Amazon will reward you for knowing what ads you see on your phone

Amazon will reward you for knowing what ads you see on your mobile. The company's new ad verification program will pay $2 per month to users who can access recommended ads. Currently, the program is only available to Amazon Shopper Panel members in the UK and US. This is a rewards program that already allows users to turn in receipts from third-party purchases in exchange for perks.

Those with the Amazon Shopper Panel app will see an option to participate in the ad verification service, which informs users that it will "collect and use information about where and when you see Amazon ads, for example, the app or website where you saw the ad and the time of day you saw it."

Customers can earn up to $10 per month by performing more tasks. As Amazon notes on the service's download website, "participants can earn monthly rewards by sharing receipts for purchases made outside of amazon.com, completing short surveys, and enabling ad verification for ads seen on Amazon's advertising or third-party companies that advertise through Amazon Ads."

Amazon reward will require users to enable Amazon Ads

Users who allow ad verification for Amazon Ads can unsubscribe and delete their personal information. The company also assures that it "will not share the personal data it collects with anyone else, unless necessary for a transaction with a third party, such as a seller on Amazon's site, or to comply with the law."

With this service, Amazon aims to generate the most accurate advertising possible with users, as well as help brands, reach an audience that can bring them an economic benefit. However, this new measure of the company needs to be pioneering. Back in 2012, Google Screenwise offered Amazon gift cards to those willing to monitor their network traffic; years later, in 2016, Facebook also provided gift cards to 13-25-year-olds for installing a VPN that would allow the company to view web usage habits.

Amazon Ads: does it work? 

Amazon Advertising (formerly AMS or Amazon Marketing Services) is a service that works similarly to pay-per-click ads on Google: sellers only pay when shoppers click on ads (regardless of whether or not the item sells).

But the problem is that Amazon, as a marketplace, doesn’t behave similarly to Google - as a search engine - does. 

And the different search intent yield, in fact, different results. According to Ad Badger, the average cost per click (CPC) for Amazon PPC is $0.97. This is on par, if not less, than similar advertising on Google and other platforms, but the CTR is considerably lower. This means most of the people who click will not, and in the end, buy your product. 

All in all, the success you have on the platform will be vastly different from the returns your brand could get on other PPC ad systems. Usually a lot lower. And perhaps this is the reason why Amazon is pushing to get more reliable data from their mobile channel.