After a year and a half, Amazon has chosen to stop bidding on product listing ads on its Google Shopping campaigns.
Amazon’s shopping campaigns, according to data pulled by the digital marketing firm Merkle, started slowing down around the end of Q1, and then totally disappeared from Auction Insights reports on April 28. Since then, Amazon PLAs (product listing ads) haven’t appeared since then.
“While it’s not uncommon for competitors, including Amazon, to disappear from an advertisers’ Auction Insights reports for a day or two at a time as a result of the natural day-to-day fluctuations in the auctions driving traffic, the widespread vanishing act observed over the last week point[s] to Amazon itself pausing its Shopping campaigns,” writes Merkle’s associate director of research, Andy Taylor, on the Merkle blog.
Merkle said that Amazon’s strongest and most consistent presence within Google’s Shopping campaigns was in the home goods product category. The company’s PLAs were also run in other categories, such as furniture, office supplies and novelty gifts.
According to the Merkle reports, Amazon’s Google Shopping Impressions share in the home goods category took a significant downturn following the end of Q1.
It’s not clear if this is Amazon taking a break in order to retool their Shopping campaign strategy, or if it’s for good.
Without Amazon ads showing up, this could be an opportunity for smaller retails in the same product categories that lack the AdWords budget that Amazon has to take the retail giant’s place.