Digital Marketing Strategies of Amazon: A Comprehensive Analysis

This report provides an in-depth analysis of Amazon's digital marketing strategies. It begins with an introduction to digital marketing, defining key concepts and highlighting the shift from traditional to digital approaches. The report then delves into specific digital marketing tools employed by Amazon, including search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, digital display advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, and mobile marketing. Each section explores the relevance, importance, and implementation of these strategies within the context of Amazon's business model. The report also examines the role of analytics in measuring the effectiveness of these strategies and discusses the overall strategy and planning involved in Amazon's digital marketing efforts. References to relevant literature are included to support the analysis.

Running Head: Introduction to Digital Marketing
Table of Content:
Introduction to Digital Marketing..........................................................................................................2
Search Marketing..................................................................................................................................3
Need for SEO.....................................................................................................................................3
SEO Process.......................................................................................................................................4
Off Page SEO..................................................................................................................................5
Search Marketing: PPC (Pay per click)...................................................................................................6
Digital Display Advertising...................................................................................................................10
Amazon.com
Introduction to Digital Marketing
Tools of Digital Marketing

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E-Mail Marketing.................................................................................................................................14
Social Media Marketing:......................................................................................................................16
Mobile Marketing................................................................................................................................19
Analytics..............................................................................................................................................20
Strategy and Planning..........................................................................................................................21
References:..........................................................................................................................................23

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Introduction to Digital Marketing
Digital marketing can be understood as the marketing of the product and services using the digital
channels to reach the consumers. It is the promotion of products or brands through one or more
forms of digital media. Some of the examples of digital marketing are social media marketing,
marketing through internet, mobile marketing etc. Digital marketing has brought in disruption in the
marketing world. Traditional approaches of marketing like print advertisement, television
advertisement etc., have taken a backseat, and everyone is focussing on digital marketing. Every
company across globe is investing heavily in digital marketing because of its numerous
benefits(Mooney & Slobodian, 2016)
Search engine optimisation(SEO), Pay per click(PPC), Public relation(PR), Social media
marketing(SMM), Content marketing, Affiliate marketing, Viral marketing & influencer marketing are
some of the different types of digital marketing strategies companies are adopting. These techniques
have a great advantage over the traditional approach in terms of the reach & targeting. The ability of
digital marketing to initiate a 2 way communication makes it extremely useful tool in the hands of
the marketers(Ryan, 2016). It also helps the companies to successfully conduct market research,
research on any new product the company is looking to launch and also to collect and review the
feedback shared by the customers and handle their grievances. The biggest advantage of digital
marketing is the engagement and the conversation a brand can have with its audience. Another
major utility of digital marketing over traditional means is the analytics, with the advent of digital
marketing, marketers have gotten heaps of consumer data regarding their preferences, their buying
behaviour, likes and dislikes, their hobbies, which when analysed provides useful information to the
marketers. Eventually after analytics segmentation, targeting and positioning and remarketing
becomes easier for them (Lanz & Carmichael, 2015)

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For the purpose of the study, Amazon.com is selected. Within the purview of digital marketing, all
strategies used by amazon, its relevance, importance and its future scope will be discussed. The
various digital marketing channels will also be discussed at length along with analytics.
Search Marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing strategy which focuses on increasing the
visibility in organic (Non-paid) search engine results.SEO covers both the technical & creative
elements which are required to improve the website ranking, drive more traffic on the website and
increase the awareness in search engines. Every website requires working on its SEO, not just to
make it search engine friendly, but it also makes the website better(Berman & Katona, 2013)
Need for SEO
Majority of the website traffic is driven by search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing), then comes various
other social media platforms, affiliate marketing which pushes the remaining traffic on the website.
However, search engines are still the preferred way of navigation for the users (Fishkin, 2015). The
advantage of search engines is that they provide targeted traffic, because people are looking for
your content, hence the users are highly filtered and targeted, thus if the search engine is unable to
read the website, it will not show the website in the search result, thus losing out an opportunity to
gain a customer, resulting in revenue loss. Targeted traffic to the website helps to gain popularity,
revenue and exposure like no other channel of marketing. Search engine requires SEO, because they

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need to crawl through millions of website and come up with the most relevant result to the user
(Dwyer, 2015)
SEO Process
SEO process can be broken down into 7 steps
 Website analysis: It involves data gathering and competitor search, it gathers data on
existing traffic, current ranking of the website and some of the best landing pages.
Competitor research on the targeted keywords, best performing pages and backlink
discovery is done in this step (Horowitz, 2014)
 Keyword research: Brainstorming keyword ideas, ranking the keywords & data gathering is
done in this step. Tools like Google keyword, word tracker & SEO moz are used in this step
for data gathering(Romanwoski & Konak, 2016)
 Onsite optimization: It requires website architecture, content and HTML technical
issues(Sauter, 2015)
 Content optimization: The most important element in website, it requires working on the
title, tags, keywords, converting Meta description, landing pages with call to action, working
on internal linking and easy sharing of content (Blasco & Gunduz, 2014)

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 Link building: It involves link consolidation, competitor assets, partner links, freestyle links
and natural link building(Zhang & Cabbage, 2017)
 Analysis and evaluation of the work
 Online reputation management: The last step of SEO process, which requires brand
monitoring, brand engagement and dealing with the feedback (Kumar & Dash, 2017)
Key Elements of SEO
In order to understand the elements of SEO strategy, it is divided in two parts: On Page SEO & off
Page SEO
On Page SEO refers to the techniques which can be implemented on the website to improve the
ranking in Search engine results page, on the other hand Off Page SEO refers to anything to
everything that can be done outside the website to increase the visibility (Seo & Jung, 2016)
 Content: Content of the website is the most important element of SEO strategy. The
content should be relevant and interesting for its users. Average word count for a page
should not be more than 300 words with no repetitiveness on any other page(Seo & Emura,
2013)
 Keywords: While searching on search engine a user puts in the keyword, and if the keyword
is found on the website the result will display it. Hence it is advised to use the keyword in
the webpages and it should look like a natural fit. Unnecessary fitting of keyword will not
result in a good SEO(Bucklin & Hoban, 2017)
 Meta title & meta description: The meta title is the title published in the SERP, it can have a
maximum length of 55 characters, an effective meta tile should have at least 3 keywords in it
and a well-crafted line to define the business. Meta description on the other hand is the text
which is displayed in the SERP under the website(Jette, 2017)
Off Page SEO
 Backlinks: It can be understood as word of mouth advertising. The best way to create the
backlink is by creating great content and sharing it on a regular basis , this will let bloggers
and other website to use your content, which will result in backlink (Seo, 2015)
 Social Media: One of the most used source of increasing website traffic, publishing content
on social media platform will drive good traffic on the website(Sharma & Bansal,2016)
 Online directories: It allows the website to be visible on a variety of websites and gather
positive review for the website, it also gets traffic on the website(Sahu & Chhabra, 2016)

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Sitemap can be understood as an XML file that lists the URL’s for a site with additional Meta data
about each URL.
In order to measure the success of the SEO strategy, KPI measures are in place, some of the
examples of it are:
 Analysis paralysis
 VQVC: Volume, quality, value & cost
 Rank for main converting keywords
 Majestic citation flow
 Majestic trust flow
 Moz domain authority
 Moz page authority
 Moz spam score
 Total links built
 Percentage increase in branded search traffic
 Percentage increase in referral traffic
Search Marketing: PPC (Pay per click)
In simple words, SEM can be understood as inorganic marketing (Paid advertising), it is the process
of gaining traffic on the website by buying advertisement on search engine(Lanz & Carmichael,
2015). Brands use PPC to gain attraction on the website and increase the sales; it also helps in

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increasing the brand awareness. It is more often used by brands to promote their product and
services (Social, 2015) Some common terms synonymous to PPC are:
 Paid search ads
 PPC
 CPC-Cost per click
 CPM- Cost per thousand impressions
Just like SEO, PPC has certain aspect to it in order to achieve a formidable strategy.
Important elements of PPC
 Ad relevance & Quality score-Every company these days have understood the importance
of PPC and the ad relevance. Relevancy is linked to how the targeted ads are shown to the
users and are pushed onto the website. Relevancy of ads is most important in PPC, as it is
the factor which generates high Click through rate (CTR). Quality score is defined in context
of Google ad words; it has a scoring from 0 to 10. The number of times the user search
matches the keyword, it increases the quality score. More the quality score, less amount the
company has to pay on bidding for the ad, hence a better ROI(Ledford, 2015)
 Keyword Management-Bidding for PPC happens on the keywords, hence it is pivotal for
businesses to focus on the management of the keywords(Halavais, 2013). Keyword
management includes the following steps
Keyword research: Researching for the keyword is the basic thing, every business should focus
on, but some people try and not do it effectively and use the tool provided by Google. If the
keyword is relevant, half of the work of PPC is done.
Keyword Grouping: This is the process of grouping of keywords and combining them to target
the important market segments(Killoran,2013)
 Campaign settings-After searching for the keyword, the next step is setting up of the
campaign. Google ad words has simplified the campaign settings for its users, hence it is
advisable for brands to invest some time on campaign settings(Strauss, 2016) Moreover,
Google earns 85% of its revenue from PPC, hence Google puts in all the efforts to deliver
results to the companies using PPC.Some of the ways by which the campaign can be
optimized are

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General setting: In this setting, choosing the name of the campaign along with the description is
important. The types of campaign can be chosen from:
Search Network Only: Ads are triggered according to the search query, and the ads are only in text
Display Network Only: In this, both text and display appear on the publisher site.
Search & Display Network: Ad appears both on the search query and publisher site(Rehman & Khan,
2013)
Network: Google has the maximum network (67%), falling behind are Bing & Yahoo. Network is
important to get more clicks on the advertisement. Google has maximum publishers in its kitty, like
About.com. This helps in getting more impressions.
Devices: Advertisement should have do mobile targeting; the rising share of smartphones makes it
inevitable for businesses to not focus on the device targeting in their campaign settings(Kang &
RIew, 2015)

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Location: Google ad words provide an option of choosing the location or the geographical area. It
helps in better targeting(Mierlo, 2014)
Languages: As location helps in better targeting, Google has also given provision for selecting the
language(Yuan, Wang, Li & Qin, 2014)
Bidding & Budget: Money on ad words is an important criterion for selecting a keyword and also
managing the campaign. Google provides many options like setting up of daily budget, enable
enhanced CPC etc., one should choose the bidding method according to the size and budget the
campaign has been assigned(Fernandez, 2015)
 Unique selling propositions-PPC marketing helps in identifying the best keyword and with
the help of campaign a best possible campaign can be created. The next important thing is
focussing on the USP of the advertisement, which will get the immediate attention of the
user and he would click on it(Stokes, 2014)
 Effective call to action-Call to action should be enabled with the PPC ad, otherwise the
entire purpose of it gets lost if the user is unable to act on the ad he is being shown(Kharim,
2015)
 Ad extensions-Another feature which increases the CTR of the campaign, many
organizations are not following the extension. Extensions are the site enabled links which
appear in the search result page. There is multiple ad extension like location, product, and
special offers and so on(Springborn & Barford,2013)
 Split testing-Another useful feature provided by PPC, split testing helps the marketers to
make some variation in the ads , see the CTR, and compare it with the previous CTR(Singer,
2017)
 Effective landing page-Research report suggests a user would stick on the website if the
landing page is attractive and has the offering for which he clicked on the ad. Hence, setting
up a great landing page is important. Landing page should focus on relevance, call to action
and should also provide means for tracking and monitoring(Krum, 2013)
PPC marketing is thus a very important tool, and Amazon takes real good advantage of the benefits
of it, due to its business model, PPC is very relevant for the firm. It effectively uses Ad words and
keeps on changing the strategy of its ad campaign to widen its targeting(Wilson, 2017)

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Digital Display Advertising
It is a form of advertising which conveys the message using text, logos, GIF, animations, other
graphics. It is very selective in targeting and it is different than Google’s classified ads or text ads,
because that only includes the brand’s message, but the overall message of the brand(Vandatta &
Poulin, 2015)
Marketers often presume that this advertising is expensive, but on the contrary, it is in direct
proportion to the size of the banner and the host site(Jakobson & Rueben, 2013)
Benefits of Display Ad’s
Amazon takes great advantage of the display/online ads, it spends heavily on the publishers site and
other networks. Some of the benefits it of which is:
 Digital ads are visually appealing
 Ads supports brand awareness
 Effectively target with display ads
 Increasing the visibility with display ads
 Display ads provide data
 Display ads support retargeting(Fulgoni, 2013)
Building awareness, increasing the visibility and targeting the audience are some of the key benefits
of Digital display advertising, as mentioned above, amazon does the same to increase the brand
awareness and let its beautiful creative speak for the brand.

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Challenges of Digital advertising:
 Lower click through rate- These ads have a lower click rate than the search ads, as these are
based on the history of users and are highly targeted(Ghosri & Todri, 2015)
 Lower conversions-This has a direct link with the sales, if the user is seeing the ad, it is not
interested in buying the product, he will not click on the ad, and hence result in lower
conversions (Yang & Kang, 2016)
 Ad avoidance-Different ad blocking tools are available for free in the market, which gives
user the provision of blocking these ads(Turner, 2012)
Amazon though, with its extensive big data knowledge, puts in lot of effort to not let its CTR
decrease, hence does a good evaluation of the campaign before putting it live(Goldfarb & Tucker,
2011)
These ads are provided in different formats, depending on the host site or the publisher, some of the
popular ad formats Amazon use for its digital display campaign are:
 Leader boards (728*90 Pixels) - This is the most common form of web ads, these accounts
for 30% of the digital ad space. Most frequently used at top or bottom of the website(Burns
& Lutz, 2006)
 Medium/large rectangle (300*250 pixels, 336*280 pixels)- These often interfere with the
content display on the page(Le & Vo, 2017)
 Wide skyscraper & Skyscraper (160*600, 120*600)- These are the tall ads that run to left or
right hand side of the site
 Non Standard Dimension-This ad does not conform with the IAB guidelines, it is a kind of
deal struck with the publisher
 Full banner (468*60)- Looks like a small leader board
 Buttons(120*90, 120*60)- They don’t usually offer functionality, as in link to the site, they
are small boxes which offer brands animation
 Billboard (970*250)
 Large leader board(970*90)
 Portrait (300*1050)
 Mobile Banner (320*50)