Amazon sold a lot of products last week during its annual Prime Day promotion. It also sold a lot of ads.
Egged on in some cases by Amazon itself, advertisers spent nearly three times as much on Prime Day as they did on the average day in the two weeks prior, according to data from Perpetua, an e-commerce firm that analyzed the accounts of more than 1,000 Amazon sellers. That was a bigger jump in Prime Day advertising than in prior years despite an increasingly competitive market.
The ads they bought cost more, too. The average Prime Day ad cost $1.67 per click—58% more than the going rate during Prime Day 2021, according to exclusive Perpetua data on sponsored product listings, a popular form of Amazon advertising. That jump was propelled by a surge in ad spending as brands both big and small vied to get their products in front of shoppers. But the additional spending didn’t always translate into an equivalent amount of sales revenue: Perpetua says each dollar spent on Prime Day ads in 2022 generated 25% less revenue than it did the year before.
