3 strategies to drive growth with Amazon Marketing Stream

Tracking how and when key metrics change throughout the day and across the week is important to understanding how your budget is being allocated and can help identify where there is opportunity to be more efficient or adjust your bids to better align with your goals. 

Using Amazon Marketing Stream, you can see performance by hour of the day and day of the week, allowing you to gather insights about your advertising performance, and create nuanced and data-informed hourly dayparting schedules. 

Insights garnered from Amazon Marketing Stream can help you optimize your ads strategy to achieve a variety of objectives including maximizing sales, visibility, and efficiency. 

Maximizing Sales

To grow sales, you need to identify which times of day and days of the week sales volume is the highest. Other metrics to consider when prioritizing sales are clicks and conversion rate, as these are additional indicators of when customers are more likely to purchase.

Once you identify intervals with high sales volume, we suggest finding times of the day when CPCs are also the lowest as this indicates a high return for minimal cost. Advertisers should then bid more aggressively on those time intervals to help drive incremental attributed and total sales. Conversely, during less optimal hours (times with low sales volume) we recommend reducing bids so that this budget can be allocated to the more favorable hours. 

Maximizing Visibility

To maximize visibility, advertisers should look at impressions, click-through rate, and cost per click, as these metrics are great indicators of when customers in the market are browsing your specific category.

For example, using the sample heat map above, we can identify that impressions are highest during the late morning into early afternoon periods across most days of the week. This would mean, you’d want to increase your bids during these times to ensure you stay competitive, maximizing reach and visibility within your category’s audience. 

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Maximizing Efficiency

Shifting your investment away from low-profit periods (high expected ACOS) to focus on specific hours of the day — or days of the week — when your campaign ACOS is lowest helps to maximize efficiency.

We suggest using Amazon Marketing Stream insights to determine when ACOS and CPC are the highest and recommend adjusting bids during those hours by reducing spend (eg. 50%). You can then reallocate this ad budget to hours of the day and days of the week that have lower ACOS. 

Additionally, advertisers can look at clicks to identify opportunities to drive greater efficiency.  If clicks are consistently higher from 4 PM to 5 PM but generate low orders, this indicates that during this time people are likely not in the buying mood. It may be more beneficial to shift budgets/bids from this period to another period to generate better sales without wasting ad dollars.

Best practices to build dayparting schedules

• Because sales have a 14 to 30-day attribution period, we recommend reviewing extended historical sales data for at least a month to understand sales trends accurately before setting up your first schedules.

• If you have a low budget that doesn’t last the whole day, use dayparting to turn off campaigns during inefficient hours (12–6 am). You can also use Perpetua’s Real Time Budget Optimization to get a notification when budgets hit a certain threshold during the day. 

• If your campaign ACOS is higher than your target ACOS, and bid adjustments don’t work, use dayparting to reduce wasted ad spend and lower ACOS further.

• Audit your campaigns regularly to track any changes in shopping behavior and fine-tune your dayparting schedules as needed. 

Overall, Amazon Marketing Stream’s granular hourly insights are a critical tool to better optimize your ads and maximize the impact of your ad spend. To learn more about how you can use Amazon Marketing Stream and get started, reach out to us at hello@perpetua.io.