Amazon’s Demand-Side Platform (DSP) has emerged as a powerful engine for accelerating brand growth on and off Amazon. By leveraging Amazon’s vast first-party audience data and programmatic advertising capabilities, brands can turn browsing behaviors and customer insights into tangible sales. Amazon’s ad business underscores DSP’s impact – Amazon Ads revenue jumped 24% year-over-year to $17.7 billion in Q3 2025, driven by the trillions of first-party shopping signals that DSP leverages. In short, Amazon DSP enables extremely precise targeting and full-funnel engagement that can turn audience data into sales at scale.
Key Benefits of Amazon DSP include:
However, Amazon DSP is a premium advertising tool that requires sufficient budget and expertise. There is typically a minimum spend commitment (around $35,000 for a self-service DSP account), or brands can work through Amazon’s managed-service or an accredited DSP partner agency. Managing DSP campaigns involves advanced programmatic skills – from defining custom audience segments and setting frequency caps, to optimizing bids and placements – so many mid-sized and direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands choose to partner with experienced agencies to run DSP. When executed well, the investment in DSP can pay off handsomely in incremental sales and new customers – as the following case studies demonstrate.
Kagome – a century-old Japanese food and beverage company famous for its vegetable juices – provides a striking example of DSP’s impact for a CPG brand. Kagome has sold on Amazon Japan since 2007 and had strong baseline sales, especially via repeat purchases of its popular Yasai Seikatsu 100 juice. By 2023, Kagome wanted to accelerate growth by acquiring more new-to-brand customers, but determining the optimal ad budget wasn’t straightforward given their already high organic sales.
Kagome partnered with Amazon Ads agency Ubun to revamp their strategy using Amazon’s analytics and DSP. First, Ubun leveraged Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to analyze Kagome’s customer metrics (like revenue per user and acquisition cost) and discovered the brand was underspending relative to its growth opportunity. In response, Kagome increased their Amazon ad budget by 130% for 2024 to invest more aggressively in customer acquisition.
Next, they built high-value audience segments (e.g. lapsed past buyers for re-engagement and lookalikes of their best customers for prospecting) and ran DSP campaigns – including video ads on Twitch – to reach new audiences. The DSP campaigns focused on boosting repeat purchases among existing customers and attracting fresh shoppers at the top of the funnel.
The results were dramatic. After a series of DSP-augmented campaigns, Kagome’s total sales increased by 190% year-over-year, marking its highest-ever quarterly revenue. In Q4 2024 alone, sales from new-to-brand customers driven by advertising rose 149% compared to the prior year – a huge leap in customer acquisition. Shoppers who viewed Kagome’s DSP video ads had a 111% higher conversion rate than those not exposed to the ads. By tapping into Amazon’s data and expanding reach with DSP, Kagome unlocked a new level of growth that far exceeded what their legacy marketing efforts had achieved.
Even mid-sized brands have harnessed Amazon DSP to drive remarkable returns. Healthy Pet, a pet supplies company known for ökocat natural cat litter, was experiencing stalled growth on Amazon. They struggled with retaining customers and reaching new ones, leading to “losing out on sales [they] should have been obtaining”. After seeing subpar results from a previous agency’s efforts, Healthy Pet engaged agency Nectar to overhaul their Amazon advertising – with DSP as a core component.
Nectar identified key challenges (low customer retention, limited new customer reach, and inefficient ad spend) and crafted a DSP-centered solution:
The impact of these DSP strategies was substantial. Over a short period, Healthy Pet’s Amazon sales saw a 36% increase in revenue, directly attributed to the DSP campaigns. Conversion rates across their listings climbed by 12%, indicating that the retargeting and awareness efforts brought in more ready-to-buy traffic. Most impressively, the first month of DSP advertising delivered an 8× Return on Ad Spend, and by the second month ROAS hit 10×. This blew past the initial goal of 4× ROAS. Healthy Pet’s experience shows that with skillful DSP execution – especially leveraging retargeting of high-intent shoppers – even a mid-market brand can dramatically improve performance. Once Healthy Pet had a team that truly understood Amazon DSP, they unlocked much higher returns and reignited their growth trajectory.
Not only large brands benefit from DSP – smaller DTC players do as well. Waken Mouthcare, a U.K.-based direct-to-consumer brand offering eco-friendly oral care products, used Amazon DSP to punch above its weight in a competitive category. Waken launched on Amazon UK in 2021 selling sustainable mouthwash and toothpaste, but it faced entrenched household-name competitors in oral care. To drive growth, Waken enlisted agency Unicorn Orange, which devised a full-funnel Amazon advertising strategy with DSP playing a pivotal role.
Unicorn Orange initially focused on mid- and lower-funnel Amazon ads (standard Sponsored Product and Brand campaigns targeting keywords like “toothpaste” and “mouthwash”). This captured some existing demand but wasn’t enough to turbocharge growth. They soon realized Waken needed more brand awareness to scale, so they incorporated Amazon DSP for upper-funnel reach.
From late 2022 into early 2023, Waken ramped up investment in DSP to drive brand awareness among new shoppers, while also running DSP retargeting ads to re-engage anyone who saw Waken’s ads but didn’t purchase. The DSP ads blended contextual targeting (placements on relevant content) with Amazon’s in-market audience segments, allowing Waken to introduce its products to consumers who had never heard of the brand. Meanwhile, anyone who clicked or viewed a Waken ad without buying was automatically retargeted with follow-up DSP ads – keeping the brand in front of interested prospects.
After this initial awareness push, Waken shifted more budget to Sponsored Product and Sponsored Brand ads to convert the interest generated by DSP. They targeted competitor brand names and category searches, ensuring that once shoppers had heard of Waken from the DSP campaigns, they would see Waken’s products prominently when shopping on Amazon. They also used Amazon’s Sponsored Display ads to retarget on Amazon itself, aiming for consistent engagement at every stage.
The full-funnel approach paid off. By March 2023, Waken’s monthly Amazon revenue exceeded its target by 8.5%, with ad revenue up 27% compared to the previous peak. New-to-brand customers grew 24%, and subscription orders more than doubled (2.5× vs. the prior year), with roughly 33% of those subscriptions driven by the DSP campaigns. In short, combining broad awareness from DSP with focused Sponsored Ads helped Waken achieve its highest sales month ever and significantly expand its customer base. This case shows how an up-and-coming brand can use DSP not only to spread awareness but to feed the funnel for efficient conversions – achieving growth that outpaced what either DSP or PPC alone could deliver.
Amazon DSP can also drive sales on a brand’s own website, not just on Amazon’s marketplace. Because DSP ads allow links to external sites, a company can leverage Amazon’s shopper data to send high-intent traffic to its direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce site.
For example, agency Skale Strategy used DSP to retarget a footwear brand’s Amazon visitors, and it drove nearly a 96% increase in online sales on that brand’s DTC site. Likewise, popular shoe brand HEYDUDE ran DSP ads to promote its products on HEYDUDE.com (where it offers Amazon’s Buy with Prime checkout). HEYDUDE achieved an 11.4× ROAS on its site, and about 47% of those DSP-driven conversions were new customers. The brand even saw a halo effect: its combined ROAS across HEYDUDE.com and Amazon rose to 26.7× during the campaign, as the off-Amazon ads also boosted Amazon storefront sales.
These cases highlight how Amazon DSP’s off-Amazon reach can expand a brand’s customer base and revenue beyond Amazon itself. By working with experienced partners (like Skale Strategy or Amazon’s own team), DTC-focused brands can tap Amazon’s advertising network to scale up their direct sales while maintaining control of the customer experience.
In summary, Amazon DSP has proven to be a powerful catalyst for revenue growth when used strategically. With the right approach, brands have achieved everything from triple-digit sales surges on Amazon to significant off-Amazon e-commerce gains by leveraging DSP’s unique capabilities. As Amazon’s advertising platform continues to evolve, incorporating DSP – and executing it with data-driven precision – can give your brand a competitive edge and unlock new levels of scale.
