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Did Someone Say Amazon Prime Day 2019? Yes, We Did.

4 MINUTE READ | June 12, 2019

Did Someone Say Amazon Prime Day 2019? Yes, We Did.

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Lauren Resnick

Lauren Resnick has written this article. More details coming soon.

Last year, Amazon Prime day was the largest recorded shopping day in Amazon history, until Black Friday and Cyber Monday swept the top spot in 2018. Even with a small site crash, Amazon managed to surpass sales records. And before you ask, no the date for Amazon Prime Day 2019 has *not* been announced, but it’s never too early to start preparing. Based on Prime Day timings in the past, you can expect this day to fall on the 2nd or 3rd Monday/Tuesday of July (only about a month or so away)! 51% of US households are Prime. So, yeah – it’s time to get started.

Since last July, Amazon has rolled out quite a few serious updates. From a complete Amazon Advertising rebrand to the rollout of automated bidding, there have been numerous changes since Prime Day 2018. Here’s a quick overview of what’s changed and how you should leverage before Prime Day.

Earlier this year, Amazon rolled out dynamic bidding as an optimization setting for Sponsored Ads. This real-time optimization will adjust your bid up or down (by a max of 100%) based on the likelihood a consumer will convert. Amazon also introduced Placement bid adjustments to bid to the top of search and product pages (replacing bid+).

According to Amazon, these new features will help with campaign management and give advertisers more control over where ads may appear, how you target, and how you bid.  As an agency, we have seen mixed results under the new automated bidding features — including increased CPC’s and a higher ACoS. Similar to any automated bidding algorithm, it can’t be a one size fits all model. Ensure you are constantly learning and testing and not setting and forgetting.

The newest metric added to the Sponsored Ads reporting repertoire — these Sponsored brand metrics will indicate how many customers are “new to the brand” in the last 12 months. For one PMG client, 78% of total Amazon revenue comes from new to brand orders.

Amazon offers an array of advertising reports that will help optimize and prepare for Prime Day. From search term, targeting, and placement reports, these Amazon reports are the perfect way to ensure you are maximizing campaign efficiency before competition increases for Prime Day. These standard Amazon reports are as helpful as you make them.

Sourced from Amazon Advertising’s Reporting Module

Take the advertised product report for example, yes, it is extremely beneficial to see top selling ASINs in your campaigns and continuously optimize. However, you can also take it one step further to ensure that you aren’t spending media dollars against older, out of stock, or ASINs that are not retail ready. This way, you can get the biggest bang for your buck during Prime Day.

The latest Amazon product update is the introduction of negative keyword targeting for Sponsored Brand campaigns. With positive keyword mining and expansion comes negative matching, to ensure that your ads are not showing for irrelevant, inappropriate, or inefficient keywords.

Sourced from Amazon Advertising’s Blog Post on Product Portfolios

In late 2018, Amazon introduced product portfolios, a way to organize Sponsored ad campaigns. If you are worried about overspending or campaign management during Amazon Prime Day, portfolios are the perfect opportunity to group these like campaigns.

Last year, PMG brands saw a 217% lift in ad attributed sales and nearly a 200% lift in impressions during the day itself. If we learned anything from last year, we found that participation in Prime Day is a must, regardless of if your brand was offering an official Prime deal or not.

  • Start leveraging non-brand campaigns now! The sooner you increase brand awareness and consumer consideration before the big day, the better. While returns might be minimal, you are speaking to the window shoppers and early researchers.

  • Continue maximizing brand coverage — this is a far more efficient way to convert customers. Utilize the search term and targeting reports to add more positive (and negative) keywords into your account now.

  • Start now and sustain through July — this will build up your “quality score.”

Long story short, it’s never too early to start preparing for Amazon Prime Day 2019. Last year, Amazon Prime Day was a huge success, regardless of if brands had a deal in the market or not. With noticeable lifts in traffic and sales, there’s no reason to sit on the sidelines in 2019.

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