Despite the delays, Prime Day is finally upon us. Amazon Prime Day 2020 will officially run from midnight on October 13th until midnight on October 14th. This is a full three months later than it’s usual July date which brings additional considerations for brands looking to capitalize on the annual sale.
Due to COVID-19 causing supply chain disruptions and shipping restrictions while massively changing consumer buying behavior, Prime Day 2020 will be very different from years past. The move to Q4 – a very important quarter for many online retailers – means Prime Day will launch the holiday shopping season which will continue with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. For brands that struggled during the start of the year due to the pandemic, this year’s Q4 is more important than ever.
We’ve already put together a guide on How to Prepare Your Advertising for Prime Day 2020. At this point, your deals should already be submitted and inventory prepared. However, there is still a lot of preparation you can do in the days leading up to Prime Day to ensure your advertising sees the most success.
Here is a final checklist of last-minute tips for a successful Prime Day:
Keyword Bidding and Budget Check
As keyword bid competition drives up CPCs, it is good to perform a final keyword check immediately before Prime Day. This allows you to optimize your existing keyword strategy and adjust your bids if necessary.
With so many new consumers shopping online and the move to Q4 affecting buying behavior, you should not rely on benchmarks or timing from last year.
Have a plan and established budgets for the day, but be prepared to be flexible and actively monitor your campaigns. You can set budget caps for specific campaigns and create alerts when campaigns run out of budget. This will allow you to respond quickly as adjustments to your ad strategy need to be made throughout the day.
Retargeting Campaigns
With all the new shoppers anticipated for Prime Day 2020, this is an ideal opportunity to broaden your audience. With Prime Day so close to the holiday season, launching your retargeting campaigns as soon as possible will be critical for capturing these buyers.
Ensure that your retargeting campaigns are set to launch directly after Prime Day ends. Use Sponsored Display or Amazon DSP advertising to re-target Prime Day visitors after the event.
Check Product Pages and Brand Store
With Prime Day launching the 2020 holiday season, your product pages and brand store should all be fully optimized with this messaging. Double-check all product pages to make sure all graphics, titles, and text are correct, up-to-date and fully optimized for Prime Day and heading into the Holiday season. Make sure your storefront is updated to highlight your Prime Day deals.
Your brand store is also an opportunity to highlight additional deals that may not meet Amazon’s updated deal requirements. The best way to do this without taking focus away from your Prime Day deals is to offer deals on complementary products and bundles.
Check Auto Campaigns
While many keyword and product campaigns will need to be closely monitored and adjusted over the 48- hour event, you can still benefit from running auto campaigns for some less fluctuating campaignsthose with less fluctuation. If you are using auto campaigns, double-check them to make sure your discounted products are showing up with the correct deal.
Run Holiday Advertising Experiments
Prime Day always presented an opportunity to test different discounts, promotions, advertising, and bidding strategies to later use on for the holiday shopping season. With Prime Day scheduled for Q4, this gives you a rare opportunity to run these tests with a large volume of traffic within the same season as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Develop any tests you have been thinking about performing. Experiment with different keywords and bidding schedules and test out the discounts and messaging you’ll run with through the holiday. Then, immediately analyze the performance of all your campaigns to help you start working on your holiday advertising strategy. A much later Prime Day means you will need to quickly use what you learn from your advertising strategy here in order to see success for the rest of Q4.
With the rescheduling of Prime Day and the potential loss of revenue in the first half of the year due to COVID-19, many brands are counting on a very successful Q4 to help them meet their 2020 goals. Luckily, 2020 has also seen more consumers making the move to online shopping than ever before.
With Amazon Prime Day kicking off the 2020 holiday shopping season for a record number of shoppers, this is an incredible opportunity for your brand to have it’s most successful Prime Day ever and to capture new consumers to help drive revenue through the rest of the year.
