Survey Highlights Consumer Attitudes Toward Amazon Ads

Marketing platform Skai recently conducted an Amazon-focused survey of 1,000 consumers that revealed consumers' attitudes toward Prime Day and Amazon advertisements. According to Skai, one in every eight digital advertising dollars goes to Amazon Ads, making Prime Day (July 12-13), which is exclusively available to Prime members, a potentially big day for advertisers.

However, half of the Amazon survey participants reported that they don’t remember seeing ads in the Amazon search results in the last 30 days. In a recent post to the Skai blog, Joshua Dreller, senior director of content Marketing at Skai, discussed the survey’s findings, writing that this may be surprising considering nearly all Amazon searches include sponsored ads, but “the fact that [the sponsored ads] seamlessly coexist with the organic search makes sense, given that 60% of consumers don’t recognize paid search ads on Google.”  

“One can imagine that because half of Amazon users don’t ‘see’ the ads is probably a good thing for advertisers,” wrote Dreller in the June 22 blog post. “However, at times, consumers can be somewhat skeptical of ads so if they think your Amazon ad is an organic search result, they may be more likely to read and click it.” 

A few other data highlights from the survey included:  

•  55% of Amazon users buy from Amazon ads they’ve clicked on, though most users don’t click on ads at all. 
•  Only 16% of Amazon customers are wary of Amazon ads. When asked about their usefulness, only 11% of respondents labeled Amazon ads “disruptive.”
•  Three out of four respondents said they don’t mind targeted ads. In fact, when asked about how they feel about advertisers targeting them by the keywords they search or their purchase/buying behavior, most responded it was OK. 
  • 25.5% answered, “It’s helpful. As long as they don’t know who I am, I am fine with being shown ads for products I might actually want.”
  • 45% answered, “It’s fine. I don’t have to click them, so let them advertise to me.”
• Consumers want a second Prime Day event earlier in the year.
• Consumers are using search engines and social media to discover products to buy on Amazon.

Currently, there are more than 163 million Amazon Prime users in the U.S., and that number is expected to grow to over 180 million by 2026, according to Skai research. 

View Dreller’s blog post on the survey findings here.