Preparing for Amazon’s BFCM Sale: Insights & Strategies

It’s that time of the year again–Amazon’s Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) sale is fast approaching. Last year consumers spent $38 billion overall online during Cyber Week 2023, which was an uplift of 7.8% YoY, $9.8 billion of which was reported as Black Friday shopping sales. 

This year, Amazon’s Cyber Week sale offers advertisers another huge opportunity to build brand awareness, engage with new-to-brand (NTB) shoppers, and drive sales. Here are 3 tactics to remember as you build out your BFCM strategy:

Tactic 1: Align your Amazon ads strategy to consumer purchasing patterns

Consumers tend to shop a little differently during peak events like BFCM, browsing and researching products in the lead-up to the sale as they plan out their purchases. Because of this, it’s important to make sure you’re building up visibility during this consideration period. We recommend bidding aggressively early to build organic rank and maintain top-of-search (TOS) placements ahead of Black Friday. While you might not see a lot of conversions during this period, this is a great time to garner traffic to your listing and encourage shoppers to add your product to their cart so that when the sale hits, they’re ready to check out. 

Once cyber week arrives, CPCs will increase, so you’ll need to be strategic and leverage your ad spend efficiently. Looking back at Amazon Stream data from last year's sale can help you identify the days and hours that see the highest conversion rates for your brand. You’ll want to ensure that your budget can extend throughout the day to reach those peak shopping periods. 

After BFCM is over, typically CPCs will remain high but volume will teeter off and conversion rates (CVR) will start to decline. But that doesn’t mean you should automatically pull back your ad spend. Having a lead-out strategy can help you maintain rank and visibility as we move into the holiday and gifting period. This is also a good time to consider re-targeting strategies using Sponsored Display, the Amazon DSP, and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) audiences to capture customers who were new-to-brand and build cross-selling campaigns. 

Tactic 2: Leverage multiple ad types to boost visibility and capture demand

During the lead-up to BFCM and throughout the Cyber Week sale competition is at an all-time high, so you need to take up as much space on Amazon as possible. But you’ll want to do so with a variety of different ad formats that encourage clicks and conversions. Your content will be key here–high-quality images and videos can set your ads apart and entice shoppers to click your ad and ultimately purchase your product. When leveraging video within your ads, make sure your product's unique selling points and brand story come across without volume. Many shoppers may have settings on their browsers that automatically mute videos on landing pages, including the search results.

To increase product visibility on Amazon’s search engine result page (SERP) and maximize your paid and organic share of voice (SOV), you’ll want to use Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display ads. Focus on the most important keywords within your category. You can find these by looking at Search Frequency Rank (SFR) within the Brand Analytics Search Term report in Amazon. This will help you better understand what keywords are searched for the most by shoppers relative to your products. Isolating specific high-volume, high-performing keywords in their own campaigns with top-of-search (TOS) multipliers can support you in targeting the highest placements possible on these key terms, with more control over bids and budgets.

Another strategy is to target competitors to take up space on their PDPs and the terms they themselves bid on. Through Amazon’s “dark search” functionality, targeting competitor ASINs can also target the search terms they rank highly on. Consider setting up targeted PAT campaigns to support this, but remember that if a competitor has brand defense tactics in place, this strategy could get expensive. 

Tactic 3: Create dayparting schedules to avoid ads going dark during key periods of BFCM

During BFCM, CPCs increase, and winning the most visible placements on key search terms will become more expensive. To avoid going dark, you need to review your campaigns throughout the day and ensure you can stretch your budget into the evenings. Leveraging insights from Amazon Marketing Stream, you can build tailored dayparting schedules to ensure you don’t exhaust your budget before shoppers are ready to buy. 

Dayparting is a helpful tactic to help control more limited budgets. These schedules can help you conserve budgets when traffic and conversions are low and ramp up ad spend when shoppers are most likely to purchase. One thing to be careful with is the extent of your dayparting, as the Amazon algorithm can be a bit fussy with huge changes too often (i.e. really aggressive up and down % multiplier changes on an hourly basis).

Monitoring your campaigns and budget throughout the day is crucial to avoid going dark. With Perpetua’s Real-Time Budget Optimization tool, you can get notified in real-time when your campaigns have hit a certain threshold of budget for the day, helping you more strategically shift budgets during the event to avoid losing out on sales. 

Looking for more Amazon Ads strategies to help you make the most of this year’s BFCM sale? We’ve got you covered. To help you maximize visibility, boost sales, and drive overall brand growth, we’ve created a BFCM playbook.

To take your Amazon advertising to the next level, from BFCM and beyond, reach out to us at hello@perpetua.io.