Ep 522: How to Strategically Win a 4‑Day Prime Day on Amazon | AKNF

0:00We got a four day Prime Day. Is there anything different about that? Yeah, I mean, so it's going to be more of a marathon. In previous years, there's a lot of times something that breaks in terms of like reporting. A lot of brands don't have time to react if they get day one wrong. With four days, there's time. Clients really hype up Prime Day. It's like this massive thing that really you need to do so much prep work for and there's all this to do. Amazon does a lot of it. Amazon recently changed their titles to like a two-part title. What's new with AMC or how are we currently thinking about the Amazon Marketing Cloud?

0:35AMC is a big one. This is not just like, you really nailed the ad strategies and you can just kill it. No, if your competitor beside you is doing 100 things and you're doing one, they're going to beat you.

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1:58It's all killer, no filler. I'm Eric and I'm here with the Pilot House Amazon team. Feels like only two months ago we were talking about Prime Day and we are now talking about Prime Day again. I guess we've been talking about Prime Day for five years. Prime Day is coming up quick. Tell me about what I need to know about Prime Days. There's also some really exciting stuff I want to talk about the Amazon Marketing Cloud. But let's first talk about Prime Day. It's not going to be long until just every day of the year is Prime Day. Because this year, Prime Day is four days long. So it's July 8th to 11th this year.

2:30Nice. That's like when your kid asks, when's there's Mother's Day? There's Father's Day. There's when's Kids Day? And they're like, every day is Kids Day. Okay, we got a four-day Prime Day right in the heart of the summer here. We got heat waves sweeping the continent. Is there anything different about that? Just keeping your ads up longer, I guess? Yeah, I mean, so it's going to be more of a marathon. It's going to be similar in a lot of aspects. But one of the things that I think key differences is in previous years, there's a lot of times something that breaks in terms of like reporting on the advertising side of things.

3:04you're also a lot of brands don't have time to react if they get day one wrong because by the time they go into day two there's just like there's there's not enough time to like actually change things with four days there's time so the theory is slow moving brands are actually going to have time to realize they got it wrong day one make changes day two capitalize on those changes day three and day four. So competition could be increased in the last few days. Whereas for scrappy teams like us that are monitoring this thing super closely, it's just a more of an opportunity to take advantage of the increased buyer period.

3:43Anything to add there, Cliff? Yeah. I mean, Prime Day was always like a weird, like as when you manage brands on Amazon, it's like an adrenaline filled two days of coffee where you work for 18 hours a day and then you kind of go to bed checking your phone of the brands to make sure that they're still selling well and how the day ended up and you stay up till midnight to make sure you see the final tally of the first day and you're excited for the second day and you're like oh no my rose is too too low i spent too much day one but then day two comes through strong and you come out okay like Like, I feel like it's going to lose a bunch of that funness if it's four days.

4:22Like, that two-day excitement is good hype. Like, it's fun. It's exciting. It's fun for us. Now it's like four days. Like, you can't hold that momentum for four days. I'll be crashing out on day three for sure. Make sure you fuck up on day one, then. Just pivot. And then you get your rule. But do you really think? Because I think you'll just have the same extended roller coaster period for four days. I think it's just two more days that you have to be a slave to your phone. Is that really that big of a problem, Clifford? I think it's going to be like a Black Friday, Cyber Monday, because that's always like a four-day event.

4:58And the weekend's less intense on Black Friday, Cyber Monday. It's still bigger sales than a normal day. People are still very aware that most of the sale, I think everyone's aware at this point, Black Friday goes to the end of Monday. And I think this will be the same, that the beginning will be very hype. a lot of shopping, a lot of sales. And then the last day will be a lot. And then in between, it'll be better than a normal day because everything's still on sale and there's still huge traffic on the site. But I don't think it'll be as much. So I think we'll see like a twin peak effect like we usually do for Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

5:33I think Prime Day, they might honestly be trying to emulate it. Maybe there's something about that that they like at Amazon that it's that four day thing. So today's June 25th. This will come out actually next week. So right before July 8th to 11th, where are we right now? Like, are we pretty much fully prepped for Prime Day or are there final preparations being made? A lot of different aspects. On the deal side, like your promotional offer that you're going to make, there's just minimums basically you have to hit. I think we discussed this internally a lot with a lot of the people who are managing brands, is that clients really hype up Prime Day as like this massive thing that really you need to do so much prep work for and there's all this to do.

6:18Amazon does a lot of it. Like it's their job to go make Prime Day a success. It's our job to make sure we participate. Yeah, that's a good point. Take advantage of the traffic that's there, but it's kind of always our job to make sure we're taking advantage of the traffic that's there. So what changes outside of the normal is really just making sure that like we're putting our hand up to participate in every way that we can. So that's if there's deals available, usually it's for kind of larger brands or certain sales levels that you have to be at to get deals, deals, they call them, making sure we're enrolled in all of those, you're hitting the minimums, there's no product flags that prevent you from being in them.

6:58If you're not in those, you can enroll in prime exclusive discounts. Those basically fill the same purpose, they just don't get some of the special placements that the deals get. But you You still get that nice, probably red badge. They change the color sometimes. Badge that says Prime Day Deal. You don't get filtered out if people filter for things, stuff like that. So as long as you're like putting your hand up to make sure you're part of it, that's the big one. Outside of that, it's like you could do some creative stuff, like change up some content to be Prime Day focused, make virtual bundles that are specific for Prime Day deals.

7:35There's some ad stuff like making sure your budgets have a lot of headroom going into it, making sure your bids are taken into account what your increased conversion rate is going to be as Prime Day approaches. There's kind of the same things that happen every tentpole event, these kind of ideas. But in my eyes, kind of Amazon's deal to go make sure Prime Day is successful. We'll make sure we take advantage of the traffic they bring in, but it's on them to bring in that traffic. Do you flex up your budgets? Like you say, there's a lot of headroom, but are you expecting to spend a lot more? And like what orders of magnitude more?

8:08Like 30 % more or just a little bit? That stuff that Rob mentioned about how there was a really big advantage of being agile when it was two days. Unfortunately, one of those big ones is that a lot of competing brands will budget cap. Like their ad budget are set at a certain level. They might increase them a little, but the ad manager's off at five o 'clock. They go home and, oh, the budget capped at seven. And there's like a good five hour chunk where their budget's gone and you get some real nice cheap cost per clicks at the end of the day. If it's four days, they'll probably fix that on day two.

8:42And then day three and four, they might be okay. So like that, we used to have a pretty big advantage from competitors budget capping. Hopefully they still will budget cap and they won't fix it. But yeah, definitely like, it depends on your lift question, the 30 % lift, it's way higher than that sometimes. Like we've seen 5X days prime day compared to a normal day for brands. If you're running a decent offer, a lot of the competitive market around you is not running a decent offer. And you're in a category that is like relatively well searched for this. Like, you know, maybe not like a replacement filter for a specific product or something like that.

9:25Like probably not a huge lift on prime day for them. But if you're like something that someone might buy, just any person might spontaneously buy. Yeah, Prime Day can be a 5x plus of a normal day. And so your ad budget needs to be able to scale appropriately. All right, that's Prime Day. What's this next notice we have about Amazon title changes? Just something to mention. Clifford might be able to talk to more in terms of how the implementation has been. but Amazon recently changed their titles to like a two-part title, which is like a clear, concise section that covers the essentials and then a product highlight section.

10:02So it's just a recent change that went through. But in terms of implementation, has it changed much or is it kind of the same thing? I don't think we know anything yet. A lot of the industry is hyping it up because it seems like it's going to be a massive change. Like Amazon titles have been the same way for almost the inception of the site. so if they make a huge change like this it will be a massive change to seo as a whole on site but we don't really know how it's going to change exactly yet there's like these inklings of like it's going to be that yeah like like all those things you said rob but i think the big one is just like be aware be prepared and be ready to change all of your catalog as soon as it happens because the first movers on it will have a huge SEO advantage if there's one to be gained from the change.

10:50That said, whenever Amazon does make site-wide changes like this, a good example is the way they've started to integrate a lot of their AI stuff. A lot of it does take into account how listings are already set up on site. So a lot of the time if they're going to make a change like this, they're not expecting the entire website to up and make some action on all of their listings overnight. Usually it's more so like, no, we took your title that already existed and we put it in this format and we already know your title existed in a certain way for this reason. So this is why we moved it to this.

11:29So like, I don't think it's putting a lot of faith in Amazon to not screw it up, but it's a left field too, right? It's a clear, concise title that covers the essentials, the brand name, the product name, model, variation size, flavor type, and then product highlights where you highlight your USPs. It's pretty sort of common sense as well. I mean, I think maybe they're sick of being a meme, like Amazon product title meme of chair, mother, daughter, son, gift, present, anniversary. Yeah, I think that's it. Something we do with our titles already is like try to balance that like SEO versus like USP.

12:02Readability, yeah. Yeah, because you want to have something that has the SEO for rank and relevance and to play to the algorithm. but then you also want to have something that's engaging and readable and tells the customer something important. So it's always a balance you're playing with already. So this might make it just more clear. But I think we can have some, I mean, I might regret saying this. I think we can have some faith in Amazon because they are operating in the best interest of their customer. So if they screwed up all their rankings and their relevance, that would screw it up for people trying to find what they really want to buy.

12:37So in that aspect, they're still invested in showing the relevant product to the relevant customer to make their 15 % plus the ad fees. Faith and Bezos, we must have. This leads us to a bit of a broader conversation. You know, Clifford, you brought up talking about sort of influencers in the Amazon environment, which I don't actually, I don't often think about, which is kind of interesting. But just the broader ecosystem, the Amazon Marketing Cloud, which is their advanced analytics platform that allows advertisers to understand their customers' behavior. across all these different omni-channel strategies.

13:09What's new with AMC or how are we currently thinking about the Amazon Marketing Cloud? AMC is a big one. It's been locked behind a lot of like, you have to have API access and you have to be a software partner or provider or whatnot for the past year and a half. Typically, it was only like the really big DSP spenders who had access, DSP providers. That's changed in the last six months, four months, maybe even tighter than that, where they've opened up access a little bit more. You still have to kind of weasel your way in a little bit through some software provider that you probably pay for in some way.

13:43But once you have access, it's basically, it's giving you access to all of Amazon's customer data through SQL queries. And it has like a chat GPT code maker, basically to help you make SQL queries in it. But examples of things like if you're selling in Whole Foods, you can get which customers shopped your product on Amazon and shopped it in Whole Foods. Or if you're running Prime Video ads, you can get attribution down to like who saw your Prime Video ad and then bought in-store versus bought on-site. Any sort of like demographic data that you normally wouldn't have access to inside Seller Central or inside Vendor Central, like ages, regions, anything like that.

14:35Customer path data. So things like they saw our display ad and then they saw our sponsor brand ad and then they saw our sponsor product ad and then they purchased and how many people saw all three and how many people only saw one before they purchased and what's the conversion rate if they saw this one and that one. You can start to like form some of these things that weren't possible before. Or that said, how actionable is a lot of that data is a very different question and I think much harder to get to. If you're a massive brand running huge amounts of touch points, you have an awareness campaign over here and Prime Video, you're spending 100 ,000 a month over here and you're running ads on live sports with Amazon and you have display ads that are retargeting and then you have your on-platform ads.

15:23yeah there's some pretty good value there and trying to decipher the how much that awareness is really driving for you and get a really good like picture of that you can pixel your site and bring in data from there so like there is something really cool about that combination and it's all basically first party data from amazon so it's it's not there's no loss in there but as a typical Amazon, like smaller brand, who's not spending huge ad budgets on huge awareness campaigns. A lot of it does seem like it's kind of just trying to tell you like, well, look, if you spend more on these upper funnel, upper funnel, I'll put in quotes, uh, type of ads, then you'll just sell more.

16:08Um, and seems like it's kind of trying to push people to just spend more that might not actually be super warranted spend more because you could have just got the same with just the same sponsor product ad you were running in the end rob probably has a different less skeptical opinion of it yeah i mean i think what you said is good where we're at with it now is trying to discern where's the where's the true value and where does it make sense like we're performance marketers we're scared of vanity metrics i'm not scared just don't like vanity metrics don't like view attributions. I want to understand what actually drew the conversion and where can we spend for impact.

16:46Will we be able to get some of that value from AMC? 100 % yes. How much and where is what we're looking to answer right now? So I think this comes down to testing some really specific audiences. For example, using AMC audiences to truly target net new customers. so to actually exclude any customers who have previously interacted with the brand so we can say hey what's our actual like end hack and then use that to like build into like what is it going to cost to actually grow the brand and that could be a valuable insight but what we also have to figure out through testing is does it just give us insight into that data or does it actually perform better because maybe just targeting a sponsored product term and letting amazon choose who to display to and what price to charge us performs better or maybe segmenting it out performs better like that's that's the question and i akin this to like back in my meta advertising days of like running an interest-based audience versus an open audience it's like you have if you have enough data just trust in the meta pixel and let her rip and run open and sometimes that would perform super, super well.

18:02And you'd actually just spend more for interest targeting. And I don't know if that's the case now. I haven't bought on meta in a few years, but it's something, it's a little bit similar. So it's like, are we actually limiting the algo by getting too specific from an audience perspective? Or are we optimizing and getting good data? It's interesting. I was just listening to a quote or reading Cody Plofker post this morning about deduping new users from existing users and making sure you're very cognizant of the budgets that are going to both. Is that something that was not possible before AMC on Amazon or on Amazon?

18:35Can you really easily control, you know, whether your brand's being shown to existing customers or new customers before AMC? I would say it was just after AMC. Typically before that, it would just be like existing customers will search your brand and new ones won't. And that was kind of it. But of course, like that's where I think that is one of the big values is trying to find those niche audiences that help make current strategies a little bit better. so like in our classic running shoe example uh if you're selling a women's red running shoe you might advertise to the word running shoe but really you're not actually trying to hit everyone that searches the word running shoe the problem is that sometimes women that want a red running shoe just search the word running shoe they don't search women's red running shoe specifically they just search the broader term and this is where that fight comes in of shouldn't amazon's relevancy engine that already exists that has existed for a long time that they improve on every single year or whatever already know that this person is more likely to buy my shoe than they are to buy another shoe and that's why i get a lower cost per click and if i artificially limit that audience using amc to say well actually i only want to target women or and actually it's only women who live in florida who are really interested in the red running shoe more so than the blue running shoe in california uh those people are the ones who we could really like segment down to but then are you missing a ton and you're actually messing up what amazon could do for you with its relevancy engine and it's like that level of over segmentation might actually just lead to hurt performance and missing a ton of sales and you're kind of discounting the relevancy so that's where it's like it starts to like it sounds good from a top level but that's basically then saying like oh well amazon's not doing anything for the relevancy and it's like well they have been there's definitely relevancy factor that happens in search so you're just going to get rid of that in hopes that you know better?

20:59I don't know. Yeah. I just think just on any platform, they're going to try to take as many ad dollars as possible. So if they're going to show a bunch of ads to people that were going to buy your product anyway, if you can take that out of the funnel and just let the people who are going to discover you naturally discover you that way and that all net new people who weren't going to discover you this way, that seems to be the holy grail. Interesting. And then what was your point then, Clifford, about external influencers in the Amazon environment. Is that something that AMC tracks as well? I wouldn't say directly.

21:28It's kind of like just independently outside of that as Amazon continues to become just the default to buy stuff. Like I think it's just becoming more and more and more. I say this like very often, but the influencer spot to go. And I don't mean like anything super like link heavy or like you have to specifically have a sell-through link that goes to some page that then goes to Amazon or anything like that. I think like we've seen some recent examples of brands that we manage where like your brand just gets mentioned somewhere, they come by it on Amazon. Like the value of PR and influencer marketing is so easy to like make worth it when there is a centralized shopping channel for people like this now that they don't even have to say it's on Amazon.

22:28They just say like, oh, I have this thing. I like it. Like we had a TikTok influencer once for a brand that didn't even mention the brand name, didn't even mention the product name, just kind of showed it for a second, the package, and then someone in a comment said, oh yeah, it's this, I found it on Amazon or something like that. And it's over. They got like$100 ,000 in sales from a couple million view TikTok. Those kinds of very organic influencer hits go a very long way to drive a huge amount of ranking and relevance on Amazon. And as more live streams become more popular and as more of TikTok becomes more popular and this kind of entire area of PR and influencers continues to grow, Amazon keeps being the like, even though TikTok literally is a built-in shop, people still hear about a product and they go buy it on Amazon.

23:37so making sure that like everything is set up to receive that traffic if you're running those kinds of campaigns and also definitely considering running a lot more of those ideas and those kinds of influencer and PR campaigns knowing the huge advantage you'll get on Amazon from having that level of brand recognition and brand searches coming in because a lot more of the space is getting those brand searches. And if you're not, you're then behind. It's super interesting too, just about really overt testimonials or really obvious influence stuff just doesn't work at this point. But when you make the customer feel like it's their idea in a way, right?

24:20Where you just show something and then they go search it. I bet the conversion rates are just way higher when it's just more casual like that. So it's maybe a little bit hard to architect in that more hands-off approach. yeah i think we've seen both work so it's like 100 like if you can have something like truly organic like architect something that appears truly organic or just have something truly organic like pop off like that's going to be like a top performer but even working with direct influencers where it does appear like an influencer like if they have the reach people will see it and they'll go to amazon like tv placements like we had brand um their product i mentioned on a tv placement like a morning i think it was like a morning show and then like again big traffic spike to amazon so any of those things you're doing even if you're not directly directing to amazon you'll likely see lift there we're also been leaning heavier into creator connections for a few brands too which has been really cool and there's some brands offering some like very high commissions uh in there too that we we've seen so i think we've talked about creator connections, but just walk me through that one more time.

25:30It's a basically an affiliate platform is I think the best way to put it. It's just, it's within Amazon. You can give Amazon affiliates a higher commission on your, to sell your product, to use a link, to bring to your products rather than the default, like Amazon associates commission, which is like 2 % roughly depends on category, but around 2%. You can offer a minimum. You have to, you have to offer a minimum of at least 10%, but we're seeing, I'm technically an Amazon influencer myself. So I get all these emails from all these other brands offerings. Brands out there are offering 40%, 50 % commissions to send traffic to their listing.

26:10Big brands, like big top of category brands are offering 40 % commissions in certain like beauty spaces and even household stuff like 15, 20 % commissions, like really much larger than you would expect. Yeah, like the margin in a lot of cases or more. Yeah, huge amounts. And if you're like, I feel bad for the poor like brand that's beside them that's trying to compete that doesn't do that. And you're just like trying to ramp up the PPC ads and like hope that if you bid more for this keyword on top of search, it's gonna work this time. Like, and meanwhile, beside you, you have just huge amounts of like buzz feeds.

26:51here's the top 10 products on Prime Day like and they're just like pushing that traffic to this listing that's right beside you they're not going to outrank that that listing no matter how much you try with PPC so it's like you really have to think a lot more holistically as we get into a little bit more of this world because as we always say this is not an individual selling platform this is not just like you really nail the ad strategies and you can just kill it no if you're competitor beside you is doing a hundred things and you're doing one, they're, they're going to beat you every time they're going to rank you.

27:27They're going to outsell you. Their PPC costs are going to be cheaper. Like you really have to take advantage of everything as a whole to really be a top seller in that marketplace. Cause it is pretty much a zero sum game, right? Like it's not like you're going to, they're going to edge you 60, 40 if they're, if they're outperforming you, but they're going to 99, one kind of thing. They're going to outperform you. If you're the running shoe that people are coming and searching running shoe and they recognize that one and they buy it and there's only like two or three spots at the top of that search result and people don't scroll down too far past those first few spots.

28:03If one brand is pushing huge amounts of influencers and publications and PR all over the place, commissions, they're offering huge commissions over here. Goalie Vitamins is giving away Range Rovers. like these kinds of things start happening. It becomes a lot harder to do just the flat fund strategy of run the PPC and rank up and you'll do great. It's like, no, you kind of have to be doing everything to compete against some of these campaigns that are out there. Exciting times. Are you guys eyeing up anything for Prime Day this year? Any purchases in the funnel? I'm gonna get a robot vacuum. I've had a robot vacuum for the past two weeks.