Amazon DSP is a misunderstood platform. Heck, even the name is confusing!

The Amazon DSP we’re referring to in this episode is the Demand Side Platform. Not to be confused with Amazon’s other DSP - Delivery Service Provider (the independent contractors who deliver your Amazon packages).

Amazon DSP Ads are a way to target shoppers on and off Amazon with highly relevant image and video ads based on Amazon’s behavioral shopping data.

No one has more shopper data than Amazon. But Amazon doesn’t publish that data or allow anyone to use it unless…you advertise using Amazon DSP.

DSP is one of the most powerful advertising platforms I’ve ever encountered. But it’s also commonly misunderstood, and it is advanced. This is not for beginners.

There are a lot of ways to waste money with it. But there are a few ways to accelerate growth.

Here’s a look at what we discuss:

• The top mistakes advertisers make when running DSP ads.
• The top 3 strategies for accelerating growth with Amazon DSP.
• Why running DSP remarketing only and testing too small will likely fail.
• What it means to have a DSP “seat” and why they are so rare.
• How one seller tripled their DSP spend and accelerated growth by 35%, all while lowering their TACoS.
• Understanding DSP attribution and why it’s a hotly debated topic.

‍

Transcript

Chris:

Anytime you have uncertainty in an economic environment, we see people pull back on certain areas. I have seen, I don't know if I've seen as low of an inbound interest in DSP since we've been doing this for six years. To me, it lines up exactly with the economic conditions that are out there. And yet OMG has consistent advertisers that are still running DSP and I would just highly recommend that's got to go into your thought process. When people pull back, it's a great opportunity to put yourself right back in.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today is a very special episode. We have not one but two guests and not just two, any old guests. These are OMG experts. One guest you undoubtedly know, he's been on the show many, many times. My business partner and the co-founder of OMG Commerce, Mr. Chris Brewer. Chris, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Chris:

Good to be back. It's going well. A little warm down here in the heat box, but other than that, it's all good.

Brett:

Yeah, so OMG HQ is in beautiful Springfield, Missouri. We're experiencing some unseasonably mild temperatures. It's still summertime, but it's feeling pretty good. But Chris is down in Florida and is hot. It's always hot and so you kind of know that, you know that moving in. So just the way it goes. But Chris is not the only guest. As I mentioned, there are two guests and the other guests on the show. This is not just his first time on this show, this is his first time on any podcast. But this guy is an Amazon DSP legend. And that is our topic today. We're talking about Amazon DSP, what that means, what you should know about it, how you can utilize it, and all sorts of good stuff around Amazon DSP. And so Austin Chambers, DSP specialist for OMG Commerce is our other guests. Austin, what's up man? How's it going? And thanks for joining the show. Yeah,

Austin:

Good to be here. It's going pretty good. It's definitely a little change of pace for me from being behind the scenes usually. So we'll see.

Brett:

Yeah, you're behind the scenes. You know how to work a spreadsheet. This guy understands line items and orders and all kinds of stuff related to DSP. He can nerd out with the best of them, but understands the tactical side, the strategic side. But yeah, podcasting, this is new for you and it's going to be a lot of fun. So we're going to dive right in. For those that do not know, what is Amazon DSP? So Mr. Expert, why don't you start

Austin:

For a newbie? A DSP is a demand side platform. So it's a platform to do display advertising. Amazon DSP is obviously Amazon's demand side platform. Their DSPs all over the place. Google Ads is a version of something like that, but Amazon's is exclusive to Amazon. Only accessible through Amazon.

Brett:

Yeah, it's kind of interesting. So one, there's a little bit of confusion as to what DSP is because there's another Amazon DSP. So we're talking demand side platform. We're all about advertising and accelerating growth and getting new customers, making sales on Amazon. But do you know what the other DSP stands for? Chris? This may be the DSP. Some people have in mind.

Chris:

Well there is one with Amazon. When you Google it, it's their delivery, which is brilliant naming convention when they started this.

Brett:

I think this does sort of underscore the fact that Amazon kind of operates in these small autonomous teams and sometimes these teams do not talk to each other at all. Right? So yeah, the other DSP is delivery service provider. And actually there was a point in time where I was like, I want to start A DSP, that kind of DSP. If I find I knew this guy that was into logistics, I'm like, Hey, what if we partnered together, we start this business? And he's like, dude, that'd be a terrible business. And then after I looked at the numbers, I'm like, you're correct. So I'm not talking about the delivery service provider, but demand side platform and to people that don't know. And I am glad you laid it out that way. Austin, people may think that DSP is unique to Amazon if that's their only exposure, but it's actually a generic advertising term demand side platform just means it's a platform that advertisers can access and utilize and run ads on. However, the name's a little bit misleading because getting access to Amazon DSP either requires a special seat or massive amounts of ad spend or a connection with an agency like ours. But simply put Amazon DSP as a way to run display ads, video ads on and off Amazon, but utilizing Amazon's shopper data. Now, Austin, from your perspective, why is that a big deal that we can use Amazon's shopper data to build our ad targeting?

Austin:

Well, the main thing is Amazon has hundreds of millions of shoppers, even just in the us and they don't share that first party data with anyone. It's all housed internally. So using Amazon's DSP as a way for us to build custom audiences or Amazon builds audiences to target shoppers based on data signals straight from Amazon, we're not relying on a third party doing market research. We're getting the metrics straight from Amazon.

Brett:

Yeah, love it. And Chris, from your perspective, why is that? Why is that such a big deal to harness Amazon's shopper behavioral data?

Chris:

Well, I mean, for one, if you're a seller, if somebody visits your page and decides to keep shopping, looking at other comparisons, seeing who's got a promo or a deal, having access to that data is huge because you can quickly within milliseconds, I think Austin retarget those people and we can talk about it too. But you also, you don't necessarily have to be an Amazon seller to harness the power of that data. Brett, you can also run ads off platform to that audience, which can also be valuable depending on your brand and what you're looking from a return perspective.

Brett:

And no one has more shopper data than Amazon. Nobody has more shoppers in the US and nobody has that data like Amazon and you are not getting that data any other way other than utilizing it through the Amazon DSP platform and it just works. And so when you take that data from Amazon and then combine that with the ad networks that you have access to through DSP, now you can reach any Amazon shopper at any time and it can be extremely effective. So talk about that just a little bit, Austin, where might our ads show up? So I'm running DSP, I can target people based on what they're in the market for, what they're shopping for, what they viewed on Amazon, I can target them based on that. Where might my ads show up

Austin:

Really all over the place? I'd say typically 80% plus of spend is on site ads. So whether that's product detail pages on Amazon, so whether that's product detail pages on the sidebar and search results, stuff like that. But also Amazon has partnerships with a few dozen different third party, what they're called open exchanges where whether it's the Google or I mean you can show on weather channel Yahoo. So you have access to endless inventory virtually. Yeah,

Brett:

It's almost the entire internet or it is like the whole internet that you would want to be associated with. You can access through Amazon DSP. And yeah, there's actually a backdoor into the Google display network. And we're a big Google agency as well. Chris and I have been doing Google ads since forever. And so what's cool is now you can run ads on the Google Display network through Amazon DSP based on what people are shopping for on Amazon. But to your point, Austin, 80% of the time your ads are showing up on amazon.com search results page. There are some areas on the side and at the bottom where display ads show up even on product detail pages, even on your competitor's product detail pages, you can run Amazon DSP ads, which is brilliant on Amazon's part. They don't care. They don't care if someone buys from you or from your competitor, they just want someone to buy. But it's also pretty awesome from your perspective too. If you can show up on a competitor's page and steal that shopper, why not do it? Which is pretty great. Alright, Austin, so let's get everybody excited about Amazon DSP. Let's talk about a case study. What is one of your favorite Amazon DSP case studies and what's possible with DSP?

Austin:

So my favorite case is an example. It's a client that came to me about two years ago. They were doing good on P P C, doing good on the seller side of things. We've been pretty consistent on DSP averaging 12, 13,000 in ad spend over the course of the 2021 year. But came to me, said, Hey, I want to lead into DSP more. Here are the keys to the house. So I love hearing that,

Brett:

By the way. Yes, we will always, if it's a brand we know and trust, we'll always accept the keys to the house. We'll take very good care of your house. But yes, we very much love to hear that phrase.

Austin:

Yeah, exactly. So I took that and kind of ran with it. We like to ease in. We don't want to blow up the boat overnight. So we will increase 13,000 to 17 to 20 to 25 throughout the course of the 2022 year. I think we averaged right around 30, 35,000 in ad spend per month. So up for 13,000 P P C ad spend remained flat year over year. So it was a difference of less than 1% difference in P P C ad spend. So

Brett:

Basically tripling DSP spend, sponsored spend, so Amazon P P C basically stayed the same,

Austin:

Yeah, basically flat on the P P C side. Take that into 2023. We've increased to about 50,000 a month in DSP ad spend. We've actually seen a decrease on the P P C side by 10% or so. Sales are up 35% versus 2021 when looking at it on a monthly average. So tacos and we use DSP ad spend when figuring that tacos is down from 35 to 40 down to under 30 some months. So we've increased DSP ad spend by three x plus, but also decreased tacos at the same time and increase P P C efficiency.

Brett:

Beautiful, love this so much. So we've gone accelerated to the floor, but in a very controlled, methodical, measured approach, but triple DSP ad spend, but we've been able to reduce sponsored ad spend and now total efficiency, total tacos is better than it's ever been. Go ahead Chris.

Chris:

Yeah, a couple of key learnings here. I get the fortunate place to be able to talk to a lot of potential DSP advertisers and now this case study is a little different because they kind of passed the trust threshold with OMG. They were currently advertising and obviously knew what we could do. But the key factor here with this particular client, and I can't emphasize this anymore to brands, is they gave us the leeway to be able to grow and not just like, Hey, let's test this for two or three months and see how it goes. Because typically when I've seen new brands come in and we used to all actually allow a three month DSP test, and that's usually what it ended up. People limped along spent the bare minimum and then couldn't really tell actually how it was impacting because you looked at this DSP spend relative to their P P C spend, and it was one percentage, two percentage, 3%, you're not going to be able to tell any sales differences from those kinds of numbers. So they stuck with it and they had a team that could focus strategically. And this is a key difference because when we get DSP advertisers coming from other places, I'm not going to name names, but a lot of times it's places that are using somebody else's seat or it's software driven and they don't have people that really understand how to effectively use the audiences and scale. So that's something just to keep in mind.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really interesting. We do talk to people and DSP is a bit of a controversial channel and we'll get into this more later, but there's been a couple of Twitter storms or X storms I guess you should say now, where people are like dog and DSP. And we have talked to a number of brands that have not had a great experience with DSP, but we found exactly what you said, Chris, we're like, okay, well how much did you test? How did you test? What did you do? And they're like, well, we spent 3000 a month. And when we do the math and look at the traffic that generated, we can say that increased the number of shoppers to your page is by two or 3%. It makes sense then that you wouldn't feel that or wouldn't notice that, right? If you're already growing a little two or 3% bump, maybe you see it, maybe you don't.

And so yeah, this is unique where this client trusted us and we'd earn that trust. We've proven it and we're able to scale. I do think, and this is just a quick side note because I know we have agencies listening, amen. This, we have a lot of clients listening to this. You're working with an agency, obviously don't trust someone until they've earned it, but when you want someone to steer the strategy or steer campaigns, don't also keep your hand on the wheel. If you're steering and you've got someone over on the passenger seat trying to jerk the wheel, bad things happen. And so yeah, this is one where we were given a little bit of free rein and we took advantage of it and proved it out. And so what's also interesting about this is I think a lot of brands hit a bit of a ceiling with sponsored ads. I love sponsored product ads, sponsored brand sponsored brand video. I think they're foundational. I think you got to start there and really get those working well first. But sometimes you get a ceiling where you can't really scale more than you are now efficiently. And that's where DSP can come in. So it can create great top of funnel growth, great remarketing growth, great repurchase growth, and help you even improve your tacos, which is amazing.

Austin:

And I'll provide a little bit of context of what Chris said about people coming in, spending two 3% of their ad dollars on DSP. This client was spending in the single digits, five, six, 7%. Their monthly sales can fluctuate that much each month anyways. So cutting out that much spend or adding that much spend, it's hard to see the difference. It's going

Brett:

To look normal. The patterns are going to look the same,

Austin:

The patterns are going to look the same. So we took that from 7% to, I mean a quarter of their ad spend almost plus. So whenever you add that much, when it's that substantial of a percentage of the overall piece, you can tell when it makes a difference.

Brett:

What are some of the top mistakes you see Amazon, DSP advertisers, sellers making with Amazon DSP? We talked about one where you're testing at such a small level, you'll never be able to feel the difference. Now I will say I think you should test in a way that's reasonable, right? Don't just start spending 50 grand a month unless that's an in significant amount to you, which I know some sellers it is. So you want to test smartly, but test in a way that we see the difference. So that's a mistake. What are some other mistakes you see people

Austin:

Make? You already said it. Testing small, testing only. Bottom of funnel is one of the biggest things. People want to come in. They want to spend minimum budgets on only retargeting or only repurchasing, which is a piece of the puzzle, but it's only one piece of the puzzle. It's not where DSP really shines. I like to spend roughly a third on bottom of the funnel tactics. When you're only spending a small percentage of overall ad spend on bottom the funnel, you're not going to see a big difference. The other thing which Chris alluded to is people only wanted to test for a short period of time. And this case study, it was six plus months of scaling before we actually started to see a difference in the monthly averages. So can't speak to exactly why that's the case, but that's what we've seen time and again, so giving it 6, 7, 8 months of scaling and being a significant piece of the pie for it to actually prove itself out.

And then one of the other things, and one of the biggest things for me is judging it strictly off roas DSP. When you're talking mid and upper funnel DSP with awareness campaigns, if you judge them by roas, it's going to be a fail 99% of the time, especially when you consider Amazon's attribution model is last touch or last click. Whenever you're running awareness campaigns, that's going to be their first touch. They might have three or four other ad types they come on contract with along the way. So of course that in market campaign is not going to have a good roas. So typically if you're just judging all of the campaigns based on ROAS or ACOs, you're going to be disappointed.

Brett:

Yeah, I love this so much. And I think the way you should look at this is more the way you might look at YouTube or Facebook where part of this is generating awareness and building a brand and getting people to convert later. Anything that's not bottom of funnel, part of the impact or benefit is the lift you generate or the halo effect generated. One reason why people love sponsored products and they get addicted to it, and actually they get a little bit spoiled with sponsored product ads, is it's immediate gratification. If someone clicks on a sponsored product ad, they're likely very close to making a purchase. They're interested, their comparison shopping, they're ready to pull the trigger. And so that's where you get 10, 15, 20% conversion rates, something like that on some product detail pages. So DSP is not the same if you're running remarketing or retargeting, that can be similar.

But the real beauty, the real magic of DSP is when you can layer on some of the other targeting and over time you're building that top of funnel interest and it is going to create a lift. And this is one of those things where you have to have a little bit of faith, right? We're still measuring. We can still see are we on the right track even in the early days. But the real benefit comes six, seven months later, like you talked about Austin, where, hey, you know what? We're spending more on DSP, but our tacos, our total advertising cost of sales, the total percentage we're spending on ads has gone down because of DSP, which is awesome. So let's talk about some of, what are some of the strategies you recommend? How are we utilizing DSP? You said about a third for bottom of funnels, like third remarketing, repurchase. Where do the other two thirds

Austin:

Go? Yeah, so I like to do thirds for bottom, mid and upper funnel. Typically, that's not a one size fits all, but that's usually pretty close. So when we're talking mid funnel, it's going after people that are already familiar with your competitors. They're in the market for, you're selling product A, your competitor selling product A, so they're looking at your competitors. So we're targeting people that have viewed those competitor products or we're targeting the product pages themselves. So this is combination of contextual targeting and competitive remarketing is what a lot of people call it.

Chris:

Well, maybe too Austin, and forgive me Brett, if this is on your roster of questions later, but I think it may be a good time because, and I'm just remembering things when I talk to people on calls and things come up around the same timeframes we were talking about audiences is how is what OMG can do with our own DSP C different from sponsor brand display, some of the display options that you already have within sponsored? Where is it good? Where is it limited? People often want to understand the difference there,

Austin:

Which I know that one of the later questions is when to consider DSP versus just sponsored display. Brett, do you want to wait to compare the difference?

Brett:

Go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, Chris has totally hijacked the show. He's totally just, he decided I'm no longer a guest, I'm a host. I'm just going to fire away questions like I own the place. No, actually that was fun. And so no, yeah, answer the question. I love that question.

Austin:

Yeah, so one of the main differences between DSP and sponsor display is the way you can customize your targeting. So sponsor display is really good at some things. One of the things I love about it the most, which is not available through DSP is bidding on a C P C basis. So DSP is strictly ccpm, so we're paying for impressions, not strictly for clicks, but with sponsored display, you're a little bit more limited with the type of targeting as far as overlapping and excluding certain audiences. With DSP, we can target a viewer of a specific product. We can exclude people that have already purchased that product or a competitor product or people that have viewed 30 days ago, but not within the past 15 days. With sponsor display, you're kind of at the mercy of what they offer. So last 90 day viewers kind of open-ended, last 265 day purchasers. I can target people that have purchased in the last 30 days if I wanted to. So the customizability with DSP is far and way better with sponsor display. And from what we've seen, the scalability is as well with sponsor display on both our clients and other clients or other brands that I've talked to. Sometimes they hit a pretty low cap on sponsor display spend, which is something that we rarely struggle with on DSP. Yeah, D

Brett:

S P way more customizable, targetable, and you can really scale it, which is amazing. Now Chris, you've mentioned a couple things. You mentioned something a few times that I bet people have heard and they're like, wait, whatcha talking about a seat? We're talking about a chair. What is the seat? So can you explain that? What does it mean to have a DSP seat and why is that a little bit unique right now?

Chris:

Yeah, so I don't remember. It's been I think over five years, Brett. Yeah,

Brett:

Yeah, for sure. It was like 2017.

Chris:

Yeah, we had heard about DSP A guy that actually used to work with us, heard about it, and we started to ask questions of our Amazon team about it. And back then, I don't know what is now, but back then it was like you had to have $30,000 as a brand individually to advertise on DSP. I think it

Brett:

Was like 30 to 50 a month that you had to commit to get a seat for DSP.

Chris:

Yeah. And so back then we didn't have that because we didn't have any advertisers at that point for DSP, but we started to get some in and I don't know, we got our own platform. And so here's the key things that you need to ask for, especially if you're out looking for a Amazon DSP provider is one, find out how experienced the team that's going to be actually overseeing the campaigns and the ads is ask them how much time they kind of spend in the account. Do I get a strategic discussion? Because what you'll fare it out there sometimes is if they are outsourcing that, because some places say, oh, sure, we have our own seat. But what they mean is their seat is their advertising software provider and they're running it through that. And again, all I can tell you is the feedback I've had from some of those, we get a decent amount of leads from those kinds of relationships. We've also ourselves provided seats to software companies, but we do it a little differently to kind of give them that strategy. And so that's basically it. We've even helped agencies kind have a seat through us so that they can get enough to kind of get their own. So we try to be a good industry partner there as well, try to

Brett:

Help the ecosystem where we're friendly to other agencies. We don't keep all of our toys just to ourself. But yeah, I think it's a great question to ask. Do you have your own seat? And then what kind of experience do you have with DSP? Yeah, we've been doing this for five plus years. I think it was 2018 ish. We were one of the fastest growing Amazon D SS P agencies. So myself, our Amazon director, we had to fly out to Amazon to the hq. We had dinner with Jeff Bezos. So all of that was true, except the Jeff Bezos part did not see him, did not meet him. But we did get to go to Amazon hq, which is cool. And so yeah, ask those questions. And so Amazon has kept the barrier pretty high to get an Amazon DSP seat for a while. They were not making it available to anybody. I think that's opened up a little bit. But anyway, so OMG is a little bit unique in that sense. We've had a seat for a long time, very seasoned, very experienced. We had a direct line to the Amazon DSP team, so that's pretty

Chris:

Special. And usually a good question to ask is, well, if we run DSP with you, can we get access to the platform so we can kind of get in there and see what you're doing? And if they say, oh, sure, we'll give you a dashboard access, usually that means they've got some kind of software overlaid because with OMG commerce, all of our accounts are within the same essentially DSP seat. So if we were to give a client access, they would be able to see all the information from all of our clients. So it's just a little bit of extra little tip there to find out, hey, is this really their own seat or are they outsourcing this somewhere

Brett:

Else? So let's go back to strategy Austin. So you were kind of beginning to lay that out. So third remarketing and repurchase, third kind of mid funnel. And you were talking about being able to target people that are shopping for competitive products. You talked about being able to put an ad on a competitor's product detail page. So continue the thought there. Why is that? I think that should be obvious why that's so cool, but why is that special?

Austin:

Yeah, well one is you're hopefully drawing sales away from competitors, which if competitors are selling more or less and you're selling more, it's going to help your organic ranking. You're going to show up for sponsored ads more. So that's kind of the main thing. Whenever we go after anything that's not bottom of funnel, it's stealing a sell away from someone else.

Brett:

And how often would that be if someone gave you this scenario, call it five, 10 years ago where they said, Hey, what if shopper's about to buy your competitor's product and at the last minute you show up and show them your product and show them the price and the reviews and maybe a little message about why it's so awesome, would you want to do that? I would be like, yeah, I want to do that. I'd do that all day long. And I remember back in the early days, and I've been doing this a long time, in the early days of remarketing back when that was kind of a novel idea, people would ask, Hey, can we remarket to our competitors shoppers? So remarketing on Google or Facebook or whatever, you're remarketing your own shoppers or your own site visitors. But people have always wondered, can I remarket to my competitors shoppers?

And the answer pre DSP is, well no, unless your competitor lets you pixel their site. Other than that you can't. But with Amazon DSP, Amazon's like, I don't care. So yeah, sure. Use target shoppers of your competitor, put the ad on the competitor's page. We just want people to purchase. And so if you leverage that and do that, right, it's such a powerful way to grow. And the thing you got to keep in mind is I think there are some cases where if I'm looking at Nike shoes on Amazon and a pair of Adidas sneaks in there, probably still going to buy the Nike. But for a lot of product categories, we're not super brand loyal. So I'm looking at one product, but I see another brand that's maybe comparable and has better reviews, and I like the look of it better. It's possible that I'll buy that instead. Yeah. Okay. So that's competitor targeting A do you have another thought there?

Austin:

Yeah, something I was going to add is with those audiences, if you have one or two top competitors that seem to be performing well, we can make an audience of just those competitive viewers or target just those product pages. If you don't care, we can make an audience of 150 different ACEs in your category and exclude ones that have a price point that's too high or too low. So the way that we can customize those audiences to target exactly who we want to target is pretty endless.

Brett:

And one of the things I like to think about with Amazon, and I think this applies to Google shopping and some of the other marketplaces and stuff, is part of the success here is part advertising, part merchandising, showing up on the digital shelf, and whether that's organic, and that's Amazon brand management and s e O type of stuff, or it's sponsored ads, that's the P P C magic that we like to run. But with Amazon DSP, there's a little bit of merchandising too because it's like we're able to follow someone as they slide down that aisle, right? They're on the aisle looking at toothpaste or they're looking at fitness equipment, and as they slide down the aisle away from our products, looking at a competitor's products, we can pop up and say, Hey, hey, what about me? Did you think about this? And just pretty powerful. And so lots of opportunities there. So I would say that's kind of mid funnel. Maybe it's inching in the top of funnel depending on how you define it. But then what would be kind of some top of funnel strategies?

Austin:

So top of funnel is typically going to be in market audiences, which is people in the market for x, y, Z category. So let's say you'd sell toothpaste and someone might be in the market for oral care products. So maybe they were on Amazon and they went to a product that was in the oral code subcategory. So those are typically the largest audiences, super broad. They do have some more specific ones here and there, but usually you're going to get several million people in an audience like that, sometimes 50 million. So super broad audiences, both in terms of size and in terms of how broad the category can be. They're also lifestyle and demographic audiences that can be layered in. So based on people's purchase habits and shopping habits over their lifetime of being an Amazon shopper, they're obviously really into fitness. They buy a lot of supplements and workout equipment and athletic apparel, and then another, not necessarily past top of funnel, but the very top of the funnel is typically where we use video ads, S t V. So streaming TV is kind of the new big thing. It's one of those things, it's like running TV commercials, it takes a pretty big investment, but this is about as far up the funnel as you can go. It'd be comparable to YouTube top of funnel advertising,

Brett:

And we love what's possible there. With streaming tv, you can show up on Amazon fire TV sticks and Amazon devices and things like that, which there are millions and millions of. Let's talk about those in-market audiences really quickly. So give me a category, Austin, make up a category, not toothpaste. I think that's a little too broad, but something else. Dog food. Dog food. Okay, so let's look at dog food. So basically if we're looking at an in-market audience, let's go a little more specific. Let's go organic dog food, okay, so organic dog food, what does that in-market audience look and how does someone get in that audience and how does someone get kicked out or leave that audience? Just so people can kind of understand who are we targeting if we say, I want an InMarket audience for organic dog food?

Austin:

Yeah. So InMarket for organic pug food virtually means that within, and it's either 28 or 30 days, I believe it's past 28 days of shopping on Amazon's side that within the past 28 days, that person has searched viewed bit in the subcategory for organic dog food. So whether they clicked on a couple products and search results that were or labeled organic dog food, maybe that was part the title of the product, something along their shopping journey within the last 28 days indicates that they are about to purchase or wanting to purchase organic dog

Brett:

Food. So we know they've been on the aisle, right? To think about this like a physical store, someone's been on the organic, someone's been on the dog food aisle, but then they've been down where the organic dog food is, right? They've been living for it, they've been shopping, and maybe they add it to their cart and they put it back on the shelf. We know there's interest there, and so now we can target them. So what are some of the creative ways that sellers and that we are using in market audiences?

Austin:

So typically what I like to do, Amazon has some pretty good overlap reports that show us how certain in-market audiences overlap with our custom audiences. So let's say we sell organic dog food and I have an audience that's made up of people that have viewed our product. Amazon is going to show us the in market and lifestyle audiences that overlap. So we can pick and choose which audiences make the most sense based on how our audience actually fits into those other categories. Once we let something run for a while, we like to pull some audience insights reports that show us what other audiences that we're not targeting interact well with these ads. So maybe people are in the market for organic dog food, but it's also people that live in high-end gun zip codes or people that are over 55 and maybe it's primarily women that click and not men. Over time, we can layer in those audiences to get as specific as possible to get the best possible results.

Brett:

What's really cool here, Austin, is actually you can utilize DSP to get more insights into your shoppers, to get more insights into your buyers and those people that are looking at your product by saying, Hey, what are the related audiences? What's overlapping with my buyer? And yeah, you get to learn some pretty cool things and then that can adjust your targeting. Anything. And Chris, want to get you involved in this as well. Do you hear any misconceptions when you're talking to potential DSP advertisers or are there areas where they're just blown away when they hear what's possible on DSP? What's kind of the perspective from an audience standpoint of the people you talk to?

Chris:

Well, first I must say that I've got an audience of organic dog food lovers behind me that may potentially chime in because there's someone in the house they don't recognize right now.

Brett:

You mean the furry, the furry lovers of organic dog food or maybe lovers of any dog food in general? There

Chris:

You go. Actually, I think he got so excited about Austin's organic dog food example that it just could not contain himself.

Austin:

Makes sense.

Chris:

At any rate, your question was around what was that? Because now I'm often dog

Brett:

Food. Yeah, and it's totally okay that the dogs are, which by the way, I'm going to say something kind of controversial, not super related, but just curious to me, curious what kind of dog food you feed your dogs, Chris. Because I've started to see this trend of vegan dog food, and that's always surprised because I've always thought dogs were meat eaters. Are your dogs meat eaters, Chris? Are you feeding them veggies and stuff?

Chris:

Actually they are loving this week because I cooked some fantastic ribeyes out on the grill the other night. And did you Giving your

Brett:

Dogs ribeyes,

Chris:

Man, given dogs ribeyes. We are also, I'm going to tell you what kind of a couple Jenny and I are. We offered to babysit my daughter's boyfriend's poodle while they are in Central America for two months. And anyway, it's one thing walking a dog like our poo who's about this big, and it's another walking a dog of that size. And let's just say that the plastic bag has to be larger. That's all I'm going to say. And I think this relates to your question, it's because we feed them, we lift those ribeyes had to put 'em up way up on the refrigerator so the dog wouldn't get them. And then we woke up the next morning, realized we never put them in the refrigerator. So they've been getting cut ribeye chunks for the last several days and they're loving it. But we actually do buy the fresh food in the refrigerated section at Walmart, which is the organic stuff that doesn't have all the fillers, and we mix that in with some really high quality food. But you asked, there's the answer.

Brett:

Fascinating. Totally a side note, but super interesting. Hey, I believe there's a market for anything. So sell vegan dog

Chris:

Food increases engagement in your podcast. People love dog stories for sure. This is going to be the only part people maybe I love that podcast, especially the dog food segment. I like the

Brett:

Dog part. And why does Chris give his dogs ribeyes? It's crazy when you leave it out and don't refrigerator. It makes sense. So Chris, what I was talking about though was audiences. So you talk to people when they first reach out to O mg and they're like, Hey, what's possible with DSP? What are either the misconceptions about audience targeting or the things people get really excited about related to audience

Chris:

Targeting? Oh gosh, they just don't know. They don't know. They've heard D SS P, they've heard it can be great. They don't know. They aren't familiar with the different audience types. Again, that's a good vetting out for your agency is how well does your agency understand all the audience types, all the various targeting and where you should actually start. We don't do this with everyone, and I think we also are sensitive to people's interest in getting a good return. Sometimes people just want to see, Hey, what is my return actually going to be? And in those cases, we'll actually recommend, Hey, let's start more bottom of funnel. Let's get you those retargeting audiences and most people that they get that audience right away. Retargeting, there is some confusion sometimes about where their ads are actually going to appear to these audiences on platform, off platform. But we've got a great resource in our strategy document that we can share with folks, and I'd be happy, anybody wants to contact the podcast to send this over to 'em that kind of lists those different audiences out. I think we still have a resource on our website, the DSP roadmap that goes through some of those audiences. I would highly recommend if you are a newbie to DSP and you want to know more, that's a great resource to grab and it's a very easy

Brett:

Read. Yep, got to get that for short. So a couple things to talk about. We talked about some of the traditional things to do like, hey, if you're selling organic dog food, let's target that. If you're selling tooth whitening toothpaste for sensitive teeth, even though I said don't talk about toothpaste, that you target people that are in the market for that, but you can also get creative in addition to that. So use this as an example. Silicone wedding rings. I've seen ads for silicone wedding rings, looking at treadmills or looking at other exercise and fitness equipment. So ways to look at, hey, what else might someone be shopping for that's very related or complimentary to my product? Or they would indicate, Hey, someone's looking for that. They would benefit from having my product as well.

Chris:

Are you doubling up there too? What's that? Oh, that's your, okay. I was looking at that. This is

Brett:

A health. So yeah, talk about this is like a sleep tracker health tracker. It's an aura ring, but same thing if you start to see, hey, this looks like this is a biohacker, this is someone who's buying all kinds of fitness stuff and supplements and crazy things like that. Let's show them an ad for an aura ring. And so you can begin to do things like that too, to find someone who's likely to be a customer of yours.

Austin:

And that's one of the other things about the audience overlap report that we can pull sometimes audiences show up there, show up in that report that it's like, why is someone that's in the market for this clicking on my product at a high rate? It shows you things that you wouldn't have ever thought of,

Brett:

Just shows you, hey, other ways to merchandise and sell this product,

Chris:

And this is a perfect opportunity to do. What I've been able to do on every podcast I've ever been on with you is that I actually was in the market for one of those aura rings, one of those little biohacking devices, but I got it down to two, but I just could not make a decision. I was just frozen because it was just an either aura decision.

Brett:

So I knew it was coming. Listeners, I should have stepped in, I should have spared you. I should have put the kibosh on it. When Chris warms up like that, I'm like, okay, there's a pun, there's a pun. There's a pun impending here. But no, that's actually pretty good either Aura, I get it. W okay, so let's do this. Let's talk about measuring DSP because this is one of the more interesting parts about DSP. I mentioned that sometimes there are people on platforms that talk ill towards D SS P I saw a Twitter storm, a good buddy of mine who's in the space texted me late one night. I was like, dude, do you see what's happening on Twitter right now about Amazon DSP? So I looked and I chimed in and I talked to my buddy and stuff, but a lot of misconceptions about how DSP is measured. So what do we need to know about DSP measurement? Austin,

Austin:

Which one thing that I tell every client that we bring on is I take especially OZ numbers. I take those attribution numbers with a grain of salt because it is view based attribution. One question that we get asked a lot is, okay, I'm selling this product. Someone looked at this product and then we showed a DSP ad and then they purchased or are they going to come back and buy anyways? There's no way to quantify that. I guarantee that some of the people would've come back and bought anyways, which is why we take the numbers with a grain of salt. There's no exact formula for accounting for that, but we do know that there has to be some over attribution just because all the numbers point that there is. So we expect ROAS numbers that are above realistic. If they're lower than what we expect, then something's probably not going quite right.

Chris:

But I think that's to be, there's some amount of that with anything you do. Facebook is going to attribute more, they're going to lean more into Facebook attribute the things that led to conversions there. It's going to lean heavier there. And so I think that's common. I do think that Amazon, because of the nature of what it is, I think you have to go into it with again, that longer view because if you fall in love with your early returns of what you see in the reporting just from a retargeting basis, those are going to change as you move more up funnel. And you've got to see over time how it impacts the bigger picture.

Brett:

And I kind of nerd out about attribution. I like it. So I'm going to give my point of view on this and try not to get too nerdy. I hear people say things like Amazon attribution is wrong, and my take on any attribution is it's only wrong if it's broken, if it's not working the way it was intended to work, that's when it's truly wrong. Otherwise wrong is probably not the right word to use. You just need to understand what is this measuring? Because when you look at Facebook attribution, it's measuring what it's says it's going to measure. If you look at Google Analytics, it's measuring according to a set of standards. One example here, and this may not be a great example for everybody, I'm not an accountant. I've never aspired to be an accountant, but you got cash accounting, you got accrual accounting.

You would never say that cash accounting is wrong and accrual accounting is right. Maybe accrual accounting is preferred for your business model. It's just two different ways of measuring. And so what you got to look at with Amazon DSP is that it's not a click-based conversion only. It's also impression based. And that actually makes sense. Now, you may be like, oh, well I can't handle impression based conversions well, but you're also buying it based on impressions. So that's why Amazon is doing it. So that's not right. That's not good, bad, right, wrong. It just is what it is. So if you know that conversions are coming in view based or click-based, that's going to help shed light on what you were looking at. And that kind of plays into what you said Austin, where yeah, we probably want to overshoot a little bit on ROAS because there may be some view based conversions that are attributed that maybe those people are going to buy anyway if they didn't see the ad. So maybe we need to be a little more conservative in our look at things. Were we going to add something to that, Austin? Yeah,

Austin:

You were talking about attribution models is you have to understand that Amazon uses last touch with an emphasis on clicks,

Brett:

Right? That's another great point.

Austin:

And I think it's across all ad types. Now. I know at one point, I think sponsored brand used a different look back, but I believe across all ad types, it's a 14 day attribution window. So if someone clicks any type of sponsored ad sponsored product brand display and then views a DSP ad, as long as they don't click that DSP ad and they still purchase within the 14 days of the original click, the click gets the attribution. So DSP is not going to get a sale attributed when A P P C click took place within the same attribution window.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. And again, not to get too technical, that can just be too much for a podcast, but there is a little bit of setup. There's a token you have to place to get everything communicated to get DSP communicated with your sponsored product ads and stuff and sponsor display and sponsor brand. But yeah, once everything is communicating, then only one ad is going to get the credit. And so that's a really good call out. If I click on an ad and then I see a D Ss P ad, DS P is not going to get credit and I convert, or if I click on a DSP ad or just view a DSP ad first and that's what gets me interested. And then I search for you and click on a sponsored product ad. That sponsored product ad is going to get the credit for the conversion. So you got to understand what it's measuring to know how it's working.

Austin:

One thing that we haven't talked about yet, which as an agency, we're just getting our feet wet in is A M C, which one of the nice things about A M C, which is Amazon Marketing Cloud, is they have queries that give us different attribution models. So if we want to see based on first touch or last touch or multi-touch, we can see the path to conversion and maybe eight times out of 10 that in-market audience was the first touch attribution, but it's getting almost no credit because they're converting through A DSP retargeting or a sponsored brand.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, it's so good. And there's some areas where Amazon is way ahead of Google as an example, competitor targeting and stuff like that. Can't do that on Google for obvious reasons. But then there are other areas where this comparing attribution models, like that's kind of table stakes in Google, but it's not available everywhere in Amazon, but it is inside of the Amazon marketing cloud. And that's so interesting to use a football analogy, what if someone didn't really understand the game of football and we're all chiefs fans Go, chiefs go Mahomes. What if someone didn't understand football? But they did understand that the person in the end zone with the ball, they're the one that scores, they're the one that gets points. Someone could look at Mahomes and look at the chiefs and say it's the receivers, it's the wide receivers and the running back.

They're the ones that have, they have the ball in the end zone, not that dude with kind of the crazy voice or whatever. Number 15, it's not him, it's that's the guy in the end zone. But we all know it's the quarterback that sets it up. And in some ways that's what DSP does. It's the setup. It's the setup for the actual conversion. But you can only see that if you run DSP long enough and you're measuring lift and you're measuring total sales and you're looking at your tacos, or if you're looking at an A M C report and seeing, hey, you know what D SS P was the first click or the first impression on 20% of my conversions or 30% of my conversions or whatever. So yeah, understanding the role that DSP plays, understanding how Amazon measures it all, that's really important to crafting the right strategy and knowing when to press the gas pedal and when to hit the great brake pedal as you're building your business.

Chris:

So what you're saying, Brett, is this is a great podcast or post is this is how you don't fumble in the attribution game.

Brett:

Yeah, you do not want to fumble. You don't want to get right. That

Chris:

Was a great example. I do think you got to go with that somewhere. Yeah.

Brett:

Sweet. I like it, man.

Austin:

I will say that's one reason why I like the N F L more than Amazon because N F L uses multi-touch attribution. Quarterback gets credit lineman get credit receiver gets credit. Amazon's all last touch.

Brett:

So true. Yeah. Yeah. Guys, even the N F L gets multi-touch attribution basketball, multi-touch attribution. You got assist, you got rebounds, you got points, all that. Anyway, so get with the program. No, just last click. Awesome. So let's talk about what are some other considerations here? I'm just getting, if I'm listening to this and I'm like, okay, I'm a successful Amazon seller, when do I know the time is right for me to start on DSP? And then what should I start with other than reaching out to Austin and talking to Austin? That's a given, but what should I start with and when am I ready?

Austin:

And you kind of alluded to this before, there's a point when you are running P P C ads that you're spending about as much as the platform will lets you, you're efficient, you're making money, but you've plateaued. You can't really push any further. And what I've seen is that is

Brett:

Any incremental dollar you spend is just like, it's just going to Amazon. You're not getting much out of that.

Austin:

And that's the point where DSP comes into play. If your P P C is, you're holding it back because performance is not that good, DSP is not going to come in and magically make everything more efficient. DSP is there whenever you've plateaued and you're ready to grow. I would never recommend it for a brand who is not in a great spot on the P P C side of things. Or if they're in a super big growth stage and we don't know where P P C is going to go, then we don't really know where to start with DSP whenever P P C has so much fluctuation. So I like to look at D SS P as a percentage of overall ad spend. Let's say you're spending $200,000 a month on P P C at the right spot. I'd like to be spending roughly 50,000, 75,000 on the DSP side.

Keep a one to three, one to four ratio. So if you've hit that point and you don't have to be spending 200,000, that's just an example. But if you hit that point where your P P C ads are going, well, they're efficient, but you've plateaued and you want to continue growing, that's where DSP comes into play. We like to start small with bottom of the funnel campaigns just to make sure return is going to be what we hope and expect it to be. But we also come in with a playbook that has a built-in ramp up period. So month one, we might only run minimal spend on retargeting repurchasing, but there's already a plan in place for month two and month three to add mid and upper funnel and to scale budgets. So there's no guesswork whenever month three hits. Like, oh, what campaigns do we want to start? Now we already know what campaigns we're going with, assuming everything to that point is performing, we think it should.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. Really this DSP is a way to accelerate growth. It's not the way to fix fundamental business problems. It's not the way to grow your business when there are other more pressing issues. It's what works when you've got a stable foundation, good product, good reviews, good sponsored product, sponsored display, sponsored brand video, things like that are not sponsored display. Sponsored brand. Sponsored brand video. Then you go hard on DSP. Chris, how do you advise people? People come to you, you're the first one that people talk to, typically, what are you advising people on when they know they're ready for D S

Chris:

P? Yeah, and I would just say these are not hard and fast rules or anything. This is just strictly me having a lot of discussions with Austin and the team and evaluating brands because I could say easily, oh, you need to have at least a $25,000 a month P P C budget so that we could at least have an incremental spend to start with on DSP. This is if you're not coming in and saying, Hey, we want to run top of funnel and we've got this budget set aside and we're good for that. But I think to do having a healthy P P C spend is a good indicator that you could be successful on DSP. I'll let Austin speak to more about that. And we're also going to be ones that are going to say, Hey, we don't think we're going to analyze that because you've got to have enough sessions and visits to your product page. That's a key thing that we can't, even if you wanted to, we couldn't even get advertising. There's certain products, Amazon won't let us advertise on DSP for certain categories, but also if your sessions are running, let's just say roughly below 7,500 a month in a 30 day lookback window, it's probably not going to go anywhere, but I'd want to lean on Austin for any additional things you might say on that topic.

Austin:

Yeah, and I'd say even 7,500 at this point is pretty conservative. Even if that audience does go through, spend is going to be next. 7,500.

Brett:

What? Austin, could you clarify that? 75 or

Austin:

What sessions or with vendor accounts? It's called a glance view. So that's basically how many individual sessions of people visiting the page have occurred over whatever look back window. We do 30 day audiences, so we always look at a 30 day look back window.

Brett:

Awesome. Well guys, we have even exceeded the allotted time that I thought we would spend, but it's been so good. I still love DSP as a marketing junkie as a long time advertising marketing guy. DSP just fires me up, man. It's just unique. It's got unique targeting capabilities, it's got all kinds of data at your disposal. Some really, really cool stuff you can use with DSP. It is advanced. It's not the first thing you should do, but it is something that should be part of your growth strategy if you're a serious Amazon seller serious about growing a brand on Amazon. And so, hey, if you're interested, omg commerce.com, click on the Let's talk button and let's talk about DSP. You'll almost certainly be talking to Chris at some point. And then if everything looks good, you'll probably talk to Austin as well. But gentlemen, any closing thoughts on Amazon DSP or anything marketing related or hey, chiefs related?

Chris:

My closing thoughts would be anytime you have uncertainty in an economic environment, we see people pull back on certain areas. I don't know if I've seen as low of an inbound interest in DSP since we've been doing this for six years. To me, it lines up exactly with the economic conditions that are out there. And yet OMG has consistent advertisers that are still running DSP and I would just highly recommend that's got to go into your thought process. When people pull back. It's a great opportunity to put yourself right back in and

Austin:

A little bit more to add in. Closing thoughts on when to consider DSP. If you think of it like account health seller, account health as personal health, if you go talk to a personal trainer and your diet is trash, they're going to tell you to get your diet right before you start working out. And I like to see you P P C and DSP as diet versus exercise. We could work out all day long on DSP, but if you're not eating right, then it's pointless. Whereas if you get your diet right, you start eating well, get healthy, then you can work out and actually see gains.

Brett:

And even to go next level and to talk about my ring for just a minute, if your diet and exercise are right, but your sleep is garbage, you're going to be sunk too. So you got good sponsored products, you got good DSP, but there's fundamental business issues. We can't fix those either, but love that analogy. Love Amazon, DSP. So check it out omg commerce.com with that. Gentlemen, thank you. This was entertaining. This was fun. We covered a lot of subjects, chiefs, dogs, organic versus vegan versus meat for dogs, plus a lot of marketing. Goodness. So thanks fellas. Awesome. Thank

Chris:

You.

Brett:

Thanks Brett. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. Connects with us on the socials. I'm actually pretty active on LinkedIn right now, so hit me up. Or check us out on Instagram and YouTube. The YouTube channel is growing, so check that out as well. And with that, until next time, thank you.

‍