Advertisers are increasingly leveraging Amazon’s advertising services. Not only does the company have loads of data on consumers’ online buying habits, but it has much more detailed information on consumers too, making Amazon extremely valuable to advertisers today.

Amazon’s ad business is now worth around $125 billion. The company started with selling ads on Amazon.com that would appear near product search results. Since then, it has been expanding its business by selling video and display ads on sites across the web. Not only does Amazon know what consumers are buying, but it also knows where people live and what credit cards they use. Even further, it knows behaviors of these consumers based on what they buy, if they have children, what interests they have and much more.

This data is becoming extremely valuable for advertisers and Amazon is now among the ranks of Google and Facebook. Amazon has the advantage of knowing exactly what these consumers are buying on top of targeting them based on interests, searches and demographics. Its ad network started off by only working with larger brands due to a minimum advertising commitment, but Amazon has been slowing moving toward offering self-service to make it more available to others. This self-service system has hundreds of audience segments that include shopping behaviors and even the media people are consuming on Amazon.

Amazon also uses cookies to further track consumers after they leave their site. The company also now has the option to pixel its ads to show the path to conversion, and can dynamically serve ads based on where the consumer is in the purchase funnel.

It should be interesting to see what else Amazon will offer in years to come and how it will compete with Google and Facebook. It started off taking over the eCommerce space and has now made big strides into the ad space. The amount of scale and demand Amazon has will only increase as we move into the future.