Inside Google's fierce Goliath-versus-Goliath fight against Amazon for shopping dollars

Amazon has built a $15bn+ ‘search ad’ business (retailers just call this marketing)

There are two primary types of shopping: search-driven shopping and discovery-driven shopping. Today, Amazon dominates search-driven shopping: 74% of online shopping searches in the U.S. now originate on Amazon.com (much to Google’s chagrin). You go to Amazon and you search “paper towels” or “hand soap” or “laundry detergent.” Search-driven commerc... See more

The difference in margin between e-commerce and advertising has become a much bigger story than Amazon: everyone from Uber to Walmart to Instacart is pushing into ‘merchant media’, and hiring at scale  

The distribution channels that underpinned the rise of today’s Internet giants have dried up. Google, Facebook, and Amazon serve as a triopoly that dominates online advertising. The three accounted for 90% of US digital advertising in 2020, up from 80% in 2019. The arbitrage that once existed on these platforms has more or less disappeared and CPMs... See more

The difference in margin between e-commerce and advertising has become a much bigger story than Amazon: everyone from Uber to Walmart to Instacart is pushing into ‘merchant media’, and hiring at scale:

As we discussed in last week’s article, Amazon – like Google – is primarily a search engine. But since all its search results – unlike Google’s – are products, it’s easy to rank them by price. If you already know what you want, there’s no point in searching on Google first. Your shopping journey starts and ends on Amazon.