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Improving Your Prime Day 2018 Advertising Strategies

Prime Day 2018 is almost here, and with it, the need to advertise. You want your business to reap all the advantages of one of the biggest Amazon shopping days of the year–and using the right advertising strategies will transform your efforts and make it possible for you to better reach your target audience. These simple tips will make it easier for you to make the most of your Prime Day 2018 advertising strategies:

Before Prime Day

Before Prime Day, there are several strategies that will maximize your advertising advantage. Make sure that you:

Do your keyword research.

Offering sponsored product ads with automatic targeting in the weeks leading up to Prime Day will give you a better idea of which keywords are actually driving customers to your products. Once you know which keywords are most effective, you can focus your advertising efforts on those keywords. Make sure to take advantage of negative keywords to help minimize the number of inaccurate searches that will pull up your products: you only want searches from customers who will be genuinely interested in purchasing your products!

Design great ads.

Make sure that your ads have high-quality images, that they’re spelled correctly, and that there are no grammatical errors. A poorly-written ad will be less likely to bring customers to your products.

Increase your ad spend.

An increased advertising budget will lead to increased sales for Prime Day by taking full advantage of Prime Day traffic. Increasing your Prime Day 2018 advertising spend also means increased visibility, which will in turn drive brand name recognition. Many vendors increased their ad spending by as much as 180% through the month of July last year–and they got the returns that made it worth it.

Increase your bid amounts.

For Prime Day ads, bid amounts may increase substantially, especially on high-volume sales items. Make sure that you increase your advertising bids to match, especially if you’re worried about high amounts of competition. Turning on Bid+ will automatically increase your bids as much as 50% as needed, allowing you to more easily make the threshold you need to keep your ads competitive.

Choose your deals.

As a third-party seller, you are eligible to put products up for Amazon’s Lightning Deals, but you have to make sure that you meet Amazon’s criteria. Vendors, for example, are eligible to choose what Lightning Deals they like from their inventory to be approved for Lightning Deals, while third-party sellers need to have their items pre-selected, then evaluated by Amazon. They must also:

  • Have at least a 3-star rating for the products and a 3.5 star rating for the vendor.
  • Be Prime-eligible.
  • Include a minimum percentage of item variations (colors and sizes, for example).
  • Come in new condition

Even if you aren’t eligible for Lightning Deals or you aren’t chosen for those specific sales, you can still run some great sales for Prime Day. Note that most of the time, you’ll see the highest levels of success when you offer sales and deals on high-performing items or items that perform around the middle of the road for sales, not on items that typically perform poorly.

Run test ads.

Leading up to Prime Day 2018, take the opportunity to run test ads. See what keywords are the most likely to drive traffic to your items. Determine what types of ads are the most useful to your customers. Your test runs will allow you to better customize your campaigns and prepare for Prime Day 2018, highlighting products and styles that are of most interest to your customers.

Increase your inventory.

No, this isn’t an advertising strategy, but it is a critical part of preparing for Prime Day! Most sellers experience a noticeable bump in both traffic and sales as Prime Day progresses, even if they aren’t running Prime Day deals. For this reason, it’s critical to ensure that you have the inventory on hand to handle those increased sales.

Choose the right type of ads for your products.

Amazon offers several types of ads, including sponsored products, product display ads, and headline search ads. Carefully consider which one will be the most effective for your needs, then design an ad campaign that will incorporate the types of ads that are most effective for you.

On Prime Day

When the big day finally arrives, you want to be sure that everything is running smoothly. Don’t be caught off-guard by ads that don’t accomplish your goals! Make sure that you’re monitoring your advertising efforts throughout Prime Day, including:

Tracking your ad time.

If your ad runs through its budget in the early parts of the day, you’ll need to add to your advertising budget in order to reach customers who are rushing to Amazon to check out the deals in the later part of the day.

Checking your click-through rates.

Which ads are receiving the most clicks? Which ones are being virtually ignored? You may find that increasing your bids or your advertising budget for the day yields more clicks.

Monitoring your sales by keyword.

What keywords are bringing in the most sales traffic? This isn’t just about click-through rates. It’s about seeing which keywords are bringing in traffic that ultimately converts to a sale. Keep track of your keyword sales to learn both which items are performing best and which keywords are bringing customers to those items.

Keeping up with any issues.

Problems with your pages can prevent buyers from checking out or lead to shopping frustration–and that often means buyers who will turn away from your page to shop elsewhere. On Prime Day, make sure you’re keeping track of any problems with your advertisements or your product pages to ensure that you’re able to fix problems as quickly as possible.

Carefully monitoring your ads and your sales throughout Prime Day will allow you to more effectively track their performance. Note, however, that it may take Amazon’s stats as many as three days to fully update, and changes to your advertising campaigns may take as much as an hour to take effect. As a result, you may not be able to attain fully accurate information until after Prime Day has already passed–but that’s alright! Not only is increased traffic predicted for several days following Prime Day itself, the data you collect this year can be used to improve your odds of a more successful Prime Day in 2019.

Need a partner in your Amazon marketing and advertising strategies? Orca Pacific is here to help- contact us today for a quote or a consultation.

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