Prime Day PPC Roundtable

Jodea Pearl Abalos
July 13, 2019

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How prepared are you for Prime Day? Listen as experts share their strategies and best practices for the upcoming Prime Day next week. Get free insights into the workings of high performing Amazon accounts and what it takes for Prime Day success! Liran Hirschkorn, Liz Adamson, Destaney Wishon, Brent Zahradnik, Ellis Whitehead and Danny McMillan will be sharing with you how you can drive traffic and maximize Prime Day to your advantage.

Prime Day Preparation Strategies

Increasing budgets before Prime Day 25% to 50% and increase by 100% on Prime Day itself.
Reduce by 50% a couple of days after Prime Day and go back to the original budget
Increase your bids. This does not mean that [a-cost] will be higher but conversion will be better on Prime Day.
Place deals and Prime Coupons to get better placement.

Take a targeted approach especially with products and catalogs that do not convert really well.
Review on product level and keyword level and increase bids on keywords that perform really well
Get data from your historical performance to find out which data or keywords are the most likely to convert and do well on Prime Day.

Start planning ahead with your team a few months before Prime Day
Reach out to clients 3 to 4 weeks in advance and get their info on what deals and promos they are planning to have, the status of their inventory etc.
One mistake to avoid: bidding too much and being too aggressive in the week leading up to Prime Day.
Activate or deploy plans on bids and coupons about 48 hours prior to Prime Day on top of existing promotion.

Before making plans for Prime Day ask if there is a good basis for making assumptions about the impact of Prime Day on the conversion rate through PPC.
Good basis for assumptions is your data from last year which remain relevant to this year (this applies if: the product selection remains the same etc.).
The only data you change at this point is increasing the budgets, not the bids.
Rule of thumb for increasing budgets: x2 or x3.

What is the advantage of staggered increase of PPC budgets over several days prior to Prime Day?

You can expect that there is an increase to the traffic leading up to Prime Day. If there is increased traffic, it would make sense to increase the budget to capture those impressions so people can see your product..
Note for B2B clients,who do not join on Prime Day: Decrease their budgets and pause campaigns over the weekend leading to Prime Day.
Increase the budget for PPC on the products that need extra exposure before Prime Day hits.
In marketing, customers may need to see a product 7 to 8 times before they purchase.

What you should do before Prime Day to recover the status quo

We do not recommend high bids or high budgets. It needs more analysis
Align your Prime Day strategy and keep that in line with your regular strategy
There is no one size fits all solution: Do not follow trends or gurus, do what is best for your keywords or brands.
The only one-size fits all recommendation we have: Make sure you are investing into your brand. Aim on the sponsored and headline side of things. You don’t want customers landing on your page and see another ad of another brand in there.

How to know whose PDAs are utilizing lightning deals

If you check on the individual product targeting through Seller Central side and scroll through the suggestion list that Amazon gives, it will show who is running lightning deals currently and who is running best deals on all the other badges that they have.
Check if you have competitive advantage over that deal that your competitor is running. It may be color, price, or size. We bid extremely high on that lightning deal that we run and we get initial exposure through that other lightning deal.
Do this only if you have competitive advantage so you get to win that ad space.

Strategies for Defensive Advertising

Bid on all of our ASINs on PDAs because we want to win that ad inventory whether below the buy box of sponsor related item.
Target audience with no brand allegiance.
Make sure your ads are strategically placed to reach the target audience. For example, last year 53% of purchases were made by first time shoppers.
If you are increasing PPC, budget and bids, make sure you are capitalizing on the traffic.
Having a secondary image such as promotions and deals that will take advantage of the additional traffic: buy 2, get 30% off etc.
Do more headline type ads – they are prominent on mobile, if you get that traffic.
AB Testing your ads – you can do this if you have a lot of products for responsive type ads.

Strategies for Headline Searches

Running on competitor branded keywords and running this on your store page
Create a specific tab on your store page containing the lightning deals so your customers can see everything in your inventory that has a deal running on it.
Run a headline driving them to this deals tab.
There is not much traction on appending the word Prime Day to your keywords campaign – did not have very useful impact.
Consider adding Prime as a negative phrase match to your campaigns if the products are inappropriate.

Brand Analytics Strategies

Use this to check the trends and where things are moving in and improve your product retargeting and product display ads.

Campaign and Ads Strategies

Day-parting to decrease spends by pausing ads from 12am to 4am or 5am until people are actually going online.
Weekend ads pausing for B2B clients reduces their ad spend. Focus ads on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays are big days for B2B clients.

Last Minute Tips

Take advantage of Prime Day and generate as much sales as possible and use it for your Q4.
Stay on top of your account
Watch your budgets
Optimize your listings ahead of time as much as you can: images, keywords etc.
Check your budget and budget caps frequently.

Key Steps that You Should Be Doing to Prepare Your Accounts for Prime Day

Stay on top of your ACOS.
Filter anything below your ACOS goals or anything that has been below ACOS goals increase the budgets but anything that is above the margin should be decreased so you don’t hemorrhage on Prime Day.
Go into your account, look at keywords and turn the column on for Cost Per Click and if your ACOS is higher than what you’d like, lower your bid below your Cost Per Click.
Make sure you have good copy and good images. Prepare your pages. There is no point in driving traffic if your page is not prepared.
Look at your competitors and make sure you have a professional looking page.
Make sure you are optimized for mobile.

ASIN Targeting Strategies

Target your own catalog and your own ASINs
Make sure to target Star count – target those with 4 or 4.5 stars
Target pricing – target those with slightly higher pricings
Update your PDAs after 6 to 12 months, rankings drop after a few months and status change.

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