Prime Day is Amazon's biggest sales event of the year. It attracts millions of people to Amazon every year and offers advertisers a unique opportunity to present their products to a wide audience and increase their sales. As OnlineMarketing.de reported last year, 21.5% of Amazon's existing customers save up specifically for Prime Day to take full advantage of the offers.
We want to assess and quantify the success of this year's Prime Day, which took place on July 11 and 12, 2023. In order to get accurate information about the key advertising metrics, we will analyze the development in the Amazon Market Index AMX500.
A clear peak on Prime Day is already visible at first glance. We will analyze how this was achieved in the following.
Development of advertising key figures
We have created a summary of the most important KPIs from the AMX500 for you. The values of Prime Day (July 11 and 12) were compared with the values two days before Prime Day.
- Impressions increased by 95%, paid clicks by 64.8%
- The click-through rate fell by 15.5%, but the conversion rate rose by 14.3%.
- Advertising costs have increased by 101.6%, due to higher budgets, as well as more expensive click prices (22.3% higher)
- The increased spending has paid off, as it has led to a significant increase in orders and significantly higher revenues. The number of Paid Orders has increased by 88.3%, while Paid Sales have increased by even 183.8%. In addition, the average basket value has increased by 50.7%.
- The fact that the higher expenditure is definitely worthwhile is also shown in the ACoS, which has fallen by 29%, to an average of 14%.
Many of these metrics are even better than last year. Among others, impressions, shopping cart value and paid sales have seen an even more significant increase than last year.
What impact does Prime Day have on other channels like TikTok or Instagram?
During Amazon's two-day shopping event, Prime Day related content shared on TikTok reached hundreds of millions of views. In a 48-hour period starting July 11, videos with the hashtags #primeday, #primeday2023 and #amazonprimeday2023 were viewed at least 400 million times on TikTok. That number has doubled every year for the past several years. TikTok has grown in popularity in the U.S., with more and more users viewing content related to shopping.
Although Facebook and Instagram are important channels for shopping, they mainly serve as advertising platforms. In contrast, TikTok is not only a growing advertising network, but also drives purchasing decisions through user-generated organic content. Such content does not exist on Facebook and Instagram to the same extent. As a result, TikTok may have the greatest influence on social shopping, and the phrase "TikTok made me buy it" is becoming more common.
Despite the high number of views, TikTok did not generate any direct revenue from the hundred million Prime Day views. The conversion rate was also low, as only a few posts contained direct links to Amazon. So it's not surprising that TikTok wants to change that. The company plans to introduce a native checkout experience to turn TikTok into a marketplace, and is even considering acting as a retailer itself and selling goods directly.
Prime Day is undoubtedly the most significant day for social commerce, as users share content with others on this day. TikTok has established itself as an excellent platform for this type of social shopping. This underscores not only the enormous potential of social commerce, but also TikTok's unique position and importance in the e-commerce space. TikTok's ability to influence shopping decisions is not limited to Prime Day, but extends to other days and products as well. Even things that shoppers would not normally buy online are increasingly being purchased through TikTok because of online influences.
Learnings for future sales events
- It definitely pays off to increase your budgets and bids. Although click prices increase noticeably on Prime Day, it still makes sense to increase bids, because the revenue growth outweighs the rising costs by far. We have already seen this on past Prime Days.
- Prepare well for Prime Day. To make the most of Prime Day, it's not enough to make adjustments just 1-2 days in advance. Especially if you want to create coupons or deals for your products, you should start creating them at least a month before Prime Day. This way, you make sure that you have enough time to prepare high-quality and appealing promotions.
- Take advantage of BidX's scheduling feature. Thanks to the scheduling feature, you can effortlessly plan your campaigns based on days of the week, times of the day or even seasonal events. This allows you to always prepare in time for sales events like Prime Day and promote your products in the best possible way. This enables you to make the most of marketing opportunities and maximize your reach to potential customers during Prime Day.
Tip: Events like Prime Day significantly distort your results and the performance of your campaigns. If you want to prevent this, you can use the "Exclude periods in bid adjustments" function in the BidX tool to exclude such events when calculating bid/structure adjustments.
You aren’t using BidX yet? Then simply test it 14 days for free and convince yourself. The next Prime Day is sure to come!
