5 Common Prime Day Challenges and How to Avoid Them with Amazon Marketing Stream

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Prime Day isn’t just a two-day sprint anymore. For 2025, Amazon has extended the event to four full days, running July 8–11, with fresh promotions dropping each night at midnight. That shift hasn’t just stretched the sales window; it has introduced new planning, pacing, and optimization challenges across the board.

According to Skai’s 2025 consumer survey, 72% of shoppers plan to participate in Prime Day this year, and more than half say they’ll shop across multiple days. But while the opportunity has grown, so has the complexity. Performance can swing hour to hour, and small changes in bidding or timing may have an outsized impact.

The marketers who come out ahead will be those who can adapt in real time. That’s where Amazon Marketing Stream (AMS) comes in.

What Amazon Marketing Stream unlocks for Prime Day 2025

Amazon Marketing Stream is a push-based Amazon Ads API that delivers near real-time Sponsored Products and DSP data to advertisers. Unlike traditional batch reporting, Stream continuously sends hourly updates on performance metrics such as impressions, sales, ROAS, and clickthrough rate. Stream offers advertisers hourly updates across key signals, unlocking a higher level of granularity for optimization.

Stream isn’t a dashboard—it’s a data pipeline. That distinction allows marketers to use the information in ways that traditional dashboards can’t match.

• Hourly performance signals help pinpoint spend inefficiencies or emerging opportunities in real time.
• Dayparting transparency reveals when shoppers are actually converting, not just clicking.
• Brand halo reporting captures the lift in sales across ASINs that weren’t directly advertised.
• DSP-enhanced data brings more cross-surface visibility into campaign impact.

With Prime Day now running four full days instead of two, real-time adaptability becomes even more important. Shoppers will enter and exit the event multiple times, and many will revisit abandoned carts later in the window. These kinds of behaviors make in-the-moment insight critical, not just for performance, but for managing budgets and avoiding fatigue.

Prime Day problems to plan for

Here are some challenges you might face during this year’s longer Prime Day and how Amazon Stream can help solve them.

Challenge: Spending too much, too early

Day 1 may feel like the moment to go big, but it might not deliver the best returns. According to Skai’s survey, only 27% of shoppers say they plan to complete all their Prime Day purchases on the first day. That leaves a lot of opportunity and competition for days two through four.

Without Stream, it’s easy to over-index on morning spend or underestimate when buyers are active. Stream can help marketers dynamically reallocate budgets across all four days as conversion rates shift and demand patterns evolve. That’s critical for catching the late-event surges that often separate good outcomes from great ones.

Challenge: Missing competitive shifts

Bid pressure and CPCs often spike during high-traffic hours. Without fresh data, teams may not catch those shifts in time to react. Stream provides the early signals: rising CPCs, sudden dips in impression share, or shifts in high-performing ASINs.

Marketers can use that intel to adjust bids or switch up targeting before wasting spend. Stream makes these moves timely, not reactive.

Challenge: Inefficient ROAS during peak hours

Traffic spikes don’t always translate to revenue. In fact, high-volume hours may attract window shoppers or deal browsers who don’t convert. Stream helps isolate when performance isn’t matching cost, so marketers can pull back when needed and double down when returns are strong.

This flexibility matters. 44% of consumers say they add items to their cart and revisit later, meaning constant visibility may not be as efficient as smarter, more surgical exposure.

Challenge: Repeating the same ad too long

Creative fatigue sets in fast. With four full days to cover, marketers may struggle to know when engagement starts slipping. Stream’s clickthrough and conversion data by hour help flag when it’s time to refresh creative or test variations.

Combined with automation, these signals can support smart swaps that keep ads fresh without needing full resets.

Challenge: Guessing when your audience is actually shopping.

Assumptions about shopping windows often fall flat. Some categories peak at sunrise, others in the late evening. Stream surfaces real-time shopping behavior so marketers can make smarter dayparting decisions.

Instead of wasting impressions during low-conversion hours, marketers can align spend with actual shopper intent and stretch limited budgets further.

How Skai helps you act on Amazon Stream insights during Prime Day

Stream offers real-time visibility—but that only matters if your platform can keep up. Skai is purpose-built for agility, enabling performance marketers to react quickly and intelligently when shopper behavior shifts. This year, two new capabilities make our platform even better equipped to help you translate Stream insights into results.

These tools in Skai’s platform are designed to help performance marketers stay responsive, stay efficient, and stay ahead—all in real time.

Smart Tags help segment performance by promotion, creative, product type, or retailer—so you can surface insights faster and track results more clearly.

Automated Actions & Alerts let you define rules and thresholds to trigger real-time campaign changes using the insights you glean from Stream data.

Budget Navigator manages spend pacing across your full Prime Day plan, reallocating mid-flight based on how performance trends shift hour by hour.

Creative Manager rotates and schedules Sponsored Products creative based on engagement trends to reduce fatigue and keep ads fresh throughout the event.

Product Performance Grid gives visibility into SKU-level data at different times of day, helping to spot winning products and underperformers quickly.

Search Term Analysis tracks shifts in keyword performance and intent signals to fine-tune targeting as consumer behavior evolves throughout the week.

Together, these tools help teams close the gap between insight and action—so Stream’s real-time signals don’t just look interesting in hindsight, but actively improve outcomes in the moment.

Conclusion: Put your real-time strategy to the test

Prime Day 2025 demands more than great deals and big budgets. With the event now spanning four full days, real-time adaptability is the new advantage. Amazon Marketing Stream provides the data, and Skai helps make it actionable across every touchpoint.

The combination allows marketers to move from reactive to proactive—aligning spend, creative, and targeting to the realities of in-the-moment shopper behavior.

Skai’s Retail Media solutions enable marketers to plan, activate, and measure campaigns across 200+ retailers—including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Instacart—as part of a broader commerce media strategy. AI-powered pacing, product intelligence, and keyword tools help teams meet shoppers across the journey and tie spend to sales with confidence.

Schedule a quick demo to see how Skai can help your Prime Day strategy deliver across all four days and beyond.