Where he trained / 01
Dr. DSP did his residency on a real DSP book.
Not a deck about programmatic. Full Circle and reMKTR run Amazon DSP as a daily job — bought on our own advertiser accounts — inside a group that has managed more than half a billion dollars of Amazon spend. Every audience that worked, every supply source that quietly wasted money, and every campaign that should never have been switched on is what Dr. DSP learned from.
6.04x
return on ad spend across 30 advertisers, July 2026
$500M+
Amazon revenue managed across the group
100+
brands we've worked with
10 yrs
of accumulated category playbooks, feeding the model
Brands the agency has worked with
HexClad
Cookware
Ridge
Accessories
BK Beauty
Beauty
Beardbrand
Grooming
Epic Gardening
Home & Garden
The Woobles
Crafts
These are brands the agency has worked with, named because they are public. We do not name DSP clients. Programmatic media plans, audience strategies and results belong to the brands paying for them, and a logo wall of advertisers who never agreed to be on it is not a credential — it's a leak. If that's the kind of proof you need, ask us on the call and we'll show you method and anonymised structure instead.
The honest part / 02
Last-click cannot prove incrementality. It never could.
This is the thing the category will not say out loud, because saying it makes display harder to sell. A last-click report tells you which touch happened last. It does not tell you whether the sale would have happened anyway — and on Amazon, where the same shopper sees your display ad and then searches your brand name, it systematically hands the credit to whichever surface was standing closest to the checkout.
What last-click can't answer
- Would this customer have bought without ever seeing the display ad?
- Is DSP creating demand, or re-buying demand your sponsored ads already had?
- When DSP and sponsored ads both touched the sale, which one actually moved it?
- Is your retargeting reaching people who were going to come back on their own?
- What happened to shoppers who saw the ad, didn't click, and bought a week later?
What actually answers it
- Holdouts. Withhold DSP from a matched region or ASIN set and compare against the rest
- Matched controls. Comparable products and geographies, not last year's version of you
- Amazon Marketing Cloud. Where DSP and sponsored ads stop double-counting each other
- Path-to-purchase analysis in AMC. Which combinations of touches actually preceded orders
- New-to-brand as a real metric, not a nice number in a slide
Why Amazon Marketing Cloud is the honest room
AMC is Amazon's clean room. Your DSP impressions and your sponsored-ads events land in the same place, at event level, so you can ask the only question that matters: what did the combination do that either one alone did not? Outside AMC, DSP and sponsored ads each report the same order as their own win, and adding up the two reports produces a number larger than your actual business.
We agree the measurement design with you before we agree the budget. If a holdout is going to be uncomfortable, it is better to find that out in week one than in month six — and if a brand does not want to run one, we will say plainly which claims we can and cannot make without it.
What the book did / 03
Real numbers, scoped exactly as they were pulled.
These come from a direct Amazon DSP API pull on 20 August 2026, covering 30 advertisers in July 2026. They are portfolio-wide across those 30 — not one flattering account picked out of the book, and not a projection.
6.04x
Return on ad spend
Blended across all 30 advertisers in the pull.
78.4M
Impressions
Delivered in the month.
$4.00
CPM
Blended cost per thousand impressions.
$1.42
Cost per click
Blended across the same 30 advertisers.
$5.49
Cost per acquisition
Blended, across attributed purchases.
57,137
Attributed purchases
In July 2026.
20.1%
New-to-brand
Share of those purchases from customers new to the brand.
$4.00
CPM
Blended cost per thousand impressions across the same 30 advertisers.
Read this the way we'd want it read
Scope. Thirty advertisers, one month — July 2026. Not the entire book, and not a like-for-like promise about any single brand inside it. Different categories, budgets, creative and starting points produce different results, and some of the 30 will have done better than 6.04x while others did worse.
Attribution. Those purchases are Amazon-attributed DSP conversions. That is the measurement layer everyone in this market quotes, and by the argument two sections up, it is exactly the layer that cannot prove incrementality on its own. It tells you the media delivered efficiently. It does not by itself tell you the business grew because of it — which is why we reconcile in AMC.
No guarantee. Nothing here is a promise of what your account will do. It is evidence that we run this at scale, competently, and that we are willing to publish the arithmetic rather than a testimonial.
How he thinks / 04
Fable 5, pointed at every audience you can buy.
The model is the engine. A decade of Amazon account data and DSP playbooks is the fuel. Together they produce something a media planner with a spreadsheet cannot: a written, specific reason for every audience, every supply decision and every dollar of frequency — reviewed daily rather than at the next quarterly.
01
Read the whole funnel
Sponsored ads, DSP line items, audiences, supply, frequency and the catalogue underneath them — reconciled across a full attribution window, not a seven-day snapshot.
02
Decide whether DSP belongs
The first honest question is whether display is the right next dollar at all. If sponsored ads still have profitable headroom, or the listings aren't converting, he says so before anyone buys media.
03
Build the audience plan
Retargeting tiers, in-market and lifestyle segments, competitor conquesting, and a genuine prospecting layer aimed at customers who have never bought from you.
04
Propose or act
Bids, budgets, frequency caps, supply exclusions, creative rotation and pacing. Every day — either applied inside your guardrails or queued for your approval. You decide which.
05
Log every reason
Each change is written down with the evidence behind it. If Dr. DSP can't explain why he cut a supply source, he doesn't cut it.
06
Reconcile in AMC
Performance is checked where DSP and sponsored ads stop double-counting, on the measurement design agreed at the start — with rollback triggers on every change that fails its window.
The console / 05
This is what he actually hands you.
Not a media report. Not an impressions-delivered email. A written account update and a stack of specific proposals — each with the evidence behind it, how it will be measured, and the condition that automatically undoes it. In human-approval mode, nothing reaches the DSP until you click.
Account update · week 33 · example account
Your display is efficient and partly redundant, and those are two different problems. The retargeting line items are returning the best reported ROAS in the account — which is exactly what retargeting always does, because it buys impressions in front of people who were already coming back. The AMC path analysis says a large share of those orders also had a branded sponsored-ads touch within the same window.
I want to shift budget out of the deepest retargeting tier and into the prospecting line item, and I want to prove it rather than assert it. Proposed design: a two-week geographic holdout on the retargeting tier, matched on baseline sales, read in AMC.
Separately, a block of third-party supply is delivering impressions at low viewability and has produced no attributed orders in a full window. That is the cheapest money on the table and I'd like to cut it today.
Three proposals are waiting for you. Nothing has been applied to the DSP.
Frequency cap
Retargeting · tier 1
Awaiting approval
Reduce frequency from 12 to 6 impressions per user per week
- Evidence
- Beyond the sixth impression in a week, incremental attributed purchases per thousand impressions flatten while cost keeps accruing. The tail of that curve is the most expensive reach in the account.
- Measurement
- 14 days. Success = attributed purchases held within 5% on materially lower spend, confirmed in AMC rather than the DSP report alone.
- Rollback
- If attributed purchases fall more than 10% within 7 days, the cap returns to 12 automatically and the line item is re-queued for review.
Approve and apply to DSP
Reject
Level 1 · your click required
Supply exclusion
Third-party inventory
Awaiting approval
Exclude a block of low-viewability third-party supply
- Evidence
- Impressions delivering below the account's viewability floor with zero attributed orders across a full attribution window. Same pattern across three line items.
- Measurement
- Expect delivered impressions to drop and effective CPM to rise, with attributed purchases flat — that trade is the point.
- Rollback
- Reversed if total attributed purchases fall more than 8% in 14 days, which would mean the supply was doing something the reporting didn't show.
Approve and apply to DSP
Reject
Level 2 · would auto-apply
Budget shift
Line item scope
Applied · logged
Move budget from the deepest retargeting tier into new-to-brand prospecting
- Evidence
- The source tier's reported ROAS is the highest in the account and its new-to-brand share is close to zero — it is buying customers you already had. Prospecting was pacing out before end of day.
- Measurement
- 28 days, read in AMC. Success = new-to-brand purchases up with total contribution profit flat or better. Reported blended ROAS is expected to fall, and that is an acceptable outcome here.
- Rollback
- Budget returns to the original split if total attributed purchases fall more than 12% for 5 consecutive days.
View in change log
Level 3 · applied inside guardrails, logged
Dr DSP™ Console — representative view. The figures inside this illustration are examples, not a client account.
Your call / 06
You choose how much he does on his own.
"Autonomous" is not one setting, and it should never be the vendor's decision — least of all when real media budget is moving every day. Dr. DSP runs at whichever of these three levels you pick, and you can change it at any time, per account, without renegotiating anything. Some brands sit at Level 1 for a quarter, read the log, and move up. Some never do. Both are fine.
Level 01
Full human approval
Dr. DSP does all the analysis and proposes every change. Nothing touches the DSP without a human clicking approve.
- Every bid, budget, audience, frequency and supply change arrives as a proposal card
- Each card carries the evidence, the measurement plan and the rollback trigger
- Approve, reject, or approve in bulk — one click each
- Rejections feed back into the strategy, so he stops proposing what you keep refusing
The frequency cap aboveSits in the queue until you click "Approve and apply to DSP".
Level 02
Supervised autonomy
Routine, low-risk work executes on its own inside guardrails you set. Anything above your threshold queues for approval.
- Auto-applies: supply exclusions on non-performing inventory, bid steps inside your band, pacing corrections
- Queues for you: anything above the threshold, new audiences, new line items, creative changes
- You set the band — for example, bid moves up to 10% and budget shifts up to an agreed daily ceiling
- Daily digest of what ran automatically, with the same evidence attached
The supply exclusion aboveInside the agreed band — applied automatically, logged, still reversible.
Level 03
Fully autonomous
Dr. DSP runs the DSP account inside agreed guardrails. You review the log and the outcomes rather than each decision.
- Every change is still written down with its reasoning and its evidence
- Every change still carries a measurement window and a rollback trigger
- Guardrails are yours: spend ceilings, target efficiency, protected audiences, untouchable campaigns
- Weekly written account update; drop back to Level 1 at any moment
The budget shift aboveApplied at 6am, measured for 28 days in AMC, auto-reverted if purchases fall 12%.
What does not change between levels
The same evidence trail
Level 3 is not a quieter product. Every change produces the identical written record — you're choosing whether to read it before or after.
The same rollback triggers
Nothing is applied without a condition that undoes it. Autonomy raises the speed, not the risk tolerance.
The same measurement design
The holdout and the AMC reconciliation are agreed up front and run the same way at every level.
The same hard limits
The right-hand column two sections down is off-limits at every level, including Level 3. Full autonomy does not mean unlimited authority.
What he watches / 07
Awareness a media planner doesn't have on their best day.
A human planner watches a handful of these, on the accounts they have time for, and reads the numbers weekly. Dr. DSP watches all of them, on every line item, every day.
Audience performance
Retargeting tiers, in-market, lifestyle and custom-built segments, judged on incremental contribution rather than reported ROAS alone.
New-to-brand share
Whether you're buying growth or re-buying customers you already had — the number that decides if display is worth it.
Frequency & fatigue
Where the marginal impression stops earning its keep, by audience and by creative.
Supply quality
Viewability, placement and inventory sources that deliver impressions without ever delivering outcomes.
Pacing & delivery
Flights that will underspend, and flights burning the month's budget by the ninth.
Overlap with sponsored ads
Where DSP and search are paying twice for the same shopper, reconciled in Amazon Marketing Cloud.
Creative rotation
Which sizes, formats and messages hold attention, and which are quietly dragging the average down.
Downstream readiness
Stockouts, buy-box loss and suppressed listings — spend paused the moment expensive traffic points at a dead page.
Honesty / 08
What he does alone — and what he never does.
Everyone in this category says "autonomous" and nobody defines it. So here's ours, in public. The right-hand column applies at every approval level, including Level 3 — these are not permissions you can switch on.
Runs unattended
- Adjusts bids toward the agreed efficiency goal, within guardrails
- Tunes frequency caps where the marginal impression has stopped converting
- Excludes supply that delivers impressions and no outcomes
- Rebalances budget between existing line items and fixes pacing
- Rotates existing creative against measured fatigue
- Pauses spend when listings go out of stock, lose the buy box, or get suppressed
- Expands and contracts existing audience tiers inside the agreed structure
Always needs a human
- Anything touching inventory risk — he doesn't know your container is late
- Total budget increases and any new flight or market
- New creative, new messaging, and anything a brand team must sign off
- Launching a new product or entering a new category
- Pricing and promotion decisions
- Building audiences from newly supplied first-party data
- Deciding what "worth it" means for your business
- Telling you to stop spending on DSP entirely
When DSP is genuinely the wrong spend
Display is not a default. There are four situations where we will tell you not to buy it — and the demo call is where we look for them, not month three.
Your sponsored ads still have profitable headroom. If there is unspent, converting demand on search, that dollar is worth more there. Display's job is to create demand, not to jump a queue that already exists.
The listings aren't ready. Buying expensive top-of-funnel traffic to pages that don't convert is a way to fund Amazon, not your growth. Fix the page first.
Inventory can't absorb it. Generating demand you can't fulfil damages rank and burns the budget twice.
The budget is too small to read. Below a certain spend, results are noise and no holdout will ever reach significance. You'd be paying for a measurement you can't act on.
If a DSP vendor won't tell you when their product is the wrong purchase, ask them why.
Orbit, included / 09
The whole software suite comes with him. Free.
Dr. DSP lives inside Orbit — Full Circle's full Amazon software suite. Sales, advertising, search terms, keywords, traffic, inventory, finance, ASIN-level profit, and a set of trackers that watch your BSR, buy box, price and fee changes for you. This is software other companies charge a monthly subscription for. With Dr. DSP it is included at no extra cost, exactly as it is with Dr. PPC.
Sales & analytics
- SalesRevenue, units and trend by marketplace
- KeywordsRank tracking by term, paid versus organic
- TrafficSessions, conversion and where they came from
- InventoryCover, velocity and stockout risk
- FinanceFees, reimbursements and contribution profit
- ASINsPer-product economics down to the SKU
Advertising & DSP
- PPC AnalyticsSpend, sales, ACoS, TACoS, RoAS and the hourly day trail
- Search TermsEvery term with an opportunity score and true profit
- Campaign AnalyticsMatch type, campaign type and the profitability map
- Live TrackerToday's spend as it happens, hour by hour
- Dr DSP™ ConsoleThe analysis, the proposals and the decision log
Trackers & alerts
- BSR TrackerBest-seller rank movement by ASIN
- BuyBox TrackerOwnership and loss events
- Price TrackerYours and the competition's
- Fee TrackerAmazon fee changes before they surprise you
- Alerts & notificationsSuppressions, stockouts and spend anomalies
Included, not upsold.
Orbit comes with Dr. DSP at no additional charge — no separate software line on the invoice, no per-seat pricing, and no tier you have to upgrade into to see your own profit numbers. You keep access to every module listed above for as long as Dr. DSP is on the account.
The third category / 10
You've had two bad options. This is the third.
A self-serve DSP seat hands you a media-buying console and wishes you luck. A traditional agency hands you a planner, a monthly report and a retainer. Dr. DSP is the thing in between that nobody was selling — the work done daily, with the reasoning written down and the measurement designed to survive scrutiny.
| Self-serve DSP seat | Traditional agency | Dr. DSP | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | You do | A planner, some of the time | Fable 5, every day |
| Account touched | When you log in | Weekly at best | Daily, every line item |
| Who approves changes | You, manually | Them, told to you later | Your choice of three levels |
| Reason for each change | Whatever you remember | Ask on the next call | Written, with evidence |
| How performance is proven | Platform-reported ROAS | Platform-reported ROAS | Holdout + AMC reconciliation |
| Retainers | n/a | Usually, on a fixed term | No retainers |
| Told when not to buy DSP | Never — you bought the seat | Rarely — it's the revenue line | In writing, section 08 |
| Human expertise | None included | Varies with who's assigned | Operators from a $500M+ team |
| Commitment | Platform minimums | 6–12 month contract | Month-to-month |
| Software included | It is the software | Billed separately | Full Orbit suite, free |
The offer / 11
Thirty days free. Then a real conversation.
First 30 days freePricing is set on the call, against your actual media budget and scope.
No retainersNo onboarding feeMonth-to-monthQuoted on the call
- Fable 5 working your DSP account every day
- A written audience and measurement plan before any media is bought
- An honest answer on whether DSP is the right spend at all
- Your choice of approval level — change it whenever you like
- Every change logged with evidence, measurement and a rollback trigger
- Holdout design and Amazon Marketing Cloud reconciliation
- Operators from a $500M+ Amazon team supervising
- The complete Orbit software suite, free
- Weekly plain-English reporting
- Leave whenever you want
Book a Dr. DSP demo →
30 minutes. We'll quote you on the call, not before.
We're not going to publish a number here that we'd have to renegotiate the moment we see your media budget. What we will do is tell you the structure on the call, in full, before you commit to anything.
Questions / 12
The things people actually ask.
Is this about Amazon delivery driver jobs?
No — and it's a fair question, because Amazon uses the same three letters for two unrelated businesses. Amazon DSP in advertising means Demand-Side Platform: buying programmatic display, video and audio ads on Amazon's properties and across the open web. Amazon DSP in logistics means Delivery Service Partner: the courier franchise programme where owner-operators run delivery vans and hire drivers. This site is entirely the advertising one. If you're looking for driving work or how to start a delivery route business, Amazon's logistics site is where you want to be.
How do you know the display ads actually added anything?
Honestly: last-click attribution can't prove incrementality, and never could. What works is holding out a matched region or ASIN set, comparing against a control, and reconciling in Amazon Marketing Cloud, where DSP and sponsored ads stop double-counting each other. We agree the measurement design with you before we agree the budget — and we'll show you the method before we show you a number.
What does it cost?
Pricing is set on the demo call, because DSP engagements vary widely by media budget, market coverage and how much of the account we're asked to run. The first 30 days are free and there are no retainers. We'd rather give you the real structure in a 30-minute conversation than publish a headline number we'd have to walk back.
When would you tell me not to run DSP?
Four situations, and we look for all of them on the first call. When your sponsored ads still have unspent profitable headroom — that dollar is worth more on search. When the listings the traffic lands on aren't converting yet. When inventory can't absorb the demand you'd create. And when the media budget is too small for any holdout to reach significance, which means you'd be paying for a result you can't read. We'd rather lose the deal than take the budget in any of those four.
Do I need my own Amazon DSP seat?
Not necessarily. We buy on our own advertiser accounts, and the right structure depends on your spend level, whether you want the relationship in your own name, and what your brand or retail team already has in place. It's one of the first things we work out on the call, and it's a structural decision rather than a sales one.
Can I keep approval on everything?
Yes — that's Level 1, and plenty of accounts stay there, particularly early on when real media budget is moving. Dr. DSP still does all the analysis and writes every proposal; he just waits for your click before anything reaches the DSP. You can move up to supervised or full autonomy later, or move back down, at any time and without renegotiating.
Who are your DSP clients?
We don't name them. The brands listed on this page are companies our agency has worked with and are public; none of them are presented as DSP clients. Media plans, audience strategies and performance belong to the brands paying for them. On a call we'll walk you through anonymised account structure and the measurement method in detail, which tells you far more about whether we're any good than a logo would.
Are those July 2026 numbers what I should expect?
No, and we'd be misleading you if we implied it. Those figures are a portfolio-wide pull across 30 advertisers for one month — 6.04x return on ad spend, 78.4 million impressions, a $4.00 CPM, a $1.42 blended cost per click, a $5.49 blended cost per acquisition across 57,137 attributed purchases, 20.1% of them new to brand. Some of those 30 advertisers did better and some did worse. Your category, creative, price point, listings and starting position all change the answer, and nothing here is a guarantee of outcome.
What about creative — do I need new assets?
Usually some, and we'll be specific about what's missing rather than vague about it. Display needs different assets from sponsored ads, and creative is a real cost line that we quote separately and honestly on the call. What we won't do is bury it, or pretend a static image resized six ways is a campaign.
Do I lose control of my account?
No. You keep ownership of everything, you choose the approval level, you can see every change and its reasoning, and the hard limits in section 08 are the real boundary. Total budget increases, new markets, new creative, pricing and anything touching inventory risk always come to a human first — at every level, including full autonomy.
How does this relate to Dr. PPC?
They're siblings, and most brands should think about them together. Dr. PPC runs sponsored ads — the search-driven, bottom-of-funnel work. Dr. DSP runs programmatic display, video and audio — the audience-driven work above it. The interesting question is where they overlap, which is exactly what the AMC reconciliation is for. You can run either one on its own; running both is where the double-counting finally becomes visible.
Start / 13
Put Dr. DSP on your account.
Thirty minutes. We'll look at your real account, tell you honestly whether Amazon DSP is the right next dollar, and — if it is — show you the audience plan and the measurement design before anyone buys a single impression. The first 30 days are free either way, and Orbit comes with it.
Book a Dr. DSP demo →
No contract. No onboarding fee. Cancel anytime.