What Prime Day(s) looked like to one small seller

[littleman]

I'm posting a graph so you could see the relative difference Prim Day (actually two days) had on my order volume.  As you could see there was a small upswing the day before, then a sharp drop in sales after Prime Day ends and then a rebound.   I had no special promotions going, just the usual low volume PPC and nothing on sale.

[rcjordan]

So just the massive increase in Prime Days traffic with people in a buying frenzy bled over to your PPC.

[littleman]

That graph is sales, not traffic.  PPC was up, but the ratio of non-PPC to PPC didn't change.  Amazon created a shopping event out of nothing.

[rcjordan]

> created a shopping event out of nothing.

On my feeds, the Prime buzz this year was bigger than Black Friday.

[ergophobe]

What happens to bids as Prime Day approaches? Does traffic cost a lot more?

Last year on Black Friday/Cyber Monday we tried an idea where way out when BFCM where we bid a few months in advance when bids were really cheap and tried to get people signed up to newsletters and Facebook to get early notification of BFCM sales and it worked fairly well. I wonder if you could do that for Prime Day.

Are you trying to build a list and customer base, or is your business not conducive to that?

[littleman]

The average PPC for the month was $38, the first day of prime was $52 and the second was $46, so it was more than average.  The cost per conversion was lower than average.  I do about 10-15% of my sales in Amazon from PPC traffic.  The CPC was very much on line with every other day, tight PPC campaigns though.

[ergophobe]

$52/click. Ouch!  You need good margins and conversion to pull that off.

If you're making a profit at those rates, my hat is off to you. That's some good work!

[littleman]

Oh man, that's what I get for using a cell phone and posting late at night.  Add a "0." before those numbers.; so $0.38, $0.52 and $0.46 respectively.

[ergophobe]

Ah! Okay. Right. I think anything over a dollar is expensive.