What Sellers Need To Know About Amazon DSP

June 8, 2021

Mindy Fashaw

Mindy Fashaw

Chief Operating Officer at Pacvue

Dave Vermeulen

Director of DSP Advertising for Buy Box Experts

Listen to the podcast

Mindy Fashaw is the Chief Operating Officer at Pacvue, an enterprise platform that helps brands, sellers, and agencies optimize their e-commerce advertising. Clients use Pacvue to programmatically manage their campaigns on Amazon, Walmart, and other marketplaces in order to lower costs, grow share of voice, and increase sales. Before joining Pacvue, Mindy held leadership roles at Amazon and Newell Brands.

Dave Vermeulen is the Director of DSP Advertising for Buy Box Experts. In 2001, Dave founded Seattle Ad Force, Inc., a full-service agency that supports mid-sized and large advertisers with their DSP advertising strategies. His specialties include DSP advertising, programmatic media buying and planning, mobile advertising, and more.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • Mindy Fashaw talks about Amazon DSP and how it fits with other forms of Amazon advertising
  • The benefits of Amazon DSP versus Amazon AMS
  • What types of Amazon sellers should start taking advantage of Amazon DSP?
  • Dave Vermeulen explains what non-endemic DSP means
  • Mindy and Dave’s thoughts on the process of remarketing to customers on Amazon
  • How to effectively budget for Amazon DSP at your company
  • The key features of Pacvue’s Amazon DSP software
  • The difference between using Amazon DSP and self-service DSP
  • Mindy and Dave discuss the future of Amazon DSP

In this episode…

In order for e-commerce sellers to grow and scale on Amazon, it’s essential that they effectively target potential customers and drive them to their product listings. While many sellers have used Amazon sponsored ads for this purpose, it may be time to start incorporating another strategy: Amazon DSP.

Amazon DSP enables brands to programmatically buy display ads on and off Amazon to reach a bigger audience and promote their products. Amazon DSP also helps brands and advertisers improve their organic rankings, remarket to customers, and collect valuable data. So, what do you need to know about Amazon DSP to start boosting your e-commerce business today?

In this week’s episode of the Buy Box Experts podcast, James Thomson is joined by Mindy Fashaw and Dave Vermeulen to discuss what e-commerce sellers need to know about Amazon DSP. Mindy and Dave discuss the differences between Amazon DSP versus sponsored ads, the types of Amazon sellers that should use Amazon DSP, and the benefits of Pacvue’s Amazon DSP software. Stay tuned.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

Buy Box Experts applies decades of e-commerce experience to successfully manage their clients’ marketplace accounts. The Buy Box account managers specialize in combining an understanding of their clients’ business fundamentals and their in-depth expertise in the Amazon Marketplace. 

The team works with marketplace technicians using a system of processes, proprietary software, and extensive channel experience to ensure your Amazon presence captures the opportunity in the marketplace–not only producing greater revenue and profits but also reducing or eliminating your business’ workload. 

Buy Box Experts prides itself on being one of the few agencies with an SMB (small to medium-sized business) division and an Enterprise division. Buy Box does not commingle clients among divisions as each has unique needs and requirements for proper account management. 

Learn more about Buy Box Experts at BuyBoxExperts.com.

Podcast Episode Transcripts:

Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies and errors.

Intro  0:09  

Welcome to the Buy Box Experts Podcast. We bring to light the unique opportunities brands face in today’s e-commerce world.

James Thomson  0:18  

I am James Thomson, one of the hosts of the Buy Box Experts Podcast. I’m a partner with Buy Box Experts and the former business head of the selling on Amazon team at Amazon, as well as the first account manager for the Fulfillment by Amazon program. I’m the co author of a couple of books on Amazon including the recent book, Controlling Your Brand in The Age of Amazon. Today’s episode is brought to you by Buy Box Experts. Buy Box Experts takes ambitious brands and makes them unbeatable. When you hire Buy Box Experts, you receive the strategy optimization and marketing performance to succeed on Amazon. We also support investors with due diligence services. Go to buyboxexperts.com to learn more. 

Before I introduce our guests today, I want to send a big shout out to the team at GETIDA, a global leader in Amazon FBA auditing and reimbursements, GETIDA analyzes your Amazon data, reconciles your FBA inventory and files claims for reimbursements on your behalf. To learn more, check out getida.com. Today I’m pleased to welcome two guests to the podcast. We have Mindy Fashaw and Dave Vermeulen. Mindy is the Chief Operating Officer at Pacvue, the enterprise platform for brands sellers and agencies to manage their e-commerce advertising. Combining the power of holistic performance data with the tools needed to take recommended actions, marketers use Pacvue to programmatically manage their campaigns on Amazon, Walmart and other marketplaces in order to lower costs rowshare voice and increase sales. Mindy previously worked for Amazon and Newell Brands. We’re also joined today by Dave Vermeulen, the director of DSP for Buy Box Experts. In 2001, he founded Seattle Ad Force, a full service agency located in the Seattle area, where for the last 10 years he supported mid and large advertisers with their DSP advertising strategies. In 2019, he joined the egility.co, which later combined with Buy Box Experts, where today he leads the DSP team. Mindy and Dave, welcome. And thank you both for joining us today on the Buy Box Experts Podcast.

Mindy Fashaw  2:24  

Thanks for having us. Thanks, James.

James Thomson  2:26  

So a lot of our listeners may not be familiar with the Amazon DSP. I want to start by asking you, Mindy, would you take a moment to explain what is Amazon DSP? And where does it fit with other forms of Amazon advertising?

Mindy Fashaw  2:40  

Yeah, that’s a great question. So Amazon DSP is a demand side platform. Meaning that it enables advertisers to programmatically display video and audio ads, both on and off Amazon. When I say programmatically, I mean in an automated fashion, right? So you can set specific settings, parameters, etc. And then the system goes in and does that buying for you based on those parameters that you set. And it allows advertisers to programmatically reach audiences, both online audiences, I should say, both on Amazon sites, devices and apps, as well as through publishing partners and third party exchanges. And so those are what we typically call off Amazon placements. So for example, you know, if you’ve ever been, you know, shopping online, and then, you know, put your phone down and came back and decided to read the news, and you open the CNN app, you might be revisited by one of those products that you were just looking at online. And you might think that, you know, maybe it was just a coincidence, or or maybe Big brother was watching. And the reality is big brother Jeff Bezos was watching. And that’s you being served that that ad,

James Thomson  3:53  

We’ll talk more about the types of ads and the types of targeting you can use to serve up those ads. But that’s very helpful. Can you give me a little bit of context? Where does that fit in with traditional Amazon ATMs that we all know so well, at this point? 

Mindy Fashaw  4:08  

Yeah, I think let me just also tell you a few quick key features of Amazon display advertising or DSP, the demand side platform. And the other thing I’ll say is, you know, typically, when you talk about Amazon DSP, you’re typically talking about their self service demand side platform, versus the Amazon managed services within Amazon advertising. So some key features of the Amazon DSP platform are that it’s an audience based targeting tool. So you really get to look at, you know, Amazon’s rich one PII data and really segment a set of users that you might think might be interested in your product or whatever it is that you’re selling. Again, it’s available both on and off. Amazon uses Amazon’s rich set of first party data that allows you to get hyper granular in your marketing And then also, it is available to both advertisers who do and don’t sell products on Amazon, which is what they call endemic versus non endemic. And then where it fits in with Amazon’s other marketing tools, I’ll focus more on the paid search, because that’s more of the marketing, we’ve seen a lot of the, you know, category Merchandising, and things like that switch more to these paid marketing placements. So, you know, I would say it’s an advertising tool that’s complimentary to paid search, it can be used both together. And separately, however, it’s recommended that you start with search, and then you move into display. So taking sort of that latter approach and getting your foundation strong, and then moving up our funnel with display advertising.

James Thomson  5:41  

Thank you, Mindy. Dave, you’ve had the opportunity to work on other DSP platforms prior to working on Amazon DSP. Tell me a little bit about where does Amazon DSP stand relative to some of these other DSP platforms that some of our audience may have participated in?

Dave Vermeulen  5:57  

Absolutely, um, first, Mindy really touched on it just, you know, Amazon, as the largest e-commerce platform that’s out there, and they’re massive amounts of one peak data really gives you an opportunity to reach a unique audience that other DSPs won’t have access to.

James Thomson  6:15  

And I’m going to treat Sorry to interrupt. Can you just clarify for our audience? What do you mean by a one p audience?

Dave Vermeulen  6:20  

What does that mean? So it’s just basically, it’s the data that’s gathered by Amazon. So it’s first person data that they’re collecting by using their own platform. There’s other platforms that are out there, like, you know, everybody knows Facebook, Google, they also have one PII data, but so many other DSPs that are out there in the marketplace right now, really rely on three PII data. And again, I don’t want to go too far, deep into the weeds. But we’re hearing so much in the industry right now about, you know, the personal identifiable information, PII and how they’re moving away from cookies. Yes, how the whole industry is trending away from that, well, any of these platforms that have large amounts of data, one, PII data is really going to benefit them moving forward, because they have an opportunity to more highly target specific users or like Mindy mentioned audiences based on either a center specific users or user behavior.

James Thomson  7:25  

So if you’re Amazon, and you have more search data, you have more purchase data than anybody else. I would think that would naturally give you a leg up in terms of offering targeting capabilities to your advertisers.

Dave Vermeulen  7:39  

Yeah, absolutely. And then a couple of things that, like Mindy mentioned, the fact that there is, you know, Amazon managed services, and then there’s the self serve agency, which would be like Buy Box Experts. There are differences. I know we’re going to touch on these later. But another call out is other DSPs. Anybody can sign up for, you know, any brand and they can use it as a self-serve functionality. But on Amazon specifically, those are really the only two access points into the DSP is either through Amazon managed directly or through a self serve agency like

James Thomson  8:16  

so it’s not democratizing the way that running sponsored product ads might be today on Amazon.

Dave Vermeulen  8:22  

Correct. And then lastly, Amazon has access to all that off Amazon inventory that again, Mindy spoke to who ready, but all these other DSPs they don’t have access to the Amazon inventory. So that’s another really big call out on your ability to you know, unique reach is such a big term in the industry. But that’s where Amazon really has a strong foothold.

James Thomson  8:48  

So this is a question, maybe you can take this one. Know How should a brand’s advertising manager be thinking about Amazon DSP and Amazon ATMs being used separately or being used together? You talked about starting and creating a foundation at the bottom. How do you see the interplay between AMS and DSP today on Amazon? 

Mindy Fashaw  9:10  

Yeah, that’s a great question. So just to kind of orient the audience, you know, search keyword focus, meaning that you bid on keywords and it follows a cost per click model. DSP is impression and audience base, meaning you bid on the price that you’re willing to pay per 1000 impressions cost per mille, it’s referred to, for a specific audience target, I would say DSP offers more flexibility with creative and that you can leverage custom creative more broadly than you can with paid search. However, in terms of, you know, some of the just different benefits of each, I would say, you know, the I really had to think about this and I thought about, you know, for display advertising, think about it as if you might be informing a consumer of a product that they need or want when they didn’t Know that they needed or wanted it right because it might be, you know, so far up in their purchase journey, but but it was maybe your ad that told them that they wanted to buy that product. Whereas with search, the consumer is already, you know, lower in the funnel on their purchase journey. They’re already kind of spearfishing looking for similar products. So they already kind of know what they want or need. And you’re serving them ads when they’re at that stage in the journey. But from a DSP perspective, a display perspective, you know, the consumer might not even know that they needed or wanted that product. So it could truly be incremental for your brand.

James Thomson  10:34  

Sorry, Dave.

Dave Vermeulen  10:36  

Yeah, I just kind of want to dive into this topic a little bit deeper. Because the relationship between the DSP and sponsored ads is so critical, with a brand that has a well built out long term strategy to skinny use the DSP to really engage that, you know, the Amazon flywheel, you hear that term a lot as well. But as you’re using the DSP to reach people, based on their, you know, shopping behaviors on Amazon, but they might not know about your brand, as you’re reaching more and more of these users, again, that unique reach to the net new users that you haven’t been able to get in front of before, but then you drive them on platform. So what you’re actually doing is through the DSP, you’re sending new users onto the platform, and you’re retargeting them with your product retargeting campaigns after that have a high conversion rate, the high conversion rate, the driving traffic from off Amazon onto Amazon, these things all helped with your Amazon algorithm. And it gives you an opportunity to really win bids more IE distantly from and then it boosts your, you know, your, you know, when you’re looking at the amount of traffic that’s coming in and how you’re doing it, it really helps your organic rankings grow. And as your organic rankings grow, then your efforts grow on sponsored ads, that helps the DSP because there’s more traffic, that gives the DSP more of an opportunity to drive more to the sponsored ads, and increases the amount of branded searches on the platform. And as they really engage together, that’s when you really see that you know, the top line sales grow. And the real brand growth really started.

James Thomson  12:26  

So let me ask you this. I’m an Amazon seller today. I use AMS, I know that model. Well, I see how viciously competitive it is. Now you’re telling me this new type of advertising called Amazon DSP, for what types of sellers should they like? Which types of sellers should be paying attention to DSP today, and saying, This is worth me trying out? versus what sellers? May DSP not make a lot of sense yet? Yeah. 

Mindy Fashaw  12:53  

DO you want me to take that one? Please? Yeah. So just kind of, you know, dovetailing off of the previous conversation, I would say, you know, this is not it’s not one versus the other. Right. Think of it as an incremental tool in your tool belt. And what I would say is, you know, it’s for everybody, right? There’s no specific seller, that this makes more sense for what I would say there’s a lot of reasons, you know, why sellers would want to engage with a tool like this. You know, when you talk about the types of sellers that might see more value in it, it could make sense in more hyper competitive categories. You know, as we know, we’ve seen a lot of saturation within paid search. We actually did our q1 CPC webinar yesterday, where, you know, we looked at just CPC trends over time on paid search, because you know, the mantra in the industry is that CPC are going up. And, you know, the reality is, we see a ton of volatility quarter over quarter, but I looked at the lowest CPC since Q1 of 2019. And I found on sponsored products, the lowest CPC was in Q1 of 2019. And it’s increased by I think it was 9% since its lowest point, and then for sponsored brands, the lowest CPC was in q4 of 2019. It’s increased 19% since it’s lower. So just to kind of orient you in how competitive paid search is really getting, you know, the point at which any seller seller vendor, whoever you know, wants to drive more sales, you do have to start to move up that purchase funnel, you know, as things are becoming more competitive in that paid search space.

James Thomson  14:32  

Let me ask you about the funnel though. I can use DSP at the bottom of the funnel. It’s not just a mid or top funnel exercise. So when I think about whether I’m at the bottom of the funnel, I’m going to use AMS or I’m at the bottom of the funnel, I could use DSP. Again, while it may make sense for anybody to want to use DSP as an additive tool to AMS, there are some constraints in place. Dave, you want to talk a little bit about the constraints around For whom does DSP, Amazon DSP today, is it probably not a realistic option?

Dave Vermeulen  15:06  

Again, I’m gonna back up mini AI. And I come from the world of DSP, I think it’s an option for any brand, but we can talk about things that will make them more successful. One call that I want to make is Amazon uses last touch attribution. So if you’re driving inventory, people are engaging in the DSP ad, and they’re going on platform, and then they click on a sponsored ad, only that sponsored ad is going to get credit for that purchase, or the club, you know, however, you know, whatever they’re using to attribute. And then also within the same lines, that someone’s engaging in a DSP ad, but they go on to the branded, you know, they go on platform, they do a branded search on a keyword search. And they clicked on a sponsored ad, the DSP does not get credit for that. So you’re actually, you know, making sure there’s a complete separation. But the reason why I call that out is because the DSP will help grow on platform, even if it’s not being attributed that sale. But to get to your question, the one of the most important things, and James, you and I talk about this all the time, all the time is really that clients need to have their house in order to really capitalize on the DSP. So you want to make sure you have your backend search terms all built out correctly, you want to have your pages optimized, you want your brand store to be highly engaging so that all the efforts that you’re doing on PPC are going to benefit. What’s happening on the sponsor’s side?

Mindy Fashaw  16:48  

Yeah, and if I could just add to that, James, to answer your question a bit more specifically, you know, you’re right, both of these ad products can be used lower funnel and upper funnel, what I would say is, you know, similar from like a retail perspective, where you take a ladder approach of making sure you’ve got strong base content before you layer on marketing dollars, right, right. That’s sort of how we think about the marketing side of things. So you know, the easiest to get started is search. But as you get more mature in your search capabilities and your performance, you know, there is this whole other set of tools within display, right. And between the two, they both serve different parts of the purchase funnel in different places, right, so they can both be lower funnel, but their placement shows up in different places. So really, the way to think about it is that they both work together to help brands accomplish similar goals of both brand awareness and attributed sales.

James Thomson  17:44  

All right, let me let me shift gears here, Dave, Mindy, a moment ago, talked about non endemic DSP. tell our audience a little bit more about what non endemic means and where, or what kinds of company would be using non endemic DSP.

Dave Vermeulen  18:00  

So we’re seeing a lot of growth in the non endemic area right now. And basically, that can be any brand, even if they aren’t selling on, Amazon can still use the Amazon DSP. So you’re actually able to reach people. Again, we call down how you have access to inventory on Amazon that other DSPs don’t. But you’re able to reach audiences on Amazon and drive them specifically to their website. Now, the one, the one big call out is when you’re running non endemic campaigns, you can’t build audiences based on specific ASIN on Amazon, but you can use a data management provider or a data provider that is going to be able to sync up their data specifically with Amazon and create an audience that way create a lookalike audience, and also use those robust audiences that Amazon already has built around in market behavior and lifestyle where people are still in category based off of their search behavior. But you’re able to reach those users and drive them off platform.

James Thomson  19:11  

One of the things I’ve heard about DSP, and I’d love to get your take on this. companies are using external email addresses, they may have customers, and you’d mentioned that you can build lookalike audiences, but it sounds like you can also use those lists to do exclusions. So explain to me how a brand that sells on its own direct to the consumer side, as well as selling on Amazon can use DSP actually to help itself on both fronts.

Dave Vermeulen  19:37  

So everything that you’re targeting on Amazon, whether it’s an audience that you’re looking to reach, or an exclusion audience, it is all based on the building of an audience around data. So we can take a list of emails and actually capture that data and build an audience around that and exclude it or We can also exclude that actual list but at the same time build a lookalike audience. So we’re reaching people that are, you know, have so many data points matched up with that actual audience. But we create a lookalike audience and we can reach them as well. Another very typical use case for building these types of audiences or look alike is through pixel implementation. So if you put a pixel on someone’s thank you page or conversion page, we can exclude that audience from anybody who’s ever purchased on their website, but at the same time, build a lookalike audience based on that, as well as any other page or section within the website.

James Thomson  20:45  

So Mindy, when I first heard about Amazon DSP, my first thought was, I thought Amazon had Terms of Service that said, You can’t remarket to your customers. And yet here we have a platform that Amazon controls that allows you to remarket to your customers, and in fact remarket to your competitors customers remarket to your shoppers who didn’t buy, there’s an awful lot of things you can do here that, in many ways are exactly opposite of what Amazon doesn’t want you to do under normal circumstances. Give me your thoughts on this whole process.

Mindy Fashaw  21:17  

Data anonymity. That’s the key differentiator, right. So, you know, history, if you’re a seller, and you want Amazon to, you know, send you all the customer information so that you can then reach out directly to those consumers, Amazon, Amazon’s not going to do that, right, because they care so much about protecting that one PII data. But if they can anonymize that data and use it to add to their advantage, you know, that’s a no brainer for Amazon.

James Thomson 21:45  

Dave, anything you want to add to that?

Dave Vermeulen  21:47  

You know, that I mean, that is the key differentiator, the one thing that Amazon’s doing, and this is unique, it’s in a beta process right now. But the Amazon Marketing Cloud, they’re actually using a cleanroom. And I am not an expert in SQL, but we do have people who are and you can actually capture all that data in a sequel cleanroom and use that data to build again, like audiences based off of shopping behavior. And now we’re actually able to draw a clear path of purchase, from when somebody engages in the DSP ad to see exactly how they move through the process before making a purchase,

James Thomson 22:29  

Well, give me an example of what you’re talking about.

Dave Vermeulen  22:32  

So an example would be if somebody was to see a DSP. You can see within what recency window that they actually saw an advertisement, you can tell how many times they saw it within that specific recency window. Then what was their next step today? Do a branded search online or unbranded which sponsored product that they engage in? Was it a product targeting through sponsored display? Was it a standard sponsored product ad? Where’s the organic placement? And then when did they ultimately purchase it?

James Thomson  23:11  

That sounds really, really cool to have that level of data, where up to this point, if you’re an advertiser using SMS, nothing like that exists. So let me ask you, this sounds great. I like the sound of this DSP thing. How do I find this? If I’m already spending my ad dollars on other forms of external non Amazon advertising? Where are companies finding the budget to fund this?

Mindy Fashaw  23:35  

Yeah, I think that depends on if they’re already doing it or not, right. So expect most larger enterprise brands are already doing it. And they’re likely funding it through their brand teams working with agencies of record who are their total brand media budgets, right? If you’re more of an SMB, then it’s a bit more nimble. So let’s say you know, you’re not live on Amazon DSP. But you want to become live, typically, we see, you know, clients get started by one, either they’ve withheld some tests and learn funds for the year from a marketing perspective, that’s how we always encourage people to get started testing and learning, right. But we’ve seen a lot of different ways. Typically, it’s, you know, you go first to your brand and trade marketing teams try to get dollars there. You know, you’ve probably already convinced your finance partner to support you in that request. If you don’t get those funds, you might see people going to, you know, maybe their e-commerce team, if their e-commerce team holds budgets, or even an executive sponsor, we’ve seen things like that where executive sponsors hold on to test and learn budgets to fund, you know, different projects throughout the year. So you know, they’re seeing a multitude of different ways that brands are funding these but you know, pitching it as a small kind of test and learning to start out is usually the most successful.

Dave Vermeulen  24:50  

Yeah, and I just want to back that up. We really looked at it as you know, you should find the, you know, a budget within that test and learn area. Now we do see a number of our clients that they take budget away from the sponsored ads, but we do not recommend it. But they’re so excited to try out the DSP or they use it at a smaller level. And they believe that, you know, I’m going to start putting 70% of all of my Amazon budget into the DSP, because it’s doing so great. And we were always like, know that, you know, again, focus on long term growth, it has to be about foundational first on platform and let the DSP support that. And then the other real world situations that we’re seeing. And again, it’s not recommended, because we want our brands to continue to engage in off Amazon awareness campaigns, because it’s gonna help you know that customer jersey on our journey on to Amazon, but we do see them pulling budgets from Google and Facebook, frequently. You know,

Mindy Fashaw  25:55  

James, one of the things I wanted to call out, and I think it’s, you know, when you first see it, you do one of those kind of, you know, shake your head kind of similar to your question you asked earlier about, you know, Amazon doesn’t want to give away customer data, but they’ll sure let you use it to their advantage, but it’s kind of one of these things. But, you know, when Amazon, they switched on DSP to talking about total row as opposed to adding attributed row for three reasons, right. And, you know, as much as you know, as a hardcore data analyst, and you know, ex finance person that just kind of eats at my core, what I will say is that it’s been highly successful in driving adoption. And, you know, if I could just like, tell a quick little personal like, please, please. So, when I went to Newell Brands, you know, Amazon had just launched self service, paid search, and display was still very new, right. So, you know, we were testing and learning on display. And we were running gray code, one of one of the largest brands, so higher ASP, right? And I just remember, like, these reviews, like your mid flight, and you’re looking at these, like, single digit low low rows as numbers relative to your average selling price, and you’re just beating up your Amazon account executive overrode, right. And, you know, just in what’s, what’s the word I’m looking for, like being vocally self critical and Amazon’s language, I was wrong, right? Like I I actually, now that Amazon has switched to this total metric and have seen more brands get on board and adopt DSP, the results that we’re seeing overall, for the business, in terms of total sales are phenomenal. We’ve seen some really great use cases. So I just wanted to kind of poke a little bit of fun at myself being too focused on the data, and not really willing to open my mind and think about like, you really do need to be feeding those new to brand customers, right?

Dave Vermeulen  27:50  

They will also over the last couple of years, Amazon has been providing more and more data than they ever did before, which is so great. So now, when you get that row as versus total row as number, you can actually get a report that says here’s, you know what you were attributing, here’s your featured Ace, and that’s your row as, but now we can actually pull a report that says within your brand, Halo, these are the specific products that are being purchased from your brand, but they are not being featured in your advertising. So as Amazon’s growing, the DSP is growing, and they’re kind of pushing their efforts more to the self-serve side. We’re getting more and more data access, which is really helpful to tell that story to the brand totally.

James Thomson  28:37  

Mindy, your firm Pacvue recently launched software that supports Amazon DSP campaign management, tell me a little bit more about who the software is aimed at. And what does the software allow brands to do?

Mindy Fashaw  28:51  

Yeah, that’s a great question. So, you know, the software is aimed at, you know, those who want to leverage additional automation to drive their display strategy. So, you know, that’s typically agencies, and is from a managed services perspective on behalf of brands, obviously. And then also, you know, maybe like enterprise brands who might have the resources or even, you know, SMB brands who have people that are experienced with buying display media. So, you know, we get this question, every time we launch with a new platform, it’s like, what’s, what’s the Pacvue value add? So, you know, we do have a core set of features that we tend to plug in as we launch new platforms, and it’s, you know, things like, automated budget, pacing and budget control, things like that. But obviously, you know, this is the first self service display platform that we’ve launched with and so some of those features specific to Amazon DSP for Pacvue, our automated campaign management, advanced budget management, programmatic bidding rules, which you also see on the search side of things. Creative builder, with wrap commendations, audience recommendations, a fully customizable dashboard, etc. So lots of great features. One in particular that I’d like to highlight is our tagging feature. So, you know, we leverage tagging both on the search and display side of things. And what that does is it really allows you to categorize your campaigns. So for example, you know, you could create a tag within your display campaigns, for all of your retargeting and all of your competitor conquesting campaigns, then you can actually do that on the search side of things as well. So you can take all of your competitor content questing campaigns, and, and your branded campaigns and then you can really tell a full funnel story for clients that were, you know, looking at your branded side of the house versus, you know, your competitor conquesting activities and really look for, you know, where those, how those were performing, and then where you can drive efficiencies at that level of granularity.

James Thomson  30:57  

is gonna say in full openness to our listeners, no Buy Box Experts does use Pacvue software. And you know, we were big fans of the software. Obviously, as DSP becomes a bigger part of more brands, advertising dollars, the need to be able to scale and do this with more automation and more guidance around how to make better decisions. Software is a good thing. So you know, it’s exciting to see that you’re building out these capabilities. You know, I’m sure the software will continue to get more and more bells and whistles as more data is released by Amazon, but also as customers ask for more information, and more ability to have the software do intelligent things for them.

Mindy Fashaw  31:40  

Yeah. Oh, sorry. If I could just add one more thing, and then I’ll let you dive in. I think what we’re most excited about is this is the first time we believe that brands are really going to be able to see that better together story in one place, right? There’s no other platform out there right now that’s pulling this information in and really showing from both a management and reporting perspective, being able to really control and execute and audit that performance side by side. Sorry, Dave, I

Dave Vermeulen  32:04  

didn’t mean to cut you off. Honestly, that’s basically exactly what I was gonna say. I’ve been using Pacvue for the last couple of years. When we started with the agility, we were using Pacvue as well. And you know, that tagging feature is tremendous being able to basically slice and dice the data. So combining that with the DSP reporting that very visual and vibrant reporting that packs you present, and being able to show the, you know, awareness, first consideration, and then purchase and retention areas of the funnel, and combine the two of them so you can see them side by side and see how well they’re performing together is fantastic. I’m saying that as a fan.

James Thomson  32:51  

So Dave, you mentioned earlier, self service managed service for, Amazon DSP. Talk to me about the big differences between what someone like Amazon would do with managed service DSP versus what a firm like Buy Box Experts would do with self service management, a DSP?

Dave Vermeulen  33:08  

Yes, I think the one that gets brought up most often is kind of the barriers to entry for Amazon managed services, because their DSP through Amazon managed, it’s, you know, it’s expensive, I mean, it’s, you know, $35,000 a month. And they’re, they have some flexibility with that, but then you only get a certain amount of line items. The last I heard it was 15,000 minimum per line item. 

James Thomson  33:37  

So when you go with a straight line, I’m explaining that just everybody understands what that means.

Dave Vermeulen  33:41  

SO in order would be built, you know, something you would build around a product or a product line in the audience that you build out. A line item would be how you’re reaching your audience, whether it’s through the based on inventory sources, whether it’s through mobile app, a mobile on Amazon, or off Amazon, or desktop, on Amazon, off Amazon, and even different functionality or functionalities, it becomes very granular.

James Thomson  34:11  

It is basically a campaign with certain types of, Okay, okay,

Dave Vermeulen  34:15  

if you’re, if you’re going to the search side, you know, on sponsored ads, it’s basically equivalent to campaigns and ad groups that how you would break it out. So I mean, it’s not exactly the same, but it’s a good visual, but it gives you you know, with self serve, there are no minimums on that line item level. So you can do a lot of testing, you could choose one audience and have an exclusion audience. You can change the recency windows, you can, you know, do a lot more testing and identifying, you know, using audience segmentation reports, to see what your true audience is the highest engaging audience on Amazon is, so it gives you a lot more opportunity to you know, feature more products do a lot of testing and optimize to the highest level of performance.

James Thomson  35:06  

Great, fantastic. So, Mindy, I want to wrap up our conversation today. But talking about, you know, where’s DSP going? Where do you think it’s gonna evolve in the next couple years? What changes might Amazon make that you dissipate being good, bad, ugly, for the overall platform? 

Mindy Fashaw  35:24  

Yeah, I mean, for me, what I see is Amazon, in typical fashion, pushing this out more to the Self Service ecosystem, right. So we’ve already seen strong signs that Amazon’s telling us that their intention, you know, and moving it more, you know, into the hands of the industry, just because obviously, with the agencies, we’ve got broader reach. I think also, I see them moving more upper funnel, right. So you know, we’ve talked a lot about the funnel. And, you know, we’ve talked about, you know, these tools work at different stages of the funnel, but I do see them focusing a lot more on their upper funnel products, pushing users more toward, you know, Ott things with broader reach, and potentially even, you know, pushing people to use more of sponsor display for that kind of lower to mid funnel. So really trying to kind of the, the lines are obviously very blurred, and becoming a bit more blurred between, you know, search and display on Amazon. But I really do see them, you know, focusing more on those upper funnels, those broader reach tools, and then pushing this out to the ecosystem.

James Thomson  36:28  

Dave, where do you see DSP going?

Dave Vermeulen  36:31  

Yeah, I just want to piggyback on that and say that Amazon has put a strong focus on driving traffic through the brand storefront as well. And they’re trying to engage like Amazon posts, which are more of their social media type, you know, initiative that they’re putting out there. So I do think that you’ll see the DSP evolve with those really upper funnel executions with Ott with online video, and really try to get people more engaged in a social type of an environment as it moves forward.

James Thomson  37:09  

Fantastic, well, I want to thank you, Mindy, and thank you Dave, for joining us today on the Buy Box Experts Podcast. For those of you interested in learning more about Pacvue’s Amazon DSP software, please visit pacvue.com that’s pacvue.com for those of you interested in learning more about Buy Box Experts, Amazon DSP management services, please visit buyboxexperts.com. Thanks for joining us today and we look forward to having you again on the Buy Box Experts Podcast. Today’s episode is brought to you by GETIDA. GETIDA is a global leader in the Amazon FBA auditing and reimbursements GETIDA analyzes your Amazon data reconciles your FBA inventory and files claims reimbursements on your behalf no obligations no hidden fees just GETIDA recovering your money GETIDA helps you get your money back into your pockets so you can focus on investing in more inventory and growing your business. To learn more, check out getida.com. That’s getida.com.

Outro  38:11  

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