It's over again - Black Friday or Black Friday Week 2019 at Amazon. We don't want to bore you with reports about record sales figures on this day, which can be read in many online articles. Rather, we focus on analyzing the advertising KPIs from our customer data and then give you recommendations for future shopping events that can be derived from it.
For example, we analyzed and compared the key metrics of our customers' PPC ads three weeks before Black Friday Week, on Black Friday Week and on the following Cyber Monday. This enabled us to gain interesting insights that can provide important recommendations for action for the next Black Friday.
In the following diagram you can see the percentage values and changes in the period from November 2 to December 2, 2019 of European accounts:
- Impressions
- Ad spend
- Advertising sales
- Average selling price
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- ACoS
- Conversion Rate (CR)
Analysis of advertising data
If you look at the graph, you will notice a few things that we will explain here.
Product search begins before Black Friday Week
It is not surprising that the impressions on Black Friday have increased on average. Since many potential buyers visit the Amazon platform on this day, more visitors are seeing the advertisements of the sellers. Already the weekend before Black Friday Week starts the impressions are on average higher than the weeks before. This can be an indication that potential buyers are already searching for products before the start of the discount week.
Increase in the conversion rate
The fact that potential buyers inform themselves before the bargain week can be confirmed by an increase of the conversion rate on Black Friday. After a click is done the chance of an order is probably higher, because customers already know exactly which product they want to buy.
No fear of high cost per clicks
The CPC does not rise above average on Black Friday Week and Black Friday. Nevertheless, ad spend on Black Friday has increased by about 32%, which can be attributed to more clicks. Since the CPCs are created by the second price auction, the approximately constant CPC can mean that most merchants do not increase their maximum bids, which also does not change the actual CPCs.
More sales and better ACoS
The increase in ad spend is more than offset by the increase in orders and revenues. Revenues from advertisements on Black Friday alone increased by approximately 130% (compared to the previous three weeks).
Since the Thursday before Black Friday at Amazon already starts with Black Friday Deals, this day also records approx. 80% more sales through advertising.
Due to these extreme sales increases, the ACoS is also lower on these days. As you can see in our chart, the ACoS even starts to drop one day before the start of Black Friday Week.
The increase in revenue is not only due to the increased number of orders, but also to an average selling price increase of approx. 46%. This is probably due to the fact that Black Friday is often used for Christmas shopping and the people who wants to buy more expensive purchases rather wait for a discount - and thus for Black Friday.
Learnings and recommendations for action for 2020
Some recommendations can be made from the analysis of the key advertising figures.
- Make yourself visible before Black Friday Week. During this time, the search and comparison of products already begins, so that you can "hit" immediately on Black Friday.
- Concentrate on your more expensive products, because potential customers are more willing to buy high-priced products (with a discount) on Black Friday.
- Dare to increase your bids for your top products at Black Friday Week. So you have a good chance of becoming the highest bidder without having to increase your CPC significantly.
- You can also increase your daily budget. Even if your costs increase, the chance - as our analysis has shown - is very high that your orders and sales will increase proportionally more than your costs and thus even your ACoS will be optimized.
Tip: For special sales days such as Black Friday or Prime Day, use our Boost function with which you can increase your bids and budgets once by up to 100% and then reduce them again.
Watch your conversion rate after Black Friday and lower your bids and budgets again, if necessary, because the sales on the following Cyber Monday were much lower than on Black Friday. Basically it can be said that the desire to buy directly after larger shopping events is often lower than average. Due to the Christmas business, however, this does not necessarily apply to the time after Black Friday.
