It’s official: Prime Day 2022 will take place July 12 – 13. The highly anticipated online sale is the biggest ecommerce event of the summer. For brands, it’s also the most competitive. Prime Day 2021 delivered the two biggest days for small and medium-sized businesses in Amazon’s stores worldwide. Shoppers spent over $1.9 billion on more than 70 million small business products. But not all Amazon sellers benefited equally. To compete on Prime Day, you need an aggressive and targeted marketing strategy. Otherwise, your product listings will disappear amid the endless barrage of impressive deals and offers competing for the same Amazon real estate. To help your brand stand apart from the crowd, we’ve compiled the best strategies for running Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display this Prime Day.
Sponsored Products Strategies for Amazon Prime Day Marketing
Sponsored Products Overview:
Sponsored Products is a self-service, cost-per-click ad solution that appears in shopping and detail pages. This is one of the most popular and effective marketing tools to help brands reach customers. Sponsored Products allow advertisers to choose their budget, bids, and targeting parameters. This helps brands of any size reach a wide variety of goals, including generating awareness of a new product, promoting seasonal items, clearing excess inventory, or showcasing best-selling items.
BEFORE Prime Day
Consider these four recommendations before you launch your Sponsored Products campaign this Prime Day:
- Create and select the strongest products in your campaign
Be sure to create engaging product detail pages to help customers make an informed purchase decision and increase the likelihood of conversion.
- Prepare your budget
Ensure your campaigns have enough budget to keep running so you can engage customers throughout the entire Prime Day duration.
- Choose how to allocate your budget in your bidding strategy
Remember, you pay only when customers click your ad and you decide how much you’re willing to pay. That is your bid. For Prime Day, set your bids to the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for a click. You can always lower your bids at any time. When you create a Sponsored Products campaign, you can choose from three bidding strategies: dynamic bids (down only; up and down), fixed bids, and rule-based bidding. Pick the strategy that works best for your campaign’s objective. For Prime Day, take advantage of the dynamic up and down bidding feature where Amazon Ads can adjust your bid (by a maximum of 100%) when it is more or less likely to lead to a sale. Dynamic bidding can also reduce your bids for impressions that are less likely to convert to a sale, which can reduce spend in less impactful placements while focusing on quality clicks. - Select your targeting and add keywords
Select your targeting and add your top keywords and products to show your ads on shopping results and detail pages to relevant shoppers. You can select keyword, product, automatic, manual, and/or negative targeting. In the weeks leading up to Prime Day, optimize your keyword match type strategy by monitoring your campaign for high-performing keywords.
DURING Prime Day
Use the following tips to monitor the performance of your campaigns and inventory with Prime Day shoppers:
- Make sure to review your bids and budgets
If your active campaigns are going out of budget, try adjusting bids or your budget upwards. When your campaigns go out of budget during the day, your ads will be paused until midnight of the next day, and you could lose impressions and sales.
- Understand your top-selling item
Log into your Seller Central or Vendor Central account and see which of your Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASINs) have been selling well since Prime Day started. Once you understand which ASINs are popular, make sure you’re promoting your top-selling products and check that your budgets and bids are sufficient for the entire day. Promoting top-selling items while millions of customers may be browsing on Prime Day can be a good branding opportunity that can help incremental exposure and sales.
- Understand your least-selling item
Identify which items have been selling the least since Prime Day kicked off to understand your customer demand. For example, you could either pause your ads for the ASINs that aren’t selling or lower your bids and budgets for these ASINs and allocate the off-set budget to the top-selling ASINs instead.
- Don’t measure your ROAS right away
Hold off on measuring success based on the return on ROAS. Sponsored Products ads have an attribution window of 7 days which means that purchases made by customers up to 7 days after clicking your ads could be accounted for in your sales attributed to advertising. Amazon recommends waiting at least 7 days to review your campaigns in full. - Check your inventory level
Log into your Seller Central or Vendor Central accounts, and check that the ASINs you’re advertising are still in stock. Sponsored Products ads display if the promoted product is also the feature offer on the product detail page and is in stock. If the product is out of stock and not the feature offer, the ads will pause until the product is back in stock and available for purchase. If some of your ASINs are low or out of stock and can’t be restocked before Prime Day is over, try promoting complimentary products or similar products.
AFTER Prime Day
- Make sure you understand your top-performing products and help maximize by creating new, always on campaigns.
- Review your advertising budgets and plan for your next shopping event.
- Help drive incremental sales with Sponsored Products by reviewing the search term report and try increasing bids on high converting keywords using manual targeting. This can help maximize impressions and generate more sales even after Prime Day.
Prime Day Marketing Ideas for Sponsored Brands to Drive Traffic and Increase Sales
Sponsored Brands Overview:
Sponsored Brands is a customizable, self-service, cost-per-click ad solution that helps customers discover and engage with your brand. This solution can help build your brand presence. Sponsored Brands feature rich creatives to help you tell your brand story through three ad format options: product collection, Store spotlight, and video. Sponsored Brands are ideal for driving traffic to a product detail page, custom landing page, or Store, building customer loyalty, and differentiating your brand through customizable creative campaigns.
BEFORE Prime Day
Here are three steps to consider before Prime Day that can help optimize your campaigns:
Be prepared for the Sponsored Brands review process
- Your Sponsored Brands campaigns must pass through moderation before they go live. Keep an eye on your email in case your campaign is rejected. You will receive this email within 72 hours of submission if your campaign is not approved. Be sure to allow enough time in case you need to adjust and re-submit for approval.
- Common rejection causes include headlines with misspellings or grammatical errors, inaccurate or irrelevant information, or unsubstantiated claims (such as “#1 best seller”). If you receive a rejection, duplicate the campaign and fix the error, then re-submit for approval.
Choose your Sponsored Brands ad format: Product collection, Store spotlight, or video
- Product collection: Display your product collection with a custom image featuring your brand and link it to your Store or new landing page. Customers can view your entire product collection, which can help you get a better ad spend.
- Store spotlight: Use Store spotlight to showcase up to three subpages, a brand logo, and a customized headline.
- Video: A 6 – 45 second auto-playing video allows you to promote a specific product. Prioritize video for bestsellers or products with promotions or new launches.
Create your Sponsored Brands campaign, set your product targeting, and establish your bidding strategy
Choose your targeting tactic and decide which products to advertise (make sure they are in stock). Set your campaigns to ‘no-end date’ to benefit from the momentum. Then select your keyword or product targeting options by entering your keywords and the ones suggested by Amazon. You may want to increase your bids significantly to compete for the highly visible top-of-results placement. You can do so with custom bid adjustments, which allows you to manually decrease or increase your bids for placements below top-of-results while keeping your bids for other placements within your typical bid range.
DURING Prime Day
Similar to Sponsored Products:
- Make sure you monitor your campaign performance.
- Review bid and budgets.
- Understand your top-selling products.
- Check your inventory level.
AFTER Prime Day
Similar to Sponsored Products:
- Identify your top performing products, review your budget, and plan for upcoming events.
- Help build brand loyalty with Sponsored Brands ad formats by investing in branded and category keywords in campaigns. You can also test the new video format to help increase your brand’s visibility in desktop and mobile shopping results with an engaging video creative.
Sponsored Display Strategies for Prime Day Deals
Sponsored Display Overview:
Sponsored Display is a self-service, cost-per-click ad solution that helps drive awareness, consideration, and conversion with automatically generated display ads that highlight your products on and off Amazon. You can complement your other campaigns with Sponsored Display to help build brand loyalty.
BEFORE Prime Day
Make sure to consider these six key recommendations before you launch your Sponsored Display campaign:
- Set up your campaign at least two weeks before Prime Day to give it time to collect data for optimization.
- Advertise 10+ ASINs per campaign to help increase ROAS and lower CPC.
- Set strong bids (of at least $1, or your currency equivalent) for your cost-per-click and competitive budgets to help keep your ads serving all day. Like Sponsored Products, you can use dynamic bids down only and up and down strategies.
- Target both products and categories in your product targeting campaigns. Product targeting can help promote your product with customers who are browsing your product, similar products, and relevant categories. Category targeting can promote your product with customers who are browsing categories relevant to the product you’re advertising and engage a wider set of potential customers.
- Use audience targeting to engage new and existing audiences on and off Amazon who’ve visited your product detail page, the detail pages of similar products, or any relevant category on Amazon, but haven’t made a purchase. You can do so through views remarketing or Amazon audiences such as in-market, lifestyle, interests, and life events.
- Use custom creative headline and logo to become eligible for all Sponsored Display placements.
DURING Prime Day
Monitor your performance and:
- If your campaigns aren’t receiving impressions, consider increasing your bids to be more competitive.
- Co-sell and cross-sell with product targeting.
- Check your metrics regularly with sponsored ads campaign metrics and downloadable reports such as purchased product report (sellers only), targeting report, advertised product report, and campaign report.
- Check your daily budgets to make sure you have enough to last throughout the entire day. Remember you can update your daily budget at any time.
- Ensure your ASINs with active promotions are included in your campaigns, so you can take advantage of automated badging and let customers know they can save on those items.
AFTER Prime Day
Similar to Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands:
- Understand your top-performing products, review your budget, and plan for upcoming events.
- Use Sponsored Display to re-engage audiences on and off Amazon, who browsed or viewed your products during Prime Day, but did not buy.
- Use downloadable reports to understand what strategies worked and what didn’t work for you to optimize product targeting and audience campaigns.
