I received a note from Amazon to spend money so that more people can buy my books: “Build awareness and connect readers to your books with ads that appear in Amazon shopping results. You can now advertise eligible books available in your Author Central account with sponsored ads on Amazon stores in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom and United States. Sponsored ads are self-serve ads that can help you reach readers looking for books like yours.” Yes, you can advertise right in Amazon; I have written about that business model many times in the past, under the double play strategy.
Amazon has the finest digital advertising business in the world for merchants: “Amazon said its advertising business is growing 32%, and booked $31 billion last year.” That growth is possible because merchants like it. Merchants soup up their products on Amazon so that potential consumers can see them. It makes sense since you are likely spending that money on people who are in the “spirit” to shop. Indeed, who visits Amazon website without being in the buy-sphere?
Contrast that with Google or Facebook which can show you adverts for products when there is no interest from you. Yes, you are in that free blog, working on your college homework, and someone is telling you about a cruise to the Bahamas. Of course, Google is the king of advert.
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In 2021, Google’s ad revenue amounted to 209.49 billion U.S. dollars. The company generates advertising revenue through its Google Ads platform, which enables advertisers to display ads, product listings and service offerings across Google’s extensive ad network (properties, partner sites, and apps) to web users.
This is a slam dunk – there is no reason to put adverts on Google for anything that can be sold on Amazon. Facebook will be a waste of efforts if Amazon carries that item especially if you have a merchant store within Amazon. Both Google and Facebook will give you clicks from adverts; Amazon will deliver sales to the bank accounts. That makes Amazon ad business a superior business. If ads are to take users to commercial sites, Amazon wins because it is the grand-dominion of all digital commerce sites.
The Amazon ad was engineered to serve the Amazon oasis, the ecommerce. Like the One Oasis Strategy, that business has grown after making the ecommerce better through better discovery for premium merchants. Yes, the ad unit has evolved to become a business itself. The Amazon ad business will redesign the industry, affecting Google and Facebook. But do not weep for the latter duo – they will be fine. Yes, they will continue to run the show for a long time but Amazon ad will take most of the merchant advertising within a decade.
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The ads space is not linear, but multidimensional, what Amazon is doing is linear, so can only scratch one side of it.
You will always have more people who are not in the buying mode, so how do you get them to know that you sell on Amazon? You need to go to Google and co to make it happen. Google won’t lose significant ads revenue because of Amazon ads, rather it will be a case of merchants increasing their ads budgets, to be able to settle Google and others on one side, and those in the buying mode via Amazon on the other side.
Conversion is everything, your ads on Amazon is essentially preaching to the converted, largely raising your hand to be noticed; while what you do on Google and others is to drag non believers to your worship centre, and there will always be more people on the latter.
How about a platform that can really make a search well targeted like a vector, rather than what is currently obtainable on Google or Facebook? That is where what will finally upend the current web space as we know it is headed, and the work is already in progress; stay tuned…