Why Amazon pulling Google Shopping is a golden opportunity

A small, maybe temporary win for us all

Jul 29, 2025

TL;DR
Amazon have pulled out of Google Shopping and that means brands have a rare opportunity to consider the incrementality of Amazon as a sales channel

This time last week if you’d googled pretty much any brand term, then Amazon would have been present if not dominant in the Google Shopping results. Then last Tuesday, Amazon pulled out of ads.

This is a great opportunity for very brand that sells on Amazon to take stock of what the true impact of the sales channel is.

As part of our Amazon incrementality study we did last year, we’ve always paid close attention to how Amazon was ranking in Brand Shopping for all of our clients.

The Shopping real estate is important – at least for now while search is still impactful. Image choice, offer, copy, all these things impact where you click.

And yet a huge volume of these sales are brand terms.

If you’re searching for a brand, you already know you want it. You have already discovered that brand. The marketing and the activity of actually creating that sale has already taken place.

The attributed sale therefore is not, by default, incremental. We don’t need a complex measurement approach to understand this – logic will get us far enough. But in case you are after one, almost every MMM and incrementality lift study you can find shows that brand search isn’t incremental.

Where this begins to taper differently is with Brand Shopping. Many brands operate across multiple channels. If you’re not stocked in other stores, then it’s still likely you’ll be on Amazon as well as your own Shopify DTC. And while in theory a search link could also be pointing you to another retailer, this rarely had the impact as it did when Shopping arrived.

And so Brand Shopping can be incremental – in terms of delivering a sale to your Shopify. It’s not necessarily incremental in terms of your overall business volume, because the sale still takes place if Amazon captures it. But instead of taking X% of CM direct, you’re giving up a lot more via your wholesale margin instead.

Meta is less effective if the sale goes to Amazon

As well as being a pain from the perspective of lost margin, it’s also a pain for your advertising that actually creates that demand.

Meta relies on signal to operate effectively. The more data Meta (or TikTok) has, the more effective it will be at finding customers to create and convert for you.

Meta spend in blue, strongly correlates with Amazon revenue in grey

When we look at high levels of Meta spend and Amazon revenue, the two correlate well. I.e. we know that Meta is creating customers on Amazon.

Why?

Because people see an ad, they browse around, they tell their partners, they dwell, then google, the click, they buy. Very, very few sales happen by: seeing an ad → clicking → purchasing straight away. (This is why CTR is a terrible metric to judge ad success by).

And so the question becomes one of ‘where do we want that sale to take place?’ All things considered, it’s better to own that sale on Shopify so Meta can capture the data.

This is a great opportunity to understand the true impact of Amazon

Amazon pulling spend from Google is likely a big incrementality study for Amazon itself.

But it’s also the opportunity to consider incrementality yourself – especially if you’re a smaller brand for whom holdouts or MMMs just aren’t possible.

Here’s how I’d approach it.

Put together a dataset that contained the following:

date | meta spend | shopify sales | amazon sales

So long as meta spend is consistent, see if you can see a drop-off in Amazon sales from last Tuesday onwards. Does that also increase Shopify sales alongside it?

Dig deeper in your own Amazon ads data too: what’s happened to ROAS and volume since last Tuesday?

It might be that the data is too noisy to recognise anything. But if you can see a shift in Amazon behaviour after last week, maybe start to consider this performance to be closer to the ‘true’ performance of Amazon.

Ultimately, what you do with that information will be up to you.

Some customers prefer to shop on Amazon, others direct. In retail, the brand awareness created through complete distribution is powerful. There’s likely something similar to be said for digital distribution. And there’s often different ‘types’ of buyers on Amazon which behave differently to direct.

And so there are strategic reasons to be on the platforms even if they’re less incremental than they appear. But the knowledge is useful.

If you’re also stocked in other retailers, you may decide its time to think about a refresh in Shopping strategy so you can dominate more of those results. And if Amazon return to Google, which I bet they will at least in some categories, then the same questions are important.

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