Amazon’s rapid advertising growth
Amazon Advertising is growing rapidly and some brands, particularly those with consumer packaged goods, are shifting 50-60% of their Google Search ad budgets over to Amazon. (Source)
In its third quarter this year Amazon saw its advertising budgets climb 122% year over year to $2.5 billion. An eMarketer report stated that Amazon was the third largest digital advertising platform.
While it still has a way to go before catching up with Google and Facebook in terms of market worth, Amazon Advertising is helping the company experience faster growth than all other major digital advertising companies.
Why is Amazon valuable for brands?
Brands see Amazon Advertising as having more of a finger on the pulse of people’s shopping habits than other digital advertising platforms.
With 20+ years in business, Amazon has a wealth of unique first party shopper data. Over the years they’ve observed billions of shopping patterns. These observations have informed their advertising platform to help advertisers to reach customers at every step of the purchasing journey.
These shopping behaviours and observations include:
- Product interests
- What people want to buy
- What people bought and how
- People’s habits, life moments
- Information on people who aren’t customers yet.
Amazon’s data is also constantly updated in real-time. This is extremely valuable to brands in targeting people at exactly the right time and increasing conversions to purchase.
Stats:
49% of product searches begin on Amazon (Source)
90% of product searches on Amazon end with a purchase (Source)
Currently Amazon Advertising is only available in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan and Mexico. However, given its rapid growth, we can anticipate that the advertising platform will soon be available in more regions.
How to leverage influencers with Amazon Advertising
You can use influencer produced content on Amazon Advertising products, in particular DSP and Amazon Stores, to improve the ROI of your campaigns.
Influencer marketing and programmatic advertising is a marriage of convenience. It gives advertisers the perfect combination of data and creativity. To prevent ad fatigue you can use a variety of high-quality influencer assets in your programmatic campaigns on Amazon Advertising and optimise on the highest performing pieces of content.
Different kinds of people are attracted to different kinds of content. Having a variety of influencer assets at hand can help you to target the best person. From still imagery, to cinemagraphs and video, influencer produced content can be used for any format, any placement at scale.
Amazon Advertising Cheat Sheet
Amazon’s recently re-branded their Advertising platform which has thankfully meant the phasing out of some rather confusing acronyms (AMG, AMS, AAP).
Now they have consolidated it under the umbrella of Amazon Advertising with products that include sponsored ads, stores and DSP. We highlight some of these below.
Amazon’s Demand Side Platform (DSP)
This is a programmatic display advertising platform. It uses technology to buy and manage your display/video advertising mix more efficiently. DSP uses the cost-per-impression (CPM) model.
Objectives you can achieve with DSP:
- Brand awareness
- New product launch
- Increase sales
- Drive traffic
- Reach new audiences
DSP ads can appear in these formats:
- Desktop and mobile web display ads (high resolution ads that can be seen on Amazon and other sites around the web)
- Video ads (in-stream or out-stream video that run on third party websites)
- Mobile banner ads (uses apps on Android, Kindle Fire and iOS to display advertising)
- Mobile interstitial ads (full-screen mobile ads that cover the entire interface of their host app)
You can:
- Target people on and off amazon.com and Amazon owned sites
- Drive people to your amazon.com product/store or to another website
- Target people at all different stages of the sales funnel
- Re-target people from shoppers who visited your brand’s site (pixel), shoppers who viewed your product but didn’t purchase, shoppers who viewed other products from your brand and shoppers browsing products similar to yours.
- Include customer reviews/rating stars in your ad to add credibility
Stores
Amazon Stores are a multi-page curated customer-facing website on Amazon for your brand to showcase your brand story and product portfolio.
Using powerful imagery, video and creative copy, you can give shoppers more information about your brand and products. You can drive traffic to Amazon Stores to help increase conversions.
This isn’t available to everybody yet – just brands registered in the Amazon Brand Registry. You can see how brands like Listerine and PRIVÉ REVAUX are using Amazon Stores here.
Sponsored ads
Sponsored ads within Amazon help you to boost your product to Amazon customers with a cost-per-click ad.
You can sponsor a product or a brand to target Amazon customers in real-time as they use the e-Commerce site to research and discover products. Paying for performance, sponsored ads are targeted on a keyword level.
