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Bonus: How Nearly 50,000 Brands Spent $607M This BFCM – Insights from Triple Whale
00:27:47
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- [00:00]
A
Bsem, honestly, this year was bigger and earlier than ever. And I feel like every year it kind of keeps getting that same, that same vein. But this year especially, we saw that Shopify merchants drove over 14 billion in sales and Triple Whale accounted for just about 20% of that. So nearly 3 billion from our users alone. Brands are seeing the reality of competition, reaching new audiences, the importance of expanding omnichannel, and that really showed in the data. Diversification is no longer just theoretical. You absolutely need to think about how you can test in new platforms and learn about how your audience performs on that. Brands know their buyers the best, but it's good to start testing on new platforms.
- [00:49]
B
Anthony, welcome back to the DTC podcast. Always nice to catch up with you. You guys are leading the industry here with Triple Whale and I'm curious you. You guys have put out a. Or this. This podcast will. Will help help you guys put out some amazing insights that you've gathered from Black Friday Cyber Monday 2025. We're hot on the heels of it. Today is Wednesday. I made two purchases yesterday. Got some steak knives and some nice club glasses from Fable. Still got their discount, which was great. How is Black Friday Cyber Monday been for. For you guys over at Triple Whale?
- [01:21]
A
Yeah, and thanks for having me, Eric. You know, it's great to see you and great to be back on Black Friday Cyber Monday was no shortage of, of chaos and fun here at Triple Whale. We saw tons of success in our customer base and today we're really releasing all of those successes and just all of the insights that we found by looking at our data set of over 50,000 customers to basically pull out aggregate trends, trends by platform, trends by customer type, trends by placement type, new versus existing, like you name it. So really, really excited to release those out in the world today. Like, I think in the next hour we'll be, we'll be making those live and just talk through some of those insights today because there's so much I having this being my fifth or sixth Black Friday Cyber Monday this year, I thought was. It was. Was really unique in the. The new versus existing customer makeup, the spend per platform. So we're really seeing some, some cool insights that we're excited to share.
- [02:20]
B
Cool. Well, let's start at the top. Talk to me about aggregate performance. I think there's a lot of noise in the marketplace. There's a lot of noise in culture right now. But give me, give me sort of the high level on, on how Black Friday looked for you guys.
- [02:32]
A
So. Yeah, bsem. Honestly, this year Was was bigger and earlier than ever. And I feel like every year it kind of keeps getting that same, that same vein. But this year especially we saw that Shopify merchants drove over 14 billion in sales and Triple Whale accounted for just about 20% of that. So nearly 3 billion from our users alone. But what stood out to me specifically was really around like the volume that came from our new customers. So just around from, from new customers versus existing. So, so it's around 1.4 billion of came from new customers which just sets up a huge retention opportunity for brands. Heading into late Q4, early Q1 and BFCM for us really underscored just how essential triple well became for operate has become for operators. Like brands needed unprecedented efficiency this year and they really relied on us and MOBI as real time strategic advisors, not just a dashboard and not just data tools. And it really showed that AI is no longer experimental. It's how brands protect margins and compete. So I have some, some interesting numbers to talk through aggregately if you're interested.
- [03:38]
B
Yeah, let's hear.
- [03:39]
A
So across all our brands we saw that there were 26 million orders, there was over 606 million in ad spend and AOV was just around $79. And as I mentioned, new customers were just. New customer revenue was around 1.4 billion, which is just about half of BFCM dollars. Which is a shift historically. I mean we see that shift change as a business grows in size, in revenue. But for businesses under a million dollars, we're seeing 60% of their revenue came from new customers. Which is just really astounding and really awesome to see that businesses are continuing to scale, consumers are continuing to spend in more places. And one of the coolest things that we did this year that I'm super proud of is we launched a real time public facing BFCM analytics dashboard called BFCM Live where you could look at, no matter if you use oil or not, data that's updated in real time across every marketing channel. So that was meta, Google, affiliates, ctv, Klaviyo, I mean every channel, not just the big ones, sessions, conversion rate, aov. All of the key metrics that then were updating in real time where we had a spike rate of over 1700 orders per second, 25,000 page loads and sessions that we're ingesting per second. So really, really cool to externalize a lot of that data so that operators can make real time decisions.
- [05:03]
B
It's great to hear about the, I think the new customer thing is, is, is really interesting and, and I think it's that's been the discourse all year is brands getting really serious about splitting out their new and returning customers, all the platforms rolling out features to really aid in this as well. What do you point to as the biggest reason for maybe the growth in new customers this year? Do you think it was think it's the focus that brands have on it?
- [05:25]
A
Honestly it seems like brands have diversified their acquisition and retention and leaned also back into acquisition. I think there were even though I will say efficiency is so top of mind and it was definitely the most expensive BFCM that we've recorded from an ad cost perspective. We did see that brands were just spending more and more and more on ads and really trying to reach new audiences and using new platforms to reach those audiences. So looking at things like TikTok shifting spend to TikTok to AppLovin to Pinterest to reach new audiences and acquire new customers in conjunction with sending email and SMS campaigns through Klaviyo through Attentive to really reach their existing audience. So it was, it was definitely such a balance and that diversification definitely contributes.
- [06:14]
B
I was just reach reading a post Taylor Holiday made about brands that weren't on Applovin this year. Maybe missed out because there does appear to be quite a segment of new customers lurking on those apps there.
- [06:25]
A
Totally. I will say it's, it's niche but, but, but notable like it's the way that we've described it like I think there we've, we've seen just the number of, of users that you're reaching can be so much larger and like over the last year of just even I feel like last year Applovin really this BFCM right right around this time Applovin blew up and, and we're still seeing it be a really, really unique way to, to reach audiences. I mean I will say their, their ROAS was slightly down year over year, just only 3% but CPAs were down year over year. CPMs they were our most expensive channel but very specialized and really makes sense for especially like app heavy gaming verticals where you're, where you're going to find customers who are, who are focused on.
- [07:11]
B
Those you get the guaranteed impression on that platform too. Right. People are kind of content locked so I feel like if you, if you're investing a little bit more money in your content there it's, it's not a bad place to be testing it because you're going to get the view.
- [07:22]
A
Totally. It's great for middle and downf.
- [07:24]
B
What about sms? I feel like for the brands that I subscribe to, I got more texts than ever this year. It's such a immediate direct channel to your customer. Do you feel like more SMS were sent this year?
- [07:35]
A
That is a great question. You know I do have some, some data on that that I want to pull up. We did see that text like because one of the things that we offer at Triple Whale is a zero party data collection. So we have a post purchase survey that's been pretty critical to our attribution modeling, one of our attribution models total impact for years now. And so looking at those insights because of course looking at the customer journey can be complex and maybe emails taking credit if they're using separate platforms where we saw that email was about 7% of those post purchase survey responses and this is again over those 50,000 brands. Text was about 2% so it is still a lot lower. And I will say we have SMS campaigns from the messages sent of the brands that we looked at was just around 300,000 SMS messages just during that four day period.
- [08:29]
B
What other, any other insights from platforms? How were the behemoths, how did, how did Meta fare?
- [08:34]
A
So really like Meta, it was broad lens. Was that like Meta and Google are still dominating but there definitely are some cracks. Meta still captured 67.6% of all BFCM ad spend. Google then took just a little over 22% and TikTok, AppLovin, Amazon, Snapchat, Pinterest in that descending order. So I will say that they, while the behemoths took the majority of the spend spend did nudge down year over year. So Meta changed just about.05 which sounds like a little but when you're thinking about hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spend, anything like 03 to 0.5 is like serious money moving from Meta to TikTok to Applovin and Amazon. So, so it's really interesting. I also thought like Meta brands like from a efficiency standpoint it was a little bit tighter this year because CPMs were up almost 8%. Meta is one of the few channels where we saw ROAS actually increase 3% year over year. So brands are spending the most there but you're paying more for only slightly better results. So it's kind of that trade off. Whereas Google really efficiency slipped. It's converting obviously extremely well at the bottom of the funnel with search, but just costs were up steeply. So CPMs up almost 11%. CPA is up almost 34%. So really, really costs are rising faster than returns which is, which is why brands are choosing to Diversify more especially with TikTok.
- [10:02]
B
I wonder if that has anything to do with their falling revenues in because so many of the answers I look for in Google now are at the top in their AI summaries. I wonder if they're compensating in with. With rising CPMs to compensate for the fact that they're showing fewer people are going further down the page with their listings.
- [10:19]
A
That's a great point. Yeah. Like I would be interested from like the, the Google AI overviews if you looked at like common paid search terms and the AEO visibility and the like of the AI overviews. So how that convergence looks, who were.
- [10:31]
B
The biggest winners or the biggest takers of, of the budget that maybe fell from Meta and and Google?
- [10:37]
A
TikTok definitely. So TikTok was, was third in spend and it also was the really the saw year over year. So CPMs were down almost 30% which was the cheapest really among the majors. CPA is also down 29% while ROAS was up 28%. So it was definitely where a lot of brands shifted spend just overall to be more efficient. And then second we saw is Amazon where really CPAs were the lowest of the pack, only up 4%. Of course like everything is up, so only up 4% is still a win. But it was, it was not quite at the same conversions as TikTok. So it's just a different, different ROAS and Aldi we're seeing there.
- [11:21]
B
So zoom out a little bit and is this, is this mainly we're just seeing the like the Omnichannel gospel really, really lock in this year brands were looking at to diversify more and more. Is that something that you'd sort of agree with 100%.
- [11:35]
A
Brands are seeing the reality of competition, of reaching new audiences, the importance of expanding Omnichannel. And that really showed in the data.
- [11:46]
B
And then so it sounds like TikTok was one of the biggest winners here. What are some of the like the insights you'd take from your report from this data for brands looking to build into 20, 26 and beyond?
- [11:56]
A
I would say first is that diversification is no longer just theoretical. You absolutely need to think about how you can test in new platforms and learn about how your audience performs on that and say who you know. Brands know their buyers the best. But it's good to start testing on new platforms and then also starting to think about different placements. So one thing that we saw for BFCM was that placements had such a significant impact on efficiency and it was constantly a weight of scale versus efficiency. So testing new placements, things like reels and reels overlay, they delivered some of the strongest returns on meta Facebook overlay as well. Strong highest roas. And then for Google too like trying new things in search to work alongside of their AI overview because we of course are still seeing search remaining at being that conversion engine and performance max. Really being that driver for scale, but trying to work a lot of test alongside of other Google products is huge.
- [12:57]
B
Any insights? We talk a lot on this podcast about YouTube being the sort of top of funnel for Google's demand capture engine. On the search side of things. Is that something you saw born out in the data or is that maybe where they lost some of their efficiency because people haven't really figured out YouTube yet.
- [13:12]
A
I think we're seeing such mixed signs on from brands. Some brands are having such success on YouTube, others are still wondering how best to capitalize the content to produce overall demand gen and display delivered lower roas. So really more for that upper funnel play as we think about like a period as central as bfcm, but definitely something we're seeing outside of BFCM and beyond brands continuing to invest and test in more to then bring users through their funnel.
- [13:40]
B
So my only purchases were some whiskey glasses and some steak knives, some high end steak knives. So home homewares, home house goods were a big category for me. Any other big category winners or anything surprising in the data about the sort of industry categories that we see?
- [13:55]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Those are some, some good purchases too. I think I got slippers and some, I think I got a lot of vitamins but neither of which actually well I guess apparel. But we saw really apparel and Beauty owning BFCM. So together they made up almost 60% of total revenue across all of our brands. And really when you look under the hood we saw a lot in regards to like unit economics. So as we think about unit economics for bfcm it was really looking at like AOV to CPA ratios where interestingly even though their spend wasn't as high in Automotive had a 4x ratio and Travel Accessories and Luggage had a almost a 3.8x ratio. Whereas like media and publishing and health and wellness were feeling a lot more pressure when it came to unit economics.
- [14:41]
B
The other big thing that brands were going through to add to all the complexities that they that we have going on here was the massive Shopify outage. Talk to me a little bit about that and what triple whale help brands do to mitigate that.
- [14:54]
A
The Shopify outage was and Shopify Outage just for everyone's context. As I'm sure most know, Shopify Admin and some of their POS also went down during Cyber Monday which left brands, many brands unable to log into Shopify Admin and see performance. Which means they couldn't see their live revenue order volume conversion rate, the inventory and merchandising insights that they get and really just flying blind a little. So Triple Whale, thankfully, because Shopify APIs were live, all we our platform was not interrupted at all. So all of the real time data tracking across revenue orders, new versus existing customers, all your channel performance, your inventory, your blended roas and mer across every platform was still live. And so we really wanted to ensure that while Shopify is an extremely close partner of ours or an investor of ours, that we could also just mutually support our mutual brands and let them know that hey, even if you can't log into Shopify, we're here to support you. You make real time decisions using Triple Whale's data. I know we had a customer of ours quoted that with using Triple Whale's real time metrics his team could scale budgets aggressively intraday on Cyber Monday because they saw how the increases were impacting revenue across the entire ecosystem all in real time. So really exciting stuff and glad that we were able to support brands during a definitely stressful moment and to take.
- [16:16]
B
Advantage of the brands that do that. Maybe don't have that data and pull back, you know and leave leave that space in the marketplace for those that are willing to kind of keep keep totally.
- [16:26]
A
We saw a lot of sales. I wonder if you if you said notices too Eric. A lot of sales even continue through yesterday because Cyber Monday they had faced a lot of some order challenges obviously everything on Shopify Admin so so it is definitely something that brands were having to to adjust their their strategies.
- [16:43]
B
Did brands start your brands are going a little bit longer this year. Did you see that brands also started earlier this year?
- [16:48]
A
We did, yeah. So looking at the data we really saw a lot of brands think about Black Friday Cyber Monday as like the two weeks before. I will say we looked at the week before they were generating nearly $2 billion in revenue which is nearly 40% of their entire BFCM event. If we think about like how it compared. So still very concentrated compared to the BFCM week but the week and the week prior. So the two weeks before were critical for brands to launch promo and manage them dynam adjusting discounts, creative and budgets based on that performance over those first two weeks and then having that be the prime time. Here's our strongest offer, here's our strongest creative. Over BFCM weekend, you guys have so.
- [17:38]
B
Many sort of tools that can, can help brand owners. What were some of the ones that got maybe used the most or saw the most traction this year that you felt made the most impact?
- [17:47]
A
I will say we have, we have, we have a lot. I think our real time data is always something that brands are in love with. They can measure all their cross channel performance across every place they're spending and be able to make those live decisions. What was the most exciting is that they were using Mobi, our AI. We have Mobi Chat and we have MOBI agents. It's an agentix system to basically help inform those decisions of how they should adjust. So over BFCM weekend we had just about 25,000 messages from customers actively engaging with mobi in five different languages which was awesome really all around real time performance monitoring and strategy. So it wasn't just like pull me this data we saw on Black Friday at 6pm Customers were asking like if I have a marketing efficiency ratio of 3.2, what should spend distribution look like tomorrow? If I want to achieve an additional 600k in revenue, how should I split $1000 a day between top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom funnel? These are verbatim questions and so it's really, really exciting to see all of the different use cases where Triple Whale not only just became their data hub and source of truth, but they're truly decision and command center. So many really cool prompts that are live in our BFCM report too. That just got our team super jazzed.
- [19:05]
B
There's nowhere else to really go for that data unless you are a data scientist or have a team of data scientists. So to be able to just talk to it in, in plain English and get responses must be quite a relief for the marketers who used it.
- [19:19]
A
Absolutely. And that's really the most exciting thing we hear from brands all the time is that Mobi is not just a software that they use, but the teammate of theirs. And so it's really, really awesome that they could leverage that teammate to its fullest during bfcm. And no matter the size of your business, you have an entire team of data analysts thinking about all of the use cases of mobi.
- [19:42]
B
How do you see MOBI evolving kind of going forward? It's just going to get smarter, it's going to ingest more data, it's going to get more maybe accurate with. I'm not saying it's not accurate, but it's only going to hone in with more data. How much of the entrepreneurial or marketing process is Moby going to evolve to help with?
- [20:00]
A
It's a great question. Yeah. And it's something we're thinking of day in and day out. So really Moby is getting actively smarter. So we're building structural data retrieval processes that we're constantly refining so MOBI has access to the data and the relationships of those data sets in the way that anyone on your team understands it. What's really exciting is that MOBI is just doing more from a use case and execution perspective. Mobi can now build you ads, turn ads on and off. It can build you creative, really, really good creative. We have some awesome use cases from brands like True Classic who've used mobi's creative generation and creative editing capabilities to then set live all through Mobi. And so these mobi's very soon going to be able to create segments for you that you can then send to Klaviyo with the email campaign targeted towards those segments. So we're really thinking about how can Moby not only become your intelligence partner, but your action partner and execution partner so you can lean on Mobi to help inform those decisions and then execute those decisions. Very human in the loop, but autonomous from a, hey, you can make all these decisions in triple whale and if you set rules around that, you can actually just have MOBI do them for you autonomously.
- [21:14]
B
You mentioned you're still seeing lots of sales kind of come in. Like when does Black Friday, Cyber Monday actually end this year? Is it going to kind of continue right up into the run up to the holidays?
- [21:24]
A
Yeah, I think it's such a great question that we're actively looking at because we're doing a lot of work thing trying to show the performance of brands. We have a new exciting experience next week going live. BFCM wrapped in the application and so we're really trying to surface the performance of brands throughout the next month such that when they get into holidays in late December, they can take all of those insights from really early November through mid December and then refine any last minute holiday strategies and really ensure that the end of the year is, is beyond successful. So it's, it's, it's continuing all the way through the end of the year.
- [22:06]
B
Honestly, you guys have 50,000 brands on the platform. What are some trends you spotted? Maybe among the top 1% that you saw them really honing in on?
- [22:14]
A
This year our best brands are, are doing a few different really strong tactics as we think about their marketing strategy and operational strategy versus like diversifying where they're acquiring and reaching customers and thinking about marketing as every channel that a customer could engage with their brand. And so spending on more platforms, testing on more platforms, testing new ad, creative, email creative. And so that test first culture that sits both within platform diversification and within their creative and within their email has been really critical. On top of that we're seeing UGC just as we're like the rise of UGC as I think we've talked about it, the re rise if you will.
- [22:59]
B
Because it died. I think we reported on it dying. So I'm glad it never died.
- [23:05]
A
It's resurrecting and it's having such a strong impact and we're seeing brands using TikTok shop, even having really really strong success using TikTok shop and testing there. So again it's kind of all bleeding into that omnichannel diversification but, but really having that human component but concurrently also leveraging tools like a, like AI chats, AI agents to be able to 10x their team without needing to hire new people.
- [23:33]
B
Nice. That makes sense. Did you have any data on, on AI in Creative this year? I know you mentioned MOBI has the ability to, to, to help with that. Is that something you see more and more brands using as well?
- [23:44]
A
Yeah, we've seen brands been really looking at okay, the creative image editing. The generation is also really strong in Moby. But I think the most exciting thing for them is they'll take one of their top performing ads, ask MOBI to create different iterations of it, whether that's a different color, a different background and then be able to test those ads. They also a lot of some brands were looking at hey, of our top competitors, what are they? What are their ads? They can tap into Foreplay, which is a tool to look at the meta ad library and then be able to identify okay, based on what my competitors are doing, here's how I should evolve my ads, edit those right within mobi. And so we saw a lot of brands doing that over the weekend to make slight creative iterations, to see what would be working in real time and to ship those and launch all from.
- [24:35]
B
Well, what's the verdict these days? I guess you guys are a measurement platform. But how. And I think you know, a lot of smart brands know you've got to use a third party measurement platform. You can't go off of in platform data. Do you have any insights on, on the state of like in platform data? Can brands use that at all at this point or do you pretty much need a third party source of truth?
- [24:58]
A
Of course I may be a little partial but we do a lot of data just even when we're looking at that zero party data. I mean if we say like when looking at that of our post purchase survey we found that like nearly one in five customers say that they came from word of mouth but nearly half of credit from meta last click may show something else. So it just really illuminates the fact that platform reporting is only a piece of the puzzle and so you need to be thinking about measurement holistically and in new ways. I mean we're investing, we have mmm incrementality to really unify measurement tools to provide you capabilities from from click to non click channels all in one platform.
- [25:41]
B
Especially as people are diversifying and diversifying into platforms that maybe have tracking that isn't as evolved as the metapixel. Whether it's OTT or you know, applovin or anything like this it becomes pretty important totally.
- [25:55]
A
And that's really where we're seeing like MMM and incrementality have such a critical component in the measurements that measurement story now where we're thinking beyond the core metas in Google's well if you want.
- [26:06]
B
To dive deep you can download the full Black Friday Cyber Monday BFCM recap Report on triple whale.com Any final words for brands sort of evaluating Black Friday Cyber Monday this year and thinking about 2026.
- [26:20]
A
Yeah I think the biggest thing is looking at how you were able to achieve your efficiency ratio, understanding how you're able to think about real, making real time decisions and working with a platform that allows you to do that and thinking through how AI can solve that. So I would say as you head into the holidays, think what platform is really going to allow me to win knowing that speed is really what it's all about right now.
- [26:46]
B
And don't neglect TikTok. TikTok is one of the it's going to have its comeuppance like you just see the amount of in my life and you just see the numbers on its use, how much it's being used more and more than some of the other platforms. It's like only a matter of time before the commerce aspect of it catches up and I think maybe we're seeing that a little bit this holiday.
- [27:06]
A
Totally. It's time to test on TikTok. And yeah as I mentioned earlier to TikTok shop we're seeing a lot of brands like as a sales channel be really efficient so it's worth giving that a whirl as well.
- [27:16]
B
Nice. Well, download the whole report to get all the gory details. And thanks so much for coming on again today, Anthony. This was a lot of fun.
- [27:23]
A
Thanks, Eric. Really appreciate it.
- [27:31]
B
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now at directtoconsumeralloneword co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the DTC podcast. We'll see you next time.