DSP Best Practices

As Amazon DSP continues to become more prevalent, it is important to know best practices for the platform. There is quite a bit of variance from Sponsored Ads across different components of the tool, which we will dive into within this article.

While ACOS or ROAS are typically the main focus within sponsored ads campaign, there are several other metrics you need to consider within DSP campaigns which include

When you are launching a consideration phase campaign, you will want to focus on these alternative KPIs with the goal of driving traffic, and topline sales, over directly attributed sales

In order to keep a granular structure to optimize your campaigns, you should break out line items within your orders. A few ways you can break down your line items could be

It is important to have a naming structure that allows you to have the deep level of breakdown within your line items.

Base bids is the CPM you offer to gain inventory through the DSP. It is typically recommended to start your bid around $5, then making changes based on delivery rate on a weekly basis.

Max bids are the max CPM you are willing to spend on the DSP. If you leave this unset, this will be set to 2x your base bid. It is recommended to have this about 25% higher than your base bid.

Frequency caps on DSP set the limit that an individual user can see an order or line item within an hour or day. You can set this on a order group, order, or line item level. It is generally recommended to have a order cap around 7x a day and a line item cap around 2x per 2 hours.

The other way to implement frequency caps in through AMC, which allows you to set a total advertising frequency cap to limit the number of advertisements any user can see over any desired period of time.

One of the biggest challenges of DSP is finding the right audiences you should target.

It is generally recommended that you should start with a general in-market or product views audience for your first month. After your first month, you should review an overlap report, which will show you how you perform with users in all Amazon audience segments, even those not being directly targeted. This will allow you to expand your overall segmentation of audiences.

Budgeting and flights is one of the most manual parts of the DSP platform. It is important to move your budget between different orders based on goals and performance. Flights are one great way to do this, in which you can set budgets for individual time periods in the future.

When looking at flights, it is generally recommended to set them on a monthly basis, unless you are in a tentpole month, in which case you can set specific flights for these events. It is then important to monitor spend on a weekly basis to ensure you have flights set up optimally.

Overall DSP is a very automated process, but there are some very important levers such as budgets and frequency caps that are important to understand and monitor. As you get started with DSP, developing systems around optimization is a vital step in the process. The Intentwise team is here to help you, reach out for more insight into how to best optimize DSP.