Amazon DSP lets you put your brand everywhere your customers browse, stream and scroll—but its power is a double-edged sword. A few small setup errors can burn budget faster than Prime Day shoppers burn through Lightning Deals. Below are the five slip-ups I see most often when auditing new accounts, along with practical fixes you can apply before your next flight goes live.
Treating Frequency Caps as an After-Thought
The rookie move: Launching an order with either no cap (hello ad fatigue!) or a one-size-fits-all cap that ignores overlapping campaigns. When the same shopper sees your banner 10 times in a day, performance plummets.
How to dodge it:
- Start testing with a 3–5 impressions-per-user-per-day cap, then refine based on AMC reach reports.
- Use Amazon’s Frequency Groups to control exposure across multiple orders (not just inside one), boosting unique reach by ~6 % on average.
- Rotate fresh creatives each quarter so you’re not capping the same stale banners.
Letting the Budget Pace Itself
The rookie move: Setting a lifetime budget, crossing your fingers, and discovering mid-campaign that you’ve spent 80 % in week one—or only 20 %. Amazon now flags “under-pacing” orders automatically, but only if you pay attention.
How to dodge it:
- Check pacing alerts daily; resolve under-delivery by widening CPM caps or opening additional inventory.
- Create week-by-week spend targets inside a project tracker and course-correct every 48 hours.
- Front-load learning: run a short pilot with higher daily caps, apply insights, then scale to full budget.
Skimping on Creative Mix & Sizes
The rookie move: Uploading a single 300×250 display and calling it a day. Missing sizes throttle delivery; relying only on static banners leaves CPMs higher than they need to be.
How to dodge it:
|
Must-Have Display Sizes |
Why They Matter |
| 300×250 / 160×600 |
Ubiquitous inventory on desktop & mobile |
| 728×90 / 970×250 |
High-impact desktop placements |
| 320×50 |
Mobile web reach |
- Add at least one 15–30 s video; inventory opens up and view-through conversions jump.
- Follow Amazon’s creative best-practice checklist (clear logo, tight copy, visible CTA).
- Use the “Add missing creative sizes” recommendation card to plug gaps before launch.
Blanket-Targeting Everyone with One Audience
The rookie move: Building a single in-market audience and blasting it top-to-bottom funnel—or worse, stacking several similar audiences and bidding against yourself. Poor segmentation is the #1 reason advertisers overpay for CPMs and under-deliver on ROAS.
How to dodge it:
- Split campaigns by funnel stage: Prospecting, Consideration (viewed similar items), Re-Engagement (detail-page viewers, cart abandoners).
- Exclude converters from upper-funnel orders; suppress internal competition and stretch reach.
- Layer look-back windows (e.g., 14-day vs. 30-day) to control freshness and message sequencing.
Flying Blind on Measurement & Iteration
The rookie move: Relying solely on the default DSP dashboard, downloading a performance report once a month, and hoping for the best. The result: frequency, budget and audience issues keep repeating because nobody sees them in real time.
How to dodge it:
- Wire Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) or third-party analytics into your DSP logs for hour-by-hour insights.
- Automate weekly look-back analysis—ROAS, reach overlap, path-to-conversion—so optimizations feed back into creative, budget and targeting.
- If bandwidth is tight, lean on specialists who can continuously manage Amazon DSP campaign data and surface trends before they become problems.
Key Takeaway
Amazon DSP rewards precision. Dial in caps, pace budgets deliberately, give creatives room to breathe, target with surgical intent, and watch the numbers—daily, not monthly. Nail those five fundamentals and you’ll move from rookie mistakes to seasoned wins in a single quarter.
This post is provided by a third party who may receive compensation from the products or services they mention.
