Preparing for Amazon Prime Day

This year’s Amazon Prime Day is slated for July 12-13, effectively kicking off the back-to-school shopping season. In 2021, Amazon Prime Day sales growth slowed alongside changes in shopping behavior, which likely contributed to this year’s Prime Day being pushed later into the summer in an effort to capture rising demand as a new school year draws near. Shifting market conditions and greater competition could contribute to another year of moderate sales growth for Amazon as inflation continues to rise, consumer sentiment remains low, and retailers like Target announce competing sales over the same period. For advertisers, Amazon Prime Day presents a unique opportunity to grow brand awareness and connect with new customers, and it is best approached using three phases of strategic media planning and execution. 

A recent Kantar survey found that 75 percent of shoppers were “likely” or “highly likely” to purchase a product during Amazon Prime Day that they discovered before the event. In fact, brands that advertised leading up to and during Amazon Prime Day gained a 216 percent increase in awareness and a 214 percent increase in consideration, compared to the week prior, according to Kantar. Such a significant visibility boost ahead of time can drive considerable results when it’s time for shoppers to purchase on Amazon Prime Day. 

To generate momentum leading up to Prime Day, brands can launch Sponsored Search Ads, paired with investments in Amazon’s DSP or streaming TV solutions, to build awareness and drive consideration ahead of the two-day event. Launching DSP campaigns early can ensure targeting and delivery options are set up correctly, helping to optimize performance and identify key trends. Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brand ad types, in particular, can boost visibility within Amazon search results while there’s less competition on the platform, while Amazon’s display solutions provide advertisers with a head start on competitors, showing key audiences branded creative or featured products before the shopping event officially begins. By launching ad campaigns across Amazon’s advertising products ahead of time, Amazon campaigns can build up relevance rather than fighting for efficiencies amid the surge of high-budget advertisers during Amazon Prime Day. 

While advertising on Amazon in advance of the two-day event is ideal, there is still ample opportunity to maximize sales opportunities without activating Amazon advertising campaigns. 

With shoppers on the hunt for the best deals, conducting competitor research ahead of time can help inform Prime Day strategies. Competitor research may answer questions, such as: 

Are competitor products priced comparably? 

Are competitors actively discounting products? 

Does a competitor’s average discount match what your brand intends to offer on Amazon Prime Day? 

Answers to these prompts will provide important context to inform a brand’s strategy as Amazon tends to only allow official Prime Day badging on the platform when brands are offering customers their best deal in recent history.

Across other paid media channels like social and display, brands can increase brand awareness with reach and video view objective campaigns. Creative should be informative and educate potential customers on the benefits of the brand’s product. Brands that build a dedicated landing page on their .com to tease Amazon Prime Day deals can begin to populate targeted audiences for the shoppers who have viewed the creative, or visited the landing page, which can then be utilized during Amazon Prime Day. 

On Prime Day, we recommend that brands:

Continue utilizing a diversified ad type mix that will help improve reach and visibility across the platform as millions of people visit the site to find the best deals. 

Advertise products with 3.5-star ratings or better. Not only will showcasing high-quality products build trust with potential customers, but it also allows certain ad types to display customer reviews and star ratings directly in creative assets. 

Keyword targeting should include brand names and product titles in addition to key terms related to the event such as “[Brand Name] deals” and “[Brand Name] Prime.”

Auto-targeting campaigns can help fill any gaps that may exist across campaign structures, and also accelerate ad delivery during hyper-competitive shopping moments when specific keyword bids are at their highest and visibility is more difficult to achieve. 

Ensure Amazon Attribution links are used when directing traffic from other platforms and sources outside of Amazon directly to a brand’s product detail pages. While this won’t offer real-time optimizations for ads on other platforms, Amazon Attribution links provide valuable insights for future campaign planning and performance. 

For advertisers who prefer not to manually change daily budgets, Amazon Budget Rules within the Amazon Ads UI is a great tool to automatically increase budgets by certain percentages, using two rule sets: 

Schedule: Increase budgets during high traffic periods or specific date ranges

Performance: Increase budget according to certain KPIs, such as return on ad spend (ROAS), advertising cost of sale (ACOS), and clickthrough rate (CTR).

Additionally, implementing negative keyword targeting wherever possible adds an additional layer of control for low-performing shopping terms and products, while helping to improve the overall effectiveness of ad campaigns. PMG brands also have access to PMG’s proprietary marketing technology platform, Alli, to help monitor spending, flag performance anomalies, and more. Since Amazon Prime Day is such a competitive sale, Amazon will often automatically increase bids and budgets to improve performance. We recommend setting daily budgets at least 200 percent higher, as it’s not worth missing out on potential sales due to low bids and early budget cap-outs. 

While the deals may be over, customers who didn’t end up purchasing on Amazon Prime Day are still likely in the market to buy. Brands can re-engage these shoppers with cross-selling opportunities to help drive additional sales and close the loop to ensure any new or potential customers are part of remarketing media strategies moving forward. With the insights gleaned from Amazon Prime Day, brands will also uncover new performance and purchase behavior trends that can inform testing roadmaps and future opportunities across Amazon and other platforms. 

“In years past, Amazon Prime Day has driven historic sales figures for participating retailers, and we can expect the same to occur this year despite economic uncertainty and other market forces,” said Earl Hwang, global client strategy director at PMG. “With back-to-school season just around the corner, brands that approach Amazon Prime Day in phases are going to be best positioned to drive sales before, during, and after the mega-sale event.”