Sponsored Products tells you what happened at the bottom of the funnel. It cannot tell you whether demand is growing. DSP and Amazon Marketing Cloud can, if they are set up to answer that question rather than to spend a budget.
Flights are phased, not flat
A DSP flight that runs the same split for three months is a flight nobody planned. We start heavy on reach to fill the awareness pool, then move budget into retargeting as that pool becomes worth harvesting. On a recent supplements account the split moved from 80/20 reach-to-retargeting in month one, to 50/50, to 20/80 by month three — and the retargeting side was returning 1.32× ROAS on 23% of the spend by the time it took over.
What AMC is actually for
Not dashboards. Three questions:
Which combinations of ad types actually move a purchase, so you stop paying twice for the same conversion. Which audiences are worth building — cart abandoners, lapsed subscribers, people who bought the complement but not the hero. And what paid media is adding on top of organic, measured by modelling the same period with and without it.
Measuring the halo
Off-Amazon spend shows up on Amazon, and most brands never look. We track branded search volume, awareness-pool size and search ratio weekly, so the effect of a DSP flight is visible while it is still running rather than argued about afterwards.
Charts and the full method are in the supplement case study.