A Data-Oriented Approach to Amazon Prime Day Advertising (2024 Update)

September 19, 2024
By The Badger

Amazon sellers may disagree on a variety of topics, but you’ll find most agree on one thing: Prime Day is the single most important event for grabbing sales and boosting your Amazon Advertising profits.

In this article, we’ll explore the key strategies that will help you maximize sales and improve the effectiveness of your ad campaigns on Prime Day.

How Important is Prime Day?

This is your Super Bowl, Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals, the Daytona 500, or whatever else has some importance in your eyes. This is Prime Day. You are the Tom Brady of your Amazon PPC Account. I am your Bill Belichick. Got it? Good.

Now, do what I say if you want to win. In a word, do your job.

Prime Day was once held in October, but for 2024, it’s returning earlier in the year, taking place on July 15-16.

No matter when in the year it takes place. Prime Day is still a golden opportunity for sellers to make a lot of money.

Let’s dive into our gameplan.

Non-PPC Strategies

Let’s get started with a few strategies that don’t relate to PPC. Amazon Prime Day gives sellers a lot of unique opportunities, that are rarely available or utilized on Amazon.

First, double-check your inventory levels to make sure you can handle the excess Prime Day demand. There’s nothing worse than missing out on tons of Prime Day sales due to stocking out.

Next, we have Amazon Coupons. You can still set up and use Amazon Coupons for Prime Day 2024! Coupons are discounts that appear on your product pages. Launch your Coupons two days in advance of Prime Day because they take two days to appear.

Using Amazon Coupons can be a great way to take your external traffic and entice them to your Amazon listings.

Another feature that’s prominent on Prime Day, and already in effect, is Deal of the Day. If your product is discounted 40% or more, Amazon will designate it as a Deal of the Day! You can even start doing this right now, as early Deals of the Day are a thing this year.

The final point on our non-PPC strategy list is to make sure your product listings are optimized for SEO. This means checking and improving:

Titles
Bullets
Descriptions
EBC (Enhanced Brand Content)
A+ Content

Prime Day PPC Strategies

Like any good coach, I can offer my wisdom on both sides of the ball. Defense and offense. But that doesn’t mean I don’t prefer one to the other. As far as Amazon Advertising is concerned, let’s just say I like PPC as much as Mike Leach loves passing the ball. Let’s get to it.

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These strategies revolve around the changes in metrics for Prime Day. Luckily, we have years of data at our disposal, and after carefully examining it, we have some strategies that will boost your Prime Day performance.

A Surge in Activity

About 48 hours before the official start of Prime Day, you’ll see your impressions go up, but your clicks and conversions will stay stagnant, leading to a jump in ACOS.

This is normal; in preparation for Prime Day, people are window shopping to see what kind of Prime Day purchases they want to make.

Conversion Rates on Prime Day

On average, your conversion rates on Prime Day can jump by as much as 35%.

Conversion rates can be extremely valuable in making Amazon Prime Day-specific decisions. Can you access your data for Prime Day 2021? Not if you didn’t download it last year!

It can’t be said enough. Download your data every month.

CTR on Prime Day

On Prime Day, CTR is going to be cut in half. For example, in July of 2019 the avg. CTR was 0.37. On Prime Day, it was 0.19. There may be more purchases going on, but customers are also more methodical on Prime Day.

So what does this mean for you? You have to fine-tune your product listings and campaigns.

You’re fixing to kickoff the biggest day of the year. Do you want to set yourself at a disadvantage? Of course not! So make sure everything is as it should be.

One thing that plays a huge role in keeping everything “on-point” is nailing down your negative keywords. Impressions go way up on Prime Day, so spending money on non-converting or “iffy” keywords is not worth it!

ACOS on Prime Day

It’s very reasonable to be concerned about your Amazon ACOS with this large increase in budget, bids, and CTR. The most important thing for you to remember is that a small uptick in ACOS is worth it if you increase sales.

For 2019’s Prime Day, sellers saw their ACOS drop from the avg. 31% to 20%!

It’s All About the Money: Budgets for Amazon Prime Day

If you haven’t seen the pattern yet, a major theme of Amazon Prime Day is MORE. More customers, more deals, and more money spent on ads and products.

Keep this in mind when planning your Prime Day advertising budget.

On Amazon Prime Day in 2019, there was an average budget increase of 78%. You should at least double your budget before both Prime Days.

As we discussed earlier, CTR goes way down on Amazon Prime Day. People are looking for deals and buying items they weren’t necessarily looking to buy.

Don’t let lower CTRs scare you away from increasing your budget. While people are slower to buy, they buy more!

Bidding Strategies

You always want to base your bids on conversion rates and revenue-per-click. With the huge increase in conversion rates on Amazon Prime Day, your bidding can be more aggressive.

But you can’t simply just be more aggressive around the board. It must be targeted aggression. That means honing in on certain placements, such as top of search and product pages! Your base level bid needs to be stronger, but make sure it’s proportionate to the other two placements.

How much to increase bids?

In terms of how much stronger you should make your bids, think of it based on revenue-per-click. Things that regularly convert for you should get a 2X bid to keep pace with the increase in conversion rate.

While a 2X increase on bids is extreme in any other case, it’s very much in play during the biggest day of the year for Amazon sellers.

Using a Tool to Set Bids?

If you’re using a tool to set your bids, increase your target ACOS for Prime Day! This will tell the tool that you’re willing to be more aggressive and deal with the increase in bids.

We recommend increasing your target ACOS by 10 points for standard products. That means if you have a target ACOS of 30% your target ACOS for Prime Day will be 40%. If you have a hot item, think about increasing the target ACOS. An increase of 20-30 points is alright for a product that converts well.

Want to get prepared for Prime Day? Get this guide for free and start boosting your sales today.

Special Prime Day Campaign Strategies

You may be considering drawing up some campaigns custom-tailored to Amazon Prime Day. Bidding on keywords like “Prime Day deals” might seem like a good idea at first glance, but since shoppers are browsing and searching with the assumption that they’ll find Prime Day deals, there are better avenues. This tactic can boost your search volume a bit, but it’s more of a “nice to have” than a “need to have.”

You need to run brand defense strategies during Prime Day. You’ve already spent so much time building your brand-– you don’t want to lose all that ground now.

If you have cross-selling opportunities, take them. People will be entering Prime Day with multiple items on their list, so you want to remember your Market Basket Analysis and cross-promote products for extra sales.

Regardless of what time of year it is, you should always run every campaign type available to you.

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The Bottom Line

So there it is. Your blueprint to Prime Day 2024. The two big takeaways from this strategy are to make sure your account is fine-tuned and ready to rock on July 15th and 16th and to be very aggressive with your Amazon PPC strategy on Amazon Prime Day.

Good luck to all of you. Now go out there and make a play.