Amazon continues to grow as a global brand and as an advertising powerhouse. Consumers have been using it to search for and purchase almost every product possible throughout the US, and more recently across other markets around the world.
As they have innovated, we have to keep in mind that their services have moved beyond ecommerce and have become dominant players in other areas through Amazon Prime, Amazon Kindle, AWS and Amazon Alexa, as well as the purchase of other innovative companies such as Audible and Twitch.
Over the past couple of years, Amazon has launched and scaled their DSP technology, as well as their wider marketing suite. When coupling their media buying technology with their data asset, it is easy to see how the popularity of their DSP for marketers can quickly rise to the top. In fact, in the US (where their data asset is the most scalable) Amazon now has over 10% market share, up nearly 3% points year on year. Their advertising business grew by 52% in the same period.
With COVID somewhat acting as a catalyst for a range of brands digitising and moving into the eComm space, the value of this data only strengthens.
If you are anything like us, you may have some questions around just how important this is for marketers in Australia. The numbers above are US numbers which can sometimes fail to translate into other markets.
We went straight to the source and asked them to talk to us about their media buying platforms. Given all their services are available here, this has allowed them to, over time, create an extremely scalable and valuable data asset with information on the vast majority of the population. As a publisher in Australia, they are actually now considered the 4th largest, behind only Google (incl YouTube), and Facebook.
We spent some time unpacking a few common misconceptions with their team –
- People don’t buy on Amazon in this country: in fact, there was $1.12B worth of purchases on their platform in AUS in 2020, up 99% YoY.
- Amazon data comes purely from their product platform: while this provides the majority of their scalable data, it also includes other properties such as Twitch and IMDb.
- You can only use the Amazon DSP if you have an Amazon storefront: using the Amazon platform to buy media we can optimise towards sales on the Amazon stores OR we can direct traffic to a brand’s eCommerce page and optimise off Amazon.
- The Amazon DSP doesn’t provide anything ‘unique’: the Amazon DSP has unique access to their data, as well as to media (IMDb and Twitch).
- Amazon is only good for performance activity: given their access to all major exchanges, the platform can access video and BVOD ad units as well as standard display. While it is true that their data is fantastic for performance marketing, they have scalable demo, finance, life stages, and interest data that is perfect for branding campaigns that want to target these audiences.
- Amazon is not set up for success post-cookie: quite the contrary. Given Amazon’s data asset is all first party, they are very well geared up to be successful as the cookie deprecates.
At Bench, we have identified this value and have been busy integrating it into our media buying stack, and testing some executions for our customers. Bench platform users can now measure their Amazon ads alongside all other digital media activity. Check out our video showcasing the integration and reach out if you want a live demo.
Want to start measuring Amazon ads activity alongside the rest of your media channels? Get in touch with one of our team to schedule a demo.
