Amazon is one of the world’s largest and most powerful digital marketplaces. Although most people view it solely as a website for online shopping that offers a huge variety of products, in the big picture it’s also a powerful advertising and digital marketing channel. More specifically, it’s an often overlooked promotional channel due to the nature of the sites advertising options.
Understanding the different types of Amazon ads can help you more effectively determine which options will benefit your business and give you the best return on investing on paid promotion through Amazon.
Here are the various types of Amazon ads, broken down according to how they can benefit your business. For more insight or expert guidance, contact us at Coalition Technologies..
External Product Ads
In a typical Amazon point-of-sale situation, the consumer sees an “Add to Cart” icon to select the item for purchase. However, in situations where paid promotion comes into play on a certain product being viewed, an external product ad will appear. This icon gives the consumer the option to click through to an external vendor site (your e-commerce site) and complete a checkout via the vendor’s site rather than Amazon’s.
A benefit to this specific Amazon ad option is that the seller of the product (and purchaser of the ad) does not have to be charged a revenue share percentage. These charges can end up being costly and difficult to deal with for smaller-scale outlets. Rather than paying a share percentage to Amazon, the merchant pays a CPC (cost per click) fee for the ad space.
PPC Ads
Amazon’s PPC advertising option, a more common customer-facing ad, sources from the vendor’s Google AdWords account. PPC ads appear at the bottom of search results and product page listings, and are a proven-effective form of digital marketing across a variety of industries. Amazon is a Google Search Partner, so paid ads through this channel may appear on other sites like eBay and Ask.com.
What’s great about the PPC option for Amazon advertisers is the display and appearance of sponsored results. Amazon lists the products as sponsored links, which from a branding perspective is ideal for customer perception. With a paid PPC ad on Amazon’s sponsored links option, your brand is appearing as an Amazon-caliber outlet, standing out from similar products and brands. In the eyes of the common consumer, this could mean the difference between a purchase and a scroll-past.
In terms of cost, PPC ads are structured the same way as similar advertising options: you pay for the clicks that materialize from your placement. In most cases, successful PPC ads will return solid traffic numbers at a cost you’ll be happy with.
Making a strategic choice
With the different types of Amazon ads out there, deciding which route to take for promoting your business on the global product powerhouse can be a difficult decision that requires a lot of research and planning. Making the right choice here means giving your business the opportunity to stand out from competitors, which can be of huge value in the long run.
If you’d like some expert guidance and insight on which types of Amazon ads will best suit your particular business, get in touch with us and let’s talk about it. We’ll give you a completely free consultation, and help you determine how you can better leverage your products using Amazon.