Last-Minute Ad Tips for Q4 Success Plus Q1 Strategy Ideas

Advertising Success in the Short-Term 

Before we dive into the intricacies of Amazon’s latest updates, here are last-minute steps advertisers can take to promote their seasonal deals and discounts. In a landscape as dynamic as this, quick and strategic adjustments can make a substantial impact on your year-end results. 

For instance, advertisers can still fine-tune their campaign strategies — even towards the tail-end of the season. Beyond reach and impressions, how are your campaign’s conversion rates? Are your customers dropping off mid-way through their journey? Strong upper-funnel and weak lower-funnel conversions could be a sign of a poor product page. To troubleshoot, take a look at the key details of your product page — pricing, images, and more are all essential details that matter to shoppers.

Still waiting for the right time to launch your holiday campaign? Typically, campaign spending ramps up at least two weeks prior to Cyber 11. But if you’ve yet to start, don’t fret, it’s better to kick off your campaign now than wait until after the holidays — a week is better than nothing at all.

Advertising Success in the Long-Term

With several new updates underway at Amazon, sellers would be remiss to miss out on the wealth of advertising opportunities Amazon offers in the long term, especially as Q1 planning is just a month away.  

What Updates Has Amazon Advertising Recently Made? 

At its flagship advertising event, Unboxed, Amazon unveiled both new and improved advertising capabilities:

• An exciting opportunity to reach cord-nevers: You’ve heard of cord-cutters, but have you heard of cord-nevers? This new term refers to a shift in viewing behavior amongst younger audiences — those who have grown up amongst streaming TV and, thus, have never had to “cut the cord.” The chance to reach this streaming audience will be greater than ever with the release of Sponsored TV, Amazon’s self-service TV advertising solution. Brands can run streaming campaigns with no minimum daily spend, campaign spend, or upfront commitment on Amazon Freevee, Twitch, and Amazon devices.

• AI-powered image creation: Amazon is embracing generative AI with its new image-generation solution. The tool, while still in Beta, will play a pivotal role in streamlining and optimizing the creative process for both smaller brands and larger enterprises. 

• A host of new ad tech capabilities: To empower advertisers, Amazon has released several new ad tech capabilities across the campaign lifecycle. These features include a new media planning suite to forecast and de-duplicate reach, easier and more powerful campaign activation and optimization in the Amazon DSP, and more comprehensive measurement capabilities. 

• A new clean room solution: Amazon has also released Amazon Publisher Cloud: a clean room solution that facilitates secure collaboration for optimized Amazon DSP deals through first-party signal analysis, enhances privacy, and streamlines programmatic activation.

Amazon is taking its advertising capabilities even further through its new partnership with Meta — a game changer for the e-commerce giant. Amazon will be able to access a wealth of first-party data from Facebook and Instagram, enabling better ad targeting and an improved shopping experience. Better still, the deal will give Amazon a social entry point to circumvent Tiktok’s banning of Amazon links.

The big takeaway for advertisers?

As we near the end of Q4, and with more details forthcoming in Amazon’s rollout, it pays to determine how these updates align with your Q1 strategy.

For instance, a common Q1 strategy entails maximizing your Q4 spending by retargeting those who made purchases during the holiday season. When are they likely to repurchase? How can you stay top-of-mind for these audiences? With Amazon’s new DSP Events Manager, advertisers will be able to explore and answer these questions on a deeper level. The new feature enables advertisers to seamlessly track conversions from the Amazon storefront to Amazon DSP campaigns, ensuring a comprehensive and thorough measurement of the customer journey through the entire sales funnel.

As the holiday season wraps up, advertisers should start considering upcoming events and trends in the new year. Take the time to truly understand your product to find its peak performance times in Q1, whether by looking at data from past quarters or analyzing historical category trends. Consider TV manufacturers, for example; key shopping periods to focus on for analysis include Black Friday and the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl in Q1. Better still, refresh ad creative from holiday campaigns with Amazon’s AI-powered image generation or by working with a trusted ad partner like Feedvisor — give your holiday deal creative new life by shifting the focus to Super Bowl discounts, for instance.

And if your product underperforms in Q1, don’t hit the brakes. The payoff in the long run comes from maintaining the momentum of your campaign. Amazon’s DSP is programmed to learn from and optimize against data continuously. In other words, the more data Amazon’s technology has to learn from, the better your campaign will perform. 

Amazon will make several performance enhancements to this feature in the near future, including the ability to set specific key performance indicators (KPIs), such as reach or conversion, allowing Amazon DSP to optimize campaign bids accordingly — making it that much more important for advertisers to provide ample data to the DSP. Delaying your campaign launch means you’ll have to start from scratch, risking insufficient data for optimal performance in future significant events.