Shopping events like Prime Day and Black Friday are when most consumer brands go all-in to win new customers and boost sales. Visibility on the digital shelf is key when it comes to shopping events, and search advertising is a popular strategy. Dayparting—the art of reserving your bids (and budgets) for when your shoppers are most likely online—is a smart way to optimize your retail media budget, although it’s wise to review your regular Amazon PPC dayparting schedule for the before the shopping events: while the opportunity is high, cost per click (CPC) is too.
Should I switch off or adjust Amazon PPC dayparting during shopping events?
Given the surge in shopper activity, you can capture demand by switching off dayparting and maintaining ad presence during all hours. You might also consider increasing bids and budgets to stay competitive during these peak periods. However, the decision to adjust dayparting depends on your campaign goals and performance data. You might continue dayparting if your data indicates certain times yield better returns, even during shopping events like Black Friday or Prime Day.
How does Share of Voice data inform my Amazon dayparting advertising strategy?
If you want to stick with dayparting through the shopping events, you can further optimize your return on advertising spend (ROAS) using Share of Voice (SOV) data. SOV data tells you where you and your competitors rank in search, both organic and paid. These insights are updated frequently throughout the event. If you have access to Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), you can use these SOV insights to help you decide whether to adjust your bids or dayparting schedule in line with your SOV position.
What is Share of Voice and how do I calculate it?
In retail media, the Share of Voice marketing metric measures your brand’s visibility in a marketplace, relative to your competitors, for the keywords you’re investing in.
Amazon’s search algorithm is heavily influenced by sales volume, so the more product you sell, the higher that product will rank in organic search. Paid ads can boost sales and create a halo effect (as you will see in the Nescafe example below).
The formula for calculating SOV is:
Share of Voice (SOV) = (Your Brand’s Ad Impressions (or Spend, Clicks, etc)) / Total Ad Impressions (or Spend, Clicks, etc.) in the Market x 100
You can check out our Ultimate Guide to Share of Voice in Retail Media here for more tips on tricks on using SOV analysis.
Example: “NESCAFE” Share of Voice on Amazon.co.uk
In this example, Nescafe has dominated Share of Voice on its own branded keyword with a combination of advertising and organic efforts. One Sponsored Product has also achieved Best Seller status, and another has won the Amazon Choice badge in the category, pushing it up the ranks in organic search to take top spot after Sponsored Products.
How to use Pacvue’s rules-based automations to boost visibility and optimize budgets for shopping events campaigns
Pacvue’s advertising tools use rules-based automations. This means you can create rules that automatically kick in when certain factors align. When sales events are at their most competitive for advertisers, a little automation goes a long way in refining your approach and saving time. For example, it doesn’t make sense to advertise a product that’s already in the top search spot organically, so your optimization rule in this instance would be:
Rule: When my product’s organic search rank =1; pause bids.
You can also use Pacvue’s rules to adjust budgets based on CPC so that you spend just enough to get you into the winning spot.
Let’s take a closer look at how Pacvue’s Amazon Marketing Cloud integration combined with our Dayparting Analytics helps you design powerful Amazon PPC Dayparting strategies while putting budget controls in place.
What is dayparting on Amazon?
Dayparting on Amazon refers to the strategy of scheduling your pay-per-click ads to run at specific times of the day or days of the week when your audience is most likely to convert or when competition is lower.
Amazon doesn’t natively support dayparting within its Advertising Console although 3rd party tools like Pacvue’s Amazon API integration helps you automate the process of dayparting. These tools give you granular control over when campaigns are active and when they are paused.
How to enhance dayparting with AMC
If you have an Amazon DSP agreement, an AWS account, and you are actively running campaigns, you can tap into Amazon Marketing Cloud data to build highly effective audiences and extremely efficient campaigns. If you have SQL expertise, you can query AMC data, in a secure environment, to get detailed, event-level insights on customer interactions, including ad impressions, clicks, conversions, and Share of Voice. If SQL expertise isn’t on hand in your organisation, Pacvue’s integration with AMC solves the problem.
Pacvue integrates Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) data into its advertising platform to provide brands with insights through user-friendly data visualizations, including:
- Pacvue’s self-service dashboards are a collection of standard, visualized reports with real-time data updates and user-friendly filtering.
- Pacvue’s pre-configured reports focus on common analytics needs, such as assisted conversion analysis, enhanced dayparting, path-to-purchase analysis, and overlap reports.
- Pacvue’s customizable visualizations allow you to create tailored reports that answer specific business questions, for deeper insights into campaign performance and audience behaviour.
Pacvue’s AMC Console vs Amazon’s AMC Solutions
At the time of writing, Amazon has announced templated analytics via AMC Solutions which will go some way towards making AMC data more accessible for all users. So far, Amazon plans to make only two reports available; a High-Volume Audience Report, and Optimal Frequency Analysis.
Pacvue’s AMC console covers a wide range of templated analytics including:
- Multiple Path-to-Purchase insights
- Demographics and geographics
- Marketing traffic and funnel trends
- Channel overlap reports
- New-to-brand volume at ASIN level
- Multi-touch attribution modelling including first touch, last touch, Markov Chain or a custom mix
- Long-term value analysis using 12+ months of data
- Templatized audiences, including cart abandoners; new-to-brand customers (for retargeting); channel and campaign overlapping audiences; 1P audiences; and lookalikes.
Crucially for dayparting, Pacvue’s AMC Console offers both:
- Hourly Share of Voice Analysis and
- Hour Of Day Trends, integrated with Pacvue’s Dayparting Automation
How hourly Dayparting Analytics can help you manage shopping events campaigns
Daypart Analytics from Pacvue help you optimize Amazon advertising spend, even during the busiest of times. You can automatically adjust your bids based on Pacvue’s rule-based automations. You can create and adjust rules, including which products to boost and when, based on SOV data drawn from AMC. Pacvue updates this data at hourly intervals and automates adjustments to the bidding process, according to your rules. Key features include:
- SOV data at brand and ASIN level, including paid and organic, that compares performance across time.
- Performance analysis including search volume, CPC, CPA, and rankings using SOV data.
- Keyword scraping 24 times a day to give you hourly data points.
- SOV comparisons across the top five brands and ASINS using detailed visualizations, heat maps and trends.
Five hacks for shopping events campaign success using Pacvue’s automations
Pacvue’s automations can really enhance your shopping events advertising campaigns and lighten the load when it comes to managing multiple channels, brands, ASINs and ad campaigns. Here’s how to effectively utilize some of these features:
1. Budget management
- Automate your budget adjustments using Pacvue’s Budget Calendar. Schedule budget increases during peak holiday periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday to ensure your campaigns remain competitive when traffic surges.
- Automatically refill your budget. Enabling this feature allows you to automatically replenish campaign budgets when they deplete, provided performance goals are being met. This prevents downtime and maintains consistent ad presence.
2. Bid optimization
- Switching to Dynamic Bidding is something to consider. You can automatically increase bids when a conversion is most likely. This strategy can be helpful during high-traffic periods.
3. Dayparting
- Strategic scheduling will adjust your bids or pause campaigns during specific times of the day based on historical performance or other data such as Share of Voice. This helps you focus spend during high-conversion periods.
4. Keyword management
- Find seasonal keywords with Pacvue’s Keyword Research tools and incorporate holiday-specific keywords into your campaigns, such as “Black Friday [category]” or “Mother’s Day gifts.” You can identify trending terms and add them to your campaigns to catch even more seasonal traffic.
- Automated keyword harvesting is possible when you create automated rules to harvest high-performing keywords from search term reports. This keeps your campaigns relevant and in line with emerging trends.
5. Inventory monitoring
- Product Center alerts will notify you when inventory is low or when you lose the Buy Box. Pausing or adjusting campaigns on products that are out of stock helps you reduce wasted ad spend.
You can find a bunch more tips for digital shelf and advertising optimizations in our handy guide here.
Conclusion: When Amazon PPC Dayparting meets Share of Voice data, cool things happen.
Shopping events like Black Friday or category events like Amazon’s Holiday Beauty Haul present immense opportunities for brands to drive visibility, sales, and customer acquisition. Adjusting your Amazon PPC dayparting strategy, with the help of Share of Voice (SOV) data and tools like Pacvue, can make all the difference. By leveraging hourly SOV insights, rules-based automations, and enhanced analytics, you can stay ahead of competitors while optimising your advertising spend.
Whether you decide to maintain 24/7 ad visibility or strategically schedule campaigns, tools like Pacvue allow you to adapt dynamically, ensuring you capitalize on peak shopping moments without overspending.
If you’d like to find out a little more about combining insights with smart automations, we’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch.
Meanwhile, here’s hoping your brand can secure a winning spot on the digital shelf during 2025 key shopping events.
