Understanding Amazon shopping trends by the day of the week:
Selling on the Amazon platform continues to get more competitive so identifying and capitalizing on sales trends can help sellers stand out on the platform while maximizing sales without giving up on profitability.
One of the trends that we track is shopping habits and how the day of the week performance impacts key metrics like sales and conversion rates. Understanding the shopping trends of your customers and then having the tools to utilize this information in your advertisements can give you a huge advantage as a seller.
Since we are able to aggregate data throughout multiple markets and over 60,000 unique products, we’re able to see wide-ranging trends that we can apply down to the account level. In the article below, we will cover how shopping trends fluctuate during the week and how you can utilize this knowledge in your account.
What is The Busiest Day of the Week for Ad Sales On Amazon?
While each customer is unique on the Amazon platform, we definitely see trends in our client’s accounts in overall sales and conversion rates. Previous studies of online shopping like this 2017 study from Workarea.com or this 2016 analysis from Similarweb.com both indicated that Sunday and Monday were the busiest days for online sales.
Intuitively, this makes sense right? People enjoy their weekend and then as they prepare for the workweek, they do a lot of their online shopping on Sunday and when back at work on Monday. Except for one thing – that’s simply not what we’re seeing in the recent data.
Tuesday and Saturday top the list for Highest Sales and Saturday Takes the Win for Most Traffic
Trending up Amazon ad sales, we see that both Tuesday and Saturday had sales 20% above the average with Tuesday having slightly higher figures. Monday came in at the third spot slightly above the average for total sales.
Next, we took a look into our impression data which is a good measure of overall traffic. Saturday is the clear winner here for Amazon sales traffic followed by Tuesday and then Monday.
So if traffic is higher on Saturday but overall sales are comparable to Tuesday, then conversion rates must be a lot lower on Saturday, right? That’s exactly what we saw in the data. Wednesday actually came in highest for conversion rate with a general trend of higher conversion rates early in the workweek.
Making Sense of Amazon Weekly Sales Trends
Since the previous studies in 2016 and 2017, we’re seeing yet another shift in online shopping trends. As online shopping becomes more ingrained in our lives, people seem to be transitioning from using their free time on Saturdays from browsing at the mall to browsing on Amazon. The continued troubles of shopping malls and brick and mortar stores echo this viewpoint.
Browsing is a good summary of Amazon shoppers on Saturday. While traffic is higher, the conversion rate is the lowest on Saturday meaning that shoppers are using their free time to continue to browse but are less likely to make a purchase on an individual listing. However, since there’s so much more traffic on Saturday, total sales tie with Tuesday.
When people return back to work on Monday, their habits seem to change from browsing to more focused buying decisions. Conversion rates are higher during this period allowing Tuesday to take the top spot in total sales even though total traffic is lower than on Saturday.
Utilizing High Conversion Trends Through Bidding
Amazon Advertising gives us the power to take advantage of these trends in our customer’s shopping behaviors. Since we can judge when people are most likely to convert to paying customers, we can use the bids on our ads to target these customers at ideal periods.
By increasing the bids when our customers are most likely to buy, we can increase the frequency our ads are shown leading to more clicks and sales. Since your customers will convert at a higher rate during these times, we can afford to pay more since we’ll be getting a better return per click.
Taking the same approach, if we know our customers are least likely to buy from us on Saturday, we can reduce the bids over this period so we’re not spending as much but still getting a good return (since we’re not paying as much per click).
If your competitors are just using a fixed bid approach while you’re able to outbid them over the highest converting periods while letting them win the bids for ads during the lowest chances for conversions (wasting money), you can have a huge advantage over your competition.
Apply This Strategy to Your Amazon Advertising
If you want to take the DIY approach, there are some quick moves you can make to take advantage of these trends. The first approach is to use these overall results to manually boost bids on the highest conversion days and then reduce them when sales typically don’t convert as well.
While we see these general trends over all of our accounts, there are definitely outliers where some clients don’t fit in these cases at all. To make sure you’re targeting the best sales trends for your specific account, you can use our Day of the Week tool to analyze your trends over the week. We will outline how much we recommend adjusting your bids on each day of the week to take these trends into account.
And the Good News is – it is ABSOLUTELY FREE!
All you need to do is just upload your Search Term report from Seller Central and our tool will provide you a detailed analysis. This will include various metrics in an easy-to-interpret bar graph chart with bid adjustment suggestions as shown below.
Make Use Of Tools To Analyze Your Sales Trends And Automate The Bidding
If you don’t feel like babysitting all of your bids each day, there are tools to your rescue. Our automated tool, Trend Analyzer, will continually reviewing your customer’s trends and automatically adjust your bids to make sure your ads are getting shown just when your customers are most likely to buy. Given the fact that the Trend Analyzer is integrated with our other bidding modules (optimizing your bids based on hundreds of different data points on the keyword and product level), you can sleep well at night knowing your ad strategy is giving you a huge advantage over your competition.
Bottom Line
We suggest you take full advantage of our Day of the Week Tool to understand your sales trends and incorporate the recommended daily bid adjustments into your overall advertising strategy.
If you’d like us to take care of this for you or if you’d like a second opinion on your current advertising performance, you can schedule a free consultation with our PPC experts.
