RESOURCES

With increased traffic to Amazon due to the Prime Day deals, it would be a major missed opportunity not to be advertising your brand, all products, and especially your lightning deals during Amazon’s peak. That would be like a major toy brand opting out of advertising during the Christmas holiday season and still expecting dramatic, increased sales.

Marketplace Strategy has a few tips on how to prepare your campaigns and AMS account before Prime Day to ensure your brand is getting optimal coverage and the best possible return on ad spend for the July holiday.

1) Increase Overall Budget for July

With increased traffic, comes increased ad demand. Increasing overall Amazon ad spend in the weeks leading up to Prime Day and the subsequent few is essential if brands want to capture the value added traffic.

On average, last year, we saw the maximum impact from our clients who increased their AMS budgets by 180% for July. While that may sound like a dramatic surge in the budget, our clients who aggressively increased bids to keep up with the competition and won the valuable ad space, saw the return.

Monitoring your budget closely in July will be critical as bids and CPCs are expected to rise - budgets will also run out very quickly. The last thing you would want to happen is for one of your high-performing campaigns to run out of budget early in the day and automatically turn off!

2) Test Ad Copy, Groupings, and Images

Starting now should be the time that Vendors and Sellers are testing out potential ads to run during the Prime Day holiday.

With an increased budget in July, advertisers shouldn’t want to throw away those added bucks on ads that don’t have high click-through rates (CTR) or generate sales. Which is why getting a head start on testing the ad copy, the product pairings in headline ads, and which images are used in headline ads is a strategic move.

We’ve put together a quick guide on the components brands should be testing of each ad type in AMS. Keep in mind, as a best practice, you should only test one element per ad test at a time to control your variables.

Headline Search Ads

• Headline Copy
• Left Image
  • Brand Logo
  • Product Image
  • Custom Image
• Landing Page
  • General Store Page
  • Specific page within Store
  • Custom Landing Page
• Right Side Image(s)
  • One image, multiple images
    • For Multiple Images:
      • Other top sellers in the category
      • Related products
      • Upsell items
    • Bid Increase (to find the  most profitable bid point)

Sponsored Products Ads

• Keywords
  • Testing various keywords per product to find what search combinations work best together
• Bid Increase (to find the most profitable bid point)

Product Display Ads

• Image
  • Image
  • Logo
• Ad Text
• Product Name (editing from the default product description)
• Bid Increase (to find the most profitable bid point)

3) Maximize Bids

Lastly, with an increased budget and sets of ads that have a proven track record, the last step is to increase individual CPC bids in July, with the highest bid increase on Prime Day itself. Our suggestion is it’s always better for Vendors and Sellers to bid forcefully rather than miss out on prime ad real estate on the channel.

On average, we suggest a 43% increase in CPC on top-performing keywords, while that does vary depending on the product category and category competitiveness.

Read last week’s post: Preparing for Prime Day: Strategically Submitting Deals

Interested in learning more about how to leverage your AMS outside of Prime Day? We’re hosting a webinar on Advanced Amazon Advertising Strategies to Maximize ROI register today!