#109 - Amazon PPC Stats: Prime Day 2025 vs 2024

#109 - Amazon PPC Stats: Prime Day 2025 vs 2024 Speaker 1: Today we're taking a deep dive into the Amazon PPC performance for Prime Day. We're getting down and dirty with the stats comparing 2025's performance to 2024. Did Amazon's historic change to four days of Prime Day set new records? Or did it simply ruin the magic of Christmas in July? Speaker 2: We're uncovering the data today on That Amazon Ads Podcast. Speaker 1: Alexa, play That Amazon Ads Podcast. Unknown Speaker: Which one would you like to hear? Speaker 1: The best one. Unknown Speaker: Okay, now playing that Amazon ads podcast. These gentlemen are completely changing the game. Speaker 2: After listening to that Amazon ads podcast, my ads are finally profitable. Unknown Speaker: I also heard they're pretty cute. Speaker 1: All right, my friends and family, Andrew and I have spent almost the whole day so far working with our developers to query our database of AdLabs users to pull in as many insights as we can around what exactly happened with Prime Day in July of 2025. The results on LinkedIn are mixed. The results that you hear from Amazon We are mixed. Can we believe them? Can we believe what other agencies are saying? Lots to uncover and unpack, but Andrew and I have gone through the data. We've got a lot of things we're excited to share with you and we'll talk it through. But Andrew, first up. How are you doing? Just kidding. We don't care. What do you have for us? Interesting insights. Speaker 2: I was going to say, I don't know what you were doing all day, but I wasn't spending all day on this. So we got to work on that productivity. But yeah, I'm doing well, man. Speaker 1: It was at least a couple hours. Speaker 2: It was. It was. Yeah, man, doing well. Excited to dive into this Prime Day. 2025 was a little bit different this time. They stretched it instead of two days. It's now four days and so those year-over-year comparisons are a little bit tough to follow. A little bit different comparisons. I think Amazon really just did that because they saw that they weren't gonna hit their numbers for just two days of Prime Day. So they decided to stretch it further and extend that event and excited to dig into all the details around what really happened. Just on Prime Day one, there was a little bit of drama going around on the internet. And it was primarily stimulated by this company called Momentum Commerce. They came out after Prime Day one and said that Amazon sales For Prime Day one, we're down 41% and they are looking at over $7 billion of revenue under management or that they're actually tracking with their softwares and things like that. So it got a lot of backlash. It got a lot of heat. Amazon came out, started saying how that wasn't true. They didn't have access to all of the data and just created kind of this polarizing topic kind of coming through. So yeah, the Overall, I think for my clients, for what we're seeing, Prime Day, you know, turned out pretty well, but excited. Let's just dig into some of the stats here. Speaker 1: Yeah, so we've got the screen share pulled up so you can see what we're looking at. Now, some quick disclaimers on the data. Looking at year over year data, we are using, I mean, obviously everything's anonymized. We're not breaking things out by category. We have no way to tell who was running deals versus no deals. So we just, there's a lot of stuff where we're not able to really like break down. But what we can do is just look at the average Spend, Average Sales, Average CPCs, Conversion Rates, all those things that are still going to be directionally giving us some insight to how things have changed. Now, AdLabs has grown, our user base has grown tremendously in the last 12 months. So just to put it into perspective, we can't compare all of the clients that we currently have connected this July of 2025 compared to last year because A lot more accounts have connected, actually 10 times as many accounts have connected. We've had some accounts disconnect. So to really look at the year over year data, we are only looking at accounts that were connected for the entire month of 2024 and 2025, the entire month of July. So if their advertising account was fully connected for all 30 days, spending a minimum of $100 per day, that's the other criteria. So if someone disconnected their account in the middle of the month or connected in the middle of the month, they're going to be excluded. Or if someone's just a low spender, they're going to be excluded. So the minimum total spend is, I mean, $100 a day times 30 days, $3,000 a month. Obviously, if you average $33,000 a month, then some days you would have been below 100 a day and you would have been cut off. It's geared towards the people that are probably on average spending, call it like $10,000 a month, is kind of where this is landing. And we have 80 total advertising profiles that were fully connected. This is US only, I believe. Both of these years, the year-over-year data, it's about 80-ish advertising accounts in the US spending $10,000 a day. And then we will look specifically at just all of our advertising accounts in July of this year, which is 659 total advertising accounts in the US spending at least $100 a day for 30 consecutive days throughout the month of July. That's just a much larger data set that we can zoom in and get a bit more data around 2025 specifically. But for the year-over-year comparison, we're using that smaller data set to be consistent. Enough disclaimers. Andrew, what are we looking at? What are the callouts? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Lots to dig into here. So just so you know, the first charts that are up here, the tables and everything that we have up there are just comparing the four days of Prime Day in 2025 versus the first two days of Prime Day in 2024 and the last two days post Prime Day for 2024. Honestly, it's not really a fair apples to apples comparison, but I saw some other people doing it this way. Momentum Commerce being one of them had an article that they put out saying that Overall, Amazon sales were up about 5% year over year, and they did this comparison, basically looking at this timeframe. So just kind of mirrored that. Speaker 1: So again, this is for the 80-ish profiles, year over year data. We're seeing in total around 27, 28% growth in total ad sales. Unfortunately, we do not have the total, total sales from Seller Central. So this is only the PPC data here. So looks like on Prime Day 1 this year versus last year, only a 2% increase. Not huge. Prime Day last year was July 16th to the 18th. Is that correct? 16 to 18? It's just the two days, so I think it was 16, 17. 16, 17. 16, 17. So a little bit of a bump on that first day and then obviously looking into like the last two days where we're still running deals this year versus last year, you're going to see some big jumps. So looking at the day-to-day stuff isn't going to be too valuable, but looking at the totals for the whole deal period will be valuable. I was joking with Andrew earlier that This year I feel like there was some unprepared intern who walked into an Amazon meeting that was like all right What's the strategy for Prime Day this year to grow sales and the guy was like? It's it's four days instead of two days and all the Amazon execs were like yes Good well done intern. Let's make it four days. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's entirely possible I'm not 100% sure why they decided to extend it like that, but it is interesting to see you know number one just I The lack of urgency throughout the four days of Prime Day 2, like when it's normally just two days, you get a really big surge on the first day, everybody kind of getting in there. And then the second day, you also see a kind of big surge towards the end of day two, most of the time, because people, it's a lot more urgency around the deals around the event itself. And so people are trying to get in, get their deals and move on with things. But this time, since they extended it a little bit further, We got a little bit of a lift on that first day, but then it kind of just tapers off the last three days of Prime Day. And we, you know, kind of picks back up a little bit on day four, but not super crazy in terms of how much lift we got on that final day. So I think that's just due to that lack of urgency and such an extended timeframe for the overall deal period. Speaker 1: Yep. And something else you'll see here is actually on Prime Day two, Even though sales were actually down year over year, which makes sense, because last year, that's like the last opportunity to grab those deals, make sure you snag them. This year, people have time. So like the sales weren't coming through on Prime Day 2, but folks were still increasing their ad spend more than last year. So that's actually going to equate to an increased ACoS on Day 2. And then that ACoS finally kind of comes down the last two days. But again, that's just including more deals on those time periods compared to previously. Overall, for the entire deals event, it was actually a higher ACOS relative to last year. And, whoa, conversion rates actually down in total relative to last year. Wow, even on day one. Interesting. I mean, we don't know how many of these profiles were running deals, how competitive were they to last year. Speaker 2: And relative to the other days, day one was the highest converting for 2025. And then it kind of picks up there on day four as well. But I don't know about you, my clients did not run any deals. And there was a lot of hesitation around even wanting to run deals just due to the weirdness of the event, the tariffs and all that type of stuff, economic uncertainty. People were more apt to kind of capture higher margin on those deals days. And maybe that was a broader trend that's kind of being felt here. Speaker 1: Yeah. So, I mean, I also don't know about you, Andrew, or any of the listeners, but This was actually the first Prime Day in July that I did not buy anything. And I normally do buy more expensive electronics like a Roomba or, I don't know, an Amazon Fire Stick, something like that. I'm normally shopping for some deals. Electronics typically have the best deals because they've got decent margins. This year I did not. And I think the reason why is because, you know, when Prime Day 1 happens, there's no rush. You're like, I've got, you know, a whole 72 plus hours to look at this. And then by the time Friday rolls around, it's kind of just like, it's Friday evening. I'm not gonna like go spend an hour shopping on Amazon for a deal. And you just kind of like forget about it. And there's nothing super high priority for me to buy anyway. So I just like, let it go. So I think also just having Prime Day end on a Friday was awkward, and probably not great for sales. And I'm actually gonna jump forward to just the 2025 totals, just so you can see what's going on here. So this is a pretty interesting one. This is 659. Total advertising accounts. This is the daily data. It's the daily average data. So we're taking the total totals, which is, well, how much ad spend was that? And it's this much times 659. $250 million total ad spend divided by 659 advertising accounts. So a very average account. I mean, when we say average, that's a combination of some people spending, you know, maybe $6,000 a month, and some other people spending a million dollars a month. So average is not the same as median here. But for what it's worth, the average account spent should be in dollars, as should this. Around $44,000 in the month of July. And you can see what's happening with the spend and sales trends here. And it does look like spend on Friday was actually the lowest spending day. Even though the conversion rates were higher compared to the days two and three of Prime Day, so we actually did get some higher conversion rates and some better ACoS on the fourth day of Prime Day, which was a Friday, but just lower overall volume. I mean, the sales kind of came through, but just lower spend, lower clicks, fewer impressions. Speaker 2: Lower CPCs, lowest CPCs of the four-day event. Speaker 1: Yeah, and why did those CPCs come down? It could just be people running out of budget, people pausing campaigns if products are running out of stock, if the deals funding ran out, whatever. So a few reasons why those CPCs came down. Go ahead. Speaker 2: I could also see people kind of adapting to what they've seen over the last two days. That first day, it makes sense to kind of be aggressive. You don't really know what to expect. You're going into an event period that you've never been through before. But then those two days, those second and third days, you're seeing a lot lower conversion rates. Tapering back the bids, tapering back your aggressiveness and your ad spend. So that could be part of it as well. Speaker 1: Yeah, and fortunately, I mean, if you guys were following us before when we've talked about Prime Day, one of the things that we've flagged is the best deal periods, the best sales opportunities, conversion rates, everything, are the first eight hours of Prime Day and the last eight hours of Prime Day. The first eight hours, people are trying to rush to grab the deals before they go out of stock or run out of funding. The last eight hours are the last minute shoppers. So I was smart enough with my clients that I was managing to increase bids on day one I actually used a day-parting schedule within AdLabs and just day-parted it out throughout that whole four-day block. And well, really the whole week, I had a custom day party schedule for the week of Prime Day that included pulling back bids before the event, cranking the bids for the first eight hours, returning back to baseline for most of Prime Day, increasing again for the last eight hours, and then cutting drastically, like 50% immediately after Prime Day ended. And you can see down here, well, yeah, you can see here like these conversion rates really start dropping quickly immediately after the deals event. And you can also see down here, Following either the conversion rate or actually the cost per click, revenue per click chart is probably a pretty good one. So you guys should understand by now, if you've been following this podcast for a while, why revenue per click is so important. You can actually see if you were trying to adjust your bids, to time your bids properly and control your bids throughout a seasonal kind of crazy event like this, you want the CPC, the blue line, to follow that red line as much as possible. So if you could perfectly predict this, you would have it increase the highest on the first day, pull back a little bit on day two, come up a tiny bit on day three, a little more on day four, and then sharp pullback, whatever $4.03 403 divided by, what was the other one? 524 minus one, 23%. 23% would have been the appropriate amount to pull back it off from for the next couple of days, just while that kind of prime day hangover settles. And you actually do see that the revenue per click kind of stays lower through the rest of the month, or like the conversion rate stays a little bit lower. Speaker 2: Ignore this. Yeah. The conversion rates kind of taper. If you look at 2024 versus 2025 as well, the conversion rates in 2025 really start to taper off in the back half. Obviously, this is branded. We're shooting this episode on July 31st. The last period. Speaker 1: Side note on that, just because it is July 31st, you guys have to ignore the last five days of July. It looks like ACOS conversions falling on a cliff. That's sales attribution delay. So don't worry about that. Ignore kind of the last like 72 hours. So don't read into that. Keep going. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's basically all I was going to say was that you see it here in 2025, those conversion rates really start to taper off throughout the back half of July after the event, whereas in 2024, To close out July, conversion rates were actually going up. Yeah, trending up. Speaker 1: Go ahead, Andrew. I'm sorry. I keep interrupting you. Speaker 2: You're good. Like you said, we can ignore that back half of July where it's really dipping off there, but go ahead. Speaker 1: If you guys haven't yet, make sure you comment. Maybe some of your own insights of what you experienced in Prime Day of this year. Those comments do help us out in YouTube's algorithm. And of course, always like and subscribe. But something else I kind of, I think might've thrown off some of this year's performance is we had the 4th of July weekend heading right into Prime Day. So it's just kind of awkward, right? Last year falling on like the 16th and 17th. Amazon is very different as opposed to happening like right on the piggyback tail end of 4th of July weekend where like you can see these conversion rates already kind of dropped into that weekend. So now you're trying to like come out and heap things back up in the markets. It was just, it was awkward timing. Four days was weird and landing on a Friday was weird. So it was just a weird execution on Amazon's part. So if your results were underwhelming relative to last year, I would just say that's, I think, an average experience for a lot of people, especially like Andrew was saying with tariffs and all this kind of stuff, inflation, et cetera. Did you find anything else interesting in those articles regarding tariffs, specifically Prime Day, or not too much? Speaker 2: No, just kind of the overall, the way everything netted out, kind of Amazon's reported sales lift was around 5%. Yeah, that's all I really got. I didn't have too much on tariffs itself, but just people kind of calling out the economic climate and how it was the weirdest prime day ever. Speaker 1: Yeah. And so coming back to this whole section, which is only the 80 consistent profiles with true year over year apples to apples comparison. Um, it is, it is weird to see like how these ad sales kind of shaped up like huge on the first day and then like this little mini, you know, hump at the, on the backend, but really not too much compared to like a consistent two days. So I think if anyone was like, if anyone was underwhelmed on day one, and they just tried to like really crank the spend to make up for it on the next few days, you probably ended up in a world of hurt. Yeah, so Prime Day one is just always going to be the most important day for pretty much anyone. So no matter how many days there are, if it's two days, four days, Prime Week, or whatever we end up getting, it's always going to be that first day of deals. That is the biggest opportunity. And is that also when we had the lowest ACoS? No, we did have a lower ACoS on the very final day. But again, that could just be because those those CPCs came down. So conversion rate wise, the best conversion rates are that first day for sure. And then on the tail end, you still want to just like make sure things are staying in budget. But you probably don't want to be increasing your bids per se, not relative to the first day, just because that would cause your A cost to go up. Speaker 2: Yeah, lots of insightful things to be learned here. We'll see how things go in the second half of this year. We've got October Prime Day. You've got, you know, Cyber 5, whatever, Turkey 12. You know, Amazon just keeps taking their deal events and just making them longer. Used to be T5, now it's T12. You know, it's just they're messing with us, I think. But yeah, this is some good stuff and hopefully we'll help you navigate any future prime days if they decide to switch it up on us again. Speaker 1: We hope this information is helpful. If you want more Amazon PPC stats such as these, comment, let us know what you'd like to see and we'll make that information for you. We'll catch you guys next time on That Amazon Ads Podcast.