Amazon Advertising, including its Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands products, provide ad solutions to help users find, attract, and engage Amazon customers at every stage of their journey.
It's a necessary platform to maximize your growth on Amazon, as with any other retailers that have launched or are developing their own platforms. However, it helps to gain a competitive edge and build your brand. Relatively cheap to get started, but needs a dedicated advertising budget as costs will rise with campaign success.
The Sharethrough ad placement was done in a native format that is easy to blend in with the other web content. We designed our ad to make sure it provides a fun informative experience to our customer while selling some of the services.
Advertisers can use Sharethrough to communicate with customers in a way that other ad channels can't.
As advertisers we encourage clients to use content that is interesting to customers instead of just carrying a heavy sales message.
We can use the sharethrough space to create a fun message for customer, however, we always had trouble finding the landing page to take people to. Not every client has enough budget to create a new landing page for every campaign. If Sharethrough allowed for landing page support at a low cost, that would be great.
Another problem was that the placement of the ads were mostly random (at least that's what I was told at the time) It's hard to control where our ad would show up. It is possible that our ad message may be inappropriate with the rest of the content. For example, if this was placed at a news channel, we wouldn't want to have our funny message right next to tragic stories.
The cost/ROI is not where I would like it to be, but I can glimpse the improvements that have been made are making a difference. My expectation is that they will get to a place where the ROI has been adequately addressed. I think the sales have sharpened over the COVID nonsense since stores are shuttering. This has increased the market share for anyone advertising on Amazon.
Google advertising is by far the leader in digital ad platforms, Amazon [Advertising] Sponsored Products really only addresses the need to promote listings on Amazon.com. Sponsored products does not address the need for off-site media, so google advertising is essentially the top of the search funnel whereas sponsored products would be at the bottom of the funnel where conversion happens.
The difference between Sharethrough and the other channels is that Sharethrough allows for a better story telling experience with the multi page carousel experience. We used all the different channels for different types of messages and needs.