Amazon’s Prime Day wasn’t successful only for retailers but also for advertisers who tapped into the online shopping event’s success. Here are the key stats you need to know and what to do next.
Amazon’s Prime Day was their ‘biggest shopping event’ up to now with members buying more than 175 million items worldwide in two days. Retailers saw a big increase in their sales and even other sites benefited from the online shopping spree.
Key stats include:
- Prime members worldwide saved more than one billion dollars throughout Prime Day.
- Members in 18 countries shopped – double the number since the first Prime Day five years ago.
- A record number of Prime members shopped during Prime Day in the U.S.
- Amazon welcomed more new Prime members on July 15 than any previous day, and almost as many on July 16 – making these the two biggest days ever for member signups.
According to Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder and CEO:
“Members purchased millions of Alexa-enabled devices, received tens of millions of dollars in savings by shopping from Whole Foods Market and bought more than $2 billion of products from independent small and medium-sized businesses. Huge thank you to Amazonians everywhere who made this day possible for customers.”
Except for the sales, there was also additional revenue coming from the advertisers who wanted to benefit from the increased interest in Amazon’s site these two days.
In fact, advertisers were encouraged to increase their spend to make the most of the big audience that could turn into potential customers for them.
The growth of Amazon advertising
Amazon’s advertising business has become very profitable. There is annual revenue of $10 billion from selling ads and there is an estimate of further growth.
In fact, Amazon is currently the third-largest digital advertising platform in the US after Google and Facebook. According to eMarketer, Amazon will claim 8.8% of US digital spend in 2019, which is a great increase from 6.8% in 2018.
There are many ways to make the most of Amazon advertising especially on busy days like Prime Day.
The idea of using sponsored posts, display ads and even video ads can help advertisers promote their products even when they are not selling them directly on Amazon.
Amazon ads can also help you gain valuable insights on consumer habits and the best ways to approach your prospective customers through the right messaging.
It’s about learning what consumers want from your brand or any similar product to deliver the right ad at the most appropriate time.
This is something that can be very useful during busier periods such as Prime Day.
Advertising success during Prime Day
Prime Day allowed advertisers to benefit from a busy shopping event that brought them closer to a new audience.
Kenshsoo looked at their ecommerce performance data to find out how advertisers reacted to Prime Day.
The findings were very interesting:
- Advertisers spent 3.8X on Prime Day compared to any other day in July.
- What’s more interesting is that they also generated 5.8x of their usual revenue on any other day in July
- Kenshoo advertisers who joined Prime Day last year spent 2x the budget on the first day of Prime Day in 2019
- The most popular categories for increased spending were Toys & Games, Health & Beauty, Computer & Electronics, and CPG
- When looking at the spending, advertisers spent 6.8x in Toys & Games ads compared to last year, 3.1x in Health & Beauty and 2x in Computer & Electronics
What we can learn is that there is a growing interest from advertisers to tap into Amazon’s Prime Day. The success of the event will spark even more interest in the future, which comes to the importance of planning ahead and setting up an advertising strategy that will beat the competition.
It’s also useful to look at the specific categories that saw an even greater growth from last year to explore how you want to benefit from big shopping events in the future.
Opportunities with Amazon advertising
Advertising on Amazon can help you improve brand awareness but also reduce the sales cycle.
From finding out more about your target audience to making your funnel shorter through the right actions, the opportunities are numerous and diverse.
As the third biggest ad platform in the US, it is becoming easier to justify your ROI by creating ads that speak to your target audience.
Amazon’s ambitious plans for its advertising model and the estimates for a bigger interest in it, and thus revenue, indicate that paid search can facilitate the shopping decisions both for consumers but also for retailers who want to promote their products.
Prime Day seemed like the perfect event to increase the ad spend so the next challenge is to use the learnings from the two busy days to set up a long-lasting plan that will bring even greater success.