Prime Day 2024 - What should you expect?

Prime Day is 1 week away, and while many of you have been preparing for months, there are a few things you want to consider as we gear up for this key shopping event. First, the details: 2024 Prime Day will be a two-day event running July 16-17. Prime Day Early Deals have already started, and shoppers are showing strong interest as in past years. Here are a few key things to keep in mind.

John T. Shea has dubbed July the "Prime Day middle finger", and once you have that image in your mind you can't get it out. Based on tracking YOY, he predicts a 12% growth this year.

Remember that Prime Day is happening in week 29 of this year and week 28 of last year. David Hosei reminded us to consider this when comparing year-over-year (YOY) performance. And if you're starting to feel the pre-Prime Day summer slump, don't worry. Adam Mellott and Michael Erickson Facchin break this down in a recent podcast, providing tips on how to talk to your brands about this.

Prime Day Deal Personalization is another aspect to note. Amazon shared that they are transitioning from presenting deals at the aggregated Deal ID level (each containing anywhere between 1-20K products) to an individual product-based customer experience on both mobile and desktop. Global Overview shared the benefits of this change in their recent newsletter, including how this will improve the customer experience. They noted that "this personalization will require an additional lift to ensure all aspects of their Prime Day strategy capitalize on these benefits. Greater focus on performance tracking and optimization opportunities throughout the event will be essential."

Over the past few years, we have gotten more value from tools like Amazon Marketing Stream. While it has value year-round, it increases during key shopping moments like Prime Day. Laura Meyer reminds us that having real-time data to make strategic decisions is critical. It allows the Envision Horizons team to navigate Prime Day, ensuring budgets are updated, spending is accurate, and intra-day changes are made based on market changes.

But intra-day is more than just bid and budget management. It can also provide insights into how shoppers are shopping. Guru Hariharan shared some examples from 2023, showing that 1) peak glance views and revenues happen by 9 AM PST on Day 1 of Prime Day. Missing this window could mean losing share of voice (SoV) to the competition; 2) ROAS is also 25% to 43% higher on Day 1 compared to Day 2, so ensuring budgets are allocated accordingly will maximize your profitability; and 3) categories like Electronics sold through the fastest, generating 50% of their total Prime Day sales in just 18 hours. Now that these new data signals have been around for a few years, your team should have a solid plan for how you plan to use them.

Setting goals is critical to managing your brand's success. Laurel Butts of Cartograph shared an inside tip on another way to use goal setting: "Set clear goals for your Day 1 sale. And if you don't meet them, launch a more aggressive plan on Day 2. Enhancing your on-Amazon strategy with email + social can drive incremental sales during Prime Day." This reminds us that our plans have to be fluid, and we can't plan for everything that is going to happen. The brands that develop strategies based on flexibility will win.

Amazon DSP remains a key tool when fully harnessing and measuring Prime Day's impact. Hopefully, you have already shifted your campaigns to be awareness-focused, building an audience during the lead-up period, which we are now in. This will help you make an audience pool you can re-target during the event. Joe Shelerud shared a three-step strategy that his team uses for the lead-in period: 1) Create a custom audience of 365-day purchases of your product(s), 2) Analyze overlapping in-market, lifestyle, interest, and demographic audiences, 3) Group audiences to create targeted segments. This method helps Ad Advance target the right shoppers on Prime Day.

Deal or No Deal? This is a question that is asked every year. I have settled that you need a deal strategy but don't need to discount across the board. This requires you to be smart about which products are used to capture attention and which ones are designed to drive sales. Don't be fooled; shoppers are looking for deals, and the steeper the discount, the better your sales will be, but this needs to be balanced when looking at your profits. That is why you need a discounting strategy. Momentum Commerce analyzed thousands of brands and showed that a mix of discounting and advertising drives the best outcome. They conclude that "Brands are likely better off aiming for a slightly more modest increase in paid visibility while devoting any additional promotional budget to discounts."

So, do you think you'll need a deal? Ad Advance did a deeper dive into the concept of deal or no deal to look at how the performance changes, and they concluded that in 2023, "Ad sales increased by nearly 3x over average, ACoS was favorable, and even brands with no deals had solid results." Their data showed that brands with deals had a more favorable ACoS, mainly due to better conversion rates over competitors who didn't have a deal. Guess what, Joe? I will look for your 2024 updates to see if this data has changed.

Product Update: Sponsored Product dynamic bids - up and down for Prime Day: With this change, Amazon Ads is temporarily allowing bids for campaigns using dynamic bids - up and down to increase by up to 100% for the rest of the search and product page placements (currently, this is at 50%). After the Prime Day event has ended, the dynamic bids maximum will return to 50% for the rest of the search and product page placements. (source: Elizabeth Greene )

Want more tips? One of the best ways to get insights is to look at past performance. Check out my post from last year, where I recapped many of these learnings and so much more.

Want to be featured in my 2024 recap? It's pretty simple - use the hashtag #PrimeDay2024 or tag Jeffrey Cohen in your post.

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