Every year, brands treat Prime Day like a 48-hour event.
They increase bids.
They raise budgets.
They fight for the same shoppers as everyone else.
And every year, the same thing happens:
The brands that win Prime Day are usually the brands that started preparing weeks earlier. At WBX, we’ve learned a simple lesson from managing Amazon advertising across hundreds of brands:
Prime Day isn’t won during Prime Day. It’s won before it begins.
The Biggest Mistake Brands Make
Most advertisers still approach Prime Day as a search-only event. They assume shoppers arrive on Amazon with high purchase intent, search for products, and buy. The reality is much different. Today’s shopper journey is fragmented and influenced by multiple touchpoints before a purchase ever occurs.
Research shows shoppers often experience 5–8 touchpoints before making a Prime Day purchase, and consumers exposed to both DSP and Sponsored Ads are significantly more likely to convert than shoppers exposed to search advertising alone.
Yet most brands still allocate the majority of their budget to bottom-funnel search activity.
That’s backwards.
Prime Day Has Become a Full-Funnel Event
The most successful brands now think about Prime Day in three phases:
Phase 1: Pre-Event (4–8 Weeks Before)
The goal isn’t sales.
The goal is attention.
This is where brands should be:
- Building awareness
- Creating audience pools
- Driving video views
- Generating product detail page visits
- Identifying high-intent shoppers
CPMs are generally lower before Prime Day competition intensifies, making audience building significantly more efficient.
At WBX, we typically recommend allocating 30–40% of event budgets during this period to build demand before competitors flood the market.
Phase 2: Prime Day Event Window
This is where most brands focus. But by this point, the real work should already be done.
The objective now is activating the audiences you’ve built:
- Retargeting product viewers
- Re-engaging cart abandoners
- Reaching shoppers who engaged with prior campaigns
- Converting category buyers already showing intent
Brands should prioritize warm audiences first and then expand to category-level acquisition opportunities.
Phase 3: Post-Event
This phase is often ignored. That’s a mistake.
Prime Day creates a massive influx of new customers.
The question becomes:
What happens next?
Post-event strategies should focus on:
- Retention
- Repeat purchases
- Subscribe & Save adoption
- Cross-selling
- Lifetime value growth
The sale is not the finish line. It’s the beginning of the customer relationship.
Why DSP Matters More Than Ever
Amazon DSP has evolved far beyond a display advertising tool.
Today it provides access to:
- Streaming TV
- Online Video
- Display advertising
- Premium off-Amazon inventory
- Advanced audience creation
- Full-funnel measurement
Most importantly, DSP allows brands to influence shoppers before they ever perform a search.
That’s where competitive advantage is created.
The shopper who searches your brand on Prime Day is often the result of awareness and consideration campaigns that happened weeks earlier.
Audience Strategy Is the Real Differentiator
The best Prime Day strategies aren’t built around keywords. They’re built around audiences.
At WBX, some of our highest-performing audience segments include:
- Product detail page viewers
- Cart abandoners
- Category shoppers
- Competitor shoppers
- Lookalike audiences created through AMC
- Existing customer expansion audiences
Prime Day creates the largest audience pool of the year. Brands that start early accumulate signals that become incredibly valuable during the event itself.
What the Results Look Like
We recently worked with a pet supply brand that had historically relied almost entirely on Sponsored Products.
The challenge was simple:
They weren’t growing new-to-brand customers.
By introducing a full-funnel strategy that layered DSP awareness, consideration, and conversion campaigns on top of existing search activity, the results were dramatic:
- 762% growth in new-to-brand customers
- 423% growth in ad sales
- 13% improvement in ROAS
All within the first quarter of engagement.
The lesson wasn’t that search stopped working.
The lesson was that search worked better when demand was created upstream.
The Future of Prime Day Advertising
Prime Day has evolved. It’s no longer a search event. It’s no longer a bidding war.
And it’s certainly no longer just an Amazon event.
Today, Prime Day is a full-funnel marketing opportunity that spans:
- Streaming TV
- Online video
- Display advertising
- Search
- Audience creation
- Retention marketing
The brands that understand this shift will continue to gain market share.
The brands that don’t will continue competing for the same shrinking pool of in-market demand.
Final Thought
At WBX, we believe the biggest opportunity in Amazon advertising isn’t capturing demand. It’s creating it. Prime Day rewards brands that show up early, build audiences intelligently, and think beyond the final click.
The winners won’t be the brands that spend the most during the event. They’ll be the brands that spent the weeks before it building the audiences everyone else is trying to reach.
That’s how modern Prime Day advertising works.
And that’s how sustainable growth is built.