Sponsored Display for Defence and 14-Day Retargeting

Sponsored Display earns its budget in two places, and prospecting is not one of them: defending your own detail pages against competitors targeting them, and re-reaching people who viewed a product and did not buy. Run as a reach line, it reports a return that Sponsored Products and DSP have already claimed, and the three numbers get added together in a board deck by somebody who has no way of knowing. The double count, and what we do about it: Sponsored Products attributes a conversion to a click for seven days. Sponsored Display counts a click for fourteen and a view for fourteen. DSP defaults to fourteen as well. One order touched by all three appears three times in three interfaces and no interface is wrong. Where you have an Amazon Marketing Cloud instance, we report a single deduplicated conversion count and show what each channel contributed. Where you do not, we report Sponsored Display on click-attributed conversions and the view-through figure sits in a separate column, labelled, in every report we send. Nobody has to remember the caveat six months later. Settings we change in the first week: Cost type, which most accounts leave wherever the default put it. Views remarketing runs on CPC. Similar-to-advertised runs on vCPM, and only when reach is the thing being bought deliberately. Lookback windows follow the purchase cycle rather than a house style: thirty days for hardware people research, seven for game codes and anything consumable, and ninety for nothing at all whatever the dropdown offers. Purchasers get excluded from every audience for products nobody buys twice. Your own converting ASINs get negative-targeted so you stop paying to appear beside yourself. Defence campaigns: Contextual targeting on your own detail pages costs money to hold a placement you would otherwise concede. It earns that money when a competitor is actively targeting those ASINs and your basket value carries the CPC, and it does not on your long tail. We will tell you which of your pages are genuinely under attack, which is readable in the product targeting data and which most accounts have never looked at. What we refuse to run: Sponsored Display as a prospecting channel measured on ACOS. Any of it on a catalogue that has not passed pre-flight, because retargeting somebody to a suppressed listing is paying to lose them twice. Off-Amazon placements for brands with an adjacency problem: if your product sits near gambling, loot boxes or age-restricted content, the open placement set is the wrong instrument and DSP with a private marketplace deal is the right one. Who this is not for: Anyone whose Sponsored Products account is not yet in order. Sponsored Display is the third thing you fix, not the first, and a shop that sells it to you before the search account works is selling the easy thing. Brands wanting audience prospecting at scale should be reading the DSP engagement instead of this one. The retainer: Fixed monthly fee, no percentage of media, no minimum spend commitment on our side, thirty days notice either way. The account is reviewed weekly and changed when there is a reason in the data, which in a stable month means two or three changes rather than twenty. If you want to see activity, this is the wrong practice; if you want to see the reasoning, every change we make arrives with one line explaining what we expected and, the following week, whether it happened.