Prime Day 2026 is over. It ran from June 23 to 26 and, despite the calendar risk of moving out of July for the first time since 2021, US online spending across all retailers grew 9.3% to $26.4 billion during the four-day window, according to Adobe data. Day one alone drove $8.3 billion — the biggest e-commerce day of 2026 so far.
The event beat expectations. But the more important story for PPC now is what it revealed about category-level competition, CPC pressure, and how budget structure actually held up under load. July is where accounts do the work of translating that data into what changes for the rest of the summer.
Prime Day gave us four days of data at higher CPC pressure than any other point in the year. That data is more valuable than the sales themselves — it shows exactly which campaigns hold up under load and which need to be rebuilt before Q4." — Andrejs Klimovskis, Founder, INNELS
Category performance during Prime Day was uneven, and the winners were not always the ones that historically dominate. Adobe's day-one data showed electronics up 105% versus a typical June day, appliances up 95%, and tools and home improvement up 75%.
The bigger story was in essentials. Personal care orders surged 130%. Grocery staples rose 65%. School supplies jumped 140%. Strollers spiked 220% and car seats 140%. Shoppers used the event to stock up on high-frequency purchases rather than splurge on discretionary items — a pattern that shows up clearly in the basket data.
Numerator's final tracker reported the average order size at $47.66, down from $53.34 in 2025. 69% of items purchased sold for under $20. The average spend per item was $23.23, down from $24.59. Shoppers are converting on smaller-basket, essentials-heavy purchases at a higher rate than higher-ticket discretionary items — which changes the ACoS math for sellers whose products sit in the $40+ price range.
On the CPC side, Ad Badger's current benchmark data puts the 2026 average CPC at $1.22 across all Amazon categories — up $0.10 from the same point in 2025. May 2026 recorded the year's highest average so far at $1.27, and Prime Day itself pushed category-specific CPCs significantly higher across essentials, personal care, and electronics.
Post-event CPCs are falling but not to pre-event levels. Elevated bidding from the pre-Prime Day ramp-up carries residual pressure into July, particularly in categories where competitor accounts are still working through inventory purchased in preparation for the event. The right expectation for early July is CPCs 10 to 15 percent above the May baseline in most categories, not a clean return to pre-event conditions.
The post-Prime Day CPC pattern this year is different from previous years. The event moved earlier, but the CPC pressure has stayed longer. Accounts that expected an immediate return to pre-event costs on June 27 are already seeing that assumption was wrong." — Mark Daniel Zalomajev, Founder, INNELS
Across the accounts we manage, the biggest CPC increases during and after Prime Day landed in health and wellness, personal care, and home essentials. These are the categories where shopper demand shifted most decisively — and the auction reflected it. In one supplements account, average CPC on hero keywords climbed 42 percent from the June 15 baseline to the Prime Day peak, and has settled at roughly 18 percent above that baseline in the first week of July.
Electronics and appliances accounts saw sharp CPC spikes during the event but cleaner post-event normalisation. In one appliance account, CPCs peaked on June 24 and returned to within 8 percent of the pre-event level by June 30. The demand shifted quickly once the deal window closed. Health, wellness, and personal care CPCs have not normalised as cleanly.
The campaigns that performed best across our accounts shared a specific structure: exact match campaigns on the top ten to fifteen historical converting keywords, run with their own dedicated budget cap and separated from all discovery campaigns. Accounts that had this structure entered Prime Day protecting their most valuable placements from budget exhaustion. Accounts that ran mixed campaigns — where hero keywords and discovery terms shared budget — saw their proven terms lose placement to lower-priority traffic during the highest-CPC hours of the event.
One consistent observation from the post-event search term reports: broad match campaigns during Prime Day surfaced a large number of essentials-adjacent search terms that were not high-converting for discretionary categories. Accounts selling in gift, home decor, and non-essential categories saw significant spend on terms driven by shoppers who were in essentials-buying mode. Adding those terms as negatives in the first week of July is the highest-ROI cleanup available right now.
The accounts that came out of Prime Day cleanest are the ones whose exact match campaigns for hero products had their own budget line. Every account we audited that mixed discovery and hero-product spending in the same campaign lost placement on their best terms at some point during the four days." — Niks Saknitis, PPC Manager, INNELS
The clearest budget allocation lesson from Prime Day 2026 is that concentration outperformed distribution. Across the accounts we managed through the event, campaigns that received 60 to 70 percent of their spend allocation on the top ten converting keywords delivered materially better ACoS than campaigns that spread budget more evenly across a wider keyword set. The gap widened as CPCs climbed — high-CPC conditions penalise dispersion more than normal-month conditions do.
A second observation from the accounts running multi-format strategies: Sponsored Brands Video consistently produced lower CPCs than Sponsored Products on the same head terms during peak Prime Day hours. The placement inside a search results page dominated by static images meant SBV drew disproportionate engagement. For accounts that had SBV live going into the event, the layered format strategy — Sponsored Products for direct conversion, SBV for high-intent traffic capture — outperformed accounts running Sponsored Products alone.
What did not work: increasing budgets on campaigns that had weak conversion history heading into the event. Prime Day amplifies existing performance patterns. Campaigns that were underperforming in May did not suddenly become efficient during Prime Day — they consumed budget faster and produced results at a lower rate. Budget should have been concentrated on proven campaigns, and that lesson applies directly to Black Friday planning starting in Q3.
Prime Day is not a fix for underperforming campaigns. It amplifies whatever pattern was already there. The accounts that scaled cleanly are the ones that concentrated spend on what was already working — not the ones that tried to prove a struggling campaign under load." — Mario Reambonanza, PPC Manager, INNELS
If you have not yet pulled your Prime Day search term report, do it now. The 48-hour window after the event closed on June 26 was the highest-value moment for that report, but the second-highest-value moment is this week. Every irrelevant term that spent budget without converting should be added as a negative before another dollar goes through those campaigns.
Do not cut bids back to pre-event levels in a single step. Post-event CPCs are still elevated in most categories, and organic ranking signals built during the four-day event need time to stabilise. A phased step-down over five to seven days protects the ranking gains while returning ad spend toward normal. Accounts that cut aggressively on June 27 are already seeing organic momentum weaken faster than expected.
Identify which categories in your account had the biggest CPC increase during the event and check whether those elevated CPCs are still holding this week. If yes, do not fight them — competitive pressure in those categories is likely to persist through July as competitors continue to spend down Prime Day inventory. Focus on conversion rate and listing quality rather than trying to outbid the auction.
Start Q3 planning now. Prime Day validated a specific structural pattern: exact match hero-keyword campaigns with dedicated budget, separated from discovery campaigns. That structure should be locked in for every account heading into back-to-school demand in August and Black Friday in November. The accounts that will scale cleanly through Q4 are the ones building their campaign architecture in July, not October.
The best time to fix what Prime Day exposed is in the first two weeks after the event, when the data is fresh and there is no pressure. The worst time is in October, when the same structural problems will cost you more." —Niks Saknitis, PPC Manager, INNELS
If your account came out of Prime Day with results that were not what you expected — or if you are not sure whether the campaigns you scaled during the event should stay scaled through July — we can help. INNELS runs post-event PPC audits across categories and marketplaces, focused on the structural changes that will carry through Q3 and Q4.
Book a consultation at innels.com or contact us directly. This monthly update goes out at the start of every month — follow it to stay ahead of what is changing in Amazon advertising before it affects your account.
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