The difference between Amazon ad visibility on mobile and desktop
If you’re in charge of your brand’s digital marketing efforts as well as your Amazon ad campaigns, the mobile versus desktop debate will be nothing new. Ever since Google declared that mobile search use had surpassed desktop, mobile compatibility, optimisation and speed have been ever-present considerations. This also extends outwards to your Amazon adverts as there are key differences between ad appearance and visibility across the two device types. Let’s take a look at how they differ.
Mobile
Amazon offers shoppers two different routes to its marketplace and a stash of products from a mobile device; its app and its mobile site. According to The State of Mobile 2019 report, it sees more traffic from the mobile web than its app, with 57.6% of shoppers loading up Chrome on their smartphone when they wish to visit the site.
Interestingly, the report found that app users, despite being fewer in number actually spend much longer on the site – suggesting that as a seller, you won’t want to discount how your ads appear on the iOS or Android app simply because it doesn’t generate quite as much traffic as the mobile web.
When a shopper does visit Amazon from the mobile web, ads enjoy a prime position at the top of the search results. There’s a “sponsored by” strip at the very top of the screen but other ads are perhaps less obvious with sponsored products appearing below organic results and marked only by a subtle grey ‘sponsored’ label before the title. The sponsored posts are mixed in amongst the organic posts on the search results page, meaning they aren’t as prominent as you may wish them to be as an advertiser. In fact, to the less than eagle-eyed shopper, they may not be distinguishable from the search results.
The importance of having your product ranked in the top 3-4 positions on Amazon, becomes far more important as less products are shown than what is seen on desktop computers.
When you click through to a product page, the sponsored products are much more easily identifiable.
Desktop
Desktop traffic shows a much wider variety of Sponsored Ads followed by organic results. Sponsored Brands (formally known as headline search ads) position extremely well at the top of the page making this real estate fantastic position to dominate search results for high converting keywords.
Far more detail is provided about a product when clicking through such as “key features”, “frequently bought together”, “Compare similar items” and so on. Visitors through desktops have much more information at their disposal which means as sellers, each area of your product description should be optimised and carefully analysed amongst your competitors.
