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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.
[...] "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 makes money every time consumers click on an ad — and it still gets to sell whatever people end up buying.
[...] Amazon would not comment on the growth or placement of sponsored ads, but offered this statement: "At Amazon we work hard to continually invent new ways for customers to find the right products to meet their needs. We take the same approach with sponsored products and sponsored brands. We are focused on creating value for customers by helping them discover new brands and products."
Source: recode
(Score: 4, Interesting) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @07:02PM (2 children)
The problem is that the advertisements are starting to interfere with their core business.
For example...every single goddamn time I try to buy anything at Amazon, the very first thing I do is go through the filters clicking pretty much anything with "Amazon" in the filter name. Prime delivery, fulfillment by Amazon, all those options in an attempt to ensure that I'm actually getting products shipped from an Amazon warehouse instead of some small shop halfway around the world that's going to take two months to ship the damn thing. And every single time, I go to the checkout, and they show me one or two shipments. And every single time, when I get the email confirmation, those one or two shipments have suddenly become six or eight shipments, coming from all over the goddamn globe.
Then again, I've had cases where I ordered exactly two of the exact same product (a pack of ten bolts...would fit in a friggin' standard envelope) in the same order, they got sent out from the same Amazon warehouse in Texas...and they shipped in multiple packages that arrived several days apart. I even confirmed with support that I had, in fact, chosen to "group by order into as few shipments as possible". Support also didn't have a fucking clue why they shipped out separately.
Sure, a supermarket exists to sell me things. And I even appreciate the ads they mail out in the form of coupons for shit that I typically buy. But I'm not gonna shop there if every time I walk in there's a dozen loudspeakers blaring various advertisements at me the whole time I'm shopping. There's a limit, which Amazon is trying their hardest to blow right past. Unfortunately, it's a bit harder to hit that limit for an online store because it's easier to conceal the advertising and make it look like legitimate search results.
Christ, you can't even sort by price anymore. I did a search just a few minutes ago, sorted lowest to highest price. And the results I got back were all over the place in pricing -- first item was around $200, then it dropped down to $99, then around $150, then down again to $120...the whole goddamn site is broken, the only thing that works anymore are the advertisements...
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:48PM
The problem with physical stores is you can only buy what companies can afford to list in the stores inventory: companies have to purchase space on the stores shelf.
Sometimes the brand/product you want to buy will only be available online because of it.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:32AM
Now that's a fair argument that may have some amount of truth to it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.