At Fujisan, we deal with digital marketing for businesses in many industries. But if there’s one industry whose purveyors often underutilize a platform with benefits specific to them, it would be autos and Amazon. Here’s why:
Auto dealers’ hesitation and how they benefit from Amazon Ads
In our experience, lots of car dealerships are a bit reluctant to dive into Amazon-based ads. Their concerns and questions are reasonable; the most common is “Well, nobody is going to buy one of our cars online, so why bother?” This is often accompanied with uncertainty over how Amazon Advertising works, and how running ads on Amazon would help their dealership.
It seems to us that Amazon’s position as an ecommerce site overshadows the fact that, at its core, it’s a search engine — the 3rd largest in the world, in fact, behind Google and YouTube. So while many auto dealers get stuck on the thought process of “Amazon’s an online store and people don’t buy cars online, so it’s not valuable for my business,” what they really should be thinking is “Amazon has 80 million users in the US and 300 million worldwide who can see my ads. That is valuable.”
Furthermore, the average Amazon user spends $1,400 a year there and, while people aren’t going to purchase a car online, the mindset people have when on Amazon is based on making a purchase or researching for a future one.
And what really separates Amazon is that, since it’s an ecommerce site, the data that accompanies it and informs advertisers are based on purchases; advertising on Google allows you to focus on user search intent, Facebook allows you to focus on user interest, but Amazon is where you get to leverage users’ purchase history.
What about Amazon is so helpful for the auto industry?
The qualities we talked about are of course imperative to all advertisers regardless of industry, but what makes Amazon useful specifically for the auto industry? That all comes down to Amazon Vehicles and Amazon Garage.
Amazon Vehicles is an intuitive car research tool for users — it typically links to other car sites. But Garage is where the fun bits come in.
The Garage feature works by Amazon users adding their vehicle to the system. In return, they receive information on parts and accessories that fit their car, deals and rebates, and a medium to share knowledge and ask questions with other users. What this means if you’re an auto dealer is that you’re advertising on a platform that, as of just 2016, had car data from over 35 million people. That’s a freebie.
Combine that with the Amazon Display Network, and advertisers can leverage Amazon Garage data with third party data to run more efficient programmatic display. This Amazon Garage-based focus allows your ads tighter targeting plus allows you to have display ads throughout the internet, not just on Amazon.
Example of Acura Display Ad Through Amazon Vehicles
Example of Acura Vehicle Page Through Amazon Vehicles
Putting the efficacy of Amazon for auto advertising into perspective, a case study in Germany found that 30% of users who interacted with an Opel ad were outside of their standard targeting demographic. Furthermore, almost 50% of visitors to the ad landing page had never previously visited the Opel website. From this, Opel learned valuable insights such as potential demographics to target in the future, which color was most popular (black), and more. They then made creative tweaks to their site and advertisements based on this information and found that, critically, 96% of landing page visitors scrolled all the way to the bottom. Without the insights Opel was able to learn through Amazon Advertising, we can see they’d be missing out on a huge chunk of visibility and engagement.
Bottom Line
In our experience, auto dealerships can often be late to the game — we’re still seeing dealers enter the market on Google Ads, and those have been around since roughly the Byzantine Empire. For any business, playing catch up instead of being proactive isn’t a good call, but that’s especially true when you’re considering a platform like Amazon that provides data so specifically useful to your industry. Every minute you’re not utilizing the insights from Amazon Garage is a minute where you’re losing visibility relative to its ceiling. While it’s easy to believe ads on Amazon won’t result in direct action — again, who buys a car online? — Amazon Garage’s data provides a uniquely efficient means to promote your brand, products, and services to people highly inclined to choose you in the future.
