November 2, 2023
Stratably hosted Joe Shelerud from Ad Advance to share his perspective on the pros and cons of using Google to drive traffic to Amazon.
While most brands default to driving Google traffic to their DTC site, Amazon offers conversion rate advantages that may be significant enough to offset the data, control, and diversification benefits of DTC.
Watch The Recording Here
Action Items:
- Opportunity Cost: Estimate the value of a DTC sale compared to an Amazon sale and then consider the conversion rate differences between the two to inform where to drive offsite traffic. Brands that have a clear understanding of the lifetime value of their consumer across these two channels will be best equipped to do this. But brands that might not have that lifetime value capability can also look at it from a one-off transactional perspective. Having a clear financial picture will then serve as the basis for determining if DTC benefits like customer data, better percentage margins, and diversification benefits are worth more than the conversion benefit and (difficult to measure) improvement to organic ranking available from Amazon.
- Amazon Closing the Data Gap: While brands will continue to have the most potential with their own first-party data, Amazon is closing this value gap (and enhancing the value of 1P data) through its measurement tools including Attribution, Stream, and Amazon Marketing Cloud. Leveraging these tools in a sophisticated manner should be a top priority for brands advertising on Amazon.
- Staff Incentives: Since Google ad budgets don’t live within the Aamzon account team, cross-functional collaboration will be necessary. This can even extend to incentive compensation considerations if a brand shifts a meaningful amount of traffic from their DTC site to Amazon.
- Storefront or PDP: Sending Google traffic to the storefront can make sense for keywords that are broader, whereas brands should favor sending to a PDP for more specific keywords. The Amazon team inside the brand can work with their team running Google ads to help map out these differences.
