Over the past year, Amazon has been pushing into the digital advertising space at a more aggressive rate than ever before. Expanding its efforts to search, video, and display, the juggernaut has big plans to partner with tech companies, and break into the TV advertising space. In July 2018, it was reported that Amazon’s ad business has grown by 132% year-on-year, increasing its competitiveness against the likes of Google and Facebook, who have suffered a decrease in ad revenue this past year. In line with the rebrand of its programmatic platform, Amazon Advertising, Amazon is expected to experience continued growth in ad revenue.

Advertising through Amazon

Amazon’s latest development has been on the cards for a while, and it’s now begun to sell its search data from its own platform. During a period of relative privacy, this comes as a breath of fresh air to those who work in the programmatic space.

This change will allow advertisers to re-engage users who have shown interest in a brand or a product through search terms, not just browsing behaviours via product pages. Advertisers are now able to target based on search intent behaviour – a very valuable data source.

This will give advertisers the ability to reach out to customers, helping to push them further down the funnel. According to Amazon, it takes users an average of five to 16 days to make a purchase after their initial query, and with more and more customers using Amazon as part of their purchase process to research and read reviews before buying products, its data is more valuable than ever. Display advertisers will also be able to exclude audiences who have already purchased from the brand to ensure only new audiences are targeted.

There are, however, a couple of limitations to the new update. Third-party tracking isn’t permitted on ads leveraging Amazon audiences, and campaigns utilising these audiences need to link back to Amazon. This means that the client must sell on Amazon.

Despite this, the update highlights a change in Amazon’s strategy to re-shape its data policy. Search-based retargeting is now available across the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the US, and Canada, and this number is expected to grow in the coming year.