GET

PRIMED
FOR
PRIME
DAY
Ten Tips from Kenshoo Ecommerce
Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com 1
Contents
Introduction 2
About Kenshoo 3
The three keys to maximizing Prime Day season 4
The Amazon success philosophy: holistic retail 5
Prime Day Tip #1: Do not break the new rules of Amazon Advertising 5
Prime Day Tip #2: Align your entire business to the opportunity 6
Prime Day Tip #3: The center of a holistic Amazon approach is search 7
Market intelligence will be the difference on Prime Day 8
Prime Day Tip #4: The smartest marketers will win 8
Prime Day Tip #5: Figure out what data you need and go get it 9
Prime Day Tip #6: The right measurement data to guide the way 10
Prime Day will fall flat without the right management 12
strategy and foundation
Prime Day Tip #7: Be agile, be ready, and stay diligent 12
Prime Day Tip #8: A strong technical foundation to 13
help execute your Prime Day strategy
Prime Day Tip #9: Go all out for Prime Day: cross-channel for the win 14
Prime Day Tip #10: Best practices with Kenshoo Ecommerce 15
Kenshoo Ecommerce: Enterprise-level management 16
for Prime Day—and beyond

Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com 1

Introduction
The first Prime Day in 2015 was held in honor of Amazon’s twentieth birthday but has gone on to become a
retail event so large that it now rivals the end-of-the-year holiday shopping season. In 2018, Amazon sold 100
million products on Prime Day—and that was eclipsed last year as 2019 surpassed even the previous year’s
Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined with consumers worldwide purchasing more than 175 million items,
from devices to groceries and more, throughout the event.

“We want to thank Prime members all around the world,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO last year. “Members
purchased millions of Alexa-enabled devices, received tens of millions of dollars in savings by shopping from Whole
Foods Market and bought more than $2 billion of products from independent small and medium-sized businesses.
Huge thank you to Amazonians everywhere who made this day possible for customers.”

Needless to say—for a variety of reasons—2020’s Prime Day is going to be the biggest one yet.

In March, COVID-19 pushed consumers online as they avoided going into stores and even those that did quickly
discovered most essential items were quickly out-of-stock—which drove even more online purchases. Although
the ecommerce revolution started more than two decades ago, 2020 will forever represent a fast-forward of
this shift. As the pandemic pushes this year’s Prime Day into Q4, this is bound to be even more important to
ecommerce advertisers than anyone could have even imagined.

This year, it will be more critical than ever for brands looking to cash in on Prime Day to be savvy and smart.
Consider the challenging market forces coming together for this year’s event:

• The meteoric growth in ecommerce due to the pandemic

• Prime Day now part of the end-of-the-year holiday shopping season
• Mature Amazon marketers with multiple years of experience under their belt
• Retail brands desperate to save 2020 with a big Q4

As a leading Amazon API integrator with thirteen years as an enterprise-level paid search and social advertising
platform, Kenshoo is uniquely positioned to help marketers understand this multifaceted marketplace.

Are you ready to get primed for Prime Day 2020?

Read on to learn how you can take your Amazon advertising campaigns to the next level.

Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com 2

About Kenshoo
Kenshoo is the leading marketing technology platform for brands looking to plan, activate and measure
growth strategies across the most-engaging digital channels. Kenshoo offers the only marketing solution
that combines data-driven insights and best-of-breed optimization to help make informed decisions,
scale and measure performance across Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Walmart, Apple Search
Ads, Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram, Verizon Media, Yandex, Yahoo Japan, and Baidu. Kenshoo’s machine-
learning algorithms and artificial intelligence leverage market signals and enable companies to predict and
keep pace with the omnichannel customer journey. Kenshoo has 27 international locations and backing
by Sequoia Capital, Arts Alliance, Tenaya Capital, and Bain Capital Ventures. Please visit Kenshoo.com for
more information.

Kenshoo brand and product names are trademarks of Kenshoo Ltd. Other company and brand names
may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com 3

The three keys to
marketers should focus on three key areas:
maximizing Prime season
For marketers, this Prime Day will be more
competitive than ever. Amazon Advertising—which
marketers invested nearly $14 billion in US ad
revenues in 2019—almost 8% of the US digital ad
market—has become a fully-realized advertising
channel and will certainly be in full force during the
event. On top of that, Google and Facebook now
allow their advertising to drive to Amazon pages
which enables even more dollars to stimulate
purchases on the giant online marketplace.
In order to make Prime Day/Season 2020 successful,
1. A
 holistic approach to Amazon which follows
the new rules of Amazon, aligns your entire
organization to the opportunity, and prioritizes a
focus on paid & organic search visibility to drive
sales
2. A
 foundation of the right retail analytics with
solid insights to drive data-driven marketing and
measurement for performance optimization
3. A
 best-in-class management practice to make
sure the strategy is executed flawlessly

Outside of being Amazon’s biggest annual retail

promotion, we know that Prime “Day” generally
extends way beyond the official two-day event. The Read on for tips that follow this
weeks leading up to—as well as the weeks that three-pronged attack
follow—generally see a huge spike in consumer
spending turning Prime Day into Prime Season.

Week of Prime Day

Impressions
Clicks
Spend USD

-6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5 +6

Weeks from Prime Day

Source: Get Primed for Prime Day (Kenshoo, 2019)

Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com 4

The Amazon success
philosophy: holistic retail
Prime Day is an opportunity to sell goods, but
an even bigger opportunity to create customers.
By approaching the Amazon Advertising channel
holistically—meaning to manage every aspect of it in
which all pieces are interconnected and impact each
other—you can maximize the results for your brand.
As we stated in our most popular report on Amazon
to date, To Win At Amazon Advertising, You Must
Think Like Amazon:
“Modern advertising practices need to be reevaluated
to work within Amazon’s unique marketplace. ROI
models of digital marketing are largely based on
short-term, click-to-conversion tracking which can be
limiting. Amazon is a place to build your brand, create
customer loyalty, offer detailed product information,
and sell your goods. This means you have to keep
products in stock, have great reviews, generate
an increasing velocity of product page views, etc.
Measurement moves beyond classic marketing metrics
to include operations and bridging the gaps between
retailers, channels and tactics.”
Advertisers who approach Amazon like they would
Google or Facebook will find limited success. It’s not
just about driving traffic to Amazon product detail
pages (PDPs). The entire enterprise must be involved
Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com
to ensure that this sales channel runs smoothly.
Even if a fraction of your brand’s sales is online, it
must be absolutely understood that consumers now
use Amazon to research product purchases—which
means even offline sales will suffer if you don’t focus
on how shoppers now shop.
Prime Day Tip #1: Do not break
the new rules of Amazon
Advertising
A major consideration for marketers looking
to master Prime Day is how important it is to
understand the rules of Amazon Advertising. An army
of algorithms enforces Amazon’s singular focus to
ensure the best customer experience is maintained
by its advertisers. This makes it a bit trickier to master
than other ad channels as it requires more than just
the marketing team—it requires an organizational
alignment that many brands aren’t set up to handle.
It is absolutely essential that nothing interferes
with your Prime Day program. If you don’t play by
Amazon’s important rules, you may experience issues
and you don’t want your ads to have any problems
during this important retail event.
Keep Amazon happy by keeping its customers
happy
Managing Amazon as a holistic channel can be
challenging for marketers who are used to simply
targeting and bidding on digital ads. Amazon knows
that it will stay at the top forever if it can serve up the
best online shopping experience. In a chaotic time
such as Prime Day—especially in 2020 given the
recent events—the marketers who can best navigate
around these rules will see the positive impact in their
advertising results. Keep customer satisfaction high with
smooth operations (getting products shipped fast and
without errors), plenty of options (more features and
packaging choices), and encourage shoppers to share
positive feedback on your product pages to signal to
Amazon that you’re doing right by their customers.
5
Never, ever (ever!) go out of stock
Amazon knows that one of the most annoying
aspects of online shopping is spending time
figuring out exactly what product to buy and then
not being able to order it because it’s out of stock.
Its algorithms are diligently policing in this area
to ensure its customers have the very best online
shopping experience which is why you don’t see
this problem very often on Amazon.com. Going out
of stock can potentially get your ads delisted by
Amazon—and with the massive numbers of products
being sold on Prime Day—you must be ready from an
organizational standpoint to handle the volume.
Ensure profitability for Amazon even with
your low-cost Prime Day deals
Profitability for the publisher is an aspect of Amazon
Advertising that marketers don’t have to worry about
with any other channel. It’s all interconnected. There
are incentives baked into the system for products that
maintain a high profit for Amazon and disincentives
that can negatively impact advertising results for
products that don’t hit the profit-margins desired.
Remember, Amazon’s advertising program is primarily
set up to stimulate product sales within the online
store, not as just pure advertising revenue. An example
of this is Amazon’s algorithms which constantly scour
the internet to compare prices on your products. If
they find your products cheaper somewhere else, they
may automatically drop the price on Amazon.com
to match. This could lower Amazon’s profit on those
products which can negatively impact where your ads
appear in search results.
Prime Day Tip #2: Align
your entire business to the
opportunity
Amazon Advertising is unique because factors outside
of marketing play a big role in successfully capturing
and converting traffic during Prime Day. Collaborating
with other team members to ensure that there are
strategies in place to support your advertising efforts
Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com
is crucial for standing out in the sea of deals during
Prime Day. This is not usually a role that marketers
have had to play, but these factors cannot be
decoupled from Amazon Advertising if you hope to get
the best results possible.
Managing this channel holistically means that you
have to match up your entire business and lead
your other teams in what is required to win. Prime
Day is just too big of an event not to bring your
“A-game.”
Work with your sales team to win the buy box
Winning the buy box is a sure-fire strategy to win
sales during Prime Day. But it’s not so cut and dry
to attain. First of all, your prices must be extremely
competitive. Work with your sales team to clean up
authorized and unauthorized reseller pricing in the
lead-up phase to Prime Day. Additionally, Sponsored
Products cannot be featured in ad placements unless
you are winning the buy box. And if you’re running
Sponsored Brands, and losing the buy box for your
advertised products, other sellers who are winning
the buy box can swipe sales from traffic sent to your
product detail pages. Win the buy box and you can
win Prime Day.
Work with your product team to get your
content in good shape
Well-rounded content is always impactful for
converting shoppers, but as the competition to
win conversions is high during this time, content
needs to be in top shape so work with your Product
team closely in preparation. Consider the seasonal
implications of Prime Day in Q4 by selecting
seasonally relevant ASINs and optimizing for early
gift shopping if applicable. Make sure high volume
keywords are infused through the listing to match
up with any prominent keywords within your titles,
images, videos, bullets, product descriptions, and
A+ content. Good content makes your page look
legitimate and trustworthy. Remember, a shopper
6
cannot physically experience your product prior
to making an online purchase so enhancing their
experience utilizing the product detail pages is key
to winning over customers.
Work with your operations team to be ready
to handle the volume
As mentioned earlier, staying in-stock is absolutely
essential. Not only will ads that are sent to out-of-stock
items waste the budget and drive shoppers to your
competitors, but your ads could be potentially delisted
even when you are back in-stock if you break Amazon’s
rule too often. For Prime Day, you need to make sure
that the big deals you promote will be able to be
fulfilled. This means checking with your Operations
team in the weeks leading up to the event to coordinate
promotions. Even if there’s a certain product that
you really want to get fully behind this Prime Day
with Amazon Advertising, if there’s any chance your
Operations team won’t be able to keep up, you may
want to rethink where and how you apply budgets. Be
ready to pause those ads in case of stock issues.
Prime Day Tip #3: The center of
a holistic Amazon approach is
search
During the Prime Day season, consumers will be looking
for deals. While the deal pages will be an important
avenue for traffic to your promotions, mastering
visibility on the Amazon search results pages during the
event will also be an important aspect to your success.
Showcase your best Prime Day deals with aggressive
bids for terms most prominently searched on for
those products. During Prime Day, bids on those
terms are going to spike—just like they do in Q4 for
SEM—so you need to watch them closely so that
rivals don’t bid up and take away potential sales.
Holistic search: manage organic + paid ads
For the last twenty years, search engine marketers
have embraced the holistic approach of search
Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com
engine optimization (to increase their organic search
rankings) and paid search (to fill the gaps where
organic rankings are weak). The same holds true
for Amazon. Marketers must monitor their organic
search rankings on Amazon’s product search engine
and understand where to strategically supplement
paid traffic for a holistic search program. This
couldn’t be more vital during Prime Day’s high
conversion rates where every search is a potential
sale. Don’t pay for traffic when you don’t need it and
vice-versa.
Be defensive with your brand terms
Remember, competitors can buy your brand and
product keywords. If a consumer is looking for
deals associated with your brand but only sees your
competitors’ products, the lost sales could be huge.
Don’t assume that your competitors are going to keep
doing what they’ve been doing in the months leading
up to Prime Day. They might be preparing to go big
and own your terms for the event. It’s important to
keep a critical eye on your brand rankings at this time.
Don’t just look for it—expect it—and be prepared to
react with your own chess move.
Bid on keywords based on the new metrics of
Amazon
While search engine advertising is generally
optimized with click-to-value metrics (such as CPA),
there are some differences with Amazon Advertising
that you need to consider. The lifetime value of
a customer may mean you should be willing to
spend more upfront to convert those customers
on Prime Day than you may normally pay, because
it could be worth it in the long run. The Sponsored
Brands ad format offers the new-to-brand metric
where marketers can see if a customer has never
purchased—or at least not recently purchased—from
them before. In today’s competitive market, “buying”
customers on Prime Day will mean more sales
throughout the year that could eclipse your Prime
Day revenue.
7
Market intelligence will be
the difference on Prime Day
Already on a meteoric trajectory before the
pandemic, the ecommerce advertising space is
growing faster than any other marketing channel.
For brands, the opportunity is there.
The budget is primed.
But the data is not.
In traditional retail, the role of data is decades ahead
of where it is for ecommerce. Established data
powerhouses deliver terabytes of information to
retail analysts to number crunch and extract the
necessary insights to power product development,
market strategy, and operations. And for digital
marketers who have been empowered with the rich
data available in Search and Social advertising, what
Amazon Advertising offers marketers is surprisingly
sparse. This may be because the channel is simply
still a bit nascent or that unlike Google and Facebook,
Amazon’s ad sales are just a fraction—not the
majority—of its revenue.
This Prime Day, the marketers who are able to rely on
a data practice to fuel data-driven decision making
will have a leg up on the competition.
Prime Day Tip #4: The smartest
marketers will win
The data gap in ecommerce advertising is real.
Marketing teams are still learning how to best
approach this channel as they go, testing theories,
and validating hunches by cobbling together retail
analytics from different sources. Sometimes, it’s hard
to even know what questions to ask, let alone find
the answer. Where are the connections? By pulling
here, does it affect things over there? What impacts
ad pricing and performance? How can an ecommerce
marketer best drive ROI?
Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com
Having the right data at your fingertips is crucial
this Prime Day to manage your Amazon Advertising
programs effectively.
Monitoring the “digital shelf”
Understanding the “digital shelf” for your most
important products and product categories is
becoming an important part of a full retail analytics
foundation for ecommerce advertisers. There are
data vendors who can aggregate the publicly available
Amazon product data for you and your competitors
so that you can gain visibility on what’s happening in
your “virtual aisle” of the store. This is important intel
for your team in the days and weeks leading up to
Prime Day so that you can maneuver appropriately—
finding product gaps for your catalog to exploit while
also deciding how much offense you need to play
where there’s oversaturation with competitors.
Keyword intelligence to know where you
stand in the search results
Mastering your visibility on Amazon search results
pages is going to be key this Prime Day, and you can’t
do that unless you have the retail analytics in place to
track your and your competitors’ keywords. Brands
will be going for the jugular on Prime Day, trying to
conquest your brand keywords and bidding for the
moon on key category terms. Ensure you have your
Share-of-Voice monitoring set up for priority keywords
to see which brands are conquesting you or being
aggressive in the non-branded space to appropriately
set your own bids to own the search results pages.
The right sales data for clarity into what’s
really working
TACoS is more than a delicious food. The Total Average
Cost of Sales helps you understand the effect your ads
have on the total sales picture, not just the ad-driven
sales, and is a key metric to monitor. When analyzing
performance, trend out your advertising spend at
the ASIN level to total sales to see how much you’re
investing compared to the total share and if you’re
8
increased spend is increasing total sales at the same
rate. A good rule of thumb is that for every ASIN, you
should increase your investment at not just what your
ad clicks are bringing, but at what your organic + ad
traffic is generating.
Prime Day Tip #5: Figure out what
data you need and go get it
Beefing up your data game to make the best data-
driven decisions during Prime Day is what could make
the difference this year. If you don’t have the data
readily available, you may need to find ways to get it.
Once you figure out the gaps in your dataset, you
need to be very proactive in filling those holes before
Prime Day. The data is out there, you just need to
prioritize this part of your practice in order to get into
place so you can use it during the big event.
Unify your data across the organization
Every company has a lot of data that could be
useful for marketers, but it just tends to be siloed
by function. For example, Product knows a lot
about customers in order to develop the right
product lines, features, and assortment varieties.
Sales and Operations know a lot about what’s
happening at online retailers and offline programs.

SPINMASTER CASE STUDY.

THE POWER OF RETAIL ANALYTICS.
Kenshoo Ecommerce client Spin Master is a leading global children’s entertainment company with innovative
toy lines, entertainment properties, and digital games and toys. Its brands include Gund, Etch A Sketch, PAW
Patrol, and more. As COVID sent the world into lockdown in March 2020, and Amazon delayed shipping on
non-essential items, the Kenshoo team in partnership with Spin Master experienced a dip in its Amazon
Advertising conversion rates compared to the previous week. They needed to find a way of shifting advertising
spend to maintain conversion rates on available items.

The assumption was that the products impacted by the inflated estimated shipping times were dragging down
performance. This may have likely been caused when consumers clicked those ads but didn’t order once they
landed on the Amazon product pages because they saw that it would take a while to receive their items.

The team wanted to find a way of preventing spending on products with extended shipping times in order to
turn the conversion rate around, but unfortunately, the data on which products were affected wasn’t available
from Amazon. They had to turn to another source.

Working with ecommerce intelligence partner, DataWeave, the Kenshoo team developed a process to
automatically track the estimated shipping times for Spin Master’s catalog of products by aggregating publicly
available data from Amazon.com. This solution checks up-to-date shipping timelines on every product the
brand sells on Amazon continuously throughout the week.

Armed with this valuable data, the marketing team diverted the Amazon Advertising budget to only drive traffic
to products estimated to arrive within a seven-day delivery window. Anything beyond seven days was paused.

The team’s hypothesis paid off and in the week following the new strategy, conversion rates rose sharply again.
Shipping times do correlate to ecommerce advertising success.

Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com

9
And, of course, your different Marketing channels,
Prime Day Tip #6: The right
agencies, and tech partners have a treasure trove
measurement data to guide
of advertising data which can offer a lot of insight
the way
into consumer preferences. But it’s just not all
A strong measurement foundation is key to any
together. Connecting the dots between all of these
data-driven marketing practice—on Prime Day or any
data sources through cross-functional coordination
other time of the year. Regardless of what may have
is important. The challenge is in bringing it all
been learned through experience or best practices
together so that the marketing team can benefit
that have always worked before, measurement is the
from the combined intelligence investments of the
ultimate true north for every marketers’ performance
organization.
optimization compass.

Third-party data vendors can fill the gaps

Retail analytics vendors—such as Kenshoo
partners Profitero and DataWeave—are dedicated
commerce data vendors that can take your retail
analytics practice into the stratosphere. From
aggregating the publicly available product data
off of Amazon to compare pricing or tracking
keyword share-of-voice on Amazon search results
pages, the types of data you can get from these
companies can help give you a 360-degree view of
your category. The data is constantly shifting—even
throughout the day—so you need a partner who
understands the nuances and subtleties of how to
both gather this data and also how to best display
One thing that will always be true about Prime Day is
it so that your marketing team can find the insights
that there will be surprises to even the most veteran
they need to navigate through the chaos of Prime
ecommerce advertisers. KPIs that most Amazon
Day (and beyond).
marketers can rattle off the top of their heads may
be upended and completely different during these
Leverage your third-party Amazon platform
intense weeks. Unlike the rest of the year when you
analytics
can look out from your ship and navigate through the
Platforms like Kenshoo Ecommerce can help
waters, treat Prime Day like being in a submarine and
marketers better understand what’s going on with
your measurement practice is the periscope. Trust
their Amazon Advertising investment. Through
the numbers and stay agile so you can make quick
detailed analytics and reporting, marketers
decisions before the opportunity fades.
can derive advanced insights to help optimize
performance across their investment. That could
Check last year’s Prime Day results
be as simple as an integrated connection to output
Month-over-month benchmarks will be less
your Amazon Advertising data into your preferred
helpful for you during Prime Season than they are
analytics tool or deeper through partnerships
throughout the year. What’s better is for you and
Kenshoo has developed to offer deep retail analytics
your team to do a deep dive on last year’s Prime Day
side-by-side with advertising campaign data.
numbers which could be a stronger indicator for

Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com 10

what’s going to happen during this year’s event than
what happened even last week. Where did things
spike that you weren’t expecting? Where were things
slower than anticipated? Learn from your mistakes
last Prime Day to potentially identify places you might
have gaps this year.

Begin learning from the first day of Prime

season
In the weeks leading up to the actual 48 hours of
Prime Day, there will be more consumer activity than
normal as shoppers look to window shop and zero
in on exactly the kinds of things they hope to come
back and score with a deal. However, they may find
what they’re looking for on those initial passes and
pull the trigger if your pricing seems competitive
enough not to wait and not risk potentially going
out of stock. That’s what has happened every year
during the event, but it’s going to be even more at
play this year because of how close it is to the end
of the year holiday shopping season. Make sure
that you’re watching your metrics closely and your
Amazon Advertising performance with a critical eye
to see if you can gain any insights into what is and
isn’t working. If a series of ads that normally drive
great traffic to your product pages begin to fail, swap
them out and test. If conversion rates begin to spike
unexpectedly on a certain product line, follow the
money and boost those ASINs.

You’ll need to look beyond Prime Day signals

As we know, this year is going to be different because
of the effect of COVID-19 and the proximity to the
end-of-the-year holiday shopping season. You will
absolutely have to merge your Q4 retail strategy with
your Prime Day approach—there’s no getting around
it. What products are trending this year and will be
big holiday gifts? Check your growing sales leading
up to Prime Day to make last-minute adjustments to
capture whatever is getting hot. Keep an eye on your
competitors’ deals to see what they’re betting on—
maybe they know something that you don’t.

Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com 11

Prime Day will fall You may find that an entire set of ads need to
be rewritten or that a competitor that has never
flat without the right threatened your business before is looking to go big
management strategy and this year and you will have to be savvy to invest in the
foundation right spots to combat that threat. If you don’t have
the infrastructure in place before the event starts,
Understanding Amazon’s rules and playing by them
you’ll leave yourself open to being leapfrogged by
are important. And arming your team with the data
rivals that may not have better products or a better
they need for data-driven marketing in a channel still
approach than you, but are simply better at “playing
lacking the data it needs is also a necessary step. But,
the game” during crunch time.
ultimately, having the right strategy and technical
foundation to execute that approach is key to making
Prime Day 2020 is going to be more important for
it all work.
brands this year than ever before. Don’t lose out
simply because you can’t execute fast enough.
The right strategy will make all of the difference in
the world but you could still miss the mark unless
you and your team can manage all of the chaos
Prime Day Tip #7: Be agile, be
appropriately. Your competitors will be reacting and
ready, and stay diligent
The amazing opportunity of Prime Day is that it is
increasing bids. They will try to steal your thunder
an intense period of shopper activity that can drive
with Sponsored Brand ads on your top keywords. You
tremendous results to your bottom line.
will have to roll with the punches early and often and
that means having an agile campaign management
The not-so-great thing about Prime Day is that it
process that can identify issues quickly and respond
will be over before you know it. If you blink, you
even quicker.
could miss something important and lose out on
critical sales.

Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com 12

Have everything done that you can before
the event
There’s going to be so much that you and your team
will have to do to react in real-time to the chaos of
Prime Day that you need to get everything done
weeks before the event even starts. Have all of your
campaigns loaded and on pause ready to go. Get
your report templates in place with a cadence already
figured out so you aren’t having to stop and make
those decisions while everything is going on. Decide
who’s going to do what and how often. If you can get
some incremental budget to have on hand in case
you need to boost parts of your program that really
need it, try to line that up. The final weeks leading
up those key 48 hours will be time to tweak what’s
already there, not to be building.
Prime Season deserves an “all hands on deck”
approach
Bring out the big guns this Prime Season. If you
usually review numbers weekly, move to daily. Push
your agency and tech partners to see how they
can help support you at this time. There might
be features that you’re not taking advantage of
in your Amazon campaign management platform
that could take your program to the next level.
During the actual 48 hours of the event, make sure
everyone’s moved as much off of their plates as
possible if it doesn’t have to do with Prime. Have a
plan on how to make the most out of every team
member this year. In essence, leave no stone
unturned.
Stay agile and be prepared for anything
Try to imagine scenarios that could arise and
address those situations before Prime Day hits. For
example, what’s your ad editorial review process.
Who needs to sign off on budget increases? What
will you do if conversion rates fall on Day 1 so that
you change things up on Day 2? Have a daily “war
room-style” meeting each morning for the week
leading up to the event to check-in and make sure
Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com
everything’s ready to go. The only thing for certain
during Prime Day is that there will be curveballs to
handle—so be ready!
Prime Day Tip #8: A strong
technical foundation to help
execute your Prime Day strategy
Knowing what to do to maximize your Prime Day
2020 is just the first part of the puzzle. You then have
to run those advertising programs with precision.
Some Amazon advertisers have very large product
catalogs and thousands of keywords to manage. This
can be a very daunting task to accomplish—and to
do flawlessly. One little mistake could mean that the
wrong ad gets loaded up or the budget on your most
important campaign gets input incorrectly.
Enterprise marketers in paid search and social
advertising have known for years that going beyond
the native ad management tools enables them to
save time, drive performance, and make intelligent
decisions about how to optimize their programs. It
can also help to reduce manual errors that simply
can’t happen during such a critical time as Prime Day.
Leverage automation during the Prime Day
chaos
Digital advertising execution is filled with repetitive
tasks—and this certainly applies to running Amazon
Advertising campaigns. These tasks can be handed
over to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and
rules-based automation in order to free up your
team to spend more time focused on the high-
value things that can truly tap into their expertise.
Marketers can use automation to make granular
changes to their accounts such as dropping bids
when ROI begins to drop, pausing underperforming
ads, and turning on and off campaigns based on
predetermined flight dates. Automation can also be
used in conjunction with alerts to notify marketers
when specified conditions are met—such as if a
campaign runs out of budget.
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Save valuable time through the event with
workflow assistance
During the short Prime Day window—every second
counts. Just like on Black Friday or Cyber Monday,
marketers don’t have days to get new ads loaded
up or hours to change bids. The increased traffic
from Prime Day with multiple ad types and campaign
strategies can lead to an increase in revenue, but
managing this activity can be a challenge when each
campaign is multiplied by hundreds or thousands of
keywords, category, and product targets. Third-party
management tools can help you make changes to your
Amazon Advertising campaigns in a fraction of the time
that it would take you through the native platform.
Use powerful analytics tools to power data-
driven decision making
Simply put, data-driven marketing needs data. When
you and your team are trying to figure out what’s
working and what’s not, where to cut and where to
boost, and how to best invest your Amazon Advertising
budget during the Prime Day season, the only way to
do that right is with the right data. Third-party tools
can go beyond the basics to provide insights which can
help you to make the right decisions.
Prime Day Tip #9: Go all out for
Prime Day: cross-channel for
the win
Prime Day is arguably the biggest shopping period
of the year, but the larger trend is that it’s no longer
confined to just Amazon. And this year, being in Q4,
marketers must widen their scope to maximize the
end-of-the-year holiday shopping season. This means
bigger budgets, bigger deals, and involving more
channels than just Amazon Advertising
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Pinterest now allow
marketers to point their ads to Amazon pages. This
change has come over the last few years as brands
petitioned the publishers to open up destination
URLs beyond their owned properties. This Prime Day,
Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com
embrace where paid search and social advertising fit
within the product research funnel to drive maximum
sales to Amazon.
Google’s role in product searches and
capturing intent
The opportunity for advertisers to reach customers
and build loyalty starts before Prime Day and extends
well beyond. Prime Day leads to high search interest
in product research and creates a halo effect after
Prime Day where consumers are comparing prices on
Google Shopping and seeing if products are available
in a store nearby. Many product searches still begin
on Google so make sure you’re capturing shoppers
at the top of the funnel as they figure out where to
spend their holiday dollars.
Facebook’s role in driving awareness and
interest
Facebook offers the ability to expand a brand’s reach
and narrow in on a highly-targeted audience to lead
new prospects towards becoming repeat customers.
Most importantly to Amazon sales, marketers can
target people who aren’t already actively searching
for their products. It provides sellers the ability to
reach a wider audience, boost rankings, and generate
more organic sales from Amazon.
External ad traffic can now be measured
Whether it’s driving traffic to your Amazon Store or
a product detail page, you can automatically apply
Amazon Attribution tags to your Google, Facebook,
Microsoft, and Pinterest Ads, giving you the visibility
to scale and manage cross-channel initiatives. This
valuable information will help you better understand
what is and what isn’t working in your paid search
and social advertising programs to optimize
toward real value. Marketers without this level of
measurement will be forced to optimize toward proxy
metrics such as low CPCs and high CTR. This might
mean they are hurting their Amazon sales rather than
helping them.
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Prime Day Tip #10: Best practices issues before Prime Day hits. The last thing you need

with Kenshoo Ecommerce is inventory or buy box issues to sneak up on you

right when the surge in volume comes. Set up filters
Every advertising channel—either online or offline—
from the ads grid to identify the following serving
has best practices that have been built up over time
errors: Ad is out of Buy Box or Ad is Not in Stock.
which tend to more often work in certain situations.
Managing a large assortment of keywords and ads is
Monitor where competitors are ramping up
repetitive, time-consuming, and mistake-prone.
Identify and tag keywords with the “Share-of-Voice
Keyword = YES” dimension if you know they will
The Kenshoo Ecommerce team is made up of
be important to your Prime Day strategy. Do this
ecommerce and digital advertising experts who
several weeks ahead of time so that you can monitor
have all run Amazon campaigns. They’ve been
through the Brand Insights Dashboard If they are
able to see first-hand what the most cutting-edge
winning shelf space in those areas. This will give your
marketers are doing with this channel. When using
directional insights on how aggressive your bids and
our platform, here are some of the best practices
placement adjustments should be.
you can apply to leverage the technology for a
successful Prime Day:

Keep up the pace all day

Let Kenshoo’s Automated Actions do the heavy lifting
for you when it comes to making sure your campaigns
are well funded throughout the day. Break your days
budget into quarters then schedule incremental
increases in budgets every six hours so all your budget
doesn’t get used up during the morning rush!

Stay competitive from the start

Filter for keywords with historically high-performance
(ROI, ACoS) and then check to see if any are below
the Amazon suggested minimum bid. Use Kenshoo
Ecommerce’s Automated Actions to set them to at
least the minimum bid at the start of Prime Day. This
way you will have a better chance to ensure that your
core keywords won’t fall below the fold.

Develop a placement strategy

Identify your priority products and their campaigns
and leverage Kenshoo’s Bulk Top of Search Bid
adjustments functionality to drive more traffic from
the top of search placement.

Think ahead when it comes to serving issues

Set up automated alerts that notify you of serving

Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com 15

Kenshoo Ecommerce:
Enterprise-level management for Prime Day—and beyond
Total market intelligence. Totally intelligent ecommerce.
The world of marketplace advertising is rapidly changing the shape of online shopping and providing ecommerce
marketers with new opportunities. Capture active shoppers with one platform for launching and scaling
advertising success across Amazon and Walmart.

Leading brands and agencies leverage Kenshoo’s advanced optimization, analytics & automation solutions to get
started quickly, navigate new ad formats, and drive growth.

We call this Total Ecomm Intelligence.

• Best-in-class optimization. Drive performance & impact with Kenshoo’s advanced optimization suite.
Algorithmically optimize bids & budgets to make the most of your marketing investments.
• Enterprise-grade automation. Maximize productivity by automating repetitive tasks. Drive operational
efficiency by streamlining time-consuming workflows. Do more in less time with Kenshoo’s automation suite.
• Actionable insights. Make the most of your data with Kenshoo’s comprehensive analytics suite. Derive
actionable insights & make informed strategic decisions.
• Experts at your service. Kenshoo’s seasoned team of ecommerce experts are standing by to help you
thrive.
• Cross-channel excellence. Leverage a single platform to break down silos & orchestrate a cohesive, cross-
channel program. Maximize the value of every customer touchpoint across channels: Ecommerce (Amazon,
Walmart), Search (Google, Microsoft, Verizon Media) & Social (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest).

It’s not too late to have the power of Kenshoo Ecommerce by your side for this Prime Day. Reach out to us now
and schedule a brief demo to see how we can help.

Get Primed for Prime Day 2020 | kenshoo.com 16