🍤Tracking & Analyzing BFCM Marketing Data

Hello!

Welcome back for another bite to chew on. 

COT Community

We’re making some changes to our newsletters. We hope you’ll like them, but we’d love to hear your feedback either way.

• Polls: Expect the occasional question or two to create proprietary data-driven content, inform our content direction, collect feedback, and more.

• Wednesdays: Shorter. Tactics (snacktics?), play-by-play, extra-digestible info, and wins. A few bites to chew on. 

• Sundays: Longer. In-depth. We’re serving up a meal to sink your teeth into. 

Speaking of polls…

On The Menu

We’re talking about analyzing & reacting to intraday holiday data. AKA what we’re doing on holidays themselves (BFCM and other):

• Our actual computer setup: what we’re looking at, when, and why

• The other KPIs we care about: metrics for success

• How’d BFCM go for Obvi? A lil’ overview

Bite 1: BFCM/Holiday Computer Setup & Tracking

Thanksgiving Day was pretty slow, but we saw a small uptick in sales in the evening (6pm): that’s when the early buying started and when we first started to push our bids and budgets. 

From there, we were pretty much locked in looking at the screen from Black Friday at midnight to the following midnight.  

And we put what’s most important front & center:

1. Our Triple Whale Dashboard: We used Triple Whale to pull all our numbers and get an overall look at efficiency during the day.

(That’s also what we do every day.)

2. A Google Sheet: Here’s how we* set up our spreadsheet…

…And we updated it every hour. 

If the trend was increasing, and we were seeing an increase in spend, could we push it even further? 

By later Friday evening, that’s when efficiency started to drop for us—that was the sign to pull back. 

• 📉After a couple hours of falling ROAS, we dropped the bid and budget by 20%. 

*Shout out to Dave Rekuc for showing us this spreadsheet strategy! 

3. Ads Manager: Although we were updating data in the spreadsheet every hour (and obsessively checking, let’s say, a lil’ more than that), we were only adjusting actual spend every 2 to 6 hours or so. 

Bite 2: The Other BFCM/Holiday KPIs 

What not to look at: BFCM is not the time to be looking at leading indicators, e.g., CPC and CTR. That weekend (and on any other holiday), there’s nothing actionable you can do in the moment to influence those metrics.

They’re reflective of LPs, ad assets, and other creative. 

On a related note…

A reminder on assets and creatives: We’ve said it before, but we’ll keep saying it until the 🐮s come home. The holiday itself is not the time to be making adjustments and trying to fine tune there.

It’s like trying to stand up on your surfboard when the wave’s 2 inches from your face.

What else to actually look at:

• Profitability: The actual metric depends on your organization and your preferences, but it could be gross margin or contribution margin, for example. 

• CPA: On a non-holiday, it can be helpful to look at both CPA and CPO, but on acquisition-heavy days, you want to have a specific understanding of your acquisition cost.

• New Customer ROAS: Besides the acquisition spend itself, we care about efficiency of our acquisition budget and keep it in line with our expected margin over time (i.e., LTV:CAC).

Bite 3: How’d We Do on BFCM, Tho?

TLDR: This BFCM was quieter (relatively) on DTC than in previous years because we’re in retail now. 

Turns out, retail had an impact on our DTC performance. 

How? Why?

Our analysis:

We’re all in search of a better deal. Our customers are no different. We get that. 

Obvi’s top-selling product is our Collagenic Burn. It’s $39.99 on our website, and we offered a 30% discount there. But on Walmart.com, it’s at $19.99. 

So, even with our DTC discount, you’d be saving 8 bucks at Walmart.

And our customers know about Walmart. 

We’ve done a lot of Walmart marketing. Folks know that we're nationwide. We've promoted this in our community. We've sent out emails, text messages saying, “Hey, here's the everyday low price in Walmart.”

You would never want to pay full price for the product, right?

How we’re applying this learning to next year: Rather than simply doing major DTC BFCM discounts, we’re going to launch a new product(s) onsite! 

🧠That’s a certified customer-coming-back hack.

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Catchew Later!

We sincerely appreciate every moment you spend with us and reading our work. We’ll see you soon.

All the best,

Ron & Ash