Dive Brief:

• Desktop display ads accounted for 54% of Amazon's ad impressions for its marketing campaign leading up to Prime Day, according to an analysis by media intelligence platform BIScience provided to Marketing Dive. Mobile accounted for 29.7% of impressions and mobile video 16%. 
• Mobile dominated the impressions for other retailers’ corresponding Prime Day promotional efforts during the same timeframe. Mobile display accounted for 93.9% of impressions for Walmart, 62% for eBay and 58% for Target. Mobile video accounted for 79% of impressions for Best Buy and 32.6% for Target.
• Prime Day house ads, or those appearing on Amazon.com, garnered about 1.7 billion desktop display impressions for the 2018 event and about 565.2 million impressions for non-house ads. Last year’s event had more than 510.2 million non-house ad impressions on desktop display.

Dive Insight:

While mobile shopping continues to grow, the BIScience analysis reveals that desktop display is still a valuable format for Amazon and other retailers, as shoppers often rely on both mobile and desktop during a shopping session. However, as shoppers often use mobile devices to browse for products, and then complete their purchases later on desktop, this gives major retailers like Walmart an opportunity to entice shoppers to their sites before they head over to Amazon.com. During the 2017 holiday shopping season, desktop was projected to account for 46% of U.S. retail website visits but 66% of online retail revenue, according to Adobe Analytics cited by Recode. 

This year’s Prime Day shopping event got off to a rough start, as Amazon’s mobile and desktop sites experienced glitches. Despite the problems, Amazon broke sales records, with Prime members worldwide ordering 100 million products. Top sellers were Amazon devices, the Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote. Seventy-six percent of Prime Day deals beat Black Friday prices, according to deals site BestBlackFriday.

Amazon expanded Prime Day this year to 36 hours, from 30 hours last year. On top of its digital desktop display push, Amazon embraced several innovative, experiential marketing tactics to promote the shopping event. Amazon delivered several “smile” boxes to locations around the world and live streamed the “unboxing” to reveal pop-up concerts and other events, and unveiled virtual reality kiosks at shopping malls in India to promote the event. 

Amazon also dominated digital advertising around Father’s Day with mostly desktop display ads, earning 6 billion impressions, according to a separate BIScience analysis. The e-commerce giant’s success with desktop display ads seem to contradict industry growth projections for mobile advertising. EMarketer predicts that mobile will account for 69.9% of all digital advertising in 2018, driven by display ads.