The Rise of Amazon Search

On the fifth day of Christmas Honchō gave to me Amazon search… Nina, our PPC Account Executive, reveals how Amazon has taken the world of search by storm and why you should make it your priority.

Why are so many businesses only starting to invest in Amazon ads this year, when the management platform has been around since 2012? With over 300 million users, Amazon is the perfect platform for both SMEs and big name brands who are looking to gain more visibility for their products. Since the start of this year, Amazon has risen by +122% to be part of the top 5 ad platforms of 2018, becoming third in line after Google and Facebook.

{Image credit: www.amazon.com}

There have been new insights that have shown that most consumers now start their search process for products through the Amazon platform, as opposed to on Google. Amazon has taken advantage of finding that sweet spot of users that are further down the consumer funnel and are ready to buy, which makes the extra step of searching on Google obsolete for certain products.

Organic rankings have also been proven to be boosted through the use of Amazon Ads due to the data collected from enhanced sales history. A product’s sales history is a very strong ranking factor on Amazon – so the more products sold, the higher up it appears in the search results!

How does Amazon Search work?

Ads on Amazon use the same principles and structure of Google and Bing ads; using keywords from a user search enquiry or the search for products to target the ideal users and including negative targeting to refine the search targeting.

The same keyword types are used:

• Broad
• Phrase
• Exact

There are 3 types of ad campaigns:

• Amazon Sponsored Product Ads
• Headline Search Ads
• Amazon Product Display Ads

The ad results appear with the top listings as “sponsored” or include “ad” within the post.

Structuring and targeting of campaigns is through bids with advertisers only being charged for when a user clicks on their ad. This is the same auctioning style as Google and Bing with outbidding to get the first position in the Search results.

How Amazon Ads look

Targeting competitors using brand names as keywords

Results based optimisations

There are the same performance metrics used in performance reporting with clicks, impressions and spend. The revenue-based metric that is used to measure performance from the campaigns is called Advertising Cost of Sale (ACoS). This represents the percent of attributed sales spend on advertising by indicating the ratio of ad spends to targeted sales.

ACoS = 100* (Total Advertising Spend ÷ Total sales)

Amazon has recommended aiming for 10% or under, which is a much stronger result and indicator that the campaign is performing well.

Our verdict

Amazon Ads work for every e-Commerce brand, no matter how big or small! The simplicity of the setup, ease of running the campaign and tracking your performance does bode the question: why isn’t everyone on here?

With 80% of Amazon advertisers planning to increase their budgets next year, Amazon ads are definitely one of the main platforms to keep an eye on throughout 2019! So watch this space because we believe 2019 will be the year for advertising on Amazon.

Tweet Honcho_Search and let me know your thoughts on Amazon search. Merry Christmas!