In a couple months the Amazon Marketplace will be swarming with an influx of holiday shopping traffic.
Q4 can be the most competitive time of the year for Marketplace sellers, but it can also be extremely lucrative, especially for businesses who properly prepare their advertising strategy.
FREE WEBINAR: Prime Your Amazon Profits for the Holiday Shopping Season
Although the majority of sellers hope for a spike in sales, there is always something to learn from your Amazon Prime Day data and there is equal value in understanding why some of your campaigns failed to perform.
At CPC Strategy, we believe understanding how to best utilize your Amazon Prime Day data is pivotal for a strong finish in 2017.
“We’re here to talk about Sponsored Products and how to prepare those campaigns and be ready for Q4,” Petriello said.
“We want to make sure you are prepared to get the most out of the increased traffic that we’re going to see in Q4, specifically as it relates to your Sponsored Products advertising efforts.”
“We want to make sure your process is up-to-date, that you’re following best practices, and that you’re on top of any changes to the campaign manager or the Sponsored Products functionality.”
The goal of this article is to provide Amazon sellers with actionable tactics to implement in Q4 based off of your Prime Day data.
2017 Amazon Prime Day
It should come as no surprise that Amazon Prime members recently enjoyed the biggest global shopping event in Amazon history.
According to recent reports, 2017 Amazon Prime Day sales surpassed Black Friday and Cyber Monday (2016) and the event grew by more than 60 percent over last year.
To recap, the retail giant offered up 30 hours of deals to their Amazon Prime customers.
One of the most popular selling items on Prime Day was the Amazon Echo Dot, which was discounted to $35 (regular pricing of $50).
Amazon Prime Day record sales included:
- The 55-inch Element 4K TV with Amazon Fire
- InstantPot programmable pressure cooker
- 23andMe DNA ancestory tests
- Sony Playstation 4s
- Nintendo Switch
- Alexa-enabled smart plugs
- Whey protein powder
- “Game of Thrones” seasons 1 through 6 on Blu-Ray
Even if your product isn’t listed above, there are still a number of ways to put your own Prime Day data to good use in Q4.
What You Can Learn From Your Amazon Prime Day Data:
1. Analyze Strong (and Weak) Performance
The first thing you want to do is analyze what worked and what did not. Take a look at your data to identify strong and weak performing items including:
- Products
- Campaigns
- Ad Groups
- Specific Keywords
- Bids
That way you can see what performed efficiently and use this data moving forward to make optimizations in Q4.
“It’s almost like you’re training for a marathon,” Petriello said.
“You run the half marathon first so you can figure out where in the race you start to break down, or when you need to hydrate and stretch. It’s better to learn that in the run-up, rather than during the marathon itself. That’s what this prep strategy is all about.”
2. Return Products & Negative Feedback
It’s possible you experienced a successful Prime Day but now you’re noticing an influx of returns with negative feedback flooding in.
Although nobody enjoys reading through painful feedback, this is another learning lesson: Optimize your product copy / images and take a closer look to determine where content is not clear.
“Make optimizations and clearly communicate the value of your products to shoppers. This is only going to help you be more efficient in your organic sales results and advertising efforts going forward,” Petriello said.
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3. Evaluate Your Inventory Planning
Post Prime Day is also a good time to figure out how effective your inventory launch process is and if it needs refinement or sophistication.
For example, did you overstock and now you’re facing those unwanted longterm FBA storage fees? Or maybe you ran out inventory too quickly? Either way these are signals that you need to advance your inventory planning strategy prior to the holiday shopping season.
Additional Insights From Our Experts on Prime Day
As we continue to gather data for our clients on Prime Day, we’ve compiled a list of interesting takeaways from our account managers that could be useful for your Q4 planning process:
Takeaway 1: Prime Day Jump Starts New AMS Account
One client ran a Lightning Deal (on Prime Day) and their new AMS account (campaigns 2 weeks old) saw 150% growth at 25% ACoS. Of course, we can’t prove the correlation between the two, but thought it was interesting to see Prime Day jump start a brand new AMS account so significantly.
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Takeaway 2: Discount Products Triple in Sales
We have a client who sells in the US & UK, but has never seen any success in the UK. He ran a Lightning Deal in the UK for Prime Day and ended up receiving more sales there than he did in the US. We saw a strong relationship between the clients that discounted their products with general price discounts and those who saw a lot of success on Prime Day.
One client in particular who discounted his products tripled his sales last week. Although clients who only increased bids and budgets also saw increases in sales, it was not as dramatic.
Takeaway 3: Make Your Item Enticing To Shoppers
In my opinion, you need to run promos, Lightning Deals, and lower your prices for your catalog, where fit. If not, people are going to look for competitor products that have a deal.
In my personal experience, I was looking for certain products for myself on Prime Day for purchase. I ended up not buying three things I needed because they didn’t have a deal running. Instead, I bought them a few days later.
For more on Amazon Prime Day and Q4 prep, email [email protected]