Prime Day: Best practices for authors

Prepare ahead of time

• Use learnings from the results of previous campaigns that have run over a 30-day period prior to Prime Day.
• If you don’t have any active campaigns, consider running test campaigns before Prime Day. This will help you understand what keywords work best for your books, as well as refine your targeting approach.
• Create a plan focusing on four key elements: the books you’ll be advertising, your targeting strategy, the bid tactics, and your budget allocation.

Put your best books forward

• Try advertising books you haven’t advertised yet, especially those you’re driving organic traffic to.
• Use deal ASINs and top-performing books in your campaigns to help drive traffic to your ads.
• Explore ways to easily update and improve your product detail pages to increase your chance of making sales.

Make the most of your event budget

• If you ran campaigns during Prime Day last year, use previous learnings to make budget decisions for this year.
• If it’s your first time advertising during Prime Day, have a set budget in mind when it comes to advertising. Try allocating the bulk of the budget in the lead up to Prime Day, and at the event peak, to take advantage of incremental traffic during that time.
• Reallocate and adjust your bids near the end of the event, and after the event, to continue engaging with shoppers, while remaining within your budget.

Targeting success

Part of a successful advertising strategy is reaching and engaging the relevant audiences for your books. Our targeting recommendations can help you achieve just that during this high-traffic event. If you’d like to learn more about targeting, head to our targeting help page.

Automatic and manual targeting

There are two targeting tactics available for your Prime Day campaigns: automatic and manual. With automatic targeting,² we’ll do the work for you by matching your ads to shopping queries and products. Manual targeting ³ gives you the control to select specific keywords or products and set bids accordingly.

• Try automatic targeting for Prime Day campaigns if you want to get started quickly with Sponsored Products. This approach also gives you insight into what shopping terms Prime Day customers have used when shopping for books like yours. Running multiple manual campaigns at the same time and using shopping queries you know are relevant to your books can help drive incremental sales.
• Try manual targeting for Prime Day campaigns if you’re creating Sponsored Brands campaigns, or if you’ve run automatic targeting campaigns with Sponsored Products before and have enough data from your reports. This way you can be more precise by adding high-performing search terms—those with high sales and click-through rates (CTR)—to optimize for conversions.

Keyword targeting

• In the weeks leading up to Prime Day, monitor your campaigns for high-performing keywords. Use your search term report to identify terms with high sales and CTR and include them as keywords in your Prime Day campaign. Be sure to add specific keywords from your category that define your product well. This helps ensure your ads are relevant for the customers shopping for books like yours.
• Test new keywords in your Prime Day campaigns. It can help you reach larger audiences and gain extra visibility for your books.
• Increase the number of keywords in your campaigns over Prime Day to help your ads appear in more shopping queries. These can be a combination of keywords you’ve chosen from past campaigns and those recommended in campaign builder.
• Use a mix of match types to create a multi-goal strategy. Broad match can help increase your reach, while exact and phrase match allows you to target precisely on the keywords that convert well for you. Find out more about match types in this help page.
• Be mindful of restricted keywords. Avoid including keywords that could result in an offensive, insensitive, or undesirable shopper experience, as your ads won’t run against them. Learn more about targeting restrictions in this help page.

Product targeting

• Use product targeting for your Prime Day campaigns to widen your reach within a category, engage customers shopping for your brand, or target individual books or authors that are similar to you.
• In the weeks leading up to Prime Day, monitor your campaigns to identify your successes. Use category and ASIN-level reporting to see your data, then create your Prime Day campaigns around books and categories that perform well in your campaigns.
• Avoid restricted products. Don’t include any restricted products in your campaign targeting. You may be able to add them during campaign set up, but your ads won’t run against those targets. Find out more about restrictions.
• Not sure what to target? Take advantage of our product targeting recommendations for Prime Day, which you’ll find under the Suggested tab in the Product targeting section, within the campaign manager.

Negative targeting

• Prevent your ads from appearing on shopping results pages that don’t meet your Prime Day goals. Depending on whether you’re using automatic or manual campaigns, you can target negative keywords, products, or both.
• Exclude low-performing and irrelevant shopping queries in your Prime Day campaigns. These should include any shopping queries with high spend, and no—or very low—sales.

Setting your bids and budgets

Increased traffic during Prime Day can result in your ads being seen more often, leading to more clicks. With an uplift in clicks, your campaigns may run out of budget quicker than usual.

Ad campaigns that use their full budget and stay live throughout the entire day have greater potential to reach readers and drive sales. So, it’s even more important to monitor your bids and budgets multiple times throughout Prime Day.

Here are four recommendations to help ensure your advertising spend is as efficient as possible, and your campaigns are optimized to reach, engage, and inspire customers to purchase:

• Prepare for a potential uplift in traffic. Increasing your daily budget, particularly for campaigns with high clicks or sales, can help ensure you don’t run out of budget and miss potential sales before, during, and after Prime Day. Setting budget rules to automatically increase your budget during Prime Day is an easy way to help avoid your campaigns going out of budget. We suggest using HAQM Ads recommended budget increase percentage, which is based on historical Prime Day shopping activity.⁴
• Move your budget to your most effective campaigns. Consider reallocating all, or a portion, of your budget from lower-pacing campaigns to high-performing campaigns. This can make your advertising spend more efficient, and help you achieve your advertising goals for Prime Day, without exceeding your budget.
• Adjust your bids using insights from recent campaigns. Learnings from relevant campaigns that have been active over the past 30 days can help set you up for success. Decreasing or pausing bids for keywords that underperformed over the last 30 days, and, in turn, increasing bids for keywords that generated sales can help drive additional traffic to your ads. If you’re setting up new campaigns, we recommend using bid suggestions for Prime Day, available via the advertising console.
• Use dynamic bidding to increase your chance of driving sales. Dynamic bidding can help save you time and optimize your campaign performance throughout Prime Day, by allowing HAQM Ads to automatically adjust your bids in real time. Dynamic bidding (up and down) will increase your bids when your ads may be more likely to drive sales, and decrease your bids when they’re less likely to do so.