Oren Stern
General Manager for Ecommerce
See your Amazon Prime Day sales surge this year with a few smart advertising strategies
Amazon Prime Day — the much-anticipated day of extraordinary deals and record-breaking sales — begins July 16 at noon Pacific Time this year. If you haven’t yet, it’s time to get your advertising game plan together, because Prime Day prowess is equal parts preparation and execution. This is Amazon’s fourth Prime Day, likely to be its biggest yet, and set to last 36 hours.
How big is Amazon Prime Day?
The first Prime Day in 2015 saw nearly a billion dollars in sales, while 2016 shot up to $1.5 billion, and 2017 sales topped $2.4 billion, according to Digital Commerce 360. In 2017, only Cyber Monday was a bigger sales day for Amazon.
The impact of advertising
Brands that used Amazon Marketing Services to advertise their offerings put up some big numbers on Prime Day 2017 compared to one week prior: 250-300% lift in ad-attributed sales; 100-150% lift in ad clicks; and 150-200% lift in ad impressions.
So where do you start?
In order to really make the most of your advertising strategy, you have to be clear about your goals. Are you looking to maximizing sales? Drive brand awareness? Increase your market share? Fight off competition? Whether you’re a first party vendor or a seller on Amazon, organizing your campaigns to achieve a clear goal is your fundamental first move.
Your next power play? Using Skai E-Commerce — and the exclusive set of tools, controls, and capabilities it offers — to manage your Amazon advertising campaigns. Amazon Prime Day 2018 is going to be a fiercely competitive selling environment, and you’ll need every advantage you can get to stand out and stay ahead of the competition.
Tips for Amazon Prime Day
To have a successful Prime Day, you need the right data at your fingertips, a solid promotional strategy for your best products, and the right tools to help you manage your advertising budget. Sounds simple, right? It can be, with a little preparation and the capabilities to make it all happen. Follow the tips below and you’ll be well prepared for one of the year’s biggest sales events.
1. Promote the right products:
To win on Prime Day, you have to focus your efforts on products that will make an impact that day. To help you choose, you need insights into a whole set of product attributes, including inventory, price, and consumer reviews, as well as data on how your products perform and convert.
Find quick converters – Amazon Prime Day is all about capitalizing on same-day sales, so it’s important to know which products convert quickly. Look at your conversions/sales windows when advertising to understand who your best customers are and what kinds of products they buy within a tight timeframe. Skai gives you this visibility with one-day conversion windows for your ads and products—those that generated a sale within one day of being clicked. Focus on the products that convert quickly and promote them to drive more sales.
Promote popular pairings – On Prime Day, customers buy an average of 2.76 products at checkout. If you understand shopping basket behavior, you can increase your sales. In Skai you can Import the Basket Analysis report to see which products are purchased together, so you can plan your campaigns (such as putting multiple such products in one Headline Search Ads campaign) to drive improved results.
Spot your superstars – Use customer review data to help spot the products that are most liked by your customers, and focus your selling efforts there. With Skai you can upload your reports from Vendor Central to easily identify which products have earned top marks so you can promote these crowd pleasers.
Avoid products ineligible for advertising – Some of the products that you choose to advertise may in fact not be eligible for advertising. There are many reasons why this could happen and it’s useful to investigate why your products may or may not be serving. Skai has unique reports that allow you to see the reason ahead of time, to ensure sure you build your plans around only those products that will run.
2. Dig into the data:
Amazon gives you a lot of data, and Skai helps you make sense of it all with deep insights. How do you know where to focus when you’re busy trying to sell? Hone in on these key areas and you’ll save yourself time and drive the right results.
Understand product performance – Look at the performance of individual products, not just your campaigns. This can be challenging if you’re advertising the same product within multiple campaigns, but it’s helpful to analyze at the product level, so you understand where the friction might be. Skai has the unique capability of being able to identify and group all of the ads promoting the same products (ASINs) and aggregating their performance, giving a critical view into marketing activity by product. Brands can view the results of product ads across their campaigns, instead of in a campaign-by-campaign view, saving time and providing insight into which products are performing best.
Activate Amazon’s search term report – This Amazon report shows all the search terms that triggered your ads to show, enabling you to strategically select new keywords, and understand which terms work or don’t work for your product campaigns. This data also helps you refine your keyword strategy and identify negative keywords. To make things even easier, Skai can help you identify and add negative keywords to your auto-targeting campaigns, helping you limit ad serving to the search terms you know are profitable.
Streamline reporting and insights – To make informed decisions on the fly you need to have all of your data ready and easily consumable. Whether you’re running Sponsored Product Ads, Headline Search Ads, or Product Display Ads, seeing your performance at a glance instead of switching from report to report will save you time and help you make better decisions. Our solution provides you with a complete set of product and campaign insights, presented in an easy-to-view, side-by-side format, to help you make the right decisions at the right time.
3. Manage your budget and bids to match the day’s volume:
Shopping volume is going to be exceptionally high on Amazon Prime Day, so expect your ads to be served and clicked significantly more than usual, too. You don’t want to miss out on this incredible sales opportunity by treating it as just another day from a budgeting standpoint.
Increase your budget – The last thing you want on Prime Day is to miss sales opportunities because you ran out of budget. We recommend increasing your budget by 200% across all campaigns for the Prime Day selling period.
Set out-of-budget alerts: Increasing your budget alone is not enough. You need to closely monitor performance intraday as well. Use Skai’s automated actions to set an out-of-budget alert to stay on top of your funds.
Enable Bid+ – For the ideal optimization of your products and ads, be sure to enable and manage your bids with Bid+. In Skai, marketers can manage all bid activity in bulk, setting multiple, optimal bids that help make the most of ad dollars.
Not on Skai E-Commerce yet? Need more guidance and expert advice on your Prime Day plan? It’s not too late to get set up in time for Prime Day! Contact us today and we’ll help you make the most of this massive sales opportunity.
