Amazon Marketing Services or commonly known as AMS has been in India for quite some time. The way this giant search engine created its near monopoly among e-commerce platforms, it has become more essential for brands than ever to have strong foothold on Amazon regardless of they are selling on it or not. There were many pivotal changes in technology and consumer behavior and timely response to those by the tech giant turned around the table of search ecosystem. Now Amazon beats Google in being starting point for product search, smart home speaker shipments or becoming World’s most valuable brand. If not all then here’s few solid facts that advocates Amazon over any other platforms and why it is essential to invest on it –
Buying intent – Most of the people visits Amazon with intent to buy a product. Regardless of which phase of purchase cycle they are in (product research, consideration or decision making), there is sure shot intent that they are actually interested in the product. For a marketeer what would be more lucrative than this niche segment to address
Research – As a matter of fact, maximum product searches starts on Amazon. So whether you are selling directly on Amazon or have offline store for that, you may still want to tap the audience who may have at least slight interest in the product you are selling or the similar one
These facts are sufficient to agree that one may get quality audience on Amazon and understand why advertising on it can be a wise investment for business. Consider the fact that maximum percentage of people browsing on Amazon do not go beyond the 1st page of options appears against your searches ie SERP (search engine result page). Everyone wants to be there on it and hence involve the concept of relevancy, purchase behavior driven by machine learning and algorithm and user experience. Since, it’s practically not possible always for most of brands / sellers to secure the top spots in the SERP, paid promotion comes into rescue.
Paid advertisement on Amazon is called Sponsored Ads and they broadly have two placement grounds for these – search engine result page and product details page (PDP). Formats to cater these placements include Sponsored Brand (SB) ads and Sponsored Products (SP) ads. We are not covering product display ads (PDAs) as these have been announced for deprecation for long time while display ads is the new big thing coming in which we will cover in a later post.
So, the first format in search driven marketing is Sponsored Brands (SB) ads which has features of showing banner with 3 of your products along with a Brand logo and a creative headline (that is the reason it used to be called as Headline Search Ads or HSA earlier). Since it secures the prominent placements like top of search, adjacent columns and bottom of searches, it is greatly suitable for driving awareness for your products. Shouldn’t forget to mention here the ability to redirect traffic to product listing page or your own store page on Amazon to fulfill the branding goals.
Talking about the second format which is hugely popular due pull marketing, Sponsored Products (SP) ads are driven by consumer search queries and therefore have highest chances of conversions at your desired ROI. SP ads target individual products against the search queries called as keywords. The goal is to show your product on first page of search results at the best possible position.
Besides the relevancy factor (which is the most critical), the Sponsored Ads involve lot of parameters to look for in order to get the best out of these. The cost per click (CPC) bid you’re willing to set for these ads, targeting type and strategy can fire up your campaigns to maximize sales and awareness or it may burn your budget without getting the desired results at all. Thus, it is apparent to plan your digital marketing on Amazon carefully and if need be consulting an expert who can help you set up or even run these campaigns on your behalf would be a wise choice.