Are You Ready to Advertise on Prime Day?

Amazon Prime Day is right around the corner. This year Prime Day will start on Monday, July 16 at 3pm ET and will run through July 17. It’s no secret that Prime Day is a growing phenomenon, and last year, it was surpassed only by Cyber Monday as Amazon’s biggest shopping day ever. In 2017, the event grew by more than 60% compared to 2016, with 3.5 million toys purchased, over 200,000 women’s dresses sold and more than 200,000 light bulbs sold. This year Prime Day will be even larger. For 2018, Prime Day is extending to 36 hours (the longest Prime Day yet) and will offer more than one million deals around the world, including deals at U.S. Whole Foods Market stores.

prime day

Prime Day presents huge opportunities for brands who advertise on Amazon. According to Amazon, last year on Prime day, Amazon Advertising saw a 100-150% lift in ad clicks, a 150-200% lift in ad impressions, and a 250-300% lift in ad attributed sales, compared to the previous Tuesday.

Want to capitalize on Prime Day’s increased traffic and purchase intent to maximize your sales on Amazon? There’s a few things you can do to get your Amazon Advertising campaigns ready.

Prime Day Readiness Tips

  1. First, make sure your campaign daily budgets are set at an adequate level to capture the huge surge of search interest on Prime Day. Some sources recommend setting your daily budget at least 200% higher than your typical daily budget. However, before making daily budget changes, carefully consider the type of keywords you’ll be targeting and the priority of the ads in the campaign.
  2. Next, make sure your keywords bids are sufficient enough to maintain visibility during this high-traffic period. One way to do this is to ensure your manual keyword targeted Sponsored Products campaigns have the Bid+ feature enabled. When bid+ is enabled for a campaign, Amazon will increase your keyword bid by up to 50% if it means your ad will serve in the top of search placement. The better engagement from that top placement is typically worth the CPC premium.
  3. Lastly, monitor your campaigns very closely throughout the day. In the Amazon Advertising UI you will be able to see when your campaign is approaching its daily budget, or has reached its daily budget. This means those keywords and ads are no longer eligible to serve for the rest of the day, so depending on what time it is, and if those keywords and ads are a priority, you may need to increase budget.

Also monitor for any campaign or keyword with a low click-through-rate. This means the competition on those keywords has pushed your ad down to a lower placement. Consider increasing the keyword bid in an effort to appear higher in the search results. Also, be aware that sales data can take up to three days to update in the UI, and campaign edits may take up to one hour to update.

Don’t Miss Out

As an advertiser on Amazon you do not want to miss out on Prime Day, or not be prepared for it. Prime Day is a massive opportunity to turn increased volume and higher purchase intent into sales for your business or client. The good news is that you still have time to prepare your campaigns and plan your day so that you’re allocating more time to monitoring campaign performance. Go get your campaigns ready and remember to routinely check campaign budgets, keyword bids, and CTR once Prime Day hits!

More on Amazon

Prime Day isn’t the only opportunity for advertising on Amazon. Download our award-winning Age of Amazon research to discover how B2C marketers can maximize Amazon’s many other marketing opportunities.

Catalyst's Age of Amazon Whitepaper - Amazon Marketing Research

Or, check out our other recent Amazon blogs and POVs:

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