Prepare for Amazon Prime Big Deal Days with Lessons from Prime Day

Amazon Prime Day is the most exciting retail media network event of the year. It generates billions in revenue, attracts millions of shoppers worldwide, and now has a recurring sequel, Amazon Prime Big Deal Days. 

Previously called the Early Access Sale and scheduled for October 10-11 this year, Prime Big Deal Days has cemented itself as not just another sale; it provides a whole new opportunity to transform the way consumers shop and the way brands do business on the world's largest e-commerce platform. Outside retailers such as Best Buy and Target have also been more willing to promote their own large sale events during Big Deal Days than Prime Day. Savvy brands will leverage this retail juggernaut to clear inventory, launch new products, and achieve impressive revenue growth. Savvy marketers will take advantage of it for a follow-up chance to turbocharge their digital marketing results. 

Now, you might be wondering: "How can I make Prime Big Deal Days better than ever?" The answer is simple – learn from Prime Day. We are sharing our biggest lessons from Prime Day, informed by data, and proven by results for brands to prepare for this next big Amazon event of the year. Before we dig in, here is the performance from a few of our clients that proves our most recent Prime Day strategies were in fact the best ones yet: 

These superior results were driven by four key adjustments to our paid media strategies that will be crucial to incorporate going into Big Deal Days. 

1. Patience is Key.

INSIGHT

While most searches and sales happen on day one, we’ve learned that consumers do not start pulling the trigger until later in the day. Traffic starts off strong while consumers are searching, but conversions are slow until after work hours. 

ACTIONS

- Be aggressive with positive adjustments (bidding up high-performing items) during the afternoon, and wait to heavily incorporate negative adjustments until the evening. 

- Increase upper-funnel budget during the first half of day one while sales are slow. This approach even led to awareness ads more effectively driving conversions. 

2. Amazon Marketing Cloud data pays off.

INSIGHT

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is Amazon's secure, cloud-based clean room solution that uses pseudonymized signals and reporting for marketers to build custom audiences using SQL queries and activating on them in Amazon DSP campaigns. 

Our Rise team is uniquely trained in writing SQL queries for AMC and can use this expertise to appropriately plan for Prime Day and better understand the full user funnel for each of our clients. We leverage our team and technology to skip to the confirmed best approach without needing to waste time constantly testing.

ACTIONS

Unleashing the power of AMC allows Rise to research, analyze, and activate on multiple holistic insights. Here are just a few questions that we have answered for each of our clients while using AMC to prepare for Prime Day:

- What combination of ad types best improves conversion rates? 

- Are audiences overlapping too much so that different audiences are unintentionally seeing the same ads? 

- To best allocate spend, how many touchpoints does it take to convert a new-to-brand shopper?

- Which audiences are the most impactful this year so we can reach them using AMC Audience next year?

3. Amazon DSP Converts More Than You Think.

INSIGHT

Amazon DSP is a powerful, upper-funnel program that helps escalate brand interest and searches. The DSP touchpoint tends to be the first step in a consumer’s purchase journey and provides significant awareness to expand impressions and reach, especially if well-funded on the days before a big event. However, analyzing the data of Prime Days past showed us that DSP was moving beyond only being an effective opening act with performance also trending upwards on the day itself. 

ACTIONS

- Find the optimal time frame to run DSP ads that fill the funnel before Prime Day, whether that is ten days or two days depending on the consumer and products. Many brands see success by shortening the lead-up duration to much shorter than expected.

- Shift any remaining budget so you can be aggressive with DSP on Prime Day proper. This approach has proven to not hinder day-of search volume and drives efficient results even when competition and prices are high during the event. A national CPG client of ours saw the below results activating on this insight during Prime Day:

4. Automate Wherever You Can.

INSIGHT

Peak season days are all hands on deck, and it never hurts to have some of those hands be automation. Automation and machine learning help streamline the process of running and managing an advertising campaign so the team can focus on strategizing, and in cases like Prime Day, getting some sleep! 

ACTIONS

- Rise partner, Pacvue, has technology that automates and manages ad campaigns across Amazon Ads. Their products provide advanced levers including the ability for Rise to set up a plethora of automated rules to optimize budgeting in off-hours. 

- Rise takes our team and technology approach in-house with our proprietary media optimization platform, Connex®. Connex provides a platform to track, analyze, and optimize the data coming from Amazon, and all of your other media channels, in real-time and in one place. Take the Connex Product View for example: 

Using this view, you can directly see the results of all your Amazon sponsored products. Being able to identify what is selling (or not selling) helps you quickly and most effectively allocate your dollars by product. If customers are blasting through inventory, you immediately know where to focus your attention and optimizations so their favorites are always within reach. 

*Connex is also the place to access historical Amazon performance data after the 90 days it is stored in the platform. 

With Connex Alerts running 24/7 on Prime Day and Prime Big Deal Days, Rise teams take immediate action on value-driving opportunities to exceed business KPIs faster.