When it comes to paid search advertising, for years, Google Ads has been the flagship. Amazon is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with in its own right as its advertising capabilities continue to improve.
You will likely be using one or both of these platforms at some point in your career if you have already as a digital Marketing. You might be wondering if your knowledge of one platform will translate to the other if you already have experience.
The main aim of this article is not to tell which one should get the majority of your marketing and paid search advertising budget or to persuade you that one platform is better than the other. We will instead be focusing on the differences and similarities that you as an advertiser can expect to check out while using either platform for the very first time.
Ad Types: Comparing Amazon to Google
Each with their own unique set of advantages that can help you in accomplishing whatever advertising goals you might have as both Amazon and Google offers several of ad types.
We will be focusing on the similarities and differences between the two most commonly used ad types, including Google’s Search Ads and Amazon’s Sponsored Products for the majority of this article here,
The Ad Auction Explained
To determine which ads are eligible to appear when a search is performed and the cost, an advertiser will pay for the click on their ad as both Google and Amazon use the auction. The idea is executed differently by each of the platforms though it is the same.
How Amazon’s Ad Auction Works
Instead of paying your bid amount when someone clicks on your ads, you will pay an amount slightly higher than the second-highest bid is what Amazon uses, which is the second price auction.
It does not mean that you can simply win an ad placement 100% of the time by having the highest bid, as this is quite straightforward to determine which ads are the most relevant to the search and eligible to display as Amazon uses an algorithm, but the thing that entails is completely a mystery here.
How Google’s Ad Auction Works
Google is more transparent about how ad quality affects the auction process though it uses a similar model. To determine AdRank, which is the measurement of the quality of your ad for a given search as Google uses various signals and real-time data. To calculate the Ad Ranks, your bid amount, ad relevance, and expected click-through rate is also used.
You need not have to pay a slightly higher price than the next highest bid for a click, as it is important to note that Ad Rank is factored in while calculating the CPCs. If you have a high Ad Rank, it is possible to win a better ad placement and pay fewer clicks than your competition.
Keywords and targeting on Amazon vs. Google
Keyword Targeting
Being the main way to target consumers, both Amazon and Google use keyword searches. Definitions of both are virtually the same between the two advertisers, and both allow the advertisers to use the Exact, Phrase, and Broad keyword match types.
Although Google is again more transparent when it comes to their definition of a closer variant, it also includes close variants for exact match keywords.
Product Targeting
The ability to use the products instead of the keywords as targets for ads is one of the unique benefits of Amazon Advertising. The advertisers can target the list of products, specific products, or whole categories that you refine based on the number of reviews, brand, and star rating.
Automatic Targeting
With its unique automatic targeting capabilities, Amazon again has a leg up on Google here. Advertisers allow Amazon to do keyword research for them and can also use automatic targeting for their Sponsored Products campaigns.
Amazon matches the ads with similar keywords and products with automatic targeting. It allows you to gain valuable insights into what keywords and products you should use or avoid in your manual targeting campaigns, as you can then view a list of search items and products where your ad appears.
Audience and Demographic Targeting
Here Google wins the race. To enhance their advertising campaigns, Google has a vast library of user data that advertisers can tap into. To target and exclude the users from your campaigns, data such as age, gender, hobbies and interests, device, and more can be used.
By setting a percentage for your audiences to be hyper-focused when it comes to keywords, bidding is how you can also adjust the bids. Almost all of Google’s ad products give you quite a few options to play around with as you fine-tune your advertising strategy as it allows you to use these capabilities.
For DSP or Demand Side Platform is where Amazon has its only targeting capabilities, and this is the display network offering of Amazon. The Sponsored Display Campaigns, Sponsored Products, or Sponsored brands do not support the audience and demographic data.
Other Amazon vs. Google ad Differences to Consider
Conversion Tracking
With Amazon, conversion tracking is quite easy as the revenues and orders can be automatically be tracked for any of the advertised products.
For any event on your website, Google Ads, on the other hand, needs you to create your very own conversion actions. It can be a lead form submission or a purchase. Like while someone adds a product to their cart, it allows advertisers to track the important events beyond just the purchases.
For the first-timers, conversion tracking setup can be a pain. To help you through it, Google offers thorough documentation, and you can get help even from the customer support team.
Automated Bidding
To eliminate the tedious work that is bid optimization, Google Ads offers several completely automated bidding strategies. Google will automatically set the keyword bids and make optimizations for you based on your goals and how your campaigns perform when you are using a bidding strategy like Target ROAS or Maximize Conversions. It eliminates the need to spend hours optimizing bids regularly as it makes campaign management a lot easy.
With Amazon, you need to manually set the keyword bids on your own or use software to manage the bids for you as it does not offer completely automated bidding strategies. To automatically increase or decrease bids for you based on the likelihood of a conversion, Amazon does have two automated bid adjustment features.
# Conclusion
For any online marketing strategies, both Amazon Advertising and Google Ads are great as well as effective advertising tools. They both share several similarities to make it easy to choose one or the other or even both if you are getting started with PPC advertising, while they certainly have their differences.
Dilip Tiwari
Dilip Tiwari is Digital Marketing Expert at USS LLC he likes to share Tips on Digital Marketing Services, Google ads management, Amazon ads management, and other blogs ideas.