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{Simon Freeman (00:09) question. ⁓ Matteo Favaro (00:00) first of all, you guys have been around the block quite a few times with Black Friday, Cyber Monday scaling. What's something that you're planning to do for this upcoming year Charlie (00:09) I'm happy to start on that one. I think the main thing that I'm really pushing clients to do this year, and this is what I found in the last couple of years, is those sort of conditional offers. Three for two type thing, up to 50 % in our sales section. I found that those haven't really worked in recent years, and there's become an expectation to have a sort of meaningful blanket discount. And that's often sort of thing that clients don't really like to hear. And I've sort of tried to... tactfully explain to them, of course there's no point running offers where we just make a loss, but if we're going to go into Black Friday we have to buy into this idea that people are expecting to see meaningful blanket discounts and don't tend to be going for the sort of conditional offers because they just don't stack up against the sort of crazy stuff that you tend to see. Simon Freeman (01:01) I mean I think a lot of branches are over complicated, they? It's such a... you know, they think of ways to make it interesting or unique, but at end of the day, like, just the old KISS principle is the way forward. It's super simple message. Straight, know, this is the discount. No discount codes, anything like that. It's just got to be a... Ogie Hollywood (01:01) Yeah, I haven't even... Simon Freeman (01:21) like a nice, clean process. But I think for lot of brands that I work with, we have obviously ads that work really well throughout the course of the year, and just such an easy win is just we're using those ads with Black Friday branding on them. Again, I don't need to overcomplicate it. Just stick a border around it, Black Friday, or a strip across the top in terms of what the discount is. Yeah, again, simple approach is generally the right one. Ogie Hollywood (01:49) Yeah, I very much agree with that. think something that we notice a lot in the marketplace is that consumers want value for money, especially whenever economics are a little bit more constrained. People want an actual offer or an actual deal. They don't want to be sold a dream on something that is a company trying to flog all their excess stock that is the loss-feeding products or stuff that isn't really very valuable to the client. I think as a result of that, whenever you do some of these, know, a blanket site wide, you know, 20, 25 % across the board, but no discount code required. You see a major uptick because the customer feels like they're getting good value for money. They feel like they're actually getting a deal and they're buying the product that they want to buy in the first place. They're not being forced to buy your, you know, excess stock that no one else purchased at a 50 % discount. They're getting the product that they already had in their basket or that they were already considering buying last week, but now they get it for 20 % off. And therefore that drives not just short-term value in terms of profitability and sales, but also longer-term lifetime value for the customer because they're a happy customer going forward and they appreciated buying from you because they got a good user experience. So think there's a lot more to it than just the short-term profitability on the day and also more looking into that lifetime value of the customer and that relationship that you're building with them during this period. Matteo Favaro (03:09) So Charlie (03:09) I One thing that when you said Simon there about adding borders to or adding like Black Friday branding to specific ads, that's something I'm giving like a little bit more thought to this year than I have previous years. And I think that's in light. I mean, this is very meta specific, but in light of the Andromeda update and the sort of subtle iteration reinvention is not really being as effective. So a hundred percent, I'm going to do what you're suggesting there, but drafts I've got back from clients already, my instincts are telling me that they have to be quite heavily Black Friday branded and they have to try and look like different creators and so on. I don't know whether that's something you would agree with or possibly fill with your space, you see that sort of thing more often. Simon Freeman (03:50) Yeah, I I agree, it be really interesting to see how it plays out. So it's kind of been a bit of a default for the past few years. And if it meets the requirements for creatively diverse slash unique content according to what Meta wants. I mean I'd say even so, like yes, always trying to do that in our accounts anyway. But in the past couple of months, still seeing iterations work really well. It'll be interesting. I guess the game has changed a little bit, particularly on Meta with the new algorithm. And what that means for Blacklight Friday advertisers probably remains to be seen a little bit. Ogie Hollywood (04:33) was wondering guys, what's your take in terms of meta ads? We noticed for example, in Google, a lot of clients, I would say get too excited and want to push too much budget towards Black Friday. ⁓ And there's also a major risk factor that if you do so, you end up with a lot of revenue, but actually potentially at a loss or very close to breakeven. And like how to balance that process of not going too aggressive after just driving top line revenue, but actually understanding the unit economics and the impact that these ads are having during this period. Simon Freeman (04:43) you you Ogie Hollywood (05:02) and also the competitiveness of the auctions due to so many people trying to push at the same time. And I guess how to kind of balance that when it comes to meta ad spend. Simon Freeman (05:11) I mean, yeah, it can be a really tricky one and obviously there's so much every brand in terms of what their economics are and what makes sense. One of first conversations I have with brands is, are you using Black Friday to reward... your customers that are already in the database or haven't quite purchased it but at least are brand aware and if so in theory hopefully we can hit those guys with a lower cost per acquisition or are using it as a new customer acquisition tool and therefore what are the lifetime value calculations off the back of that but yeah spot on I mean those conversations are so important because I think brands see bright shining lights and big revenue opportunities but when you're paying 40 to 60 percent and your CPMs above normal and then you discounted 30 to 40 percent. Those margins get pretty thin don't they? Ogie Hollywood (06:03) Yeah. Charlie (06:04) Yeah, I do think there's a major sort of horses for courses component to it. Like, I would say I have a couple of clients who massively blow up over Black Friday and it's incredibly fun and exciting. And then other ones can do well, can do quite well. But the sort of nature of the product in this doesn't quite fit as aggressively from a sort of seasonality perspective. And then one of the clients last year, clothing brand, and it's clothing brand that never discounts. So going on a Black Friday discount is mega. ⁓ Yeah, they sold out all of their stock and then they had nothing really to sell in Christmas and January. So in the end, they sold a lot of product at a much lower discount and it was a high discount and it was products that were selling really, really well anyway. But the takeaway from that was that they run out of stock, not that the campaigns were wrong and that it wasn't wrong to hammer it. So this year we're arming up with a lot more stock with the view of not doing that to try and get a best of both worlds where we can really capitalize on the Ogie Hollywood (06:40) and Mm. Charlie (07:01) on the massive jump we saw on Black Friday, but not have the issue where we then don't have anything to sell in December or January. Which I think is the right takeaway because the uplift was so big, but I can see with other brands maybe where they don't get such a big uplift and they actually just get, you know, maybe slightly better than normal performance, but actually the performance is not better enough to make up for the discount. That's where I think the problem comes. But then... Ogie Hollywood (07:07) Mm-hmm. Charlie (07:27) Also with that point, I would say that generally the level of discount that clients I'm working with are doing is definitely lower these last couple of years than it was before that. And I think that's again, that slight switch to sustainable growth altogether, which includes a sustainable Black Friday where people are actually making money, not doing a shitload of sales at a loss. So I think it is a lot more calculated these days to take into account margin as opposed to just a nice sort of monthly growth figure to show investors or whatever. Ogie Hollywood (07:57) Yeah, it's also a good point in relation to I think the communication between clients and media buyers around where their stock position is at and what capacity they actually have for growth during this period because I think that is ⁓ pretty much a catastrophe situation where they load a little on revenue but then end up in a position where they have no stock for the remaining six or eight weeks. And essentially as a result of that, it's overall probably a pretty heavily net loss in terms of the impact of the business if they had just held that stock. and allow it to trickle over the three or four weeks following Black Friday instead of selling out at a 40 or 50 % discount, making a really thin margin and then leaving your future customers in a very frustrated position where they have nothing available to buy. Charlie (08:40) Yeah, I actually think for this brand, you know, did like 5x, it's, it's, it's biggest ever monthly revenue. So it was was a major, major step up. So I think it was a sort of learning could have been done better, but was still seen as a big positive because of that big increase. And the discount was also only 25%. So it wasn't a 50 % discount, but it certainly, yeah, could have been done a lot better. But to that point, are you finding that the brands you're working with, is there like an appetite to go and do those sort of 50 % discounts? Or is it generally more conservative? Ogie Hollywood (08:48) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Matteo Favaro (08:55) Okay. Ogie Hollywood (09:07) No, I would say generally a lot more conservative. And I think similar to what you mentioned at the very start, leaning more towards like heavily value orientated and doing like site wide promotions across the board as opposed to, and there'll have to be a bit of both. be a major site wide sale and then potentially like a subset of categories, which are on like a super deal promotion with, know, 50, 60 % off, which it is an opportunity to shift some of that excess stock that's still sitting there, but still ensuring that there is still a more comprehensive or. Charlie (09:11) Yeah, same. Ogie Hollywood (09:35) value added kind of site wide offer on the table. The other thing as well, not necessarily directly with some of our clients, but doing some research is that there is an increase in customers choosing not to do any discounting on Black Friday whatsoever. So that proportion, the stats I was reading was like it used to be about 20 to 22 % of e-commerce brands would choose not to run any promos. And it was increasing to kind of between 30 to 32 % last year. And I think that just shows you that people are realizing that sometimes the value being derived from these aggressive sales isn't really worth it. And so it is, yeah, it's an important thing to balance. think as Black Friday has matured as a trading day or as a sales day, people have a lot more backend data to see the impact of how it actually nets out for the business. And are now making, I guess, lot more strategic decisions about the level of discounting and what do they discount at all during this period. But it'd be like another good example, like a lot of... The meta in Google teams would obviously be pushing people to aggressively lower ROAS targets, uncap budgets, and just go after the auction as aggressively as possible. And that can be, again, somewhat counterintuitive. If you do the two things at the same time, you add a discount and you decrease ROAS aggressively, that is essentially a recipe for going into loss-feeding activity. We're much more in favor of utilizing, for example, within Google, we'd use seasonality adjustments within the campaign settings. to give Google a signal that we're expecting a conversion rate uplift and therefore to give them more flexibility to spend due to the increasing conversion rate during this period, as opposed to just blanket decreasing ROAS targets. Because ideally we actually want to sustain or increase ROAS during this period as opposed to the other way around, but we still want to spend a lot more on advertising, but not just wasted aggressive spend on low to loose broad terms, for example. Simon Freeman (11:18) Yeah, that's interesting for Google, isn't it? And I feel like there's more robust mechanisms within Google to be able to run that way over Black Friday, ⁓ which are default, Charlie. yeah, if your campaign set up from a technical point of view for Black Friday, generally just run at lower cost, or you try and run with some big caps or something to control it a little bit. Ogie Hollywood (11:27) and Charlie (11:42) ⁓ Definitely depends on the client. This sort of slightly relates to another question I wanted to bring up about discount timing and so on because I would say... ⁓ I mean, on Google, think it really depends. Sometimes you find that that sort of counter-intuitive lower ROAS targets get the whole system moving again and actually can be incredibly beneficial. But I do completely agree with what you say, when you have another call with your Google rep and they tell you your problem is your ROAS targets are too high. And you're like, OK, great. It sort of seems that they've slightly run out of ideas on that one. So I understand that. And you told me about the seasonal adjustments a few years ago. And I found that's especially helpful for picking up a reasonable momentum afterwards. I think where I'm still like a little unsure is that, is the, is the timing to sort of make these changes. So one, the timing to, well, the timing to be like a little bit more aggressive and sort of try and proactively capture that increase in demand, which is probably going to be around the discount, but not necessarily. And I don't think I've quite nailed this year. Like I've got a few clients who've started early, started already with discounts. I've got a couple who are just going to run it for a few days and a few who are going to run it for that sort of two week period. Obviously all of the reps are telling us that Black Friday is starting earlier than ever and you have to do it from the 1st of October. I'm not necessarily seeing that and I'm also not necessarily seeing a massive uplift on those brands that have gone super early. So I don't know where you guys have fallen on that. I'm sort of leaning towards thinking that that sort of two week period is the sweet spot, realistically probably expecting the real peak to happen on the week of. Ogie Hollywood (13:19) I Simon Freeman (13:20) Yeah, I mean, I would agree. I've got some brands that have started now and the typical curve for them is like sales bump, real dip, you know, two weeks and then they come up naturally out the other side and you you're trying to run the numbers and say well actually it hasn't been any beneficial for you to go... this early, like three weeks out. You see a couple of brands last year launch on a Friday before and I think that was quite good because I think in the consumer's mind it might have been Black Friday for them or it would have just caught a little bit unaware and that's actually like a real nice spot in the Friday before because it's still front of mind but not so far in advance that know all people with running the same kind of messaging over and over. But yeah, mean the timing one's a really interesting one. Ogie Hollywood (13:51) Amen. think that one also works very well, especially in the UK market because the consumers are not quite as aware as to what Black Friday is and when it is. So like obviously in the US it's a Thanksgiving holiday, whereas in the UK it's like, oh, it's a promotional period to get discounts on products online. And I think especially whenever it's later in the month. So think this year it's going to be last Friday, is, it's the 28th or 29th. Charlie (14:30) Night. Ogie Hollywood (14:33) you know, there is a good chance that the Friday beforehand people are confused and think, if there's a promotion on this must be it. But the one thing that we've seen a lot of the last couple of years is that, yes, you can go early in terms of launching your promotions early. A lot of customers will wait out for Black Friday. So either the Friday before when they think it's like the fake Black Friday or the actual Black Friday to make their purchase, because they assume that the offer is going to get better. So they might add stuff to the basket, they'll have things favorited, you'll get a lot of traffic. Simon Freeman (14:44) you you Ogie Hollywood (15:01) but people won't necessarily convert and there won't be much of an uptick beforehand. Whereas on Black Friday itself, even if you do minimal to no increase in aggressive marketing, you will naturally probably have a massive uptick in sales on that day if you have a reasonable offer on site. And that's where again, think sometimes you don't actually need to maybe invest or spend as much as you think you do on that day because you already have a lot of those customers in your pipeline and in your funnel. And that can be another lesson, which is that you You can potentially push more traffic in the three to four days prior to your offer going live just to fill your funnel with potential customers, especially if you can acquire some of those into an email list and actually run at a slightly lower ROAS than would normally be acceptable for the business for that period because you know there's going to be such a big uptick on the back of that traffic on the Black Friday itself that that slightly lower performing ROAS over the three to four days preceding it is worthwhile for the business overall. Charlie (15:56) Yeah, that's kind of the point I was actually alluding to as well. didn't put it quite as nice as you, Eggy, but do you think that three to four days is the balance for that? Because again, I'd say a couple of years ago, I had a few brands where we started early and we had the philosophy of let's build loads of traffic for those two, three weeks. And actually we couldn't really make it up ⁓ for the Black Friday period. And last year I had a more conservative approach. Ogie Hollywood (16:16) Mm. Charlie (16:20) and generally started to ease our budgets sort of just two to three days and it results in a much more sustainable, successful Black Friday from a pure profit perspective. So this year I'm a little bit torn if there's a sort of halfway house. So it's interesting to see you also talk about that sort of three to four days is optimal and actually just trying to pump for two weeks just creates too much distance to make up from a sort of revenue standpoint. Simon Freeman (16:44) Oh yeah, I think that's the sweet spot. I think week of, Black Friday, you do it on Sunday or the Monday or the Tuesday, you've got to keep it fresh in people's minds. If they've signed up to an email list, know, for weeks beforehand and you've already peppered them with emails that have lost interest potentially. So yeah, I think it's more condensed windows. Ogie Hollywood (17:07) What about in terms of tactics guys for meta? I'm assuming you guys have a lot more utilization when it comes to retargeting in audiences. So again, during that period, you're building up audience lists in that maybe one week before, a bit of an aggressive push then on retargeting. Are you guys pushing the impression caps up very aggressively, putting ads in front of people more frequently? Any kind of specific tactics to kind of get the uplift that you're expecting for Slans during the period? Simon Freeman (17:33) Yeah. I some of it on the brand in terms of the, I guess, the direct strategy, but like I know overarching is trying to get as many touch points in as cheaply as possible in the days leading up. Whether you run that very upper funnel and kind of like an awareness campaign or video views and hint towards Black Friday or pull people into an email list. I think that is a good way to combat rising CPMs during that week and still like get the volume. It doesn't work for every brand, but think for brands that a bit more mass market and have a wider appeal, that works quite well. But for ⁓ niche brands, then probably not so much. But yeah, strategy-wise, just very, very upper funnel and then heavy retargeting over that Black Friday period. As many audiences that you can create around various interest levels, particularly people that have engaged in some way and not purchased, they're the ones that are nice to get over the line during that period. Yeah. you Charlie (18:34) Have you found one thing the clients are always asking me to do and every year I say we did this last year and it didn't work is the lead forms on meta in advance. They sort of have the idea that if you run lead forms and you get 30, 40 P and you lead build a database of 10,000 leads and then you think you're just going to be laughing on actual Black Friday. I've done that a number of times for me once I've ended up doing it twice. And the lead quality for me on those is just utter tripe. And actually then when you put them through as a specific segment on Clavio, you realize that the value they actually bring at the end is nowhere near worth the lead prospecting at the beginning. And you're just much better off allocating that into conversion spend. The slight exception I've seen is when you're actually pushing someone to a landing page and there's that little bit of friction where they have to actually then make a decision and not just like very quickly sign up on the lead form on Meta. But then the lead costs typically are a lot more expensive. What's your take on that? Are you doing that? Have you seen it actually be truly effective? Simon Freeman (19:33) Yeah, I mean I've bit of lead gen testing this year in particular. ⁓ and I have such an aversion to the Facebook lead form of just categorically never using it again, unless something significantly changes in the setup to improve the lead quality, because it's appalling. But yeah, along the same lines of what you're saying. I don't feel like it, but it's... Ogie Hollywood (19:46) Thank you. Charlie (19:50) Yeah, but it can feel like progress, I think that's why the clients like it because it's like, oh, we've got 1000 leads and we only spent 100 pounds. think I think it can feel like progress. And then I always say to them, like, particularly when I take on new accounts, I'm like, did you segment that audience and actually see how much they converted? And they're like, well, no, but I remodeled really well. it's like, yeah, Clavio always does really well, because it's like, you know, if you were near a Clavio email when you made a purchase, it'll take credit. But you know, that specific segment. Yeah, but it's one that I always feel like I'm slightly battling on and then I always have to set it up to prove that it's not effective. Simon Freeman (20:14) I mean might go to at the moment Ogie Hollywood (20:24) Yep. Simon Freeman (20:27) If I'm expecting someone to make a purchase at any point in the journey, which is 99.9 % of the time, even for lead capture, I'm still using the sales objective, so sales campaign website lead form. Likely lead costs might be two or three times higher than Facebook lead form, but the return off the back of it is significantly better. We've rounded it for earlier in the year, like quite significant spend. AB testing both, I think we ended up with a negative return on ad spend on the Facebook lead form, running the lead objective first. Yeah, the sales objective leads to two extra ad spend, which is good for this brand, but the cost per lead had gone from a dollar up to close to eight or nine dollars. That eight or nine dollar lead gave us the positive return on ad spend. yeah, just about talking to clients to see beyond the cost per lead sometimes and understand. Ogie Hollywood (21:20) in. Simon Freeman (21:22) the value of them is so much more important than the quantity sometimes. You Charlie (21:27) Sorry, my Airpods just died. Yeah, always say that point as well. mean, going off the Black Friday topic, but it's always the same thing with like, just generally the top of funnel campaigns when you see a huge amount of reach yet, no conversions, I think sometimes clients, like we're sort of so used to that idea that yeah, reaches for each, conversions for conversion and you know. You can spend thousands in a reach campaign and not generate sales. Whereas your CPAs can be pretty low in a conversion based campaign. And it's kind of something you just kind of get over time, but can actually be pretty hard when you're really pressed on it with a client of like, okay, fine. But if you're showing that many people, surely someone's got to purchase. And yeah, it's still something I find to this day, quite hard to validate, especially with bigger clients, when those objectives do become kind of important to play the... Ogie Hollywood (22:11) Just. Charlie (22:18) the reach game and getting incremental reach and so on. But it's still, ⁓ I would say something I haven't ever like truly been able to solve is how to validate the place of reach and pure like upper funnel, early funnel objective campaigns and proving their impact. Ogie Hollywood (22:37) Yeah, there's a good example that relates to this. was chatting to a close friend recently. He's running a lot of PMAX for insurance client and their main KPI is quotes. So I was like, okay, generate a quote. And that's kind of what the business was based in their overall value on. And it was working very well for quite a while. And all of a sudden overnight, was like, for some reason, very few of these quotes are articulating into actual insurance policies getting taken out. And what they realized when you look at the backend on the script on PMAX was that the Google had reallocated a large portion of investment towards video. And as the video spend increased, the cost per quote was coming down. That looked great from the internal platform metrics, but actually the conversion rate from quote to policy had substantially dropped off. And that's where it's very, very challenging then to go back and essentially rebuild the campaign with a new conversion action, because you pretty much got to start from scratch. And that's where I think just in general that, yeah, obviously in e-commerce, the equivalent will be trying to optimize towards an add to basket. it's like, sure, Google will be able to find customers to press add to basket, but the proportion of them that will purchase will be much, lower. Whereas when you actually just give it the hard data of purchase conversion value and transactions, it knows that it has to go and achieve those transactions in order to hit the ROAS target. And therefore it does a very, very good job of it. So it's like, if you do feed it the right conversion action and tell it what to do, it will hit that threshold. And that's why I think... Google's automation and especially ROAS bidding for e-commerce companies is, I think, hands down one of the most effective ways to bid for customers, but you need to have the correct conversion tracking that actually pulls in your purchase value and autonomously into the account on a day-to-day basis. And similarly, for Black Friday, I anyone who is trying to run lead capture campaigns or getting email sign-ups as their main conversion event or looking at driving people to add to basket. Simon Freeman (24:10) You Ogie Hollywood (24:25) there's just going to be lot of additional waste to spend with probably very little in terms of purchases that come in the back of it. Phil (24:32) What I've tried the last couple of years with that is I agree if you do anything but the conversion event, you're going to get low quality traffic is I would just stick and I have control over this on the CRO side. I would put more friction with pop-ups and baked in opt-ins on the landing pages because in that two to three week period, your opt-in rate increases exponentially because people are opting in. So I would go from a baseline of 15 % to 25%. But this is where the email team has to work closely to continuously email because those leads may not. sell in the first week, but if the email team continuously updates a welcome flow or sends campaigns on Black Friday, it will pay itself off. Because that's another metric to look at is the earnings per lead or revenue per click on an email will increase as well, which will pay off the ad spend. Ogie Hollywood (25:10) me. Charlie (25:18) And Phil, that's specific to Black Friday messaging. Opt in to be the first to hear about our Black Friday kind of OK, yeah, now I think that makes sense. Phil (25:23) Yeah. It depends on the product too, because if you have a product that's seasonal and gifting and you have an issue with the shipping turnaround time, so there's a finite period of time where you can ship. Like it's a personalized product, you want to sell through earlier, but if you're selling a t-shirt that's sitting on inventory, people know that they're going to be sitting on inventory. So they're going to wait till Black Friday anyway. Charlie (25:45) Yeah. Ogie Hollywood (25:48) Yeah, that makes sense. In terms of guys just like, sorry, tried to go on. Charlie (25:50) and turn. There you go. Ogie Hollywood (25:56) I was just going to say, terms of a keen to run through some of the more tactical stuff on Google Ads that people could actually look at implementing that will, I would say, drive a solid impact for the business. And again, similar to what the sales, I think it's doing a small number of very effective things well, as opposed to trying to completely change the game in terms of your ad strategy. So as a typical basis, we won't launch new Black Friday specific campaigns. We'll run our BAU search and shopping campaigns, but we'll change tactics within those campaigns to be more Black Friday specific. So if we look at, for example, on shopping ads, there's kind two or three core tactics which will drive a lot of uplift within the business for conversion rate. Number one is actually the blanket putting the sales live on site and ensuring that the sale price icon is pulling into your feed. So for example, if you're doing a 20 % sale, your product goes from $100 down to $80, that Google will then show that automatically in the feed. And you'll essentially have a big badge that will appear. as a sale icon on the top of your shopping listing ad. And that is actually one of the most effective things to ensure that you have in place. Secondary to that on shopping ads is putting in place the seasonality adjustments. So Google are often slow to react to whenever promotional periods happen. You would think that Black Friday is one that they would be very familiar with, but even still, the algorithm can take a little bit of time before it understands that the conversion rates have increased very drastically. So what we'll essentially do is put a positive seasonality adjustment during the sale period in order to give Google a signal to say, hey, people are going to convert at a higher rate than they typically do. So therefore, increase your bids or increase traffic from these campaigns during this period due to the promotion going live. ⁓ And they are kind of the two main, main ones. If you want to go more tactical, you can. for example, update your fee titles to include Black Friday based messaging, but you can add the percentage discounts or anything like that, but you can put like Black Friday deal, for example, into your titles. I generally don't think it's worth it ⁓ personally, but it's something that if you really want to highlight it that you can do. But otherwise shopping ads, it's somewhat straightforward. Once you've got your sale price in place, that's going to drive a lot of your value. When it comes to search ads, there's a lot more tactics that you can put in place. And I think sometimes it's about trying to try to know which ones are worth doing, which ones are not. So for example, a lot of people will go and create specific Black Friday ads, which again can be useful, but it takes quite a bit of time to get a new ad approved and then a new ad to ramp up and get data behind it. So we typically, it will actually also just keep the same search ads that we have running, but we'll add what's called a campaign level headline to those ads. So therefore it doesn't force it to go back into a review phase. So your ad doesn't go back into review and start from scratch. The same ad stays running, but you have a campaign level headline for the promotion offer. So whether that's say, you know, 20 % site wide sale. And ideally do these on a category level. So instead of doing a blanket headline that you put across all search campaigns, you'll do kind of a catch all one for your brand campaign. And then you'll do category specific ones for every category. Ideally you already have your search campaigns broken into your kind of main parent categories that you sell them online. And therefore adding those headlines specifically for each category is a very good way to cover Black Friday messaging in a very quick and effective way. And again, doing this from an actual operational standpoint, if you make those updates in Google Ads Editor, it's pretty much a blanket sweep that you can upload them all in one go, prepare them all in a Google Sheet very quickly, use the help of AI to help writing these things, it what your promotion is going to be, tell it what categories the promotion is going to be on. And essentially you got to just spin out 20 or 30 different headlines. or three per category and then as you put them into a sheet, tag them at the right campaign names and upload it through editor and you'll have that job done in a very short space of time. And then the other two main ones is utilizing extension coverage, so assets within Google Ads. Number one, which is a no-brainer, is doing promotion extensions and you have a specific Black Friday related promotion extension which will say Black Friday and then the sale that you have running at that time. Again, you can do kind of a blanket one for your overall account, or you can do specific campaign level promotion extensions, which again, I would encourage doing the campaign level promotion extensions just to highlight the specific category that's going on sale. Even if the whole site is on sale, it's much more compelling if someone is searching for a certain category, say they're searching for a bed, that you say, you know, Black Friday bed sale, 20 % off, for example. And then the last one that I'll cover, I think is useful, is updating your site links. and essentially using your site link assets to call out the different sales that you have running. So for example, you'll have one which will just be linking to your general sale page, but one that goes to maybe one of your top categories to that promotion category page, other promotion category page, et cetera. And again, it's just a way of putting more Black Friday related copy into your ad. And again, the final one, similar to doing the campaign level headlines, you can also do campaign level descriptions. So again, doing specific add descriptions that have the Black Friday promotional call-outs within them and applying that again at a campaign or ad group level just to make sure that you have updated copy that calls out the Black Friday promotion that's running. And that probably is going to get you 90 % of the way there. For some of our larger e-commerce companies, we will do some more advanced tactics and there'll be bit more planning and preparation going into it. But what we often find is people overcomplicate these things and they try and launch brand new campaigns two or three days before Black Friday. They go and target, for example, broad match Black Friday keywords that are just relating to any Black Friday sales. And a lot of these things are just a way to burn a shit ton of money. And to be very honest, maybe cover if you want to add keywords, cover specific exact match category level product keywords with the term Black Friday included in it. So for example, the Beds example there would be Beds Black Friday Sale, as an exact match term within your current campaign. If you're doing that, make sure you add labels on those keywords so it's very quick and easy to pause them after the period is over. ⁓ But yeah, there are some of the core tactics that we'll generally do across the board for all companies who are running ⁓ promotional activity during the Black Friday period. Simon Freeman (32:17) I love it, that's pure gold there mate. think people will pay a lot of money to get that advice just before Black Friday I think. I think that you might kind of this from really good points that in essence relate to Meta or TikTok or wherever you're advertising there. The big one, ⁓ get your ads set up early. Don't be launching them on Black Friday morning and expect them to get through the system. quick enough and start to bring the biggest road to failure when there's so many ads going through the ad inventory that Meta offers. So I'd be setting them all up in advance, a week or two before, or at least a week before, just scheduling everything so you can have it. It's a piece of mind knowing that everything's pre-approved and running. But a really solid Meta setup, similar in theory to Google. utilize the features that are there, the five primary text areas, the headlines, actually got really strong call-outs, good creative diversity, all the things that kind of ring true for Meta anyway, still need to be applied across Black Friday. But the one that kind of sits outside of the other accounts a little bit that I think is always well worth checking in with brands is just website. What are their plans? What's happening with the landing page experience? If they're spending significantly more than they usually do, as they're hosting, etc. set up to be able to take the increase in numbers. That's probably one of the biggest ones, but really understanding what page load speeds and what their plans are in terms of how they're branding their websites to make sure that conversions are frictionless as possible is just super important. Yeah. Ogie Hollywood (34:06) Yeah, such a big one. I seen a couple of years ago, I Jim Shark did one of their big kind of blackout Black Friday sales and the whole site crashed. And it's like, okay, great. You just pump the shit to the money board, this massive marketing campaign and your website can't handle the capacity of the traffic that's being driven to it. And then the other big one as well is back end logistics. think a lot of people don't realize the strain on warehouse capacity that comes with a day of four or 500 % increase in sales. And you've, you you have some very frustrated and low morale employees for a couple of weeks afterwards, or you've prepared things, whether that's with automation or expanding warehouse capacity to oversee this substantial increase in sales. Phil (34:48) Same with support. Simon Freeman (34:48) Yeah, it's a one isn't it? Communicating around expectations with delivery times and work with a couple of brands that make to order. And those windows really get pushed out. The last thing you want to do is annoy the people that have purchased with you. You don't have the system to the place to cater to it. Ogie Hollywood (34:57) me. Yeah, big time. Phil (35:09) Yeah, to the support is really important too. Cause if your customer support gets overstrained and you have questions that come in, especially on that day of, when is it going to get delivered by? How do you order? How does the product use? Typically people are on that conversion event. If you can't respond quick enough, you lose a sale. So support is incredibly important that I don't think people talk about operationally. Ogie Hollywood (35:32) Are you seeing anything interesting actually with AI integration for support? It's something I'm not super privy to myself, but I'm assuming there's a lot of, I would say very compelling AI integrated automated support bots that can be very well trained on all of your inventory, all of your stock, all of your offers, et cetera. And I think that surely should be bit of an area to help fill those gaps. If not this year, at least going forward over the next couple of years. Simon Freeman (35:59) Yeah, work with one brand that I like have nailed it pretty well. They've got AI bots that respond to every comment on Facebook. I the ones that I don't want people to see. It covers the inbox really well with questions and it's such an unlock in terms of just being able to get back to people so quickly with the right answers. I imagine in their system if it's not something it can answer it goes to a real person but they're answering 90 % of any comment question via any channel via AI which is... Ogie Hollywood (36:06) Mm-hmm. E Simon Freeman (36:28) Yeah, custom build as far as I'm aware. don't have the mechanics behind it all. but yeah, something they've done themselves. Ogie Hollywood (36:29) Do you know, have they built something custom, Simon? Or what kind of product are they using custom? That's truly a massive opportunity right now. Service-based agencies building custom AI, customer support services for e-commerce companies. could be a good spin-off on the side, guys. If we get bored of media buying, there's a tech startup idea for us. Simon Freeman (36:57) Perfect. Matteo Favaro (36:57) Thank Simon Freeman (37:00) ⁓ I social proof is so important on social platforms ⁓ and you know for every person that asks a question there's at least another couple that have the same question that we're too afraid to ask for whatever reason. Unfortunately some brands that just have no interest in replying to comments or know the people you know really kind of like genuine questions someone's just about to buy you can tell them they just want that one little bit of assurance to get them over the line. Ogie Hollywood (37:05) Yeah. Mm. Simon Freeman (37:26) just left hanging. ⁓ So yeah I think it's a good idea. Maybe we'll make millions off it. Yeah, exactly. Ogie Hollywood (37:32) Yeah, such a missed opportunity, right? It's like you've got a customer there, they're interested, they're in the funnel, and just due to whatever resource or laziness, you don't have the capacity to get back to them and give them what they want. You lose them and they go to a competitor. Charlie (37:49) Switching back to the more detailed meta strategy, I was curious, Simon, on your take on conversion setups actually for the week of or for the peak period for brands, how you balance introducing Black Friday ads with Evergreen ads from sort of campaign or ad set standpoint. Simon Freeman (38:08) Yeah, you know what's perfectly honest I probably change my opinion on this regularly in terms of what's ideal with the know, go with the standalone Black Friday setup so it doesn't negatively impact your evergreen campaigns or do you just feed into your evergreen knowing that performance will change and out the other side of that it's going to be a little bit harder to recover but maybe you have a potentially a better Black Friday. I think my standpoint at the moment is probably new Black Friday campaigns and to not impact evergreen I feel like particularly on meta, I like TikTok. Sometimes you work so hard to get those other brain campaigns to form consistently over time with a good group of ads, a full funnel. And then you can go in and wreck that very quickly by throwing in a whole bunch of Black Friday content. yeah, think my approach this Black Friday will primarily be new campaigns, but within those new campaigns, making sure I'm giving it really good signals in terms of who the past customers are, who an engaged audience is, and what a... non-engaged audiences and how I want that to behave within that campaign. So it still takes the opportunities that are there, like the way I'm hanging through with people that are engaged and not bored, over the past 30 days that would be held within the Evergreen campaigns to make sure that those audiences still feed into the Black Friday ones. Charlie (39:36) Yeah, I think I have a very similar take on it. think actually where I'm landing at the moment is whether I feel it warrants a new campaign or just additional ad sets. I'm finding generally with new creative that I'm launching more and more new creators into new ad sets as opposed to new creators into existing evergreen ad sets. Still do a little bit of both, but I'm finding more and more that if I want to give new creative the best chance of working, a new ad set tends to be the best place. And more often than not, if I launch something Like sometimes you have that really nice idea, right? That you maybe have pain point orientated or product orientated campaigns and that's really nice for reporting and aesthetics. But I'm finding more often than not, if I just do that within a campaign, within ad sets, then I'm getting better performance than trying to start a whole new campaign. So I would say less and less now do I launch new campaigns for new sort of verticals and I'm just doing it within the same campaign in different ad sets. So I'm kind of thinking that if that's what's been working for me recently, then that's probably what's going to work for me better with. Simon Freeman (40:26) You Charlie (40:35) Black Friday. There's definite exceptions with certain clients where it really makes sense to have it separated. So I think hopefully I'll get that chance to test a few different setups and just try and learn very, quickly. But I would say at the moment I'm leaning towards more using ad sets within evergreen campaigns to run the Black Friday offers, but on an ad set budget optimization. Simon Freeman (40:41) Yeah. Okay, cool. That was gonna be my question. Where are you? Ogie Hollywood (40:56) So, Charlie, would that be essentially duplicating the current ad set targeting and essentially then launching new creative within that ad set but under the same campaign in meta? Charlie (41:09) Yeah, think the majority of campaigns, sorry, ad sets I'll be using for Black Friday will be pretty broad targeting. broad audiences, exclusions where it makes sense. But again, I feel like I'm probably limiting the amount of exclusions and just letting the Black Friday assets do the sort of whole funnel and then trying to just really crank them. So yeah, it's essentially duplicating audiences, but I mean, it's the whole of the UK or the whole of the US. ⁓ Ogie Hollywood (41:17) Mm. Thank Charlie (41:39) not a particularly refined audience. Ogie Hollywood (41:42) Yeah, fair, sense. Simon Freeman (41:43) How long do you feel like ads are taking to optimize and learn? When you launch a new creative, what's that? know it's very dependent on spend, how quickly conversions come. etc. But you need to get a feel that that's taking longer with the new Andromeda algorithm, or is it about the same as it was previously? . Charlie (42:05) Yeah, I mean, in the context of Black Friday, I'm expecting that things ramp up pretty quickly. But again, I would argue that last year I was at times a little bit surprised that the evergreen content that I didn't make any change to was often equally as competitive as the new Black Friday ads, which was also partly why I brought up the component of trying to make it a bit more distinct this year. I would say I'm definitely going out trying to do more specific Black Friday content versus previous years, because definitely a couple of years ago, know, a banner running at the top of a video and the bottom was... perfect at everything you need and I just didn't find that as effective last year. ⁓ So yeah, I'm expecting and hoping that it ramps up very, quickly and adds performance sort of from the off. In terms of more general release since the Andromeda update, yeah, I'd definitely agree that it's taking a little bit longer, I think. But I would also say that I'm launching ad sets with more creatives and more diverse creatives. So I would say there's also more stuff to be working through. ⁓ And I think that again is following what I'm seeing work, following what is deemed sort of best practice. So I think there's no argument that it's taking longer, but it's also because there's a sort of more diverse bunch of creative that I'm sort of getting the system to work through. Simon Freeman (43:15) Yeah, I mean, similar, you know, my gut feel is that ads are taking longer to kind of optimize and get going. Or the flip side is, know, meta's saying create ads for a single person and we'll find the right ad for the right person at the right time. So maybe it the system is incredibly smart and it's not that they're lagging, it's that meta knows when to show that ad. and there's only a small group of people that will convert off the back of that or it's got a very specific spot in the funnel. I feel like I've definitely noticed differences this year compared to last year in how ad accounts are behaving from a creative point of view and there's definitely less need to cull ads that aren't working. You can leave them there ready for them to show at some point and I've certainly had some that have left in an account for a month or two and then they just start. Matteo Favaro (43:50) you Simon Freeman (44:10) performing all of a sudden, which has been quite interesting. yeah, I think there's just a bit of a big unknown around Black Friday and how quickly we'll add to optimize over what is a very short window of time. yeah, I as long as you create diversity in those sorts of things in the messaging strong, most brands will probably be fine. But these are probably a little bit different to how we've expected it to behave this year compared to in the past. Charlie (44:38) Yeah, Phil, you work through a lot of creatives. One thing I have found recently is that I felt like there's a period where, one concept, two to three hooks, its own ad set definitively is that good or is that bad ad? I've less and less started doing that over the last few months in light of this Andromeda update and consolidated maybe three to four different concepts. You end up with an ad set with six to 10 ads. Ideally on a theme, but there's ⁓ definitely a handful of different concepts within there. So I do feel like that's working better, but the frustration has definitely been lack of clarity on certain concepts. Is that something you can relate to or have figured out how to solve? Phil (45:17) What we started adapting to that is we used to do very slight iterations on the hooks and we would keep the concepts constant just so we can know what variable changed but they just would not get as much spend after that update. We started treating every single hook as a mini add. So a different talking point, so a different voiceover, different visual that people see and then if there's a banner, a different overlay and each hook would have different variables. Matteo Favaro (45:27) you Phil (45:41) So it would call out a different person very directly within those three seconds. And that started working quite well because Meta will actually push spend to each of them thinking it's an individual ad unit or the rest of the video is unique or sorry, the same. And then once we find when we do another iteration, if let's call it version video one ⁓ of that concept is performing well, we do five spin-ups of that version. But the iterations are also five completely new hooks. Whereas before we just always change one variable. Now they're more distinct. And that works quite well. ⁓ Regarding like the Evergreen versus holiday sale ⁓ ads, we would just take the Evergreen ads and you just put on a banner on top of them. You take the best Evergreen ads, stick Black Friday sales on them. ⁓ That's a one quick one for people. Another one is as you get closer to Black Friday, the shorter the ad, the better it's going to perform because people are already in that conversion event. Whereas now at this point, two weeks out, the longer the ad needs to sell people and nurture them and educate them on the product. As you get closer to it, it can just be a super short GIF or an ad. You can even take a photo and turn that into a video, like a GIF, and get new placements there too. So just manipulating the existing assets works really well too. That's an easy one. Charlie (46:54) So, and then your argument with the distinct hooks, you found that just naturally the system gravitated more equally if there was a clear distinction between each video. Yeah. Phil (47:02) Yep. ⁓ It doesn't have a hard time spending equally and then it will find its eventual leader versus if it's not distinct, it's going to push to one and it's always going to allocate to that one add. Here it's even at first and then it pushes. Matteo Favaro (47:22) feel like the end drop-in update is something that we could have a whole other hour conversation about just in and of itself. ⁓ I had a quick question about what you guys do after Black Friday. Once you've accumulated all of these new customers and emails, what do you do with that then? Ogie Hollywood (47:39) There's one thing on Google. Simon Freeman (47:39) that's a good one. It's, yeah, sorry about that. Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting. I think that's where media buyers need to be, firstly, like super aware of what the sales cycle is straight after Black Friday. Do you need to cut spend really significantly? You know, I've seen brands I work with, obviously, but other brands, you know, go back to quite a high spend, which is a Wednesday, Thursday. Ogie Hollywood (47:43) Sorry, Tom, go ahead. Simon Freeman (48:06) they're just not getting any conversions and all of that ground that they created over Black Friday with their very thin margins because they're just scanning the highest CPMs they can lose that very quickly by expecting conversions to roll through particularly over the following week. you know that way I'm going to think the number one thing there is to be really conscious of what that looks like for a brand and pull back there but you know there's a big LTV piece there. customers that you require on Black Friday and every brand will be a little bit different whether that feeds into like a retention marketing team or what that strategy looks like but for brands, I work with a of supplement brands and know so a 1 or 1.5x return on ad spend is quite normal for a new customer acquisition and that margin might be a little bit thinner on a Black Friday so you know they haven't made bank on that customer acquisition on Black Friday and less so than any other time of the year so upsells, cross sells, anything that brings people back in that you've acquired over that time is just super critical. You can't leave that to chance and hope that people will come back. That retention piece is part of the Black Friday plan. That's all encompassing. It's not an afterthought. Otherwise, you're potentially throwing a lot of money away. Ogie Hollywood (49:24) What do you do to prevent that major overspend in the preceding days after the sale period? Simon Freeman (49:32) I mean a safe approach is to schedule budget changes or schedule ad sets to stop and make sure from Monday midnight that within the system that it cannot overspend. What's kind of more new this year is that Meta is now working off daily averages in terms of spend instead of just hard daily spends and so what I think will be really tricky for media buyers particularly this year is that if Meta is seeing a whole lot of conversion data Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and you've got a campaign that's set to whatever $1,000 a day, Meta can spend $2,000 on that if it wants to and so that Tuesday is a real risk particularly with all the nice conversion data that's come in so I think it's a, depending on the brand and where they sit, I think it's a real hard cut in terms of If not, just turning campaigns completely off and a bit of a reset the following week or closely after that. you Ogie Hollywood (50:34) Yeah, it's almost like, would say arguably more important than the period itself. As you said, if have a good Black Friday and then you don't pull back your ad spend aggressively enough, you end up having a massive overspend in the week following the period that then essentially eats into all of the additional profitability that you've just driven during the sale. Google's always operated in that way where it has the 30.4 day average is your kind of budget cap, but on a day-to-day basis, it can spend two to three X your daily budget. And that can be very challenging in periods like Black Friday because naturally it's going to more than double, sometimes triple your budget. But what we find actually is a bigger risk factor is if you have a budget, so often clients will run their budget caps at 50 % of both their average spend because they don't want to cap it and Google won't necessarily spend it. But what happens if you come near the end of the month and you've had three or four days of really strong performing ROAS hitting, say your targets at 500 % and you're hitting 650 or 700%, Google says, we've got a lot of flexibility here to spend because we've overachieved for the last couple of days. And therefore it will start to pump spend very aggressively, often after Black Friday. And we've seen this last year on a couple of clients where they didn't have heavy promotions, but they had a heavy uplift in purchases over the weekend. And Google essentially then for the preceding week just continued to invest very, very heavily with ⁓ quite poor returns to cost of sale and grow was worse. And guess what we would look at from a Google standpoint is similar tactic to the positive adjustment to let Google know that it's going to convert. We then also look at a pretty aggressive negative seasonality adjustment across the board after Black Friday. And that's kind of a good way without necessarily having to make major campaign changes. You tell Google, hey, don't go and get aggressive because we don't expect this conversion rate to remain stable. We're actually expecting it to drop pretty aggressively after the period. And again, even sometimes they still won't necessarily respect or listen to that. So the combination of reducing back down your budget caps, putting in a heavy negative seasonality adjustment to pull back spend, ⁓ and just hoping that Google don't get too greedy and tend to spend a lot more because of their good performance for a few days. Simon Freeman (52:45) Yeah, it's such a tricky one, isn't it? And then you have, I guess, brands that go straight into that gifting period, you know, lead up to Christmas. You've got a nice little kind two-week window there before delivery windows chop, or maybe three weeks. So you don't want to miss out on those opportunities either. Just because Black Friday's come to an end, there's still lot of brands that have giftable products that can and should do quite well over that period too, so. Ogie Hollywood (52:58) in Simon Freeman (53:13) I mean it's a media buyer's nightmare and dream all at the same time, this period. It's so exciting, it's a lot of work, and particularly over that weekend, making sure that all the brands will be working with the wiring, getting results, some that are not hitting expectations for whatever reason. So it's a pretty interesting time, I think. Ogie Hollywood (53:17) Jesus. Mm-hmm. Charlie (53:37) Yeah, I got a lot of brands that will go straight into that gifting period. when Mateo was asking that question, I was thinking, it's like, you know, no rest for the wicked. You're into the gifting period where you want to try and sort of maintain similar numbers, maybe over a slightly more extended period. ⁓ But I think one thing I'll look at is not getting too carried away with those evergreen campaigns so that when you do have that drop off, you get rid of the Black Friday campaigns. The evergreen ones are still at sensible budgets, maintaining a sensible ROAS, ⁓ and then you build back up with the festive stuff.}