Prime Day 2021 was a year of firsts.  It was the first year Prime Day took place in 2nd quarter.  From 2015 to 2019 Prime Day was in July.  In 2020, due to the pandemic, Prime Day was moved to October and became the de facto kickoff to holiday shopping.  

This year was also the first year that Prime Day experienced year-over-year growth of 10% or less.  But when the 2-day event brings in $10-11 billion in sales, any year-over-year growth still represents HUGE growth in real dollars.  

For this episode, I brought in OMG’s Amazon Director Chris Tyler to help unpack what we experienced with our clients this year during Prime Day.  Here’s a look at what we discuss:

• Some surprises we saw in the OMG client sales data
• How advertisers may have been more excited than shoppers this Prime Day
• Prime Day may not be a great fit for every seller - some categories crushed it during Prime Day, other categories were “meh.”
• Why inventory issues for many sellers influenced the prevalence of deep discounts and likely took some of the urgency out of Prime Day shopping.  
• The strange shopping behavior we saw during day 2 of Prime Day. 
• How to maximize Prime Day or holiday shopping by thinking Full Funnel with your ad approach
• Plus more!

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Chris Tyler

Via LinkedIn

Mentioned in this episode:

Amazon Prime Day from Statista

OMG Commerce Blog

Sales Force Prime Day 2021 Recap

OMG Blog Prime Day Prep

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Episode Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking Prime Day 2021 recap. What happened with Prime Day this year? Lots of really interesting things to uncover and dissect. I think some things that may be a preview to what we're going to see the rest of the year, and also some things that maybe considered for Prime Year next year, potentially. We're just going to unpack the data and the trends.

Brett:

No better person to have on the show than the Director of Amazon and OMG Commerce, Chris Tyler, a crowd favorite. Chris, how are you doing? Welcome to the show, man.

Chris:

Doing well. Thanks for having me.

Brett:

Yeah, absolutely. So always good to have you on the show. First of all, Prime Day, it has become kind of a summer holiday for us in retail and us, people that enjoy shopping, but today or rather this year, Prime Day was different. And so I thought it'd be fun to do a quick history of Prime Day, like 15 seconds and what we've seen in previous years and then let's dive into this year, because this year was a different beast for a couple different reasons.

Brett:

So 2015 was the launch of Prime Day, and a lot of people don't know it was the 20 year anniversary of Amazon. And it was one of those events fabricated by Amazon really to drive prime memberships, and that's what it did for so many years. You'd have millions of new people signing up and trying Amazon Prime because of Prime Day. And we know that prime memberships really fuels Amazon's flywheel.

Brett:

So for a long time, it was about building prime memberships. Now, it's just a massive sales event. It's bled into other retailers jumping on the bandwagon. You got Walmart and Target, Best Buy and every other retailer imaginable also doing big deals around Prime Day. But this year it was different. So historically, Chris, Prime Day has always been in July, the Christmas in July type of thing.

Brett:

Q3 is not a good quarter for retail typically. So last year was different as well. Last year Prime Day was in Q4. It was moved to October because of logistics issues caused by the pandemic and Amazon just not being ready, the infrastructure not being ready to handle Prime Day in July. So it got moved to October. Nobody really knew what to expect, right?

Brett:

It's the first time the Prime Day has been in Q4 and it really launched the holiday shopping season, likely pulled forward some of the holiday purchase activity last year. So a couple of interesting things from last year and just to show how much this event has been growing year over year. 2019 versus 2018, Prime Day sales grew about 70% according to Statista, but then about 45% year over year growth from 2019 to 2020, right?

Brett:

But again, you're comparing apples to oranges here. 2019 was the normal July date, 2020 was October. So it was Q4, all kinds of interesting things. And then this year, Chris, we got the announcement that Prime Day was moving to June, not July. And even though it's a few weeks difference, it's a different quarter, right? Moving to Q2 instead of Q3, which was the norm and Q4 last year. Did you hear any speculations as to why it was moved to June?

Chris:

Honestly, I did not. We didn't find out till last minute. At least it's better than last year where it seemed like a week before they said, "Hey, we're having it in October." So at least they told us a few weeks before, but I think Amazon kept that close to their chest.

Brett:

Yeah. Our Amazon reps do a pretty good job of keeping us up to date, but, and it makes sense, they don't want word to leak about Prime Day too early because then people wait for some purchases, right? So you want to give enough time to build hype and make it a big event, but not so much time that you kill sales four weeks out from Prime Day.

Brett:

I heard a couple of different pieces of speculation who really knows, but this will help Amazon with their comps, looking at Q2 this year versus Q2 last year, because Q2 2020 just had an amazing spike because of the pandemic, especially on Amazon because stores were closed. So this will actually help Amazon probably comp pretty well Q2 of this year versus Q2 of last year. That's probably not why Amazon did it, but that is an interesting side note for sure.

Brett:

A couple other interesting things as usually and this is in July, you got back to school sales that could be a part of this. It's not really feeling like back to school time, right? This is June. Summer still feels like you got a lot of runway left in summer. So not as much of a back to school event. So just an interesting event and timing and all of that.

Brett:

And so we're seeing numbers that Prime Day 2021 versus 2020 grew anywhere from nine to 11%. I saw one report showing it didn't grow at all, but I think that was a bit of an outlier as far as the report goes. So 10% growth or whatnot over last year, but we're comparing a June event to a Q4 event last year. It's pretty hard to compare this as apples to apples.

Brett:

What were some of the... And one cool thing too Chris, and this is why I had you on the podcast. OMG is big enough now. Our client base is big enough that we have a considerable amount of data that we can look at from our own clients. Advertising data, sales data that really paints a nice picture. It's kind of a microcosm of Prime Day and third-party sellers globally. And so let's dive into this a little bit. What were some of the key takeaways, the big takeaways from Prime Day this year?

Chris:

Yeah. Great question. I don't know. To your point, we've got enough clients advertising, spending data, to understand, "Okay, what are the trends that we're seeing as an agency?" And so the data we pulled was based off of the two weeks prior to Prime Day this year and weekly segments, each Prime Day individually.

Chris:

And then what we're going to do is track the weeks after. And we do have the week post-Prime Day, but I will say in the advertising there's usually attribution lag, so that may be somewhat different in the coming days. And then that is to give us a picture of post-Prime Day versus prior to Prime Day and then obviously Prime Day in between. And we did the same thing last year.

Chris:

So what we wanted to look at, at the start was we know nothing's the same in the sense of last year we had a big COVID E-commerce spike in the summer and then Prime Day was actually like you mentioned, Q4, which really just blasted the last three months of the year. And then this year it was in June, which worth noting that we started to see in April a lag in sales or softness in performance, as well as..

Brett:

April was really strange across the board. Even non-Amazon sellers, April 2021 was pretty soft.

Chris:

Yeah. And that led into May and June being a little bit better, but we're not seeing that E-commerce push that COVID gave us. So then year over year comps are kind of wonky within that. And so what we first looked at then going back to the Prime Day data was year over year, what were the differences?

Chris:

And it was really interesting to see last year, the week prior to Prime Day saw a boost in impressions and traffic between 10 and 20%. This stayed, obviously pre-Prime Day, it saw a big push, but then post-Prime Day it actually increased again, 15%. And so traffic was there and then in the same side, total sales.

Brett:

When we started, Chris, you said there was an increase in impressions?

Chris:

Impressions. So we wanted to figure out, "Okay, is the traffic there? And then within that, what are the sales doing? What's the CPCs? What's our ad spend ratio to total sales?" And we found last year, the impression were boosting even prior to Prime Day and then stayed post. What we found this year-

Brett:

That makes sense because it was the beginning of holiday shopping.

Chris:

Right. Right.

Brett:

And so this is an interesting take. So we've got our line of sight into Prime Day and what happened is really through the advertising lens, right? But if you see a lift in impressions, more ads being shown, it means there's more eyeballs there, right? This is a really interesting perspective. We're seeing what retailers are doing, what advertisers are doing based on response to shoppers, basically.

Chris:

Right. And then for us as advertisers it helps us understand what is the pie we're looking at, and then what tactics strategies we are using to formulate, "Okay. How much can we on that in terms of the goals for our clients?" And then in Prime Day this year, what we found was the impressions and clicks, correspondingly, saw a very small decrease. So in our mind they were flat a week before Prime Day versus that preview period, where last year we saw a boost. And then going into Prime Day-

Brett:

A week before Prime Day this year was flat or potentially down just a tiny bit-

Chris:

A little bit.

Brett:

... to the week before Prime Day, last year. So that leading up period.

Chris:

Yep. Yep. And then even to the week before this year, so if we're looking at June 7th, it would be two weeks prior, and then June 14th would be the week before Prime Day. They were about the same in impressions and clicks. Where last year we saw a boost week over week going into the period right before Prime Day. That said, there's window shoppers, but traffic's coming in, it's building.

Chris:

We didn't get that this year. And so that was a sign that there just was a smaller audience whether it's the fact that it's in June, that with COVID, restrictions are being eased. People are traveling. It's the beginning of summer, people aren't thinking, like you said, buying, where July had more of an impact, I think, than October. It was just... That is the mindset. So we noticed that going into there.

Chris:

And then when we hit Prime Day, I would say that the numbers corresponded to this year. So if I look June 21st and June 22nd, those sales metrics jumped between 108% and 126% compared to the period right before, right? And those are similar to last year's comps. When you look at Prime Day versus the week prior to Prime Day.

Chris:

But what happened, like we mentioned, was the traffic clicks and even total sales were softer prior to Prime Day this year versus last year. So the ratio's there, but that's why we're only getting nine, 10% increase is because it was already soft before Prime Day this year. And it was a lot of data ..

Brett:

.. look at the data, right? We want to see how did Prime Day do this year versus last year, but also how did Prime Day do compared to the weeks leading up to it. Because that is really what you want to look at, is what's the Prime Day lift, right? You got this baseline of sales that happen on Amazon regardless of whether there's a big event and then measuring the lift of Prime Day. That's super interesting. So 108 then 120, is that what you said ..

Chris:

Yeah. So it was around 126% day one, I think 108, 114% day two, which were very comparable to last year's percent ratios though overall the sales just went up a little bit compared to last year, as you mentioned. We did find... And our assumption is this is based on a smaller amount of impressions, is CPC went up about 25% first last year.

Chris:

And this was prior to Prime Day, but especially on Prime Day, I think it was on the high end of 30, 35 and ACoS went up about 10%. And what I mean by that is ACoS went from 30% to 33%, that's a 10% increase, but I don't want people thinking 30 to 40.

Brett:

That's 10 points.

Chris:

Yeah. And so it was much more competitive, less space, but more competitors in that space is what we found. And so we were paying more to get the same traffic. Conversion rates were comparable, but because we had to pay more for each click, that's the relation to why ACoS increased.

Chris:

And then the biggest thing that we want to track ongoing, we're going to do this weekly. We'll put it in our blog. I think it's something that anyone listening to the podcast will want to follow along, is we want to know what happens post-Prime Day, because last year it was amazing, right? It makes sense. It's Q4. And I want to say, even in 2019, the numbers were up post-Prime Day, but it's only one weekend and so I don't want it to be like the norm per se, just yet.

Chris:

But what we have found is looking at 23rd through 29th, that ACoS is higher, that TACoS is higher. Conversion rates are lower, which makes sense than for ACoS and TACoS, and then click through rate is 5% lower, so it's nominal in my mind. And then CPC is about 10 to 15% higher when we look at May and April.

Chris:

And so we're still finding that there's a tail end of that push that everyone made for Prime Day, that it's still there, but the customers are at least at the same level. And so we're paying more for the same traffic and then the sales are not increasing with that. And so it's a more volatile space to look at.

Brett:

So if I had to simplify some of this, advertisers are maybe jumping on Prime Day to a higher degree than customers are this year, right? Prime Day still grew year over year by almost every account, which is pretty significant, right? And we start talking about billions and billions of dollars over a two day period. This is a massive event.

Brett:

And so the law of big numbers kick in, right? You can't grow 40% year over year forever, right? That does begin to slow down at some point. You start to reach some market saturation type points. But I think the data we're seeing is that advertisers know. We're conditioned, we're trained, we know that we've got to be aggressive to not miss out on shoppers for Prime Day. So we're bidding more, right?

Brett:

So CPCs are going up. We're really trying to go get those sales, but it sounds like there's more advertising competition and not the same year over year growth that we've seen on Prime Day. So some things are becoming more inefficient, it sounds like.

Chris:

100% and I appreciate you taking all that data jargon and putting it back in a nice way for the listeners. I would add to that, and this is its own discussion, that in general the space is getting more competitive. Amazon's releasing more placements for ads and there's benefits to them, but it also means that there's more places to spend money and more competitors that will want to do that.

Chris:

So even taking out June, if you look at April, May versus last year, I think CPC was still up 10 to 20%. So it's not strictly Prime Day related, but it is highlighted because the traffic wasn't there. And so then it impacted really everything, especially conversion rate and total sales.

Brett:

Yeah. And then that is just the trend, right? As the third-party marketplace becomes more and more competitive, that does drive up CPCs. Eventually that does self-regulate to a certain degree. We've seen this one on the Google side, we see Google Shopping, Google search for retail clicks. They do hit a top end, right? Where just the economics no longer makes sense. You can't pay $7 per click with conversion rates of one to 2% for an item that cost 30 bucks, right? You just can't can't do it, right?

Chris:

Yeah.

Brett:

So those CPCs will regulate a little bit, but when a big event like this happens, advertisers get aggressive, right? And they just want to go for it. One thing that I think will be interesting to unpack a little bit is the categories, right? Prime Day isn't a huge event for everybody. This is becoming increasingly clear to us.

Brett:

Some of our clients see massive jumps on Prime Day. Others do not. And I was looking at some data. I've got actually the Salesforce recap of Prime Day, pulling it up right now, and this will probably be no surprise, but one of the largest segments of growth, year over year growth, was luggage and handbags.

Brett:

So luggage was up about 74% Prime Day 2021 versus Prime Day 2020. Totally makes sense. People were still not fully thinking travel even in October of 2020 and that is coming back, so no surprise that that grew. But talk about that a little bit, Chris. We saw some real disparity. Some clients crushed it in Prime Day. Other clients were like, "Meh, this is a normal day."

Chris:

Yeah. So I think at the category level, some of the bigger ones we saw jump were gift related items based on price points that I think their AOV was 20 to 40 bucks so that they were able to run some deals with those products that brought in good volume, but also allowed for customers just kind of jump in on, "Okay. Yeah. I can just buy that, right? I'm looking to buy anyways."

Chris:

You've got the two days in Prime Day compared to maybe somebody selling a product for 800 bucks. And I would say categorically-wise though, our best performers were the toy category. We had a couple new electronic space that did see really good numbers. And one of them ran a good amount of deals alongside pairing that with our DSP offering and really had a full funnel approach for that leading up to Prime Day. And they saw a three to 4X growth and they didn't really see a low prior to Prime Day, so those numbers were phenomenal.

Brett:

Yeah. So talk about that just a little bit. That's kind of intriguing. You mentioned a full funnel approach leading up to Prime Day. Some categories you may just try to do a little better over Prime Day but some categories you can really capitalize on Prime Day. What was that full funnel approach just kind of high level leading up to Prime Day?

Chris:

Yeah. And I would just put it out there that we have on our site the blog. I can walk you through what that will look like, if you're curious, after the podcast, but ..

Brett:

What was that blog? Is that the blog that Amber did on Prime Day?

Chris:

Yeah. The Prime Day Prep.

Brett:

Yeah. Prime Day Prep. So search OMG Commerce Prime Day Prep blog. You'll find that also linked to in the show notes.

Chris:

So the full funnel really starts with a mixture of DSP, Demand Side Platform alongside PPC within seller central.

Brett:

Running display ads and then the standard PPC.

Chris:

Yep. And then any external traffic and then obviously product page readiness. And so DSP, that was a factor, especially with this client prepping the audience and traffic two weeks prior to Prime Day. So focusing on competitors that were similar to their products that they were running deals for, that we knew our price was going to slay and so building an audience of those people who viewed the competitor and did not purchase as well as building our own customer in-market audience.

Chris:

People in-market for keyboards or just bought a computer or whatever it might be that they need a corresponding product so that when Prime Day hit, we weren't scrambling to say, "Who are we going to target? Are we just going to update?" So we actually set a plan in motion to have that funnel, build the audience that we wanted to highlight.

Chris:

And then also build correspondingly a retargeting audience then, because anyone who goes to that product page of our brand that we're running and did not buy, we can target again. And really we push the creative and then the budgets during both Prime Days to say, "Here's the deal. We know you haven't bought anything based on the audience we've built." And we found the results there just phenomenal.

Chris:

And then a lot of that does tie... We worked with this client months before to make sure the product page were ready, that they've got a storefront up and running and it's prepped with a deals page and then they've got posts they're going to launch for these products. So it was full funnel on the ad side, but also on the organic side that everything was ready there because you don't want to just use PPC as a weapon. You want it to compliment the foundational piece that you should have in place.

Brett:

Yeah. I love it. And this was a strategy that works for holidays. So as we're preparing for holiday, which is coming up, right? We should be laying the groundwork right now for holiday. We've got a webinar coming up for Cyber 5 Prep, stay tuned for that. But yeah, this idea of, hey, remarketing is always your cheapest form of advertising, right?

Brett:

And so we know, and we just talked about CPC is going up 25%, even the weeks leading up to Prime Day. And on Prime Day, CPC is up 30%, right? So it becomes more and more expensive to advertise during those peak shopping days because the advertising competition is so high.

Brett:

So if you can start to seed some audiences, reach some in-market audiences. We do this on the YouTube side as well, where we try to reach people who're maybe shopping for toys or home decor, or different supplements, whatever the case may be. Seed that audience, get them to visit the site, check things out.

Brett:

Now you've got a big remarketing pool that you can really hit during your Prime Day deals and get them for a lower cost and get them to convert with your product. So thinking full funnel totally makes sense. That's definitely something to file away for next year's Prime Day, but also for Cyber 5.

Chris:

And one of the things I would add to that, it's not new, but it seems like it's new in some of the forums we're having and what we're hearing from advertisers is getting traffic from external sources to Amazon. And we talked about impressions, clicks were lower this year until the thought was, "Okay, where can we get ideally the same CPCs or better."

Chris:

And one of the ones that we highlighted and run as Google to Amazon in terms of running search ads on Google doc to Amazon product pages or storefront. And not to go on a tangent, but there's Amazon attribution, which allows you to track sales return. And storefront also has tags that you can add to that if you run any pages on your storefront.

Chris:

And we found we go after low-hanging fruits, so searches on Google that have Amazon in their query. You can get 10 to 40 cents CPCs, or better put probably 30 to 70% less CBCs than you have on Amazon. The conversion rates are lower, but you're building traffic.

Chris:

I look at it as almost like how DSP has mid-funnel where you're building a retargeting base and you're also building awareness because people are coming to Google to search maybe mirrors on Amazon or a Derma Roller on Amazon. And then, one, I don't know why they search on Google, but they do. The search volume is there. You can ..

Brett:

So people that.. To buy something on Amazon, but they start their search on Google. And it happens millions of times every day. I actually just did a talk with Orange Klik recently.

Brett:

I can link to their interview and Chris you'll help me prep for this, but I pulled data on people who search on Google for bedsheets, but Amazon is in the query, right? So I'm searching for Amazon Prime bedsheets. That was a pretty popular query or whatever. Almost a million searches a month for those keywords related to bedsheets and Amazon.

Chris:

Here's a hack for you. If you're going to do that, just go to amazon.com and put in bedsheets. You're going to figure it out. You're going to get right to what you want to see. I've got a buddy that will put Facebook into the Google search and then click the Facebook link. And I'm like, "You know if you use a dot-com at the end you're right there."

Brett:

So this underscores an interesting consumer behavior, shopper behavior thing. For a lot of people, the web begins on Google, right? That's just where they begin everything. This is where they start. Like, "This is my entrance into the web," and it's hilarious. So one thing I'll underscore here.

Brett:

I think there's been this evolution for Amazon sellers where back in the beginning days of the third party marketplace, you could win by just having a product there and maybe gaming the system and keyword spamming, and doing some stuff to get organic rankings, right? So just have a product, get organic rankings, you make a lot of money, right?

Brett:

Then it became more complex. Now you are having to advertise on... You're doing giveaways, maybe doing a little bit of advertising on Amazon. As things become more competitive, we have to be more sophisticated, right? So what we like to talk about at OMG Commerce is, "Hey, if you're selling on Amazon, you need to have a base of Amazon advertising rights, sponsored products, foundational, sponsored brands, sponsored brand video," I think that is a must now. Amazon DSP for the remarketing side and maybe top-of-funnel.

Brett:

But then you look at other traffic sources. The next frontier that a lot of people are tapping into is Google to Amazon, right? And that's what you're just talking about. It's this incremental growth, it's maybe reaching the shopper before they get to the Amazon category page and before they see all your competitors ads, you can reach them when they're on Google, which is where they enter every site. Thinking about now, this is going to be key for holiday, key for Prime Day next year, a sophisticated approach to marketing and growth versus just, "Yeah, I'll just let my organic rankings do it."

Chris:

Yeah. 100% agree with that.

Brett:

Cool. Other takeaways. And I'm excited. I know you and Amber and team are going to be working on a blog with full recap and stuff, so we'll just be watching the OMG Commerce blog for that. That's coming out pretty soon. But other interesting takeaways from Prime Day this year.

Chris:

What I would mention is we found it interesting on day two. So the whole Amazon team at OMG is like... For those two days, we're just at our computers. We've got eight tabs up, whatever, we're looking at all of our clients.

Brett:

Re-courses, right? You're just ..

Chris:

Deal with the mind type thing but with a better ending. And what we found was the second day was trending much lower than the first, and this was for at least the first half of the day for most of our clients and our assumption was, "Hey, we may end, I don't know, 20 to 30% lower in sales, just based on that first half of the day."

Chris:

And then we saw this climb, a very steep climb, maybe 70% of our advertisers that the sales started to go back up and it was actually higher in that last, let's say, the third quarter of the day. From 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM, the sales just jumped up and we ended up being down maybe five to 10% with a lot of clients actually being up the second day and that wasn't expected.

Chris:

Yeah. We're still digging in. Some assumptions we have is people are waiting to the end of Prime Day and they're like, "Oh, I got to make a purchase. Or there's deals..." There's that fear of missing out that says like, "I am back home maybe from work or I just have time now the last few hours and I'm going to just push through." And the other thing tied to that was we found conversion rates are up around 15% the second day, even though impressions ..

Brett:

Up 15, so conversion rates are up the second day, 15% compared to what?

Chris:

To day one. Sorry.

Brett:

To day one.

Chris:

Yeah. To day one. So they were better there and impressions and clicks dropped between 20 and 30%, but sales only dropped between five and 10 and that's because conversion rate picked it up. And so it seemed like the traffic was more intent on like, "I got to buy." And I don't know if that means set more deals up and I know you don't have full control for the end of the day. What do you do with that? We're still figuring it out. But I think that's an interesting thing we saw.

Brett:

It kind of speaks to the consumer behavior though. We all have FOMO, fear of missing out, but also procrastinators to a certain degree. So, "Hey, the tail end of a sale urgency, I got to get the deal now, or I'm not going to get it." So it does kind of make sense that there'd be a huge push for day one. There's excitement, there's buzz. People are checking it out.

Brett:

Maybe kind of a lull on morning of day two, but then it really picks up after that. So I think you kind of plan your advertising around that a little bit, right? And be watching the campaigns. You can't... I know we weren't because we were glued to our screens, but hopefully people didn't just go to sleep on Prime Day or figure that it was over after a soft morning on day two, because it really picked up after that.

Chris:

Right. Yeah. And to tie to that-

Brett:

But it also-

Chris:

Oh, sorry. off.

Brett:

No, go ahead.

Chris:

To tie to their budgets, right? We prepped and made sure we weren't on a budget. Like you said, we were glued to the screen, but if somebody is listening, they're like, "Oh yeah, max budget midday or before the end of the day on the second day." I think that's a key indicator of maybe reallocation-

Brett:

They missed out. Yeah.

Chris:

Yeah. So thinking about that for next year in a better way that says you don't miss that opportunity.

Brett:

Yeah. It was also really interesting Prime Day is obviously deal driven, right? It's a shopping holiday. We're looking for deals. I didn't see any real deep analysis on this. This was more anecdotal, but it didn't seem like there was an overwhelming amount of deals. I know just talking to friends. I don't know many people that really bought that much stuff on Prime Day this year. We bought a bed for Benjamin our four-year-old, it's an elevated bed with a slide. That was about it.

Chris:

Nice.

Brett:

Last year we did start doing some Christmas shopping-

Chris:

I got one of those too.

Brett:

Did you get? I know I saw it, I was like, "Dude, this is really fun. It's made of metal. I could probably get on it." I don't know if it'll hold my frame. I don't know. Again, this is just anecdotal, but a couple years ago we were buying entertainment center, TV stuff, just getting ready.

Brett:

It felt like a huge buzz. Last year just really felt like holiday shopping, which was cool. But this year, I don't know. It obviously grew and it's still a massive event, but the deals maybe didn't seem as appealing or as amazing as they have in years past.

Chris:

I would agree with that. And I would say for some of our clients that in the past that run pretty steep deals they had inventory issues and they had other challenges that ..

Brett:

So you get inventory issues you just don't discount, right?

Chris:

Right. Right. They're going to sell it anyways. And so that was a balance there. And then others that ran, I'm going to talk about the electronic company, they crushed it, but they put steep deals. They could do it. Inventory was really good. And then a few others that ran deals both 2020 and '21. It was softer this year. And I don't know if it's... Like you said, there just weren't as many good deals.

Chris:

It seemed like there was a lot of deals, but they weren't great. And so when I looked a little bit, I got overwhelmed and I'm like, "Some of these, I don't even know if it's a better price if I were to look at it 60 days ago," right?

Brett:

Yeah.

Chris:

And so I definitely think deals didn't have the same impact overall, but if you're able to do a steep enough one and you balance it with, again, PSP, PBC, and try building it, we did find really solid success there. And they were actually the outliers in terms of best performance.

Brett:

Yeah. And I'd be really curious to see what was the lift for these other retailers, right? Walmart did their Deals for Days event and we do a lot of YouTube advertising here on OMG Commerce. So I was watching YouTube, a decent amount. I always do. I'm looking at for ads and stuff, and Walmart was blasting YouTube with their Deals for Days on electronics and some other things.

Brett:

So curious how other retailers did. I think some of the early data was pretty positive that Walmart and Target and Best Buy did pretty good. But yeah, it was a unique Prime Day. I'm sure next year will be different too. Who knows what quarter it's going to be in... Next year we'll keep an eye, but really some good takeaways. Just thinking about what is your growth and advertising plan leading up to Prime Day? Think full funnel, think holistically.

Brett:

Know the competitor who's going to drive up ad costs and who's going to be really cut-throat during those two days. So what can you do to prepare for that? Understand that maybe there's a low early day two, but there's going to be that push for the finish line at the end of day two, which is super interesting. And so hopefully some of this will get you ready for next year, but also ready for Cyber 5. Any closing thoughts, Chris Tyler.

Chris:

Yeah. So you nailed it with the Cyber 5 coming in the sense some of these takeaways I think could be seen in Cyber 5 period. It will be different because it's Q4 and people will be in that purchasing mindset.

Brett:

Yeah. Conversion rate should be elevated for that normal.. Traffic period.

Chris:

But keeping a close eye, leading up to it during and after to see, "Okay, has traffic gone back up," especially looking year over year because we still should be knock on wood out of this COVID space at least better than we were last year. And so we'll keep everyone updated within blogs and stuff leading up to it, but also acknowledging, if you want to do it right, the foundation is your product pages, your storefront, your inventory, everything we know.

Chris:

And I would say, again, that Prime Day prep functions almost the same for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but then making sure that at least the two weeks, we looked two months before that you've got all these other pieces in place. Like we mentioned, external traffic, DSP, even just campaign types.

Chris:

More advertisers are using it for sponsoring video. It now can do targeting. Make sure you know what's out there and what's available and prep so you've got these things running at least two months prior. So you have data so that you can put your best foot forward when it matters.

Brett:

Yeah. Get data while costs are lower and while costs are more predictable so you know what to do as CPCs go up because CPCs will go up just like always and we got to be watching that ratio if CPCs go up. So cost per click goes up, but conversion rate also goes up and you're golden, and you can just keep pushing.

Brett:

If there is some disparity there CPCs go up faster or more than conversion rate, then you've got to be able to adjust. And that's where having that full funnel approach, having some remarketing audiences you can tap into, really just having a plan is what you need.

Brett:

So stay tuned to the podcast and also to the blog, we'll keep you up to date. We'll help you get ready, locked and loaded for Holiday 2021, Cyber 5 2021. Stay tuned for that. With that, Chris, man, really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on and thanks for ..

Chris:

Thanks for having me.

Brett:

I know you're still probably recovering from the late nights during Prime Day.

Chris:

It was a nice break, but yeah, I appreciate always coming on this podcast. It's great.

Brett:

Awesome. And as always, I appreciate you tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love that feedback on iTunes or wherever you consume podcasts. That review helps other people find the show, makes my day as well. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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