Amazon’s Demand Side Platform (DSP) has evolved into a powerful tool for brands aiming to reach high-intent audiences both on and off Amazon. With significant updates in 2025, understanding the current costs and capabilities of Amazon DSP is crucial for advertisers seeking to maximize their return on investment.
But is it worth it? Looking at this new(er) advertising model on Amazon, many sellers find themselves wondering just how much Amazon DSP costs and whether the upfront expense is worth the investment. Today, we’re diving into the estimated costs of Amazon DSP campaigns, the value it offers, and how to determine if it is worth it for your business.
Key Takeaways
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- Amazon DSP gives sellers the ability to target your desired audience with ads based on advanced targeting factors, such as behavioral, contextual, and lifestyle.
- There are two account management types with DSP; managed-service (working with an Amazon consultant) and self-service (handling the account yourself).
- Amazon DSP comes with an upfront cost and charges based on impressions rather than clicks.
- DSP works best if you know your audience, can create quality marketing media, understand how to optimize your endpoints, and focus on the analytics the tool provides to drive results.
What is Amazon DSP?
Amazon DSP stands for Amazon Demand-Side Platform (sometimes also referred to as ADSP, as other platforms offer demand side platforms). It expands on Amazon Advertising’s original functionality to offer targeted marketing both on and off the Amazon platform. You have the capability of purchasing display, video, and audio advertisement slots and can choose your market targeting factors, which are highly sophisticated, using Amazon’s extensive audience analysis technology.
It’s often a stronger play for brand awareness campaigns or overall retargeting to prospects and customers. As such, attribution can be a bit more difficult to measure. Additionally, the spend required to run intelligent ads can be a barrier to entry.
Amazon DSP Deep Dive
When you sign up for the Amazon Demand-Side Platform, you will have the choice between two account management types.
- Managed Service DSP: This allows you to work with an Amazon advertising consultant who can help you optimize your campaign settings to meet your specific goals. You will work together with your consultant, or you can choose to fully take your hands off the wheel and request specific results.
- Self-Service DSP: This allows you to take full control of your campaign. In fact, you can tweak every setting from in-market to retargeting audiences. This option is best for sellers or their marketing agency representatives who are already experts in marketing.
Advanced & Robust Targeting Options
One of the advantages of advertising through Amazon DSP is the advanced targeting options. Advanced targeting allows advertisers to focus campaigns and add layers of persona characteristics, all with the goal of increasing sales and conversions.
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- Behavioral Targeting: Media appears for audiences that take specific actions or engage in predictable and desirable behaviors.
- Contextual Targeting: Media appears based on immediate circumstances such as the audience’s location, what they have recently searched for, and products they are considering.
- Lifestyle Targeting: Lifestyle markets target interest groups like sports fans, gardening enthusiasts, or yarn crafters (yes, that’s a real thing).
- Remarketing: Remarketing targets viewers who have already considered or purchased your products in the past. For consideration, this could be website visits, Amazon page views, add-to-cart occurrences, and more.
- Lookalike Audiences: Audience lookalike marketing shows your media to people who match your data. By taking past users who have purchased, viewed, and added your products to their shopping carts, you can get Amazon to find users who share the same interests, lifestyles, and behaviors as your data.
Level up your audience creation even further by integrating your DTC website with Amazon Marketing Cloud though Audience Builder +.
Off-site Marketing
Amazon has also cultivated a vast marketing network that goes far beyond its on-site marketing opportunities. Amazon DSP will automatically present your content across their advertising network. Based on your targeting information, your products and chosen media ads will be shown to anyone within that network whose buyer qualities match your settings. This network includes third-party websites, Prime Video, Kindle products, and so much more.
Marketing Analytics
You will also enjoy access to built-in analytics available through the DSP that will help you determine the success of your campaigns and hone your settings. Theses analytics are powered by Amazon Marketing Cloud to make future marketing and advertising efforts even more robust.
How Much Does Amazon DSP Cost?
Amazon DSP has a lot to offer, but it comes at an upfront cost, as well as a higher necessary ad spend. By understanding where your money goes and what those upfront costs are, we’ll get a better idea if it’s worth the investment.
Cost Per Thousand (CPM): Impression-based Charges
Unlike most Amazon Advertising, DSP charges per impression (PPI), not pay-per-click (PPC). It uses the “Cost Per Thousand” (acronymed to CPM for “cost per mille”) model for billing, calculating costs per thousand times your content is targeted and shown to a potential lead.
These estimated numbers often look exorbitant next to CPC fees, but remember that it applies to the cost of 1,000 impressions.
Baseline Costs
The managed-service DSP model requires a minimum spend of $35,000-$50,000 to get started. This is not limited to a specific interval of service but serves as the fund from which your initial campaign will be run. The price gives your advertising consultant flexibility in choosing how they recommend your ad media and products are run and allows for a campaign timeline before you decide to re-invest or try something else.
The self-service DSP model also allows for more variable investment as you will be making more fine-tuned decisions about how to allocate your marketing spend. However, you have to run DSP on Amazon through a partner like Trellis. This allows that minimum required spend to be distributed amongst multiple advertisers, decreasing the barrier to entry.
Is Amazon DSP Worth It?
When clients ask us if it’s time to implement Amazon DSP, it usually isn’t. This type of advertising campaign is for brands ready to go to the next level. They’ve often run every other type of advertising campaign, have social media presence, an Amazon Storefront, and more. While you can be successful with a $1,000 monthly budget toward a Sponsored Product ad campaign, it’s unlikely you’ll see similar results with a DSP campaign with the same budget.
However, so many sellers have already reaped significant benefits from using the intuitive and finely targeted Amazon DSP advertising services.
In other words, it only works if you make it work. DSP has potential for efficient impact, but only if you know exactly what you are doing when setting up the service. It’s one of the easier ways to spend a lot of money without the right return.
Make the Most of Amazon DSP
As you may have guessed, the best way to ensure that your investment in Amazon DSP is worth it is to optimize your campaign. The better targeted and the better quality of your advertising through DSP, the more valuable results you will achieve.
1. Know Your Audience
Amazon DSP offers detailed targeting options to help you reach your ideal audience. It’s important to approach DSP with an already clear view of who you are targeting and why. Do your market research, and consider a few PPC campaigns through other platforms and services to fine-tune your targeting before investing in a DSP campaign.
This is also where buyer persona data comes into play. If you don’t have access to a buyer persona, you can also consider targeting the problems your product solves and common characteristics or behaviors of those groups.
2. Create High-quality Marketing Media
Bring your A-game in terms of marketing content. DSP allows you to market using your product listings, display ads, video ads, and audio ads. Use your highest-quality marketing materials to have the greatest impact using this platform. Consider crafting all-new media in order to meet the full potential of this automated targeting platform.
If budgets are tight, there are great generative AI functionality available to help you create seasonally relevant image and video campaigns as well.
3. Optimize for Your Endpoint
Ensure you optimize your media assets for where they will be appearing. OTT ads through smart TVs, for example, must look superb on large and high-resolution screens. Audio marketing must have great sound quality to better integrate with the music/podcast audio platforms that will be reached.
4. Test & Iterate Based on Analytics
Lastly, always hone your campaign settings for better results. With DSP’s cost, you want to make sure you’re spending every dollar wisely. Watch your metrics and tweak your settings for better results as soon as the numbers are in. However, remember that you need to let these ads run for significant periods of time (7+ days) to garner enough data to make decisions.
Get Started with Amazon DSP
If you’re considering Amazon Demand-Side Platform for your next big marketing campaign, this can be a rewarding investment if you’re ready to take the plunge.
At Trellis, we can help you hit the ground running with Amazon DSP, from your initial campaign asset assessment to fine-tuning your automation settings. Book a demo to see the platform in action, and make the most of your next advertising campaign.
