Digital retail is changing fast, and success now depends on how well you connect data to action. Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) give brands the power to reach shoppers across the open web using real purchase intent signals: what people have viewed, bought, or are actively researching. The newest DSP audience tools make this even more precise, helping retailers use Views, Purchases, and In-Market segments to reach customers at every stage of the buying journey.
By blending AI precision and human intuition, you can use these audiences to build awareness, drive conversions, and grow long-term loyalty, all while improving return on ad spend (ROAS) across Amazon, Walmart, and beyond.
Trellis helps you do this automatically. Our platform combines AI-driven audience targeting, dynamic pricing, and analytics so your DSP campaigns perform efficiently…and profitably.
Want to see how brands are using data-driven advertising to grow on Amazon and Walmart? Check out our Success Stories to learn how Trellis clients are improving efficiency and profitability across every marketplace.
Key Insights
- DSP audiences turn data into growth. Use In-Market, Views, and Purchases audiences to reach shoppers at every stage of the funnel with precision and relevance.
- Audience insights are becoming richer. New tools like Amazon’s Audience Detail Page help advertisers understand demographics, interests, and shopping behavior before launching campaigns.
- Dynamic pricing drives performance. Real-time pricing adjustments improve conversion rates, strengthen Buy Box ownership, and protect profit margins across retail media channels.
Read more: How To Win The Amazon Buy Box
Read more: How To Win The Walmart Buy Box
What Are DSP Audiences and Why They Matter for Retail?
A Demand-Side Platform (DSP) is a programmatic advertising system that lets brands buy digital ad inventory in real time. Unlike standard display or search ads, DSPs use first-party retail data, like browsing behavior, purchase history, and category interest to reach shoppers with precision. This means your ads don’t rely on third-party cookies or guesswork. Instead, they’re based on what people actually do while shopping online.
For retail marketers, DSP audiences unlock a full-funnel strategy. You can reach new customers researching similar products, re-engage shoppers who viewed your listings, or encourage past buyers to purchase again. Each audience type represents a different level of intent:
- In-Market Audiences show who’s currently shopping for products like yours.
- Views Audiences capture shoppers who considered your product but didn’t convert.
- Purchases Audiences help you re-engage existing customers with upsell or loyalty campaigns.
These signals let you move beyond simple demographics and speak directly to shopper intent. Retailers use them to align creative, bids, and budget across the customer journey, from discovery to repeat purchase. In a competitive marketplace, this level of targeting helps reduce wasted ad spend and improve Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) by focusing efforts on the shoppers most likely to buy.
DSP audiences matter because they bring data-driven relevance to every impression. Instead of broad, untargeted outreach, your campaigns reach real shoppers at the right time, with the right message, turning intent into measurable growth.
What Are Three Core DSP Audiences Every Retailer Should Know?
Retail DSPs organize shoppers into audience segments based on real behavioral signals. These segments help you reach people at the right point in their buying journey, whether they’re discovering new products, considering a purchase, or ready to buy again. The three most effective audience types for retail advertisers are Views, Purchases, and In-Market audiences. Each plays a unique role in building a full-funnel DSP strategy.
Views Audiences: Turning Browsers Into Buyers
What They Are
Views audiences include shoppers who have seen or interacted with your product pages but haven’t purchased yet. They’ve shown intent—they know your product exists—but may still be comparing options, reading reviews, or waiting for the right offer.
Why They Matter
This group sits in the consideration stage of the funnel. They’ve already engaged once, which means your brand is on their radar. Retargeting these shoppers with helpful, relevant ads keeps your product top-of-mind and can close the gap between interest and conversion.
Best Practices
- Use recency targeting to re-engage within a short window (7–14 days after a view).
- Test creative variants that address common objections, like shipping, price, or value.
- Cap frequency to avoid ad fatigue and wasted impressions.
- Measure success through Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate (CVR) improvements.
Read more: What It Means to Be Out-Of-Stock on Amazon? And How to Recover Fast
Purchases Audiences: Driving Loyalty and Retention
What They Are
Purchases audiences are built from previous customers who’ve already completed a transaction. They provide the strongest intent signal possible—a confirmed interest in your brand and product.
Why They Matter
This audience fuels retention, upsell, and cross-sell strategies. Reaching these customers with relevant messaging builds repeat business and long-term loyalty. For example, a buyer of a laptop might be shown ads for accessories, warranties, or newer models.
Best Practices
- Segment by product type or purchase recency to customize messaging.
- Highlight complementary or replenishable items.
- Use dynamic creatives to tailor ads based on prior purchases.
- Track Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Repeat Purchase Rate as primary KPIs.
Read more: Building Full-Funnel Amazon PPC with Sponsored Brands Video + DSP Overlays
In-Market Audiences: Capturing High-Intent Shoppers
What They Are
In-Market audiences identify shoppers who are actively researching products within your category, even if they haven’t interacted with your brand yet. DSPs build these audiences using first-party retail data—signals like search queries, page visits, and cart activity—to find users who are close to making a purchase decision.
Why They Matter
These are your prospecting and acquisition audiences. In-Market targeting helps retailers expand reach while maintaining relevance, focusing on shoppers most likely to convert soon. Because these users are high-intent, ads served to them often deliver strong new-to-brand sales and incremental growth.
Best Practices
- Use category-level targeting to align with shopper interests.
- Pair educational creative (benefits, comparisons, reviews) with competitive bidding.
- Optimize toward New-to-Brand (NTB) metrics, Reach, and Impression Frequency to gauge performance.
Read more: Brand Defense: When to Overbid, When to Suppress, and When to Let Organic Win
How to Combine Audiences for Full-Funnel Growth
Each DSP audience type – In-Market, Views, and Purchases – serves a different stage of the buying journey. When used together, they create a complete funnel that attracts new customers, nurtures interest, and builds lasting loyalty. The key is understanding where each audience fits and how to layer them for efficiency and scale.
Top of Funnel: In-Market Audiences (Awareness and Acquisition)
Start by reaching shoppers who are already researching products in your category. These audiences expand your reach while maintaining relevance. Use broader creative messages that focus on brand value, product benefits, or problem-solving angles. The goal here isn’t an immediate conversion…it’s introducing your brand to high-intent shoppers and driving initial engagement.
Mid-Funnel: Views Audiences (Consideration)
Next, re-engage shoppers who interacted with your listings but didn’t purchase. These users need reminders and reassurance. Serve them ads with clear visuals, customer reviews, or limited-time offers that help remove hesitation. Optimize bids and frequency to balance visibility without overspending.
Bottom of Funnel: Purchases Audiences (Retention and Loyalty)
Finally, re-engage your past customers. Use their purchase data to promote complementary or replenishable products, subscription programs, or exclusive deals. This strengthens brand loyalty and increases customer lifetime value (CLV).
When these audiences work together, they form a continuous feedback loop:
- In-Market brings in new prospects.
- Views converts interest into sales.
- Purchases drives repeat revenue.
Aligning your creative, messaging, and bidding strategy across this funnel ensures that every impression contributes to measurable growth. By analyzing performance at each stage (awareness, consideration, and loyalty) you can identify which segments drive the highest return on ad spend (ROAS) and allocate budgets accordingly. This connected approach transforms isolated campaigns into a unified, data-driven system for retail growth.
How Can Trellis Help With DSP Audience Optimization?
Trellis brings together advertising automation, dynamic pricing, and full-funnel analytics to help retailers make the most of their DSP campaigns. With AI-driven targeting, Trellis identifies high-value audiences and optimizes creative, bidding, and spend in real time. Its pricing engine connects ad data to product performance, adjusting prices automatically to stay competitive and maintain profitability.
Retailers using Trellis gain visibility across Amazon, Walmart, and the open web, turning fragmented ad data into actionable insights. The result is consistent growth, efficient spend, and measurable return on investment across every channel.
Ready to see how Trellis can help your brand grow smarter with DSP audience targeting? Book a demo today!
New Audience Tools and Insights to Watch
DSP platforms are evolving quickly, giving retailers more visibility into who their audiences are and how they behave. One of the most valuable updates is the Audience Detail Page insights feature introduced by Amazon Advertising. This tool gives advertisers deeper transparency into audience composition, helping refine targeting and creative strategies.
With Audience Detail Page insights, you can now access:
- Demographic data: See audience breakdowns by age, gender, and household income to understand who’s responding to your ads.
- Top retail categories purchased: Identify which product categories your audience shops in most often to uncover cross-sell or expansion opportunities.
- Top Prime Video content streamed: Understand the entertainment interests of your audience to guide creative messaging and contextual placements.
- Overlap and reach metrics: Measure how your audiences intersect, ensuring campaigns complement each other instead of competing for the same shoppers.
These insights allow advertisers to move beyond assumptions. Instead of relying on surface-level targeting, brands can validate audience quality and engagement before launching or scaling campaigns. For example, if your In-Market audience heavily overlaps with a Views audience, you can adjust budgets or creative sequencing to improve efficiency.
For retailers managing multiple product lines or marketplaces, these tools make it easier to identify which segments deliver the most value and how to expand reach without diluting performance. Access to this level of audience intelligence helps advertisers refine their funnel strategy—ensuring every impression is served to the right shopper, in the right context, at the right time.
DSP vs. AMC Audiences: Know When to Use Each
While DSP audiences and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) audiences often work together, they serve different purposes within retail advertising. Understanding when to use each helps you balance speed, flexibility, and depth in your targeting strategy.
DSP Audiences: Fast Activation and Ready-to-Use Segments
DSP audiences are built from predefined segments using Amazon’s and other retailers’ first-party data. They include In-Market, Lifestyle, Views, and Purchases audiences that you can activate immediately within your campaigns. DSP audiences are ideal when you want to:
- Launch or scale campaigns quickly.
- Use established behavioral signals such as product views or past purchases.
- Reach broad but relevant groups with proven intent data.
They’re best suited for advertisers focused on execution and performance, for those who want consistent audience definitions and reliable reach without the need for custom data modeling.
AMC Audiences: Custom Insights and Advanced Segmentation
AMC, or Amazon Marketing Cloud, gives advertisers the ability to build custom audiences using SQL-based queries and deeper event-level data. This includes cross-channel interactions, multi-touch attribution, and more complex audience definitions. With AMC, you can:
- Combine multiple behaviors (e.g., “viewed a product three times but didn’t buy within 14 days”).
- Analyze full-funnel performance and customer paths to purchase.
- Export refined segments to DSP for activation.
AMC audiences require more setup and technical skill but deliver greater flexibility and insight. They’re ideal for advanced advertisers looking to optimize based on long-term performance trends or unique audience logic.
When to Use Each
- Use DSP audiences for efficiency and campaign speed.
- Use AMC audiences for precision and custom analysis.
Together, they form a powerful ecosystem: DSP for activation, AMC for exploration and refinement. By blending both, retail advertisers can reach shoppers efficiently while continuously learning from detailed behavioral data—driving smarter, data-backed media decisions across every stage of the customer journey.
Creative Tips for Each Audience Type
Strong creative makes your DSP targeting work harder. Even with precise audience data, the message and visuals are what convert attention into action. Each DSP audience type – In-Market, Views, and Purchases – responds best to different creative strategies. Tailoring your approach ensures that your ads feel relevant, not repetitive.
In-Market Audiences
These shoppers are exploring products like yours but haven’t engaged with your brand yet. Your creative should focus on education and differentiation.
- Lead with clear product benefits and problem-solving messages.
- Use short, visual formats that highlight your unique value.
- Include recognizable brand elements early (logo, color, or tagline) for recall.
- A/B test creative that compares your product to category alternatives.
- Keep calls-to-action simple: “Learn More” or “Shop Now.”
Views Audiences
Views audiences already know your product, so your creative should reinforce confidence and reduce hesitation.
- Feature social proof such as ratings, reviews, or testimonials.
- Test limited-time offers or dynamic pricing to drive urgency.
- Highlight convenience factors, like fast shipping, easy returns, or bundle savings.
- Use sequential creative: show educational ads first, then promotional ones.
- Align visuals with the product they viewed to trigger recognition.
Purchases Audiences
These shoppers have already converted once, so focus on relationship-building and added value.
- Personalize creative with messages like “Welcome back” or “You might also like.”
- Promote complementary products or subscription options.
- Offer loyalty incentives, like exclusive deals, early access, or points programs.
- Use softer CTAs such as “Restock Now” or “Explore More.”
- Refresh creative regularly to avoid fatigue, especially for replenishable items.
By matching creative tone and format to each audience type, you guide shoppers through the full funnel naturally—building awareness, reinforcing trust, and encouraging repeat purchases. When creative aligns with intent, DSP campaigns deliver stronger engagement, higher click-through rates, and a measurable lift in return on ad spend.
How Do Dynamic Pricing and DSP Work Together?
Dynamic pricing and DSP advertising share a common goal: maximizing profitability while staying competitive. When used together, they create a feedback loop that connects ad performance with pricing strategy, ensuring every impression drives measurable value.
DSP campaigns generate traffic and visibility, but conversions depend on what shoppers see when they click through. If your price is too high compared to competitors, even the best-targeted ads may underperform. Dynamic pricing solves this by adjusting prices in real time based on market conditions, competitor listings, and demand signals. This helps maintain an optimal balance between conversion rate and margin.
From a funnel perspective, pricing impacts each audience differently:
- In-Market audiences are often comparing options across multiple brands. Competitive pricing helps you stand out and earn the first click.
- Views audiences are revisiting your listing. Dynamic discounts or temporary offers can push them to complete a purchase.
- Purchases audiences respond well to loyalty-based pricing, such as bundle savings or refill discounts.
Dynamic pricing also helps stabilize Buy Box ownership on marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart—an important factor for ad performance. When your product consistently holds the Buy Box, your DSP ads direct shoppers to listings that are both visible and conversion-ready.
By connecting DSP data with pricing intelligence, retailers can identify patterns, like how small price adjustments affect ROAS or conversion rate. This data-driven approach turns pricing into another optimization lever within your advertising strategy, helping ensure that every campaign dollar supports profitable growth.
What are the Key Metrics to Track?
Successful DSP campaigns are built on more than impressions and clicks. To understand how your ads truly impact business outcomes, you need to measure across the full funnel, from awareness to repeat purchase. The following metrics help retailers track effectiveness, optimize budget allocation, and identify growth opportunities.
/Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
ROAS measures how much revenue your ads generate for every dollar spent. It’s the clearest indicator of profitability and should be monitored by audience type, creative, and placement. A healthy ROAS confirms your targeting and bidding strategies are aligned with shopper intent.
New-to-Brand (NTB) Sales
This metric shows how many conversions came from first-time customers. Tracking NTB sales helps determine whether your DSP campaigns are expanding your customer base or mainly reaching existing buyers. In-Market audiences typically drive the highest NTB results.
Conversion Rate (CVR)
CVR measures how effectively your ads turn views into purchases. It’s especially useful for Views audiences, where optimization around creative, pricing, or landing pages can directly improve performance.
Frequency and Reach
Frequency shows how often your ad is shown to the same shopper, while reach measures how many unique shoppers you’ve engaged. Balancing both prevents overexposure and ensures your message connects with new potential customers.
Omnichannel Metrics
For retailers selling both online and in-store, omnichannel measurement links digital ad exposure to total sales. This includes in-store purchases attributed to DSP impressions—a key advantage of using first-party retail data.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
CLV connects advertising performance with long-term profitability. Tracking CLV across Purchases audiences helps gauge how effectively your campaigns drive retention and repeat business.
In Summary
Retail media is moving fast, and success depends on how well brands connect data, pricing, and advertising strategy. DSP audiences (In-Market, Views, and Purchases) give retailers the tools to reach the right shoppers at every stage of the funnel. When used together, they turn raw intent signals into measurable performance, driving awareness, conversions, and long-term loyalty.
As audience tools become more sophisticated, retailers have the opportunity to move from simple targeting to full-funnel optimization. Integrating insights like audience overlap, omnichannel performance, and pricing responsiveness ensures every campaign dollar is working harder.
Trellis helps brands do exactly that. By combining AI precision and human intuition, Trellis connects advertising automation, dynamic pricing, and analytics into one system built for profitable growth. Whether you’re scaling campaigns on Amazon, Walmart, or the open web, smarter DSP audience strategies backed by real-time data give your brand a clear path to sustainable success.
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