Amazon DSP: The Complete Guide to the Demand-Side Platform

Amazon DSP is available to brand advertisers, ad agencies, and tool providers. Unlike Sponsored Products, you do not need to sell on Amazon to use DSP. It is designed for reaching audiences both on Amazon and beyond. Available in 15+ marketplaces across North America, South America, Europe, Middle East, and Asia Pacific.

A demand-side platform is software that centralizes and automates media buying from multiple sources through a single interface. Instead of negotiating placements with each publisher manually, a DSP lets you set your audience, budget, and objectives once, and buys the right impressions programmatically in real time.

Two options: self-service (you run your own campaigns), or managed-service (Amazon or a certified partner runs them for you). Self-service works for any budget; you just register an account. Managed-service typically requires a minimum spend of $50,000 USD (may vary by country) and is designed for advertisers who want consultative help or lack programmatic experience.

Yes. Amazon DSP is not restricted to Amazon sellers. Non-endemic advertisers (auto brands, travel, financial services, etc.) use it heavily to reach Amazon’s audiences via first-party targeting. Your ads can appear on Prime Video, IMDb, Twitch, and thousands of premium third-party publishers even if you have zero products listed on Amazon.

Three categories: Amazon Audiences (first-party buying, browsing, and streaming signals, exclusive to Amazon DSP), advertiser audiences (your remarketing lists, hashed customer data, product-relevance lookalikes), and third-party audiences (broader web behaviors from external data providers). Combine them for precise reach.

All the standard programmatic options: real-time bidding (RTB), private marketplaces (PMP), private auction, and programmatic guaranteed for locked-in reach. Amazon DSP also has an “inventory hub” that centralizes all deals across Amazon properties and third-party inventory for easier discovery.

Standard IAB creative sizes, your own custom ads, or Amazon’s e-commerce creative templates (which auto-generate a creative from your product detail page). E-commerce creatives are ideal for direct-response campaigns since they always feature the current product, price, and Prime badge.

Amazon DSP reports both industry-standard metrics (impressions, viewability, reach, frequency) and Amazon-proprietary metrics like detail page view rate (DPVR), add-to-list (ATL), and new-to-brand (NTB) rates. Eligible advertisers can layer in third-party measurement, brand-lift studies, and offline sales lift. For custom, cross-campaign analysis, use Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to query event-level data.

Amazon’s “Ad Relevance” initiative is the platform’s answer to third-party cookie deprecation. Instead of relying on cookies or IDFA, Ad Relevance uses AI-powered contextual and behavioral signals from Amazon’s own first-party data, meaning your campaigns keep working even as browsers phase out third-party tracking. Privacy-centric clean rooms let you match your first-party data with Amazon’s without exposing raw customer records.

Sponsored Products are cost-per-click ads that appear on Amazon search results and product pages. They are conversion-focused, cheap to test ($10/day), and require an Amazon Seller / KDP account. Amazon DSP is a programmatic demand-side platform for display, video, audio, and Streaming TV ads. It is awareness- and consideration-focused, has higher minimum spends for managed service ($50K), and works even if you do not sell on Amazon. Most mature brands use both.