Amazon Marketing Insights

Looking at Amazon’s latest numbers, one thing is very clear for sellers: Advertising sits at the core of how the marketplace works. Ad revenue continues to grow rapidly because visibility on Amazon is increasingly tied to the auction. Traffic is there, but access to demand depends on how effectively you compete for it. What sellers should focus on: 1️⃣ Build margins with advertising included from the start. Business models that only work without ads tend to break under competition. 2️⃣ Sales velocity drives ranking. Paid momentum often creates the lift that leads to organic growth. 3️⃣ Conversion fundamentals matter more than campaign tweaks. Content quality, reviews, pricing, and inventory health determine whether ad spend scales profitably. 4️⃣ Efficiency creates leverage. Brands with stronger positioning and better unit economics frequently outperform competitors with larger budgets. 5️⃣ Brand strength compounds over time. Differentiation, repeat purchase, and pricing power make higher CPCs sustainable. Amazon today rewards operators who think in terms of acquisition cost, lifetime value, and contribution margin, just as you would with any performance marketing channel. Curious how other sellers are adapting their strategies this year.

Amazon spent $14.1 billion on advertising in 2024. More than P&G. More than Unilever. More than Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestlé combined. 💡 The Ad Age ranking tells us everything about where marketing budgets are actually moving. Global ad spending crossed $1 trillion for the first time. 75% of it is digital. But the real story isn't the total, it's who's spending it and why. The top 5 U.S. advertisers: 1. Amazon ($14.1B) 2. Comcast ($6.3B) 3. Procter & Gamble ($6.1B), 4. American Express ($4.7B) 5. Capital One ($4.4B). Two of the top five are financial services companies. P&G, the brand that defined modern advertising, dropped to third. The fastest-growing categories on the list: insurance and banking. Progressive grew ad spend 150%. Allstate grew 189%. Capital One +14%. AmEx +16%. These companies understand lifetime value the way SaaS companies do. They're buying customers, not impressions. Meanwhile, look at the CPG block: L'Oréal ($3.7B, +5.2%), Nestlé ($2.7B, +7.1%), Unilever ($2.1B, +10.4%), The Coca-Cola Company ($2.0B, +10.8%), PepsiCo ($2.2B, +1.2%). Growth is steady but single digits. The brands that built modern advertising are no longer setting its pace. The platforms collecting most of this money tell the other half of the story. Alphabet Inc. pulled $209 billion in net digital ad revenue globally. Meta: $184 billion. Amazon: $69 billion. These three companies alone captured more in ad revenue than the next seven combine, ByteDance, Alibaba Group, Pinduoduo, Microsoft, Tencent, Kuaishou Technology, and Apple. Amazon, Google, and Walmart appear on the advertisers list. They also own the media networks where everyone else spends. Amazon is the #1 advertiser and the largest retail media network. Walmart is #7 on the spend list and the second-largest RMN in the U.S. Google is #6 on the spend list and captures $190 billion in ad revenue. They're advertisers, media owners, and data platforms, simultaneously. That structural position matters. U.S. retail media is already past $60 billion and headed toward $100 billion. Amazon and Walmart capture 80%+ of that growth. Search, retail media, and social now account for the three largest pools of ad spend globally, roughly $357 billion combined. CTV is growing 15–18% annually. Linear TV is shrinking. For CPG brands, the math is clear. You're spending more every year inside platforms controlled by your retail partners. The budget is shifting from trade marketing and shopper marketing into Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, and Instacart Ads, because those channels sit closest to the transaction. The CMOs who read this list correctly already know: the budget going into Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect is no longer discretionary. It's the cost of staying on the shelf. Sources: Ad Age, EMARKETER #RetailMedia #CPG #FMCG #Advertising Mars Mondelēz International Ferrero Reckitt Diageo AB InBev LVMH

Amazon Ads just announced Dynamic TV Creative for Prime Video. The short version: brands upload one base creative asset, and Amazon automatically personalizes the headline, call-to-action, product imagery, and product details per viewer, based on their shopping behavior. Same 30 seconds of video. Different overlays, different buy buttons, different product cards for different shoppers. Invite-only for now, US advertisers selling on Amazon, with broader rollout in Q3. The feature itself isn't the story. The bet behind it is. Three things Amazon is signaling with this move: 1️⃣ Personalization is becoming the core of every ad surface they own. Not just search. Not just Sponsored Products. Every impression on every surface will eventually be assembled from shopper behavior at the moment it loads. 2️⃣ Branding and performance are collapsing into the same surface. A 30-second Prime Video ad now has a shoppable button tied to your Amazon account. TV ads on Amazon are starting to behave like Sponsored Products with a video wrapper. 3️⃣ Amazon is doubling down on the data advantage everyone else is losing. Meta and Google are bleeding signal as privacy rules tighten. Amazon is gaining it, because their data is first-party, logged-in, and tied to actual purchases across 90% of US households. What it means for your ad strategy, regardless of size: The old playbook was one hero creative, one audience, one message. The direction Amazon is pushing everyone toward is many variants, many audiences, many messages, with the platform assembling the right combo per viewer. You don't need a Prime Video budget to start operating this way. Every ad type already has personalization levers worth pulling: Sponsored Display can run different creative for view remarketing, category browsers, and competitor shoppers. Sponsored Brands can rotate headlines and product trios based on the search query. ➡️ Amazon DSP can serve audience-specific creative to in-market shoppers, lapsed buyers, cart abandoners, and lookalikes, with dynamic e-commerce ads that auto-update price, rating, and Prime badge per viewer. ➡️ A+ Content and Brand Store sub-pages can speak to different buyer personas instead of routing everyone through one generic flow. ➡️ Dynamic TV Creative is the headline. The real story is that Amazon has decided personalized ads outperform generic ones at every level of the funnel, and they're building tools to make personalization automatic. Worth asking: where in your ad stack are you still running one message to every shopper? That's where the easiest wins are sitting.

AI-powered ads are coming. Nobody can seem to agree on how to do them. Perplexity tried ads but pulled back due to concerns about objectivity. OpenAI launched ads in ChatGPT last month. And now Amazon Ads is making a move that I think deserves more attention than either of those. Amazon Publisher Services is in early conversations with sites and external firms to power ads within their chatbots. This isn't Amazon building its own chatbot. It's Amazon approaching from the publisher side first: help platforms monetize, then let the demand follow. The move would extend Amazon's ad tech influence well beyond retail media, give it valuable data on user behavior outside its own ecosystem, and put it in direct competition with OpenAI. Here's why I think this is the one worth paying the most attention to. The AI platforms entering the ad space, like OpenAI and Perplexity, are genuinely innovative. But they're building ads and commerce expertise from scratch. They know AI. They don't necessarily know ad tech infrastructure, advertiser relationships, measurement, or how to build trust with brands managing millions in spend. Case in point: it was recently reported that OpenAI has scaled back its direct checkout ambitions in ChatGPT after finding that users browse but don't buy. Commerce is hard. The infrastructure behind it is even harder. Amazon has spent decades building both. They also bring mature data, measurement, and ad tools that marketers already need and expect. That's fundamentally different from selling placements inside your own AI product. And frankly, it's the approach most likely to work. The proof is already in the numbers. Having spent nearly four years at Amazon Ads, I've seen firsthand how the company builds infrastructure that scales beyond its own walls. ADSP now reaches 300+ million ad-supported users in the U.S. It powers everything from Prime Video to Netflix inventory. It helped drive $21.3 billion in ad revenue in Q4 alone, up 23% YoY. Our data at Skai tells the same story from the buy side: upper-funnel DSP investment surged 72% YoY last quarter while costs actually fell 24%. That's not experimentation. That's marketers voting with their budgets because the infrastructure delivers. Powering chatbot ads for third-party platforms? Same playbook. Next frontier. For brands, this is encouraging. Instead of navigating yet another walled garden with unproven ad tech, you could potentially manage chatbot advertising through an ecosystem you already know and trust. Discovery, recommendations, and transactions blending into AI-mediated experiences, powered by the same infrastructure that's already working across your commerce media program. The complexity isn't going away. But the right infrastructure can make it navigable. And right now, nobody's better positioned to build those pipes than Amazon.

Your living room TV just became a retail media channel. Two things happened in the last two weeks that most CPG leaders haven't connected yet. First: Amazon Audiences is launching on Netflix. Starting this quarter, brands buying Netflix inventory through Amazon DSP can target viewers based on what they bought on Amazon last week. Not modeled. Not probabilistic. Real purchase data from 300 million shoppers, applied to the most premium streaming inventory in the market. Second: Walmart is rolling Vizio OS onto its Onn TV line, potentially reaching a quarter to a third of US households. Walmart Connect CTV campaigns already deliver 44% new-to-brand buyers with closed-loop attribution from ad impression to in-store purchase. Zoom out and the picture gets bigger. Amazon's ad business just crossed $70 billion TTM. 315 million viewers on ad-supported Prime Video. Ad load doubled to 4-6 minutes per hour. Netflix is targeting $3 billion in ad revenue this year. Retail media CTV is growing 3x faster than retail media search, and retail is already the largest ad category on CTV at roughly 20% of a $38 billion market. The old model: your VP of Ecommerce manages retail media on Amazon. Your CMO manages the TV and streaming budget. Different teams. Different agencies. Different measurement. The new reality: Amazon's purchase data powers your Netflix buy. Walmart's purchase data powers your living room screen. Same viewer. Same data. Same screen. Different budget owners. This is not a media planning problem. It's an org design problem. The brands that unify retail media and CTV under one strategy will compound their targeting, measurement, and creative advantage. The ones keeping trade and brand marketing in separate P&Ls will spend more to learn less. Who owns the CTV buy at your company when it's powered by retailer purchase data? #RetailMedia #CTV #CPG #ConnectedTV #AmazonAdvertising #WalmartConnect

Most Amazon optimisation still focuses on: → rankings → keywords → feature lists → bid adjustments But the longer I work with brands, the more I believe this: Amazon performance is fundamentally a consumer psychology problem. Particularly in emotional categories like pet care. Because customers are not simply buying: “daily multivitamins” or “premium ingredients.” They’re buying: → reassurance → trust → confidence they’re doing the right thing for their dog And in increasingly competitive categories, where CPCs continue rising and products become commoditised, conversion efficiency becomes one of the most important commercial growth levers available. That’s why our optimisation process at Zeal starts with: “The Why Behind The Buy.” Understanding: • emotional purchase drivers • trust signals • customer anxieties • decision barriers • premium positioning psychology Because the goal is not simply improving listings. It’s building PDP ecosystems designed to strengthen trust, differentiation and conversion efficiency. The strongest Amazon brands in the next 3 years won’t just win visibility. They’ll win consumer conviction. And if your PDP isn’t engineered to convert customer intent into purchase confidence… …increasing advertising investment simply becomes a more expensive way to leak demand.

Two of streaming’s fiercest rivals just joined forces in a way that could reshape the ad-tech landscape: Netflix is teaming up with Amazon. Beginning in Q4, advertisers across 12 markets — including the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan, France, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Italy, Spain, and Australia — will be able to buy Netflix’s premium ad inventory directly through Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP). This means Amazon’s DSP users can now programmatically access nearly every major streaming service, from Disney+ and Hulu to Peacock, Roku, HBO Max, and now Netflix. So why would Netflix — which already partners with The Trade Desk, Google DV360, Yahoo, and Microsoft — turn to Amazon? The answer: tapping into Amazon’s powerful tech stack and unmatched data trove. Let me explain... 📈 On the data side: Amazon wields unmatched commerce data drawn from its retail empire. That data translates into highly valuable targeting signals advertisers can actually use to power ads on Netflix, making campaigns more precise, efficient, and performative. Amazon also layers in clean room technology, helping marketers measure campaigns in a privacy-safe way, reduce duplicated reach, and minimize wasted impressions. 👨💻 On the technology side: Amazon’s DSP is deeply integrated with premium publishers and continues to expand its video capabilities. The platform gives marketers a one-stop shop for managing all of their streaming media buying — not just Amazon Prime Video, but now Netflix too. Importantly, Amazon offers discounts on DSP fees for third-party CTV inventory, meaning in some cases it could actually be cheaper to buy Netflix ads via Amazon than anywhere else. My big takeaway? This deal strengthens Netflix’s ad business by making its inventory easier to buy at scale, while positioning Amazon as the leading hub for connected-TV ad dollars. Together, they’re setting the pace in a streaming race where advertising is becoming just as critical as subscriber growth. And it signals a broader industry truth: the next phase of streaming monetization won’t just come from price hikes — it will come from how effectively platforms can build and sell their ad stacks. https://lnkd.in/esxFXsHH

Beating Big Bidders isn't about bidding bigger. It's about bidding smarter with data.       One of the biggest misconceptions in Amazon Ads is that the highest bidder always wins. In reality, advertisers who consistently scale profitably aren't simply increasing bids, they're making better decisions based on what the data is telling them.       Amazon Ads provides reporting that can help separate profitable opportunities from expensive assumptions.         Here's a practical framework many experienced advertisers use:       1️⃣ Start with Placement reporting   Not every placement delivers the same value. Compare Top of Search, Product Pages and Rest of Search instead of treating them equally.   Ask yourself:   Is the higher CPC (Cost Per Click) generating stronger conversion rates?   Is the improved visibility lowering ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sales) or improving ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)?   Or are premium placements simply inflating costs?   The answer should come from your reporting ...not your assumptions.       2️⃣ Adjust bids by placement, not everywhere   A single bid strategy rarely fits every placement.   If Top of Search consistently delivers efficient conversions, increasing placement adjustments may make sense. If performance weakens, reducing exposure while maintaining visibility in more efficient placements can help protect profitability.   The goal isn't chasing every impression, rather investing where the incremental return is proven.       3️⃣ Let Search Term reporting guide your decisions   Broad keywords often hide valuable opportunities.   Instead of focusing only on high-volume terms:   - Identify which search queries actually convert.   - Separate high-performing search terms from those draining budget.   - Expand efficient long-tail queries and product targeting.   Often, the most profitable traffic isn't the most expensive.       4️⃣ Segment your campaigns   Rather than combining everything into one campaign, isolate your highest-priority ("hero") keyword into its own campaign.   This makes it easier to measure Top of Search testing, budget allocation, bid adjustments, and profitability without other keywords influencing the results.   Separate campaigns can then support mid-tail and long-tail keywords that often deliver more efficient conversions.       5️⃣ Make optimization a habit   A repeatable review process helps keep campaigns aligned with current performance:   - Review placement performance.   - Review search term performance.   - Adjust bids.   - Reallocate budget.   - Measure again using a consistent reporting window.           The strongest advertisers aren't always the biggest spenders, they're often the ones making disciplined, evidence-based decisions using Amazon's Ads reporting.       How do you determine when premium placements are truly worth the investment?       #Ad #AmazonAds #Advertising #RetailMedia #SponsoredProducts #SponsoredBrands #SponsoredDisplay #DigitalMarketing #Ecommerce  

We don't pay for any Amazon reporting. Amazon's Search Query Performance report tells us how customers discover our listings. This report tells sellers search volume, impressions, clicks and purchases for their top 1k keywords. Both in total and our brand's market share. To find this report: Brand Analytics ➔ Search Analytics ➔ Search Query Performance   At the top, toggle between 2 ways to view search data: ➔ "Brand View": 1k most important search terms to your brand. ➔ "ASIN View": 100 most important search terms by ASIN.   First: Organize & Label the Data.   Export the top 1k keywords by week as far back as possible. Merge into 1 spreadsheet. A free chrome extension makes this very easy. I'll share it at the end.   In a new tab, list each unique search term and add columns with fields you'd like to filter by. Match these fields into the main dataset. These are the fields I add:  • Keyword type: Branded, Generic or Competitor • Competitor: Yeti, Hydro Flask, etc • Product Type: Adult Bottle, Kid's Bottle, Backpack, etc. • License: Character or Sports Team   Now I can see our performance when customers search for Yeti, ice buckets, Paw Patrol, our branded keywords, etc.   Here are a few ways I look at the data:   1. Search Type   One of my favorite charts is the % of our clicks coming from branded, generic and competitor search terms.   Successfully brand building means more clicks from branded search terms over time.   Generic keywords drove 60% of clicks into our listings. Now branded keywords drive most of our clicks. Growing clicks from branded search is important, this is how we track it. (chart below)   2. How Are Customers Finding a Listing?   Pulling the "ASIN View" report for every ASIN in a listing shows exactly how customers are finding your listing.   For our kids listings, character specific keywords are a huge driver. They sum up to be about 40% of traffic.   "Spiderman Toys" has been a great keyword for us. We can know how we're doing YoY on keywords like this.   3. Amazon Ads Incrementality   Knowing if Amazon Ads are increasing total sales is one of life's great mysteries.   Match this report with Amazon Ads click data by keyword & date.   Test turning on and off campaigns and watch what happens to clicks in the SQP report.   The change in average clicks from a keyword is what ads are actually producing.   You can understand how much money you are lighting on fire with branded ads. Only 20% of branded ad clicks are incremental for us.   4. Simple Modern vs Competition's Search Volume   We compare total searches and clicks for our brand to competitors by week.   It shows relative brand health and who's trending up/down.   It shows us passing Hydro Flask over the last 2 years.   5. Flipping Competitor's Customers   With this data, you can see search volume for competitor keywords.   If successful, this is a great customer acquisition tactic. A great use for SP ads.   10% of our clicks come from competitor keywords.

From replenishment to prestige: Amazon’s $30bn beauty play Amazon generated $30bn in U.S. beauty sales during 2024, effectively challenging the historical dominance of specialty retailers. Data from NielsenIQ in April 2025 indicates that e-commerce platforms now account for 41% of the sector's total sales. A recent report by Kearney highlights that Amazon was the number one destination for US shoppers in front of Sephora and Ulta, not only to buy but also discover products. International growth mirrors this trend, with health and beauty sales in France rising 43% in the first quarter of 2025 according to Iqvia. Once viewed primarily as a channel for mass-market replenishment, the platform has secured strategic partnerships with prestige players including Estée Lauder Companies. Brands such as Clinique and Charlotte Tilbury have launched official storefronts to regain control over distribution and brand equity. This expansion aligns with evolving consumer habits, as shoppers increasingly utilize the site for validation, with 57% checking ingredients and scientific credentials prior to purchase according to Front Row. The platform has become a hub for discovery, with K-Beauty terms capturing 20% of all beauty searches according to CEW. To compete with physical counters, the company is deploying AI tools for virtual shade matching and diagnostics. But a complementary direct presence is now also becoming essential as shown by the opening of an Amazon beauty store in Milan in February 2025. As digital and physical retail converge, the barrier between prestige and mass is eroding.