Growing up, I loved to whoop my family in Monopoly. I beat my in-laws so badly that we haven’t played since. My Grandma, God rest her soul, had to let her young grandson win or else suffer the consequences of a three hour game (or longer). That same obsessiveness (I prefer patience and tenacity) will be required for marketing leaders to win during the recession. While Meta and Google’s duopoly has been fading into the sunset for some time, the alternatives were accompanied by murky attribution modeling that has left some marketing leaders hesitant to shift strategy on marketing spend.
That’s beginning to change.
As we enter the most critical portion of the year for most marketing leaders, we’re going to take a deeper look into non-Facebook and non-Google advertising alternatives best positioned to break up the Duopoly over the next handful of emails. These challengers are well positioned to bring down CPM rates across the board as more and more savvy marketing leaders diversify their budgets.
Up first: Amazon. The eCommerce behemoth has opened up its ad platform to brands that don’t see on Amazon’s own platform. The catch? Your site has to have “Buy with Prime” set up and if it will take shoppers somewhere between 5 and 5,000 clicks to get complete the journey to purchase. But at the very least, it merits a test for brands able to offer free two-day shipping.
We’ve always advocated for Amazon as a customer acquisition channel before nudging customers to a brand’s own site for retention purposes, but this development could and should take that approach to the next level. I’d assume that the next logical step will be a full-blown ads platform that will allow brands to advertise on Amazon with or without a Buy With Prime button.
Perhaps the most appealing aspect of this is that Amazon’s attribution modeling should be clearer than its counterparts, given that virtually zero organic referral traffic is finding its way to your site from Amazon, anyways. Simple last-click attribution to provide a pretty clear picture here.
The only losers from this development? Brands relying on paid traffic to sell on Amazon. Your CPMs are about to increase significantly as more brands redeploy ad dollars to Amazon. Better come up with a plan B.
Influencers, anyone?
The bottom line: always be testing, especially with newer/underdeveloped/underutilized channels.
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