Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just a few weeks away! I hope each of you has taken time to do the necessary prep work to make this holiday selling season your best ever.
If you want to make sure that all of your bases are covered, our Amazon Seller’s Guide for Higher Profits on Black Friday & Cyber Monday, is an excellent free resource that you can use to enhance your current plans, or to quickly build out solid game time strategies and tactics for BF/CM.
You should also view these two major shopping days as opportunities to focus on identifying and monitoring any trends that may be useful in creating future marketing strategies for your Amazon business.
Document shopper behavior (like peak shopping times and lulls) and major trends that take place within and outside of the Amazon marketplace during the holiday selling season, for clues that can provide insights about what lies ahead on the road to 2020.
With the proper application, knowledge is indeed power; and knowledge has its origins in awareness.
In this spirit, the Entourage team and I would like to share with you those trends that we have been monitoring over the previous three months, delving into what portents these data tea leaves may reveal.
Our new Community Data Tool is the nexus where on-going data mining lives to connect the trends within the Amazon marketplace, in order to give you relevant and actionable insights to help drive your Amazon business forward, ahead of the competition in your niche.
Here’s what was revealed by the data over the last three months…
1.) Average Revenue trend – there has been a decline in the average revenue per user (PPC revenue). There was also a decline in organic revenue as well.
2.) ACoS trend – it appears to have been relatively steady (consistently in the low 30s) over the past three months until October 25th. ACoS spiked upwards (the highest recorded), which corresponded with the lowest recorded revenue. While I have my suspicions as to what internal dynamics may be shifting within Amazon, I’m going to hold off in sharing them with you until the team has collected more data to better substantiate things. Sellers within our community aren’t spending more, however, they are getting less of a return for each ad dollar spent (less sales).
3.) Impressions trend – impressions have been trending slightly upwards (because Amazon has made available more Ad space), however, the click through rate percentage (the number of clicks per impression), has gone down.
4.) Conversion Rate Percentage trend – this remained steady and high until October 21st when it started to trend downwards, reaching a low of 11% (which is the lowest rate recorded for this data set).
5.) Average Cost Per Click trend – it remained consistent for the three month period that we monitored, however this usually starts to rise as sellers enter the holiday selling season, when sellers raise their bid prices (usually concurrent with Black Friday and Cyber Monday).
6.) Performance by Day of Week trend – the highest revenue was captured on Sunday and Monday
- The lowest average revenues realized, occurred on Friday. (This information is of particular usefulness, if your holiday selling strategies include Dayparting, or careful control of your ad spend budgeting).
- True ACoS – (organic and PPC revenues combined – how much you are spending to get organic and PPC sales) appears to be consistent throughout the week, favoring no day in particular, (perhaps a little higher on Saturday and Sunday, but not statistically significant for this data set).
- Ad Spend – is lowest on Friday, with the highest day for ad spend being Sunday.
- Impressions – sellers receive the greatest number of impressions on Tuesday and Wednesday.
- Orders – the highest orders count occurred on Sundays.
- Conversion Rate – appears to be steady throughout the days of the week, favoring no day in particular.
7.) Ad Spend Per 1,000 Impressions – (the amount of money sellers are spending to get a thousand impressions on Amazon) – the amount being spent to get a thousand impressions has gone down over the last month (October), however the ad spend per order (the amount of money spent on ad spend to secure an order), that figure has risen over the previous three months.
In addition to the above trends, the team and I tracked data (to circle back to where we began), going back to 2017 – 2018, that revealed some interesting trends tied to Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
For Black Friday 2018, in terms of conversion rate, (we broke the data down into these categories to be tracked: the week before BF, the actual day, and the day after BF), the best conversion rate is on Black Friday.
- The lowest ACoS was also realized on Black Friday.
- Sales and Average number of orders highest on Black Friday.
- Lowest Average Cost per Click on Black Friday.
- Lowest Average Click Through Rate on BF.
The Day After Black Friday:
- conversion rate continues to be high, however, the ACoS does rise noticeably.
- slight increase in the average cost per click.
- slight increase in the click through rate percentage.
In 2018 for Cyber Monday, there was a significantly higher conversion rate…it was a higher conversion rate percentage than on Black Friday of the same year.
Cyber Monday had a better ACoS (lower than on Black Friday).
It also saw a higher sales average compared to Black Friday.
The Average Cost Per Click was lower on Cyber Monday.
The Click Through Rate Percentage was lower on Cyber Monday.
Cyber Monday saw a much higher number of impressions.
Trends within the world of PPC are in a state of continuous change…
It is indicative of the industry as a whole… adapting to the ever-changing desires, needs, and tastes of the multitude of online shoppers here in the US and around the world. With that in mind, every Amazon seller should make it a part of their 'best practices' processes to stay aware of developing trends, in order to develop strategies that allow them to take full advantage of those trends in their marketing and optimization efforts.
The Entourage team and I believe that an on-going analysis of PPC trends within our Seller Community will grant us valuable insights into shifts inside of our industry, with our competitors and even reveal new unexpected traits/habits of our customers that can help us to improve how we serve them.
