With Prime Day 2024 in sight, it’s time to start building out your Amazon Prime Day advertising strategy. Even if you’re not promoting products during the event, you can still capitalize on the heightened traffic the event brings. Now’s the time to start planning your first-touch campaigns, warming up your audience before the main Prime Day event arrives. While your Amazon Prime Day marketing strategy might be to focus on loyal or returning customers, it’s ‘prime time’ to find brand new, or new-to-brand (NTB) customers too. Amazon DSP, or Demand Side Platform, is a great way to do that.
Here’s why including Amazon DSP programmatic campaigns in your marketing mix — alongside traditional search advertising — will give your Prime Day 2024 campaigns a significant boost.
What is the Difference Between Amazon DSP and Search Advertising?
Amazon DSP is a fundamentally different way to target potential customers. For example:
- While search ads target keywords, Amazon DSP targets shoppers based on their behavior, demographics and interests. This means you can retarget shoppers based on their previous interactions.
- Amazon search advertising is served to shoppers looking for products like yours on Amazon. With DSP, you can serve your audience a wider range of ad formats (including video and audio) either when they’re shopping on Amazon or while they are browsing elsewhere, reminding them of your brand whether they’re shopping or not.
- Search advertising is effective at converting shoppers at the point of purchase, but DSP plays a wider marketing role — from gaining brand awareness, through keeping your products front of mind, to conversion and repeat sales.
The Power of Using DSP with Search Ads in Your Amazon Prime Day Advertising Strategy
Based on Pacvue data, *86% of ad-attributed conversions are assisted by DSP.
*First Party Data from Pacvue
Search advertising, also known as Sponsored Ads (including Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, or Sponsored Display), is proven to be highly effective during peak sales events. However, combining these search ads with Amazon DSP campaigns will help you find new ways to grow sales and share — before, during, and after the event.
Here are some of the ways Amazon DSP will add value to your overall Amazon Prime Day advertising strategy for 2024:
Incrementality and Growth: Top of Funnel Audiences
Historical Pacvue data shows that a cohort of advertisers using Pacvue had a *357% increase in NTB purchases during Prime Day. Amazon DSP allows you to target top-of-funnel and NTB customers who are unaware of your products or deals. Catching their attention before the main event gives you the opportunity to build awareness and recognition so that your sponsored ads land with more impact during the two-day event.
Conversion and Loyalty: Middle and Bottom of the Funnel Campaigns
Being able to target shoppers who have previously connected with your brand allows you to re-engage with them, during and after the event. With DSP, you can retarget shoppers who have, for example:
- Searched for relevant keywords but not purchased
- Viewed your product pages
- Purchased previously during a promotion
- Added your product to their cart but didn’t buy
How to Use Pacvue’s Amazon DSP Platform to Gain Advantage on Prime Day 2024
Pacvue’s dashboard for Amazon DSP is a set of tools that manage, analyze, and optimize digital advertising on Amazon’s extensive network. Whether you’re a vendor managing your own marketing campaigns or an agency running many campaigns across different accounts, it’s crucial to be able to build, monitor, and optimize your campaigns quickly and at scale. Pacvue helps you to do this in several ways:
Rules-Based Optimization
DSP uses real-time bidding. This can be more cost-effective, helping to maximize your advertising spend. Pacvue allows you to create logical ‘rules’, or thresholds within DSP that trigger actions when those thresholds are met. For example, you might create an automated rule for each ASIN that says: “If stock levels fall below X, reduce my bid to $0.”
By the same token, during Prime Day events, you might want to raise the upper threshold for your bids on certain products and spend more to win new customers. (Using retargeting after the event will most likely make up the profitability gap in the longer term, as you grow your customer base overall.)
Automated Dayparting
Using Amazon Marketing Cloud data, DSP, and your own historical data, Pacvue can help you understand when your ideal shopper will be shopping. This process of automated ‘dayparting’ or bidding only when your customers are most likely to buy means that Pacvue can automatically adjust your bids and manage your budget when sales of your products and your category peak, while you take a break.
Automating bid decisions based on KPIs, and using insights to influence the timing of bids, allows you to run complex and large-scale campaigns while keeping wasted spend to a minimum.
A Process of Continual Improvement Using Advanced Analytics
Pacvue allows you to monitor KPIs such as impressions, clicks, conversion rates and return on ad spend (ROAS). Advanced analytics also help you understand the impact of your ads, from audience engagement to performance analysis across devices, channels, retailers, and ad formats. This ensures your budget and focus is always weighted favorably across ad types, channels and platforms. Utilizing tags in Pacvue is an easy way to apply bulk changes when you need to.
Practical use cases for Prime Day include being able to test audiences and replace poor-performing target groups with new ones. (Pacvue can help you find these using Amazon Marketing Cloud audience data.)
Conclusion
If you’re using Pacvue’s DSP dashboard, you’ll already be familiar with some of the benefits including centralizing your budget management, automating campaigns, prioritizing opportunities and optimizing bids. Here’s a short round-up of some of the most effective ways Pacvue can help you use DSP together with search advertising during Prime Day 2024:
- Target new-to-brand customers leading up to the main event.
- Create compelling middle and lower-funnel campaigns.
- Optimize ROI by setting up automated dayparting.
- Improve ROAS with automated rules based on KPIs.
- Respond to the data. Audit and adjust your audiences and your rules as your campaigns unfold.
- Extend the opportunity Prime day offers by retargeting shoppers after the main event.
If you need help or guidance creating your Amazon Prime Day Advertising Strategy, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’re here to help.
