How We Measure Amazon DSP Inventory and Prices

The reviews and guides in the Academy quote prices, deal counts and targeting options. This page explains, once, where those numbers come from and how to read them, so each review can point here instead of arguing it again. Each review still says how its own figures were gathered and when we last checked; the method itself is described here.

The account we read from

Amazon DSP shows different inventory, different deals and different prices depending on the account you are looking from. So everything in the Academy is read from a real Amazon DSP account, not from a rate card, a sales deck or a press release. When we say a publisher has three deals, or that a floor is ten dollars, that is what the platform returned to us when we went looking.

Every client we work with is assigned their own Amazon DSP test account, and that is the kind of account these checks are run from. So when a signed-in reader sees a number, it is the number the platform returns in an account like the one assigned to them, not a figure we took from somewhere else and re-typed.

Floors, not the price you pay

Most prices we quote are floor prices. A floor is the least a bid has to clear for a deal to serve. It is the entry point, not the amount you end up paying. What you actually pay in an auction is usually higher, and depends on who else is bidding, how tightly you target, and when you run.

So read a floor as the lowest a deal can cost, and read our comparisons as comparisons of floors. A publisher with a higher floor is not automatically more expensive to run in the end, but it does cost more to get in the door. Where a figure is anything other than a floor, the page says so.

A moment in time, not a live feed

These are measurements taken on a date, not a live readout. That is why every review carries the day we last checked. Publishers add and remove deals, and prices move with them, so the figures drift over time. When we run the check again, the numbers update and the date moves with them.

We never present any of this as live. If you are planning a campaign and the exact floor matters to the pound, treat the review as a guide to what to expect and confirm the current number in the account before you commit.

One currency, never converted

Amazon prices deals in many currencies. We never convert one into another to make a table line up. When a figure is in dollars, the page says so, and deals priced in other currencies are left out of a dollar comparison rather than converted at some rate we did not measure.

The point is that nothing we quote depends on an exchange rate we invented. A price is shown in the currency the platform priced it in, next to prices in the same currency, or it is not shown in that table at all.

What is ours, and what is not

A review mixes two kinds of claim, and we keep them apart. What a product can and cannot do — the setup steps, the targeting rules, the creative policy — comes from Amazon's and the publisher's own documentation, and we present it as their account of their own product. Where a page shows an interface screenshot from that documentation, it is theirs, which is why it carries their own step markers.

The counts, floors and targeting options we found in the account are ours: our measurements, not an extract of Amazon's data. Anything from a third party — a publisher's audience number, a case study, a trade-press report — is attributed and linked at the foot of the page, and where a figure is a company's own claim about itself we say so rather than presenting it as something we measured.

Why some numbers only show when you sign in

On some pages, exact prices only appear once you are signed in. Amazon does not allow specific prices pulled from the DSP to be shown to people who are not registered advertisers, so where a page quotes figures like that, we keep them behind a sign-in.

We assign every account its own Amazon DSP test seat so they can compare our numbers.