Holiday eCommerce in the US is expected to grow by 15.5% and hit almost $236 billion in 2022. With Amazon being a popular choice for online shopping, much of these sales are expected to come through the platform.
As Amazon prepares to entertain holiday shoppers, you, as an Amazon seller, should figure out ways to capitalize on the holiday rush and carve some long-term customers out of it.
Customers flock to Amazon for bargain deals just before the shopping season begins. But your brand needs to be visible to these shoppers to benefit from them.
Amazon ads can help drive brand visibility within and beyond the online marketplace. This is why successful sellers crank their advertising efforts up a notch as the holiday shopping season rolls around.
In this blog, we will share tips on setting up a successful holiday Amazon Ads campaign to help your brand ride the high shopping wave this holiday season.
Why Work Harder for the Holiday Season?
This year, 35% of shoppers plan to spend more than they did last year on holiday shopping. And 57% of them will be doing it online as they shop for their favs on the internet.
Amazon may receive an appreciable portion of these online holiday shoppers.
This should be reason enough to work hard on gaining exposure to the right holiday traffic on Amazon. But if it isn’t, here are some more reasons you should consider ramping up your advertising efforts to gain increased visibility on Amazon:
The holiday Season is A Great Time to Attract New Customers
Customers wait for Amazon’s world-famous deals and discounts that the marketplace launches close to the holiday season. As a result, this season attracts a swarm of new-to-brand customers.
Building a powerful holiday ads strategy can help make your brand visible on the platform, enabling it to expand its customer base.
Increased Brand Awareness and Sales
Many people turn to Amazon to shop for their wish lists. This could be why Amazon sellers sold 11,500 products per minute during the last holiday season.
This number clearly represents the massive sales potential this season has.
Besides sales, people also use Amazon to window-shop. They may buy the actual product in-store but get the inspiration online through Amazon. And so, as the holiday traffic comes in, Amazon ads may help you reach an audience looking for ideas and drive brand awareness and consideration.
Improve Discount Effectiveness
Offering discounts is a great way to attract customers. However, they only prove fruitful for your brand if these deals and discounts attract a significant number of buyers. Otherwise, the slashed prices may only end up hurting your bottom line.
Advertising on Amazon helps improve discount effectiveness since 74% of the customers wait for the best deals before shopping. Amazon’s ad products help you reach these people with your deals to get them rolling through your conversion funnel.
Now that you are fully convinced why Amazon advertising is crucial during the holidays, we will quickly jump into the next section and talk about how you can get the most out of the Q4 selling potential through Amazon’s ad products.
Tips for Successful Holiday Advertising Campaigns
Pentel, an American stationery company, used Amazon ads to drive awareness, consideration, and sales during the holiday season. They deployed a combination of Amazon’s ad products, including sponsored and DSP display ads. As a result, the brand saw a 3x increase in ad -attributed sales and a 5x increase in ad-attributed impressions.
Your brand can experience similar success if you manage to build a smart advertising campaign. Here are a few tips to go about doing that:
Pre-plan Your Holiday Ads Strategy
People pre-plan their holiday shopping lists. Why shouldn’t you pre-plan your ads campaign, which is meant to drive your online selling goals?
You can start planning your holiday advertising campaign by identifying your goals. Take some time to pick a goal or goals since this would define the other campaign variables down the line.
Think: what would success look like for you? Are you looking for increased sales revenue? Or do you want to drive consideration for a new product?
Also, choose the products you want to advertise before starting your holiday ads campaign. You want to advertise your best-selling products or those that are more in demand to generate a better return on your ad spend.
Tap into your historical data to determine your most popular products and include them in your campaigns.
Additionally, optimize the detail pages of the products you are advertising. A click only results in sales when the product detail page convinces the prospect of the product’s value. Therefore, make sure your PDP is retail-ready before launching the campaign to ensure that you convert the clicks you pay for and don’t just exhaust your ad spend for nothing.
Use Historical Data
If you have been selling on Amazon for some time, you must have at least some data to guide your holiday advertising efforts.
Ideally, analyze your ad performance from previous events like Prime Day or last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday. See what worked well last time, do more of it, find out what didn’t, and try to optimize it.
If your Sponsored Product ads performed better than Brand ads last year, you would want to increase the budget for Sponsored Products.
Besides gathering ad performance data, you also need to collect audience data to ensure your ads align with your audience’s preferences and demands.
The holiday season has various holidays. Americans celebrate Thanksgiving in November, while the people in Australia, Canada, and the UK celebrate Boxing Day on 26th December. Determine which holiday your customer base celebrates during the holiday season and ensure your ads are thematically relevant to that.
Plan and Adjust Your Holiday Budget
The holiday season brings various high-traffic events for Amazon sellers. And while increased traffic is always a good sign, it can exhaust your ad budget sooner.
When more people come across your ads, you will inevitably (and hopefully) get more clicks. And when you get more clicks, your ad spend will deplete quicker.
Once your ad budget is spent, your ads will stop running. This will lead to missed opportunities. And we don’t want that.
This is why we recommend increasing your advertising budget for the holiday season. You can get an idea of your ad budget from your historical data and current goals. If X budget was spent to drive Y conversions last year on Cyber Monday, and your goal is to generate 2Y conversions this time, the budget should be 2X, after accounting for the changes in fees, prices, and inflation, of course.
Also, remember that the holiday season is a competitive time for advertisers. Everyone is bidding on high-visibility ad spaces on Amazon. So, you may experience higher average costs per click. This would also require an expanded budget to ensure you can bid effectively, win exposure, and avoid exhausting your ad budget halfway through the campaign.
Adjust Your Campaign with Time
Customers’ shopping intent and preferences may vary throughout the shopping season. Early on, they may be browsing Amazon for brands they would like to shop with when the deals come in, while near the end of the holiday season, consumers might be looking for good quality products that can be delivered quickly as they wrap up their last-minute shopping.
Therefore, adjust your campaigns accordingly. Analyze your campaign metrics daily and see which ads are performing best. Increase the budget for your best-performing ads and products to make sure your ad spend goes where it can generate the most revenue.
Also, keep a check on your inventory levels. Stock may run out fast during the peak shopping season, resulting in Amazon pausing your ad campaigns and you missing key targeting opportunities. So, make sure your inventory is well-stocked before running ads for any product.
Rethink Your Keyword Strategy
Keywords play an important role in PPC campaigns. And while you may have a well-built keyword portfolio, consider doing fresh keyword research for holiday-themed keywords.
Most holiday shoppers will be searching for keywords like “holiday sweaters for men.”
So, if you sell sweaters and target keywords like “sweaters for men,” you may have to find more holiday-themed keywords and include them in your ad strategy to reach holiday shoppers.
Check out the difference in the search results for the two key phrases.
Final Words
The holiday season is one of the best times for businesses looking to drive brand awareness and grow their sales. Investing in the right Amazon ads can help you leverage the platform’s increased seasonal selling potential and improve your bottom line.
However, simply running ad campaigns during the holiday season won’t suffice. You will need highly-optimized, sharply-targeted, and closely-tracked campaigns to capitalize on the benefits of this season.
Our eCommerce strategists at Accrue help brands build tailored Amazon advertising campaigns, helping them reach the right audience and grow on the platform. Feel free to reach out to us for a consultation on holiday advertising, marketplace growth, and more.