With Amazon Prime Day done and dusted for 2018, it’s time to look forward to Black Friday 2018 and examine the lessons learned over this summers sales event and evaluate how you can apply them to the upcoming Black Friday sales period.
There has been a fair amount published in the press regarding Amazon Prime day 2018’s overall performance. Opinion has been generally upbeat as Amazon’s biggest ever sales day although here at Tamebay we suspect that performance may have been muted in the UK and Amazon Prime Day’s success could in part be attributed to the new territories such as Amazon and India who celebrated Prime Day for the first time.
What’s more interesting for merchants is how Amazon’s 2,000,000 third party sellers performed and what can be learned from the metrics to prepare for Black Friday 2018 which will be looming fast as soon as the summer holiday period is over.
Anecdotally Amazon merchants tell us that they saw success on Prime Day, even if they weren’t a part of the official Prime Day deals. Just because there’s more traffic on the site, marking up a discounted deal appears to be a winning strategy.
“For most of our Prime Day(s) clients, we had a combination of strategies in place, but specifically for clients that were running any type of discount within their catalog, we developed a “Custom Deals Tab” within their Brand Store that allowed us to direct traffic through a Headline Search Ad to all the active deals.”
– Evan Walsh, Senior Marketplace Channel Analyst at CPC Strategy
Amazon Prime Day findings for merchants using Amazon Sponsored Product Ads
We’re also hearing that Amazon Sponsored Product Ads performed exceptionally well. CPC Strategy have gathered together some key highlights from Amazon Prime Day
- We’ve seen a +65.33% increase in ad impressions – that represents a 41% surge compared to what occurred on Monday, July 9, 2018 (the Monday prior to Prime Day).
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“When comparing increases in revenue from brands that invested in Deals/Coupons compared to those that didn’t, there was a large difference in sales increases. It’s vital that Vendors/Sellers invest in giving customers a discount coupon or a deal. Amazon will reward those brands with sales.”
– Leo Carillo, Lead Marketplace Channel Analyst, CPC Strategy -
“I’ve seen the biggest success advertising Prime Day deals with previously converting keywords. I have upped these bids anywhere from 40-70%, but the caveat is only upping well-converting keywords.”
– Stuart Dooley, Marketplace Channel Analyst, CPC Strategy - CPC ran a “Deal of the Day” for an accessory brand leading up to Prime Day.
“We saw solid performance. The additional traffic helped boost our Amazon Media Group (AMG) campaigns and we also saw spend/sales increase for our retargeting campaign. Based on the performance, we saw a growth percentage of 3,433% (YoY),”
– Karen Hopkins, Marketplace Channel Analyst, CPC Strategy
Amazon Prime Day Sponsored Ads Infographic
Tactics from Prime Day that can be applied to Black Friday 2018
There are two top takeaways for merchants who are serious about scaling their businesses and want to maximise their sales over the Black Friday period.
Firstly it’s worth running deals and heavily promoting them even if you aren’t running any official deals with Amazon. The additional consumer traffic on the site will overflow from Amazon deals as shoppers are inspired to search for similar and complimentary products.
The second takeaway is that Amazon Sponsored Products adverts should be an integral part of your strategy for selling on Amazon. If you’ve not already got to grips with them then it’s time to do so. To give you a head start, here’s a webinar we recently held which you can watch again detailing strategies to scale your business with Sponsored Products:
