This week, I completed the Amazon Ads Foundation Certification course, and a couple of weeks ago, I finished my Google Ads Certification course. While going through both courses, I noticed that they shared a lot of the same tools and features, such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, keyword matching, ad rank, and tracking metrics such as click-through-rate (CTR). Google and Amazon are both huge platforms where businesses can advertise to millions of people. Amazon and Google both have their own strengths that can help digital marketers reach different goals. Understanding how they work and what makes them different is important for anyone interested in digital marketing, which is what we discussed in this article today.
What Google & Amazon Ads ‘Offer’
Both Google and Amazon ads use a pay-per-click (PPC) model, which means you only pay when somebody actually clicks on your ad. This means you get tons of free impressions from campaigning PPC ads. Both platforms have a bidding system where companies compete against each other for top spots in the sponsored section of search results. Each bidding system is set up so that businesses can’t just throw money at it and expect to win; you also need to have good content and show that you’re an expert in your field. Both platforms have a “quality check”, where they evaluate your brand and its content to give you a quality score. On the Google search engine, brands need to have good EEAT, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Amazon works similarly, and brands must show other ways they are a reputable brand, such as a complete “brand store”, and using keywords in their product descriptions. Strategies such as “long-tailed keywords” are useful on both platforms because they have similar keyword matching systems that use “exact match”, “phrase match”, “broad match”, etc. Since the two platforms have similar features, switching from Google to Amazon Ads or vice versa is easy to do. Another key feature that Google and Amazon both offer for their ad platforms is that paid search results automatically get the best places at the very top of the page. This can make a huge difference because a lot of people only click on the first few results that they see. This means both platforms provide a way for brands to pay extra to show up at the top of the search results, which also means you can place bids on competitor names as keywords, so your ad shows up when somebody searches for your competitor.
What Are Google & Amazon Ads ‘Main Differences’
Even though these platforms are very similar advertising systems, they’re actually different in terms of reach and purpose. Google is massive, and it has billions of users and handles about 90% of all search queries worldwide. Amazon, on the other hand, has over 300 million users, which is impressive but nowhere near the proximity to Google’s reach. Amazon does claim to have lots of various places to show ads, such as Fire TV, Kindle, and other third-party websites it owns, but it still can’t compete with how dominating Google is on the digital landscape.
The biggest difference is what kind of platforms Amazon and Google are. Google is a search engine where people go during all stages of the buyer’s journey, such as when they’re first learning about a problem, when they’re comparing different solutions/products from one another, and when they are ready to purchase and decide on a certain product. Amazon is an eCommerce site where people go when they’re already pretty far along in the buyer’s journey and are typically close to making a purchase. Although Amazon does have outlets where consumers can go for the awareness stage (such as their Amazon “Reels”), Consumers don’t typically use Amazon search queries like a search engine, which gives Google a huge advantage.
Another difference is the data that platforms collect. Google tracks everything you do online, not just what you buy on one website. This means they have an obscene amount of information about users’ behavior across the entire Internet, and obviously have much more data to pull than Amazon does. While Amazon’s data is also valuable, it is limited to what people do within the Amazon ecosystem. For digital marketers, Google’s broader data means you can target people based on a wider range of behaviors, demographics, and interests.
Takeaways
Google and Amazon ads both offer great pay-per-click (PPC) advertising options with similar basic features like bidding systems, quality scores, and keyword targeting. It is important to know that they’re useful for different things. Google’s huge reach and comprehensive data make it perfect for reaching people at any point in the buyer’s journey and building awareness across the entire Internet. Amazon is better for catching shoppers when they’re ready to buy, or in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey. Knowing how these platforms are similar and different helps you spend your advertising budget more wisely and reach the right people at the right time.