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DON’T hire an Amazon DSP Agency until you listen to this…
74 Plays1 month ago
DIYing will cost upwards of $50K, just to test an unproven strategy.
Amazon DSP agencies are popping up everywhere—but very few actually know what they’re doing. DSP is only a few years old. Unless you’re working with someone who’s lived and breathed it since day one, you’re putting your brand at risk. In just 5 minutes, Sam Lee, VP of Amazon DSP at Trivium, cuts through the BS and shows you exactly what to look for in a DSP agency and how to find one so you can find a DSP partner that delivers. With the right partner, Amazon DSP could boost your sales by 100% (or more).
➡️ If DSP is your next move, click the link to get it right the first time: https://hubs.la/Q02-WYlR0
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Transcript
Introduction to Amazon DSP by Sam Lee
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome back to the Amazon Blueprint Podcast.
00:00:05
Speaker
So you're looking to test out Amazon DSP. Where do you start? What's up, guys? I'm Sam Lee. I'm the VP of Amazon DSP at Tribune
Why Test Amazon DSP with an Agency?
00:00:12
Speaker
Group. I've managed DSP across hundreds of brands over the past couple of years, and I'm going to tell you how to find the right agency to get started with Amazon DSP. So let's say you want to test out Amazon DSP, but you don't have $50,000-ish a month to commit to an unproven concept. Odds are you're going to need to find an agency to help you test this
Researching Agencies for Amazon DSP
00:00:31
Speaker
out. So how do you find an agency? I'll provide some pointers and mostly questions that you can ask agencies to vet if they're going to be the right partner for you.
00:00:38
Speaker
So if you ask Google how to find a good Amazon DSP agency, Google says, research specialized agencies, Amazon partner network, industry directories, ask for recommendations, evaluate, experience, consult Amazon industry conferences. Now I'll give you my largely unsolicited advice. First and foremost, Google and LinkedIn are of course going to be your best
Essential Questions to Ask Agencies
00:00:57
Speaker
friends. Research Amazon DSP. The easiest way in my opinion to do it is just to click the link in this description. But if you find some online, the best thing to look at first and foremost is do they call it Amazon DSP noticeably on their website? If they don't call it Amazon DSP upfront, odds are they're viewing DSP as an afterthought. So you want to find a different agency. It should be pretty noticeable on their website that it's something that they do and more importantly, something they focus on.
00:01:21
Speaker
So before hiring an Amazon DSP agency, there are a number of questions that you could ask to figure out if they're the right fit for you. The easiest question to ask is how long have you been managing Amazon DSP campaigns? Amazon DSP has only been around a few years, so if the answer is 10 years or more, that's probably not true. A couple years with Amazon DSP experience is all you're really going to need, but it shouldn't be something that's new to them. Another thing that's important to ask is do they have experience within your particular category?
00:01:45
Speaker
Amazon DSP is incredibly customizable, and as such, every category and every brand is going to need a little bit of a different strategy. So it's important that they've at least worked with some brand that's similar to what you sell at some point in time. In terms of strategy and approach, what is their approach to creating custom strategies for brands? Do they use custom audiences or do they use the pre-created audience segments in Amazon? My approach is typically largely custom. There's a time and place for things like in-market and lifestyle segments, but in reality,
00:02:12
Speaker
You want an agency that's going to be able to create custom audiences based on your brand because every brand is different and you can get incredibly specific with the way that you target.
Audience Segmentation and Ad Strategies
00:02:21
Speaker
Largely, you want to do that based on custom audiences. Another question is, how do you handle audience segmentation and targeting strategies?
00:02:28
Speaker
One thing that pretty much every agency is going to do is run retargeting. One answer that you're going to want to look for is that they negate purchase audiences. This is something that's unique to DSP and every agency should mention this in their targeting strategy because you're going to make sure that you haven't. You don't serve ads with people that have just purchased your product. Another one is what are your general budget recommendations or what is your minimum?
00:02:49
Speaker
A lot of agencies have the misconception that they have to have an incredibly high minimum because this is the standard that Amazon places on brands for them to access their own DSBC. In reality, you can get started with Amazon DSP with just a couple thousand a month. I usually recommend at least five, but there shouldn't be a super hard minimum for budget. It's also important to figure out how they're going to allocate budget across different parts of the funnel. In reality, that's going to be up to you.
00:03:11
Speaker
How much you want to spend across the bottom funnel campaigns versus the mid funnel campaigns really depends on your goal, but you want to make sure that this strategy is customized at whatever you view is important
Budget Allocation and Reporting
00:03:20
Speaker
to your brand. Another thing that's important to figure out is how they handle reporting. Amazon DSP lives completely outside of Seller Central, so you likely won't be able to access this data realistically on your own very often.
00:03:31
Speaker
So you want to make sure that you're working with an agency that provides consistent reporting, ideally on a weekly basis, and it should be customizable depending on your KPIs. So whatever they report on is actually where you're going to pay attention to and care about. It's also important to ask them if they utilize any third party or tech partners. In reality, you can run Amazon DSP without any tech partners, but one unique capability is the access to Amazon's AMC. I'll touch on this in another video, but if an agency has access to AMC, it's going to greatly improve your reporting and your performance.
DSP vs PPC Management and Case Studies
00:03:58
Speaker
Next question is how hands-on will you be and who will be my main point of contact? This opinions may be slightly controversial but I usually believe that the person that's managing your PPC shouldn't be the same person managing your DSP. There are exceptions to this and I think that it's important to have collaboration between the two platforms, but these platforms are very different. And a lot of the time agencies will just task DSP management to their PPC manager and they're usually somewhat winging it. So if they have a specialized DSP person to go alongside the person managing your PPC and you get a new point of contact, this
Continuous Testing and Innovation
00:04:28
Speaker
is ideal.
00:04:28
Speaker
Next question is, can you share any case studies or success stories from previous clients? They should be able to provide this relatively quickly. I would just keep in mind that this is going to be a highlight reel and not every brand is going to perform the same, but they should have some case studies and examples of where performance has gone well. And if they don't, that's a red flag. Next question is, what is your plan for scaling campaigns as we grow?
00:04:49
Speaker
The benefit to Amazon DSP is that there are functionally limitless target carding capabilities. So if they have a three, six, nine month plan to continuously test and idea ideate new strategies to grow your account, that's what you
Engagement and Further Information
00:05:01
Speaker
want. The last thing you want is for them to launch a couple campaigns in week one and then have it on autopilot for the foreseeable future.
00:05:07
Speaker
If you're interested in running DSP for your brand or even just learning more about it, click the link in the description. We can grab 30 minutes. I do this all the time. No questions, a dumb question. We'll probably be putting a lot more content out like this. So definitely like and subscribe and I'll talk to you soon.