Amazon and Google, two giants both alike in dignity, might not seem like natural bedfellows. After all, Google Shopping keeps upping its game with the express intention of competing with Amazon’s eCommerce prowess.
And are you surprised to hear that Google’s biggest competitor in online searches is not Yahoo, Bing, or Ask, but—you guessed it—Amazon? On the other hand, they have a surprisingly fruitful relationship, with each making a huge proportion of its money out of the other.
Here’s how they work with each other—and how you can boost your Amazon sales and make money.
How do Amazon and Google work together?
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When you’re shopping online, how often do you simply Google what you want—even if you already know you’re likely to buy it on Amazon?
With supreme efficiency of time and clicks, people often search for Amazon products through Google, using terms like ‘Amazon onesie’ or ‘onesie on Amazon.’ These searches naturally result in a very high click-through rate—as high as 35%.
Plenty of people will omit the word ‘Amazon’ from the search term and still expect to find the product on Amazon. The click-through rate for this type of search has been estimated to be as high as 15%.
And they do find the product on Amazon because Amazon has tapped into this increasingly common consumer habit, spending huge amounts of cash on Google Ads. In fact, Amazon is Google’s single biggest client for advertising: it spends $17m a month on Google Ads.
The traffic Amazon gets from Google is vast, far outstripping any other search engine or other sources.
How to use Google and Amazon to boost your Amazon sales?
If you’re investing fairly heavily into Amazon Ads, chances are your ads are finding their way onto Google because Amazon is bidding on relevant keywords.
But you don’t have to wait for Amazon to splash its cash on the keywords that are relevant to you. Amazon sellers can use the same tactics with Google Ads and get similar results.
If you’re unfamiliar with Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords), it works in largely the same way that Amazon advertising does. It’s pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, whereby you set a budget and bid on keywords.
It’s low risk and incredibly cost-effective, and a 200% return on ad spend is typical. You can use similar keywords to the ones you use for your Amazon advertising. You can also experiment with which pages you send your customers to—the product detail page or your Brand Store page.
A good rule of thumb is specific keywords, such as ‘character onesie for boys,’ should go to the product detail page, and generic keywords, such as ‘boys clothing,’ should go to your Brand Store.
What are the benefits?
Googling a product is often the first step of the online shopping journey. So you can catch your customers early to boost your Amazon sales. One of the greatest benefits is it gives you a little more chance to stand out against your competitors.
Think about the search results of an Amazon page. If you’re advertising there, you’re often one of many, all with products similar to yours. Google’s search results have fewer sponsored results, and not as many of them are for Amazon products, so you stand out more.
Your competitors might be bidding on your brand name on Amazon. This means when someone searches for your brand on Amazon, your competitors pop up on the same page, with their listings and images prominently displayed.
They might be doing the same thing on Google. So the same strategy applies to Google Ads as to Amazon Ads: brand defense is a good investment.
Any other reasons to give it a go?
There is another benefit: traffic. External traffic to your Amazon pages, if it’s traffic that converts into sales, boosts your rankings on Amazon, so its algorithms will favor you.
It is actually possible for product listings and brand stores to rank organically in Google. This requires some work, but one first and easy step will be to make sure there are links pointing to the product listings from sites already indexed in Google.
Google Ads convert particularly well because you can target them so accurately. Using not just Google but also Facebook and Instagram to link back to your Amazon product pages will bring customers from new sources, improve your rankings, and boost your Amazon sales.
What makes a good ad strategy?
Here are a few tips from the experts at e-Comas:
Don’t stop at Google
Using social media for your Amazon advertising gives you some of the same benefits, including accurate demographic targeting and valuable external traffic. You can also use it to build customer loyalty and re-target existing customers.
Amazon, Google, and Meta (formerly Facebook) soaked up 74% of all digital ad revenue last year. According to forecasts, they will take 50% of all ad spending, online and offline, by the end of 2022. In the very simplest terms, that’s because their advertising platforms work really well.
Use Amazon Attribution to boost your Amazon sales
It’s still in beta, but this platform allows you to effectively track your advertising success on and off Amazon. It gives you accurate reports on the success of your Google and social media campaigns, showing where your traffic is coming from and helping you fine-tune your keywords and demographic targeting for greater success.
Follow Amazon’s example!
Amazon seems to be the world’s biggest believer in the “spend money to make money maxim.” Its ad spend accounts for nearly 2% of all ad spend globally.
We know that the quickest way to grow on Amazon is to advertise. With a clever, cohesive campaign, you can boost your Amazon sales quickly.
Contact e-Comas for help–we’re an official Amazon Advertising Partner with a great team of friendly eCommerce experts and a proven track record of fast results.
About the author
Founder and Managing Director of e-Comas – eCommerce Made Simple, Jérôme de Guigné is an Amazon expert with 20 years of experience in brand management and distribution, and an inside-out knowledge of how Amazon works. Jérôme and his team of experts work with major multinational brands to develop strong Amazon strategies. They coach their management and operations teams to carry them to success. And they improve their agility in tackling everyday challenges.
