Time to test?: What the new Amazon Retail Ad Service means for brands

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Amazon has launched a Retail Ad Service for third-party retailers.

It promises to make it easy for multi-brand online stores to implement Amazon’s powerful advertising network and tools across their own websites and apps - and easy for brands to advertise across multiple retail networks.

Here’s how it works for both retailers and brands. 

What is Amazon Retail Ads Service?

Amazon Retail Ads Service is Amazon’s way of monetising its own competition, by offering its established ads technology to other marketplaces and retailers. 

The service is a cloud-based platform, using Amazon’s retail media network and tools to allow external multi-brand retailers, such as grocery stores and department stores, to host ads on their own websites and apps. 

This way retailers can monetise their online traffic, displaying their brands’ Sponsored Products ads in contextually relevant places, targeting shoppers where they’re shopping, and driving purchases on their own digital storefronts. 

The service works simply via API. Ads are delivered across search, browse, and product detail pages, and click-throughs stay on the retailer’s website or app. 

The ads are designed to fit in with the native shopping experience: retailers control how the ads appear. Shoppers complete their purchase on the retail site or app.

Amazon Retail Ads Service means retailers will be able to implement a fully-fledged advertising platform with little effort - monetising traffic on their website, increasing revenue and enhancing the shopper’s journey - without turning off shoppers or enabling them to click off-site.

So how does Amazon Retail Ad Service work for brands? 

If you’re a brand interested in launching your ads across retailers via the Retail Ad Service, you need the Sponsored Products Across Retailers campaign, which is currently in beta in the US. 

You don’t actually have to be selling your products on Amazon to use the service (although you will need an Amazon Ads account). 

You can choose which retailers you want to advertise on when setting up your campaign - particularly useful for brands whose products appear in lots of different online catalogues. Click-throughs on each ad will stay on the retailer’s website. 

Amazon promises complete data privacy and safety, and offers its usual data analytics and reporting, helping you make smarter decisions about where and when you place your ads (particularly if you use a data-specialist eCommerce agency like e-Comas!)

Tiffany Lemprière, e-Comas’s Head of Performance Marketing, says: “With the Amazon Retail Ad Service, advertising across different retailers could become easier. Brands can manage campaigns for multiple retailers from the Amazon ad console, which will simplify things.

“But it could also mean more dependence on Amazon. Marketplaces will decide if they want to use Amazon Ads technology, so if a brand wants to advertise on that platform they will have to go through Amazon.

“The question here is: should brands start preparing now? If this becomes a big part of retail advertising, it might be worth testing early.”

What does the service look like? Help us picture it…

Let’s imagine an online pet store, for example - we’ll call it eComPets - selling hundreds of products from different brands. 

By implementing the Amazon Retail Ad Service, eComPets can easily and automatically program ads across its site or app, integrated visually to provide a native shopping experience, and the ads will be from brands sold by eComPets. 

Shoppers on eComPets will like the familiarity, non-obtrusiveness and helpfulness of these ads - Amazon is all about the customer experience, after all. If they click on an ad, it goes through to the product detail page or ‘add to cart’ on that same website (the retailer chooses the shopper’s journey). 

It looks like a great prospect for advertisers. If you are a dog food brand, for example, and you want to place ads on eComPets, you won’t have to grapple with an old-fashioned and clunky in-house advertising system - you can easily program campaigns from the Amazon Ads console, and benefit from Amazon’s decades of data know-how and slick reporting, as well as privacy-safety. 

Does Amazon have a bigger goal in launching the Retail Ad Service?

Is Amazon trying to swallow the ads world, you mean? Possibly. Once again, the eCommerce giant has spotted a new way to drive up revenue. 

Tiffany says: “Amazon isn’t just offering a new tool for retailers, but trying to expand its ad business beyond its own marketplace. It wants to compete with other retail media platforms like Criteo and CitrusAd by using its advanced ad tech, data, and advertiser network.

“It’s yet to be seen how this will affect how brands manage their ads strategy off Amazon, but we can’t wait to find out.” 

Who can use this service?

Amazon Retail Ad Service is currently available to multi-brand retailers in the U.S. with an eCommerce site and/or app.

So far, it’s only available in the US.

We mentioned online pet stores, but it caters to all types of multi-brand retailers: grocery stores, department stores, DIY stores, etc.

What are the benefits of Amazon Retail Ad Service for retailers? 

The main one is extra revenue. 

The ease of use, attractiveness of Amazon for advertising brands, and enhanced data capabilities means you’re almost guaranteed to grow your advertising revenue through Amazon’s Retail Ad Service. 

Amazon promises that ads will be contextually relevant, placed using all Amazon’s usual ad tech expertise, data power (‘trillions’ of shopping signals) and machine learning. 

It also promises a high level of reporting for both retailers and advertisers. 

As a bonus, retailers can use Amazon Ads console to manage their own direct advertisers as well as the Retail Ad Service - so all their website/app’s advertising can be managed in one place.

So, is this a risk for brands… or an opportunity? Watch this space for more info from e-Comas!