Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Amazon's Next Big Business is Selling You

As an advertiser, whose data is the most valuable to you? Facebook, Google, or Amazon's?

It's not an easy question to answer because each company has a unique value proposition. Facebook knows who your friends are. Google knows what you are interested in finding on the internet. Amazon knows what you have bought and can predict pretty well what you want to buy next.

Any company that is trying to sell a product invests a lot of time and money to figure out how to best target its ads. Even though people do not automatically think of Amazon when they think of advertising, it is a company that has huge huge amounts of data that they have not even begun to exploit. Amazon users are further down the purchasing funnel than users on Facebook or Google, which provides a huge opportunity to advertisers. With the amount of data they collect on each unique user, Amazon is uniquely positioned to match advertisers with shoppers.

Amazon plans to have display ads on ad-supported Kindles and continues to work on their ad-targeting data based on clicks beyond Amazon.com to their other owned sites, such as Zappos, IMDB and Diapers.com. Additionally, it has been its own demand-side platform (DSP) that they have been promoting to ad agencies. A DSP powered by Amazon's rich data disturbs the competitive landscape since they are uniquely positioned to best identify a user and match that active user with an affiliation that an advertiser cares about.

With these features still relatively new, many predict that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that Amazon has just started to scale the use of shopper data in its advertiser offerings. There is a lot more to expect!

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