Being one of Amazon's biggest sales events, Prime Day offers massive revenue potential for sellers. Millions of shoppers worldwide visit the sales platform during Prime Day and browse the deals or search for attractive discounts on specific products from their wish list.

The advantage for you as an Amazon seller or vendor is obvious:

However, there is a catch:

However, as an Amazon seller or vendor you should not be deterred by this. Participation in Prime Day definitely opens up great potential. Due to the generally high propensity to buy during Prime Day, most conversions are usually observed on these days. In some cases, customers wait for the event days because they expect offers, but impulse purchases are also generally high during this time.

With the right preparation, detailed monitoring, and quick adjustments during Prime Day and by leveraging follow-up campaigns after the event, you can achieve optimal results with your ads despite the competition. How exactly? We will explain that in the following paragraphs.

If you haven't run any Amazon Ads campaigns yet, you should start doing so at least 2 weeks before Prime Day. Why? On the one hand, because according to Amazon surveys, 75% of shoppers are very likely to buy a product during Prime Day that they have already discovered in the lead-up to the event. It is therefore worthwhile to present your products to Amazon users who are willing to buy, using Sponsored Ads in the weeks leading up to the actual event. On the other hand, the advertising campaigns need at least 2 weeks to collect enough data for optimization. Which keywords, category and ASIN targeting work well? Which ones should be moved from an automated campaign to a manual one in order to bid on them specifically on Prime Day? If there is enough data, these questions can already be answered before Prime Day and campaigns can be optimized and refined accordingly so that during the event itself the advertising budget is used in the most efficient way.

If you have been selling on Amazon for a while, you should also take a look at the data from previous years. Which products did well? Which keywords performed particularly well? Which did not?

It can seem tempting at first to get rid of some slow sellers via Prime Day in order to avoid long-term storage fees. This can work, but it can also backfire badly. If sales of the product were already extremely weak beforehand, Prime Day probably won't change that. It makes more sense to focus the advertising budget on products with deals, best sellers, and all well rated products (more than 3.5 stars) and give them more visibility before and during the event with Sponsored Products ads. In addition to increasing sales, this can also improve your sales rank at the same time. And with that increase, higher sales figures can sometimes be recorded even many weeks after Prime Day (so-called brand halo effect).

Sponsored Products campaigns

Amazon sellers who run Sponsored Products campaigns that are specifically planned for Prime Day, should ideally have strategic targeting in place. This could be, for example, by product type, brand, product price, single/multiple/large packs, keyword type, etc. This will result in sellers being able to be more specific in the promotion of keywords. Furthermore, they will be able to better monitor the performance of individual campaigns and products. Using a consistent pattern for campaign naming, such as PrimeDay2022_ProductType_KeywordType, can also be helpful for performance monitoring.

Sponsored Brands campaigns

In addition to Sponsored Product ads, it is also advisable to run Sponsored Brands campaigns before and during Prime Day. This way, more advertising spaces are filled during the peak sales period and maximum visibility is achieved, drawing more buyers' attention to your brand and its products.

It is not uncommon for advertisers to bid on competitors' brand terms and products before and during Prime Day in order to tap into the competitor’s brand traffic by promoting their own products. If you do not usually bid on your own brand keywords, you should at least do so during Prime Day to protect your own brand.

It is best to increase the daily budget 2 weeks before Prime Day in order to generate more visibility and data for optimization (see point #1). At the latest on Prime Day itself, the budget should then be at least twice as high as usual - even better if it can be increased to 3x as high.

To avoid being out-of-stock during Prime Day, stock should be replenished and items shipped to logistics centers well ahead of time. Since many Amazon sellers, naturally, send their goods to the warehouse shortly before Prime Day and "traffic jams" can therefore occur, it is advisable to double or even triple the lead time. In the event that stock nevertheless threatens to run out during Prime Day, you should prepare the option of shipping products via FBM if necessary - either shipping yourself or via an external warehouse/vendor.

All advertised product detail pages should be optimized for conversions and be up-to-date. It is therefore worth taking another look at each listing and making improvements to the product title, descriptions, images, etc. if necessary. Special attention should be paid to the mobile view. A large proportion of buyers obtain information via their cell phones. How does your listing look in the mobile view? After the main image, the following images should be supplemented by a short and concise text that contains all the important points. This can be complemented by the use of tables (e.g. this product vs. competition). And if you're selling a product that needs quite a bit of explanation, you should definitely add a video - if you don't already have one.

During Prime Day, you should regularly check the performance of their campaigns and readjust them if necessary. This way, you can increase the daily budgets in time if they are used up too early in the day.

If the inventory levels of any product are in danger of getting to 0, acting quickly is vital. Products running out-of-stock have a negative impact on both sales and advertising campaigns. Therefore, the stock levels should be checked regularly during Prime Day. If you have prepared for sending goods via FBM as a backup (see section "Before Prime Day"), you can now quickly fall back on in-house shipping in the event of stock issues.

During Prime Day, shoppers often compare several products with each other and increasingly ask sellers questions about them. Those sellers that react quickly and provide answers usually gain a competitive advantage. If certain questions occur more frequently this can show that the product description is insufficient. Therefore, the product detail page should be updated quickly.

Even after Prime Day, customers continue browsing Amazon for the products they ultimately did not buy during the event. It may therefore be worthwhile to leave Prime Day campaigns active for a little longer. If the campaigns are performing really well, sellers can also consider turning them into always-on campaigns and run them continuously.

Have shoppers visited your product details page, but not purchased during Prime Day? If buyers only just discover the product during Prime Day, it may well be that they don't buy immediately because, for example, they haven't had a chance to look at it in enough depth to make a purchase decision. In this case, it can be worthwhile for Amazon sellers to address them again after Prime Day via Amazon Sponsored Display Ads on and off of Amazon using the targeting option "Views Remarketing”.

While Prime Day is a good opportunity to increase sales, you also have to expect the following after the event, at least temporarily: more customer inquiries, returns, and refunds than usual (after all, more products were sold). You should therefore allow a little more time for the support effort when planning your workload for the weeks after Prime Day.

Whether Prime Day went as well as expected or not, Amazon sellers gain one thing for sure: valuable insights. These should definitely be captured and analyzed in order to use them for the next sales event (Black Friday, Cyber Monday or the next Prime Day). Which keywords, ASINs and product categories did well? Which ones did rather poorly? Which products sold particularly well? Which ones did particularly poorly? Which daily budget is optimal? With which bids did you achieve the best visibility? All of this is useful information for the next Amazon event.

At its core, Adspert's optimization is focused on scalability and robustness. Bids are adjusted gradually, as usually a single day with a higher or lower conversion rate does not immediately mean that it will continue to stay at the increased or decreased level in future. Under "normal operation" circumstances, bids are therefore not increased or decreased abruptly. However, for certain events - such as Prime Day - such "jumps" in bids are often necessary.

For this reason, Adspert has developed the so-called Event Mode which makes it easier to react quickly to changing conversion rates and CPCs for the duration of such an event. During global events such as Prime Day, Adspert automatically switches to this mode, which temporarily suspends the moderate bid adjustment, so that the algorithm is able to adjust bids considerably in a very short time - both upwards (strong-selling events) and downwards (weak-selling events). Furthermore, the algorithm assumes a significant change in the core metrics (e.g. significantly increased/decreased conversion rate or significantly increased/decreased CPCs) for the duration of the event (max. 14 days) and takes this into account in bidding.

After the event is over, the system automatically switches back to "normal operation" mode and reverts the bids to the level they were at before the event.

No. The Event Mode is a service managed by Adspert. This means that there is no user interface for this and the function runs in the backend (background). However, Adspert Enterprise customers have the option to modify the Event Mode, e.g. to optimize only selected campaigns in Event Mode instead of the entire account, or to define the time periods for which the Event Mode should be activated/deactivated. Enterprise customers can also define their own events in addition to global events such as Prime Day. To modify the Event Mode or create their own events, Enterprise customers need to contact their Adspert representative, who then activates the mode for the desired campaigns and time periods.

Yes, we recommend adjusting the optimization goals of the Performance Groups for global sales events like Prime Day, Cyber Monday or Black Friday. This means e.g. a higher ACoS target than usual in favor of higher visibility. Furthermore, we recommend increasing the goal for Performance Groups with a cost/month (or cost/day) goal a few days before the positive (high-selling) event and lowering it for a negative (low-selling) event. Adspert’s Enterprise customers can also specify that only certain campaigns or performance groups should run in event mode. To do this, they need to contact their Adspert representative who will then take care of the setup for them.

It is very important to increase budgets during a strong selling event. Adspert is very likely to increase CPCs during a positive event like Prime Day. If there is not enough budget for this, the effect of the Event feature may be futile. For example, ads might not run throughout the entire day because the budget was used up too quickly, causing valuable traffic to be lost in the evening hours.