Amazon DSP Deal Types: When to Choose Each and How to Book One

The kinds of deal on Amazon DSP

Open auction. Also called the open marketplace or real time bidding. Anyone can bid, the highest bid wins, nothing is agreed in advance. No deal is involved. It gives you the widest reach, and you know the least about where your ad ends up. These are the basic inventory options you select when you build a campaign on Amazon.

Private auction. An auction too, but it lives in a different part of the Amazon interface and comes with more rules. The publisher sets a floor price, you bid at or above it, and you can change targeting, bids and budget whenever you want. You will also see it called a private marketplace, or PMP. About 98% of the deals sitting ready to attach in Amazon DSP are these.

Preferred. A fixed price and a first look at the inventory before it goes to auction. Nobody is committed: you can pass on any impression, and the publisher does not have to fill. You get a price agreed in advance without putting budget behind it. Most of these are only available through a proposal, which is an extra agreement with the publisher and mostly a formality.

Programmatic guaranteed. Price and volume both agreed before the campaign starts. No auction, no bidding. The publisher holds the impressions for you and you commit the spend. These also go through a proposal, and the process is not difficult.

Most programmatic experts use more than one kind of deal

Preferred and guaranteed deals are written around your dates, your budget and your targeting, so they cannot exist before you ask for one. That request is called a proposal.

It works like this. You tell the publisher what you want: the market, the dates, the budget, the ad length and the targeting. The publisher comes back with a price, and for a guaranteed deal, the number of impressions it will hold for you. If you agree, the deal appears in your account and you attach it to the campaign like any other.

Plenty of publishers accept proposals on Amazon DSP, mostly for streaming TV: Prime Video, Twitch, Fire TV, Netflix, Tubi, Fubo, Samsung, LG and more. About two thirds of them can be booked as guaranteed. In the Amazon DSP interface proposals sit on a different screen from the deals you attach every day, which is why a lot of plans never include one.

Which one to use when

Most plans use more than one.

Private auction deals are the ones you run all year. They work for brand building, for products people buy all year round, and for anything with a long decision cycle. Nobody has committed to anything, so you can move the money when the campaign tells you to.

When you have a launch, a niche audience, or a campaign that falls outside your usual targeting, this is when you want a deal of your own. It works the same way as any other private auction deal, except the terms are the ones you asked for.

Guaranteed is worth it in the few weeks when you cannot afford to underdeliver. Black Friday, a launch week, whatever your peak is. The rest of the year you would be paying extra for certainty you don't need.

It is not always the better deal. With some publishers, like Netflix, a guaranteed deal means an account team, giving up Amazon's targeting, and often a minimum spend.

Proposal deals

A proposal deal is the path inside the Amazon interface for agreeing deals with different providers, instead of emailing someone at each one. It is an easier path, but it still involves more planning and configuration work than using the ready made deals on Amazon. The main benefit is usually control and price. Netflix proposal deal CPMs, for example, are usually about 3% cheaper than the ready made ones.

Proposal deals are also useful for understanding how much inventory is really available: a Prime Video guaranteed proposal tells you what it can deliver against your targeting before you commit, which a private auction never does (Prime Video guide). You can do this before you start a campaign, or to troubleshoot one that is not delivering well.

Managing your inventory, including proposals, in DSP Launch Studio

Inventory is a key part of planning a campaign, and we think we have the easiest interface for picking publishers and deals on Amazon DSP. Everything available in your country sits in one place, whatever kind of deal it is and whatever it takes to book it.

Each ad format in your plan gets a row of publisher options, with the ones that fit the plan already ticked. Take the plan as it comes and there is nothing else to do. Click into one and you choose what you take from that publisher: its basic inventory on its own, all of its deals, a genre, or individual deals. Where a publisher also sells through proposals, those sit in the same place and are marked separately, so you can ask for a guaranteed or preferred deal without leaving the plan.

If you want to see everything available, open the deal list and use the Deal type filter. Guaranteed, Preferred and Private auction each split into two boxes:

• Ready Made: deals that exist today. Attach them and go.
• Proposal: deals the publisher builds for you, with our help.

Each proposal shows an indicative price per deal type, so you can compare what guaranteed and private auction would cost on the same publisher before you pick one. Add it to the plan and it works like any other inventory in it. When you win the client and publish, the proposal deals are built for you, which saves you and your team the work in the next section.

How to book a proposal deal in the Amazon interface

You can also book it yourself in the Amazon DSP interface. It is the slower way and it runs across a few different pages. In the side menu under Campaigns, click Inventory.

The Inventory page opens on Discovery, which is the deal list you can see when you create a campaign with extra details. Proposals is the tab beside it. Click Proposals, then Create proposal.

From there:

1. Name the proposal, then pick the advertiser and the country of supply.
2. Under Proposed deal, click Add publisher products. Products are named by publisher, deal type, format and market, for example "Prime Video | Programmatic Guaranteed Deal | Video | US".
3. Review the available products and rates, then click Add next to the one you want.
4. Configure the deal: a name, the dates and time zone, the maximum creative length for video, and your targeting. Contextual, audience segments and locations all change the rate, so check the price again after you change the targeting. For a guaranteed deal you also set the budget and the frequency.
5. Submit the proposal for review, or save it as a draft.

The status goes Pending, then Approved, in the Proposals tab. Nothing notifies you, so check it yourself.

What comes back depends on the publisher. Amazon's own inventory is approved and you activate the deals onto your ad groups. Amazon Publisher Direct and Amazon Publisher Cloud can accept, counter on price, dates or budget, or decline, and once you agree the deal id lands in Inventory Hub. Netflix answers in under two minutes with a CPM and a forecast, and you accept, revise or decline it.

Either way, you add the deal to the campaign yourself.