From recode:
If it feels as though Amazon’s site is increasingly stuffed with ads, that’s because it is. And it looks like that’s working — at least for brands that are willing to fork over ad dollars as part of their strategy to sell on Amazon.
Amazon-sponsored product ads have been around since 2012. But lately, as the company has invested in growing its advertising business, they’ve become more aggressive.
See, for example, our search below for “cereal.”
The first three results, which take up the whole screen above the fold — everything visible before you scroll — are sponsored placements that appear as search results: Ads for Kellogg’s Special K, Quaker Life and Cap’n Crunch. (It’s similarly dramatic on mobile, where it takes up the entire first screen.) This is followed by a section featuring Amazon’s own brand, 365 Everyday Value, which was part of its Whole Foods acquisition.
Not until scrolling down halfway on the next browser “page” do organic search results — non-paid, non-Amazon brands — come up: Post’s Honey Bunches of Oats and Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats and Frosted Flakes.
. . . .
Sponsored ads allow vendors to bid auction-style to have their products show up when consumers type in a related search term. If you’re Duracell, for example, you can pay to have your product show up above or among search results when someone types in “batteries” — or “Energizer.”
. . . .
“Nobody is scrolling beyond the first page when they do a search,” Jason Goldberg, SVP of commerce at SapientRazorfish, a digital marketing agency, told Recode. “If you want to be discoverable, you have to find a way to show up in search results.”
To get that prime visibility, brands are responding with more cash. Spending on sponsored products in Amazon’s search increased 165 percent in the second quarter of 2018 compared with a year earlier, according to data from marketing agency Merkle.
The competition for brands to bid on their own or others’ keywords is fierce, and is leading toward what Goldberg called a “perfectly escalating arms race where all the trends are to spend more money to buy more ads to have better visibility on Amazon.”
. . . .
Amazon’s advertising approach is increasingly important for brands, with about half of all product searches beginning there rather than with typical search engines like Google.
It’s also increasingly important to Amazon, which generates most of its revenue from its e-commerce business. Advertising is its smallest segment, measured by revenue, but its fastest-growing. (Its “other” segment — which primarily consists of money it generates from selling ad space on its websites — generated $2.2 billion in sales last quarter, up about 130 percent from the same period a year ago.) Amazon is now a big-enough advertising player that it’s expected to eat into Facebook and Google’s dominant market share.
Link to the rest at recode
PG doesn’t know if it’s an unconscious response to Amazon’s ads or not, but lately, he’s noticed that, when searching for a product to buy on Amazon without any brand or model in mind, he’s experiencing less success immediately and, sometimes, he switches to Google to run the same search with more useful results.
PG has used browser-based adblockers approximately forever and hasn’t tried Amazon with and without an adblocker in place. If adblockers don’t currently work on Amazon, he wouldn’t be surprised if someone were working on one now.
I find myself scrolling more and more these days specifically because OF this influx of ads … so ‘Nobody’ is my name, too. 🙂
Guess I’m a nobody. 😉 I’ve noticed that the first three search results on Amazon are always ads these days, which has taught me to automatically ignore them and scroll down until I get to the organic search results.
I’m a very loyal Amazon customer and go to the site every day, pretty much, and shop there often, but the plethora of ads is so annoying now. It’s not just at the bottom or the top. It’s in between and everywhere in search results.
And I often scroll many, many pages, sometimes to the very end of the results, even if it’s dozens.
“Nobody is scrolling beyond the first page when they do a search,” Well, I guess I’m nobody. I use an ad blocker and I’m still inundated with Amazon’s ads. But I know what I want and I’m not going to be distracted by sponsored products and first-page choices. Maybe some day it will come to Amazon’s attention that they are actually driving people to scroll beyond the first page.
““Nobody is scrolling beyond the first page when they do a search,” Jason Goldberg, SVP of commerce at SapientRazorfish, a digital marketing agency, told Recode.”
Just another ad company trying to hype that you have to be above ‘the fold’ in order to be discovered (they hope businesses will pay extra for that ‘top billing’. Probably the same ad firm that told a lawyer down here that shouting out his ads will make him more money – all it actually does is make me change the channel – or turn off the TV. 😉 )
> cereal
Wow! Someone’s getting way better results out of Amazon’s search function that I get. Amazon’s search is so broken I seldom use them any more. If you don’t want the first item they want to sell to you, they make it pretty miserable to find anything else.
Last week I needed some threaded rod. So I went to Amazon and typed “1/2-20 fine thread rod”. I got a hit for 3/8 coarse thread rod, then the next two pages were random trash – vitamins, diapers, cellphone covers, shoes, USB drives, and the like.
There have been times I’ve found an item on a manufacturer’s site, didn’t feel like signing up on their site, giving them my credit card information, and paying inflated shipping costs. So I went to Amazon and put in the SKU, copied and pasted right from the manufactuer. Nothing. Then the manufacturer and product names. Nothing. But I could go to any search engine, type in the SKU and “Amazon”, and it’d take me right to a page with that item.
Their “sort by price” button has *never* worked to my knowledge. Amazon gives you the items they want you to consider (probably the ones with the highest margin), but if you click “sort by price” it will just return random items.
I’ve seen articles practically swooning over how wonderful Amazon’s search function is. Those make me wonder if we’re both using the same web site…
I just now opened a tab and searched for “1/2-20 fine thread rod”. 7 of the first 11 items listed were variations on “Precision Brand 27318 – Threaded Rod, Steel, Diameter: 1/2″, Fine Thread Pitch, Length: 6ft, Thread Size: 1/2-20” in various sizes and prices.
Granted, further down there was a sponsored listing for toilet paper, but I don’t see anything wrong with Amazon’s search function in this case. Perhaps you should have your phone/tablet/laptop checked.
[checks again] And now, same here. But that’s *not* what Amazon kept tossing at me last week.
On the other hand, the prices are interesting: I picked up six feet at the local Fastenal yesterday for $35. Amazon’s prices are: $74.27, $307.57, and $604.69 on the first page…
I also got results for “marijuana test strips”, sheet metal screws, bulk toilet paper, and suture kits mixed in. Sounds like the preparations for a hot night in Dallas…
I wonder if Bezos will keep Amazon on this path long enough to lose his company’s edge to a similar company who promises not to drown on-site search results in ads. Or, heck, any online retailer who doesn’t push ads before what people are actually looking for. I know I’m not the only one who shops on Amazon specifically to buy from Amazon.
So the collapse of Amazon may not come from an outside source – but from within …
Neither my industrial strength browser based ad blocker or the whole network DNS based blocker actually block the ‘Sponsored’ links on Amazon.com.Probably because they are being served from Amazon.com as Anonymous notes above.
I haven’t been able to find what I need on Amazon lately. It’s faster to physically cruise around town than use Amazon search. I’ve given up on it unless I *can’t* find anything locally.
Besides, I despise ads, and ignore them on principle.
I, also, tend to find what I want elsewhere, then go to Amazon to check the availability and price. Lately I’ve found Amazon search results less reliable than I’d like them to be so, as an example (because I ride horses), I’ll go to an actual tack shop, see what they have, then search for a specific product on Amazon to compare prices and shipping. I would definitely say Amazon has missed out on some of my business because of this – if the item is pretty much the same price, and the shipping is comparable, I’ll buy from a specialty shop because I find their descriptions and product details more accurate.
I’ve noticed when I’m searching for a book by a particular author on Amazon, after about three or four titles, sponsored ads start popping up in the search results, usually in groups of three. I hate this because the books are not what I’m trying to find. Not only do I view having to scroll through search results that are intentionally something other than what I was looking for as a waste of my time, I tend to become prejudiced against the books in the ads.
Ad blockers work because most ads are third party (and use java script) to the site you’re viewing. It’s much harder to block ads owned by the site itself. So it all depends on ‘how’ Amazon and others show those ads as to how easy/hard it will be to block them.
And Amazon might want to be careful not to overdo the ads – lest others like PG start their searches on Google – which might in turn cause them to shop/buy at other places …