Amazon Prime Day Advertising Strategy

It’s that time of the year again, the beginning of the summer and people are more interested in going outside than spending money online. Except in 2020 when Covid19 pandemic hit and people stayed locked inside, traditionally Q3 is the slowest quarter for the retail sector. Of course not for all industries. There is plenty of demand for sun protection products, patio furniture and pool accessories. 

This natural occurrence Amazon decided to mitigate by inventing its very own holiday and called it “Prime Day”. As with all holidays, Amazon is trying to create a lot of hype, not only among shoppers but also among sellers. So you need to be careful and not get dragged into this with a sense of urgency and missing opportunities. Play it smart. 

Before we talk about strategy let’s think for a sec about the mindset of the Prime Day shopper. She is looking for a deal, a product that is on heavy discount. Will do a lot of window shopping and browsing, days in advance before making a final purchase. 

This tells us that we want to focus our efforts only on products that have active promotions. We need to set campaigns as early as possible, two weeks at minimum. You need enough time to gather meaningful data on what is working and what is not before the peak demand kicks in. 

First step beef up your existing campaigns. Download the latest search term report and harvest all keywords that historically have a proven track record. Expand the keyword lineup with additional research from Amazon Brand Analytics and third party tools. Increase your current bids 20 – 30% above your current cost per click. Employ dynamic bids strategy and adjust the percentage increase for top of the page placement. Make sure your campaigns stay active during the peak demand by increasing budgets and removing account overall budget caps. It goes without saying that when applying these settings to use common sense and know your bottom line. Don’t get too greedy. Bringing more traffic to your product page does not automatically mean more sales.

Second step is creating new campaigns with holiday specific keywords. Again, practice caution. Select only the ones that are relevant to your products. Unless you have very deep pockets avoid using broad keywords like “prime day”. This keyword will not bring efficient sales. Always use it in conjunction with something else, e.g. “laptops on sale prime day deal”. Like with every keyword selection, be mindful of the shopper’s intention behind that keyword. Also, don’t forget keywords like, “deal”, “sale”, “clearance”, “discounted”. Make sure you don’t have duplicate keywords in your campaigns. This is a rule of thumb in any scenario. Having the same keywords for the same products in more than one campaign will make optimization efforts a nightmare. If the keyword is not performing well, you will try to lower the bid. As soon as that happens, it will get picked up by the algorithm in the other campaign. You will end up wasting money on the same keyword for a prolonged period of time.

If you don’t have any active discounts on the products probably is best to avoid the second step. The influx of shoppers can be beneficial even if your products don’t have lower prices than usual. And for consumable goods most often this is the case. Get prepared by increasing bids and opening budgets. Also, research for complementary products that are running discounts. Create Sponsored Display product targeting campaigns on them. These ads usually show under the buy button, so people are more prone to purchase. You can use custom creative to incentives further the potential customer and explain the relation with the product that is viewed.

Bottom line, you definitely want to take advantage of Prime Day, but choosing the right strategy will depend on your unique situation, products and industry you are in. Hopefully, this article will help you make the right decision and. If you need tailored strategy from experts please don’t hesitate to reach out us.

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