Prime Day Advertising: 5-Step Checklist To Dominate (2023)

As an Amazon seller, Prime Day is a crucial date in your marketing calendar.

It’s a high-traffic event that can supercharge your sales, catapult your brand visibility, and create a snowball effect of success that lasts long after the day itself.

But there’s a catch: to truly unlock this goldmine, you need to understand the unique dynamics of Amazon Advertising and how to leverage it effectively throughout the Prime Day event.

The difference between a good Prime Day and an exceptional one often lies in your advertising strategy, where every click can open the door to more potential sales.

So, if you want to convert this surge of extra traffic from window shoppers to paying customers, this article is for you.

In it, we’ll discuss the opportunity before you, the key preparation required, and the best strategies for advertising success over Prime Day.

Let’s get started!

The Prime Day Opportunity

Amazon Prime Day is an annual shopping event, exclusively for Amazon Prime members, that promises to offer significant discounts on a large range of products.

It represents a significant opportunity for Amazon sellers for several reasons:

1. Increased Traffic: Amazon Prime Day attracts a lot of attention, leading to a significant increase in traffic. This means more potential customers are browsing and buying, giving you an opportunity to increase your visibility and sales.
2. Increased Sales: Due to the significant discounts offered during Prime Day, customers are more likely to make purchases. This presents an opportunity to clear inventory, increase sales, and boost overall revenue.
3. Attracting New Customers: The heightened exposure during Prime Day can help sellers reach a larger and more diverse audience. Some customers may purchase from certain sellers for the first time during this event, potentially becoming regular customers in the future.
4. Brand Visibility: Prime Day can help smaller or newer sellers increase their brand visibility. By offering competitive deals, they can stand out among the vast number of sellers on Amazon and make a name for their brand.
5. Increased Reviews and Ratings: With more sales often comes more customer reviews and ratings, which can greatly improve brand reputation and overall conversion rate.

As you can see, the benefits of a good Prime Day performance can benefit your business in the short term, but also in the long term.

The residual effects of this short burst of increased sales volume can result in long-lasting momentum that helps you get the edge on competitors that aren’t as well prepared for Prime Day.

But to reap the rewards that Prime Day has to offer, it’s essential you get prepared in the right way.

Prime Day Preparation

Diving into Prime Day advertising strategies before setting other areas up for success is like trying to collect water in a leaky bucket.

So, each year in the lead-up to Prime Day, I run through a checklist in our business to make sure we are as prepared as possible before we start running ads.

Let’s look at the core elements of this preparation checklist.

Inventory Management

The first and most essential step is, of course, ensuring you have sufficient stock to meet the expected increase in demand.

Run out of stock, and you’ll miss out on potential sales. It’s as simple as that!

So, plan well by using inventory management software, order some extra inventory ahead of time, and work with your supply chain to get inventory to you well in advance of Prime Day.

Listing Optimization

The run-up to Prime Day is the perfect time to test and optimize your Amazon listings.

The better your listings convert, the higher return you’ll get from each dollar of ad spend invested over Prime Day.

Be sure to revisit these key areas:

• Keywords. Run a reverse ASIN search against your top 10 competitors and ensure all the most relevant, high-volume keywords are in your listings so you show up in search results as often as possible.
• Copy. Read over your listings to ensure they read well and clearly communicate the benefits of your products.
• Images. Test your main image to improve your click-through rate and your sub-images to improve the conversion rate.
• A+ Content. Ensure you have A+ Content uploaded and that it is well-optimized for mobile devices.
• Video. Add high-quality videos to your listings to further educate customers and improve conversion rates.

Price Testing

Price points are one of the biggest factors that impact conversion rates, so it’s key you spend time testing for optimal pricing in the lead-up to Prime Day.

Promotion Prep

Amazon PPC isn’t the only promotional lever you can pull on Prime Day.

Amazon makes sure there are plenty of other options available to you in the hope you’ll offer customers some juicy discounts.

To start with there are regular features such as coupons, lightning deals, and multi-buy promotions.

It’s a good idea to test these ahead of time and see what deals and discounts work well for your products from both a sales volume and profitability point of view.

In addition to this, Amazon offers sellers the chance to submit special Prime Day Deals or dedicated Prime Day coupons known is Prime Exclusive Discounts.

Prime Day Deals usually need to be submitted 2-3 months ahead of Prime Day, so be on the lookout inside Seller Central for those.

Prime Exclusive Discounts can be submitted much closer to the event, though, so these offer a lot more flexibility.

For these special Prime Day coupons, Amazon does usually set a minimum discount of 20% against the lowest price the product has been sold for in the previous 30 days.

But this will give your products greater visibility over Prime Day, and these always tend to convert well for us.

So, if your pricing model allows for a 20% short-term discount, these special coupons are well worth exploring to boost your Prime Day sales.

Calendar Prep

Once Prime Day is underway you can expect an increase in customer inquiries, so it’s important to ensure you have the time set aside to handle them promptly.

If fulfilling orders in-house (rather than Amazon FBA) this is an even bigger consideration as you’ll hopefully have a lot more orders to ship out than usual.

Post-Prime Day Plan

Finally, it’s important to have a strategy for turning your Prime Day customers into repeat buyers.

The residual effect of a successful Prime Day can help boost your brand to a new level by adding new, loyal customers and driving more visibility on the Amazon platform.

Before Prime Day arrives, spend some time planning aspects like follow-up emails, requests for reviews, and retargeting shoppers with Sponsored Display ads.

Prime Day Advertising Strategies

Once you’ve prepared your business for optimal results, it’s time to turn your attention towards generating that all-important traffic.

Running effective advertising campaigns is one of the biggest needle movers for your Prime Day sales, and there are five key aspects we work on each year to maximize results.

1. Manage Expectations

Amazon throws millions of additional dollars into marketing the Prime event every year to make it one of the biggest in the eCommerce calendar.

This will impact your advertising efforts in a number of ways, but in particular, you should be expecting:

1. Increased traffic. A spike in impressions inside Campaign Manager usually starts 48-72 hours before the official event begins as more customers start to hunt for discounts. Impressions will then usually revert to normal levels towards the end of the event.
2. Decreased click-through rates. However, more impressions won’t usually lead to a similar increase in clicks as Prime Day can attract a lot of window shoppers browsing around for stand-out deals.
3. Increased conversion rates. But, as Prime Day kicks into gear, expect to see increased conversion rates as the hungry shoppers who do find their way onto your listing get swept up in the buying frenzy.

To manage these event-specific changes, you should have a strategy for your bids, budgets, and keywords.

2. Manage Bids

The first thing to consider is your bidding strategy.

There’s every chance you’ll receive an email from the Amazon advertising team in the lead-up to Prime Day with some friendly suggestions.

The suggestions are the same every year: increase bids to maximize sales.

The problem with that, though, is that Amazon’s advertising goals are not aligned with your goals.

You want to make money, they simply want you to spend money.

So it’s important you don’t just blindly follow Amazon’s advice and instead set out a strategy that works for your business.

My personal approach is to leave bids mostly as they are. Many brands will be following Amazon’s advice and pushing bids higher than normal, but fear not.

The sheer volume of extra traffic means there is usually plenty of spillover once the big spenders run out of budget.

If you’re feeling aggressive, you can test pushing bids slightly higher than normal, but I’d recommend a cautious approach to ensure your spending doesn’t get out of hand.

3. Manage Budgets

How you manage budgets should directly correlate to how you manage bids.

If you decide to take an aggressive approach and bid much higher than normal, then you may want to use budgets as a safety net in case ad spend gets out of control.

However, if you’re keeping bids close to the levels you’ve tested and proven to show a good ACOS, then my advice would be to increase budgets by 2x or 3x for Amazon Prime Day.

The last thing you want is for high-performance campaigns to run out of budget by mid-morning due to the increase in volume when you could continue to drive profitable sales throughout the day.

4. Manage Keywords

To make sure this extra volume coming your way does in fact result in profitable sales attributed, it’s also important to revisit the keywords and ASINs you’re targeting.

If you have a good Amazon PPC campaign structure, you should already be weeding out non-performing search terms and ASINs as a regular practice.

However, if you’ve been slack on structure, or just want to run over things with a fine tooth comb, the lead-up to Prime Day is the perfect time to optimize PPC campaigns and remove poor-performing targets.

5. Manage Placements

Finally, an advanced approach would also include some strategic planning around advertising placements throughout Prime Day.

As a first step, Sponsored Brands Ads can help boost sales by 20-30% by simply replicating high-performing Sponsored Products campaigns.

This is the advice of Amazon PPC expert Michal Facchin who shared these research-based numbers in our podcast interview.

It’s also a great time to revisit placement bidding to ensure you are fully optimized for the placements (top of search, rest of search, and product pages) that perform best for your products.

Taking Things Further

For most Amazon sellers, the plan we’ve outlined will be more than enough to capitalize on the Prime Day opportunity.

However, if you’re looking to add even more touch points to help make more money and increase awareness around your brand, here are some extra tips you can try:

• Influencer Marketing: Send free products to influencers in your niche with a special offer. For example, you could have them send followers to a special landing page that will collect emails for access to an exclusive Prime Day offer.
• Email Lists: Speaking of emails, if you have a list – email them! They will likely be well aware of Prime Day, and running an email marketing campaign gives more opportunity to ensure they spend their Prime Day budget with your brand.
• Social Media: In a similar vein, utilize any social audiences you have to reach shoppers who may engage with your brand there. Spin up some posts that show off your Prime Day plans and drive traffic with a direct link, or link in your bio.

Your Prime Day Advertising Roadmap

Prime Day 2022 was the biggest Prime Day event yet with customers worldwide buying more than 300 million products throughout the event.

Prime Day 2023 and beyond will no doubt see even more growth as hungry buyers flood the platform.

By following the guidelines laid out in this article, you can develop a marketing strategy that positions your business to make the most of Prime Day’s incredible opportunities.

Remember, the first step is to prepare your product pages and inventory levels well to ensure this extra surge of traffic converts well.

Then, you’ll want to make sure you run through your advertising campaigns with a fine tooth comb to make sure bids, budgets, and targeting are all on point.

Finally, set some time aside in your diary over the event to be on hand to monitor things and make any on-the-fly changes necessary to ensure the best possible performance for your business throughout this year’s Prime Day.

If you want more help with your overall Amazon PPC strategy, be sure to check our in-depth PPC Masters course, or a BBU Pro community membership.