Amazon's organic search results are decreasing

E-commerce data company Marketplace Pulse says organic search impressions take up little real estate at the top of search pages, where they drive sales.

When searching on Amazon, only 4 of the first 20 products that pop up are organic search displays. Amazon search results usually start with some branded products that have purchased ads, followed by four products that have purchased ads and four organic search display products, followed by some highly rated products (based on ratings and number of reviews), and finally a video ad. After that, there will be editorial recommendations, Amazon's Choice selections, etc.

That is, consumers need to scroll at least three times to see the organic search booths; if on a mobile device, consumers need to scroll more to see these products. We all know that few consumers will buy products beyond the first page of search. Even on the first page, few consumers will browse to the bottom of the page.

As the number of natural search positions on the product search homepage decreases, and the number of advertising positions and official recommendation positions increases, many products that were originally displayed in the first few rows of the homepage have been directly squeezed to the middle or even the bottom of the page, and even worse, directly squeezed to the second page, and the sales of the products have been cut in half. If sellers want to gain product exposure, they have to buy advertising.

These changes have created huge advertising revenue for Amazon. Amazon 's advertising sales revenue in 2021 was $31.2 billion, and its advertising business grew 32% year-on-year in the fourth quarter. Excluding AWS, the advertising business is the leader in Amazon's performance growth.

This inspired other e-commerce platforms to follow suit and build their own advertising businesses, and many e-commerce platforms also began to introduce more sponsored advertising spaces in search results.

In the early years, in order to get a high ranking, sellers needed to have products that were popular and loved by consumers. Today, this is only part of the influencing factors, and the more influential one is advertising. However, more and more sellers are buying ads now, and in order to get a good ad space, they need to pay a higher price than before.

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