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Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) is arguably the busiest sales period of the year for most businesses, and an advertising agency needs to know exactly how to make the most of this season.
Last year, Black Friday saw a record $9.3 billion in sales and Cyber Monday pulled in $11.3 billion in sales. If you’re not planning to make a splash during BFCM this season, you’re almost certain to miss out on a golden opportunity. As a marketing agency, you’re responsible for guiding your clients to run ads that resonate with existing and new customers to drive that growth. But how can you stay on top of the data to make the right decisions at such a crucial time?
Ahead of the sales frenzy, our leader of Sales and Partnerships, Zach Rego, shares his best advice for how to use Triple Whale as your superpower to drive growth for your clients during this hectic (but profitable) period.
The thing about data is that it’s everywhere. You have the information right at your fingertips, like how much of a certain product sold during a time period or the number of new customers onboarded following an ad. The problem for many businesses is that they don’t have the time to actually analyze and understand that data (and that’s probably why they turn to an agency).
Saying you need to analyze that data shouldn’t be a surprise coming from us, a company that loves data. Some of our most successful agency partners use our tools to prepare for BFCM by being super strategic and taking deep dives into the metrics to be more prescriptive around their recommendations. Our tools are built for those deeper dives, and we’ll go over a few ways to use them to ace BFCM below.
Always paying attention to what’s on the horizon, Lighthouse alerts you to anomalies in the data as well as provides insights on your ads to help profitability. This tool allows you to plot all essential metrics from any linked account to evaluate how they may or may not correlate.
For example, an agency might look at Shopify new customer orders vs. Facebook ad spend to determine the relationship (using a Pearson correlation coefficient).
An agency can also investigate how Google ad spend correlates with new customer orders on Shopify, or maybe how it correlates with sales on Amazon. Sometimes, an agency might run an ad to drive sales to the online store and find that there’s actually a positive correlation between Facebook ad spend and sales in the Amazon storefront.
If you didn’t dig into the data and see this relationship, you might just assume the Facebook ads weren’t working.
There are a variety of metrics to play off of in Lighthouse, and this is a great starting point for account managers to report back to the top line what’s happening with the actions they’re taking and the outcome of those actions at the broadest level.
The activity feed is exactly what it sounds like: a chronological feed of what’s happening in the account you’re viewing (like when Instagram was a chronological list of your friends’ posts versus being driven by an algorithm).
By logging changes in accounts from products being published in Shopify to tweaks to a Facebook ad, an agency can gauge the real-time impact of each adjustment.
You can also add specific activities to plot how it affected the other variables. For example, if you were featured on a podcast one day, you could add that as an event and evaluate if any additional traffic can be attributed to it.
If you’re on a Pro/Legacy Triple Whale account, the Insights feature, including the Smart Customer Data Platform, will be available to you.
It allows you to create really rich audiences that are dynamic, so people can be added or removed automatically. Some automatically created audiences (using RFM: recency, frequency, and monetary value) are able to change based on activity using AI. These can include the Loyal customers that frequently purchase, the Whales that contribute the highest revenue for your store, and a few others.
You can also create audiences from specific channels, like a specific one for Facebook, and evaluate the data around purchasers in that segment.
So, what can you do with that data? You can measure things like how frequently they purchase, how the lifetime value (LTV) of a customer in that segment grows, or the average order value (AOV). You can take the segment of customers you created and sync it to Klaviyo to create very interesting audiences and segmented marketing opportunities.
For example, many brands have chosen not to discount throughout the year and instead use BFCM to give their most loyal customers an exclusive offer.
By creating specific audiences that get limited time offers, you can anticipate greater buy-in from customers if you target the correct demographic. Zach described a Cosmetics brand we have using Triple Whale that sees repeat purchases in November from the cohort that made their first purchase in August.
Since cosmetics are a consumable often purchased at specific intervals throughout the year, the August cohort of customers is perfectly positioned to take advantage of a promotion during BFCM, with November experiencing a large jump and a bump to the AOV (an increase of $5).
By planning ahead, this brand can also prepare by running ads to gain a higher number of new customers in August, add all of those numbers to the CDP audience, and use Klaviyo to retain and grow that audience once November rolls around. It’s a great idea to have conversations like this with your client now, before the big promotion season is here and while you still have time to understand what’s happening with the different cohorts that already exist.
You can also create filters for many different views on the data, including segments, channels, orders, products, where customers purchased from, or attribution (based on the campaign that brought the customer in). On that note, it’s great to have proper naming conventions so you can create filters to monitor cohorts from these ads over longer periods of time.
By investigating what customers often purchase either consecutively or together, you can run targeted ads that increase the average order value of your carts. Clients should be using BFCM to:
In the current economic climate, cash is expensive, and financing an Ecommerce business isn’t as easy as it once was. To make sure profitability is always front-of-mind, we look to increase CPCs and CPMs to increase that AOV without a huge strain on the bottom line. If we’re creating bundles, we can ramp up the spend with confidence based on the data.
With the Cart Analysis tool, we can see the products that are most likely to be purchased together.
For example, if we look at customers that purchased a minimum number of two items from Facebook for Madison Braids, we see the top products are the Top Knot Ponytail Holder and Lulu Two Strand. We can see what percentage of carts include them and include both as well as new orders over a specific time frame.
When you know the products that are converting, you can go heavy with that product during BFCM for a strong return on investment.
What do customers buy second?
By knowing the answer to this question, you can plan your marketing efforts around that second product you’ll promote to customers, which can help the profitability and sustainability of the business in the long term.
For example, in the Madison Braids data we can see that customers often purchase the Lulu Two Strand after the Top Knot Pony Tail Holder.
With the consecutive purchase information, you can understand which products to focus on in your subsequent ads. Product Analytics is available in the Enterprise-level Triple Whale plan, and is a game-changer for brands that have a high number of SKUs. Since our data allows you to see the ad spend, revenue, and everything in-between, you can use the data to optimize your client’s business. This tool is very useful when you look at the contribution margin for those products.
Additionally, if your client is planning to sell-through on a specific product, they already have the information available about which specific ads have performed well to sell it. When they go in and ramp up spending on these optimized ads, they can anticipate positive results more easily.
It's not just about how much you spend on ads; it's also about understanding the revenue and product buying patterns. Advanced tools can provide insights into ad performance, ensuring each dollar spent is worth it.
Once you’ve done all the preparation and figured out which channels you want to go to market with, Triple Whale’s data is about as real-time as you can get; nobody on the market is faster at reconciling an order.
When you’re ramping up ad spend during a time when ad spend is expensive, knowing what’s over- or underperforming right away can be a gamechanger.
Here’s an example: you launch a campaign on Friday at 9:00am and have a threshold of at least $1000 on each ad.
If it doesn’t achieve NC-ROAS of 1, you can cut it off and reallocate it to another variant that’s working better. This is a huge advantage for your clients because every dollar being spent is going to be pointed towards the ads and ad sets that are returning the best metrics they’re aiming for. Triple Whale has a bunch of built-in presets, but you can also build the custom metrics you need.
In the fast-paced whirlwind of BFCM, real-time data is gold. Make sure that a member of your team has signed up for notifications with Lighthouse and Activity Feed so you can keep a close eye on ad spend and any anomalies during this critical time.
You can set up automated reporting for the things you want to keep an eye on through either a widget on your phone or the Triple Whale mobile app. With near-instantaneous data, your team can be empowered to make quick decisions on the fly with confidence.
BFCM is a challenge, but with the right strategies, tools, and mindset, it's an opportunity. As we gear up for the biggest shopping days of the year, let's leverage these insights, ensuring our clients not only stand out but also achieve remarkable success.
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