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Ep 569: How Pilothouse 3x'd Buddha Board with a Year-Long BFCM Strategy and Hyper-Vigilant Milkshake Drinking
00:31:58
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- [00:00]
A
We like to adjust campaigns very frequently during these events. We think it's really important to be very on top of your optimizations.
- [00:07]
B
We think it's a red flag if you don't have any adjustments being done, especially in the lead up to the event.
- [00:14]
A
Resellers are such a big issue because when you're advertising on Amazon, your PPC ads sponsored products specifically can't display when you don't have your buy box. So if the resellers take buy box you cannot display during a key period like Black Friday Cyber Monday. You can end up with a much lower sales result than you expected.
- [00:41]
C
Before we dive in, let's take a minute to talk about what happened this BFCM because the numbers were massive and they reveal a lot about the state of E commerce performance right now. Across the Triple Whale platform, brands process more than 26 million orders and over $2.9 billion in revenue in just one weekend. Brands also spent more than $600 million across the major ad platforms. And Triple Whale brands alone represented nearly 20% of all Shopify sales during BFCM, which is pretty incredible when you consider the scale. But here's the part that actually matters. The brands that perform best weren't reacting blindly. They had a clear understanding of what was driving results, which channels were truly profitable, how ROAS was trending throughout the weekend, how AOV shifted as promotions rolled out, and where they had the strongest opportunities to keep momentum high. That level of clarity only comes from having all your data in one place, updating in real time. Triple Whale is the agent powered intelligence platform trusted by more than 50,000 brands like True, Classic Way and Alipop. It unifies data across every channel and tool, giving you a single source of truth and actionable AI insights so you can make confident decisions faster. If you want that level of visibility heading into 2026, you can create a free account and see the platform for yourself. Visit triplewhale.com dtc that's T-R-I-P L E W-H-A-L-E.com dtc it's all killer, no filler. I'm Eric and I am here with the launch of our new Amazon Head of Amazon, Tyler as well as our Amazon team lead to Kai who's returning to the podcast. Talk a little bit about Black Friday Cyber Money recap on the the world's largest commercial platform. Like let's plant our flag. Like that's what Amazon is, right Tyler?
- [02:30]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's the biggest online shopping mall in the world.
- [02:34]
C
So that's why we cover it here. So Takai, maybe dive in first. This is something pick up on a theme I think we would often cover with Clifford and Rob, which is the lack of adjustments that sometimes we see when we audit accounts and when we look at our clients. Talk to me about the adjustment frequency noticing that you did.
- [02:55]
A
We like to adjust campaigns very frequently during these events. We think it's really important to be very on top of your optimizations. Things are going to change really rapidly with the massive increase in traffic. So as a result, you need to be adjusting your bids and budgets constantly. That's kind of opposite of what we normally suggest. Normally we like to create some stability, wait your campaign settle, make some adjustments after a few days of data. At least that way you have a good level of information to work off of. But during these days it's super important to be checking constantly. Essentially you should be in your ad console as much of that day as you can be. Really just making sure that everything is on track.
- [03:37]
C
Are you lowering bids? Are you only getting more aggressive on these bids? How big of a swing on the day Black Friday cyber money during this period are you anticipating making?
- [03:46]
A
Yeah, that's a great question. So ahead of time we're going to. So let's say the night before is typically where I like to make my adjustments. You're going to be setting your bids and budgets higher based on your prediction for how the day will go. In the actual day, you're probably making massive increases to your actual bids where you've undershot that the night before, say anywhere from 10 to 30% increases to your bids. It really depends how much you're underspending and whether you're overly efficient and you think you can gain some more top line sales there. And on the flip side, you might overshoot some of those so you might end up with campaigns that are spending way too much or overspending or capping out on their budget early in the day and you need to bring them down to match the pacing you expected. And so similar idea, you might be doing some massive 10 to 30% bid adjustments day of those budget adjustments. I like to be careful and I think a lot of us do here, and set them at a somewhat conservative rate and then give a good look over all campaigns in the morning. But you might go from a campaign that Normally spends say $200 in a day to spending $3,000 in a day during Black Friday Cyber Monday.
- [04:56]
C
Tyler, did you have an example of how this was kind of orchestrated over the holiday period there?
- [05:02]
B
I think Takai laid it out pretty good there. One thing that I do want to call out is that we have had potential clients come in and we do an audit for them and we will notice that they don't have a lot of bid adjustments either on the day of the event or even the lead up to the event as well. And just based on what Takaya was saying, there's a lot of intervention and a lot of time spent going in those campaigns, adjusting and making sure that you're taking advantage of your efficiency and also of the new glance views that are coming in during that time and adjusting accordingly. We think it's a red flag if you don't have any adjustments being done, especially in the lead up to the event as well. Of course, there are nuances in some brands it might make sense not to do that for, but it's just one thing that I think you can guarantee on the pilot house side there, there are a lot of adjustments being done, especially in the lead up to those types of events.
- [06:11]
C
Makes perfect sense. It reminds me of my favorite movie, There Will Be Blood. If you're not making these adjustments, we will drink your milkshake. Is that accurate?
- [06:20]
B
I've never heard that quote, but it sounds accurate.
- [06:23]
C
Yeah, well, you gotta watch There Will Be Blood and then you'll understand what drinking one's milkshake means. But you're obviously living it because you're doing it in Amazon accounts every day. Takai, talk to me about how you think about rank ranking. Obviously you want to be ranking for your key terms, but how do you get aggressive around Q4 to really ramp up that ranking?
- [06:45]
A
It's really important to start building your ranking and at least establishing a plan for building your ranking before Q4. So a lot of brands expect Q4 to be where everything is built and where you build all your success. But really you're building that success in the lead up to Q4. You are six months ahead, even 12 months ahead. You should have some sort of game plan for identifying the keywords that you want to rank for and how you're going to target them, and tracking that too, and tracking your progress there. So that once you get to Q4, you've already built up some relevance for those keywords you care about or that your product is relevant for. And then you can from there build on the success You've built before Q4.
- [07:27]
C
And then the keywords that you're aiming for are going to entirely depend on your strategy and where you are in it. But I assume it's similar to a Google situation where when you're starting, you're really going for those deeper funnels keywords, longer tail keywords, and then building how do you like, what's a reasonable expectation about how much of a gain someone can make in a year leading up to Black Friday? Are we talking about going right into core terms? I guess that's a broad question, but how do you see optimization in the Amazon environment?
- [07:59]
A
It really depends on the size of your brand. Of course, if you're coming from a massive brand where you're already doing say six figures a month in revenue, you're going to have a lot more potential to rank than a brand that is just starting out. Let's say you're a relatively small brand, you're going to be targeting exactly what you said there, those long tail phrase keywords, same strategy as Google. That's where your bread and butter is. And if you try to target the larger or I guess shorter keywords, the larger volume keywords, you're often going to see just massive CPCS that you really can't afford. When you have a bigger brand or you have some established ranking already, you could potentially see yourself get into those, those higher ranks for super important keywords.
- [08:47]
C
And that'll be through a combination of. Is this main. Because with, with, with Google it's like you're, you're creating content in this or that. Back in my day when I was advertising on Google was a long time ago, but you were thinking about all the content you were producing to make sure those keywords became more relevant in the Amazon environment. It's a lot more to do with just bidding on those keywords, producing a high conversion rate that Amazon then sees. Okay, these guys can support bud me a little bit about, I guess where it's different than Google when it comes to building up a rank.
- [09:14]
A
The strategy here on Amazon is you need to make sure first off your listing is in a really good state. You know, if you have a listing that just doesn't look good, you're going to have trouble getting those clicks. If your title doesn't speak to the audience it should, you're not going to get those clicks. So first, ensuring your listing is optimized for SEO and click through rate. That's very important when it comes to the actual advertising. Identifying the keywords that you believe you can be competitive on and you can afford to advertise on with those cost per clicks, that's the name of the game. You're really just trying to, like you said, get the product in front of the customer searching that keyword. And in general you're really just trying to make sure your listing looks really good and get the product in front of the right searches.
- [10:00]
B
I think on that point as well, you know, it's, it's super important to ensure that you're building relevance with the Amazon algorithm. Like that is what you're doing through this process that Takaya has just talked about. You're trying to associate that product with certain terms that people search and Amazon will serve your product if it knows that it's going to be a really good experience for that customer and there's going to be high conversion that that follows with that. So when we talk about building up that relevance over the year and then especially going into the event period, if you're late to the game and you're trying to like rush to build up relevance only a couple weeks in advance, it's really hard because Amazon, it doesn't really have a lot of information on that product especially associated with those, those keywords. So we have a client that is a perfect example of us doing this and building up this relevance throughout the year. And that client is Buddha Board. So they worked with us as well. And there's a great case study on this happening. Buddha Board is a unique product. It's kind of like an art and craft type product, but there's no specific way that you would go and search for that product. Because of that, you have to get really creative with how you approach getting that product in front of customers. So a buyer on our team, a senior buyer, Alex Dudy, he worked with the Buddha Board team to build and devise a Strategy not in Q3, not in Q4, but in Q1 of the year prior. And they built up this relevancy over the year on seasonal type keywords. And when Q4 came around, they were one of the top ranking products for a lot of these seasonal keywords. So essentially taking what Takai said there, it's like there is this technical element that's happening behind the scenes, but at the end of the day you're just trying to build that relevance and that take advantage of it during these deal days. Super.
- [12:18]
C
It's Buddha Board is a really interesting example because you're absolutely right. Like it's. As soon as I saw one I'm like, oh, that would be a great gift for my daughter. But I'm never going to, you know, search for like water board as paint and you know, like you don't, you don't know that you need it. So I'm interested. I guess you can't give away the farm here, but can you give me any more color on the kinds of keywords that you'd go after when you're. When people don't even know that they want your product?
- [12:43]
A
Really depends on your niche, of course. Buddha board, very seasonal. Right. So they're using seasonal keywords. Let's say in a different example you might be looking at slightly adjacent niches. So something that might not be exactly describing your product, but that your product could fall under. Right. If there's. If that makes sense. Yeah.
- [13:07]
C
So arts and crafts for kids or art for meditation or something like that. Gift for so and so.
- [13:14]
B
Nailed it.
- [13:15]
C
Yeah.
- [13:15]
A
You're getting into the adjacent stuff and it doesn't work for all brands, it doesn't work for all products, but it can if your product is the right fit for the market. A great way to identify that is looking at the search query performance report. You might find that this is a report in Amazon. It's Amazon first data, so it's relatively reliable because it's not coming from a third party app. You can see exactly what your brand share of purchases is for different keywords or your click share, impression, share. You basically you get your impressions, your clicks, your add to cart and your purchases. So you get the full funnel and you can use that data to kind of work backwards and figure out what keywords you maybe aren't getting enough impressions for. But you see a massive add to cart rate compared to competitors or a purchase rate. That's one of my favorite reports for identifying keywords that are being under targeted.
- [14:09]
C
That's beautiful. That seems like everyone listening to this should cozy up with that report over the holiday season and then work on putting together their keyword strategy for Q1, for Q4, 2026. How did this culminate? I know we've got the case study on Pilothouse Co. We'll link to it in the show notes for anyone who wants to take a look. But Tyler, gimme the Kohl's notes on how this actually played out over. Over Black Friday Cyber Monday.
- [14:31]
B
Yeah, so for this brand, they had an exceptional Black Friday Cyber Monday and they're. They're actually riding that wave into this holiday season as well. So. And I want to put into context here what these numbers mean. So last year they already 2x their year over year and this year they almost 3x their growth in November. They essentially 3x their business in November during one of the biggest periods for their business. And it was because of work that we, and they put in leading months in advance to the event day and it was building that relevancy and it was having that patience to know that this, hey, this was a big deal period for them and how are we going to take advantage of this?
- [15:28]
C
And.
- [15:29]
B
Well, that strategy is exactly how they did and it paid off big time.
- [15:33]
C
Very cool. So Q1 is when people need to be making the. Yeah, the planting the seeds that come to fruition in Q4 makes perfect sense. It's a big. Both Google and Amazon, their momentum platforms in a lot of ways where with meta you can hit, you can hit a right ad and you can have the right budget and you can kind of scale. Whereas with, with platforms like Amazon, it's a, it's a, it's an aircraft carrier where you really want to build up the momentum the whole year.
- [15:58]
A
Yeah.
- [15:58]
B
And one thing I'd like to plug in there as well is, you know, we're talking about Black Friday Cyber Monday here. But if your business is on a different cycle and you rely on different times of the years, well, you want to line up doing that for that time of the year as well. Like not every business might not be tied to Q4 or Prime Day or whatever it is or certain events that happen in the year. There might be certain buying patterns that their customers have. And you want to make sure that you're building up that relevancy long in advance before that time comes. Right. So I think just take this situation and move it to where it makes sense for your business.
- [16:41]
C
Should we move on to the biggest pitfalls that we experienced that we sidestepped by being very hands on during the Black Fiber Cyber Monday period?
- [16:49]
B
Yeah, definitely. Takai, do you want to take a shot at that one?
- [16:53]
A
Sure, let's see a common one. And we hate to see it, but it's inevitable once a brand reaches a certain size resellers. That was a big challenge for some of the brands there this year. The resellers are such a big issue because when you're advertising on Amazon, your PPC ads, sponsored products specifically, they can't display when you don't have your buy box. So if the resellers take buy box, you cannot display. And if this happens, say during a key period like Black Friday Cyber Monday, you can't send ads to your listings and even if you could, you wouldn't get those sales. You can end up with a much lower, much lower sales result than you expected.
- [17:39]
C
Talk to me about the Amazon buy. I actually haven't heard the term Amazon buy. Box. After all these podcasts I've been taught, what is the Amazon buy box?
- [17:47]
A
Sure. So the Amazon buy box is essentially just when you go to an Amazon listing and you see the little add to cart button there, an individual seller or Amazon itself will have that. They will own that buy box. And the lowest price is typically what gets that. Sometimes you'll end on a listing and there won't be a buy box at all. It either means it's out of stock or there are prices off Amazon that are cheaper. And Amazon is saying nobody gets the buy box here because we want you to be more competitive. So very key thing to take care of, especially if you're Amazon one p so you're selling on Amazon vendor managing your resellers and your your retail site, retail distribution becomes very, very important to make sure that you can maintain your buy box.
- [18:31]
B
Yeah. So another piece that I would like to add to that is that it's not only disadvantageous to lose the buy box because you've built up your advertising and this momentum to drive customers to the buy box. But if a third party reseller owns that buy box, they're likely not advertising to drive customers to that as well. So then you lose momentum and all of that momentum that you've built up as long as they're owning that buy box. Because as Takai mentioned, you can't run your ads because you don't have it. So now you have to rely on them running ads. But in a lot of cases, the third party resellers are running on such thin margins that they're not doing that. So it's just another thing to consider. Like when you do lose the buy box, it's almost like a double issue when that occurs because you've built up momentum and it didn't pay off. And then as they're owning the buy box, you're losing that momentum that whole time they're stealing it.
- [19:40]
C
So is the only answer to be a race to the bottom and kind of cut your margin, cut your price more and maintain the best price? What are your options when you lose the buy box?
- [19:49]
A
Well, when you're already there and the resellers are already on the listing, essentially yes. Your only course of action is to be lower priced. There are some exceptions where you might be slightly more expensive than a reseller and Amazon has said that you have such a good history as a seller on that specific asin that you can have the buy blocks, but those are relatively rare. I think typically it's just lowest price. The real solve starts at your distribution and it's making sure that you have really strict policies in place for reselling and that you're not selling so cheap to wholesale that you get undercut that massively on Amazon.
- [20:28]
C
This Monday we're releasing a podcast with Santa Villa, who I believe is a pilothouse client on the Amazon side. And he goes in depth about the challenges he had switching from vendor central to get off vendor. As an agency, are we agnostic about whether someone's on vendor or do we prefer to have that control?
- [20:48]
A
Yes.
- [20:49]
B
So I would say we are definitely agnostic to who we work with, vendor or seller central. I actually come from a brand on the client side where we were vendor central in the US and we were hybrid model in Europe and Asia. So we had 3P and 1P, but 1P and vendor, I use those terms interchangeably. So the vendor side in the US it's really hard to change over to be a third party seller or on the seller side. And Amazon essentially doesn't let you do that if you have a vendor contract signed so you can get creative and try and work with them to move over to the seller side. But there are pros and cons to doing that. And I think it does depend on the business, on what actually makes the most sense for you. And profitability usually is what is the driver on if you want to be on vendor or seller. Because on the vendor side, Amazon's buying your inventory and if they're buying it, they're actually taking on that last mile delivery cost for you. Whereas on the seller side you're paying an FBA fee every time you ship and send that product or that product gets shipped and sent to that customer. And I think if you look at trends, Amazon has been slowly increasing that fee over time. So it is eroding margins, but you get more flexibility on the seller side. And I think that's where when you're looking at pros and cons, it's like as an overall portfolio, are you willing to take a margin hit to move to seller? If you get more control and flexibility over your brand, so then you can grow and push it further. It's an interesting conundrum and I do think it, it does depend on the business itself on if it makes sense. But yeah, we're definitely agnostic and we'll help either way.
- [23:08]
C
Well, let's earmark that for a future episode. We can go maybe deep on, on the differences between the two in the cases where you'd want to do one vers the other any Other big obstacles or pitfalls that we found that people can kind of make sure they're buttoned up for, for, for 2026.
- [23:21]
A
There was a couple others, I'd say two or three more that we saw relatively prevalent this year. Credit cards, your, your billing, credit cards were being declined or not billing properly. As a result, ads would pause. Luckily we were very on top of that. So any accounts we saw that we were spamming the clients, asking for them to fix their banking issues. But that's a very common one, honestly. And sometimes it's not the brand's fault, sometimes Amazon just bills them in really funny ways and it looks like fraud because they'll bill in like $500 increments. Another one is inventory. This is such a classic Q4 problem. You're prepared, you think at least you think you're prepared, you send an extra inventory and then you just smash it out of the park and you actually under forecasted or over forecasted. In general, we were seeing a lot of not a lot, but we did see that some clients were understocked because performance was just so much better than we had originally anticipated. Or in some cases we couldn't get the stock allocated to Amazon and we had to run leaner than we wanted to because we just couldn't get that inventory.
- [24:35]
B
I would say another obstacle that kind of aligns with that inventory problem is we saw brands that didn't run deals on their Hero, ASIN or sku. They didn't see as much success over that deal period. Because if we talk about that relevancy conversation, that's a product that has already been selected by Amazon and the algorithm as being a relevant product. That's why it is your Hero product. And if you're not running deals on that product during that time, you're competitors likely are and they're going to steal that relevance because their conversion's going to be better over that deal period. And you'll lose relevance not only during that deal time, but you can lose that momentum afterwards and that halo effect. So I want to pair that with what Takai was saying around inventory, because I think you can be quite confident when you are going into these deal events to bet on your Hero skew and then to pad your inventory as well, knowing that if you have a competitive offer against your competitors, or even if it's an equal offer, you're likely going to ride that wave up during the Black Friday Cyber Monday deal day or deal week.
- [25:57]
A
A lot of brands that didn't want to put their Hero on sale. There'd be different reasons why they didn't want to run a deal on their hero product. But sometimes it was the assumption that, you know, just the increase in traffic would carry it on its own or that the sales are good enough. They wanted to just let it ride. Most of those brands either had to implement a deal partway through or they just had to suffer a bit through the lower sales than anticipated.
- [26:24]
C
A milkshake drinking type situation where, like where it comes down to really having to benchmark your, your competitors as you go into this process to make sure that you're matching their sales or having a better sale than theirs. Otherwise they'll drink your milkshake.
- [26:38]
A
That's. If I knew exactly what drinking the milkshake meant, I would 100% agree. But I think I 100% agree here. That's another great point is watching your competitors was a big deal for specifically what level of deal, like what percentage of deal you were offering. We did see in some niches competitors were offering deeper discounts than expected and as a result some brands actually had to up their discount. But we only knew that because we were very vigilant to watch and make sure we were checking out competitors by searching the keywords on the days.
- [27:09]
C
Vigilance. If, if you're in the audience and you have seen the movie There Will Be Blood and you do know what I drink your milkshake meets, please email me because there's two people in row who have not seen this seminal film. Paul Thomas Anderson. But let's get away from film critique and just into the overall vibes. How was. I think there's, there's a lot of unsurity in the market right now. There's, you know, maybe there's aliens, there's all sorts of stuff going on in the world. There's an affordability crisis. Affordability itself might be a democrat hoax, who knows? But how was Amazon? Was this year bigger than ever? Are we so back?
- [27:46]
A
Are we so back? Yeah, it didn't feel like a, you know, the best year ever kind of feeling, you know, it, it, it wasn't bad, but it didn't feel like we were leaps and bounds ahead of previous years in terms of the overall economic situation on Amazon. It's not like this year was, it felt down, but in many cases we weren't just, you know, Buddha boarding it up and hitting those, those 200, 300%.
- [28:13]
C
Interesting. Anything to add on the overall vibes, Tyler?
- [28:16]
B
Yeah, so I, I think if you're talking about expectations, I think this black Friday Cyber Monday beat expectations. If you're talking about like, are we so back? I would want to still take a step back and see if that's the case. But one thing that is promising is that people did still come out to play and buy on Black Friday Cyber Monday this year. And I think that's promising. Or it could mean that everyone is dying for a deal. Right. And maybe consumers are just getting that much more savvy, especially around this time of the year.
- [28:58]
C
What was that? It's going again. Totally depend on the client and their margins and everything like that. But what was the magic number for discounting this year?
- [29:05]
B
I.
- [29:05]
C
The thing that got me to pull the trigger on some new housewares from Fable bought some Japanese steak knives. They're both just flat 30%. That's what did it for me. Amazon's a little different because you've got fees and stuff built in. What was the offer or the discount percentage that moved the needle on Amazon?
- [29:20]
A
We really wanted to see 20% at the minimum for clients. Often if we were below 20%, we were having to bump those up once we got into actual Black Fridays every Monday because as many Amazon savvy listeners might know, there's, you know, it was a 12 day event this year. It started on the 20th and ran till December 1st. So that's a lot of sale days. Once we reached actual Black Friday Cyber Monday, some of those brands that had expected the sales to spike massively didn't see that when they were at 15% and they had to bump up to 20 above 20. Awesome. Even better. But 20 was really the minimum magic number. Yeah.
- [29:58]
B
And if you're asking for a magic number, it's better than your competition as long as you're still profitable. And I think that's why it's so important to be vigilant on the day of, like Takai said. And you have to be looking at your competitors because one, if their deal's better than yours and you do want to outperform them, then you need to adjust accordingly. Or what we also saw is competitors stocked out. So then you want to target them as they're stocked out as well on their product page and convert those buyers over to your deal.
- [30:35]
C
There's only so much milkshake to go around is what you're saying.
- [30:38]
B
I feel like the more you say it, the more I'm understanding what the milkshake is and it's coming. Circle. Yes.
- [30:47]
C
It's actually an oil reference. It's a reference to drilling on someone's land. And it doesn't really matter whether you own the land because the oil underneath is all over. And you can drink someone's milkshake even if you don't own that land. So it's. So it's actually, it's. I think it's pretty dialed to what we've been discussing. Yeah. Because Internet attention is the oil in this metaphor.
- [31:06]
B
It's people walking in, walking, virtually walking in the biggest online mall in the world.
- [31:13]
C
Excellent first episode, Tyler. Look forward to checking in with both you and Takai in the wonderful world of Amazon going forward. So have a very happy holiday. If I don't talk to you before you as well.
- [31:25]
B
Thanks for having us.
- [31:26]
A
Thank you.
- [31:33]
C
Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the D2C newsletter, you can subscribe for free at directtoconsumer. Co. And if you want to learn more about Pilot House's all killer no filler services, take off to Pilothouse Co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the D2C podcast. We'll see you next time.