Amazon Announces Discontinuation of Amazon Product Ads
Amazon Product Ads Discontinued October 31
The announcement, released today from Amazon states, “While your ads will no longer be visible on Amazon as of that date, you may access your performance reports through December 31, 2015.”
Historically, Amazon Product Ads have filled the void for sellers who could not sell on the Amazon marketplace (whether that’s because of budget, category restrictions, knowledge of the marketplace, etc).
APA allow retailers to advertise on the Amazon marketplace without having to actually sell their products on the marketplace itself by linking to external websites as seen below:
Although Amazon acknowledges the announcement could cause a “disruption”, they are recommending sellers impacted by the change should explore the following options including:
- Selling on Amazon
“If you are not already an Amazon Seller and you are interested in selling your products on Amazon, we encourage you to consider Selling on Amazon, with the opportunity to advertise using Sponsored Products.”
- Amazon Text Ads:
“If driving traffic to your own website is important to your business, we would like to introduce you to Amazon Text Ads*, our newest Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising solution that enables you to run text ads on Amazon. Amazon Text Ads is already enabled in your account.” Sellers can sign in to their existing Product Ads account to get started.
For some sellers, the discontinuation of Amazon Product Ads could potentially be a detrimental blow to their business.
In some cases, Amazon Product Ads have generated a large portion of revenue – even outpacing Google Shopping and cost of sale. Without readily available replacements, the discontinuation could potentially cut into their PPC revenue.
How will the discontinuation of Amazon Product Ads impact sellers?
We asked 3 of our in-house specialist how they anticipate the discontinuation of Amazon Product Ads will impact sellers:
“Because of the size of the program & the amount of traffic available on Amazon, there will definitely be a lot of retailers who are going to feel the sting of not receiving this source of traffic anymore.”
“But it’s not all that surprising that they’re discontinuing the program. Amazon has always taken steps to position themselves as the first option when consumers are searching for products.”
“They refuse to list on Google Shopping because they don’t want to support Google’s continued push into the retail space – Amazon wants customers to come to Amazon first & stay there. Amazon Product Ads drove customers with retail intent off of Amazon which is why the program never really seemed to align with their overall vision.”
“However, it did allow them to monetize listings for products that retailers might not be able to sell profitably on Amazon, or listings from retailers who don’t want to sell on Amazon altogether. Neither of those problems go away with the discontinuation of this program, but there are other ways to solve that problem that don’t involve sending customers off of Amazon.”
– Jeff Coleman, Director of Account Management at CPC Strategy
“Previously when Amazon Product Ads came out, Sponsored Products and AMS were no where near as capable as they are now.”
It seems like Amazon Product Ads was almost a bridge strategy for Amazon allowing them to monetize some parts of their page which will now feature SP and AMS ads.”
–Sprigley Allan, Head of Amazon Development at CPC Strategy
“The affect this is going to have on retailers will vary pretty wildly. For some clients it will just be another lackluster CSE closing down, but for others this will be the loss a lifeline of their PPC marketing efforts.”
“This definitely pushes retailers to invest further in the Marketplace and a more robust sponsored products strategy, but these approaches may not be well suited for many of the retailers who gained the most from a well run Product Ads campaign, and this revenue loss will be more or less irreplaceable.”
“Amazon Text Ads (ATA) has been extremely low volume to date, and there is no guarantee that it will come remotely close to driving a similar volume of traffic and/or revenue when it does ramp up completely.”
– Josh Brisco, Sr. Retail Search Manager at CPC Strategy
For more information on the discontinuation of Amazon Product Ads or how to transition to Text Ads, reach out to Seller Support or email [email protected]
Amazon Text Ads Resources
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