
Could Amazon Advertising Become A Formidable Rival To Google?
It might be early days, but some experts in the digital advertising field are already calling it – Amazon is the next giant digital advertising conglomerate. This is due to recent reports from surveyed digital ad agencies revealing that they have been shifting about 50% – 60% of ad spend initially meant for Google campaigns, to Amazon, making it the third largest revenue earner in the online advertising industry.
Let’s Explore Amazon’s Advertising Solutions
While this may suggest a drastic overhaul to their product offering, nothing has really changed much. There are:
1. Sponsored Ads
2. Display Ads
3. Video Ads
4. Amazon Stores
5. Amazon DSP
Amazon vs Google Shopping
Let’s delve deeper into the differences between Amazon’s offering and Google’s offering.
Google Shopping is a product designed for online retailers, where they can create a Merchant Center account and upload their entire product data. The beauty of it is that when users search for specific products eg. running shoes, the search results page will show images and prices of the products from different online retailers above the organic search results. Having your ads shown in the results will depend on your bids for the keywords and your landing page’s ranking in terms of Google’s algorithm, which can be detrimental if your website is not that great.
Amazon, on the other hand, is already a highly trusted online retailer, where the appearance of your product ads depends on your bids only. This can be beneficial for advertisers who do not have a website yet. The other good thing about Amazon as a platform is that high purchase intent is guaranteed, due to it being an e-commerce website by nature. They can also guarantee brand safety, which a lot of people do not consider when advertising on Google. What this means is, Google’s platforms have a lot of user-generated content eg. YouTube video channels, where a reputable brand is at risk of having its ads placed next to content which may harm its image and brand story. Whereas on Amazon, users are not yet allowed to generate content.
Advertisers are definitely seeing value in bidding for ads on Amazon. Whether this means, that Google should be worried and relook its business model though, remains to be seen.
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