Recent Updates To Amazon DSP

Today, it appears that Amazon’s Ryan Mayward is well on his way to achieving his five-year goal. Just two years down the line and Amazon’s DSP has already seen unprecedented levels of innovation which have resulted in the introduction of a range of new features and functions for ambitious advertisers.

Display advertising that delivers audience engagement and improved campaign management for marketers to streamline their approaches have been core objectives for Amazon DSP.

In this article, we take a look at what’s changed and how it’s working for advertisers.

Campaign Management

The majority of the recent updates to the Amazon DSP have been rolled out as new and innovative ways to manage advertising campaigns more effectively and efficiently. These updates can save marketers time, and make it even easier to see which campaigns are performing, and which aren’t, with just a single glance.

● Improved Line Item Organisation & Management

The first line item update we’re going to look into is Amazon’s new filtering option. In the campaign manager, under the ‘line item’ tab, advertisers now can organise their line-item view using a variety of filters to generate a customised overview. Line items can be filtered by those delivering impressions, paused items, and ended items, along with a selection of other options. This new feature is also available for orders. Favourite filters can be saved as the default view by using the ‘options’ button.

Availability: This feature is available to Amazon DSP users in all locations.

● Line Item Deletion

Amazon DSP advertisers may have noticed that in the ‘line item actions’ dropdown menu, there are now four choices rather than three. As well as the existing ‘view settings’, ‘copy with creatives’, and ‘copy without creatives’ options, there is now also the option to ‘delete line item’. In the line items view, the Status column shows whether a particular item is delivering impressions or not. For those that aren’t, users can now choose to either filter these items out of the view, as above or delete them altogether.

Ditching poorly-performing line items that you aren’t likely to reincorporate into your marketing strategy in the future can make managing your campaigns much simpler. Plus it provides Amazon DSP advertisers with more control over what line items they see.

Availability: This feature is available to Amazon DSP users in all locations.

● Better Budget Optimisation

While the Amazon DSP has emerged as one of the most effective channels for marketing and has demonstrated an ability to deliver a much-improved return on investment over its competitors, it’s not 100% perfect. That said, it is definitely getting there, especially thanks to the introduction of the brand new budget optimisation feature.

One of the biggest frustrations experienced by Amazon DSP advertisers to date has undoubtedly been that items that have been paused, or which have ended, hold onto any unspent budget, which sits there silently without bringing any sort of value to the campaign as a whole. With the new budget optimisation feature, the AdManager automatically reallocates leftover budget from paused and ended items to action items, ensuring that high performing campaigns don’t run out during long click periods.

Availability: This feature is available to Amazon DSP users in all locations.

For users taking advantage of the budget optimisation service, this new function will have been automatically applied to existing campaigns in April. It will apply to all new items moving forwards.

● More Bid Management Options

The standard’ base supply bid’ button in the Amazon DSP has now been transformed into a dropdown menu, offering a max supply bid option for improved line item budgets pacing. The new inline and bulk editing of max supply bids functionality, allows users to edit the max supply bids for multiple items with just a single click. This action makes it easier to manage campaigns in bulk and giving advertisers more control of their budget.

● Expanded Viewability Metrics

Amazon’s viewability metrics have formed an integral part of campaign performance measurement since the start. However, until now, these metrics have only been offered to Amazon-generated content. The good news is that under the latest rollout of new features, Amazon’s viewability metrics can now be used with third-party video.

Amazon has long enabled the use of third-party providers for content creation, although support for these off-Amazon creative assets has previously been limited.

Availability: This feature is available to Amazon DSP users in all locations.

However, to take advantage of the feature, users will need to resave their existing third party video content. For new third-party content, select ‘third-party video’ from the dropdown box.

Audience Engagement

While the majority of the latest updates to the Amazon DSP have focused on making campaign management easier and more straightforward for advertisers, two updates have been introduced that focus exclusively on audience engagement. Using these new features, users can take measures to attract the right people at the right time.

● Enhanced Ad Visibility

The first of the new audience engagement updates is the enhanced visibility of ads on the Fire TV device specifically. Two updates fall within this category: Inline banners, and sponsored tiles. The first, inline banners, allows marketers to place an inline ad at the bottom of the screen when the associated cover art is displayed on the homepage. Amazon has introduced two budget options for this update: users can buy impressions at cost-per-million pricing, or pay a percentage based on a share of voice.

The second, sponsored tiles, brings together videos and app ASINs through Fire TV. Sponsored tiles can be bought on a cost-per-click basis as a non-guaranteed item.

Availability: This feature is currently only available to Amazon DSP users based in Canada.

It is expected that the function will be rolled out across all locations shortly.

● Audience Builder Welcomes Prime Video

We’ve saved the best ’til last. In a move that has made many advertisers jump for joy, Amazon DSP’s audience builder feature now allows users to generate pools of potential audiences by Prime Video activity. Previously, the audience builder feature had based its audience generation primarily on product views, purchases, and keyword searches – all aspects relating exclusively to Amazon’s retail platform. However, earlier this year Amazon Advertising’s Director of Global Programmatic Advertising Sales, Ed Dinichert, announced plans to listen more closely to brands wanting to leverage the benefits of Amazon’s DSP without selling on the platform.

Dinichert in January said…

We’re often asked about the benefits of using Amazon DSP for brands that don’t sell on Amazon. Advertisers who don’t sell on Amazon, from financial services to telecom, see positive results with Amazon Advertising, and a key to their success is the ability to use Amazon audiences to reach new customers.

Just a few months later and Amazon launched this brand new feature which off-Amazon advertisers can use to create robust pools of audiences for off-Amazon selling.

Perhaps the recent rise in Prime Video memberships is what has driven Amazon to integrate content streamed through Prime Video with its already established audience builder. It has been reported that Q1 subscriptions for Prime Video in 2020 experienced a 28% year-on-year growth as a direct result of an increasing number of people spending time at home during the COVID-19 outbreak.

At the end of April, Amazon reported that total Amazon subscription sales were now generating more than $5.6 billion.

From Amazon’s perspective, it makes sense to focus efforts on Prime Video at a time when school closures, office closures, and stay-at-home orders are causing more people to turn to TV and film. But this update can bring massive benefits for marketers, too. This update to the Amazon DSP has introduced a whole new way for advertisers to target the right people, at the right time, by offering a chance to better understand audience preferences through their streaming content choices and digital actions.

Yet Another Step in the Right Direction

It’s no secret that the Amazon DSP faces fierce competition. It is continually butting up against the advertising duopoly of Google and Facebook, but even experts agree that the duopoly is in jeopardy.

With the regular updates that Amazon has been introducing to its DSP over the past few months especially, it is closing the gap at a very rapid pace.

These new features and functions recently launched for users are expected to simultaneously draw new advertisers to the platform while encouraging existing users to reallocate their marketing budgets. The outcome is spending more on Amazon to truly leverage the power and experience the numerous advantages of its ever-expanding functionality.

The timing is right as competition grows in online paid-advertising.