This week, we have a guest blog post from one of our members, Skai^™. The Intelligent Marketing Platform's Senior Director of Marketing Research, Chris Costello unpacks Prime Day, Amazon's annual deal event exclusively for Prime members. The 48-hour e-commerce event delivers non-stop deals on products from small businesses to big brands. But, how did Prime Day ad spend and sales compare between Europe and the US? Check out these hot-off-the-press numbers as Skai investigates performance on both sides of the pond.

Did you know that, in Europe, Amazon Prime Day is called Prime with Cheese? Probably not, because it’s not true, and now you want to watch Pulp Fiction again.

It does exist, though, and with the biggest-ever iteration of the two-day online shopping event having just concluded, it’s worth investigating the performance on both sides of the pond.

Earlier this week, Skai^™ reported overall findings for Prime Day that highlighted a 4X increase in average daily spend and a 4.5X increase in daily ad-supported sales revenue. As it turns out, we’ve tracked enough latent conversions since first publishing those results that we can now say that sale revenue increased 4.7X over the average for the prior thirty days. Return on Ad Spend, in turn, actually increased 18% compared to the previous period, six percentage points higher than what was originally reported.

When we look at Amazon markets in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), we see that the impact of Prime Day is even greater in those markets than in North America. Average daily spend increased by over 6X (+528%), and sales revenue by almost 7X (+592%). While these markets are smaller than the combined size of the United States and Canada, and small things tend to grow faster, these numbers demonstrate both the global impact of retail media advertising and that of the Prime Day event itself.

Those increases in spend and revenue led to an overall increase in ROAS of 10% for the EMEA region, compared to a 17% increase for North America and, as stated earlier, 18% overall.

In terms of individual countries, similar results were seen in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, and Italy. France was the only country where the increases were not quite as pronounced, even if they were up by at least 3X.

As rumours of a second Prime Day this year continue to circulate, one thing we do know for sure is that the Amazon sales event has a footprint that is quickly spreading across the globe, helping propel sales (and advertising) to new heights every time.