectively.
- Higher ROI and New-to-Brand Growth: When used smartly, DSP can deliver impressive returns. Some advertisers report 40–60% incremental sales lifts after layering DSP into their Amazon advertising strategy. Amazon’s own case studies show dramatic gains as well – for example, a brand leveraging new DSP contextual targeting saw a 20× increase in ROAS and another using first-party signals saw a 40% reduction in cost-per-action, compared to legacy tactics. DSP is also particularly strong at acquiring new-to-brand customers. Studies indicate Amazon’s Streaming TV ads (available via DSP) attract a higher proportion of new-to-brand shoppers than standard ads. By expanding reach and optimizing ads with Amazon’s data, DSP helps brands boost ROI and tap into fresh customer segments.
What is Amazon DSP (Demand-Side Platform)?
Amazon DSP is a programmatic advertising platform that allows brands to automate and centralize media buying across Amazon’s ad inventory and beyond. In simple terms, it’s a tool to purchase display, video, and audio ads programmatically, using Amazon’s audience data to target the right users. Advertisers can access Amazon DSP through two models:
- Self-Service: You get full control to create and manage your DSP campaigns. This option is ideal if you have in-house expertise. (Simply sign up or use an Amazon Ads account to get started.)
- Managed-Service: A consultative service where Amazon’s team (or an agency partner) helps run campaigns for you. The managed service typically requires a minimum spend of $50,000 USD per campaign (though this can vary by country). This higher budget barrier historically meant DSP was used mostly by large brands, but there are Amazon Ads partners and tools today that offer access to DSP with lower spend commitments (sometimes as low as ~$5K via approved resellers).
How Amazon DSP Works: At its core, Amazon DSP uses real-time bidding to place your ads in front of targeted audiences both on Amazon (e.g. Amazon.com, Fire TV, Kindle) and on external websites/apps that are part of Amazon’s ad network or exchanges. Because it’s a DSP, you can define specific audience criteria and the system will bid on ad impressions that match those criteria – all happening in milliseconds as users load webpages or apps. The magic of Amazon DSP is the “signal density” it brings: Amazon knows what millions of customers are browsing and buying, so it can serve ads in a highly targeted way, and then attribute resulting sales with great accuracy (even measuring cross-device and across Amazon’s store). This closed-loop attribution means you can directly see how your DSP ads lead to Amazon conversions, tying ad spend to sales revenue – a marketer’s dream for optimizing campaigns.
Leveraging Audience Data to Drive Sales
One of the biggest differentiators of Amazon DSP is its rich audience data and segmentation capabilities – essentially, turning data into sales. Here’s how you can leverage it:
- Amazon Audiences (In-Market and Lifestyle Segments): Amazon aggregates shoppers into predefined audiences based on their buying and browsing behavior. For example, “In-market for Cameras” or “Health & Fitness Enthusiasts.” Using DSP, you can target these segments to reach users who have shown interest in relevant categories. This first-party audience data is continuously updated from Amazon’s ecommerce and streaming services, giving you an up-to-date pipeline of potential buyers.
- Advertiser (Custom) Audiences: You can also use your own customer data or campaign activity to create audiences. Amazon DSP allows remarketing to people who interacted with your brand. Common tactics include:
- Views Remarketing – targeting shoppers who viewed your product detail pages (or even similar products) but didn’t purchase. For instance, if someone looked at your product on Amazon and left, DSP can show them a reminder ad on a news site or mobile app later, bringing them back to complete the purchase.
- Purchases Remarketing – targeting those who previously bought your product or brand. This is great for encouraging a repeat purchase (e.g. advertising a refill or subscription) or cross-selling complementary items (e.g. “customers who bought X might like Y”). It’s a potent way to increase customer lifetime value by re-engaging past buyers.
- Lookalike Audiences – finding new shoppers who behave similarly to your existing customers. Amazon’s massive dataset can identify users with traits or behaviors like those of your high-value customers, so you can target them with your ads. This helps expand your customer base by turning insights from your sales data into new leads. (Amazon’s first-party data makes these lookalikes particularly accurate at predicting likely buyers.)
- Third-Party Audiences: Beyond Amazon’s own data, DSP also integrates third-party data providers, like Netflix. These can include interest-based and demographic segments (for example, targeting by life events, or by involvement in certain activities not directly tied to Amazon behavior). While Amazon’s native data is the star of the show, these additional layers can further refine your targeting to ensure you’re reaching the right people with the right message.
- Creative Formats and Messaging: Amazon DSP supports multiple ad formats – from standard banner displays to dynamic e-commerce creatives, videos, and even audio ads on Amazon Music/Audible. This creative flexibility means you can tailor how you engage different audiences. For instance, use an impactful video ad to build awareness among a broad in-market segment, versus a personalized display ad showing the exact product someone viewed but didn’t buy. You also have the opportunity to include e-commerce elements in ads (like product images, pricing, star ratings) to drive direct response. By matching the ad format and message to the audience segment and their stage in the journey, you increase the chances of conversion.
- Full-Funnel Measurement: Because Amazon DSP ties into Amazon’s retail ecosystem, you get detailed metrics to gauge performance. You can track not only clicks and impressions, but downstream actions like product detail page views, Add-to-Cart events, and new-to-brand purchases driven by your ads. These insights help in attributing sales to your audience segments – validating which audience data is most valuable – and in optimizing campaigns. Moreover, Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) can be used alongside DSP for even deeper analysis, such as custom attribution models or path-to-purchase analysis, ensuring you truly understand how audience data is converting into revenue.
Amazon DSP vs. Amazon Sponsored Ads: A Quick Comparison
To understand where Amazon DSP fits in your advertising strategy, it helps to compare it to Amazon’s standard Sponsored Ads (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display). Here’s an overview of how DSP differs from (and complements) the pay-per-click ads most sellers are familiar with:
Table: Key differences between Amazon DSP and Sponsored Ads. Each has a role in a balanced Amazon advertising strategy. DSP casts a wider net and nurtures customers over time, while Sponsored Ads capture in-the-moment shoppers and are the bread-and-butter for direct sales on Amazon. Used together, they can create a powerful synergy: for example, DSP can build awareness and drive traffic to your product pages, where Sponsored Ads and strong listings can then close the sale. Conversely, Sponsored Ads can feed data into DSP (like which products or audiences are performing well) to refine your broader targeting.
When Should You Use Amazon DSP?
While Amazon DSP offers potent capabilities, it may not be for everyone. Here are some considerations for when DSP makes sense:
- You Have Growth Goals Beyond Amazon Search: If you’ve maxed out your Amazon PPC performance or want to accelerate growth, DSP opens up new avenues. It’s ideal for brands that want to scale to new audiences or recapture lost opportunities (like cart abandoners) in ways that Sponsored Ads alone cannot.
- Building Brand Awareness is a Priority: For new product launches, brand campaigns, or premium/luxury products, DSP’s rich media formats (video, audio) and extensive reach are invaluable. You can tell your brand story and educate potential customers in places where a simple search ad won’t do the trick. Lifestyle and high-ticket brands especially benefit from DSP’s ability to create a brand impression and later funnel interested shoppers to purchase.
- Retargeting & Loyalty: If you have a decent base of traffic or past customers on Amazon, DSP is a great tool to re-engage those audiences. Rather than letting one-time visitors slip away, you can serve them reminders or special offers off-Amazon to bring them back. Similarly, you can maintain loyalty by re-targeting your own customers with new product lines or subscription deals.
- Diversifying Beyond Amazon’s Marketplace: Sellers looking to reduce reliance on Amazon search (where competition and CPCs keep rising) can use DSP to reach shoppers programmatically elsewhere. This diversification can protect your sales funnel – for example, by capturing customers on third-party sites before competitors do, and guiding them to Amazon or your own site to purchase.
- Sufficient Budget and Resources: It’s important to note that effective DSP campaigns typically require larger budgets and expertise. Amazon’s managed DSP requires ~$50K minimum spend, and even self-service DSP works best when you can invest at least a few thousand dollars a month for a few months to gather data and optimize. If you work with an agency with a seat for Amazon DSP you can set that minimum to be lower. You’ll also need capacity to create compelling creatives (imagery, videos) and to monitor performance. If you’re a smaller seller still optimizing Sponsored Products with limited budget, focus there first. But if you’re an established brand or Amazon seller ready to invest in full-funnel marketing, DSP can be a game-changer for scaling up.
- Access to Expertise or Partners: Because DSP has a learning curve (with myriad targeting options, frequency capping, attribution nuances, etc.), many sellers use agencies or Amazon Ads partners to manage it. Working with a knowledgeable partner (or using Amazon’s managed service) can help avoid wasted spend and ensure campaigns are optimized. If you have access to such expertise – either in-house or outsourced – that’s a green light to leverage DSP and accelerate growth confidently.
- Professionals often consider the DSP after having exhausted traditional PPC. To see how the DSP compares with Amazon PPC you will want to consider the strengths of each of them.
- When you are considering moving on from stale or old DSP options.
Conclusion
Amazon DSP offers a powerful avenue for turning audience data into sales. By tapping into Amazon’s unrivaled customer insights and engaging shoppers across the internet, brands can accelerate their revenue in ways that weren’t possible with Amazon’s on-site ads alone. Whether it’s reeling back a customer who left your product page, or introducing your brand to lookalike audiences who’ve never heard of you, DSP enables you to reach the right customer, at the right place, at the right time – and ultimately, to convert that connection into measurable sales.
That said, success with DSP comes from strategic use. It works best as part of a holistic advertising strategy: use it to fill the funnel with high-quality traffic and nurture shoppers, while your Sponsored Ads and product pages do the work of sealing the deal. Keep an eye on performance metrics (like new-to-brand orders, view-through conversions, and ROAS) and refine your audiences and creatives accordingly. With careful management, Amazon DSP can significantly amplify your advertising ROI and brand presence.
In a world where data-driven marketing is king, Amazon DSP is a vehicle to transform audience data – interests, views, and clicks – into actual sales revenue. As Amazon continues to expand DSP’s capabilities (e.g. new inventory deals with major publishers and enhanced measurement tools), advertisers who embrace this platform stand to gain a competitive edge. If you’re looking to accelerate your growth and unlock the full value of your customer data, Amazon DSP may be the key to driving your next wave of sales on Amazon and beyond.
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