A founder in Leeds messaged us last month with £4,000 sitting in a spare bank account, earmarked for ads, and no idea where to put it. Her skincare brand was doing £19,000 a month through her own Shopify store. Amazon UK made up another £6,000 on the side, mostly organic.
The amazon advertising vs google shopping ads uk question comes up almost every week with brands in this exact spot. Both channels want your budget. Both promise shoppers who are ready to buy right now. They are not the same tool, though, and picking wrong wastes a quarter before you notice.
This post breaks down what each channel actually does, who tends to win with each one, and how to decide without guessing.
Neither Amazon advertising nor Google Shopping is inherently better. They answer different questions. One finds you a buyer who is already inside the marketplace. The other finds you a shopper who is still comparing and hasn't picked a retailer yet. Knowing which question matches your product category is most of the decision.
What Amazon Advertising Actually Sells You
Amazon ads put your product in front of someone who already has their card details saved and a cart one click away. That's the entire pitch. You're not sending traffic to a store, you're bidding for a spot inside a marketplace where the purchase decision is already half made.
Sponsored Products, the most common format, shows your listing in search results and on competitor product pages. Sponsored Brands puts your logo and a handful of products at the top of a search page. Sponsored Display follows shoppers around with retargeting, on and off Amazon.
The catch is that Amazon owns the customer relationship, not you. You get a sale, a review, maybe a repeat buyer through Subscribe & Save.
You don't get an email address, though. You can't retarget that person on your own site unless they happen to visit it separately.
Amazon ad costs also scale differently than most UK sellers expect. Competitive categories like supplements or phone accessories can push cost-per-click past £1.50.
A chunk of your margin disappears into Amazon's own referral fee before advertising even enters the picture. Run the maths before committing a big slice of budget here.
Where Amazon wins clearly is intent. Nobody opens the Amazon app to browse for fun. They open it to buy something, often today, sometimes within the hour.
If your product category already does volume on Amazon, organic or not, Sponsored Products is close to free money. It mostly defends your own listings from competitors bidding on your brand name.
What Google Shopping Ads Actually Sells You
Google Shopping is a different kind of intent. Someone searches "waterproof hiking boots women's size 6 UK" and your product image, price, and brand show up in a grid above the organic results. They haven't committed to a marketplace or a specific retailer yet, they're still comparing.
That's the real strength of Shopping ads. You capture the shopper earlier, before they've decided where to buy, and you own every click after that.
They land on your store. You can retarget them with email, a pixel, a WhatsApp flow, whatever you've built. A sale on your own site is worth more long-term than a sale on Amazon, because the customer becomes yours, not Amazon's.
Performance Max has mostly absorbed classic Shopping campaigns now. It blends Shopping inventory with YouTube, Display, and Search into one automated campaign type.
That's less hands-on than it used to be, which helps smaller teams without a dedicated ads manager. It also means less granular control over exactly where your budget lands.
The downside: your product feed needs to be genuinely clean. Titles, GTINs, categories, and images all feed Google's matching algorithm.
A messy feed quietly tanks performance in ways that are hard to diagnose without digging into the Merchant Center reports. Budget time for feed hygiene, not just ad spend, or the campaign underperforms for reasons that never show up in the obvious metrics.
The Decision That Actually Matters: Where Is The Customer Already Looking?
Forget channel preference for a second. The question that decides this is simple: does your product category get searched on Amazon first, or on Google first?
Commodity-feeling products, phone cases, kitchen gadgets, supplements, pet accessories, tend to get searched on Amazon directly. Shoppers skip Google entirely and type straight into the Amazon search bar. If that's your category, Amazon advertising deserves the first pound.
Products with more consideration, a story, or a price point above impulse-buy territory, furniture, skincare with an ingredient angle, apparel with a fit story, tend to get searched on Google first, then compared across a few sites including Amazon. If that's your category, Google Shopping earns the first pound, and Amazon becomes a secondary channel for people who prefer buying there regardless of brand.
A few other factors worth weighing:
- Margin structure. Amazon's referral fee, typically 8 to 17 percent depending on category, plus FBA fees plus ad spend can eat 40 percent of revenue before you've paid for the product itself.
- Brand control matters too. Your own site lets you control the page, the upsells, the email capture. Amazon gives you none of that beyond A+ Content.
- Review velocity is slower than people expect. New listings on Amazon need review volume to rank, which ads can accelerate, but it still takes months.
- Existing traffic changes the maths. If you already get decent organic Google traffic to your site, Shopping ads compound that work. Starting from zero on both, Amazon's built-in audience gets you a first sale faster.
- Return rate by category deserves a look. Apparel and footwear see UK return rates well above 20 percent on some platforms, and that hits margin regardless of which channel sent the sale.
Run this maths before assuming one channel is cheaper to test. The spreadsheet exercise takes an hour and saves a wasted quarter.
A Worked Example
Back to the Leeds skincare founder. Her product, a vitamin C serum at £28, had decent organic rank on Amazon already (page one for a mid-tail keyword) but almost no paid traffic to her own Shopify store. We ran the numbers both ways.
Amazon Sponsored Products at her category's average CPC, around £0.85, would likely produce sales at a breakeven-ish ACOS given her 58 percent margin after Amazon's cut. Fine, not thrilling.
Google Shopping told a different story. Pointed at her own store with a 100 percent margin minus ad spend, and retargeting warm visitors by email afterward, it had a clearer path to profitability within 60 days.
Her product had a specific enough story, a single active ingredient, vegan, UK-made, to earn a click on Google's comparison grid.
She split the £4,000 70/30 in favour of Google Shopping. She kept a defensive Amazon Sponsored Brands campaign running on her own branded keyword, and reviewed again at the 60-day mark.
That split isn't a universal formula, it reflected her specific margin and category. Your numbers will say something different.
Where Amazon's Other Programmes Fit In
It's worth separating Amazon advertising from the Amazon affiliate advertising program, which is a different thing entirely. The affiliate programme pays bloggers and creators a commission for sending traffic that converts. It isn't a bidding auction like Sponsored Products.
If you're building out influencer or content partnerships, that programme sits alongside paid Amazon ads rather than replacing them. The two can work together once you have enough product reviews to make an affiliate pitch credible.
If your store runs on Shopify and you're weighing whether to build out a proper feed integration yourself or bring in help, Shopify partners who specialise in feed and app configuration can save weeks of back-and-forth with a half-built Merchant Center feed.
That's a build and integration question though. It's worth reading our breakdown of Shopify partner vs in-house developer for UK stores before deciding who touches your tech stack.
Takeaways
- Amazon advertising wins when your category gets searched directly on Amazon and margin can absorb the referral fee plus ad spend.
- Google Shopping wins when customers compare before buying and you want to own the relationship and retarget later.
- Check your margin structure before testing either channel, a 15 percent referral fee changes the entire profitability picture.
- Feed hygiene matters as much as bid strategy on Google Shopping, a messy product feed quietly limits reach.
- Most UK brands end up running both eventually, the question is only which one earns the first pound this quarter.
- Revisit the split every 60 to 90 days as margin, review count, and organic rank shift.
If you're still unsure which channel deserves the next test budget, our performance marketing team builds the split and the measurement plan with you rather than guessing from a template. You can also read how we think about paid search versus paid social for ecommerce brands for a related angle, or compare PPC agency vs Google Ads agency models if you're deciding whether to hire out the management entirely. For a broader look at how we approach engagements, why clients choose Yellow Octo covers our process, and a quick compare against other agency models is useful if you're shortlisting. When you're ready, a 30-minute call is the fastest way to get a straight answer on your specific numbers.