Amazon India opens its homepage to display ads here

Amazon is looking to go head-to-head with Google and Facebook for advertisers’ dollars this festive season, and is wooing brands to put up display ads on its India website and app.

The company has been promoting its ‘Click-out’ campaign since June, media planners and digital advertising experts said.

This is the first time that Amazon is promoting external advertisers to place ads on its platform in India. It previously promoted only sellers and brands that sell products on its platform to advertise their listings.

Amazon has run campaigns with brands such as Citibank and Maruti Suzuki and is looking to acquire more large clients in the run up to the festive season. The ecommerce giant is pitching its large web and app traffic, and understanding of customer intent to drive high-quality leads for brands.

“It (click-out campaign) allows advertisers to use traditional targeting parameters such as demographic, customer purchase value and so on,” said Nihal Nambiar, the associate vice president, strategic solutions, at digital marketing firm iProspect. “These promotions will show up as regular display ads and when clicked, they go out to an external landing page.”

In terms of cost-per-click benchmarks, Amazon’s click-out campaign is a little more expensive than Google and Facebook’s digital ad products, but is cheaper than LinkedIn, analysts said. While Amazon’s web ads product has been available for years now, it hasn’t promoted it until now in India, while the option to show ads on its mobile app was introduced about 6 months ago.

Ecommerce platforms are being drawn to digital advertising largely because of “their scale, as well as their understanding of the commercial intent of a person, which Google and Facebook might not always have,” said Nambiar.

Amazon India isn’t the only Indian ecommerce player looking to make inroads into the large digital advertising market. Walmart-owned Flipkart has entered into a partnership with video-streaming platform Hotstar to help target consumers with more relevant ads on the latter’s platform.

Web analytics platform Similar Web ranks Amazon.in as the fifth most visited website in the country, after Google, Facebook, YouTube and porn website Xvideos. Flipkart takes the ninth spot on the list.

The festive period could be the perfect time for Amazon to make its debut in India’s digital advertising space. While the overall economy seems to be in a downturn, analysts are expecting that spending on digital ads would be up this season.

“No large business would want to lose market share in the most promising period of consumer spend,” said Dippak Khurana, a cofounder and CEO of mobile marketing platform Vserv. “They might negotiate hard with the media companies to derive more value, but brands who want to drive growth will continue to spend.”

Digital ad spending in India will touch $2 billion in 2019, an 25-30% expansion over the previous year, according to forecasts from Dentsu Aegis Network. Digital ads would account for 20% of the overall media spending in the country this year, it predicted.

Note: Nihal Nambiar's quote has been updated to reflect that Amazon has begun promoting its click-out campaigns recently but the product has been around for a while.