How to Prepare for Amazon Cyber Monday and Black Friday Sales
The Amazon Cyber Monday and Black Friday sales week is just around the corner.
It’s no secret that this marks one of the most significant holiday seasons, representing a crucial time for online retailers.
Last year, Amazon shattered records with its biggest-ever holiday shopping weekend, and the momentum is expected to surge even further this year.
Thus, if you haven’t planned your Amazon Ads strategy for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday yet, you’re on the brink of missing out on a golden opportunity
In this blog post, we will share 8 quick tips on how to get the most out of this holiday shopping season from your Amazon PPC campaigns.
Before BFCM Strategies
1. Pick Your Star Products
Selecting your star products wisely is one of the key strategies for a successful tentpole event. These are the items you’ll want to showcase and promote heavily during the event. Consider bestsellers, products with high profit margins, or items you need to clear out of stock.
Focus on products that have consistently performed well and received positive customer feedback, as they are more likely to attract attention and drive sales during BFCM event.
2. Schedule Competitive Deals and Discounts
Event like Black Friday Cyber Monday is all about amazing deals for shoppers, and you want to make sure yours stand out! Here are some popular options to consider scheduling beforehand:
Prime Exclusive Discounts
These are discounts only Prime members can enjoy on Amazon. They’re automatically applied at checkout, making it super easy for Prime shoppers to save.
You can set them up through your Seller Central account under “Advertising” -> “Prime Exclusive Discount.”
Coupon Deal
If a product isn’t eligible for a Prime Exclusive discount, consider offering a special coupon. Coupons can give a percentage or flat dollar amount off the regular price, making your product more attractive to budget-conscious shoppers hunting for deals.
Lightning Deals
These are exciting flash sales where you offer a limited amount of your product at a discounted price for a short time (usually 4-12 hours). They’re a great way to create a buzz and clear out inventory. Here’s a smart tip: Schedule your Lightning Deals for the week after Prime Day. This helps capture the interest of shoppers who are still in buying mode after the main event. Remember, you can choose a timeframe for your Lightning Deal, but Amazon will have the final say on the exact day and time it runs.
3. Review Past Tentpole Events
Reflect on past Prime Days and Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales to understand ad spending, successful product categories, and effective campaign types. Use these insights to guide this year’s advertising and retail strategy.
TIP: If you have access to Amazon Marketing Cloud, explore audience-level insights to identify the types of audiences that purchased from your brand last year. Find out which segments responded well to discounts, and use these insights to create targeted audience segments for this year’s ad campaigns.
4. Build a Winning Lead-In Advertising Strategy
Amazon is putting the spotlight on the lead-up to BFCM with their extended early deal period. This provides brands a valuable opportunity to test, optimize, and capitalize on increased shopper interest. By experimenting with spend adjustments during this time, you can uncover incremental opportunities to boost impressions, engage early bird shoppers, and improve your algorithmic relevance for the core 5-day event.
Apart from scaling your existing campaigns, here are a few advanced tips to craft a more effective advertising strategy for the season.
(1.) Clean Up Your Amazon PPC Account
Amazon PPC campaigns require regular monitoring and optimization. If you haven’t manually audited your account for a while, you may notice the accumulation of a significant number of ‘undeliverable’ and ‘low performing’ targets and search terms over time.
Before any major sales events such as Prime Day or Black Friday, it’s always recommended to conduct a comprehensive account audit to address various hygiene issues and take appropriate measures to resolve them.
So, what do we mean by ‘cleaning up’?
Pause all the targets that have received limited impressions in the last 30 days and have bids that are already too high.
Negate all irrelevant search terms that have generated significant clicks but haven’t resulted in any orders in the past 30 days.
Pause targets with an ACOS 2–3 times higher than your target ACOS or with notably low conversion rates and high ACOS.
Pause campaigns that haven’t performed well in the last 30 days (with significantly high ACOS or a low conversion rate).
Since CPCs are considerably higher these days, you need to ensure you’re spending on the right keywords and targets. This one-time exercise before the event will help you ensure that your ad spends are directed toward targets that work well for your account and not on underperforming ones.
(2.) Leverage Amazon DSP’s In-Market and Lifestyle Audiences
If you’re using Amazon DSP, take advantage of In-Market and Lifestyle audiences to capture shopper intent.
These pre-built audience segments target shoppers actively browsing relevant categories (“in the aisle”) or those with interests aligning with your product. Engaging these audiences before BFCM helps you build awareness and prime potential buyers for conversion during the event.
(3.) Dominate Your Aisle with Sponsored and Display Ads
As BFCM approaches, many shoppers are in the comparison phase, evaluating brands and products to make purchase decisions. Stand out by using contextual targeting and competitor conquesting tactics with Sponsored and Display Ads. For example:
- Contextual Targeting: Use Amazon DSP to show ads tailored to the content shoppers are viewing.
- Competitor Targeting: Run category-targeted Sponsored Ads to appear on competitor product detail pages and boost visibility where potential customers are browsing.
The key is to maintain consistent and compelling ad placements to ensure your brand stays top-of-mind.
(4.) Create Campaigns with Gifting-Focused Keywords
BFCM is unique from other shopping events, like Prime Day, as it often revolves around gifting. If your product aligns well with the gifting market, here’s what you can do:
- Create Virtual Bundles: Offer bundles with attractive discounts to entice buyers seeking thoughtful gifts.
- Target Gifting Keywords: Launch campaigns centered around holiday-specific keywords like “gifts for him,” “gifts for her,” or “holiday gift ideas.” This ensures you capture traffic from shoppers actively looking for presents.
5. Create a Dedicated Amazon Store Page
To make it easier for potential shoppers to browse and discover all your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals and discounts, create a dedicated subpage in your Amazon store and list all products with active deals.
Then, utilize Amazon Store-linked Sponsored Brands Ads to promote your deal ASINs and direct shoppers to the deals-specific subpage on your store.
Furthermore, if you’re running off-Amazon ads, driving traffic to the deal-specific page can increase the likelihood of conversion from that traffic.
During BFCM Strategies
6. Increase Bids to Be Competitive
Every brand wants to get the highest possible visibility and rank during events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday to capitalize on the increased traffic.
What does this mean for you?
An increase in CPC.
Therefore, it is advisable to raise the bids by 25% to 50% throughout the event days to stay competitive. You can also consider increasing bids by different percentages for different targets based on their past performances.
7. Retargeting: A Must-Have in Your BFCM Strategy
By now, you’ve invested heavily in building consideration through aggressive ads, in-market and lifestyle audience targeting, and more. But let’s face it—many shoppers who saw your ads before BFCM didn’t make a purchase because they were waiting for the deals to kick in.
When those shoppers return to Amazon on Black Friday, they’ll be overwhelmed with an ocean of discounts and deals. To stand out in this crowded marketplace, it’s crucial to have a robust retargeting strategy that keeps your brand top of mind.
How to Retarget Effectively During BFCM:
- Use Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP Ads: Retarget shoppers who engaged with your ads before the event using creative that prominently features your brand logo, enticing offers, and compelling visuals. This nudge can push them toward conversion.
- Create Custom Messaging: Highlight your deals and remind them why they considered your product in the first place. Use urgency-driven messaging like “Limited Time Offer” or “Don’t Miss Out!”
8. Don’t Forget Abandoned Cart Shoppers
Shoppers who added your products to their cart but didn’t complete the purchase are a goldmine of opportunity during BFCM. These customers are likely waiting for better deals, and with the right approach, you can nudge them to finalize their purchase.
Retarget Abandoned Cart Shoppers with:
Amazon Marketing Cloud and DSP: Target these high-intent shoppers with reminders of the discounts they’re about to miss. Reinforce your value proposition to encourage them to return and checkout.
Sponsored Ads and Amazon Marketing Cloud
- Sponsored Display: Use these AMC audience segments to directly in your SD campaigns to target cart abandoners and product page viewers. Increase your bids for these segments to capture their attention when they’re most likely to buy.
- Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands: You can also target these custom audience segments in your SP and SB campaign by increasing your bids for specific audience segments.
Don’t Know Where to Start?
If you don’t have access to Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) or need help targeting Cart Abandoner, new to brand shoppers, brand store page viewers and other audience segment in your Sponsored Ads campaign, reach out to the Adbrew AMC team for free assistance.
8. Leverage Dayparting & Amazon Marketing Stream
Do you have access to Amazon Marketing Stream data for your brand? If so, it’s time to put it to work. By analyzing past hourly ad traffic and conversion trends, you can identify key patterns and optimize your ad spend for maximum efficiency during BFCM. Here’s how:
1. Analyze Hourly Trends
Review your data from the past year to pinpoint:
- Peak Traffic Hours: When shoppers are most active in your category.
- High Conversion Hours: The times when shoppers are more likely to complete a purchase.
- Competitive Hours: Periods with the highest cost-per-click (CPC), which could indicate intense competition.
This analysis will give you a clear picture of when your ads are most likely to deliver the best results.
2. Implement a Dayparting Strategy
Once you’ve gathered these insights, craft a dayparting schedule tailored to your category’s trends:
- Increase Bids and Budgets During High-Converting Hours: Focus your resources where they’ll have the most impact, maximizing your ROI.
- Pull Back During Low-Conversion or High-CPC Periods: Save budget by avoiding times when competition is high, but conversions are low.
3. Monitor and Adjust in Real-Time
BFCM is a dynamic shopping period, and trends can shift. Use Amazon’s Marketing Stream hourly to monitor performance and make on-the-fly adjustments to your dayparting strategy.
9. Increase Budget To Accommodate Increase in Traffic
Increased traffic combined with a higher CPC means you will need a higher campaign budget to keep your campaign running throughout the day.
The last thing you would want during this sales event is to go out of budget and lose the brand’s visibility during the biggest days of the year.
Therefore, consistently monitor your campaign’s daily budget usage of event days, especially for well-performing campaigns.
We recommend proactively increasing the budget by at least 40-50% in advance for the sales period. Additionally, be adaptable with the budget on the sales event day; if performance is strong and order numbers are increasing by the hour, allocate more budget to the campaign.
10. Protect your Brand
Solid brand defensive campaigns should back your overall marketing strategy. The competition will be fierce during the sale event, which means your competitors will be aggressive on your branded keywords and ASINs.
If you aren’t aggressively defending your branded search terms and product pages, you might see your market share decline. Therefore, it’s recommended to go aggressive on branded terms and products to protect your brand and make it difficult for your competitors to steal your customers.
Post BFCM Strategies
11. Analyze BFCM Performance
After BFCM, dive into your performance data to assess what worked well and where there’s room for improvement. Identify successful deals, popular products, and any campaign elements that could be refined for next year’s event. This analysis is essential to help you fine-tune your strategies and boost results for future sales periods.
12. Extend Discounts Beyond BFCM
Keep the BFCM momentum going by offering post-event discounts. This encourages additional purchases from shoppers who may have missed out during BFCM and helps you sustain engagement as the holiday season continues. Extending deals can also maximize the buzz generated from the event.
13. Optimize Your Ad Campaigns Post-BFCM
After BFCM, you may notice a dip in Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) as the high conversion rates taper off. To adapt, scale back on aggressive ads that may not perform as strongly post-event. Focus on strategies that drove success during BFCM and reduce spending on ads that aren’t yielding a good return. By reallocating budget strategically, you can maintain efficient ad performance as the shopping season winds down.
Final Thought
As Amazon sellers gear up for the excitement of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, these events unfold as incredible opportunities to elevate sales. With the countdown to the big day ticking away, there’s still ample time to prepare effectively. We hope that the tips shared in this blog post will prove invaluable in ensuring you’re well-equipped for this upcoming big shopping event.
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