Episode 21: What does YOUR data say about Cyber Week?

With Cyber Week just in the rear view mirror, we’ve got a lot of questions for Ryan...Outside of revenue, how does a brand know if they were successful for Cyber Week? How do they know if money was left on the table? Or their goals were misaligned? What were the common missed opportunities in search engine marketing? What does a brand’s data say about their Cyber Week performance? When a brand looks back at their ecommerce data for Cyber Week, what should they be looking for? We've got even more questions, and we’re very fortunate to have access to Ryan who has answers!

TRANSCRIPTION:
Jon:
With Cyber Week just in the rear view mirror, I've got a lot of questions that I've been wanting to ask Ryan. Outside of revenue, how does a brand even know if they were successful for Cyber Week? Or how do they know if they left money on the table or if their goals were even just misaligned? And what are the common missed opportunities in search engine marketing that have been happening over Cyber Week? And what does a brand's data say about their Cyber Week performance? And I keep going here, but when does a brand look back at their e-commerce data for Cyber Week and what should they even be looking for? So, I've got even more questions, and we're very fortunate to have access to Ryan who has answers on things like this. Ryan, let's start with the big overarching question that is likely on the minds of e-commerce brands right now. Outside of revenue, how does a brand know if they were even successful for Cyber Week?

Ryan:
Yes. A lot of great questions, Jon. I would say revenue, most likely, is most important to brands. And so, we do have to look at that, but it gives you a very one-dimensional picture of what happened. The year 2020, almost anything goes and expectations have to be adjusted very quickly, almost in real time, of what we think is going to happen, we test it, we go, "Oh, that didn't happen. Great. Do this, this, or this." I think looking back on Cyber Week is going to be important for a lot of brands to really decide what you're going to do for the rest of the holiday season. Because for most brands, you rate in the middle of your holiday season, you still got a good solid couple of weeks left of really high conversion rates, high traffic rates, and a lot of time to make up for missings on Cyber Week or continue what was successful in Cyber Week, and really make it a holiday to remember for an e-commerce brand.
Step one, when I'm looking at data for a holiday season, I have two buckets of companies in the e-commerce world in my head. Either you have good goals or you have bad goals. Those are the only two buckets I look at. And thankfully, it doesn't really matter which bucket you're in, you can look at a certain metric that's going to help guide the rest of your analysis. Let's say you have great goals, and you are shooting generally in my world, you have great goals if you are shooting for a non-brand goal specifically. And so, let's say you had a breakeven goal during Cyber Week. And if you had a 50% margin after discounts and everything, you're going to shoot for a 2X. If you were above 2X during Cyber Week, either the whole week, or sporadically, or consistently, that tells me you left money on the table.

Jon:
Let's talk about that for a minute. When you're talking about a 2X, a 2X of what?

Ryan:
Your spend on Google, it's your acquisition market. That's generally where you can leave money on the table. Your organic traffic is set. You're not going to do any organic work and SEO work in the middle of Cyber Week and have it move the needle for you. Your acquisition market is going to be Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon if you're on Amazon, and that's the leverage you can push and pull and move stuff real quickly. And so, generally, brands are going to go into Cyber Week with a goal. Generally, they'll set a goal for budget, set a goal for revenue. What are we going to spend on each channel? And what do we expect from each one?
If you were above goal, I'm going to tell you left money on the table. Now, a lot of marketing teams, a lot of agencies are going to go back to the exec team and be like, "Look how amazing we are. We spent your money and we were above goal. Aren't you happy with us?" I would be furious with my marketing team, and I'm the marketing team for my brand. So, I'd be mad at myself that, "What are you doing not spending more money to capture more customers?" I didn't want to shoot for, let's say, 4X on my non-brand. That's great that you did that. You got us more profit, but I would rather have customers than I would profit on my non-brand terms.

Jon:
So, using Cyber Week as a way to build your rolodex, if you will, right? To build up that customer list that then you can go and get more sales from later.

Ryan:
Yeah, that's what I do with every week, it's not just Cyber Week. My goal on every week of every year on marketing is more customers. And so, that's where I set my goals, that's how I use my acquisition marketing with Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Pinterest being a new one, that's pretty lucrative now. If you're not looking at Pinterest, you should be looking there. You're probably too late to holiday season with the setup times in there. But again, all acquisition market where I have a non-brand, new customer acquisition channel, I want more customers. And that's where I set my goal. And I don't want to overshoot that. If you're under the goal, and this is an asterisk, but you probably capture the market you could have. Now, there's a lot of things that go into that, was your conversion rate garbage because you weren't working with Jon? If so, then yeah, you might not hit row as you left money on the table, because you weren't converting as well as you could have.
This year's obviously unique. And there's no scenario in which you can say that 2020 is not a unique year, period. Based on what we've seen the previous 10 years of my e-commerce time. But another wrinkle coming into this year has been Smart Shopping. Google has been a big advocate for pushing for this. And so, Smart Shopping and Google has a big push this year. It was around last year, but it was a very small percentage of advertisers we were seeing with Smart Shopping. This year, a lot of advertisers in Smart Shopping, my gut tells me they're going to go back and look at all their Smart Shopping campaigns and that was a lot of missings. There was a lot of money left on the table with those.
Generally, it's because all of your search queries go into one bucket. You can't effectively, in Smart Shopping campaigns, separate out brand and non-brand at scale. Small little tests you can do, but it doesn't work at scale. And so, if you have a goal, it's going to include brand searches, non-brand searches, remarketing display, there's a lot of things bucketed into that campaign. If you did not adjust your goal for a promotion week like Cyber Week, you, for sure, left money on the... If you're shooting for... I'm going to make this up again, say a 5X. Your blended goal, 5X, in your Smart Shopping campaigns and you're like, "All right. We're going to ride that into Cyber Week." And the only change is going to be a promo.
Your competitors probably had a promo, they probably adjusted their goals down to capture more market share, knowing the competition was going to go up. And so, the smart campaign that's trying to hit the target row as a five in this campaign is not going to be able to adjust well against all this increased competition, increased click costs, increased conversion rates to really understand how and where to play well. It just doesn't react necessarily quick, and it's got to have a lot of data to make decisions. And so, I'm guessing, if you were in a Smart Shopping campaign, chances are you left some money on the table.

Jon:
And do you feel l...