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Kepler’s retail team is already gearing up for the second biggest sales event of the year: Amazon’s annual Prime Day. It typically falls in mid-July though the date is left sufficiently cryptic until they have their ducks in a row.
While the assumption may be that Prime Day is just for brands with products on Amazon, the halo impact is much broader. From the team's experience working on retail brands that don’t sell on Amazon, we typically see an uplift in activity in general. For those on staff who identify as frequent online shoppers, easily influenced or both, these few days tend to be heavy spenders both on and off Amazon.
So…as the Retail Media Network landscape expands across the broader advertiser ecosystem, the question that now arises is: should non-retailers care about Prime Day? Should they include/increase investment with Amazon or their other marketing channels?
Kepler’s perspective is that in an increasingly online and impression-driven advertising world, the value of unique and recurring eyeballs (read: impressions with sufficient reach and frequency) these few days in July present a unique opportunity.
There are really only four possible actions advertisers can take during Prime Day—on or off Amazon Ads—and depending on what you’re advertising they each have their pros and cons:
- Increase spend (potential for high conversion rates)
- Decrease spend (potential for high CPMs)
- Shift strategy and/or creatives (get cute with puns, find niche audiences, etc…)
- Do nothing different (risk getting blown out or wasting dollars)
We’re advocating that you don’t “do nothing different”. Regardless of what service or product you sell and where you advertise, the likelihood is that your digital media will be impacted during Prime Day and the few days following it.
A savvy marketer will be aware and take advantage of the shifts in consumer behavior over those few days. A cursory view of our Kepler retail and non-retail client roster from July 2022 shows some interesting media cost comparisons.
The following data compares the media cost for the two Prime Days and the day following, with the average for the month of July, without those days:
Google Search:
- CPCs: 8% higher
DV360 Display:
- CPMs: 6% higher
- CPCs: 19% higher
Meta:
- CPMs: 4% lower
- CPCs: 8% lower
As an initial signal, this tells us that you can expect an uptick in advertising investment and consumer activity on both DTC sites and search. For advertisers that aren’t active on Amazon Ads, and are concerned about higher costs in market, Social appears to be the least impacted by these increases.
On the Amazon DSP, one non-endemic (non-retailer) Amazon Ads Kepler client saw CVR increase 114% on the first day of Prime Day. Advertisers can also expect elevated CPMs during the time period, which for this client spiked up to ~$11 compared to monthly average of ~$7.
