Amazon Ads are soaring out of this world in popularity, quite like their CEO Jeff Bezos! 
Not only is Jeff Bezos flying into space, his company is quite literally taking over the eCommerce world.
Amazon is without a doubt, the largest online retailer. The company has a catalogue of over 12 million items including… well, just about anything you can think of.
Having a marketplace this big brings both good and bad news for marketers. Large audiences mean plenty of exposure for your company, but the more advertisers there are the more competition.
There are many ways to leverage Amazon’s advertising tools and functionality to increase your ROAS.
In this guide, we’ll walk through the basics of starting out with Amazon ads, look at the benefits of you advertising on this platform, and, of course, help you achieve better results from your ad spend.
What are Amazon Ads?
If you’re new to Amazon Advertising, think of it like Google Ads.
When you type a keyword search in the Amazon search box and results appear, the top results that the searcher will see are known sponsored posts – these are Amazon Ads.
It is an advertising service that works on a pay-per-click (PPC) system. This means that sellers only pay when a consumer click on their ad.
When marketers want to achieve more exposure for their products, they can pay for more desirable positions by bidding on specific keywords. The more desirable positions appear higher up the page leading to higher visibility in the Amazon search engine page results
Sounds familiar right? It’s basically Amazon’s version of Google Ads.
Amazon’s advertising sector is rapidly growing as it diversifies its product range. Amazon DSP (Demand Side Platform) allows advertisers to produce ads at scale and on Amazon.com, Fire TV Sticks, Kindles, IMDb.com, apps, and third-party sites. This broad Amazon ecosystem allows for plenty of advertising opportunities at many different consumer touch-points.
Types of Amazon Ads
Amazon offers a wide variety of ad formats and placements for advertisers to choose from when launching a campaign. There are five main types of ads available which will be briefly touched on here. For more information on the different types of Amazon Ads, along with overall Amazon strategies, check out our recent episode of Optily Radio with Tom Baker.
#1 – Sponsored Products
Sponsored Products are the most popular type of ad available. They show the business’s product listings at the top of the search results and product detail pages. They are pay-per-click, display ads that use keyword-targeting for a business’s products.
#2 – Product Display Ads
These ads are also pay-per-click ads, however, their main objective is to cross-sell or upsell to your customers. The ads are shown below search results, on product detail pages, and on customer review pages. They can also be seen on advertising emails such as:
- Follow-up emails
- Recommendations emails
- Abandoned cart emails
#3 – Sponsored Brand Campaigns
These campaigns allow advertisers to promote keyword-targeted ads of multiple products on the Amazon search results page. Once again, they are based on a pay-per-click pricing model.
#4 – Video Ads
Moving away from the native Amazon store, video ads are placed on Amazon-owned websites such as IMDb, Amazon Fire TV, and Amazon Prime. You don’t have to be a seller on Amazon to buy these types of ads, so they’re more similar to traditional online advertising.
#5 – Amazon Native Ads
Amazon Native Ads are located on a business’s own website. They can be used to redirect customers to the business’s store on Amazon.
Below we can see an example of Amazon Ads for the keyword “Plant Pots”. The ads (labeled as sponsored) are integrated in with native results.
Benefits of Amazon Ads
Like all advertising platforms, there are pros and cons to using it. Choosing the correct advertising platforms for your business ensures you are engaging with the right customers at the right time. Here we will quickly outline some of the benefits of using Amazon Ads for your business:
- Access to customer shopping journey data
- Reduced sales cycle
- Improved brand awareness on the world’s largest eCommerce platform
- Valuable data-driven tracking to help improve ad success
Should You Advertise on Amazon?
As Tom Baker, Founder of FordeBaker said, “Amazon is pay-to-play”. This means that in nearly all cases it’s necessary for businesses to advertise on Amazon.
If you are selling a physical product, you should absolutely be advertising on Amazon. As an eCommerce business, Amazon will allow you to engage with more customers than ever before. Another benefit of advertising on Amazon is that your organic Amazon rankings are also very likely to improve. With more customers viewing your products and leaving reviews, your product listing should rank more favorably.
By reading this article and diving into the different types of Amazon Ads, you will be able to identify which ad set suits your business best. At the end of the day, if you are a growing business looking to scale your operations, Amazon can definitely be a lucrative platform to advertise on.
Conclusion
Amazon’s advertising business is growing at an incredible pace. As the company continues to diversify and expand its ad products across its ecosystem, it is only going to get bigger.
After reading this article you can see that advertising on Amazon provides both opportunities and challenges. To make the most of this advertising platform businesses need to have an effective and efficient ad strategy. To see the benefits of truly optimized ad spend, try Optily – The Only Single Click eCommerce Ad Spend Optimizer for a 14 day free trial.
Would you be interested in learning Optily’s expert tips on how to fully optimize your Amazon Ads? Let us know on our social media!
