At unBoxed 2024, Amazon Ads announced a series of innovations across the Amazon Demand-side Platform (Amazon DSP) that drive precise full-funnel audience reach with streamlined campaign planning and optimization. Amazon Ads has a unique, deep understanding of the path customers take from awareness to conversion and is delivering capabilities that all brands can easily use to create and strengthen relationships with their customers, regardless of the size of their business, their products, or which services they sell.
“The digital advertising landscape is rapidly evolving, with streaming TV becoming mainstream and full-funnel, cross-channel reach and measurement taking center stage. We’re inventing ad tech that makes it easier for all advertisers to navigate this evolution with precise reach, deeper insights, and direct measurement,” said Kelly MacLean, Vice President of Amazon DSP. “Amazon DSP can uniquely drive top-to-bottom outcomes on Amazon’s properties, such as the store and Prime Video, as well as across leading streaming apps and premium publishers. We look forward to seeing advertisers leverage the capabilities announced today to fuel their business growth and engage more customers.”
Improved usability and ease of use
To increase advertiser efficiency, Amazon DSP is launching a new user experience with simplified workflows to enable campaign creation in just a few clicks. In early tests, the new consolidated display line-item feature reduced campaign setup time by 75%. This feature brings together desktop, mobile, and app display inventory into a single line item, making it easier to launch and monitor reporting.
When advertisers visit their campaign health overview page, they will now see new insight cards and machine learning recommendations that help them quickly audit their campaign performance and make adjustments. For example, an advertiser may see an insight card that shows their campaign is currently underdelivering; they can review the accompanying recommendation and click to automatically apply that optimization. Amazon DSP will centralize and expand these cards within a new campaign management hub in 2025.
Amazon DSP enhancements also include new frequency cap controls and reporting to simplify frequency management. Advertisers can now use the frequency groups feature to holistically manage their frequency caps across multiple campaigns, channels and devices—such as capping ad frequency at a household level. Advertisers using these frequency cap controls have saved up to 26% of their campaign budgets from spending on duplicate impressions and drove up to 21% incremental reach.
“Amazon DSP’s frequency management and target frequency capabilities exceed those of other DSPs. In particular, the frequency cap insights report is the most thought-through report we have seen among all DSPs,” said Megan Pagliuca, Chief Activation Officer, Omnicom Media Group.
Enhanced interoperability across Amazon ad tech
Amazon Ads is also launching an ads data manager. This easy-to-use interface enables advertisers to securely upload their signals once, and then use them across Amazon DSP and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to engage relevant audiences, measure conversions, and optimize campaigns. It’s integrated with providers like Treasure Data, Salesforce, and Tealium, so advertisers can import their first-party data from wherever they store it. Today advertisers can use ads data manager to connect their first-party data with Amazon DSP audiences, and it will be fully integrated with the Amazon DSP and AMC in 2025.
Through the powerful combination of AMC, Amazon DSP, and Amazon Publisher Cloud, advertisers are now able to create custom audiences tailored to their business goals, then overlay them with signals from Amazon Ads and third-party publishers to increase their efficacy. This direct collaboration creates a new way for advertisers to launch enhanced deals with premium third-party publishers using their custom audiences—enriched with precise signals from the publisher and Amazon Ads to increase relevancy and campaign performance.
Xmars recently activated a campaign for Bedsure with AMC audiences and Amazon Publisher Cloud, which were enhanced with publisher-signals from a leading publisher, resulting in a 2.2X uplift in reach among the brand’s desired audiences. It also had an approximately 50% more efficient cost to reach their desired customers. “Ensuring that media dollars are driving maximum results is a top priority for our clients,” said Tony Wang, Xmars Co-founder. “We’re able to unlock even more value on Amazon DSP using our brand partners’ proprietary data in secure collaboration with Amazon Ads signals plus insights from top broadcasters to create enriched deals. This increases the effectiveness of our campaigns across the funnel and delivers even greater value for advertisers.”
Simplified campaign optimization with AI-driven performance
Amazon Ads also announced enhancements to Performance+, the always-on, automated optimization capability within Amazon DSP. Performance+ uses advertiser-provided signals and predictive AI to automate audience relevancy and campaign optimization for lower-funnel goals, like conversion and customer acquisition. It sets up campaigns, builds custom audiences, and continuously optimizes toward the advertiser’s stated KPIs. Results to date show that Performance+ drive a 51% improvement in customer acquisition costs, on average.
New Performance+ tactics, now in open beta, expand advertiser campaign strategies to include remarketing and retention, in addition to the prospecting tactic that was already available. The entire workflow has been streamlined to as few as four clicks, while still providing flexible optimization controls and transparency. Advertisers simply choose their campaign goal, such as conversion, awareness, or consideration; choose their KPI, such as cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS); and choose their Performance+ tactic: prospecting, remarketing, or retention. Performance+ campaigns continually optimize performance against these specifications to deliver the right results.
Fiverr, a company connecting businesses with freelancers, used the Performance+ prospecting tactic to drive automated performance. Within a month, Fiverr saw a 66% reduction in CPA vs. goal target and a 72% increase in click through rate vs. campaign average benchmarks.