The ‘Dog Days’ of Amazon Prime Day Advertising

The summer can feel hot and long, and for millions of Americans, Amazon Prime Day offers the welcome oasis of cool deals and a few thrilling moments of holiday-like shopping frenzy — assuming we aren’t seeing dog pics (however cute) instead of the deals we came for. For brand advertisers, however, Prime Day represents a lightning-quick window of enormous opportunity to grow exponentially by competing for the droves of shoppers hungry for midsummer discounts.

To the 300+ brands leveraging Skai E-commerce for Amazon Advertising, Prime Day success means all-hands-on-deck to deliver holiday season results in the height of summer. Luckily, they were prepared. With total sales numbers across Amazon in early, unofficial reports showing some 25% growth from last year, we turned to our advertiser pool to see how the advertising responded to the opportunity.  

The highlights didn’t disappoint:

• Budgets doubled across the board, seeing record daily highs for our advertiser index. One well-known consumer electronics brand spent 8X their average monthly spend on each day of the event.
• Average CPCs increased by 24%, as competition on key terms sent the auction into a frenzy.
• Brands invested in sales velocity and were willing to sacrifice margins to capture the opportunity at hand — yet conversion rates remained steady.

The net-net: Total daily sales as tracked by our platform almost quadrupled (3.75X) on Prime day.

Why did Skai brands fare so well? Efficiency in execution played a major role, given the tight 36-hour timeline for impact. Skai’s capabilities in automation were a key theme in our client feedback post-Prime.

From a major agency partner:

“It was great to have Automated Actions for AMS.  We scheduled Campaign OOB [out of budget] actions to increase budgets by 15% every 2 hours if they had the OOB alert.”

From another client:

“The ability to duplicate automated actions if I wanted them to run multiple times a day was key to the setup and ultimate execution.”

The value of automation in optimizing enterprise search programs on Amazon is made abundantly clear when viewed through the lens of a Prime Day event. The complexity of a broad catalog or a stable of brands within a large CPG company on any normal day of the year requires constant vigilance and a heavy dose of automation, optimization, and reporting insights just to stay afloat. Add to that the fury and fierce competition of very few major shopping events each year — Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday — and these capabilities, specific to Skai, can make or break your brand and market share.

Whether Prime Day was a smashing success for your brand, or it left you in the doghouse,  Skai has you covered next time around. The best part? With the right tools and planning in place for your advertising, you can stop and shop a little, too. That Instant Pot had your name on it.

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