How to advertise for Amazon Prime Day 2022

Amazon recently confirmed that Prime Day will take place on the 12th – 13th July, so we’ve put together a list of advertising tactics to consider to ensure your brand succeeds during this key trading period!

Prime Day has firmly established itself as a leading milestone throughout global e-commerce. Now in its eighth consecutive year, Amazon Prime Day 2022 will cover more than 20 countries and offer steep one-off discounts across thousands of products and categories. With 66% of all US consumers ‘familiar’ with Prime Day and 81% of those respondents indicating that it increases their desire to shop, the new challenge for Amazon sellers is how to cut through the competition and convert the huge uptick in browsers amid fiercely competitive pricing. 

Amazon Advertising solutions enable small and large businesses alike to effectively target, communicate and convert according to a brand’s strategic priorities and resources.

Prime Day 2022

Prime Day’s colossal year-on-year (YoY) growth since its inception has led many e-commerce analysts to speculate over what contemporary factor could affect continued growth. 

While we believe Prime Day generated sales might cool off YoY, now that participation has become a prerequisite for serious e-commerce brands, advertising is starting to play an increasingly important role. With $31.2 billion ad spend in 2021, up 58% compared to 2020,  and ad attributed revenue also jumping YoY, one thing’s for sure – a sophisticated advertising strategy is required to remain competitive, especially in the lead up to high revenue events such as Prime Day. 

Despite rising inflation and the anticipated drop in consumer confidence and spending, we believe the two day super-sale has come at the right time for consumers who are motivated to use promotions and save. This offers Amazon sellers the chance to benefit from a concentrated uptick in demand and increase sales, protecting themselves from an anticipated lacklustre fourth quarter.

Important basics – retail readiness

Ensure your non-PPC marketing efforts are worth the advertising spend by following best practice to reflect your brand story and quality. Your brand store is your brick and mortar equivalent, so your product listings should be polished. These listings include:

• Product titles – use the 200 character limit by providing a concise and informative product title. Titles should include key terms which Amazon’s algorithm can use to improve relevant search results.
• Bullet points – create a maximum of five bullet points that should total no more than 1,000 characters to help your customer inform their buying decision. 
• Descriptions – put together a concise, honest and SEO-optimised overview of your product’s uses and overall brand. This is an opportunity to further engage your customer and should go beyond repeating your bullet points.
• A+ and A+ premium content – ensure your creative assets are updated and reflect your brand and products in a visually appealing way.
• Back end details and search terms – add detailed product attributes in seller central, and search terms synonymous with reach Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). This helps Amazon help you. 

Your products are the most important part of advertising and your Product Detail Page includes your highlighted product and final destination for customer conversion. 

Prime Day advertising

Prime Day uniquely offers two of the most powerful tools for marketers – Promotions and Amazon Advertising PPC. We adjust our advertising campaigns to ensure both factors compliment each other in a two-pronged approach to maximise sales, increase new-to-brand customers, promote brand visibility and achieve specific objectives brand by brand. 

Sponsored Display

As the most upper funnel advertising campaign, pushing harder on Sponsored Display will allow you to take advantage of higher traffic. This helps shoppers discover your brand whilst highlighting your products.

On average, brands who used Sponsored Display campaigns during Prime Day 2021 benefited from an 186% increase in orders attributed to this one campaign type compared to competitors who didn’t. On top of this, overall impressions and clicks increased by 141% and 154% respectively. Here are some best practice tips:

1. Use ‘refined category’ targeting for this campaign type. This allows for subcategory targeting which strikes the ideal balance between upper funnel approach and your ideal customer, ensuring both scale and relevancy and increasing traffic and conversions.
2. Use remarketing targeting tactics. This reminds shoppers who have previously expressed interest to complete their purchase. With most customers researching in the build up to Prime, it ‘nudges’ them during the best customer window for conversion.
3. Ensure maximum visibility by using Amazon’s recently launched V-CPM targeting, where you bid per thousand impressions, rather than clicks. This scatter-gun approach achieves lower click through rate but ensures maximum brand and product visibility. 
4. Target broad audiences to communicate with customers who share similar characteristics, linking them to your product and improving relevancy. You can continuously refine this ‘audience’ throughout Prime Day in real time.
5. Increase budget allocation. Sponsored Display’s budget should be increased by 20% as its purpose is built for high traffic periods which Prime Day provides.    
6. Post Prime Day, take advantage of the extended 90 day look-back window for Sponsored Display to retarget Prime customers. You can use Prime as a tool to recruit new, long term loyal customers, and increase repeat purchases.

Sponsored Brands

More than a quarter of customers browse across multiple brands, meaning brand story and brand platform presence is crucial for differentiating value, especially amidst category saturation.

With a focus on brand awareness, consideration and customer acquisition, Sponsored Brand campaigns are dedicated to showcasing your brand story and are well suited for Prime Day. 

Emphasise your brand from start to finish with customisable imagery and bespoke headlines before linking your ads straight to your brand store, brand store sub pages or dedicated product page. Here are some tips:

1. Ensure Sponsored Brands include three products that are enrolled in Prime Promotions. You could experiment by including a non-prime listing to cross-sell and recoup revenue.
2. Refresh your creative assets across custom images used for Sponsored Brands, ensuring the images reflect the products as closely as possible.
3. Amazon are now accepting promotional custom headline copy such as ‘Save Now’. Sponsored Brands also feature prominently within shopping results and product detail pages, increasing brand discoverability amongst Prime shoppers – adjust your headline to appeal to these shoppers. 
4. Sponsored Brand Videos (SBV) are a variation of Sponsored Brand campaigns which house a video dedicated to one product. They are the only ad type placed prominently in the middle of search pages – as a result they generate increased clicks and return on ad spend. It’s best that SBVs are between six and forty five seconds, and extremely product focused.
5. Ensure Brand Defence is active and competitively bidded on. There will be an increase in your competitors targeting your brand, products, pages and keywords. Competitively target your own products and keywords to prevent this.   
6. Use Store Spotlight, which links the customer to up to three store subpages with customisable headline, providing maximum coverage of your catalogue rather than a singular home page. 
7. Make sure new campaigns are set up with plenty of time to take into account Amazon’s review period, which can take 72 hours – don’t forget that Amazon can reject creative assets.

Sponsored Products

The most conversion focused campaign type, Sponsored Products are placed on Amazon in search results and product pages. Some tips: 

1. Increase your scope of generic targeting keywords and increase bids. These are the most generic keywords by nature, meaning browsers are open to brands. 
2. Implement the newly launched ‘budget rules’ exclusively available for Sponsored Products, allowing advertisers to weight budgets according to retail ‘events’ and Amazon’s suggestions.
3. Conduct keyword research and compare previous years performance if possible, implementing deal related keywords to dedicated campaigns.

Budgets and bids

Here are some tips:

1. Watch your cost per clicks (CPCs)! Prevent budget blow out and restricted performance by monitoring campaign performance in real time; increasing and decreasing bids and budgets accordingly on an hourly basis.
2. Don’t over optimise and confirm your budgets are ‘Always-On’.
3. Upweight Sponsored Display and Sponsored Brand campaigns budgets by 20% to account for higher traffic and brand awareness.
4. Implement ‘Dynamic Bidding’. Amazon adjusts bids in real time (max 100%) when more or less likely to lead to a sale. According to Prime 2020, ‘up and down’ dynamic bid strategy delivered 119% more ad attributed sales per campaign compared to ‘down only’ campaigns. 
5. Implement ‘Top of Search’ by a set percentage to increase the chance of your ads appearing at the highly prominent ‘Top of Search’ placement.

Summary

Advertising is becoming ever more important amongst Amazon sellers – this is reflected in the YoY increase in advertisement spend, causing sellers to increasingly turn to dedicated Amazon advertising professionals to employ a strategy to achieve specific goals within their remit. 

Making use of the breadth of Amazon’s advertising campaigns will ensure an equal focus on generating sales, increasing traffic, promoting brand awareness and product discoverability whilst acquiring new to brand customers. So, to summarise:

• Ensure the important basics of retail readiness are satisfied, including updating your Product Detail Page, A+ content and campaign creatives.
• Leverage upper-funnel Sponsored Display and Sponsored Brand, to reach new audiences and refine targeting to stretch your budget and remain relevant. 
• Increase competitor targeting whilst protecting yourself from being conquested by bidding on your own brand keywords and ASINs. 
• Implement ‘up and down’ dynamic bidding and ‘top of Search’ modifiers so Amazon’s algorithm promotes your ads at increased likelihood of conversion and to increase your position at the top of search results. 
• Employ an ‘always-on’ ad approach to ensure constant ad presence across the two day period, picking up sales when complacent competitors switch off or blow their budget.
• Monitor performance on an hourly basis, optimising budgets and bids according to CPC levels and exploring pockets of further opportunity based on conversions.

Have any questions about advertising for Amazon Prime Day 2022, or need help with your e-commerce strategy? Get in touch today.