Mastering Prime Day 2025

Amazon’s Prime Day remains one of the most critical retail tentpole events globally. Whether the event spans two days or extends to four, the foundation of success remains the same: implementing a comprehensive Amazon Marketing Cloud Prime Day strategy. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), with its unparalleled audience insights and measurement capabilities, enables brands to unlock full-funnel performance and optimize their Amazon Ads strategy throughout every phase of Prime Day. 

Prime Day Historical Insights: Learning from the Past

Analyzing past Prime Day performance offers essential context as brands plan for 2025. In 2024, Prime Day delivered 2.8x more impressions and 2.6x more sales compared to July daily averages. Sponsored Ads saw a 187% lift in impressions and a 141% lift in ad sales, though ROAS remained stable. Deals proved a significant growth lever: brands running deals saw sales increase 3.1x in 2024 and 3.4x in 2023. Brands without deals also benefited but saw more modest lifts: 48% in 2024 and 67% in 2023, often with weaker ROAS due to conversion rate pressures.

Hourly trends in 2023 revealed early spikes in CPC and sustained CVR strength throughout each day as shopper urgency drove conversions. Brands layering Amazon DSP with Sponsored Ads saw 2.6x higher purchase rates, 3.6x sales lifts, and 2.7x stronger ROAS.

Amazon Marketing Cloud: The Gamechanger for Prime Day Success

Amazon Marketing Cloud allows brands to go beyond surface-level metrics and activate highly refined audience and bidding strategies essential for Prime Day. Brands can build audiences across Cart Abandoners, PDP Viewers, Repeat Purchasers, New-to-Brand buyers, and Cross-Channel Overlap segments. They can also use AMC Lookalike Audiences (LAA) for precise upper-funnel targeting. AMC enables Purchase Timeline Queries to align lead times with NTB conversion behavior. Moreover, it optimizes bids using audience insights, boosting high-intent segments while suppressing lower-intent traffic to stabilize CPC and ROAS.

Amazon Marketing Cloud Prime Day Strategy: The 3-Stage Approach

PHASE 1: Lead-In (2-4 Weeks Before Prime Day)

Objective: Build demand, visibility, and retargeting pools.

• Sponsored Ads: Launch ranking campaigns on core keywords to improve organic rank, target category-level keywords to build awareness, leverage the full suite of Sponsored Ads
  • How to Utilize AMC: Boost bids using AMC Lookalike Audiences (LAA)

• DSP: Target in-market/lifestyle audiences for upper-funnel demand, use overlap reports and 365-day purchase audiences to refine targeting, build lookalikes from CRM/email lists via hashed data.
  • How to Utilize AMC: Run Purchase Timeline Query to determine average numbers of days between first ad exposure and NTB purchase, use 1P data to build predictive audiences and LAA segments, analyze prior event performance to guide strategy.

PHASE 2: Event (4 Days of Prime Day)

Objective: Maximize conversions, defend brand presence, and retarget high-intent shoppers.

• Sponsored Ads: Apply placement modifiers to win top-of-search, run brand defense campaigns to block competitors on branded terms, Sponsored Display retargeting
  • How to Utilize AMC: Layer AMC audiences in DSP-exposed users, PDP viewers, ATC audiences, plus Support bid boosts across PPC based on AMC insights

• DSP: Retarget PDP viewers, cart abandoners, and Prime Day site visitors; use dynamic creatives to showcase offers
  • How to Utilize AMC: Create custom retargeting audiences from Lead In engagement, monitor NTB sales and audience overlap where possible.

PHASE 3: Lead-Out (2-4 Weeks Post-Event)

Objective: Re-engage recent shoppers and optimize future strategy.

• Sponsored Ads: Retarget non-converters, upsell Prime Day buyers, and gradually normalize spend
  • How to Utilize AMC: Use AMC New-To-Brand (NTB) audiences to boost bids on category keywords

• DSP: Retarget Prime Day viewers and cart abandoners, re-engage existing customers with Subscribe & Save or repeat messaging, build lookalikes of Prime Day buyers to expand reach post-event.
  • How to Utilize AMC: Run Tentpole Analysis (Lead In vs Event vs Lead Out performance), evaluate repeat purchase timelines to inform DSP windows.

How the 4-Day Prime Day Extension May Impact Performance

Extending Prime Day to 4 days alters the psychology of shopper urgency. In previous 2-day events, peak performance often occurred in condensed windows as consumers rushed to capitalize on deals. With more time, we may see more evenly distributed conversion activity across the event window. There will be lower risk of early-day budget exhaustion, but increased importance of pacing and daily spend management. The longer window provides greater opportunity for sequential messaging and promotional phasing across multiple days. It also creates larger retargeting pools and richer AMC audience data as shoppers engage at varied points in the event. CPC spikes may be slightly moderated due to less concentrated demand on any single day, though competition will remain fierce.

Ultimately, the 4-day window offers brands more control but requires disciplined execution. AMC will be instrumental not only in shaping audience targeting before and during the event, but also in post-event performance analysis that will inform strategies for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Prime Day 2026.