Which Should I Use for my Business, Amazon Marketplace or Google Adwords?
When you think of new age, cutting edge companies dominating the Internet, who comes to mind? Well, Google and Amazon of course! Aside from racing to dominate the smart home market, they are competing against each other in product listings and showcase offerings online. Whether you’re on team Amazon or team Google, we can all agree that they serve one common purpose, to promote products and increase conversions. In this post, I’ll distinguish similarities, differences, and key takeaways on promoting your products on both platforms.
The Similarities between Adwords and Amazon Marketplace
In an ad function sense, both Amazon and Adwords use CPC, are triggered by keywords, organized by ad groups, optimized for conversions, and are placed before organic listings.
Both platforms use the same keyword match types, broad, phrase, exact, and negative, BUT adwords also only uses broad match modifier. This difference enables Adwords to bring in more qualified traffic that Amazon is losing out on.
When it comes to keyword bidding, both platforms use the auction style: with manual bidding, assisted bidding, and automated bidding.
The differences between Adwords and Amazon Marketplace
The main difference between Adwords and Amazon is that Adwords will take you to a specific branded site while Amazon will never take you off amazon.com. Additionally, Amazon doesn’t allow you to retarget and not every type of Amazon ad is available to every seller.
Each platform has their own standards for ad rank as motives of the users of each platform is different. Prospectors using Google are usually higher on the sales funnel than Amazon.
Amazon uses profit to rank ads while Adwords uses the click-through-rate (CTR) to rank ads. Additional ad rank metrics are outlined below:
Amazon
- CTR
- Conversion rate
- Overall Sales
- Relevance Metrics
- Product title
- Description
- Seller name
- Keywords
Adwords
- CTR
- Landing page relevance
- Ad copy relevance
- Keyword relevance
- Historical performance
Which one should I use, Amazon or Adwords?
You should never put all your eggs in one basket, so the short answer is to use both. The long answer is a very long answer. While Amazon search tends to influence product research when a product is already in mind (ie: brand searches), search still has a very important role in discovery.
Other studies show:
- 55% of people buy a product online after they discover it on social media. Facebook drives 78% of social media product discovery, and Instagram comes in second at 59%.
- Amazon’s share of initial product searches dropped from 55% in 2016 to 49% in 2017, and search engines like Google appear to be responsible, according to a survey from Survata as cited by Bloomberg.
- Search engines are the most popular option for mobile shopping, with consumers favoring them over retailers’ websites and apps, which includes Amazon’s.
- Search still has more search share impression than amazon when it comes to product research.
- Driving traffic to Amazon instead of owned properties opens the consumer up to discover other products. On every page there is room for advertising and “customers also bought” that are not present on owned channels.
Sending traffic to a third party site will also not allow you to retarget users (a very successful tactic on search and social) or collect any consumer emails. It is essential to be mindful of your strategy on each platform and to test what is working and what is not. Search Engine Marketing is constantly changing and in order for your business to thrive, you need to be proficient across the board on Amazon and Google.
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Now, this was a pretty hefty post on the pros and cons of each platform, and if you have any questions about the topic feel free to comment below!
