Amazon DSP

Analyzing Your DSP Performance

Amazon DSP puts your products in front of people who were not searching for them. That single difference changes how it should be judged — and judging display on ROAS alone will make a campaign that is doing its job look like one that is failing. Watch the DSP walkthrough Prefer to watch? Sixty-six seconds on reading the conversion funnel. Why ROAS is the wrong first question Sponsored Products meets demand that already exists: someone searches, you appear, they buy, and the sale is credited to the click. DSP mostly creates demand. Someone sees your product, does not buy, and comes back three days later through a search — where a different campaign gets the credit. Read only the last column and you will conclude display does not work. The funnel is how you see the part that does. The conversion funnel The DSP conversion funnel The funnel traces the whole journey: impressions → clicks → detail page views → add to cart → orders, with the volume at each stage. The funnel conversion rates Underneath sit the numbers that actually diagnose a campaign: | Ratio | Answers | |---|---| | DPV → ATC | of the people who looked at the product, how many wanted it? | | ATC → Orders | of the people who wanted it, how many bought? | | Overall CVR | end to end | Alongside them, the headline figures: impressions, clicks, CTR, sales, spend, ACoS and ROAS. Reading the funnel across This is the skill worth learning. Each stage that leaks points at a different fix: | Where it drops | What it means | What to change | |---|---|---| | Impressions → few clicks | the creative is not earning attention | creative, audience | | Clicks → few detail page views | wrong people, or a mismatch between ad and product | targeting | | DPV → few add to carts | they looked and were not convinced | the listing — images, price, reviews | | ATC → few orders | they wanted it and stopped | price, shipping, availability | Notice that two of the four are listing problems, not campaign problems. That is the most common misdiagnosis in display advertising: pausing a campaign that was delivering the right people to a page that could not close them. The campaign table DSP campaigns with their funnel columns Below the funnel, the same logic per campaign. Alongside the familiar Ad Sales, Spend, Impressions, Clicks, ACoS and CPC, DSP carries columns you will not see on the Sponsored Ads screens: | Column | What it counts | |---|---| | DPV | detail page views driven by the ad | | Add to Cart | cart additions driven by the ad | | NTB Purchase Clicks | clicks that ended in a purchase by a shopper new to your brand | | NTB Purchases | purchases by shoppers new to your brand | | CPA | cost per acquisition | | CVR | conversion rate — the Sponsored Ads screens call this CR | New-to-brand is the number that justifies the channel. If DSP is doing the job it exists for, its NTB share should beat what your Sponsored Products campaigns manage. That is the case for running it: it buys customers rather than orders. The other seven DSP screens Each applies the same columns to a different dimension, so you can find where performance is concentrated: | Screen | Groups by | |---|---| | Ad Groups | ad group | | Creatives | individual creative | | Audience | audience segment | | Products | product | | Technology | device | | Geography | location | | Inventory | where the ad ran | Creatives and Audience are the two worth checking first when the funnel shows a problem at the top. A weak click rate is usually one creative or one segment dragging the average, not the campaign as a whole. Where to start Open the funnel, find the stage with the sharpest drop, and fix that stage. Then use the campaign table to see whether the problem is everywhere or concentrated in one or two campaigns. To compare DSP's new-customer performance against your other channels, the AMC Cloud dashboards break new-to-brand down across all of them at once. Related - DSP Campaigns — the campaign layer, line by line. - DSP Ad Groups — where audience, supply and device are actually set. - DSP Creatives — which creative is carrying the campaign. - DSP Products — performance by promoted ASIN. - DSP Technology: Device and Supply Performance — device and supply-source performance. - DSP Geography — where the impressions landed. - DSP Metrics Explained: DPV, Add to Cart, NTB Purchases and CPA — DPV, Add to Cart, NTB Purchases and CPA. - Decide Whether Your Upper-Funnel DSP Is Worth Keeping — the playbook for deciding.

DSP Metrics Explained: DPV, Add to Cart, NTB Purchases and CPA

Every Amazon DSP screen in TrackIQ — Campaigns, Ad Groups, Creatives, Audience, Products, Technology, Geography and Inventory — carries the same column set. Several of those columns exist nowhere else in the product, because DSP is measured differently from Sponsored Ads. Watch the DSP metrics walkthrough Prefer to watch? Fifty-eight seconds on the columns unique to display. The DSP campaigns screen The familiar columns Ad Sales, Spend, Impressions, Clicks, ACoS, ROAS, CTR, CPC and Orders mean exactly what they mean on the Sponsored Ads screens. The DSP campaigns table The DSP-only columns | Column | What it counts | |---|---| | DPV | Detail page views driven by the ad — people who went and looked at the product. | | Add to Cart | Cart additions driven by the ad. | | NTB Purchase Clicks | Clicks that ended in a purchase by a shopper new to your brand. | | NTB Purchases | Purchases by shoppers new to your brand. | | CPA | Cost per acquisition. | | CVR | Conversion rate. The Sponsored Ads screens call the same metric CR. | Why DSP should not be judged on ROAS alone The DSP conversion funnel Sponsored Products meets demand that already exists: someone searches, you appear, they buy. DSP mostly does the opposite — it puts your product in front of people who were not looking for it. That changes what good looks like. A DSP campaign that generates a large number of detail page views and cart adds is working, even when the ROAS on the same row looks poor against a Sponsored Products campaign. The purchase often happens later, through a different route, and gets credited elsewhere. So read the funnel across, not just the last column: 1. Impressions → did it reach people? 2. DPV → did enough of them care to look? 3. Add to Cart → did the listing convince them? 4. NTB Purchases → did it bring in people you did not already have? A campaign that drops off sharply between DPV and Add to Cart has a listing problem, not a targeting problem. One that reaches plenty of people but generates few detail page views has the reverse. NTB is the number that justifies the channel If DSP is doing the job it exists for, its NTB Purchases should be a high proportion of its purchases — higher than your Sponsored Products campaigns manage. That is the case for running it: it buys customers rather than orders. To see that comparison properly, the AMC Cloud dashboards break new-to-brand performance down across every channel at once. The eight DSP screens Each one applies the same columns to a different dimension: | Screen | Groups performance by | |---|---| | Campaigns | campaign | | Ad Groups | ad group | | Creatives | individual creative | | Audience | audience segment | | Products | product | | Technology | device | | Geography | location | | Inventory | where the ad ran | Related - Analyzing Your DSP Performance — the screen these appear on. - What 'New to Brand' Actually Means — NTB, which DSP counts its own way. - Glossary: ACoS, TACoS, ROAS, NTB and Every Other Column — every other column.

DSP Campaigns

The DSP Campaigns screen does not look like the Sponsored Ads screens, and that is deliberate. It opens with a Conversion Funnel rather than a row of tiles, because display advertising is judged on the journey rather than on the click. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? Sixty-four seconds on the funnel, and reading the stage rates. The funnel The DSP conversion funnel Three stages, with volume at each: Detail Page Views → Add To Cart → Orders Beneath it, the totals — Impressions, Clicks, CTR, Sales, Spend, ACoS and ROAS — and three conversion rates that are the point of the whole screen: | Rate | What it measures | |---|---| | DPV → ATC | of people who viewed the page, how many added to cart | | ATC → Orders | of those, how many bought | | Overall CVR | the whole journey, end to end | Why the stage rates matter more than the totals A single ACoS figure tells you display was expensive. The stage rates tell you where it went wrong, and the two failures need opposite responses. | Pattern | Diagnosis | |---|---| | DPV high, DPV→ATC low | you are buying the right volume and the wrong audience, or the detail page is not converting them | | ATC high, ATC→Orders low | interest is real; price, availability or reviews are losing the sale | | Both healthy, ACoS still poor | the targeting works — you are paying too much for it | That last row is the one people misread. Good conversion with bad economics is a bidding problem, and cutting the campaign throws away targeting that was doing its job. Why DSP should not be judged on ROAS alone Display works higher in the funnel than Sponsored Products. It reaches people who were not searching for you, which means: Attribution is 14 days, not 7. A DSP campaign judged after three days has eleven days left to be credited. Some of its value lands elsewhere. Someone who sees a display ad and later searches your brand converts through Sponsored Brands. DSP created the demand; another channel is credited with the sale. That is why detail page views is a headline number here and not on the Sponsored Ads screens — it captures interest that has not yet become a purchase, which is most of what display does. To see the effect properly you need AMC: Path to Purchase shows which sequences convert, and Brand Keywords shows upper-funnel spend driving branded search. See Understanding AMC Cloud. The table Below the funnel, one row per DSP campaign — campaign name, AGS, ad sales, spend, impressions, clicks, ACoS and CPC. Standard Search, Filters, Manage Columns and Export. Two behaviours differ from Sponsored Ads: DSP uses ACTIVE and INACTIVE, not enabled and paused, and the default view shows ACTIVE only. DSP is a separate connection. Having advertising connected does not give you DSP — see How to Connect Your Amazon Accounts. An empty DSP section usually means it was never connected rather than that nothing ran. Reading it week by week Daily display data is noisy, and the funnel compounds that — a small number of orders makes ATC→Orders swing wildly. Use Week for anything longer than a fortnight. And do not compare DSP ACoS against Sponsored Products ACoS. Different windows, different job. See Why SP, SB and SD Numbers Don't Add Up. Related - DSP Metrics Explained: DPV, Add to Cart, NTB Purchases, CPA — the columns unique to display. - DSP Technology: Device and Supply Performance — where those impressions landed. - Analyzing Your DSP Performance — the section overview.

DSP Technology: Device and Supply Performance

Amazon DSP → Technology breaks your display performance down by the device the ad appeared on. It is the screen that explains why a campaign with respectable totals can still be spending badly. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? Seventy-three seconds on the seven device types, and why to change the metric. The screen Device Performance over time Device Performance opens with a line per device over time, and a Metric selector in the top right — so you can plot impressions, or switch it to spend, sales or a rate. The devices reported are: ConnectedDevice · PC · Phone · SetTopBox · Tablet · TV · Unknown Below the chart, the same breakdown as a table: Device, Ad Sales, Spend, Impressions, Clicks, ACoS, ROAS, CTR. Change the metric before drawing conclusions The chart defaults to Impressions, and impressions are the least useful device metric. Volume tells you where inventory is cheap and plentiful, not where it works. Switch the Metric selector to spend, then to sales, then to ACoS — three views of the same period, and the gap between the first and the last is the finding. The pattern worth looking for: a device with a large share of impressions and a small share of sales. That is where your budget is going without doing much, and it is invisible in any total. Reading the devices Each behaves differently enough that comparing them on one number misleads. TV and SetTopBox are the clearest case. There is no click in the usual sense, so CTR is close to meaningless and ACoS looks dreadful. Their contribution shows up as detail page views and later branded search — which is why the funnel on DSP Campaigns and the AMC path reports matter more here than efficiency. Phone typically carries the volume and converts less well than desktop. Normal, not a fault. PC often shows the best conversion, on smaller volume. Unknown is a real bucket, not an error. If it is large, treat conclusions about the named devices with care — a big Unknown share means the split you are reading is partial. What to do with it Find the mismatch. Large impression share, small sales share. That is your first candidate for a bid or budget change. Do not cut upper-funnel devices on efficiency alone. TV and connected devices will always look poor on ACoS. Cutting them on that basis removes the reach that made the rest work — and you will see the loss weeks later in branded search, where it is very hard to attribute back. Check it after any creative change. A creative that works on desktop may not on phone, and the device split is where that shows first. Watch Unknown over time. A rising Unknown share is a data quality signal worth noticing. Where this fits DSP reporting is one dataset with several lenses — campaign, ad group, creative, audience, geography, technology and inventory — and every lens carries the same metric set on a 14-day attribution window. So Technology answers “on what kind of screen?”, while Inventory answers “through which supply source?” Those are different questions and are worth reading together: a device that underperforms everywhere is a device problem, one that underperforms on a single supply source is a placement problem. Two cautions Nothing here is actionable inside TrackIQ. DSP reporting is read-only in the product — device and budget adjustments happen in Amazon's DSP console. This is the screen that tells you what to change, not where you change it. DSP is a separate connection. An empty Technology screen usually means DSP was never connected. See How to Connect Your Amazon Accounts. Related - DSP Campaigns — the funnel and the campaign table. - DSP Metrics Explained — DPV, add to cart, NTB purchases and CPA. - DSP Geography — the same data, split by country.

DSP Creatives

The Creatives screen answers a question the campaign view cannot: which creative is actually working, across everywhere it runs? The same creative usually runs in several campaigns, so its performance is split across them. This screen puts it back together. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? Sixty-six seconds on reading the stack, and the bottom-funnel creative. Creatives by Campaign Each bar is one creative, segmented by the campaigns it runs in A horizontal bar per creative, stacked by campaign. Each segment is one campaign's contribution to that creative's total. Two controls sit above it: Creatives — how many to show, so you can look at the top 10 or widen it. Metric — what the bars measure. It opens on Sales. The legend names the campaign types contributing — Online Video, Remarketing: DSP, Retargeting: DSP, Warm Prospects: DSP. Why the stacking is the point A creative's headline total tells you it performed. The stack tells you where. Two creatives with similar totals can be completely different assets: one carried by a single remarketing campaign, another performing evenly across prospecting and retargeting. The second is a genuinely strong creative; the first is a strong audience with a creative attached. Look for these three shapes: | Shape | What it means | |---|---| | One dominant segment | the campaign is doing the work, not the creative | | Even across several | a genuinely versatile creative — worth more of your budget | | Strong in retargeting, weak in prospecting | it works on people who know you, not on strangers | That last one is the most common and the most useful. A creative that only performs on warm audiences is not a bad creative — it is a bottom-funnel creative, and using it for prospecting wastes it. Change the metric Sales is a reasonable default but it rewards whichever creative ran in the campaigns with the most budget. Switch to a rate — or to spend, then back — and the picture changes. A creative with modest sales and excellent efficiency is being under-used; one with high sales and poor efficiency is being carried by volume. The Creatives count is worth widening once, too. The top 10 are the ones you already know about; the interesting cases are often just below. Reading it fairly Creatives do not run for equal time. A new asset has had fewer days to accumulate. Check the date range against when things launched before concluding one is weak. Video and display are not comparable. An Online Video creative and a static display banner do different jobs, and comparing their sales directly is a category error. Compare within a format. DSP attribution is 14 days. Recent creatives are under-credited. See Why SP, SB and SD Numbers Don't Add Up. What to do with it Give the versatile creatives more room. The ones performing across campaign types are your safest place to add budget. Stop asking bottom-funnel creatives to prospect. If a creative only works in remarketing, keep it there and make something else for the top. Retire the ones carried entirely by one campaign — or test them elsewhere before deciding they were good. Changes happen in Amazon's DSP console. TrackIQ's DSP reporting is read-only; this screen tells you what to change rather than where to change it. Related - DSP Campaigns — the funnel and the campaign table. - DSP Products — the same stacked-by-campaign treatment, per ASIN. - DSP Metrics Explained — the columns unique to display.

DSP Products

Amazon DSP → Products shows which of your ASINs display advertising is actually selling — and which campaigns are doing the selling for each one. It uses the same stacked treatment as Creatives, applied to products instead. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? Sixty seconds on which part of the funnel is selling each product. Products by Campaign Each bar is one ASIN, segmented by the campaigns driving it A horizontal bar per product, stacked by campaign, with two controls: Metric — what the bars measure, opening on Sales. Products — how many rows to show. The legend names the contributing campaign types: Remarketing: DSP, Online Video, Retargeting: DSP, Prime Video, Warm Prospects: DSP. The table below carries the display-specific columns, including NTB Purchases — see DSP Metrics Explained. What the stack tells you For each product, the segments show which part of the funnel is selling it. | Shape | Reading | |---|---| | Mostly Remarketing / Retargeting | you are re-selling to people who already found this product | | Mostly Online Video / Prime Video | display is genuinely introducing it | | Spread across both | a product that works at every stage — rare and valuable | That first row is worth being honest about. Remarketing sales are the ones display can least claim credit for, because those customers had already reached your page. A product whose DSP sales are almost entirely remarketing may have been bought anyway. The second row is where display earns its budget, and it is exactly what NTB Purchases on the table confirms. Read it with NTB, not with ROAS This is the screen where judging on ROAS alone does the most damage. Prospecting campaigns look worse than remarketing on every efficiency measure, always — they are reaching people who have never heard of you. Cutting them because remarketing looks better means cutting the thing that creates the remarketing audience. Pair this screen with: - NTB Purchases in the table here. - NTB ASINs in AMC — which products bring in new customers. - What 'New to Brand' Actually Means — the definition and why it changes budget decisions. The gateway product question Cross-read this against your AMC NTB data and one question becomes answerable: which products are worth introducing people to? A product with a high new-to-brand share is your front door. Display is the channel best suited to putting it in front of strangers, and this screen shows whether that is happening or whether display is just re-selling to your existing customers. Reading it fairly Products do not have equal budgets. A product in more campaigns will show a bigger total regardless of merit. Switch the Metric away from Sales to see efficiency. 14-day attribution. Recent days under-report. See Why SP, SB and SD Numbers Don't Add Up. Check stock. The same warning as everywhere: a product display is successfully introducing, that is about to run out, is the worst combination in the account. See Product Ads: ASIN-Level Ad Performance. Related - DSP Creatives — the same treatment, per creative. - DSP Campaigns — the funnel these products sit inside. - NTB ASINs Analysis — the AMC view of gateway products.

DSP Geography

Amazon DSP → Geography maps your display performance by country, so you can see where impressions are landing and whether that matches where you sell. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? Fifty-seven seconds on changing the metric, and impressions where you do not ship. Country Performance The world map, shaded by the selected metric A world map shaded by country, with a Metric selector in the top right and a scale legend showing the range. Below it, the same data as a table: Country, Ad Sales, Spend, Impressions, Clicks, ACoS, ROAS, CTR, with the usual Search, Filters, Manage Columns and Export. Change the metric — the map defaults to Impressions Impressions is the least useful geographic measure, and it is what the map opens on. A map shaded by impressions shows you where inventory was cheap and plentiful. It tells you almost nothing about whether those impressions did anything. Switch to spend, then to sales, then to a rate. The finding is the country that is dark on the first map and pale on the second. The pattern to look for Impressions concentrated somewhere you do not ship. Display inventory is bought programmatically and can reach well beyond your selling geography. A country with meaningful impressions and effectively no sales is either: - A delivery problem — you are paying to reach people who cannot buy from you, and the fix is geographic targeting in Amazon's DSP console. - Or expected — expats, travellers, and cross-border shoppers exist, and a small tail is normal. The distinction is scale. A thin spread across many countries is normal. A single non-selling country taking a visible share of spend is worth acting on. Reading it honestly A big country is not the same as a good country. The United States will dominate almost any map on volume. Compare countries on rates, not totals, or you will only ever conclude that your largest market is your largest market. Small countries are noisy. A country with a handful of orders can show a spectacular or terrible ROAS, and neither means anything. Check the click and order counts before believing a rate — the same volume-threshold discipline the rule engine uses. Unallocated rows are excluded from the geography breakdown, so the country totals may not reconcile exactly with your campaign totals. That is by design rather than a fault. What it is good for Sense-checking targeting. The quickest way to notice that a campaign is reaching further than intended. Marketplace alignment. If you sell in several marketplaces, this is where you see whether display spend matches where your listings actually are. Nothing is actionable here. DSP reporting in TrackIQ is read-only — geographic targeting changes happen in Amazon's DSP console. This screen tells you what to change. Related - DSP Technology — the same data split by device instead of country. - DSP Campaigns — the funnel and campaign table. - Marketplaces and Currency — where your listings actually are.

DSP Ad Groups

DSP ad groups are where a campaign's strategy becomes concrete. A single remarketing campaign typically splits into several ad groups — one per supply source and device combination — and this screen shows which of those splits is actually working. Watch the walkthrough Prefer to watch? Sixty-seven seconds on reading the names, and the comparisons they make possible. Ad Groups by Campaign Each bar is one ad group, segmented by campaign The same stacked treatment used on Creatives and Products: a bar per ad group, segmented by the campaigns contributing to it, with Ad Groups (how many to show) and Metric controls above. The legend names the campaign types — Online Video, Prime Video, Remarketing: DSP, Retargeting: DSP, Warm Prospects: DSP. Read the names — they carry the structure DSP ad group names are unusually informative, because they encode the three things that define the ad group: Remarketing | 3P_MOBILE — … Retargeting | AMAZON_MOBILE — … Warm Prospects | AMAZON_DESKTOP — … | Part | What it says | |---|---| | Audience strategy | Remarketing, Retargeting, Warm Prospects | | Supply source | AMAZON (Amazon-owned), APD (Amazon Publisher Direct), 3P (third-party) | | Device | MOBILE, DESKTOP, or a format like Online Video | That naming is what makes the screen readable. Two ad groups from the same campaign differing only in supply source is a controlled comparison — same audience, same creative, different inventory. The gap between them is attributable. The comparisons worth making Same audience, different supply. Remarketing | AMAZON_MOBILE against Remarketing | 3P_MOBILE. Amazon-owned inventory is usually more expensive and better-converting; third-party is cheaper and more variable. Whether the premium is worth it is exactly what this comparison answers, and it is invisible at campaign level. Same supply, different device. 3P_MOBILE against 3P_DESKTOP. Usually mirrors the pattern on DSP Technology — mobile carries volume, desktop converts better. Same everything, different audience stage. Remarketing against Warm Prospects. Remarketing will always look better on efficiency. That is not a finding; it is the definition of the two strategies. See DSP Campaigns. Change the metric Sales is the default and it rewards whichever ad group got the most budget. Switch it to see efficiency, and the ranking usually rearranges. The ad group with the largest bar is often just the one that was funded most. The interesting one is the small bar with good rates — an ad group that works and is not being given room. What not to conclude Do not cut prospecting ad groups on efficiency. They feed the remarketing pools that look so good. Cutting them improves your averages this month and starves the funnel next quarter. Small ad groups are noisy. A handful of orders makes any rate meaningless. 14-day attribution. Recent days under-report. See Why SP, SB and SD Numbers Don't Add Up. Changes happen in Amazon's DSP console. TrackIQ's DSP reporting is read-only — this is diagnosis, not the control panel. Related - DSP Campaigns — the funnel these ad groups sit inside. - DSP Technology — the device split, across all ad groups at once. - DSP Creatives — which asset is running in them.