• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 7, 2018

Geared for marketers advertising on Amazon, Kantar Media on Wednesday announced the launch of a competitive intelligence tool for monitoring and optimizing paid-search performance on e-commerce sites.

Marketers want answers based on Amazon campaigns, so eCommerce Search Ad Insight will initially provide data and information to support Sponsored Ads campaigns running on Amazon.com in the U.S. The Kantar Media platform will allow advertisers to view their competitors’ and their own campaign performance at the keyword level -- a capability that was previously not available.

“We’re heads down on Amazon for now, but we are aware there are other platforms, from Walmart to Home Depot,” said Eric Marcy, president of AdGooroo, a Kantar Media Group company under the WPP umbrella. “We would love to bring the same type of insight we bring to search marketing with Google, and now Amazon, to other platforms.”

Amazon will earn $3.19 billion in net U.S. digital ad revenue, amounting to 3.0% of digital ad spending by 2019, according to eMarketer. It may not seem like much, but the marketplace is growing at a much faster rate than other sites.

In 2017, eMarketer estimated that one-quarter of Amazon’s U.S. digital ad revenue would come from search and that it would earn 1.1% of U.S. search ad spending -- enough to put it in fifth place after Google, Microsoft, Oath and Yelp.

Kantar Media’s e-commerce tool brings insights from what people do, such as the searches they conduct and purchases made, rather than what they say and write in reviews. It focuses on product-type queries, rather than broad questions such as “why is the sky blue” that might lead to other research.

The challenges involved in getting to the top of the list on Amazon are not the same as with Google and Bing -- for starters, product availability. One major challenge is not having enough data to analyze and optimize performance.

eCommerce Search Ad Insight will provide answers around search visibility, how visible are the brand’s products, and the performance of keyword traffic.

“A lot of the research done today for campaign running on Amazon are done manually,” Marcy said. “It takes away from being able to build a broader strategy across categories.”

Through eCommerce Search Ad Insight, advertisers can identify opportunities for new keyword that drive traffic based on gaps in their campaigns and keyword search volume. The metric unique to eCommerce Search Ad Insight shows advertisers the products shoppers most often search on.

GroupM, a WPP company, already uses the eCommerce Search Ad Insight platform.