How to Win Prime Day Like the Top Amazon Brands

Hello everyone welcome we're excited to uh dive in today to talk about Prime Day nice and early this year um we're going to give it uh about one more minute for more people to show up uh before we get started um hope everybody's having a a great day we're excited for this topic it's obviously an important one um and Amazon throwing a monkey wrench by moving up the event and not really giving anyone sufficient advanced notice is definitely a complicating factor um so we're going to dive in deep today and give you lots of good tips about how to prepare um using kind of evergreen Prime Day strategies but also um specifically around the the adjusted or new earlier timeline for the event um so give it about 30 more seconds and then we will uh get started um for those of you who don't know me I'm Jason i'm one of the founders of Nectar and I'm joined by Harriet you want to introduce yourself 1.

Yeah hey everyone welcome i'm Harriet Parson our VP of advertising at Nectar 1. Between the two of us both me and Jason we've spent the past several years in the trenches of Amazon advertising and you know Prime Day is kind of our Super Bowl so you're definitely in the right place 1, 2. Uh you know I've spent the past 10 plus years focused specifically on Amazon across sponsored ads DSP AMC also some um ops and fulfillment um roles so really just helping brands scale uh through moments like Prime Day and you know today we're going to give you everything you really need to know um about winning Prime Day the actual playbook the frameworks numbers timelines real stuff you can ideally execute 2. So you know we're not just going over tactics and while you know right now is a little bit late to start preparing it's not too late to drive an effective strategy too 2. We'll also um have a QA at the end so drop your questions in the chat as we go and we'll get to them at the end of the presentation 2. Yeah all right so we will get started um yeah diving in so what's different this year Harriet 2?

Yeah so um there's a couple things prime Day is now a 4-day format that has also started earlier than most it's going to be in late June this year 2, 3. Here's the thing about the 4-day format that most brands haven't fully internalized yet is that the prep window is actually shorter and also with it being in June you have less runway than you think 3. 4-day format isn't specifically new for 2026 we have seen it in the past but in the grand scheme of things it is pretty new where it started you know last year um for some um data from 2025 Prime Day you know uh 41% of US households are expected to shop the event it's not a small opportunity it's a massive number 3. The question is whether you're going to try and ride it um and whether it's implemented correctly 3. Um the framing that we use internally is typically you know this isn't a sales event you show up for and it's event you build towards and distinction and prep is everything 3. So um a couple things that changed last year that we expect to see similar numbers this year prime Day 2025 was up 30% over 2024 3, 4. Every year this event it really does compound um more sellers more ad spend but also more competition so if you're planning to run the same playbook you ran last year you're already behind 4. Um you know the prep window is about two to three weeks shorter that means if you're watching this now and haven't started yet again you're late but not out we'll give you the timeline um that you should be implementing 4. 85% of consumers plan to shop with you know last year um you know about half of that actually shopping um and then when you implement DSP with sponsored ads it drives about a 2.6 purchase rate increase 4. This is the benchmark for Amazon i've actually seen it in specific categories be much higher than 2.6 so keep that in mind 4. Then AMC it's now table stakes right so Amazon Marketing Cloud it's no longer a nice to have for big brands or or small brands if you're not using it to build audiences and measure measure incrementality you're leaving serious money on the table 4, 5. We've never had AMC audiences for Prime Day before so you can really leverage them to reach laps customers um bid up in your sponsored uh brands and sponsored product ads to reach users to make your ads more efficient like new to brand customers 5. And then you know more brand more and more brands are investing in DSP so leveraging AMC audiences for uh measurement obviously is a very important case and then there's specific AMC instances that you can pull in order to measure the impact of your pre-launch strategy your day of strategy and your post-launch strategy of Prime Day both on DSP and sponsors 5.

Um so we've kind of distilled this down into a methodology so we're going to dive into that um Harriet do you want to kind of outline that 5?

Yeah so we we do have a three-phase ad playbook um I but before that I want to ground everything in the framework we call the shop method 5. So here's really the principle ads amplify a well-built foundation right they don't fix a broken one 5, 6. I've seen brands triple their ad spend for Prime Day and still underperform because the listing quality was mediocre or the pricing wasn't competitive or the inventory ran out on day two 6. Ads really just think of it as pouring fuel on the fire um so let's walk through like the foundation before we talk about ads 6. Shop method is our framework for building Amazon success from the ground up it stands for strategize hone optimize and pro and um promote 6. So strategize before you spend a dollar you need to research um driven strategy right know your competitors understand demand trends nail your unit economics so your P&L understand what products you want to push um revenue looks nice but profit after ads is reality we say this to every client 6. Know your numbers before you commit spend i have seen so many brands um do a ton of revenue on Prime Day but then when you look at the bottom line they're crushing their margins from deep promos and ads 6. You should have a strategy well in advance of that day to have a budget for ads and promos to make sure that you're hitting not just your topline goals but also your bottom line goals 6, 7. Um depending on the category you might be willing to lose more margins like CPG for example you're kind of making a bet on getting newborn customers in and then you can track your recurring revenue over time 7. So um again it's dependent on your brand goals but definitely um have a plan in place for that 7. Um hone you know this is about your brand identity and I don't mean you know logos I mean more so trust um when someone lands on your product detail page they should feel confident enough to buy 7. Um there should be consistent design a strong brand story in most cases a premium feel you know we've seen small brands completely transform their conversion rates just by you know optimizing their brand presence and redoing some creative 7. Um speaking of optimizing make sure your listings are optimized for conversions this is where the conversion either happens or it doesn't so high converting hero images A+ content compelling brand store um SEO and keyword optimization 7, 8. If your listing isn't built to convert your ads are just buying traffic for someone else to buy essentially 8. And then promote this is where we come in with ads you know when the first three are in place the ads work much better than when they're not and when they're not you know you're just kind of in some cases burning budget 8. And I will say this shop strategy it also works for an ad strategy right uh as well right so strategize um and like structure your campaigns making sure that you're bidding on the top terms um and then all the way down to um optimizing and promoting 8.

I also want to add that I think sometimes brands forget about the consumer psychology of the event you know consumers are looking for deals so when you're thinking about optimizing your listings you should be focusing on uh the items that you're going to promo and you know if you're putting your listings next to your competitors and you have your deal why is your product a better value for the money 8, 9. Um obviously you know you're either uh opening price point mid-level or premium and so you know who your competitors are in your trunch um so focusing on how to position your products with that deal um is going to going to go a lot further than just indexing for SEO purposes and making sure you have all the keywords in your listing for example 9. Um so I think it's really important to keep that in mind when you're preparing your strategy obviously you don't know what your competitors are going to do in terms of the amount whether they're going to promo certain items and the amount of the discount um but in terms of what you can control it's really important to account for the consumer psychology 9. Um so kind of diving down a little bit deeper here Harry what do you recommend for the SH 9?

Yeah so just staying on the foundation for one more slide because this is where you know most brands um sometimes miss you know the reality of Amazon is that most sellers treat it like a list it and they'll come platform they put up a product throw some budget at sponsored products and wonder why they're not winning 9, 10. The truth is success starts well before you go live you need you know a research strategy uh you need to understand your competitors what they're pricing at what their reviews say where your weaknesses are and really just understanding the demand trends as well 10. Um on the brand identity side think about this for a second in terms of a Prime Day shopper scanning through the search results right um what makes them click on your product it's normally the image price um and the brand feeling right 10. It's looking like an end review so it's looking like you belong there alongside some of the you know big players that are dominating the market a strong brand story with consistent like premium design can make you know even the small a small business uh compete with those very large uh brands with with more reviews too 10, 11. And then oh go ahead sorry moving to optimize and promote 11.

Yeah and then some takeaways yeah I would say optimizing is really just about one thing making sure that every person who clicks on your ad has the best possible chance of buying so you need again high converting hero images A+ content that tells your product story um and answers any objections brand store that's set up as an event landing page for Prime Day you know make sure you're sending user to the deal page too not just a generic storefront you know SEO dialed in titles bullets backend keywords all of it 11. Uh and then the thing about SEO that is different on Amazon from Google Amazon's algorithm it cares about conversion rate uh so if your listing is weak not only are you paying for more ads you're also not moving the needle in terms of your organic rank the two are deeply deeply linked 11. And Amazon also um ranks products organically based off of not just total sales volume but incremental sales so whether you're increasing sales in terms of the market 11, 12. Uh on the promotion side paid search isn't just about running ads it's about you know running the right types of ads at the right funnel stages so using sponsored products for conversion sponsored brands for awareness and share of voice sponsored display for retargeting or DSP and then you know also DSP for really full funnel coverage 12. Um we'll get specifics on all of this too though and oh go ahead oh go ahead 12.

Yeah so just kind of bringing this all home yeah so how the shop method just maps directly to prime day performance your strategy work really determines deal selections your brand identity directly impacts your uh performance from your ads and your creative your listing optimization determines really your conversion rate on the event day and then your precision ads are really the engine for the full three-phase playbook that we're about to walk through 12. But when all four are aligned you don't just have a good prime day you have really compounding growth 12, 13.

Yeah and so Harriet's referenced this playbook and what she's referring to is having a leadin event strategy and leadout strategy so what we're going to do is cover how we do this in detail 13. Um as a before we get into this I want to say that I've seen people in the industry uh you know uh give theories that lead in and lead out don't work um I've never seen good data on that um it always has been based on a faulty data analysis 13. Um we've seen time and time again that building traffic and before the event and then capitalizing the day of by being strategic and not overspending and then uh retargeting people after the event uh using you know exclusions and things like that um basic if you know if they bought other products or bought your product work really really well um and not doing this doesn't work as well 13. Um and also when you marry it to consumer psychology again we know that people are looking for deals right so they also they're looking for deals on products they want so a lot of people uh are shopping basically building their carts ahead of time or coming look browsing products and seeing what they want to check back on to see whether there's a deal that day 13, 14. Uh you know I have a hard time personally just keeping on top of my calendar uh you know if people are going on and browsing before uh they can really just struggle to like remember all the different products they're looking at right just another example of why leadin strategy works so you've captured them and their audience and can retarget them the day of or after 14. Or sometimes people are really committed you have an expensive product they want it they want to see there's a deal but there isn't they might still buy it anyway because they're just like screw it i didn't get the deal but I want this product so I'm just going to buy it if there's not a deal on Prime Day there's not going to be a deal 14. So I just want to preface preface what we're about to get into that this works really really well whether youre a brand that's doing nine figures a year on Amazon or below uh we have executed these strategies time and time again with great results 14, 15.

Yeah so the threephase framework um at a high level we'll go deeper into each one of the phases but there's phase one which is the leadin we the best practice is four to six weeks out this is rank building and audience filling you're not just trying to get rorowaz right now you're investing in position and organic rank 15. One thing I will say for leaden is four to six weeks is best practice but you should also start implementing minimum uh six weeks way before actually um your product level promotion strategy and getting your budgets in line to understand what your bottom line needs to be 15. However this is not a one-sizefitit all fits all right some brands that are smaller and have limited budgets they can't um really do a lead in strategy that's four to six weeks out 15. The the majority of the leadin in terms of ad budget is the two weeks prior to the event and sometimes the leadin strategy for the four to six weeks it doesn't necessarily mean spending more um it could be shifting from conversion tactics to more upperfunnel or category expansion because you want to build a rank but you also want to generate more excitement and interest in your brand and your products 15, 16. And you know right before Prime Day you're still going to get sales but conversion rates typically can see a little bit of a drop um sales can see a little bit of a drop because people are holding out to purchase especially for like premium highriced items 16. Phase two the day of you know it's four days um this is real-time execution hourly ma management bid defense uh pacing real-time reallocation and using conversion rate as a signal with marketing stream 16. Then the leadout strategy week weeks one through four postevent you know that's implementing retargeting nurturing those new to brand uh customers as well as that influx of traffic you got on those days subscribe and save push you know this is the most underinvested phase and often the highest ROI 16, 17. You know we've tested this extensively as you know Jason mentioned and brands that allocate across all three phases consistently outperform brands that go in you know all in the day of it's it's really not even close 17. And if you go all in the day of more than most of the time I see margins being being severely crushed um and a lot of brands don't even realize that until after when they do a postmortem analysis 17.

Yeah and the reality is that deals drive volume on Prime Day yes there's a rising tide lifts all ships effect um but you know the the better the deal you're offering the more units you'll see and then you know you have to as Harriet said earlier really balance that with um your promotional spend right because it's a pool of money and you only have so much to not erode your margins past a certain point 17. And then I think an additional factor we saw last year was there was much more wild swings in in terms of pacing um because the event was double the amount of time as compared to historically which has added another uh wrinkle or challenge is how do you you know pace your budgets obviously it should correspond to to the deals you're running and when youre running them or when they're live um but yeah just a additional complicating factor now that's twice as long so getting into some of the uh operational readiness here uh Harry do you want to walk us through this 17, 18?

Yeah so just essentially these are the deadlines for um submitting um inventory and the deadlines so just making sure that you're planning ahead and then we kind of went through this but creative readiness finalizing your hero images and your product detail pages typically you know with deals just some metrics there is you're going to see a 3.1x in sales lift um and a much higher conversion rate on those prime days i don't think that's um that that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone 18. Um if you've ran strategies prior you can you can see much more than a 3x i've seen brands do 3X and not even reach um like half of their potential based on their strategy so again it depends on the category you play in and um your plan but you know 3X shouldn't be the the benchmark for everyone oh go ahead 18, 19.

Yeah we're just this is getting into some deal types um so just making sure that you're on top of the deadlines obviously the last slide was more FBA focused or 3P focused um but here these are deal submission deadlines you don't want to miss these and they are uh some you know they're they're coming up quickly here 19. Um you know another thing to keep in mind is that Amazon has really cracked down on historical pricing and then your your promos are benchmarked to your historical average price so you want to make sure that you're not you need to think about if you're running a deal for an for an as prime day or asens you need to think about the historical pricing uh average because you could end up making your deal ineligible on prime day if you essentially are discounting it between when you submit the deal and prime day and it doesn't meet the minimum required discount um because you've priced it lower before prime 19, 20. So essentially Amazon's looking at your average price on a trailing 90 days is that right now period or uh deal price low as 60 days um and so if you drop your price between when you submit the deal on Prime Day uh it could bring down the average and then the the discount may be ineligible so you need to keep that in mind 20. Amazon really started cracking down on it last year um and and you don't want to get to Prime Day and be like "Oh why is my deal not eligible it can potentially it could be impossible to fix or really hard to fix um so just keep that in mind 20. Um and then yeah Harry's going to walk us through really quickly um you know what which SKUs to promo i would say by this point you should have this figured out um because of inventory um but Harry really quick if you want to walk us through 20, 21.

Yeah typically in terms of choosing which uh SKUs to promo there's there's a couple of tactics there you can look at historical data in terms of what performed best right if you have historical data it shouldn't be just a repeat of the same strategy of prior prime days but you should be taking your learnings and using things that have worked so it's a not a repeat but it's a rinse refine um and then implement margin should come into play um of course new product launches 21. Prime Day is a great time to um launch new products because you get that um benefit of when a new product is launching within the first 30 days you get a little bit of a leg up in the organic rank um in terms of Amazon's algorithm you're getting a lot more visibility and if you implement the right plan with DSP and like awareness those can be really successful 21. And then um liquidating inventory is sometimes uh user uh brands use Prime Day but typically it's going to be your hero SKUs yeah and I mean I would always say that you know you're if you're trying to liquidate inventory it's because nobody wanted to buy it um and so unless you're going to offer like a really really high discount you typically don't see great success with that 21, 22.

Yep and then so with the leadin approach um really the goal here is one of the goals here is building rank with sponsored products and sponsored brands and sponsored brand video um during leadin you really want to push organic rank before the event so you pay less during the event 22. This is the single most leveraged thing you can do in the leadin period when it comes to ads here's why it works amazon's algorithm it rewards velocity it's paytoplay as we all should know when you increase bids on high volume keywords for your deal lens in the weeks before Prime Day you're building organic momentum 22. By the time the event hits you're ranking better organically which means you're paying lower CPT CPCs to show up at the top because on Prime Day your CPCs are going to skyrocket 22, 23. I will say the day of Prime Day the ranking can be a bit volatile leadup definitely has an impact on this but deals do play more into the algorithm on Prime Day 23. Um you know the data definitely backs this up we've seen almost 3x impressions um versus the July average in last year this is 2025 to 2024 um with the 4-day format we actually saw CPCs fall about 11% compared to prior years um so it can be a little bit cheaper when you're spreading it out across the four days um and you're doing lead in 23. So here's what to do specifically you know increase bids on high volume keywords for all deal asens prioritize top of search QA every deal as and then make sure your sponsored brands campaigns are driving to your store's deal page 23. Um I definitely recommend pre-building campaigns where um you're pre-building your AMC audiences and you're pre-building campaigns so you're not you know scrambling the day before Prime Day to get things up 23. Also AMC audiences can take in some cases if you're using a thirdparty platform more than 24 hours but typically it's 24 hours for them to load in the console so you if you do it last minute you might might miss the opportunity 23, 24. Um and then you know with um while you're building rank you should also at the same time be filling your retargeting pools with DSP so AMC again is huge this year we have introduction of audiences 24. Think of it this way dsp is the leadin um like filling a bucket prime Day is when you kind of pour it out 24. So some DSP awareness tactics are targeting new to brand customers um you can overlay like inmarket or lifestyle audiences you can launch sponsor brand video um to highlight key products features of your brand story you can use contextual targeting you can AB test your PDPs and brand store um with DSP 24. And then for AMC audiences these are just a couple but you can target card abandoners uh recent product detail page viewers of your product or competitors that haven't actually purchased prior event buyers so you if you have a new product coming out or you have a product that people are buying a lot of the time you can actually target users who bought last Prime Day or last October Prime Day and re-engage them the day of with a DSP ad reminding them that you know they might want to add it to their cart 24, 25. Um high AOV segments is a great one and then you know keyword searches who did not convert you know these people showed intent but they didn't pull the trigger 25. You know these AMC audiences they're what let you really move fast when the event starts if you haven't built them in advance you know you're starting from zero on day one 25. Dsp spend um for us was up 56% pre-event in 2025 the brands investing in leadin are the ones you know setting themselves up to dominate 25. We saw last year the brands that weren't investing in DSP saw a much lower lift and ended up being much more expensive for them the day of Prime Day 25.

Yeah I really want to emphasize that this is can be a massive uh gamechanger in terms of the return you get on your entire strategy and and obviously ad spend because yeah as Harry mentioned CPCs are way higher on Prime Day and and so are CPMs 25, 26. Um and so when you are more intentional about the buyers that you're targeting and that essentially they have some engagement with your brand already right it had PDP viewers or brand store page visitor visitors you know they know your brand um or past event purchasers uh you're going to increase the likelihood that you're going to convert so you're putting your money to much better use as opposed to just uh putting that ad spend towards generic searches which while they might might be relevant there's a lot of competition on those generic searches during Prime Day there's other brands running deals 26. Um so your ad spend is going to be a lot more efficient and tailored which means you will get more out of it 26. As Harry mentioned we haven't even had these audiences for Prime Days Prime Day before so this should be a really big game changer and um you can layer in exclusions like no purchases um or haven't purchased uh which again is just further refining your strategy and making your ad spend more efficient 26, 27.

Yeah and creative you know we we kind of went over most of this um it's really you your creative should be locked in before the event week ideally weeks before you don't want to wait until like the week of Prime Day to test creative you should already know what works beforehand um and scale those proven assets 27. One thing I will say is once you if you're running different creatives on the DSP what you can do through Amazon Marketing Cloud is say you have a lead in campaign for the DSP where you're targeting different audiences um you can then retarget those users that were exposed to your DSP ad whether it's display uh online video streaming TV 27. You can retarget those users with sponsor display or um DSP or even bit up on the event day on sponsored products or sponsored brand keyword campaigns um where you're reaching those users that have already been exposed to your ads downfunnel to um encourage downstream conversions because these users have already you know showed interest in some way maybe they've just been proven that they've been in the audience 27, 28. You can even do people who were exposed and then visited your product detail page and retarget those users 28. So AMC there's a lot of ways that you can leverage AMC audiences um for this Prime Day uh there's really like very minimal limits especially with Amazon opening up retail insights and unlocking organic um behavior with um AMC now 28.

Yeah and one thing which we touched on here which we haven't talked about before is just making sure that your any of your custom ad creative is compliant you don't want to schedule a campaign to go live right before and then have it be rejected because the creative doesn't meet the requirements 28. So making sure that you know it's it's in review well in advance of prime day so that if you have to make changes you can uh you know if it gets the ad creative gets rejected you can make changes in time 28, 29. Um so how about budget allocation obviously a huge uh factor in in performance 29?

Yeah again budget allocation just want to preface this with it's not one-sizefits-all right but leadin we typically recommend 25 to 30% of the budget for rank building awareness uh creative testing day and that can be you know two weeks or it can be four weeks or or six weeks sometimes 29. Um day of it depends on um your life cycle um day of it's really about 45 to 50% i have seen lower day of if you have a really aggressive coupon strategy um and you want to prioritize margins i've seen that be really successful too and day of be about 20% it all depends on your goals and the products that you select 29. But they have you know bids are going to be more aggressive there's more defense deal amplification um and then postevent 20 to 25% you can retarget users you can um do more new to brand remarketing you can also try and convert users who were first-time purchasers on Prime Day into subscribe and save um postevent 29, 30. One thing I will say for the day of targeting is the day of a lot of your work should have already been done you should have a lot of your interest build you should have been testing different audiences users should already almost know they want to purchase your brand 30. Of course a lot of users are going to discover you in the search results if they haven't been served an ad before but you should have been generating that interest and like a lot of users should be waiting to buy and then the day of Prime Day is when you retarget those users to remind them 30.

Yeah and so to reframe this what we're encouraging here is that you think about your budget more holistically not just plan you know a lot of brands they just plan their budget for the 4-day event and what we're saying is you should actually you know it's like really a couple weeks before uh the event itself and after and that that should be one pool of money and you should think about how to allocate that based on what you're doing right 30, 31. If you're in crazy high deals on Prime Day or aggressive deals you probably want to invest more on leadin um than day of right 31. If you're an expensive product you're not doing much you probably want to lean more on postevent um and retargeting right because you're going to get a lot of traffic and you might not convert as well on Prime Day because you're not running a deal 31. So as Harriet you know mentioned at the outset it totally depends on your strategy and circumstances but you should think about it as a a one big pool of money and how to allocate it properly instead of just planning it for the 4-day event 31.

Um so a lot of questions that we get are what does success look like i think a lot of people get anxiety in the leadin right we're running all these ads they're not converting um so part of that is the ad format itself but also in general like what what should how should you benchmark especially when you're trying to fill that bucket 31, 32?

Yeah and the truth is every year I feel like brands and sometimes myself are scrambling per category to understand how the category actually performed it can take like a week after Prime Day to really get a pulse on you know was the category up was it down normally your Amazon AE can give you that data um and you know there's thirdparty sources as well but um these are benchmarks and this is just across Amazon as a whole 32. Again I don't love using you know a specific conversion rate benchmark because depending on the product the price your your um position in the category it's going to fluctuate but um main takeaways here is you know sponsored products it um is around what we've seen you know 60 to 70% of ad revenue on these days this is your conversion workhorse um do not neglect it in favor of the flashier formats 32. It's going to build organic rank it's going to reach users the day of um you know layer in other formats but don't forget about sponsored products 32, 33. Sponsor brand video this is your really highest performing format for you know you're going to get really premium placements click-through rates typically higher because you're reaching more engaged users so if you're not running sponsor brand video you should be 33. And if you don't have video assets you can leverage Amazon's Creative Studio video is getting better i will say I've even noticed it over the past week it It's still kind of hit or miss but I would say like 40% of it is usable now as of I would say two months ago it was about 10% 33. Um sponsored brands have the lower uh clickthrough rate typically uh but important for new to brand percentage getting users to your brand store 33. Um sponsor display you know similar to DSP you know reaching users day of um for retargeting uh postevent sponsor display is very important and then DSP is really important for the leadin 33. Um one you know category call out you know food and grocery was up 50% year-over-year in 2025 um health products were up 41% so if you're in either of these Prime Day is a massive opportunity in food and grocery CPG so um it's a big opportunity to get you to bring customers in and then implement that strategy I was talking about where and you need to bring customers try and convert them into subscribe and save through the DSP okay so day of execution 33, 34.

Yeah so um I would say day of execution really lives and dies by three um categories pacing defense and then monitoring 34. So first try not to frontload all of your budget day one this is one of the most common mistakes that we see you know brands blow most of their ad budget day one then they're pacing very conservatively on days three and four which are actually they can be some of the highest performing days of the event 34. Day three historically has the lowest CPC and highest click-through rate of any Prime Day uh save budget for it you know it's it's really varied i think shifting from the two-day format to the 4-day format has kind of skewed the performance because it's over four days not two of course 34, 35. Um what I had seen prior was the two-day format day one typically well outperformed day two what I've seen with the 4-day format is day one performs really well i actually saw in a lot of categories the fourth day um outperformed day one so just make sure you're saving budget and you're monitoring um pacing 35. Uh second is separate your Prime Day campaigns from your really evergreen campaigns if you have spec specific ones you need to be able to see exactly what you're spending on event inventory without it really polluting like your baseline data 35. Um and then monitor hourly through marketing stream if your budget burns out by 2 p.m you know you've lost in the evening set up a 20 to 30% buffer for your high performers so you can really surge when a product is really moving 35. I'll also say if you're concerned about budget you can implement day parting it is difficult to know how users like search behavior is going to perform so on Prime Day because it's going to be different from your average daily 35, 36. If you have um the data you can look at last year's Prime Day or like October Prime Day to kind of get a sense of how um consumers purchase to dayart bids where there are certain hours of the day where you're spending less certain hours of the day you're spending more so that your budgets last longer 36. Also you can adopt for some terms a low budget or low bid cam campaign strategy where you can implement new new to brand um AMC audiences or or other niche ones where you're keeping your bids very low you're probably not going to get top of search unless you're unless those users are within a certain audience pool that have a higher intent to purchase that's also another key strategy I would recommend for this Prime Day which we've never had before 36.

Yeah these are very uh tactical kind of savvy strategies um that can really allow you to maximize uh your your ad dollars 36. Um so a lot of what we hear is you know there's things happen on Prime Day right um how do you deal with the different variables that are coming at you um so Herod's going to walk through kind of the decision framework that we use um because you don't really know how things are going to perform 36, 37. Because as I mentioned earlier you don't know the amount of the deals that your competitors are running right they might you might be running 20% and they might be running 40% just for example right you're not going to sell as well if that's the case and you need to make some decisions uh so can you walk us through this framework 37?

Yeah real time decision framework these are just a couple of examples there's many more um signals that you should be looking at but these are kind of the top um six and I'm just going to run through a couple of them 37. So like conversion rate dropping that likely might not have to anything to do with ads it's likely you know products would be suppressed buy box there's a buy issue competitor has a much lower price and uh better offering than you so you should diagnose the problem immediately 37, 38. The budget's burning early we kind of talked about this you know if you're getting too aggressive day one you should really evaluate the conversion rate before pulling back um again you should preserve budget for the rest of Prime Day 38. Some brands that I've worked with that actually have some of the most successful strategies are they don't even allocate a a specific budget for Prime Day yes they have guard rails but it's a tacos goal and a contribution margin goal so that they're blowing it out of the park in terms of sales they might have room to scale budget as long as their bottom line hits a certain number right 38. Um if your share of voice is dropping it's likely competitors are out bidding should you know adjust your bids and optimize 38. Last thing I'll just talk about on this page is if your inventory is moving fast and you're selling ahead of plan reduce ads potentially cut it you don't want to be burning your budget um spending on products that will likely run out of stock anyways 38, 39. I want to encourage everyone if you have um questions to please put them in the chat we will try to get to them uh and save a little bit of time at the end 39. All right so the postevent strategy 39.

Yeah that's why I would say this is again the most underinvested and very high ROI uh phase of Prime Day which no happens after so um the postevent strategy it has two phases 39. The first one's retargeting um this is where you would target cart abandoners um you know that's not a typo where where we have that 70% of um customers on Prime Day leave their products in the cart um seven out of 10 people who added something to their cart during the event did not end up buying 39. This is an enormous pool um of high intent shoppers that you can reach within you know 48 to 72 hours you can even reach those on day two through four of users who abandon their cart on day one 39. Um so here's what to do you know you can build AMC audiences of cart abandoners you can use DSP for retargeting um or sponsored display 39, 40. Dsp you're going to have better look back windows and you can um refine the audiences with negatives um you can retarget product detail page viewers who didn't purchase you can run um product detail page viewers of competitors products who didn't purchase 40. You can actually now target competitors um or users who have your competitor's products in their cart and try and steal that sale at the like conversion stage 40. Um AMC retargeting definitely recommend doing retargeting within two weeks of the event it drives um an increase in conversion rate of about 11% it's very it's very remarkable for a retargeting campaign and you know brands that maintained support um ad support after the event saw about a 20% click um increase on flat spend so that'll tell you just it's very underleveraged and it's a huge opportunity 40. Phase 2's retention it's ongoing so push subscribe and save to every new brand buyer immediately subscribe and save is worth typically six to 12 times the value of a onetime purchase so think about that 40, 41. If Prime Day brings in a thousand new customers and you convert even 20% to subscribe and Zeve you've built a compounding revenue stream that really lasts the rest of the year 41. Um the sequence that we use is education you know cross-ell if it's applicable repeat subscription so track your new brand percentage via Amazon Marketing Cloud understand which of your Prime Day buyers are genuinely new to brand um those are the ones to invest in retention 41. How do we measure success 41?

Yeah I think that you know I like to challenge most brands and how they think about measuring Prime Day success most brands look at revenue return on ads brand spend unit sales these are fine metrics but they're not the right frame 41. Um how we think about it is instead of revenue um we overlay contribution margin like I mentioned was the event actually profitable after you account for all costs 41. If profitability wasn't the goal and it was new to brand customers what is the average LTV of those customers and what is the repeat revenue we can estimate we're going to generate over time 41, 42. You know instead of rorowaz measure incrementality did you drive genuinely new demand demand or did you just you know pull forward purchases that would have happened anyways 42. Instead of units we track we track both but new to brand percentage you know are you acquiring genuinely new buyers who come back 42. Then instead of sales you know measuring retention on top of it what percentage of prime day buyers come back and you know 30 60 90 180 a year um and two metrics most brands ignore organic rank Did your rank improve postevent and purchase share did you gain category share that you can measure through share of voice uh which you get all of that in search query performance on the brand and the product level uh it's coming out for vendors some of you might have it some of you might not um it's a slow roll out 42. And then I'll um you know we've had a CPG brand where you know rorowaz dipped um significantly on prime day by typical standards that might look very disappointing to a brand but contribution margin was up 15% new to brand was strong revenue was up even contribution percentage was up and their retention rate um in the 60-day was excellent so that was a great prime day even though the ROS number dropped and it kind of told you the wrong story so make sure you're looking at the full story and all of the different metrics that are going to um work together to ensure that you're successful okay 42, 43.

Uh so we've talked a lot about Amazon Marketing Cloud is there anything that you think we should add about how it can be leveraged for to to maximize success on Prime Day 43?

I think that it's really just to make sure you're leveraging it because if you're not like your competitors are going to be um and if your competitors aren't then you have a huge leg up 43. But you can really use it to measure crossfunnel attribution you can before Prime Day run measurement analysises through AMC to understand what audiences should we be targeting so it helps you with your pre-launch strategy to understand who you should be targeting 43, 44. It helps you with your audience targeting and retargeting tactics to reach the right users and um retarget high intent customers and then postprime day it helps you with the analysis so AMC is really going to guide you through every single phase and um if you're using it properly you know you're you're definitely leveraging data that's going to inform your ad strategy and without it you're you're going in blind in some places to be honest 44. Um so we've outlined a timeline here which we've hit on in the interest of time I'm going to skip over this but you do want to make sure you're submitting your deals you have your inventory your creative is locked in your campaigns are ready um yeah if you miss some of these timelines you could be in uh deep trouble I guess 44. Are there kind of any last thoughts that you want to hit on Harriet 44, 45?

Um I think we covered a lot of ground um just the foundation with shop method three phases of the framework deal mechanism skew selection 45. Um last thing I'll say because I just want to reiterate this is if you haven't already aligned on a profitability structure and in terms of your asens like a lot of brands what I've seen they'll determine what asens they want to promote but then they haven't actually aligned on bottom line goals you definitely should 45. I would say 60 to 70% of brands that I've worked with prior to working with they've seen you know increases in revenue venue on Prime Day but you know they've internally called it a fail because of how much money they actually ended up losing so just make sure you have a P&L strategy um locked in because it's going to also allow you to pivot and optimize in real time the days of Prime it's a great suggestion 45.

Um do we have any questions so far 45?

None have been submitted which is a first so either we did a really really good job or uh just have a quiet audience today but if you don't have any questions now that's okay um you can also reach out to us on our website on LinkedIn um if if questions arise after 45, 46. I hope you found this helpful uh in two weeks we're going to be diving deeper into AMC um which if you aren't using it or just starting to use it it'll be great to attend that webinar um so look out for more details to sign up 46. And thank you very much for uh joining us today and thank you Harriet 46.

Yeah thank you guys 46.

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