Despite the infamous crash during the first hour of Prime Day, Amazon has announced that this year’s Prime Day was its “biggest in history”. Prime members purchased more than 100 million products during this year’s event. With millions of Amazon Prime subscribers around the world, Prime Day is an opportunity that no marketer can afford to miss out on, so we mapped out our Prime Day Prep, observations, challenges, and recommendations!
Prime Day Prep
To prepare our clients for Prime Day, we suggested building out a specific store page to highlight the products our clients wanted to promote, as well as top-rated and selling products on the Amazon platform. We leveraged these store pages in our Headline Search ads, utilizing custom store pages rather than the standard product listing page. We also leveraged additional channels, such as Social & Display to drive awareness of upcoming sales. For Social, we boosted posts directing users to the new Amazon Brand Pages. For Display, we utilized AAP to serve “Coming Soon” banner ads, targeting users with established Amazon Purchase histories as well as retarget users with recent visitorship.
Prime Day Observations
For Product Display ads we leveraged VPCs (vendor powered coupon) to highlight the Prime Day discounts. We also utilized these Product Display campaigns to defend our own page real estate from competitive takeover, highlighting these deals for a basket-building strategy.
Challenges And Tips
- Amazon has full control. Amazon has the ability to reschedule your promotions, and or even exclude it from Prime Day altogether. We had to be in constant contact with our Amazon contacts to make sure everything ran seamlessly.
- Have campaigns created in advance. All Amazon (AMS & AAP) advertising services have approval periods that last from 1-3 days. For our Prime specific campaigns, we had them created and scheduled a week in advance to ensure no problems with product selection and or copy.
- While it is recommended that AMS bids should be increased during Prime day (with the turning on of Bid+), we found it helpful to keep AAP campaigns on during this time to continue to drive overall traffic to our Brand Pages and Detail Product pages. This provided an alternative to what would be a costly CPC war, while still allowing us to reach a large number of users.
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]