On Prime Day, R+Co offered 30% off their entire catalog. They incorporated this messaging into static ads that led shoppers to their Amazon store and drove high conversion rates.
The Amazon Demand Side Platform, or Amazon DSP for short, helps advertisers programmatically buy video and ad placements.
What is the Amazon Demand Side Platform (DSP)?
When it comes to where the ad budget is being spent, the report also indicated that it was split roughly evenly between desktop and mobile. In Q2, mobile devices accounted for 51% of spend while driving 46% of purchases, and 54% of detail page views. This implies that customers are a bit more likely to browse products on mobile devices, but are likely to complete their transactions on desktop computers.
Boldify then leveraged Amazon DSP as a way to sustain and continue scaling their business growth. They first used Amazon DSP with one of Boldify’s ASINs in late May 2019. They’ve since expanded their retargeting efforts to cover another of the brand’s best-selling ASINs, and also implemented competitor audience retargeting.
Amazon DSP Trends and Data
Beauty brand R+Co launched its product on Amazon to incredible initial success, but after a while sales began to taper off. In order to bring sales back up to their stronger initial numbers, R+Co did things like build out their Amazon Store and improve their presence on both branded and non-branded Amazon SERPs.
– Mike Viskovich, CEO, Boldify
Best examples of Amazon DSP Campaigns
R+Co
The first phases of their effort to overhaul their Amazon presence involved restructuring campaigns, solidifying organic positioning, and scaling profitability by lowering ACoS. All these strategies got them significant increases in sales and profits.
Noble House Home Furnishings, LLC had historically been using Amazon Managed Self Service to handle their ads, but transitioned to Self Service for DSP in March 2019, but with the assistance of a team from Tinuiti. – Amy Feder, Director of Ecommerce & Marketing at Noble House Home Furnishings LLC
In a recent Tinuiti benchmark report, we discovered that as of Q2 2020, Amazon DSP has seen an increase in ad spending for the fifth consecutive quarter. Quarter-over-quarter growth has accelerated from 4% in Q1 to 28% in Q2, with a 29% jump in impressions.
Programmatic advertising is when you automate the process of buying digital ad space. In it, advanced AI uses data to decide what placements you should buy and for how much.
– Jacqueline Bui, Associate, Marketplace Search, Tinuiti
In Amazon’s case, DSP is unique because it allows retailers to purchase ads both on and off the Amazon platform, thereby increasing their reach and engagement with potential buyers.
– Evan Walsh, Sr. Programmatic Analyst, Amazon & Marketplaces at Tinuiti
- 85% increase in detail page views
- 70% increase in units sold
- 48% increase in total sales
- 36% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS)
Highlights for Children, Inc.
The team created retargeting campaigns to target lower-funnel audiences, while using upper-funnel campaigns to drive new customers to product detail pages from In-Market segments, and then followed up using retargeting.
“Evan at Tinuiti understood our goal of both driving traffic in all levels of the sales funnel and spending responsibly with an overall return on ad spend in mind. By building audiences across the consumer journey with Amazon DSP, we’ve achieved incredible results.”
If you don’t know what the Amazon Demand Side Platform is and are looking for ideas on how to best utilize it, don’t worry; we’ve got you covered.
Bolidfy is a haircare brand that illustrates how valuable Amazon DSP can be when used in conjunction with a larger strategy.
“Running upper and lower funnel campaigns (via DSP) worked especially well for NHHF’s product line. As it relates to furniture, typically shoppers will take their time when making a purchase. Amazon DSP upper funnel campaigns (In-market) helped to fuel our lower funnel pool (retargeting). Because the shopping experience isn’t always linear, Amazon DSP not only provided us the opportunity to reach new audiences and bring them into our funnel, but also retarget shoppers once they had shown interest in our catalog.”
- Consistently hit ROAS goals
- 700% increase in YoY sales for main product
“Highlights For Children has been an ideal client from the start. They put their faith in us and allowed us to implement our best practices, while also testing out new ideas and the results have been phenomenal.”
R+Co then launched static ads for mid- to upper-funnel to drive traffic to their Amazon store. This would let customers learn more about the brand and were more of a long-term tactic.
Once COVID hit, Tinuiti took the learnings from the first 4 months of testing and decided which In-Market segments they would continue, and which they would stop. From there, they layered in new targeting options and new products.
At the end of the campaign, Highlights for Children:
Boldify
They took a slow and steady approach to launch DSP Orders. They tested different In-Market segments each month. Highlights for Children and Tinuiti then compared data sets once the testing phase was over.
They were new to Amazon DSP and decided to take a “crawl, walk, run” approach.
– Jay Gaughan, Sr. Director, Marketing at Highlights for Children, Inc.
Together, Noble House and Tinuiti built a strategic DSP media plan that would target lower- and upper-funnel seasonal audiences. The goal was to maximize DSP capabilities in such a way that it captured audience demand during the year’s most popular shopping periods.
First, the continued lower-funnel retargeting to their top products, while bringing in mid- to upper-funnel advertising using In-Market and Lifestyle segments. Both of these segments take advantage of Amazon DSP’s wealth of consumer data. The goal here was to bring users to their product detail pages. Once customers got to the product detail page, they could then be retargeted later on.
Noble House Furnishings started with 50 focus ASINs that needed a strategy. Because DSP is a manual process, Tinuiti opted to group ASINs based on 9 new categories. This allowed Noble House to meet audience size minimum thresholds and successfully retarget. Our access to the Amazon Advertising API allowed us to design a programmatic platform that analyzes shopping and product insights. This technology ultimately provides our clients with an advantage in terms of speed to market, advertising program maturity, and overall efficiency.
“Prior to working with Tinuiti, we were running minimal advertising on our own. When we signed our contract in September, we challenged Tinuiti’s team to help us ramp up our catalog for holiday sales. As a result, Q4 was a tremendous success for us. We not only saw increases in ad volume but also a 60% increase in efficiency. We were able to scale without sacrificing profit. By January we normally return to a slower period in sales, but by the time March and April 2020 came around – we beat our own sales records by a landslide.”
The Amazon Demand Side Platform (DSP) is an important tool if you’re a retailer who wants to re-engage your potential customers. With it, you can increase your brand awareness to customers both inside and outside of Amazon while still keeping your brand message consistent.
Noble House Home Furnishings, LLC
Once all of the lower, mid and upper-funnel tactics were in place, R+Co started applying loyalty and retention tactics to further nurture current customers. One of these tactics included a basket-building opportunity. These loyalty efforts helped them stand out from other mass-market beauty brands on Amazon.
But it was their DSP campaign that made the biggest difference. Before, R+Co only ran passive display ads that were only good for catching customers who were lower in the funnel. They would reverse this in their new strategy and instead target different parts of the funnel using ads both on and off Amazon.
We’ve assembled a list of the best DSP campaigns that we’ve recently run. We hope that you’ll be able to pick up some ideas to improve your own campaigns.
Under Tinuiti’s guidance, Highlights for Children expanded their catalog size across Seller Central and the Ad Console, leveraged Sponsored Products (both Manual and Automatic targeting), Sponsored Brands, and DSP.
The competitor audience retargeting allows Boldify to build audiences off a competitor’s audiences, and target them directly. The result is a tailored program that achieves the growth, efficiency, and reach required to exceed their goals.
“The team at Tinuiti are specialists—they live and breathe Amazon Advertising every day. Since working with them, we have been able to leverage their knowledge and experience to grow our advertising ROI on Amazon.”
Long-standing publication Highlights for Children wanted to scale their advertising efforts and sales opportunities on Amazon. They had previously done minimal advertising but partnered with Tinuiti in late 2019 in order to ramp up their Amazon brand presence. – Anthony Artuso, Specialist, Marketplace Search at Tinuiti
Credit: Highlights
R+Co’s new strategy and tactics generated:
