Too many brands bank their Prime Day sales and move on – but the ones that grow do something else with their data…
There’s no denying that Prime Day 2026 was a very different beast than the normal two-day spike.
What was a concentrated burst of demand, with a clear before and after, this year became something more difficult to read during the event itself.
But that has been followed by four to six weeks of data that, if used properly, can shape how a brand performs for the rest of the year.
This was one of the clearest threads to emerge from our recent Beyond the Listings session, which brought together:
- Travis Chappell, our Head of Operations
- Emma Pickard, our Head of Client Services
- Mike Godsiff, our Head of Advertising and Media
- And PJ van Rooyen, Head of E-commerce and Brand at Ultimate Sports Nutrition
Over 60 minutes, our expert panel shared what they actually saw from this year’s event, and what smart brands should be doing with those insights now.
Prime Day itself is getting harder to read
With Amazon running this year’s Prime Day earlier than usual – in June rather than the more familiar July – additional operational pressure was created around fulfilment deadlines and preparation windows.
The four-day format, which the panel were united in preferring to see shortened back to two, has also shifted shopper behaviour in ways that make day-by-day performance harder to interpret.
Ads expert Mike noted that traffic patterns across the four days were flatter this year than in previous years and that, where historically there’s a clear open and a last-minute close, this year saw a steadier, less differentiated curve across days three and four.
External factors played a role too: the heat wave redirected some consumer spending toward immediate needs, which affected category performance in ways that had nothing to do with brand readiness or strategy.
The point, as PJ explained, is that Prime Day is an outlier.
It shouldn’t be held up as a definitive measure of a brand’s Amazon health, and it shouldn’t be dismissed either.
And that means that level-setting expectations should be a brand’s first job after the event.
Where the real value sits
The more important question – the one that separates brands that grow from those that simply have a good or bad Prime Day – is what you do with the data generated.
As Emma put it in the session, Prime Day has become less of a discrete event and more of a diagnostic.
These four days create a concentrated, high-traffic window that surfaces information that would take months to accumulate in normal trading conditions.
And what you do with that data in the four to six weeks that follow is what really determines whether Prime Day was commercially useful.
The most immediate signal? Conversion
If a product received strong traffic during the event but failed to convert it, that’s not a Prime Day problem – it’’s a retail readiness problem, and Prime Day just made it visible at scale.
Weak content, unclear value proposition, insufficient trust signals, a price point that doesn’t feel justified by the page; these are issues that exist year-round, but they’re hardest to see when traffic is modest.
Prime Day removes that cover.
Mike’s recommendation on data: download everything, and do it by day.
Campaign-level data and product-level data; and not as a single aggregated view, but day by day, so you can see the actual trends: when traffic peaked, when it dropped, what the lead-in and lead-out looked like.
This is then the data that doesn’t just explain this Prime Day, it becomes the baseline for every peak event that follows.
The Amazon remarketing opportunity most brands underuse
One of the most consistent points Mike raised, and one he says he’s been making for years, is that the increased footfall of a peak event creates a remarketing opportunity that most brands don’t fully capitalise on.
Prime Day brings a significant volume of shoppers who view products and don’t purchase, and view remarketing, available through Sponsored Display or DSP, allows brands to re-engage those shoppers on a cycle of up to 180 days.
The intent signal is already there – someone looked at your product during one of Amazon’s highest-traffic windows.
And actively going back to those audiences post-event is one of the more straightforward ways to extend the value of the traffic Prime Day generated.
The same logic applies to purchasers, particularly for consumable products.
A customer who bought a 30 or 60-day supply during Prime Day is a high-value target for a reorder campaign at the right point in that consumption cycle, because getting them to a third purchase, as Mike noted, is generally where repeat purchase behaviour becomes established.
Prime Day as a Q4 foundation
The session made clear that the smartest brands are already treating this Prime Day as preparation for the second half of the year, not waiting until October to start thinking about Black Friday or the peak quarter.
The data from this event shows category trends, competitive performance, which products are converting efficiently and which aren’t, where media spend worked and where it didn’t.
That’s the foundation for better forecasting, sharper promotional planning and more targeted content investment in the months ahead – as Mike put it, if you haven’t started thinking about Q4, you’re probably already three months late.
Our take
When it comes to planning for Q4, the data generated by Prime Day is well worth its weight.
The brands that will be best positioned going into H2 are the ones who’ve used the post-event window to diagnose what their account is actually telling them; not just about Prime Day, but about the underlying retail readiness of their catalogue, the efficiency of their media, and where the conversion friction lives.
The Bottom Line
Prime Day delivers a concentrated burst of data that most brands are under-using.
Conversion patterns reveal retail readiness, traffic trends inform forecasting, remarketing audiences are waiting to be activated.
And the insights sitting in your campaign and sales reports right now are the most accurate foundation you have for planning the rest of the year.
If you want to hear more of what our expert panel discussed – including specific benchmarking approaches, ad strategy during the event and how to use organic data to sense-check your competitive position – hit the button now to watch the full session on demand.
And if you’d like our team’s insights to interpret your Prime Day data and build a commercially clear picture of what to prioritise in H2?