Amazon Ads reveals new tools at unBoxed 2024

New Delhi: At unBoxed 2024, Amazon Ads announced a series of innovations across the Amazon Demand-side Platform (Amazon DSP) aimed at bringing precise full-funnel audience reach with streamlined campaign planning and optimisation. 

“The digital advertising landscape is rapidly evolving, with streaming TV becoming mainstream and full-funnel, cross-channel reach and measurement taking center stage. We’re inventing ad tech that makes it easier for all advertisers to navigate this evolution with precise reach, deeper insights, and direct measurement,” said Kelly MacLean, Vice-President of Amazon DSP. “Amazon DSP can uniquely drive top-to-bottom outcomes on Amazon’s properties, such as the store and Prime Video, as well as across leading broadcasts and premium publishers. We look forward to seeing advertisers leverage the capabilities announced today to fuel their business growth and engage more customers,” she added.   

To increase advertiser efficiency, Amazon DSP is launching a new user experience with streamlined workflows to enable campaign creation in just a few clicks. In early tests, the new consolidated display line-item feature reduced campaign setup time by 75%. This feature brings together desktop, mobile, and app display inventory into a single line item, making it easier to launch and monitor reporting. 

Upon going to the campaign health overview page, advertisers will get to see new insight cards and machine learning recommendations that help them quickly audit their campaign performance and make adjustments. For example, an advertiser may see an insight card that shows their campaign is currently underdelivering; they can review the accompanying recommendation and click to apply that optimisation. Amazon DSP will centralise and expand these cards within a new campaign management hub in 2025. 

Amazon DSP enhancements also include new frequency cap controls and reporting to simplify frequency management. Advertisers can now use the frequency groups feature to holistically manage their frequency caps across multiple campaigns, channels and devices—such as capping ad frequency at a household level. Advertisers using these frequency cap controls have saved up to 26% of their campaign budgets from spending on duplicate impressions and drove up to 21% incremental reach.

“Amazon DSP's frequency management and target frequency capabilities match and exceed competitive DSPs. In particular, the frequency cap insights report is the most thought-through report we have seen among all DSPs,” said Megan Pagliuca, Chief Activation Officer, Omnicom Media Group.

Amazon Ads is also launching an ads data manager. This easy-to-use interface enables advertisers to securely upload their signals once, and then use them across Amazon DSP and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to engage relevant audiences, measure conversions, and optimise campaigns. It’s integrated with providers like Treasure Data, Salesforce, and Tealium, so advertisers can import their first-party data from wherever they store it. Today advertisers can use ads data manager to connect their first-party data with Amazon DSP audiences, and it will be fully integrated with the Amazon DSP and AMC in 2025. 

Amazon Ads also announced enhancements to Performance+, the always-on, automated optimisation capability within Amazon DSP. Performance+ uses advertiser-provided signals and predictive AI to automate audience relevancy and campaign optimisation for lower-funnel goals, like conversion and customer acquisition. It automatically sets up campaigns, builds custom audiences, and continuously optimises toward the advertiser’s stated KPIs. Early results showed that Performance+ drove a 51% improvement in customer acquisition costs on average. 

New Performance+ tactics, now in open beta, expand advertiser campaign strategies to include remarketing and retention, in addition to the prospecting tactic that was already available. The entire workflow has been streamlined to as few as four clicks, while still providing flexible optimization controls and transparency. Advertisers simply choose their campaign goal, such as conversion, awareness, or consideration; choose their KPI, such as cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS); and choose their Performance+ tactic: prospecting, remarketing, or retention. Performance+ creates a campaign and continually optimises performance against these specifications to deliver the right results.