Maximizing Amazon Prime Day 2024 with Amazon Marketing Stream

Next month (July 16-17, 2024) marks another Amazon Prime Day, a pivotal event that our Skai series has been closely examining to equip digital marketers with advanced advertising strategies. (Check out our Prime Day 2024 hub for the other posts in this series and valuable marketer resources.)

As Amazon Prime has grown in importance year after year, it has also become a critical period for implementing new strategies to fully maximize the revenue potential. Sharp retail media marketers will try almost anything to get the edge right now. 

Amazon Marketing Stream distinctly stands out among Amazon Ads’ marketer resources. This functionality has proved invaluable in adapting quickly to market conditions that change by the minute during high-stakes events. The ability to respond rapidly and effectively makes Amazon Marketing Stream an essential tool for marketers aiming to optimize their advertising performance during Prime Day.

Today, we will explore how Amazon Marketing Stream can be integrated into a comprehensive full-funnel Prime Day marketing strategy. 

Amazon Marketing Stream 101

Amazon Marketing Stream is designed to enhance advertising strategies by offering real-time insights into campaign performance. This tool enables marketers to access up-to-the-minute data on sales, impressions, clicks, and more, making it possible to adjust campaigns swiftly to optimize results.

Benefits include:

• Real-time data. Provides up-to-the-minute insights into campaign performance, enabling immediate tactical adjustments.
• Comprehensive coverage. Offers detailed visibility into various metrics, including impressions, clicks, sales, and more.
• Enhanced decision-making. Facilitates quicker and more informed decisions by leveraging fresh data.
• Scalability. It supports large-scale advertising operations, making it suitable for events like Prime Day, where rapid response to market changes is critical.
• Integration capabilities: Easily integrates with existing marketing tools and platforms, enhancing the overall efficiency of digital advertising ecosystems.

While Amazon Marketing Stream supports a full-funnel Prime Day marketing approach for pre-planning months or weeks ahead, its real-time insights also enable precise targeting and timely adjustments. This adaptability is crucial during the annual event when the ability to respond quickly to consumer behavior and market trends can significantly impact the success of advertising campaigns.

By integrating Amazon Marketing Stream into your Prime Day strategy, you can ensure that your campaigns are responsive and proactive in capturing and retaining customer attention throughout the event. This agility level sets successful campaigns apart in a competitive digital marketplace.

How Amazon Marketing Stream’s insights can address common Prime Day performance questions

As discussed, at the core of Amazon Marketing Stream’s superpower is its real-time, comprehensive reporting capabilities. Here’s how those insights can be used to help in the most common tasks marketers will face for Prime Day.

How can I best manage Prime Day ad spending?

Due to heightened competition and inflated CPC rates, managing increased ad spend during Prime Day is a significant challenge. Without effective management, this can lead to overspending and reduced return on investment, ultimately hurting the campaign’s overall success. High ad spending without proper adjustments can also lead to budget exhaustion before peak traffic times, missing out on valuable sales opportunities.

Amazon Marketing Stream addresses this by providing historical insights into spending data. With this information, marketers can plan accordingly to change budgets, ensuring that their campaigns remain cost-effective and maximize ROI. This capability is essential for controlling ad spend without sacrificing campaign reach or effectiveness.

How can you ensure ad visibility amidst intense competition?

Maintaining ad visibility during the flood of Prime Day promotions is challenging — especially because those days are generally much different than other days of the year. The sheer volume of advertisements can push your ads out of prime visibility spots, making it difficult to capture consumer attention. This loss of visibility can result in lower engagement and reduced sales, undermining the effectiveness of your Prime Day strategy.

Amazon Marketing Stream helps overcome this by offering rapid data refresh rates that enable marketers to optimize ad placements for maximum visibility and engagement. This is where knowing your historical hourly performance comes into play. Prime Day typically occurs on weekdays during traditional working hours, so understanding how this impacts shopping times is crucial. By leveraging impressions as signals, you can gauge whether you’re riding the wave of consumer activity. If your impressions do not increase during the day, you may miss out on peak shopping times.

For instance, if you notice a drop in impressions around 1 pm, it could indicate a loss of momentum that needs immediate attention. Conversely, a traffic drop after 10 pm might be normal, reflecting typical consumer behavior rather than a cause for panic. By continuously monitoring performance data and adjusting bids and placements accordingly, you can ensure that your ads remain competitive and visible to potential customers throughout the event, even during peak traffic times.

How can you maximize return on ad spend (ROAS) when costs surge?

Maximizing ROAS during Prime Day is critical, especially when ad costs are surging due to increased competition. High costs without corresponding increases in sales can lead to poor financial performance and wasted advertising budget.

The performance data provided by Amazon Marketing Stream enhances decision-making, enabling marketers to adjust strategies to improve ROAS. This real-time insight helps identify the most effective ad placements and timings, allowing marketers to optimize their spending for the best possible returns. By leveraging Amazon Marketing Stream’s insights, advertisers can make data-driven decisions to improve their campaign efficiency and effectiveness.

How Skai enhances Amazon Marketing Stream for a full-funnel Prime Day

Yes, Amazon Marketing Stream has robust insights, but it’s a data stream, not a robust UI with dashboards. Access is limited to companies integrated with the Amazon Ads API, so unless you’re already a developer, you will need a partner like Skai to leverage its full potential. 

Skai provides comprehensive tools and analytics that enhance Amazon Marketing Stream’s functionality. This ensures that marketers can plan, execute, and measure their campaigns with precision and efficiency throughout the different stages of the funnel.

Top of the funnel: expanding brand awareness

At the top of the funnel, Skai’s advanced data analytics and automation tools help expand brand awareness and effectively reach new customers. For instance, Skai’s Retail Media solution empowers marketers to plan, execute, and measure digital campaigns that meet consumers when and where they shop. This includes leveraging display ads to drive awareness and create brand reach early on. 

By integrating Skai with Amazon Marketing Stream, marketers can utilize comprehensive audience insights and reach capabilities to ensure their ads reach the right people at the right time, setting a strong foundation for the subsequent stages of the funnel.

Middle of the funnel: enhancing engagement and consideration

In the middle of the funnel, Skai plus Amazon Marketing Stream supports marketers in nurturing engagement and consideration by providing in-depth insights and predictive analytics. This enables marketers to nurture leads more effectively, ensuring potential customers remain engaged with the brand. 

Skai’s predictive analytics allow marketers to anticipate consumer behavior, resulting in better-targeted ads and improved engagement. For example, during Prime Day, Skai can help optimize onsite placements with custom creatives that leverage remarketing built up by lead-in strategies, keeping potential buyers interested and moving them closer to purchase.

Bottom of the funnel: driving conversions

At the bottom of the funnel, Skai helps convert interest into sales by optimizing ad placements and budgets based on real-time performance data from Amazon Marketing Stream. This ensures marketing efforts are directed towards the most promising leads, maximizing return on ad spend (ROAS). 

Skai’s detailed insights into ad performance across multiple channels allow for a comprehensive and integrated advertising strategy crucial during high-stakes events like Prime Day. This synergy enables marketers to maximize remarketing efforts and use newly gained success to rebuild fresh audiences, effectively converting that audience into paying customers.

Integrating Skai with Amazon Marketing Stream offers a robust solution for marketers looking to optimize their Prime Day strategies. The combination of real-time data from Amazon Marketing Stream and Skai’s advanced analytics capabilities ensures a full-funnel approach that enhances brand awareness, engagement, and conversion. This synergy allows marketers to stay ahead of the competition, making informed decisions that drive success across all consumer journey stages.

It’s not too late to add Amazon Marketing Stream + Skai to your Prime Day plans

By integrating Amazon Marketing Stream with Skai, marketers can effectively optimize their Prime Day strategies with a full-funnel approach, leveraging real-time data to enhance brand awareness, engagement, and conversions. This synergy ensures that campaigns are dynamic, data-driven, and responsive to the rapidly changing Prime Day landscape — and the rest of the year, too!

Skai’s Retail Media solution empowers marketers to plan, execute, and measure digital campaigns that meet consumers when and where they shop. As part of our omnichannel platform, we connect the walled gardens and manage campaigns on 100+ retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Instacart, alongside major publishers across paid search, paid social, and apps.

For more information, schedule a brief demo to see how our Amazon Ads support can help boost your full-funnel Prime Day strategy.