With all signs pointing to Amazon Prime Day starting on July 16th in 2018 and only lasting a total of 36 hours, there is a huge rush to ensure brands are set up for success. Last year, Prime Day was the biggest shopping day with a 100%-150% increase in attributed ad sales on sponsored products when compared to the previous Tuesday. With over 100 million Amazon Prime subscribers around the world, Prime Day is an opportunity that no marketer can afford to miss out on.

It is more vital now than ever before to develop a strategy to showcase your brand and stand out amongst competitors. Many advertisers will sell products at near-breakeven costs in an effort to do so, and will utilize many tactics to ensure they reach an audience interested in their products through their search behavior, online activity, and associated brands.

Although the deadline for submitting Amazon Prime day lightning deals, spotlight deals, and coupons have passed, there are many tactics that marketers can implement right away to ensure they reach their audience and beat out the competition on one of the world’s biggest shopping day! Take a look at our cheat sheet below.

  • Use Headline Search Ads, Sponsored Product ads and Amazon stores (if you are a registered brand owner) in unison to showcase your Prime Day sales and offers.
  • Launch all campaigns two weeks in advance with at least $100+ allocated to each campaign so as to gain actionable insights that can be used towards optimizing your campaign once Prime Day starts. Take a dive into your accounts to identify your highest converting keywords and campaigns so that you can define your Prime Day strategy and budgets. Structure your campaigns and group them by product, brand, sale type, price or size, so that you can target keywords better and allow for better optimizations that result in higher ACoS.
  • Schedule alerts for yourself to run reports before and after key events like Prime Day so that you can review trends in your keywords, search terms and products holistically. These invaluable learnings can be used towards next year’s Prime Day as well!
  • The Amazon space is going to be extremely competitive leading up to Prime Day, advertisers should ensure that all bids are set high enough so that you don’t go dark during this peak period. A general guide is to set your bids at least 200% higher than your average daily bid but pay close attention to your campaigns through the two weeks that you are running them so that you can be sure to enter Prime Day with a game plan for each respective campaign. In addition, turning on Bid+ for Sponsored Product campaigns will allow the best chances for your ad to show up as a top placement.
  • Update your campaigns to include a mix of keyword match types. To expand brand reach, use broad match and to drive the most relevant traffic, use phrase and exact match. Ensure that you implement negative keywords as well to ensure not advertising dollars are misdirected.
  • Take the time to design your ads with engaging headlines that highlight your sale. Terms like “Exclusive” or “New” should be used along with actionable phrases like “Buy Now” or “Save Now” during Prime day period itself. Amazon frowns upon any unsupported claims like “#1” or “Best Seller” so save yourself the stress of having your ads flagged during Prime Day and plan this carefully in advance.
  • Often overlooked but so very important is the unified experience across not only your ads, but also your brand and product pages. You will want to ensure all offer details are added within your product descriptions to further increase relevance. Prioritizing your brand page to highlight all your Prime Day offerings and optimizing for keywords, A+/ EBC etc are steps that no successful Prime Day marketer should look past.

In addition to these tactics, it should be noted that an influx of Prime Day sales can alter the organic Amazon A9 product ranking algorithm in your favor, meaning your brand could experience increased organic rankings for key terms well after Prime Day. As such, we recommend pricing your products at an eye-opening rate to encourage as many sales as possible during this opportune window of time, while still keeping profit margins in mind.

As Amazon continues to dominate as the largest comparison-shopping engine, advertiser competition grows with it. With Direct Agents, our clients find success by tapping into our data-driven omni-channel methodology, focused on paid and earned media, both inbound to Amazon and outbound to their own sites. If you’d like to learn more about our Amazon Solution or have any questions, please reach out to [email protected].