Paid Media News & Opinion #110

Amazon’s Retail Ad Service opens ad tech to other retail websites

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> What’s happening

Amazon is making its ad technology available for online retailers to sell advertising spots on their own website on the search, browse and product pages. This means online retailers can leverage the existing advanced targeting and measurement built by Amazon, whilst providing Amazon with another revenue stream and useful data points from across the internet.

This will work like a retail media network; the ads are for products that these retailers sell. Ads will “incorporate availability and price, in addition to contextual information such as shopper search query, category or product being viewed”.

Retailers will be able to choose the ad creative formats, where ads appear across their apps and websites, and how many ads are shown.

> Why we care

1) Amazon will be able to leverage more consumer shopping data thanks to the potential to tap into online retail activity at a global scale. This will naturally help make Amazon Ads' recommendations engine and algorithms more intelligent, improving Amazon Ads campaigns for those utilising this channel.

2) For brands, products should see more reach and lead to more sales as the visibility of products combined with the power of Amazon’s ad technology is used in a wider context.

Paid media helps drive a record-breaking $241.4bn spend during the 2024 holiday season

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> What’s happening

The 2024 holiday shopping season saw a record-breaking $241.4 billion in online spending, an 8.7% year-on-year increase. Within this, paid search was responsible for 29.7% of all revenue generated, confirming it’s position as a crucial channel for retailers.

Electronics, apparel and furniture and home were the 3 biggest sectors, responsible for more than half of online spending, all growing their year-on-year revenue by between 6% - 10%.

> Why we care

Despite all the economic challenges, spend from both advertisers and consumers was still significant and grew year on year, demonstrating the reliability of paid media in delivering measurable ROI at peak times.

Mobile shopping also increased its share of transactions from 51.1% to 54.5%, emphasising the need for robust mobile-first strategies to capitalise, so make sure that is front of mind for now and the future if it isn’t already!

Microsoft Clarity integrates with Google Ads to challenge Google Analytics 4

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> What’s happening

Microsoft Clarity is a free user behaviour analytics tool, and it now integrates with Google Ads to track user interactions and post click behaviour. This new integration could help advertisers see exactly how paid traffic interacts with websites, potentially improving ROI on ad spend.

With new dashboards available in the Microsoft Clarity platform giving visibility into engagement metrics for Google Ads campaigns, advertisers will be able to see paid channel performance along with the existing Clarity features like heatmaps and session recordings.

> Why we care

Firstly, anyone using the Microsoft Clarity analytics platform now gets significant improvements in website traffic performance from Google Ads. The integration enables user behaviour tracking, showing precisely how users interact with the website after an ad click. This offers advertisers huge potential in optimising ad spend, allowing analysis of both ad campaigns and landing page performance based on user engagement data. 

More significantly, this development starts to position Microsoft Clarity as a more serious competitor to Google Analytics 4. Google’s widely used analytics platform doesn’t have universal appeal, particularly with non-tech professionals where ease of use can be a drawback. Should this integration begin to extend to include other advertising platforms, users could be persuaded to Microsoft Clarity.

What else we've been talking about:

• Google Ads’ new Promo Code assets

• Paid Search’s record-breaking Christmas (Holiday) 2024 season

• Microsoft Advertising's new commerce media innovations

• Google Search faces new UK probe

• Snapchat looks to scoop up TikTok users with new campaign