Amazon is Making Advertising Moves

It’s no secret that Amazon is trying to take over the world. Now it is moving into digital advertising. Recently, Bloomberg reported that Amazon stopped buying a type of ad from Google, and now it is being reported that amazon is set to roll out its own remarketing product. This is in the wake of Microsoft announcing the addition of LinkedIn targeting to its Audience Network in an effort to further compete with Google. Amazon appears to be set to do battle with both heavyweights with its own advertising grab.

PLAs and Amazon

Amazon used to purchase advertising space from Google in order to advertise for shopping through Product Listing Ads. At the end of April, Merkle noticed that Amazon had simply stopped purchasing these ad spaces. Speculation then was that Amazon was about to start competing with Google in this PLA space, but now that speculation is all but confirmed with Amazon announcing its new PLA offering.

While Google’s PLAs have historically outperformed Amazon’s, Amazon now has the opportunity to fine tune these ads’ performance and potentially surpass Google’s PLAs. We wouldn’t put it past Amazon to surpass Google when it comes to ecommerce since Amazon has already surpassed Google in terms of product searches.

Digital Advertising

As we’ve mentioned before, Amazon is aiming to compete with Google and Facebook in the digital ad space. Now Microsoft is looking to be a major competitor as well. Between the four of these massive digital companies, who will win out? We don’t know, but it looks like further segmentation of the market is going to occur where Amazon handles all things ecommerce, Microsoft (Bing) handles all things professional and business related, Google handles the research, and Facebook takes care of all social advertising.

This type of segmentation of markets allows for lots of smaller companies to pop up and start to compete, but for now the digital advertising space is looking a bit monopolized. These four giants look ready and willing to divide the spoils of the internet.

More than likely, not much will change besides what types of ads you see where. However, with the ease of purchase that Amazon has built into their website, we fully expect them to be able to serve some pretty awesome ads based on many more data points that will now be available to them as even non-Amazon users start to see Amazon served ads.