This year, Prime Day will take place on July 12th and 13th. It’s important for Amazon sellers to develop their Amazon Advertising plan in advance, ensuring that ads properly run, convert, and grow brand awareness. Our team has compiled essential tips that will make sure your advertising game plan is best situated before, during, and after the two-day retail event.
Plan Ahead
Diversify to Win
With increased competition for ad placements during Prime Day, advertisers need to think creatively when the bidding war starts on Page 1. We advise that they go beyond Sponsored Products with a diverse mix of ad types, including Sponsored Brand, Sponsored Brand Video, and Sponsored Display. By diversifying placements across Amazon, advertisers create the opportunity to stand out from their competitors through the use of custom creative both on and off Amazon.
- Sponsored Display: Sponsored display campaigns are unique from other ad types in that they can reach audiences both on and off Amazon, while giving brands the opportunity to drive awareness, catching the attention of the consumer wherever they are. This ad type also has proven to be a foundational placement for offensive and defensive ad strategy, as brands have the ability to conquest competitors on their detail pages, and potentially be the last product a consumer sees before buying from a competing brand.
- Sponsored Brand Using a mix of Product Collections, Store Spotlight, and Video Sponsored Brand campaigns are a great way to incorporate custom content to catch the attention of consumers. With the Store Spotlight Sponsored Brand Ad, you can further highlight other products in your catalog, while preventing consumers from clicking away through competitor ad placements.
Determine your Prime Day budget
With an increase in traffic, we recommend raising your daily budgets by at least 200%. Additionally, advertisers should monitor and increase their bids tactically during the event, as they can expect to see sharp rises in CPCs as competition increases on page 1.
Create a schedule to increase spend gradually*
- Before (July 1-11): We recommend you spend around 40 – 50% of your July Advertising budget in the days leading up to Prime Day (July 1-11). This will allow your campaigns to show more frequently in crucial placements leading up to the event, gaining impressions and allowing consumers to discover your brand’s products. Increased traffic and conversions leading up to the event can help boost the Best Seller Ranking of your products so that you can maximize the performance of your campaigns on Prime Day.
- Prime Day (July 12-13): On the days of Prime Day (July 12-13), we believe allocating at least 20-25% of your monthly budget between the two days will help advertisers stay competitive. While a majority of your campaign’s bids may have increased leading up to Prime Day, concentrating the bid increases to the top, historically converting and efficient keywords by 100% to 200%, will help make the most out of the increased traffic.
- After (July 14-31): This leaves us with about 25-35% of your budget to spend during the rest of the month (July 14-31). During these last weeks, we recommend slowly walking your budgets and bids down to pre-Prime Day rates to ensure a successful transition towards regular spend.
*DA suggestions are general best practices, however, it’s always important to consider your promotional schedule throughout the entire month before setting your budget tiers.
Tip – Establish a Back-Up Payment Method: An Advertiser’s worst nightmare is logging on during Prime Day to see their campaigns are not running due to payment failure. As an added layer of protection, we suggest that you add a backup credit card to your Amazon Advertising account. You can access the Backup payment method under “Payment Settings” of your Amazon Advertising Account.
Game Day Strategy
Closely Monitor Spend Throughout The Day
No advertiser wants to find an out-of-budget, top-performing campaign in the middle of the day. Checking back on campaigns throughout the day will ensure that effective campaigns have enough budget to continue delivering during this high-traffic retail holiday. Campaigns are sure to spend throughout the day with the increase in traffic. If they struggle, dive into your campaigns and increase bids or even consider adding in more targets to encourage additional Spend.
Double Check To Ensure You Are Appearing On PDPs and SERPs
Searching branded and non-branded terms related to your brand will allow you to see where your products appear on their own respective search engine results page and product detail pages. If you cannot see your Sponsored Advertisements on the pages, consider gradually increasing the bids of the searched branded and non-branded terms until they appear to ensure your products don’t go unnoticed during this high traffic period.
After Prime Day
Gradually Decrease Spend
Drastic changes to Spend levels in short periods of time may result in an unfavorable ROAS, so in the days following Prime Day, make sure to slowly walk your bids down. This will allow ample time for your campaigns to properly adjust to spend levels instead of drastically changing them at once.
Utilize Remarketing Campaigns
While remarketing campaigns are a great way to target consumers throughout the year, the increase in traffic towards your PDPs that occurs during the period surrounding Prime Day is worth taking advantage of. We suggest remarketing campaigns to target consumers that have been on your PDPs as well as those that have searched for products within your ASIN’s category. This will not only potentially bring an increase in Sales but will also help improve overall brand recognition after Prime Day is over.
Document and prepare for next year
Documenting this year’s Prime Day learnings will help you build an even stronger strategy for next year’s prime day and other peak traffic events. It is crucial to take note of both what went well and what didn’t within your campaigns. Some notable factors to record include Non-Branded vs. Branded performance, top-performing campaign types, and any top-performing product groups within your catalog.
Conclusion
To sum it all up, in order to make the most out of Prime Day 2022, we recommend that you:
- Prepare Accordingly – Slowly increase campaign budgets and bids leading up to the 2-day event to make the most of increased traffic during this time period.
- Observe and Adapt – Make sure to monitor campaign performance morning, noon, and night in order to ensure budgets are efficiently spent throughout the day.
- Recollect & Analyze – Slowly walk down your budgets and bids in the days after Prime Day. Also, with the increase in traffic, running remarketing campaigns to retarget consumers that viewed your products is likely to be advantageous.
As your brand prepares for Prime Day, feel free to reach out to our team of Amazon experts at [email protected] for any additional questions regarding your Amazon Advertising Strategy.
- Augustine Ahn, eCommerce Coordinator, Direct Agents