Amazon Advertising, including its Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands products, provide ad solutions to help users find, attract, and engage Amazon customers at every stage of their journey.
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Smaato
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Smaato is a supply-side publisher platform (SSP) from the Verve Group since the 2021 acquisition.
It's a necessary platform to maximize your growth on Amazon, as with any other retailers that have launched or are developing their own platforms. However, it helps to gain a competitive edge and build your brand. Relatively cheap to get started, but needs a dedicated advertising budget as costs will rise with campaign success.
Smaato is very well suited for user acquisition and retargeting companies. Their overlap in terms of audiences and publishers with other exchanges is very limited, which makes it a great alternative when you need to scale a campaign and want to maintain your frequency cap. They work very well in branding campaigns as well as performance campaigns.
Smaato has a UI where you can control your line items on the traffic you want to receive. That is a key unique selling point that other SSPs don't offer. Most of the items that you will need like reporting can be done on a self serve manner and that is a big plus, specifically for changes that need to happen really fast and you don't need to deal with account managers that may take some time to answer emails.
The cost/ROI is not where I would like it to be, but I can glimpse the improvements that have been made are making a difference. My expectation is that they will get to a place where the ROI has been adequately addressed. I think the sales have sharpened over the COVID nonsense since stores are shuttering. This has increased the market share for anyone advertising on Amazon.
Smaato's account management team is very professional. They are quite fast in terms of customer support, which is very helpful. One item that stands out is that they are willing to understand what you need for each campaign and what is the best way to move forward. They don't just jump quickly into trying to upsell more of Smaato's products (audiences, data) like other SSPs do.
Google advertising is by far the leader in digital ad platforms, Amazon [Advertising] Sponsored Products really only addresses the need to promote listings on Amazon.com. Sponsored products does not address the need for off-site media, so google advertising is essentially the top of the search funnel whereas sponsored products would be at the bottom of the funnel where conversion happens.