The holiday shopping season is fast approaching with Prime Big Deals Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and December gift shopping periods representing some of the year's largest sales opportunities. To help make this year’s holiday shopping events a success for your brand, I’ve outlined some key recommendations below:

Diversify your traffic sources

Brands need to adjust their advertising strategies during deal periods. While Sponsored Products are popular, recent trends show important shifts in effectiveness.

Last year, our agency observed that Sponsored Products cost per click (CPCs) increased by 11% month-over-month during Prime Day, while other ad formats rose only 5%.¹ This made it challenging for brands to maintain both visibility and profitability, especially for top keywords.

As a result, a balanced approach is recommended. For example, Sponsored Display with product ASIN targeting and views remarketing, combined with Sponsored Brands top-of-search placement, can be effective. Through Amerge, we've seen both Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display campaigns achieve new-to-brand (NTB) rates exceeding 70%, making them particularly valuable for customer acquisition.²

Look for international opportunities

With Ireland being Amazon's most recent marketplace addition, their expanding global presence offers opportunities in new markets. Some international marketplaces show faster growth and lower advertising costs.

Amerge's benchmarks from last year's event reveal compelling cost differences: while U.S. sponsored ads averaged $0.84 CPC, Germany's costs were 26% lower at $0.62, and Italy's were nearly half at $0.46. This translates to substantially lower customer acquisition costs in these marketplaces. Most notably, our agency clients' sponsored ads return on ad spend (ROAS) in Italy outperformed the U.S. by 162%.³

Measure what matters

Amerge's Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) customer journey analysis shows Amazon customers typically engage with two to four ads before converting.⁴ Understanding how these touchpoints work together is crucial for optimizing ad efficiency and profitability.

While basic console metrics like CPC and ROAS provide initial insights, they're limited by last-touch attribution. For comprehensive campaign understanding, combine the new conversion path reporting with AMC insights. This enables analysis of customer journey metrics, including NTB ROAS and historical deal event performance.

For complete effectiveness measurement, merge advertising metrics with Vendor or Seller Central data. Our amerge.view dashboard provides clear visibility of ASIN-level total advertising cost of sales (TACOS) and sales uplift, essential metrics for evaluating campaign profitability.

Pro tip: Running Amazon DSP? Maximize impact by setting up customer journey remarketing based on sponsored ad touchpoints and leveraging events-specific AMC audiences.

Stay in budget

The holiday shopping period brings intense competition, with CPCs climbing during lead-up and peaking during the event. Strategic budget management is crucial to maintain visibility throughout, especially during high-converting evening hours. We recommend increasing daily budgets by three to five times normal spend, with similarly aggressive bid adjustments.
Throughout the event, stay close to your campaigns to not run into the dreaded "Out-of-Budget" blackout. If stretching the budget significantly during the deal days isn't feasible, dayparting offers a viable tactical adjustment—concentrating your campaigns solely on peak converting hours, a feature readily available in the advertising console. However, if the opportunity presents itself, we strongly urge you to harness the power of Amazon Marketing Stream. This game-changing data feed, accessible via 3P tools like our in-house campaign management software “amerge.engine,” delivers hourly bid optimization. Armed with this intelligence, you can maximize your "in-budget" time and boost performance. In fact, for campaigns leveraging Amazon Marketing Stream, we have seen, across Amerge clients, an average ROAS increase of 5%.⁵

Take advantage of increased traffic pre-event

In the weeks before shopping events, increased Amazon traffic provides an opportunity to educate customers about your brand and upcoming promotions. Focus on awareness and consideration through your Amazon store and detail pages, rather than purely optimizing for ROAS.

Deploy a mix of Sponsored TV, Sponsored Display video, and Sponsored Brands video alongside your standard campaigns. For Amazon DSP users, Prime Video ads and online video on 3P websites can enhance awareness and consideration stages.

During the event, shift to remarketing through Sponsored Display views or Amazon DSP with responsive e-commerce creatives (RECs). This ensures previous brand engagers see your deals. For regularly purchased items, consider purchase remarketing to inform existing customers about your Prime Day offers.

Looking ahead

I remember my first Prime Day in 2015 well during my time in Amazon Ads. We didn’t have the tools available like we do now, and the ROAS metric was not even launched. Times have changed, and I am happy that we now have so many advertising products, tools, and insights available that inform the shopping events strategy of our Amerge clients. I recommend that you use these resources as well, and if you need support on the way, don’t hesitate to reach out.

About the author

Max Rottenaicher has led Amerge Germany since 2022 and co-hosts the weekly wieCommerce? podcast on e-commerce trends. Founded in 2020, Amerge provides global Amazon advertising solutions, combining marketplace expertise with proprietary technology including amerge.engine and amerge.view.

Sources

^1–5 Advertiser-provided data, DE, 2024–2025.