Amazon Prime Day 2024: The Results
It’s that time again: every year, Acadia sifts through the shopping mania that is Amazon Prime Day to gather the most compelling insights, results and key takeaways from the summer consumer holiday, measuring what worked, what didn’t, and what’s changed from last year.
Acadia’s Project Manager João Couceiro da Costa and Retail Media Specialist Dusan Tepavac crunched the numbers to see what strategies won this year for Amazon Prime Day, as brands pulled out the stops to make the most of the shopping event – which once again broke records for online sales volume.
According to Adobe Analytics, this year’s Prime Day sales were up 11% in the US over last year, with shoppers spending $14.2 billion in two days. There were signs the economy is rebounding as discretionary spending came out to play: compared to last year’s shopping focus on essentials, this year’s go-to items were TVs and tablets.
With so much activity across the two-day stretch, we break down what brands need to know.
Brand participation held steady, with more deals
It wasn’t the year to opt out of Prime Day: about as many brands participated in the event this year, with 80% of Acadia’s clients running deals – nearly identical to last year’s participation rate. In 2023, participation had increased 11% over 2022. In general, we’ve seen that we’ve reached a near-saturation point of participation, where the brands with products that make sense to discount nearly always participate, while a small minority of clients sit out the holiday due to their category or other brand preferences not to participate. Very few (roughly 1%) of clients were forced to not participate at all due to supply chain or operational hurdles.
Not only were brands not sitting out, they were putting more of their catalogs on sale. More clients ran promotions for their full catalogs this year, at 41.6% versus 37% in 2023. Overall, the level of catalog enrollment increased over 2023.
This all-in approach shows that brands are more willing to blast promotions to get noticed, and speaks to the higher level of deal merchandising and media spend competition that we witnessed this year when compared to years past.
Fewer coupons, more PEDs
Prime Exclusive Discounts stole the show this year, as coupons took a backseat. PEDs were the most implemented promotion this year for Prime Day, replacing last year’s coupon surge. That move paid off: clients that used PEDs saw, on average, 247% more sales than last year’s Prime Day. Brands that leveraged a blend of coupons and PEDs saw a 170% increase in sales vs. last year, whereas coupons and Lightning Deals alone saw lifts of 114% and 110% respectively.
As a whole, deployment of most promotion types were up in honor of Prime Day: Lighting Deals, Best Deals, Cross Promotions and Percent-Off Price Discounts saw more implementation to get more customers over the line. PEDs were still far and away the promo type that saw the largest increase in participation across our clients, with 43% of brands running PEDs this year:
More orders, lower value
Volume trumped order value this year, with customers hunting for the best deals and discounts. What else is Prime Day for, after all?
This year, Acadia clients saw a 15% drop in average selling price versus last Prime Day, but more people were buying: this decrease in order value was offset by an increase of 47% more orders during the two-day event.
For non-participating brands, a boost
No discounts? Prime Day still gave Acadia’s promotion-averse clients a boost, thanks to the sheer traffic and activity happening on the site. Non-participating clients saw a bigger jump in orders compared to monthly averages – and a bigger payoff than last year.
Of the 20% of Acadia clients that didn’t participate, sales jumped more than 116% during Prime Day when compared to the prior 30 days. Last year that lift in sales was 51%.
That’s another sign consumers this year are feeling more flush with cash compared to last year: some that went to Amazon looking for a deal were still willing to pay full price for the right product.
But the halo effect was still no match for the real thing. As for the participating brands, orders jumped 383% during Prime Day over typical MTD averages – about the same as last year’s increase.
Advertising highlights
The two overwhelming themes that played out in media spend for this year’s Prime Day were:
- The continuation of increased shopper browsing and purchase volume
- The continuation of competition going after that increased shopping volume, with Pacvue reporting that average CPCs increased as much as +70% compared to the year prior.
Some particular metrics that highlight these trends:
- This year, ad sales were up 62.9% over last year, whereas in 2023, ad sales rose 338% from the year prior. Volume continued to increase, but competition meant less of a dramatic sales increase from the year prior
- Investment in ad spend increased 98% in 2024 over 2023
- Efficiency gains held sway in 2023, but this year efficiency fell, with the advertising cost of sales (ACOS) up 21.6% year over year.
- While the all in cost-per-click across all of our clients rose 2%, conversion rates fell 22.5%, supporting the drop in efficiency
- Average order value increased by 8.2%.
- DSP had by far the best performance in terms of efficiency, with returns of $11.18 - indicating upper funnel ad inventory that was less competitive when compared to lower funnel onsite search
Sponsored products for the the win
Sponsored products are the tried and true type of campaign that brands deploy on Prime Day: with massive amounts of searches happening on the site, and customers more time-crunched looking for deals, getting to the top of the search results is prime positioning, no pun intended. Top-of-search placement also has the best efficiency of Amazon’s campaign types.
It’s vital that brands have a lead-in strategy to win those placements early: once you’ve hit Prime Day week, it’s too late. Start preparing earlier in the year with an increase in budgets and bids to win the top of the search. Let’s look at the numbers.
- This year, spend on sponsored products rose 82.4%, compared to last year's 86.8% increase.
- But in 2024, sponsored products pulled more weight, generating 85.8% of sales, up from 79.4% last year.
- Sponsored products also had the best ACOS at around 27.5% - though not dramatically different than the 28.6% ACOS we saw across all ad placements
- Sponsored products conversions stayed stable this year, while conversions for the rest of the campaign types decreased YoY.
Winning the search placement should be brands’ top priority because it’s a proven formula: during Prime Day, conversions are high enough to counteract the climbing CPCs, allowing brands to still achieve ACOS targets in these positions if they’ve implemented the correct strategies in advance of the big days.
Other advertising highlights
- Investing in sponsored brand campaigns? The data from this year’s campaigns indicated that SB ads leading to the branded environment of a storefront produced better efficiency than other SB ad formats and destinations - particularly when compared to sponsored brand video campaigns that generated awareness but less day-of sales.
- Manual keyword targeting remained our clients’ No. 1 investment by targeting type this year, given its ability to specifically target critical high-converting search terms on days when bids need to escalate quickly to maintain position.
Finally, a key development that we saw play out in the media side of Amazon was the integration and deployment of Amazon Marketing Cloud’s capabilities for audience targeting. The early data indicates a strong case for