Amazon’s fifth annual Prime Day is today and tomorrow (Oct 13th & 14th) with this year’s Prime Day being the unofficial kick-off to the holiday shopping season.  With 27% of consumers saying they plan on shopping earlier this year Prime Day through Cyber Week will be key in 2020 for securing revenue from early shoppers.

Amazon has already seen significant growth due to the increased adoption of online shopping behavior.  Amazon experienced significant online sales growth this year, with sales eclipsing 2019.

May & June 2020 Online Sales Significantly Outpaced November & December 2019 

Average Holiday Spend vs Actual Holiday Spend

Now that Prime Day has officially begun we wanted to provide some tactics you can implement immediately to take advantage of Prime Day and make sure you drive the most potential revenue on Amazon over the next 48 hours.  

Strategies

  • Protect & Conquest
    • Own Product Sponsored Display campaigns to protect your buy box from competitors and introduce potential customers to other products in your catalog to grow the basket size.  
  • Competitive conquesting – bidding on your competitors’ keywords can be cost-prohibitive during Prime Day, instead activate sponsored display campaigns across the top organically ranked competitors to conquest their product detail pages. This can decrease your cost and allow you to gain incremental sales 

  • Find a way to stand out
    • With a million different distractions and brands competing for shoppers’ attention, find ad units that will stand out.
      •  Use Video in search to stand out in a crowded marketplace.
      • Sponsored Brands Storefront Campaigns – The Store version of Sponsored Brands is a new creative format that highlights a brand’s Amazon Store. Usually, a Sponsored Brands campaign features a logo, headline, and up to three products. Rather than products, this new Sponsored Brands format offers a more visually appealing creative format that  allows you to drive traffic to your seasonal gift guides or other pages on your storefront to highlight a product line and communicate  your brand voice
  • Promotions/Deals
    • For Sellers that were unable to get deals approved in time for Prime Day, using coupons across your top-selling products is a quick way to help increase order volume and keep consumers from buying competitor brands
  • Check Budgets Often
    • Don’t run out of budget at the beginning of Prime Day!  Amazon does not offer great day parting options which ensures most brands run out of budget early on in the day. In order to have your ads showing throughout the day, consider increasing daily budgets and closely monitoring your campaigns to make sure they don’t stop serving ads.  
  • Don’t forget about off Amazon media

First and foremost make sure you have Amazon attribution set up to make sure you can track how your non-Amazon efforts affect and influence your Amazon performance.  

  • Search
    • Prime Day data from last year shows we expect to see a boost in branded search traffic and CVR to remain consistent vs. the prior week. 
    • Shopping campaigns also see a slight increase in traffic vs. the prior week, but a decrease in CVR, and we expect that same scenario this year.
      • In anticipation of this, pull back on budgets during Prime day. This should help to mitigate lost efficiency while not creating any drastic swings in performance, as budget changes to smart shopping historically do.
  • Social / Display
    • Shoppers’ browsing behavior steadily climbs starting in early October and continues through Cyber Weekend. If competitors are running sales on Amazon, there is a small chance they may push social and display spending this year, which may impact our inventory costs and thus impact performance by decreasing our normal levels of reach.


If you want to learn more on how to elevate and optimize your Amazon strategy email us at [email protected]