Preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Finally be ready to watch performance closely on black Friday and through the holiday season. So you can reallocate spend or adjust campaigns as needed. Do not underestimate how long your preparations can take Polish your listings, build up your reviews, stock up your inventory, automate your PPC campaigns.

There is no point in launching new campaigns, advertising groups. Advertising copy, etc. The week of black Friday will start with Monday. You want to have campaigns up and running so they can collect data beforehand. And so you have time to optimize. If you launch a new campaign the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the cost per click turns out to be much higher than expected, which it’ll likely be considering the time of year with a similar conversion rate, you’ll waste a lot of advertising spend.

Having campaigns live before the big day means that you already have a good idea of what’s working well. And what isn’t, which helps you understand how to allocate spending the lag and Amazon reporting makes this especially important optimize Amazon product listings. You want to ensure your product listings are truly displaying your products in the best.

Are they optimized for Amazon’s A9 algorithm. It’s one thing to sell a great product, but if you aren’t including the necessary keywords to rank highly an Amazon’s search engine and clearly highlighting the products, benefits and features, you could be losing potential visitors and sales leverage a plus content.

Are you showcasing your brand and products in the best possible way. Often brands are not using the a plus content tool on Amazon. It’s the perfect place to tell your brand story in an eye catching visual format and highlight the features that make you stand out from your competitors. Make sure you are competitive.

Many retailers are advertising on multiple channels during the holidays, which can complicate price comparison. Keep a close eye on the conversion rate for your most popular and your most price volatile items. Remember that Amazon is just one channel what’s being offered on Google or other channels can impact your sales as well.

Target peak times. As the day draws to an end shoppers feel the fear of missing out the golden hours between 7.00 to 11:00 PM. PST are the most profitable of the year with almost 30% of the cyber Monday revenue concentrating on bedtime advertising, scheduling, spending more on advertising and structuring advertising campaigns correctly.

Focus on your premium best seller. Shoppers hope to get the good stuff cheap during cyber a week. Direct your promotional efforts towards your expensive items. Some studies show that discounted luxury products sell particularly well. High budgets and bids perform better in Amazon cyber week because shoppers respond better to advertisements during this time.

Lightning deals are breathtakingly expensive and CPMs are up by 23% in general. Still it’s a wise investment. 50% of consumers say advertisements impact their purchasing decision. If you also target expensive items. Who advertising cost of sales per return on advertising spend is going to be just fine.

Many Amazon sellers, religiously follow the platform’s guidelines and spend large amounts of budget, trying to boost their sales rank in advance of black Friday and cyber Monday. But since customers tend to window shop before the sales. You could end up paying more for clicks that ultimately don’t convert to a sale.

We recommend focusing your advertising strategy. On the few days surrounding the weekend powerfully structured campaigns, maximize profit ensure advertisements are optimized and increased your bids on your top performing keywords when increasing your advertising budget. Don’t just add significant budget into your advertisements at the start of the weekend.

Try to encourage even spend set an account level budget too. So you don’t overspend followed by increase in budgets regularly throughout the day. Set up an Amazon store and enhance your storefront with advertisements. If you are a smaller retailer and, or have missed the lightning deals, there are other ways to maximize your involvement with cyber week.

Utilize your network, bombard social media, and make some noise and your email list. Let everyone know you’re offering some big savings and send them to your dedicated Amazon store. You need to have a registered brand. But otherwise a store is free and easy to sit up. So got an Amazon storefront. Great. Do you update it regularly?

If not, you are missing out on vital selling opportunities. Not only is the perfect place to display all your brand has to offer, but you can direct customers to your storefront via your Amazon advertising campaigns. Check your stock status and organize your inventory. Any competent retailer will want to make sure that they have a desirable product selection and any popular items that are currently out of stock are going to be replenished in time for peak season.

If you ship items to an Amazon warehouse for prime eligibility, there’s an extra layer of logistics here. This also means making sure product data and landing pages are accurate and optimiz. Don’t underestimate the power of preparation. Make sure your inventory is up to date and can handle the demands of a busy buying weekend as soon as possible.

If you run out of popular products on black Friday or cyber Monday, you’ll miss out on key sales. Try to estimate sales from what you plan on promoting to help you organize your stock plan, your promotions for black Friday and cyber Monday, along with making certain you have products in. You’ll want to put Amazon holiday promotions in place, or at least discuss if a promotion is a viable offering, promotions increase, click through rates and conversions after all who doesn’t like a good deal.

They also help you to stay relevant against your competitors, who will almost certainly be offering some kind of deal during the holiday season. People made purchases during this time of year because of perceived value or actual value. So make sure you are offering just that. If you haven’t got a lightning deal set up already, you can make use of the several promotions.

Amazon offers as well as run your own deals such as buy one, get one free. Don’t forget to increase bids or push budgets of products within your advertising campaigns and push upsell and cross sell sales. Analyze your Amazon black Friday data. One of the biggest issues noted with retailers going into Q4 is inefficient data utilization.

Harvesting last year’s results helps predict trends and approve efficiency. If you have the data available from seller central or vendor central analyze what did or didn’t work last year and adjust accordingly. For example, if you had a promotion in place for an item, but that promotion yielded little to no return, you may want to reconsider revisiting your strategy this year.

Additionally, if you know, a specific category does better than others during this time of year, be prepared to allocate more spending to this category by setting specific budgets, a good Amazon product segmentation strategy helps a lot be aware of the Amazon effect. Amazon can have a serious impact on your other sales channel.

Often retailers price themselves out on one or more channels by charging more on their website than on Amazon. For instance, if this is the case, Amazon will likely give the sale. And with most businesses that means less profit per sale. It is sometimes worth it to price Amazon items lower. If you drive a lot of volume through Amazon, or if those sales tend to create add-on purchases or repeat customers, however, it’s still worth careful consideration, don’t set it up and then forget about it.

Regularly monitor your Amazon holiday campaign performance and reallocate spend appropriately. This is something a lot of retailers fail to accomplish. During this time of year, some businesses have failed to be aggressive enough and left revenue and profit on the table while others have spent disproportionately to the returns they were seeing, and that have lost money as a result.

Amazon’s attribution reporting makes this process more difficult than on other channels, but it’s still crucial to ensuring profitability.