The one thing Amazon could do that would revolutionize advertising strategies

There are lots of talks about Amazon being the real threat to the advertising duopoly giants, Google and Facebook. The reality of the situation currently in early 2019 is the fact that Amazon is still in the infant stages of a true advertising platform to compete. The advertising offerings today on Amazon are extremely limiting and is something even experienced advertisers like us caution on. There is one thing that could change the entire landscape of advertising for Amazon though.

Analytics.

We are still in the first quarter of 2019 and guess what, Amazon doesn’t have a modern-day analytics platform. Believe it or not, if you send traffic to an Amazon product page, there is no way for you to determine if that traffic converted into a sale! This means that it’s extremely lucrative to push any traffic to Amazon without truly understanding what the conversion rate was with data. Even if you use best practices by appending parameters to distinctly track the link, you won’t know any information about it.

Now imagine if you’re a business owner that sells consumer goods through Amazon and also have a website. You have a beautiful website built on Shopify or Woocommerce and do fairly well with it. Chances are you’re probably doing some sort of paid advertising whether it be via Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or Remarketing. You get that sale notification from Shopify every time you get a sale and monitor what your conversion rate is and see what channels are performing on the backend. You can justify what your advertising spend is because you can attribute that spend to actual sales. This can not be done with Amazon.

If Amazon were to lift the curtain and show you true analytics about your product pages, it would change everything.

Despite having a beautiful website the odds are people would most likely convert much higher on Amazon over your website. Amazon leverages tremendous social proof with their reviews, customers have their payment methods already tied to Amazon, they can simply add your purchase to the cart they already are building, etc…

The shift in advertising would change dramatically if we were given transparent analytics on Amazon. As an advertiser, you could justify running Facebook ads or even Google Ads directly to Amazon product pages. The big thing that you have to take into consideration is if the percent you pay for a sell on Amazon worth it versus trying to drive a sell on your website without the Amazon tax.

Conclusion

If Amazon were to develop an analytics platform that gives us clear insight into the various channels of traffic and what the conversion rates are, it would change everything. Amazon rolling out this sort of feature would truly give advertisers a reason to really start giving Amazon some serious consideration as a new platform.

Question

Why do you think Amazon hasn’t rolled out advanced analytics?