Amazon Becoming a Shopping Search Engine?
This week, Amazon launched Product Ads. Essentially, Amazon is testing a cost-per-click ads model where online merchants can buy CPC advertising based on product searches. This initiative was launched without any official announcement, but an email directly sent to product marketers. The categories included for this test program are Electronics & Computers, Tools, Home & Garden and Kids & Baby.
What’s behind this CPC ad model test is Amazon’s aspiration to become a Shopping Search Engine like Shopping.com, for example. Now, in terms of search volume, the majority of searches today still occurs on Google. Amazon is far from being Google’s equal at this point; however, with the new Product Ads program, Amazon hopes to change that.
How it works… as covered by Amazon on this page is pretty straightforward. Upload your products on Amazon.com, customers view them, click on them which leads them to your site’s product pages, get charged for each click as a Cost per Click and hopefully generate a sale.
When users search for products on Amazon, two types of results are popping up: products directly sold by Amazon and products sold by other Merchants (on Amazon.com). With Amazon Product Ads though, sellers who offer related products on Amazon, can now advertise in their product categories through paid ads that will show up to highly targeted searches.
