Prime Day: Advertising tips

As we discussed in our last post, Prime Day is just a few weeks away and it’s about time to get ready for it. Amazon has not announced the dates yet, but the Amazing team is still betting that it will be back in July, its natural month.

We have already mentioned that Prime Day is the platform’s flagship event. It is one of the most important e-commerce events of the year and therefore attracts a large volume of consumers interested in the deals offered by the platform.  

The traffic generated by the visibility of this event is the perfect opportunity to increase the exposure of your portfolio and increase your sales. Therefore, in addition to a good promotion strategy that catches the attention and interest of users, you need an advertising strategy that gives visibility to your products and therefore to your promotions. This will be the main topic of this post, the essentials to design the proper strategy for this event.

When we discuss Prime Day and how to plan its’ advertising strategy, we often mention that the event doesn’t just take place over two days. It is longer and involves three phases, which we remind you below:

• Phase 1 or Lead-Up: This happens between 2 and 3 weeks before the event. This is the perfect time to test and give our campaigns the traction they need before the peak days.
• Phase 2 or the Event: This is the key moment and therefore when our campaign costs become more expensive, but also when we report more sales. This is the time to spend most of our budget since all the visibility that we get will be translated into sales.
• Phase 3 or Lead-Out: This takes place one week after the event for those late buyers. Competition tends to decrease, and it is a good time to boost our latest deals and increase our profitability.

Before discussing the tips in depth, you must consider the ecosystem where you are going to run your campaigns. You must understand that you are going to be in a peak event, and this implies certain circumstances that will impact your ROAS:

• The traffic and search increase on the platform leads to both an increased ad competition as well as a higher volume of users clicking on your ads. This leads to higher CPCs in the event time frame than in the always-on period, as well as a higher volume of clicks that will not convert. All these circumstances will increase the overall cost of your campaigns.
• On the other hand, the attribution you will receive for each sale will be lower, as your product will have a discount that reduces its final price.
• Both above cases will lead to a decrease of your ROAS, which is not a bad sign as you will balance it with a higher volume of sales, and therefore a higher profit in the month of the event.

Once you have understood the previous section, we are ready to discuss the 4 key aspects needed to create your campaign strategy:

1. Budget: This is often a tricky topic because we always have a smaller budget than the one we would wish for. Every time you face an event of this dimension the budget required is higher than the one you would normally have for the “always-on” period. Why? You might ask. CPCs increase as all the competitors are present and wants to take advantage of the traffic increase and the great conversion opportunity. In addition, the click-through rate also increases because users click on the ads to get more information and therefore the conversion rate decreases
2. Bidding: This topic plays a very important role as a good bidding strategy will help you to be successful. We have already mentioned that CPCs are increasing so your bids must increase to be competitive in the placement auctions. This is the case for all the verticals, where bids are multiplied by x2 and in some cases they can be multiplied up to x4.
3. The Advertised Catalogue will be key: Most of your competitors will be on promotion, so we recommend keeping your focus exclusively on products with deal. Keep in mind that the consumer is looking for a deal, so thanks to the promo tags your ad will be more ” visible ” to the final consumer.
4. The last one, Strategy: Speaking about it in last place does not mean that it is less important than the rest. Here you must keep in mind that you should protect your brand but also focus your efforts on bidding for the main generic terms, as well as monitoring your main competitors by showing up in their detail pages through the Sponsored Display format.

In summary, if you want to be competitive and take advantage of the traffic that an event of this size can generate, you must have a proper budget for your category, be willing to increase your bids and be ready to lower your ROAS in order to achieve a higher volume of sales. Together with this, you must have a strategy focused on an eye-catching promotion catalogue.

If you require the assistance of an agency to help you plan your Prime Day and/or other day-to-day strategies, we welcome you to contact the Amazing Agency.