Sponsored Products? Amazon is still the pioneer

Since I supported the rollout of the Amazon marketing tool "Sponsored Products" as an account manager in the Marketplaces team in 2013, I've been a PPC marketing geek and am still in charge of this operationally at mokebo, simply because I enjoy it so much.

Of course, I've also dug into Amazon's Display & Brand Ads again and again and tried to scale them. In the end, it always comes back to SP, which works best for us - despite comparatively high CPCs. Why? I think the good performance is by design - customers, like myself, are used to shopping results from a search results page, an SP ad comes closest to that.

Display & Brand campaigns, on the other hand, are much more obvious and often look promotional and unnatural, similar to native ads. A phenomenon that surely everyone knows from news sites like WELT.de.

SP ads will continue to move the needle in e-commerce marketing in the future. But this is exactly what leads to the dilemma: the ad format is so pervasive that the costs per click in auctions skyrocket and make customer acquisition costs more expensive. In order to control CAC and CPC, we increasingly exclude the high-volume keywords, for example, when starting product campaigns. In my view, only those who consciously make concessions elsewhere in the price calculation, e.g. in product quality or sustainability, can afford to bid consistently on high-volume keywords in order to be able to allow higher CACs.

What are your thoughts?