Amazon Prime Day 2022 was the biggest one yet! Held on July 12 & 13, Prime members purchased more than 300 million items worldwide and saved over $1.7 billion.

Small businesses alone saw more than 100 million items purchased in the 3 weeks leading up to the two-day event, despite the concerns that spending would be down due to inflation and the global economy.

Before we dive into how our brands sparkled during Prime Day, let’s look at some Amazon stats:

• $3 billion was generated in sales for small businesses.
  
• Prime members purchased 100,000 items per minute during the event.
• Amazon Devices, Home and Consumer Electronics were some of the best-selling categories worldwide.

This is Unicorn’s main takeaways from Prime Day 2022:

• Brands with the strongest results were those that utilised promotions, over those that didn’t. Discounted pricing promotions such as Lightning Deals and coupons or vouchers performed best.
• Front-loading campaign budget into Day 1 pays off: ad spend and overall revenue was higher on the first day than on the second. Customers gear up to purchase items as soon as the event goes live, so there tends to be more demand on Day 1 of Prime Day. Front-loading budget can also support increased visibility on Day 2 of the event so performance is better across the board.
• Prime Day works for new products as well as best sellers: promotions on best-selling ASINs of course have a strong chance of performing well, but we also saw strong performance for newly launched ASINs.
• Customers had a preference towards discounts on higher-priced products: we noticed that Prime Day seemed to be more impactful for accounts with higher-priced products, likely because these discounts were larger and more appealing to consumers.

Some results from our top-performing brands and categories

All of the below brands had strong price discount promos in place as part of their Prime Day strategy: 

• In the spirits category, we saw top performances of daily overall revenue increasing of 8x during Prime Day compared to the days prior.
• In the food category, we saw overall revenue increases of 3x in the US & CA.
• Across other categories, we achieved the highest daily revenue year to date on Prime Day.

Some other findings:

1. Sponsored Product campaigns are top-performers: Sponsored Product campaigns were the top-performing campaign type, but other campaign types saw strong results such as Sponsored Brand video (SB Video) and Sponsored Display retargeting.
2. SB Video significantly supports sales growth: SB Video typically performs at a higher conversion rate than standard SB campaigns and so we found that we could increase sales significantly if we advertised the products with promotions through SB Video and also target top-performing keywords.
3. Retargeting is key on Prime Day: Retargeting strategies proved to be impactful during Prime Day. Targeting the correct audience and advertising the products with promotions can help increase the number of sales.
4. Budget automations enable strong performance: You can prevent campaigns from running out of budget and ensure ads are delivered on time by using automated budget rules.
5. Increase bids on high-potential products only: We only increased bids for those accounts that had promotions running or had strong potential to increase sales. This was to avoid pushing products that showed less potential and, in turn, might make ACoS increase.
6. Watch your budget closely on Day 2: If we increased budgets significantly on the first day compared to your usual budget, then it was worth it to decrease it a little on the second day. We saw some positive performances by gradually increasing the budget throughout the second day.