Guide
A guide to Performance+: AI-driven precision, expert control, and superior business outcomes
How Amazon DSP Performance+ uses AI-driven precision and expert control for superior business outcomes in programmatic advertising.
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Amazon DSP is a demand-side platform that allows you to programmatically buy ads to reach new and existing audiences on Amazon or third-party destinations.
Navigating challenges today
In the fast-moving world of programmatic advertising, advertisers face increasing challenges in achieving advertising goals. Key obstacles include proving return on investment (ROI) amidst inconsistent data, operating efficiently under tight budgets, and integrating advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) into advertising workflows. Scaling campaigns without sacrificing performance while also maintaining transparency across platforms adds further complexity. These challenges often hinder the ability to maximize marketing potential.
Amazon DSP Performance+ was designed to address these issues head-on. By leveraging AI-powered automation, actionable insights, and streamlined processes, it empowers advertisers to overcome these barriers while delivering measurable improvements in campaign performance and efficiency.
What is Amazon DSP Performance+?
Performance+ is an AI-powered Amazon DSP solution that enhances video and display performance for your conversion goals both on and off Amazon. Whether your goal is maximizing sales on Amazon by optimizing your return on ad spend (ROAS), or increasing engagement on your website or app by improving cost per acquisition (CPA), Performance+ enables you to connect with your customers more effectively. This campaign type combines your expertise with advanced AI and first-party signals to reach the right customers at the right time.
Performance+ simplifies campaign management by automating setup in as few as four clicks while maintaining flexible control over key optimization levers and offering transparent campaign-level reporting. These features have already produced impressive results: advertisers using Performance+ have achieved a 51% improvement in acquisition costs, compared to legacy Amazon DSP campaigns.1 Performance+ is a proven game-changer, leveraging advanced AI and automation to simplify advertising complexities, maximize ROI, and drive superior business outcomes.
Key benefits include:
- Maximized ROI: Reach valuable customers using bespoke predictive models that integrate Amazon’s unique insights with conversion signals.
- Transparent reporting: Gain granular insights into inventory, creative, and audience performance to make smarter, data-driven decisions.
- Optimizations with control and efficiency: Fine-tune key levers while automating setup to focus on high-impact strategies.
How does Amazon DSP Performance+ work?
Performance+ combines first-party signals with Amazon Ads exclusive insights from shopping, streaming, and entertainment activity, feeding this wealth of data into machine learning models powered by AWS technology. This allows our AI to score every bid opportunity in real-time, ensuring campaigns reach customers most likely to convert. The system securely matches these signals with Amazon's addressability graph, analyzing trillions of data points to determine which individuals are most likely to take desired actions, updating predictions hourly. From a campaign management perspective, Performance+ simplifies the typical 70-step campaign creation process through automation.
Let's explore how to set up a campaign with Performance+. The process is designed to be simple and easy to follow. For the best results, make sure you have enough initial data for your campaign to work with.
How does Amazon DSP Performance+ work?
What are Performance+ marketing tactics?
Along with controlling your Performance+ goals, key performance indicators (KPIs), and targeting, you can now customize your campaign strategy further by selecting tactics like:
Customer acquisition tactic
Expand into new customers: Reaching out to people who behave similarly to your existing customers. If you're selling on Amazon.com, it focuses on reaching customers who follow similar patterns as people who already bought your product, signed up, etc. For your own website or app, it finds people who are likely to take actions you care about, like making a purchase or filling out a lead form.
Remarketing tactic
Deepen relationships with existing customers: Reconnect with people who've already shown interest in your brand. This could be someone who's visited your Amazon product pages or browsed your website recently. The goal is to gently remind these potential customers about your offerings, increasing the chances they'll come back and make a purchase.
Retention tactic
Build customer loyalty to maximize lifetime value: Keep your existing customers engaged and encourage them to buy again. For Amazon sellers, this means reaching out to people who've bought from you before, but not too recently. If you're promoting your own website or app, it focuses on previous customers or users, aiming to bring them back for another purchase or to try new features.
Performance+ tactics available within campaign setup
What ad formats and inventory does Performance+ support?
Performance+ offers a versatile mix of ad formats designed to reach shoppers wherever they spend time online. At its core, the platform supports the following three main ad types that consumers encounter daily:
This trio of formats enables advertisers to create dynamic, multi-channel campaigns that reach consumers at various touchpoints in their shopping journey.
Inventory and reach
Performance+ seamlessly combines Amazon-owned properties, including Prime Video ads, with valuable third-party inventory across the open web. This approach maximizes your campaign's reach while creating deeper optimization opportunities.
Brand safety features
For brands concerned about ad placement, Performance+ provides peace of mind through flexible controls:
- Allowlists to specify approved placements
- Blocklists to avoid unwanted sites
- Brand safety while maintaining broad network benefits
Mobile capabilities
Mobile advertisers will find Performance+ especially valuable, as the platform delivers seamlessly across both mobile, web, and in-app environments. This cross-device capability ensures your message reaches your audience regardless of how they access digital content, making Performance+ a comprehensive solution for modern advertising needs.
How does Performance+ optimize and measure campaigns?
Campaign timelines
Understanding the timeline and optimization process is crucial for success. New campaigns typically require up to four weeks for the system to learn and optimize, fine-tuning how to deliver better results. While conversion events can be updated mid-campaign, if updated data falls below the required thresholds, the campaign may pause until minimum data requirements are met.
Campaign controls and options
Performance+ gives you many ways to customize your campaigns to reach the right customers at the right time. You can make adjustments to improve your results as you learn what works best for your business, using the following controls.
- Campaign planning and strategy controls:
- Ad placements: determine the mix of first and third-party inventory
- Ad formats: choose media types like Display, Online Video, or Streaming TV
- Performance+ tactics: select customer acquisition, remarketing, or retention tactics
- Bidding: select delivery within budget or use goal-based bidding
- Line items: manage Performance+ line items alongside non-Performance+ items within the same order
- Targeting customization controls:
- Device: select mobile or desktop devices
- Operating system: specify operating systems to target
- Dayparting: schedule ad display times throughout the day
- Location: specify geographical targeting for ads
- Domain: manage domain targeting through blocklists
- Line item exclusions: exclude past converters/purchasers
- Brand safety and visibility controls
- Prebid brand safety: ensure brand safety through third-party pre-bid verifications
- Viewability, pacing, and frequency: manage ad visibility, pacing, and frequency
Bidding and optimization
The Performance+ bidding algorithm leverages AI models to analyze customers in real-time and assigns predictive scores to customers based on their likelihood to take desired actions. These scores are then used to adjust bids for the right customers at the right time. Performance+ also integrates seamlessly with Amazon DSP's goal-based bidding which allows the advertiser to set a specific KPI target value that the system will optimize toward.
Measurement and reporting capabilities
Performance+ provides transparent insights across multiple dimensions, including detailed campaign-level reporting on:
- Domain delivery, to see which websites are showing your ads and which ones work best
- Impressions, to understand how many times your ads are seen and by how many customers
- Engagement metrics, to learn how customers interact with your ads through clicks and video views
- Creative performance, to find out which ad designs are most successful with your audience
- Geographical insights, to understand where your ads perform best across different locations
Integration with Amazon Marketing Cloud enables deep dives into customer insights and conversion paths. While Performance+ doesn't directly measure incrementality, it works seamlessly with third-party measurement tools or other Amazon measurement solutions for comprehensive campaign analysis. Following these guidelines and allowing adequate time for optimization maximizes the effectiveness of Performance+ campaigns while maintaining clear visibility into performance and results.
FAQ
When setting up a Performance+ campaign, you'll need to define your conversion events—these are key actions specific to your business goals. For campaigns aimed at driving engagement on your website or app, you'll need to upload conversions through either Amazon Attribution Tag (AAT), Conversion API (CAPI), or Mobile Measurement Partners (MMP) via the Amazon Ads Event Manager. This is essential for tracking conversion events such as signups and purchases. However, if your goal is to drive sales on Amazon.com, you won't need to use the Event Manager, as these conversions are via Amazon ASINs.
The Performance+ customer acquisition tactic leverages advanced AI technology to go beyond traditional audience expansion methods. It dynamically predicts and optimizes performance in real-time, delivering enhanced results for ROAS or CPA goals while efficiently growing reach. Performance+ differs from Lookalike Audiences, as it analyzes purchase patterns over time to predict future conversions, rather than identifying basic user attributes.
Instead of asking "Who are these users?", Performance+ asks, "Who is likely to convert?"
Think of it this way:
- Traditional acquisition: "Find people who match these characteristics" or "Find people similar to our existing customers"
- Performance+: "Find conversion opportunities based on behavioral signals and patterns"
No, hashed identifiers are not required, but providing them can improve targeting accuracy.
Yes, if you’ve integrated your MMP with Amazon DSP, you can use Performance+ for mobile app installs or in-app conversions.
Yes, Performance+ allows you to exclude purchasers or other audience segments to refine targeting and focus on new opportunities.
1 Internal Amazon Data, 95% confidence, SS Advertisers in US and CA can reduce their CPA Ratio (Actual CPA at the end of a campaign / Campaign Target CPA) by at least 51%.