Look, we love Prime Day as much as anybody. In addition to the huge amount of preparation we put in to ensure our clients’ accounts are performing in tip-top shape going into the event, we’re bookmarking our own favorite deals and hitting refresh on our most-wanted items along with everybody else.
But when Amazon announced that this year’s Prime Day would be four whole days — twice the length of last year’s — we were skeptical. Would this Prime Day extension actually deliver better results?
Now that the data is in, we can confidently say the answer is yes — but with some important caveats that have big implications for the future of Prime Day.
It’s no secret that multi-day shopping events post their best performance early — concentrating most of their performance in the first day — and then fall off. In last year’s two-day Prime Day, for example, our accounts on day one showed about 30% more search volume and 15% better conversion rates than day two. This year’s extended Prime Day was no exception. In fact, the day one–to–day two fall-off was nearly identical to last year!
But this year, as predicted, that fall-off continued into day three, posting about another 8% decline in search volume and a 6% drop in conversion rate. It seemed that most shoppers who had their eyes on a particular deal pulled the trigger early on in the event, not knowing (or at least not confident) in how long it would last. Day four did see a moderate uptick in search volume (+25% vs. day three) as shoppers checked to see if any new deals had cropped up, but crucially, the conversion rate dropped again, down another 7%.
However! While it’s clear that performance dropped as Prime Day went on, even days three and four were better than “regular” days. Compared to an average weekday in June, day four still had about 10% greater search volume and 10% better conversion rates. That means that solely on the basis of the number of shoppers available and their inclination to buy — not the only considerations an advertiser should have, to be sure (things like your competitors’ behavior and your own inventory levels matter too) — it was still worthwhile to extend Prime Day to four days.
In the final analysis, our accounts saw their revenue grow by around 18% YoY.
There’s the rub, though. Doubling the length of Prime Day for just +18% growth is a serious diminishing of returns. There are some indications that Amazon may think so, too, given that in in their otherwise too-positive Prime Day wrap-up, Amazon didn’t disclose the actual number of products sold as they have in nearly every Prime Day prior.
Our guess is that Amazon is taking a hard look at whether such a large expansion was worthwhile for such moderate gain. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Big Deal Days in October or Prime Day next year held to a two- or three-day period.
And frankly, we wouldn’t blame them. We love Prime Day, and we’re more than happy with YoY growth. But with these results, we have to wonder how much juice there is left to squeeze out of Amazon’s flagship event.
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