Amazon DSP Retargeting - The First 30 Days

 

Above: Examples of DSP retargeting ads appearing on Amazon devices.

 

“Amazon Advertising PPC ads are about meeting customers within the Amazon marketplace,” says Stefan, “But DSP is more about building brand awareness. Rather than hoping the customer stumbles upon your product on Amazon, DSP retargeting allows you to venture out and meet the customer wherever they happen to be.”

Bobsled has facilitated great DSP results for brands selling in the following categories: 

• Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry
• Pet Supplies
• Grocery
• Beauty

When it comes to DSP, not all products are created equal.

“Since by definition retargeting means advertising to customers or potential customers that have interacted with your brand, products with repeat purchase potential are automatically great candidates for DSP retargeting campaigns,” Stefan says.

 

💡 Pro tip: If your products are a good fit for the ‘Subscribe and Save’ program, they are likely a good fit for DSP retargeting too.

 

How Do I Set Up DSP Retargeting Campaigns?

The broad DSP set-up steps are as follows:

• Create a DSP account
• Define your goals and Key Performance Indicators (Amazon DSP offers a lot of potential KPIs to track)
• Define your order budget
• Create your first order (DSP equivalent to a campaign)
• Create a list of ASINS to be associated with the order
• Create your line items (DSP equivalent to an ad group). Note: this will take some time. You need to: select your flight times, classification, targeting, location and audiences.
• Add creatives - (DSP equivalent to ads for your line items)

 

💡 For more comprehensive set-up steps please download Bobsled’s Amazon DSP Checklist.

 

 

Important Factors To Keep Front Of Mind

“The most important thing to remember is that DSP retargeting is not a set-and-forget type of program,” Stefan explains. “DSP has huge spend potential and optimization is a requirement. Ensure that you have a dedicated DSP person monitoring the campaigns daily to avoid budget blow outs.”

 

 

Above: Examples of DSP ads appearing on websites across the web.

 

What Expectations Should I Have For The First 30 Days?

Here are 4 factors that should inform your Month 1 DSP Retargeting strategy.

1. Maintain a steady daily delivery of ads. Acquiring as much data as possible is the name of the game, so don’t let the delivery of ads dry up.
2. You’re retargeting, so expect a high CTR. In other words, don’t benchmark CTR performance against ads that are striving to reach fresh eyeballs.
3. More traffic to your Amazon listings (various sources). Users could see your DSP ad, pull up a new browser and manually search for your product on Amazon.
4. Expect a positive ROI. It should be higher compared to your Amazon Advertising PPC campaigns but still not lower than 1 RoAS - if this is not the case there’s likely something wrong with your strategy.

 

The First 30 Days with DSP - Bobsled Client Case Study

Bobsled PPC Manager Ross Walker has shared the strategy behind the first month of DSP for a Bobsled client.

“The first two weeks of Bobsled’s DSP engagement for a client in the beauty category was focused on establishing retargeting ads and achieving ROAS goals. This client attains a high volume of traffic and has good brand name recognition, so we were able to quickly get spend and impressions up to the level required for our objectives.”

 

 

Above: Bobsled DSP Beauty Client - Strong Sales Growth Within The First 2 Weeks

 

“In the second half of the first month we expanded our campaigns to include in-market audiences, the goal of which was to increase awareness of the brand with customers who were shopping for competitor products but hadn’t searched for our client’s brand before. Here, the goal is to increase impressions and detail page views, without necessarily expecting a huge bump in sales. We are conquesting for new customers here, so the conversion rate is justifiably lower.”

“This increased our spend considerably (blue line) and our impressions (green bars) while bringing in incremental total product sales (orange line) from customers we haven’t been reaching on Amazon with standard PPC.”

 

 

“Initially, we had to optimize our campaigns to make sure we were bidding appropriately for our ROAS goal which increased total product sales (orange line) and decreased impressions (green bar) while keeping our daily spend (blue line) fairly stable.”

 

 

“Initial results are promising and suggest that we will be able to scale our activities to advertise more of the brand’s catalog on DSP while hitting our ROAS goals.”

 

What DSP Goals Should I Have For Beyond Day 30

Here are 3 things you should be thinking about beyond Month 1.

1. Set up a promotional calendar that allows you to use DSP to support other marketing initiatives such as price cuts, coupons, deals etc.
2. Export DSP reports on a weekly-by-weekly basis and optimize based on findings.
3. Set aside some budget to experiment with other DSP tools beyond retargeting.

 

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