#528 – Amazon Prime Day Advertising Playbook
Audio version above. Video version below
Prime Day is no longer just about turning up your Amazon PPC budget and hoping the extra traffic converts. In this episode of the AM/PM Podcast, Shivali Patel sits down with Destaney Wishon of BTR Media to break down what sellers should expect from Prime Day, how advertising behavior has changed, and why brands need a more intentional strategy around bids, budgets, audiences, and creative.
Destaney explains why campaign structure is one of the biggest levers sellers can control before a major shopping event. Instead of relying on one broad campaign, she recommends segmenting campaigns by goal, including awareness, ranking, efficiency, brand defense, auto discovery, and conquesting. This gives sellers the flexibility to shift budget based on what they actually want to accomplish, whether that is improving BSR, protecting profitability, capturing existing demand, or creating more awareness before shoppers are ready to buy.
The episode also dives into how AMC and DSP are changing the way Amazon sellers approach advertising. Destaney shares why shoppers often click or add to cart days before purchasing, which means brands may be cutting off future sales if they lower bids too quickly. She also explains how AMC audiences can help sellers target higher-intent shoppers, such as cart abandoners or people more likely to buy premium products, while DSP and streaming TV can help create demand before shoppers even search on Amazon.
To close the conversation, Destaney breaks down practical Prime Day tactics for new brands, low-priced products, lead-in and lead-out periods, dayparting, automatic campaigns, and creative assets. Her biggest reminder is that there is no one-size-fits-all Prime Day strategy. The brands that win are the ones that understand their goals, know their margins, use data wisely, and build an ad strategy that fits their business instead of copying someone else’s playbook.
In episode 528 of the AM/PM Podcast, Shivali and Destaney discuss:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 01:48 – Destaney Wishon’s Amazon Advertising Background
- 02:49 – The 3-Part Prime Day Advertising Checklist
- 03:22 – How To Segment Campaigns By Strategy
- 05:35 – Bid Management For Ranking, Efficiency, And Discovery
- 06:32 – Why Amazon Ads Are Harder Than Before
- 09:02 – Why Shoppers Take Longer To Convert
- 10:20 – How Multiple Ad Types Improve Conversion
- 12:24 – How To Use AMC Audiences For Prime Day
- 16:21 – Creating Demand Before Shoppers Search
- 20:27 – Sponsored Prompts, Video Ads, And AI Creative
- 26:42 – Prime Day Q&A: AMC, Bids, Budgets, And New Brands
Transcript
Shivali Patel:
What to expect this Prime Day, bid and budget optimizations to maximize your goals, and how to take advantage of AMC and DSP to triple your conversions and double your ROAS. This and more on this week’s episode of the AM/PM podcast. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the AM/PM podcast. My name is Shivali Patel, and I’ll be your host. And this is the show where we discuss all things Amazon, TikTok shop, and Walmart private label, and how to generate reoccurring revenue streams 24 hours a day during the AM and the PM, hence the name of the show. Get it? AM/PM podcast. And as a matter of fact, this past weekend, I was in Frankfurt, Germany. And even though I was away celebrating a friend’s birthday and meeting her baby for the first time, I was still making money online. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Shivali Patel:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Tacos Tuesday. You guys are in for a session from our local as an Helium 10 expert, who is going to be on to answer all of your questions that you might have surrounding ads, but also the upcoming Prime Day. If you are someone who is ready to capitalize on the upcoming Prime Day, then this is definitely something you’ll want to tune in fully for because she’s going to cover all sorts of things, including what to expect on Prime Day, questions you might have around budget and bid optimization, AMC, DSP, and so much more. How are you, Destaney? Where are you tuning in from?
Destaney:
I am in West Palm Beach, Florida. Nice and sunny. It’s dream weather.
Shivali Patel:
Destaney, why don’t you share with the viewers a little bit about you? You are the co-founder of Better Media. Tell us how you got into the space and what it is that you do.
Destaney:
Yeah. I have been in the space for, I think, going on seven to eight years now. I started my own agency, really focused on Amazon advertising at the time. It wasn’t near as competitive as it was now. You could almost print money back then. And I’ve stuck with it, expanded our team, really grown with all of the innovation in the space. I think we’re seeing a lot more on the upper funnel side, TV side, things like AMC and AI are absolutely disrupting the space. So we are really, I would say, on the forefront of all of that and how it integrates with your brand, but also from an agency perspective operationally. And we’ve recently expanded to all the fun retail media networks, all of the DSPs. And I’m still very involved because this is my passion, the content education and Q&A side.
Shivali Patel:
And you are the kind of person who helps people print money even now because ads are so important. Marketing is so important in any business.
Destaney:
Now, diving in here, there’s really three key things that I want to cover that really needs to be a checklist internally. First and foremost, your structure and audience. This is one of the biggest, most fundamental aspects of what’s going to drive success for your prime day. Really around segmentation of your campaigns, which allows you for much better budget and bid management. And then also how Amazon is shifting from keywords to audience-based. Your creative playbook is a big one that we’re going to dive into and also creating demand. Now, first and foremost, this is the foundation we run for almost every single product or ASIN. Now, of course, this is going to depend on your budget and your TACOS, goals, things like that. But for every single ASIN, we try to have campaigns that cover each of these strategies. We have awareness ones that are really focused on things like brand visibility, competitor targeting, things like that. We have ranking campaigns, which are solely focused on improving our BSR and total sales. We have efficiency campaigns that are really focused on driving the ROAS that we need to see. We have our brand defense campaigns. We have auto discovery campaigns. We continue to run these because Amazon does a lot of their beta testing within auto campaigns. We have our conquesting campaigns, which are focused on specific competitor names. Within those campaigns and those strategies, we’re going to typically expand across the majority of ad types. Our sponsor brands, sponsor products video, and then also sponsored display when applicable.
Destaney:
And we are running all of these strategies in unique campaigns because that’s what gives us the most control. So when we run one ASIN with all of these campaigns, and I have a day like Prime Day coming up, I have the most amount of control to say, what is my focus on Prime Day? Is it creating demand for my brand, driving a ton of traffic, have a new product launch? Is it capturing demand that’s already on the platform? This is typically more efficiency-based. It’s people that are already searching for my product. Is it retention? Is it focusing on subscribe and save customers? When I have my campaign segmented in this fashion, this is a screenshot directly from our dashboard, I can sit down and say, I need to shift more budget into my ranking campaigns because I know I have a deal or discount and my product is going to convert better than the rest. Or maybe I’m not running any deal or discounts. Maybe I want to focus solely on having a low ACOS. I can shift my budget to all my efficiency campaigns, which are focused solely on the highest profitability campaigns. Your bid management is typically the highest correlation with your profitability or your overall ROAS and ACOS. So as you can see here, my efficiency campaigns have the lowest average CPC. The only goal of efficiency campaigns are efficiency. I create a very specific bid rule set for it. If you’re utilizing Helium 10 ads, we have bid templates focused solely on things like efficiency. If it’s a ranking campaign, it’s going to be really aggressive bids because I’m focused solely on driving maximum amount of traffic to trigger a ranking improvement. If it’s an auto campaign, it’s going to be low bids because it’s for discovery. If it’s a branded campaign, it’s usually going to be a lower bid because we’re going to win those placements for cheaper since we have such high relevancy. It can be a little bit difficult operationally. Now that we have AI, it’s not near as difficult to set up all these campaigns, but setting up the campaigns in this way gives you maximum flexibility.
Destaney:
The reason we want to run this granular of approach is because it’s much harder to grow on Amazon than it used to be. As I’m sure a lot of you all know, CPCs are rising. More competition on the platform than ever before. There’s more touch points needed to drive a conversion. And there’s new tools launching constantly. I mean, we have sponsored products videos, sponsored prompts, Amazon released their MCP. Things are much more difficult. This is a CPC we actually pulled from Advertising Console for a general search term. And the problem with this is if others are bidding high, even if your bid is the exact same, you’re winning worse placements. You are falling further and further down the page. This is really important to pay attention to as we are leading up to Prime Day. Competition is higher than ever before, not just on Amazon. We now know that Walmart and Target followed the deal days. So customers are sitting at home on their computers, waiting to purchase products. But they’re typically still shopping. So we see that clicks are high, impressions are high leading into Prime Day. And then all of the deal days hit and customers are ready to convert. But now they’re spread across multiple platforms. This is why it’s important to run your advertising in this granular approach because it gives you maximum control, which allows you to pull the right levers based on all of these variables. You want to shift more money into your expensive, high CPC ranking campaigns? You can do that. You want to focus solely on profitability? You can do that.
Destaney:
The setup and the foundation is the most important aspect. And I’m not going to hop on here and give you some guru hack of set a seven-cent bid and a four hundred and twenty percent top of search modifier in order to hack the placements and drive maximum traffic. That’s not a great recommendation for anyone. Your Prime Day strategy has to be curated for your brand. You need to consider what deals you’re running, what your goals for the day are, what your repeat purchase rates are, what other platforms you’re running on. And then once you have that, you can curate the specific strategy based on the allocations that we’ve talked about today. Again, you can go more aggressive in certain areas or you can pull back in certain areas. A few other areas that I think are really important to consider as we go into Prime Day, and this is pulled directly from AMC. So anyone here who has access to their advertising console can access this data as well. Customers are not interacting with ads like they used to in the past. Five years ago, if a customer clicked on the ad, they were much higher likelihood of purchasing. There wasn’t as much competition. They were still as high intent. Nowadays, we see that that shopping window is a little bit wider. One, we’ve seen a little bit of a softening in the economy. We’ve seen tariffs affect pricing. So people are waiting until payday and adding to cart but not buying. They’re also shopping around and doing a little bit more due diligence than they used to.
Destaney:
This advertising data is one that I pulled for an account. The average price point was around $30 for their products. As you can see, a large share of their purchases happen days or weeks later. Prime Day is the exact same. People click and add to cart leading up to Prime Day and don’t purchase until later. Think about how this affects your bid management strategy. You get charged when someone clicks on the ad. But if they don’t check out until four to five days later, and you’re lowering your bids because you think your ad performance isn’t great, you could be missing out on a lot of sales. So customers in general, again, are doing a little bit more due diligence. You can pull this data with an AMC and figure it out for yourself. Another thing that we’re seeing is that it’s requiring a lot more frequency of advertising to convert a customer. They need to be exposed to multiple ads. This drives a lot of legitimacy and a lot of authority. So for brands listening in, if you’re only running sponsored product ads, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. This is also accessible directly within your ad console.
You can go pull your ad type overlap report to understand your data. As you can see here, when our customers were exposed to both sponsored products and sponsored brand video ads, the purchase rate is six times higher. If they see a sponsored product and a DSP ad, that purchase rate is three times higher. So one, it comes down to frequency. How frequently are they seeing your brands? But it also comes down to how just the search is positioned.
Destaney:
Open your phone right now, type in a few of your main keywords, and look at how the ad saturation is. If you see the sponsored product at the top of the page, and then the sponsored brand video ad, and then the sponsored products video ad, you’re going to be more likely to purchase from that brand. It’s the exact same methodology as someone driving down the highway and seeing seven billboards back-to-back to back. I live in Florida. One of the billboards we always see is the one that says, your wife is hot, fix the AC. Those do well, not just because it’s catchy, but because of the frequency of exposure with the ads. Same thing with Amazon advertising. When you run multiple ad types, you show up in unique placements. And subconsciously, you’re going to drive a higher conversion rate. So that’s something really important to consider as we go into Prime Day strategies. So we’ve zoomed out. We’ve talked about how competitive the platform is. We’ve talked about how granular of a structure we need to run to give us a lot of control and opportunity to maximize Prime Day traffic. Where are some key areas that I think are really the biggest opportunity for brands? The first one is applying AMC audiences to search. So again, everyone here has access to AMC. If you’re not familiar with AMC, Carrie and I did a full webinar on AMC around six to eight months ago. And also, we talked about this in the Outsource to Optimize series where I trained Jason, a brand owner, how to go from outsourcing his PPC to optimizing it on his own. If you haven’t watched that, I highly recommend it. He drove incredible results. And some of those were driven from AMC where we applied them specifically to his brand.
Destaney:
But really, the concept of AMC is taking your advertising and segmenting it into audiences. So for anyone who’s ran meta ads, you’re probably relatively familiar with AMC audience or audiences in general. Amazon’s taking a similar approach. No longer are you just targeting keywords. You’re able to target keywords and break out the people searching those keywords into buckets that have a higher likelihood of purchasing. We have seen conversion rates double to triple when applying AMC audiences to campaigns. Think about that. If your conversion rate doubles or triples, your ACOS immediately improves. And you can almost afford to pay those high CPCs because you know if a customer clicks, they’re going to purchase. This is incredible. Here’s some specific examples we pulled for this specific AMC audience. We had 22% of the account speed running through AMC audiences. 4.5% lower CPCs, lower ACOS, higher conversion rate. This was a general audience. But when we start segmenting into the more specific audiences that are available, like someone who clicked but not purchases, someone who added to cart but did not purchase, keyword-based audiences, cross-channel audiences, a few others that are directed within your ad console are customers who have a higher likelihood of purchasing, customers who have a higher propensity of buying high-priced products. This is a good one. When you apply these audiences that are curated for your brand to your keyword campaigns, the results can be exponential. And it allows you to, again, continue competing at those high bids because you’re converting so much higher because your audience is so much more aligned. Now, what does this actually look like in theory? Again, log into Amazon Advertising. You do not have to be using DSP. You’re going to see AMC on the left-hand side.
Destaney:
Amazon has curated a large template library for those who are interested. You can scroll through. I think there’s over 100. You can find the audiences that are most aligned with your product. You can then add them directly to your advertising console campaigns. Looks something like this. Here you can see we created the AMC audiences. We then applied them as an audience modifier to our existing campaigns. Actually, that’s a lie. We don’t like applying them to existing campaigns. We typically recommend creating new campaigns with lower base bids and then applying a high audience modifier bid to make sure we’re only targeting an audience within that campaign. Here you can see that we are targeting cart abandoners, people in the last 30 days who added our product to cart but did not purchase. We want to lightly nudge them to go ahead and complete that purchase when they come back to the category. And that’s it. It’s a relatively simple way to get much more curated and to really see huge results. For a day like Prime Day, AMC audiences do incredibly, incredibly well because you have more traffic. What’s the problem with an audience? If your audience is too small, you’re not going to drive any value. But when you have an audience that’s Prime Day specific, it’s going to be much wider and you’re going to have a much bigger opportunity of driving top line sales. So I highly, highly recommend applying AMC audiences. I highly recommend segmenting your campaigns in the way that we showcased and then allowing you to move your bids and budgets much more efficiently for Prime Day.
Destaney:
Now moving on to the second section, we’re going to dive into creating demand. So for some brands, they’re probably not going to be near as interested in this topic because maybe they like to just focus on PPC and bottom of the funnel. The problem with this strategy is everyone else is doing the same thing. When you type in protein on Amazon, you see a very large sponsor brand at the top of the page, you see four sponsor product ads, and then you see three organic placements. PPC is incredibly, incredibly competitive. So one of the things we’re really recommending our brands to do is create demand beforehand. If you’re only running PPC ads, you are waiting for a customer to decide they want you and then come to the platform and buy. The problem is you’re on a digital shelf with unlimited similar products. When we’re moving upper funnel and we’re pushing more into video ads or off-platform ads, what’s happening is we’re nudging a customer when they’re not looking at 30 other competitors. We’re subtly showing up on their TV and saying, Hey, you should buy our product. This has been probably one of the biggest growth drivers for a lot of our disruptor brands. Those who have incredible creative assets, which is now more than I would say those that don’t have because of AI. We’ve seen the upper funnel initiatives drive the best top line sales increase. Because again, you’re getting in front of your customer before they even decide they need your product.
Destaney:
One of the quotes that my team has thrown in is I think that a lot of people are too focused on just advertising. They’re too focused on a customer as that they forget how to market their product, how to really convince their customers that their product is best. And one of the best ways we’ve seen to do this is really with leaning into TV. Now, Amazon has sponsored TV directly in Ad Console. I don’t think it does near as well as what streaming TV does. And that’s something that you can access through DSP. Recommended budget is typically a minimum of $10,000 to $15,000, which can be a lot for brands. But it allows you to again, show your ad on TV. TV has always been a huge opportunity for brands. I think we all grew up with the infomercials that we can still repeat in our head. What makes streaming TV better is you can apply the audience insights that Amazon has to target the right customers. So imagine being able to target every single house in Texas that has kittens with your cat food. That is the opportunity that’s available. And then you can tie that back to your Amazon PPC as well. And with AMC, you can say, hey, if they watch my TV ad, I want to bid more on this keyword to make sure that I’m then closing the loop and driving the conversion. This is one of, again, the biggest unlocks for our brands when they get to that half a million a month revenue phase. It’s getting in front of their customers early. This is the competitive advantage. Again, if you wait for someone to go to Amazon and type in cat food, you’re being compared to every other product on the shelf. If you expose or if you show them your ad on TV while they’re sitting at home, they’re not seeing all the other products on the shelf. They’re really locked in on your product. And then you can do something as simple as add a QR code to immediately check out. So it’s still a lot more disruptive than what we’ve seen in the past.
Destaney:
Now, yes, great in theory, but what are the results? This is something we always get. I thought this was an interesting screenshot from one of our brands where you can see the branded conversion rate before and after a streaming TV launch. So a pretty large jump in conversion rate, pretty large jump in sessions. But then look at that search volume. So customers actually started searching for our products on Amazon, which gave us a huge competitive advantage. I think everyone here knows that their branded terms are going to convert much better than their non-branded. That’s what TV can do for you. Now, another area where I highly recommend brands lean into, not as upper funnel, but still attention grabbing, is things like sponsored prompts. So sponsored prompts are kind of iffy in how they’re being rolled out right now, but we know AI is one of the biggest bets that Amazon’s making. Jassy went on record stating that Rufus is going to be more powerful than a Claude or a ChatGPT because of all the retailer information that they have on their customers. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but it’s a testament to how much they’re investing in things like sponsored prompts. And we know sponsored prompts can actually be more upper funnel because you use them for more discovery. You go to them and ask questions like, hey, I’m looking for a coffee maker. What’s best for me? Rather than an espresso machine, right? So we’re leaning in pretty heavily to sponsored prompts. I think having these in place for a day like Prime Day is the perfect time to do it because it gives you a slight competitive advantage over the customers.
Destaney:
Again, with AI, everyone’s moving quicker. Everyone’s having good bid management, good keyword research. That’s now table stakes. Everyone’s able to launch great creative with custom images or sponsored brands videos. What really sets, I think, the brands that are disruptive and successful apart right now are the brands that are leaning into all of the new things because their competitive advantage is how quickly they move operationally. So I wanted to show an example of what sponsored prompts look like. So why choose athletic shirts? It’s directly tied to the brand in this case, and they’re auto-populating within sponsored prompts. One thing to note is they are live in all of your accounts right now, whether or not you want them to be. So Amazon flipped a switch, made them live, and you’re now getting charged for them. So make sure you go in and you optimize that or at least keep an eye on it, making sure your prompts are incredibly relevant. Here’s the second one I was going to talk about. So another big rollout that was announced on Box that we are expecting to scale much quicker is sponsored product video. So sponsored product video shows up directly within the search results. It shows up similar to a sponsored brand video, but it’s more interactive. So that’s an easy ad type that you can scale out utilizing the video assets you already have that can give you quite a competitive advantage because it is winning unique inventory on the page. It shows up within the full page of your mobile phone. So you’re scrolling, you see the key product, and then you see the whole video asset. I’m expecting Amazon to drive a lot more video, just guessing on their competitive landscape that they are competing against. They want to lean into video.
Destaney:
Now, the last thing I wanted to kind of quickly touch on, but I feel like this one’s a little bit overstated in our space, is the creative playbook. How are we using AI? The first thing is making sure we have all of our assets covered. Custom images have been removed from sponsored brands. I did speak with the product team and it may not be permanent. Make sure you have a custom image ad to your sponsored brands campaigns. If you have historical campaigns running, edit them within that campaign. They immediately increase your click-through rate conversion rate, especially on a day like Prime Day when again it captures attention. Make sure you have video assets for each of your products. That’s a sponsored product video, that’s a sponsored brands video, and segmented by strategy. Is it awareness and educating someone on your brand? Or is it conversion and telling them why your product’s better than the rest? We’re also leaning into AI for AMC audience creation. So I wanted to throw that in there because that’s been very powerful for us if anyone’s played around with AMC. I know a lot of people have been hopping in talking about all the amazing things that you can do with Figma and Cloud and ChatGPT. If you don’t feel competent utilizing those tools, AI Creative Studio from Amazon is actually a really good solution. We launched a full streaming TV commercial from a video we used with Creative Studio. Why I like it is operationally it’s a little bit more efficient because AI Creative Studio pulls in Amazon brand guidelines, Amazon category insights, and your personal retail and advertising data to build your campaign.
Destaney:
So let’s say you are selling cat food and you use a Maine Coon throughout all of your imagery and it is a Maine Coon specific product. The video builder will actually see that and see that as your competitive advantage within the category and build a video for those insights that they’re pulling in. Here’s a quick video I wanted to show that we actually again went live and utilized Creative Studio to build. So pretty good considering it’s an Amazon creative tool. We all know Amazon also has a pretty large investment in Anthropic. So you can only assume these things are going to continue to scale out and be much better. So really no excuse not to be using AI to build your assets. If you don’t think that the output is good, it’s typically more so do the prompting than anything else or you have to get creative with it. Maybe you should use a cartoon because you don’t like how AI humans look. Things along those lines can be really powerful for brands. The last thing I was going to say is I wanted to use this screenshot with the custom image at the top of the page and then also again showcase the sponsor products that’s standing out. Good creative is fundamental to amazing Amazon advertising, especially on Prime Day.
Destaney:
Again, Amazon’s doing all of the hard work and bringing customers to the platform. Your job is to get them to convert. So leaning into creative assets has probably been one of our biggest competitive advantages. We see sponsor brands driving over 20% of advertising sales for a lot of our brands. That’s across both headline ads and video ads. DSP is typically another 10 to 15%. It is the best way to stand on the page and we’re still seeing a ton of people underutilizing them. And again, if you’re struggling with the setup because it looks relatively complex, Jason and I did a step-by-step walkthrough on the Outsource to Optimize webinar. And as a brand owner, he saw the flow that I recommend, where we leaned into more creative, where we backed off and focused on carousels. All of that’s discussed in the videos. So hopefully this helps. And that’s all I have today for Prime Day.
Shivali Patel:
Starting off with our first question, we’ve got one from Jennifer here, who says, our brand just launched on Amazon and we launched our first campaigns with sponsored product. We’ll start iterating and launch on SBv hopefully soon. Do you think AMC is also good for new advertisers or better after gathering more data with sponsored product and sponsored brand?
Destaney:
Great question. So I do think AMC is a major competitive advantage for new brands because it allows you to get a little bit more specific with your audience. Sometimes your conversion rate is a little bit low as a new brand. Maybe you don’t have as many reviews or loyalty, things like that. That being said, you do need 2000 unique users that have interacted with an ad in order to launch a successful AMC campaign. So if you’re very early stages and you don’t have a ton of data, you’re not going to be able to go live with it. But it should be fine because if you can go live, it’s going to be really, really powerful. I didn’t give a lot of context on this presentation because I went a little bit broader, but we like to create new campaigns for AMC audiences. So let’s say I’m launching and targeting the word protein. I’ll have my general protein campaign and keyword running, but then I’ll create a new one for AMC just in case it doesn’t trigger. So that way I’m still winning traffic on my regular keyword, but I also have an AMC audience applied that is going to kick in kind of as a backup.
Shivali Patel:
Aiden asks, seeing that AMC audiences are used for bid increases, what are the recommended uses of these bid increases for advertisers sensitive to bid levels? Should overall bids decrease in order to compensate for the AMC boosted bids?
Destaney:
Great question. That’s exactly how I look at it. Now again, I don’t like applying AMC audiences to all of my existing campaigns. I don’t want to skew the data. Once you’re applying an audience, it gets a little tricky because the bid boost only applies when the audience is searching. So it can skew with your other bid management. So I create new campaigns named AMC audiences within the campaign name so I can filter by them. I set incredibly low base bids, like 20 to 30 cent base bids. And then I put a high modifier just for that audience, especially if it’s a conversion focused audience. That way what I can do is make sure that I’m really not bidding high enough to trigger an ad for any of my general keywords. I’m only triggering the ad for the AMC audience, which has the incredibly high bid boost.
Shivali Patel:
And what about for those folks who have got maybe a lower priced product? How would you narrow the focus to the primary ad strategies needed if your products are lower in cost, maybe saying average 15 to 20 bucks and you need efficiency to be profitable and you’re in a highly niche category?
Destaney:
Highly niche is difficult because sometimes you don’t have as much traffic inherently coming into the category. So you have to go broader with your terms. I don’t know if that’s your case, but it can be like a fine balance. Really, you’re having to focus on efficiency, but I find that really focusing on video as well can do incredibly well. So all of the ad types do well for a low-priced product. It’s really your bidding strategy that’s different. You cannot afford to bid near as much as your competitors. So you have to focus on a low bid. AMC, again, probably going to be a good thing for you. But at the end of the day, it’s the same thing, just different margins. It’s different math that you’re playing with. All ad types will do well, different math on the bid budget side. I would ask if you have a high repeat purchase rate. That’s something that we see frequently with the low price point product. If you have a high repeat purchase rate, then you can sometimes go a little bit more aggressive than what you realize because you’re actually doing the math for how many times someone continues to come back.
Shivali Patel:
We’ve got a question from Anthony, which is, how do you typically value the lead in and out period and change strategy to maintain relevancy when you expect competitors to stay aggressive after the event?
Destaney:
Great question. Lead in period is typically when we go most aggressive with our awareness strategies, whether it’s streaming TV or video or sponsored brand custom image, which has been weirdly, I don’t know, deprecated. I don’t know. Those are the ones that we want to go very aggressive on because we do see that traffic stays incredibly high. Sales do not. We know customers are adding to cart and still shopping. So lead in is really where we… I don’t have perfect allocations in front of me, but we go pretty heavy. I would say 20% or 30% of our budget on lead in. And then the days of prime day, of course, we continue to focus more on conversion. We shift a little bit of our budget to sponsored products and top of search. It’s our high focus. And then lead out, we shift a decent amount of our budget to only DSP strategies. So something that we frequently see is like this Prime Day hangover where conversion rate drops quite a bit the week after and it takes a while. So I want to pull back on my top of search, my ranking strategies because conversion rates are just lower. Instead, shift some of that budget into remarketing, whether it’s sponsored display remarketing or DSP remarketing. That’s our key focus. So anyone who clicked on an ad but maybe didn’t purchase, anyone who clicked on an ad but did not purchase a competitor product, we’re going to go really aggressive on. And that’s usually 10 to 15% of our budget while, again, shifting all of our sponsored ads to more of a profitability ACOS ROAS focus.
Shivali Patel:
Do you have any recommendations on which days to push ad budget during the prime day events?
Destaney:
I frequently see that the first day is still typically the highest. That being said, I mentioned the other retailers because they’re really changing a lot of this. I mean, Amazon’s moved up prime day out of nowhere. And if Walmart announces a deal day a week before on the same days, then traffic may be less. So you really have to be flexible and look at what is the market doing? What is my audience doing? But at the end of the day, always go aggressive on the first day. Sometimes you can go more aggressive on the second to third day because your competitors maybe ran out of budget, but it’s still a little bit of a gamble.
Shivali Patel:
We have someone who says, my brand is new. My question is, which ad campaign I can build my BSR with and which ad campaign can give me sales in lower costs?
Destaney:
Covered this a ton in Outsourced Optimized. Very in-depth. And that slide I showcased with all of the different campaign types is probably one that you want to look into. If you’re focused on BSR, then sponsor product, exact match, four to five keywords. Focus solely on the keywords in which you have a competitive advantage. Where are you converting better than the category? That is the best way to improve your BSR across the board. Ad campaigns for efficiency or lower costs. That’s typically your long-tail keywords that are less expensive. And you bid lower on them and figure out the bid that you can afford from a profitability, a cost ROAS math perspective.
Shivali Patel:
We have another question. I truly enjoy learning from this lady. She’s got so much knowledge about ads. How can I contact her? Is there a good place to reach out to you?
Destaney:
LinkedIn is probably the easiest place to shoot me a message or company website, bettermedia.com.
Shivali Patel:
Amazing. Is there any last few words you’d like to impart on our viewers to get ready for Prime Day?
Destaney:
Yeah. You have to create the strategy that’s best for your brand. There is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Someone could tell you that, again, a 7% a cost is best for your brand or 12% tacos. At the end of the day, the brand owner really needs to come up with that strategy. And then you start looking at the specifics behind it. Sorry, I got distracted by Anthony’s question because it was a good question. We can cover that too. Well, that’s a little bonus question that Anthony snuck in there last minute.
Shivali Patel:
Yeah. Shall we throw it up? Let’s see. We’ve got two actually. Do you recommend sunsetting bids after a certain hour or what hours during the deals day do you focus on the heaviest?
Destaney:
I’m actually not a big fan of day parting, mainly because the AMC data I showed you, I recommend pulling it for your own brand. Only I think it was 20% of clicks purchased within the first 12 hours. So again, think about that. If you dive into your ad console and you see that everyone clicks at 8am but does not purchase and you decide to lower your bids, you’re just cutting off an opportunity to gather the clicks that may be purchasing later in the day. If you have access to Amazon Marketing Stream, the API, which you usually do through Helium 10, then I think you have more insights into how your ads perform throughout the day. But you can see that customers don’t purchase in that way. They click in certain times and they purchase much later. So look at your AMC data first. The one caveat to that is sometimes bids and CPCs are much higher in the morning because everyone wants that morning traffic. So if you’re really only focused on profitability and not customer conversion, then you can lower your bids in the morning and increase them a little bit at night. But again, that playing field has definitely been leveled because everyone is trying to make perfect bid optimization. But again, I focus on the customers first. Customers are not clicking on an ad and buying within an hour. Your AMC data will show you that. So you probably shouldn’t optimize your bids in that way either.
Shivali Patel:
From Asim, who says, for a brand with zero historical data, should I use automatic campaigns to harvest keywords first or go straight to manual exact match to protect my budget?
Destaney:
Great question. I would run your auto campaigns at very low bids and low budgets just to collect data. But Amazon typically goes a little bit more broad than what you would. If you’re amazing, amazing at keyword research, like an absolute expert, then you can go straight into your exact match campaigns. But a lot of people aren’t as good at keyword research as they think. Auto campaigns do really well. Amazon has more data about your customers than anyone else, and they’re pretty good at aligning keywords and audiences. So I do like auto campaigns.
Shivali Patel:
And guys, if you have brands with really similar products out there, you can always do competitive research with Cerebro Magnet as well. And then even actually going into our listing builder you’ll be able to see where your sources are coming from. Thank you for spending your time with us and sharing your knowledge. You guys, if you have any more questions that you think of now or later on, as Destaney said, you can reach out to her on LinkedIn as well and shoot away. With that, we wrap up this month’s Tacos Tuesday.
Destaney:
Thank you, Shivali.
Enjoy this episode? Want to be able to ask questions to Leo Sgovio live in a small group with other 7 and 8-figure Amazon sellers? Join the Helium 10 Elite Mastermind and get quarterly workshops, monthly training, and networking calls with Leo at h10.me/elite
Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our podcast!
💰 Get Helium 10 with a special discount to start or scale your e-commerce business here: https://h10.me/h10
Want to absolutely start crushing it on eCommerce and make more money? Follow these steps for helpful resources to get started:
- Get the Ultimate Resource Guide from Bradley Sutton, Carrie Miller, and Shivali Patel for tools and services that he uses every day to dominate on Amazon!
- New to Selling on Amazon? Freedom Ticket offers the best tips, tricks, and strategies for beginners just starting out! Sign up for Freedom Ticket.
- Trying to Find a New Product? Get the most powerful Amazon product research tool in Black Box, available only at Helium 10! Start researching with Black Box.
- Want to Verify Your Product Idea? Use Xray in our Chrome extension to check how lucrative your next product idea is with over a dozen metrics of data! Download the Helium 10 Chrome Extension.
- The Ultimate Software Tool Suite for Amazon Sellers! Get more Helium 10 tools that can help you optimize your listings and increase sales for a low price! Sign up today!
- Does Amazon Owe YOU Money? Find Out for FREE! If you have been selling for over a year on Amazon, you may be owed money for lost or damaged inventory and not even know it. Get a FREE refund report to see how much you’re owed!
- Check out our other Amazon FBA podcasts including the Serious Sellers Podcast, as well as our Spanish and German versions!
- You can also listen to the AM/PM Podcast on YouTube here!
The post #528 – Amazon Prime Day Advertising Playbook appeared first on AM/PM Podcast.
