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Marketing Operators
E037: BFCM Debrief! The Marketing Strategies That Paid Off - And The Ones That Didn't
01:08:07
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- [00:00]
Connor
All right, here we go. It's just, after bfcm, did you guys have any. Develop any weird habits last week? Like, do you do anything to get.
- [00:07]
Cody
Through the week Besides refreshing Shopify 198 times?
- [00:10]
Connor
Oh, my God. A day. A day.
- [00:12]
Cody
Yeah. Right. That's the only weird habit you got to. I was playing a lot of. I was doing a lot of recreating last week. I was, you know, your home. There's a bunch of family and friends, so I was trying to mix in some, like, you know, buddy workouts. We went and hit, like, these trails that are near where I live. We're playing some pickleball sessions. So nothing weird, but I was definitely like, you know, whatever time I wasn't working or with family, I'm like, I gotta go, like, do something where I can resist the urge to, like, open shopify again and refresh it again when I know nothing's changed. So that. That's helpful. You know, doing. Doing the activities where you, like, have to focus on something else during this time is. Is a good little. I don't want to call it a coping mechanism, but maybe it is.
- [00:57]
Connor
Dude. 100. I. I had the opposite experience. This was the first year where after Thanksgiving dinner at my mom's house, and then I did one on Friday with. With my dad's side of the family. I was like, yeah, I gotta start doing this. I gotta ask my family to celebrate on the weekend. I'm like, it's too. It's hard to be. I found it hard this year to, like, be present on Thanksgiving with, like, everything going on. And it's like, all right, I'm, like, checking slack or I had to, like, jump on a call or whatever. Like, all right, next year we celebrate Thanksgiving on Saturday. Saturday, it's like Black Friday is behind us. We do that. I could be way more present, hang with the fam. But this is the first year I thought it. So I didn't. I didn't quite get in the decompressed time with family that you did.
- [01:35]
Cody
I don't think, Connor, what you need to do is you need to. I think you need to just call up all your competitors and all agree to never run offers again. And then if you do that, your revenue won't be so. So seasonal. And I think I would do the same. We're going to. I'm going to hit up Caraway. I'm going to hit up Made in all kind of say, listen, guys, let's just not do offers anymore. We can slowly condition our consumers over time. We'll split out our revenue a little bit more evenly and it'll be great.
- [02:00]
Connor
Yeah, that's, that's work life balance.
- [02:03]
Cody
Yep, exactly.
- [02:04]
Connor
Cody, how'd you do?
- [02:05]
Jason
I didn't probably do anything in terms of the recreating like Connor did. I feel like it was either, you know, family or a kid or refreshing, Shopify and constantly going back and forth between that and Twitter. Um, sometimes it's, you know, having to do a little work. It's a nice break from family. It's a. Got a small house, a lot of, a lot of people here. So sometimes it's a nice break. But yeah, it's a, it's a busy weekend with all of the family and travel and then obviously trying to get everything ready. I don't know about you guys. Like, we're. I'm going to take some, some time off into this week. Take like two days off or a day. Just like just beat, just beat by this point. And then I don't know about you, but everything I pushed off for like December and 2025, planning that I pushed off until after Black Friday. It's all hitting me this week.
- [02:49]
Cody
Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. Wait, Cody, I gotta, I gotta refute that a little bit though. Cause I saw one of the sexiest golf swings I've ever seen in my life on your Instagram story. So there was something going on.
- [03:01]
Jason
Yeah, we did. First, first swing since surgery. Uh, so that was pretty exciting. Felt pretty good during it. He said don't rip any drivers, but can, can definitely take some swings. So that, that felt good. Um, definitely a little sore after it, but it's nice to push it. Um, we used to play flag football the night before Thanksgiving as a family. I think we stopped probably like three years ago. We're just getting too old. So I think golf will be. Little golf simulator will be our new tradition.
- [03:26]
Connor
Oh, dude, that's a good one.
- [03:27]
Cody
So Connor, you got a nine hole. Nine hole, one on one match. Cody Flo Fer versus Jason Panzer. A mop versus an op. Who do you got?
- [03:37]
Jason
Let's do it.
- [03:38]
Connor
Who am I taking?
- [03:39]
Cody
Who are you taking?
- [03:40]
Connor
Does, Does Cody get a couple more months of recovery?
- [03:42]
Cody
We'll give Cody, we'll say Cody six months from now. Oh, he doesn't need it. He doesn't need it. Jason. You hear that? Jason? I hope you're listening to episode, whatever this is of the mobs because we got a showdown coming.
- [03:54]
Connor
Yeah, yeah. I'll take Cody then. He's sounding confident.
- [03:57]
Cody
I'm taking Jason. He's he's been on his game. I'm not a golfer, so I don't know what's, what's up from down. But you know, Jason's playing a lot, man. He's, he's pretty dialed. He's been competing. Said he's winning some, some tournaments.
- [04:09]
Connor
Crazy. Yeah, a lot of winning going over, going over at Hex, I guess so.
- [04:24]
Cody
When I took over as head of growth at Hexclad, one of our biggest priorities in 2023 was to grow our revenue, our top line revenue, by scaling paid social, specifically through more creative testing. Everyone knows that as you spend more on Facebook ads using the same creative, the same landing pages, the same offers, your efficiency gets worse. That is a nature of scaling paid media. As you spend more, you reach more people. As you reach more people, quality of traffic to grades. One way to offset this is by enhancing the amount of creative that you're testing. And like I said, that was a huge strategy of ours in 2023. It continues to be this year and it's ultimately what let us spend over 50% more year over year while maintaining our one day click ROAS. We probably 2, 3, maybe even 4x our creative output in 2023. And that allowed us to scale our Facebook account efficiently. Now Motion allowed us to understand out of that enhanced creative output what was actually working the best. You know, shots on net is great, but in order to do it effectively, you still need to understand which of those shots on net are doing the best so you can scale it up effectively in motion. Let us understand what it was working exactly. While 3,4Xing our creative output and ultimately allowed us to scale our Facebook account very efficiently in 2023 compared to 2022. So if you're in the process of setting up your creative flywheel and you're about to really enhance the amount of creative testing that you're putting into your ad account, then you also need a tool like Motion to understand which of those creative tests are working and which ones you should be spending more on and less on and doing more of and less of. So if that's you and that's the stage that your brand is at, then you need to be booking a demo today or creating a free account@motion app.com Motion offers a monthly subscription plan so you can dodge those annoying annual contracts. And if you mention the marketing operators podcast to Motion sales team, you can get 50% off your first month.
- [06:27]
Connor
So look, we can, we can transition into the crux of the episode. We're not going to talk about kind of coping mechanisms for BFCM the whole time. We do want to do a quick debrief but before we begin, I want to thank our sponsors, Premier Sponsor, Motion, Rich Panel, Prescient and House. As always, thank you guys all for listening as well. So cool. So to get into some of the more nitty gritty stuff, who wants to kick us off? Anybody have like a big takeaway or observation from. From the weekend?
- [06:55]
Cody
You know, I'll. I'll mention one that I think that you actually we were chatting about yesterday, the day before and I've been thinking about it more and chatting with the team. One of our big takeaways was we saw a much bigger drop this year going from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. And, and you mentioned Connor, that I think you read somewhere that like the people that were going to spend larger amounts of dollars with a single brand we're like really ready to go on Black Friday. And we definitely saw that and like as we were texting like I think hexcloud saw bigger like Black Friday than Yalls brand but y'all, y'all saw bigger Cyber Mondays and obviously like Hexclad has larger car values than, than Ridge and Jones Road beauty. So I think that's an interesting thought and I. It seems to be true. We also had much better like individual SKU discounts on Amazon this year versus.com and we absolutely saw like more like better performance especially if you correct for like spend between each channel on like SKU volume. So I think that was an interesting takeaway but I'm hoping you're. You're right because we have some new offers coming out for holiday sale that are, you know, more geared towards, you know, individual SKUs, kind of building a cart of all the different, you know, one off products that you may have had your eyes on. So I think that was, that was an interesting, you know, observation and insight from just yeah, the Black Friday to Cyber Monday drop, which was you know, much bigger this year for us than it was last year.
- [08:28]
Connor
Yeah, I think that's totally true. We heard that this is just anecdotal and a lot of it is like post rationalization of like what happened. But our meta rep told us he was like, yeah, I think Black Friday is really for people save their larger purchases for early in the period, ensuring they get the best deal. That's when they spend their most money. And for Ridge, you know, you might see more of a delayed effect and that kind of makes sense. We end up having larger Cyber Mondays relatively and then we, we have like really big Decembers where a great kind of hundred dollar gift when you're looking for your nephew or whatever. So I think that's part of it. But actually I want to take a quick step back because I've had this conversation a couple times today just in terms of sentiment. We'll get more data. Obviously Shopify reported like pretty significant growth year over year from a GMV perspective. All the people that you guys talk to, how do you feel BFCM turned out?
- [09:18]
Jason
Felt like very mixed bag. That's what our meta represent. That's what, you know, people I've talked to. I'm trying not to like bias it because I don't have the most positive sentiment on it. But it's, it's, it's a weird year. I feel like it's been a very weird year in general. I feel like this November was very weird. Definitely not like crushing it. I definitely talk to more. It's, it's like almost a self fulfilling prophecy. I feel like whenever anyone texts each other, hey, how are you guys doing? It's always because they're looking for like somebody to, to validate them and to suffer with. So I don't know. Yeah, but definitely the majority of people I talked to, especially like large brands, there was, there was a lot of struggles. There were definitely people doing well. There's always going to be outliers on both directions. I don't have data besides the Shopify stuff, you know, that, that they shared. But it didn't seem like it was overwhelmingly positive for everybody.
- [10:13]
Cody
I, I was gonna agree. I think like if I had to average it out, maybe I don't think it like swung too far in like the direction of brands missing forecasts or targets. But I think it was like, you know, if, if 50, 50 is, you know, one out of two hit forecast and one out of two, you know, didn't. I would say maybe slightly below just again based on like the brands I was talking to. I know there are other brands that you know, murdered Forecast. I like your approach, Connor, that you tweeted about. Just, just lower your forecast and say you beat it. That sounds, that sounds great. And then, and then 100% of brands would have crushed. But yeah, I felt like it was a very mixed bag and I just, I think there's still so much, you know, we're only halfway through this like crazy period. Like, you know, I don't know about you guys but like we're rolling out a holiday offer the next few days, so there's still, you know, A lot of question marks about how the whole quarter is going to wrap up and yeah, I don't know, it's, it's going to be interesting to see how like the consumer behaves in the next 30 days. I'm hoping strong and, and you know, we'll see. I, I, I think this year more than ever it's important to not get too caught up in the micro of November and look more at the macro of like November, December combined which is you know, kind of how we've been driving our forecast. It's less like, like we're not necessarily driving our forecasts at least when we built this initially by like here's November, here's December. As much as we've been saying, like here's how much revenue we think we're going to do across November and December and then we're basically breaking that out into like different periods of like okay, sale launched. So this is from when sale launched to pre bfcm. Here's BFCM through cm. Here's Tuesday until we launch holiday and then here's holiday through like Christmas is kind of how we've like been looking at it and that worked well for November. Like we were pretty close to our forecast. We are having a slow December so far but again we haven't even launched our holiday offer yet. I was expecting some sort of like BFCM blues and so yeah, we'll see what happens in the next few days when we launch that we did the.
- [12:11]
Connor
Exact same thing in terms of like start of sale through this period year over year. So comp that exactly for US it's like 14 days right now. Then look at Turkey 5 Thursday through Monday, same sort of deal. And then yeah, it's just, it's really interesting to see what was odd for us this year. And I don't know if you guys experienced this, but we had such a strong weekend pre Black Friday. It's like November 21st. This was right around my birthday which made my birthday awesome. But November 21st I heard from a lot of people, we were all in the same group chat so we heard it from a couple other people as well. All of a sudden 30, 40% year over year growth just seemed to show up out of nowhere, at least for us. Had a really strong weekend, soft start to Black Friday week, solid BFCM weekend. So what ended up happening was we hit like basically single digit percentage growth BFCM weekend. But if you include that weekend before now all of a sudden we're much closer to where we originally anticipated. So the distribution just Seemed totally unexpected. Like one of my thoughts and I'd never had this thought before. I'm like, oh yeah, it's super clear the consumer is going to buy when they want. Like you can launch the sale whenever, you can send emails whenever, but consumers have a natural buying behavior and kind of propensity and sort of timeline and like it was just different this year than it's been in the past. And I think, yeah, the difference in calendar years plays a role in that it's later in November, everything else. So I thought that was really weird, hard to reflect on. I think best, best we're going to do is just piece it out into little periods and look year over year as like, for like as possible and.
- [13:49]
Jason
Then, and then just look Q4 over Q4 is probably like the best way to look at it, right?
- [13:53]
Cody
Yeah, yeah.
- [13:56]
Jason
It's just like. Yeah, because that should, that should contain everything. I did think I had a banger tweet last night though, because it's. Last night was Cyber Monday. So December 2nd. I said, guys, my December is crushed. That was a banger tweet, 330% year over year.
- [14:07]
Connor
Yeah, yeah, I sent that screenshot this morning too. We're up like 180% or whatever. I was like, let's go. Yeah, it's nice to start the month.
- [14:16]
Jason
With $2 million days though.
- [14:17]
Connor
Well, dude, it's just really dumb. I mean, I get why monthly reporting is important, but it's just so stupid to do right now where it's like, dude, I honestly think if you were flat in November, you had an awesome outcome. Like you were flat in November without the Sunday and Monday of BFCM weekend. I mean that is, that is for some brands, like really, really significant. And I guess, you know, the financial reporting will just have to have an asterisk for sure.
- [14:41]
Jason
Do you guys, I don't know if you guys go on TikTok ever, but there's, there's this Tiktoker. I think he's one of the best content creators. I think his name is Zevi. It's like X E V I. Have you seen him? He does like the somebody had a problem videos. He does these like long form like stories. I'll send you some of his videos. He's, he's incredible. He makes like the best content I've seen. But he did this one about how FDR changed the timing of Thanksgiving. I don't even know what year basically based on the Macy's CEO wanted him to do because it was always the third Thursday In November. And then. Or I guess it was the fourth, right? And then Macy's CEO wanted more time to sell stuff, whatever, so he moved it earlier. People got really pissed at him. And then the Macy's CEO was like, hey, we actually are seeing no difference in sales. Like, it hasn't increased sales at all. So then they pushed it back. He's a way better storyteller, so I'll send him. I think this guy's got incredible content, but I thought it was, like, a super interesting anecdote. Who knows if it's true at all? But. But it's. It's kind of interesting. And I did notice that, like, we launched. We launched way earlier, you know, last year we launched on Black Friday. This year we launched earlier, and I was expecting a bigger bump on Black Friday, but we launched a week before that, so I think we pushed it pretty hard before that. We did get a bigger bump on Cyber Monday, but, you know, we didn't get the Black Friday bump that I was expecting. So I was a little bit disappointed on that. But it's, you know, my. Yeah, it's the. The. It's just weird timing overall, and, you know, you guys are probably doing something more similar year over year compared to what we did, but our offer is different. Our, you know, our timing is different. There's just so many variables that just makes it really hard to compare. So, you know, it's not over. I feel like we're in the fourth quarter. Like, we. We still got December, and hopefully it's a pretty solid September. December. But there's definitely a lot that I feel like, all right, so we only.
- [16:37]
Connor
We.
- [16:37]
Jason
We missed November forecast by 1%, which, you know, that's. I don't know if you consider that hitting it or not. And then Connor, earlier you said, you know, that's hitting it. But. So I'm not. I'm not wildly disappointed. It was not as efficient as we wanted. So if we did not hit contribution margin forecast, which is obviously what we care about the most, but there's a lot that I think worked up until a point, and I feel like we're. We're as a brand at this inflection point, you know, four years in, where the offer is getting a little bit, you know, a little bit fatigued, and there's just a lot of variables. So we definitely have to go back to the drawing board as a team and figure out, you know, what we need to do to execute better, because we're not just seeing, like, the same growth as we used to get during these periods with the same offer.
- [17:15]
Cody
And that is the lever at this point, right? Like you spend all year generating demand to capture it in this two month window. And that's coda. We saw the same thing with our business. Like we, we were, we also hit our forecast pretty accurately in November at a slight lower efficiency but again we were pretty happy with it. And like in terms of how that came to be, it played out exactly how you just said. We were above forecast for like most of November after we launched the sale and then we were slightly soft on it while still seeing solid year over year growth, but slightly soft on the forecast. And then that ultimately over, over the, the Turkey 5 weekend and that all mainly on Black Friday Cyber Monday, which obviously that was December, but that was kind of the, you know, the different subcomponent parts that added into us hitting that forecast. But like that is where we've spent most of our time. Now that we're just slightly slow in December is just like what, what can we manipulate to capture as much of the demand we've generated as possible in December? So that's, you know, that is the lever to pull right now. If you're a brand out there that's maybe a little slow. It's like you're not going to launch like a new awesome YouTube ad right now that's going to make your year. But you could maybe manipulate your offer a little bit in a non brand damaging way to see if you can close the gap in your forecast in actuals.
- [18:32]
Jason
Agree with that. We've been talking about upper funnel channels a lot, especially leading up into peak moments and honestly it's been one of the biggest unlocks for us as a business is helping us reach net new customers and getting them into our funnel. But the challenge is historically the stuff is very difficult to measure. You're not going to see it, you know, in platform roas clicks. So one of our secret weapons this year has been prescient AI. We onboarded with them about midway through the year and it's been a game changer and helping us to measure some of these very difficult to measure upper funnel channels like tv, like linear tv, like streaming. They've been able to move really quickly that the team's been great and actually get betas up with new channels that we've been testing. So it's been great. We've been loving it. We're able to to see and forecast if we were able to scale and spend on some of these channels, you know what our incrementality would look like Pression has become a really important part of our marketing workflow. It's. It's one of the main tools that we use to set our budgets every month. And yeah, it's just become a really important, you know, part of our stack that we feel like we can't live without at this point. We love the unbiased cross channel measurement. It has also love the Halo effects where we're able to actually see how it's impacting. You know, we're just on D2C but I know brands that are on Amazon, they're, they're able to get Halo effects to actually see how their upper funnel spend and their D2C spend is impacting Amazon. So it's just become a really big part of our workflow and I can't recommend it enough. We're using it, Hexcloud is using it. Symbiotica Coterie and dozens more impressions blowing up from everyone I talk to. Can't say enough good things about it. If you want to try it to measure some of these upper funnel channels that we're talking about, go to Prussian AI.com operators to book a demo.
- [20:12]
Connor
So I actually, I do want to get to like we can get to. What are we doing from here? This episode is going to come out in a week, so it'll be, you know, December 10th. But I want to talk about like manipulating offers after the fact because I think that's a really big opportunity. But last week, in the moment, do you guys have any like big takeaways, things you do differently next year or like decisions that you made that you think were either bad decisions or good decisions?
- [20:40]
Jason
Yeah, I got a few. I mean, so I'll say what I think were bad decisions, like where I think, you know, I could have done a better job or Jones Road. But I will say and I'll probably get in trouble for this. Meta performed terribly during this period for us and that's disappointing because it's such a large percent of our budget. And I'm not necessarily blaming Meta. I don't know if it was Meta. I don't know if it was our offer. I don't know if it was our creative. Like, I'm not saying it was like a bug, but for whatever reason, when we needed it the most, the performance was pretty terrible. The CPMs were very high and usually you will get a big conversion rate increase with that. We just didn't see it. And so I don't know if that's our offer. I did talk to a Lot of people and a lot of them in beauty or in skincare and wellness that said the same thing. Huge CPM increase with not a big enough conversion rate increase to justify it. So you're kind of when that happened, stuck between Iraq and a hard place. We spent and we spent heavily year over year at way less efficiency because we still do want to drive growth, you know. But yeah, I was, I was very disappointed in our meta performance. I think there's a lot of stuff we could have done better, but I don't know. I don't know what to make of it. I don't think it was just that I think, I think something was going on or there was just so much demand, so much competition and not that much demand. I think people were looking for really big deals, but that was disappointing.
- [22:04]
Cody
Could you speak to like a little bit of the like signal that you were seeing that makes you like create that insight that your meta performance was down? Was it like your, your one day click roas during BFCM was like way lower than it normally is during an offer moment or like was it way.
- [22:21]
Jason
Lower Your even our like in platform. Yeah, even our. Yeah, usually it's, you know, it's better right? Like our, our one day click, they're, they're directional so they're not like act like the same. Our one day click north beam roas compared to our in platform roas on a one day click are not the same but they're at least directional. When things are struggling, they all go down. When things are getting better, they get better. Yeah. Usually when we have some type of promo period, they get better. Right. With it's not a creative. It's just when the offer is really good, conversion rate goes up, people want it more, click through rate gets better. That's usually what we see. Conversion rates just did not increase that much. AOVs went up a little bit because of the offer, but CPMs, I mean we're looking at like $60 CPM some days.
- [23:07]
Cody
And what is that?
- [23:09]
Jason
It's more than double. It's more than double.
- [23:11]
Cody
And that's just, that's just period over period like from offer launch to previous like November period when offer was ever or there was evergreen. Just BAU.
- [23:22]
Jason
Yeah, don't quote me on the exact BA. Let's say we set out like a $28 on average for the year. Okay. And so yeah, just, just so in platform ros. Just not where we wanted it to be at all.
- [23:36]
Connor
At all.
- [23:37]
Jason
But I feel like you're stuck in a rock and hard place because if you don't spend then you're, you know, and there's no, there's nothing maybe besides Applovin and, and where like you can put you know, 400K into one campaign a day. So it's like I don't know and I don't know if it's just meta. Like I'm not saying it's a bug. It might just be consumer sentiment, it might just be beauty, you know, like the conversion is not there. It might be our offer. There's a lot that I think we could have done better but I also think when you've got those conditions and I might just sound like a complainer, but you got those CPMs and the conversion rates aren't, you know, aren't backing into it. Like it's, it's very hard to hit your numbers.
- [24:19]
Connor
Yeah, yeah. It's a pretty simple equation. Right. And I do. It's probably some combination of all of them. I will say meta also was terrible for us. Connor, how did it perform for you guys? Like at expectations obviously you. It sounds like you guys landed above forecast.
- [24:34]
Cody
Yeah, Meta was good. I'm looking right now like we our met like We2X star roas in meta from the preview from the first 14 days of the month when we were evergreen, we actually saw the one day click go up a bit over Cyber 5 compared to the previous five day.
- [24:52]
Jason
Clip and that's what you should see during a promo.
- [24:54]
Cody
Yeah, right. Yeah. So I was happy with how meta performed but our conversion, we were also noticing weird trends in conversion rate that I still don't fully feel confident in. Like the insight on like we like our conversion rate year over year was much worse and I know it. And we also tested our new web experience and I'm, I'm going to get into this later. And like we saw a massive bump in conversion rate on the on the web experience we built compared to the which was a huge swing, like multivariate change compared to the previous version. So I really think it was just like a function of traffic and ad spend and like degradation of traffic quality as you spend more on ads. Like that's really the only hypothesis that makes sense. We actually like we weren't gonna test the new experience because it was just like intuitively so much better. But then when we saw the year over year conversion rate we're like holy crap. Like maybe, maybe we were wrong. So we were like all right, shit, let's just, let's run a quick split test to validate whether or not this is the issue. It wasn't. So yeah, I don't know, when you.
- [26:02]
Connor
Say conversion rate you mean like in this case from meta, like obviously your blended conversion rate will obviously go down.
- [26:09]
Cody
I'm saying like just pure Shopify conversion rate. And we haven't really found any channel specific. I mean that's probably the next part we need to go a lot deeper is go and look at traffic by UTM and look at conversion rate in North Beam and like GA and Edge Mesh year over year to see if like we can pinpoint one specific traffic source. But it was just like the blended conversion rate on our site overall was down a good amount. And yeah, my only like, I mean we've scaled spend pretty aggressively year over year. So I think that's probably the main culprit is just like overall less quality traffic. So I don't know that that was an interesting one. But yeah, overall Facebook as a channel was, was good. I have, I have no complaints.
- [26:55]
Connor
Gives you. Good for you.
- [26:59]
Jason
No, but his business is too big to run. Hold out Facebook is crushing it. I think he was texting us about like being out of stock of stuff the other day. Like they couldn't keep stuff in stock. Just a tough life over there.
- [27:13]
Cody
Well, only on the, only on the, on the non top line revenue movers.
- [27:18]
Connor
Right, right, right. So two things. One, yeah, I'll start with conversion rate. We experience similar conversion rate declines. I really think we don't know for sure. I think it could be meta driving categorically different traffic than they did last year. I always say when we say meta is working, it's because consumer strong and when meta is not working, consumer is not strong. Like that's obviously a factor. I think people are spending money different ways because we've seen the same thing. And we saw this during Father's Day and Memorial Day as well. And the first question is like O God, we somehow screwed up the site in the last like six months. Even though like everything's been AB tested and it's like it's been very incremental the whole time. One data point, the other data points that we look at. And I think this, this kind of serves as a nice little like unbiased barometer is like queries. So like for on Google we drove more queries. For Ridge Wallet, year over year we drove more queries and we saw an increase in revenue. So those queries converted at a lower rate. Right. That's like pretty simple. Where we also saw that was on Amazon so you can see branded queries and then you could see how many purchases occur from those branded queries and then how many brand purchases you had. And we saw a very similar thing. Very large percentage increase year over year in queries and a decrease in conversion rate. Now that might be some sort of consumer factor there, but it at least gives me confidence to say it's not some sort of like weird site issue that we introduced. Right. We're seeing that same sort of decline on Amazon and Amazon is like probably the most optimized e commerce experience. So is one. And you guys might be experiencing something like that. Connor. And maybe worth looking into what, what Amazon looks like year over year because I think that's just makes everything more difficult when people are converting at a lower rate. Obviously the, the second one I wanted to talk about was Meta. Yeah, Meta not working. It was the same for us one and it makes everything so much harder. That's why we ended up with much smaller growth, spending quite a bit less. We could, we literally could not spend the dollars that we wanted to as efficiently as we needed to. And I think a decent decision that we made. I mean we're, we're comfortable with the results we landed at. So I feel good about really rediversifying pretty late in the game. So we got House readouts just before Black Friday Tuesday last week that were bad for meta. So it's like, yeah, we had like validation on every front. It's like, yeah, it doesn't look good in mta. It doesn't look good from House. Like total clarity that this doesn't look good. Now maybe someone could argue maybe there's going to be a ton of latent revenue. And like, actually that was great prospecting. I find that all very hard to believe. So we ended up spending way more than expected across other channels. Spent like we spent over six figures on AppLovin. We spent almost six figures on YouTube. We spent 50 grand on Snapchat, which I like, I would have never expected us to do. So we ended up having to fill our almost our whole budget from other channels and we were lucky enough to be able to do that. But really just comes at. It's a net. Net worse outcome for the business. I would much rather dump a bunch of money into a functioning Facebook ad.
- [30:24]
Jason
Yes, I agree with you. I agree with a lot of it. Definitely curious about your House test, but I do the same thing. By the way, any big change to our website, we AB test, but anytime there's a conversion or a drop, I'm always like, like, did we mess up something on the website and I think back I'll like be like in bed at night I'll be I'll think back to the tests we did and I'm like was it that like I in my mind I think that even though we ab tested things and it was a winner that we deployed like somehow when we deployed it like that tank conversion rate and it's like always a worry I have so I'm glad I'm not the only one. It sounds like you have that too.
- [30:57]
Connor
Yeah, totally. We we actually saw a really bad one in the EU because it's just funny how it happens our the tool that we use for the website translation and a new landing page tool we tried in our EU market like did not play nice together slowed down the whole site. Took us like five days to figure that out. So sometimes it is totally a site screw up but I think a lot of the time blended conversion rate decreases are just a symptom of one traffic mixes. Like if you're driving a bunch of display traffic or YouTube shorts, it's obviously going to be lower, lower quality and you'll see a drop in conversion rate there. It might be something larger like consumer so I'm not not quite sure.
- [31:36]
Jason
Totally agree with you.
- [31:40]
Connor
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- [32:40]
Jason
Tell me about this house test.
- [32:41]
Connor
So we, yeah, so we went into house. We launched our Black Friday sale November 12th. On November 12th we launched four house tests. We did a scale up test for rings and our EDC business on YouTube. So we had that data we'd already validated like hey, we're comfortable with like these results now we're going to test scaling that up. So we did those two tests and then we did full channel holdouts for meta because we've had issues with meta for the last couple of months and I was like I want to go into BFCM and into December with as much clarity around the impact of meta. So full 10, 15% channel holdout or something with the idea being we launch them November 12th, we'd get our readouts, you know, the 25th or the 26th or whatever just so that we had a little bit more data available to us going into BFCM so we can make better allocation decisions. So neither of them were particularly complex. They were just more about timing and clarity.
- [33:40]
Jason
I love that we're, we're in December, we're going to run our first. We've ran a bunch of meta tests but not on just like conversion optimized stuff. Kind of never doubted the incrementality of it because it's been so much of our spend and right when meta, when, when meta spend goes up usually you know it goes up but now prescient and you know some, some mmm stuff is definitely suggesting that maybe we're over allocated to, to meta. Maybe we've just reached that level. Maybe it's our creative but we're probably overspending there relative to the performance. So I think we've got to go back to the drawing board on a lot. We've probably just gotten, gotten sloppy with a lot of things but I think obviously if we're overspending there I would rather put it somewhere else or pocket it, you know, if we're kind of past the point. So sounds like you might have seen a similar thing.
- [34:23]
Connor
Yeah, exactly what we're doing from here. So we're going to launch this this week but we're three cells, we're going to do a holdout. Cell A is business as usual or let's call it cell two business as usual. And I was like guys, let's just like let's try to run it how we've been running it which is not that good. And then cell three is like actually a new strategy where we're, we're.
- [34:47]
Jason
We'Re.
- [34:47]
Connor
Just going to structure campaigns a Little bit differently. We're going to do heavier exclusions, more top of funnel content. What I mean by that is like problem and solution oriented, largely video. Like, how do we best introduce ourselves to someone net new, exclude as many people as possible and hit that top of funnel more deliberately. Then we're going to layer in like more top of funnel events to optimize for. Like, I mentioned this on Twitter, but one of our best campaigns was optimizing for view content, which is just like something weird is going on there if that's your best campaign. So we're going to do more of that and then hopefully like actually be feeding the funnel of like ASC conversion optimized campaigns. So that's our plan because like, again. And we could also talk about this on future episodes, Cody. But you know, given results you get, you go back and you look at 20, 25 and it's like, oh yeah, we're not going to be able to grow the same way we always have if we want to get to 40, 50% growth. So we're just going to get some more iron in the fire and try to be more experimental over the next couple of weeks and months.
- [35:42]
Jason
How will you know? I love that test? Um, that's awesome. Yeah, we're gonna go with the two cell tests and then depending on how that shakes out, we'll. We'll figure out, you know, what we want to do. How will you know which one of those tactics in that cell 3 made the difference if you're adding in view content and exclusions and different creatives.
- [36:01]
Connor
Yeah, totally.
- [36:02]
Jason
Do you care? No, like, no.
- [36:06]
Connor
I mean, well, I. What I don't want to do. What we clearly need to do is be more aggressive in experimentation. So like, rather than, I don't know, someone. People will disagree with this, I'm sure. But rather than saying, okay, look, we're gonna, we're gonna do everything as usual and then layer in view content or like, we're gonna do these problem solution videos, conversion optimized, but do heavier exclusions in an ABO campaign. Like, rather than do it piece by piece, I'd rather brute force. Let's go with our gut a little bit in terms of like, how do we, how do we make a concerted effort to reach top of funnel, hopefully fill that funnel for these ASC campaigns. Because again, I feel this is all a little speculation, but like, meta feels as if it's become more middle of funnel potentially from like just a ad optimization standpoint. I think ASC is like kind of naturally does that we've also from a content standpoint, if we're measuring everything in meta platform or one day click, we might be favoring the middle and bottom of funnel stuff that might be some sort of like death spiral essentially of like our content's becoming more middle of funnel, meta is becoming more middle of funnel. So let's just brute force our way to not being that. If we see positive signs then we could piece it out and figure out what exactly is making that difference. But I would rather make that larger bet sooner, have less clarity around what it actually was but be more comfortable with the short term results and then.
- [37:32]
Jason
We could and then iterate and then.
- [37:33]
Connor
Chip away at it from there. Yeah, 100%.
- [37:36]
Jason
I like that. I mean, yeah, I agree that's, that's our biggest struggle. I'm meeting with our meta reps in person next week and be like, help me reach new people. Like exclusions, creative, whatever it is, like it's not working. We're getting 55% new visits and when we scale up it gets worse. Like that's just not sustainable. Like something is wrong on the platform. So we're, we're going to be also pretty aggressive with our meta strategy. I think we've gotten really complacent and have found all these other channels to test. But it's just a reminder, right? You know, nine figure businesses, like we should always be not getting complacent and what can we do better to get, you know, the majority of our spend working for us better?
- [38:13]
Connor
Totally. 100%. Yeah. You know, it's funny, the View content campaign, it was like from a rose perspective, it was like 20% worse, 96% new visits, which just blew my mind. It was like that is as fresh of traffic as it can be.
- [38:27]
Jason
I mean at your scale, that can't not be incremental. Like I know that there's probably a lower conversion rate. You're probably, maybe you're not spending the same amount on that but like some level of your spend has to be worthwhile to get new people to your site because you've been advertising on meta for right years now and they're converting.
- [38:47]
Connor
Like it's not that hard to paint a compelling case for that where it's like, look at you're, you're barely off your like blended roas for the account and you're driving 96% new visits and we're getting like 60 cent clicks. It's like we're driving four or five times as many people and getting, and we're tracking 70% of the revenue or whatever.
- [39:05]
Jason
Is that something you've ran Evergreen or only during promo periods?
- [39:09]
Connor
No, we just launched it because we were like things are not working so like let's try something else. And it just happened to work really well.
- [39:15]
Jason
Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. I have talked, our meta reps have told me about that being like one of those strategies that people will do during Black Friday. Because you don't. Because. And I should have tested it with our CPMs being so high. But essentially the theory is you get a lower CPM on that but you still convert at a good enough clip to make it worthwhile. Because even though you're losing the purchase optimization because the demand is so artificially inflated during that time, conversion rate will still be good enough that that can kind of pencil out better than the situation I talked about earlier of that super high CPM with, you know, modestly good conversion rate.
- [39:53]
Connor
Right? Yeah, 100%. So we were, it ended up being that for us and then it was still a very small percentage of our total spend but not insignificant. I mean probably 15k a day on that campaign, something like that. So we saw some success there.
- [40:06]
Jason
Are you, are you targeting 40, 50% growth next year? Did I hear that right?
- [40:09]
Connor
I would like to get back to 40 to 50% growth. We're not. That's not in the forecast. But if it's going to happen, things have to be radically different than they were over the last two weeks.
- [40:18]
Jason
I feel you.
- [40:20]
Connor
Yeah. Are you guys have anything else from BFCM specifically?
- [40:24]
Cody
I think knowing, knowing what I know now, I would have peppered in a different offer in the back part of the weekend or at least not, not necessarily change it up. I mean hindsight's 20 20. Right. But for the, for the reasons I mentioned, I wish we would just would have had like a better funnel clearing offer to end the sale. It's like if I would have known that we were going to see that like a soft CM that we saw like yes, would have, would have maybe rolled out our like what we're planning for the holiday offer early and then just rolled that all the way into December. But you know, hindsight's 20 20. Now we know, now we know.
- [40:59]
Connor
What was your guys's team meeting structure like over the week? We talked about this kind of going into it. But did you guys end up feeling well prepared or like how much, how much communication was going on Thursday and Friday?
- [41:11]
Cody
Ours was all skew based really. Like we, we basically were just doing daily standups. Most days we canceled them A few days when we were just like, hey, we're good, we don't have anything to talk about. But a lot of it was like, hey, we're, we're low on this. Hey we're out of stock on this. But the next shipment comes in two weeks. So like should we keep selling or should we out of stock? And like, if we keep selling, how do we message our way to like a better customer experience? So it was mainly like that's how we would start every call with like how are we doing to forecast? And then we would go in, then we would just get more granular into like SKU mix and what manipulations we need to make based on SKU mix. And that's pretty much it right there. So we were doing a lot of like, honestly more, more manipulating of SKUs than I'd like. That's the other thing in retrospect if, if you know, I think we need to kind of set you know, these tolerated risk levels to like support certain top line levels of growth. So we're not gonna have to do all these skew gymnastics next year. So that's another good key learning. But that was, yeah that was basically it. And those would be you know, 15 to 30 minutes each day and kind of just like war room style type type of meeting.
- [42:15]
Connor
What, what's an example of like one of the larger changes you guys had to make because of inventory.
- [42:20]
Cody
So we had like a seven piece knife set for example. Like we were just so, so to add some color here like to. This was the first year we actually took like in my opinion a pretty good swing at building demand generation funnels around non cookware. So we didn't really know like how that was going to turn into revenue and Q4 and like the good news is it turned into a lot of revenue. Like our non cookware growth exceeded you know, the entire business's growth in the US which is awesome to see. But that also put us in some, some inventory constraints. So like on the seven piece set for example, we had to basically you know, first off figure out like okay, we're running out, we're going to run out on this date. When's the next shipment coming in? So our ops team is doing all sorts of gymnastics trying to figure out like when we can get seven piece sets in our warehouse. Then from there we're going or manipulating pricing actually because we're like, hey, we're moving too many of these right now. We actually need to like increase the price a little bit to, to slow down the Velocity here, which you know we could talk about that for 30 minutes and why that's a terrible experience. And then, and then doing a lot of like shipping messaging changes on the product page. Like me meeting with and a lot of these things we had like modules built out for. So it was more so me like meeting with our dev and UX designer be like hey, let's change this, let's do that. So that was a big one. Another big one was we were pretty slow on our take rate on the 12 piece set up sell. So like me and our UX designer and our CRO director like immediately met like two days, three days into the sale. You know we kind of collectively, you know, not me design it, but like all of us with them designing like building out a new upsell experience. And that had a really, really nice bump. I think we increased our take rate on our 12 piece and six piece setup cells by like 40% on the 12 piece set. And that was during the split test. I need to go back and look to see what it was once we actually launched it everywhere. So that was a pretty big one. Just like being reactive and you know, responding to the data there. So just things like that and then a lot of bundle swaps. Like that's the hard part about our business is like we sell these $1,400 bundles and like oh, we're overselling on knives and this Aiden Chef's knife is included in that $1,300 bundle. So now we have to have like basically like a V1, V2, V3 of that bundle. And like granted most people aren't like gonna not buy it cause the Aiden Chef's night's not there. So it's like all right, let's just swap in a 7 inch Santoku knife. Or maybe we take the bundle out or the knife out altogether and we just add in like a different product. So there's a lot of like backup bundle preparation happening in trying to like guess when we're gonna go out of this like single product in this, this bundle that has you know, 15 products in it. So that's, that's probably like the most biggest headache for our BFCM is like prepping all those backup bundles with the hope that you never have to use them.
- [45:10]
Connor
Totally. Cody, anything on your guys end.
- [45:13]
Jason
So like I mean we had our normal meetings because we, you know, we launched 11 days earlier. So we're in the office and stuff. So we just you know, do our meetings and meet you know, at people's desks whenever. But during the period, like once, like third Wednesday, Thursday starts, it's all Async. You know, we'll huddle if we need to, but I don't think we really needed to. In the past there's been a lot of stuff with like ops team, you know, some fires that come up econ, but we didn't have any of those, so there was really nothing there. We have our demand planning team shares, like projections of runouts and you know, against like their forecast twice a day throughout the whole period. And then we just got this paid social channel that we're just going back and forth on, pacing. You know, I heard about this new thing called surf scaling this time. So we're just in there surfing. We're just in there surf scaling. Guys, we're, we're, we're out of four. Let's bump. Let's go. We expect a bump later. Like just, just ton of async, like 60 reply threads in there. And then once, once it just gets too long, we'll start a new one. I don't know. So we just did Async and we're just pretty much between slack and dashboards, you know, all weekend.
- [46:16]
Connor
Well, what would you guys do to measure like up to the hour spend? Do you know what I mean? Like, like how, how would you, if you want, if it was noon and you'd done $100,000 in revenue, how did you know exactly how much you'd spent up until that moment?
- [46:33]
Jason
What we do in the past, we did manual with either somebody on our team or VA every hour. Here's our mer, here's our revenue, here's our spend. We didn't do it this year. I hate to give them any plug, but there's one of the attribution platforms. If you get their free dashboard, I won't say who, it'll actually give you real time updates. And so we use that. It doesn't have all of our stuff in it. It doesn't have TV and AppLovin, but it's got all of our digital stuff. And so we'll just look at MER and AMER in there and we'll just know we have to kind of haircut it by a little bit because it doesn't have all of our spending. But that's what we do and we just refresh that non stop.
- [47:14]
Connor
Yeah, that's good. Well, Connor, something similar for you guys.
- [47:17]
Cody
We weren't honestly like this year, probably more than the last two, we were not like we were keeping budget. Like we weren't, we were Obviously scaling over the weekends to like, you know, capture demand. But we weren't doing a ton of like intra hour kind of like surfing.
- [47:32]
Connor
You guys were like, you guys were like boogie boarding the budgets. It sounds right.
- [47:35]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, more, more boogie boarding. But like when we needed to do that, like we would just go into north beam and set the, you know, the granularity by hour to get the, you know, the spend from channels that, you know, fill in the north beam and then we would just go inside of the actual channels that don't port well into north beam and pull that and just kind of manually add it up. And we weren't like doing a ton of that. But like also, you know, I would say off the top of my head, like probably 85, maybe a little less. 82% of our spend was going through channels that do integrate cleanly with north beam. So like we were mainly able to just be like, okay, we can just go look at the hour, the hourly granularity and get most of our spend and then kind of like estimate like what the other channels had spent if we weren't going to go inside the channel. So that, that got us most of the way there.
- [48:26]
Connor
Yeah. My ask for all of the analytics tools listening to this podcast is someone needs to improve this experience. Shopify has got to fix their hourly year over year reporting. Somebody's got to figure out super accurate up to date hourly spend. I just feel like we all just described. I didn't describe it, but it's similar boat. All this manual work you got to do all the time. It's insane. We had a VA every hour update me. So I knew exactly where we were. Add in Amazon, add in Amazon. Like the whole thing. It just seems so dumb. I'm like, look guys, we're doing whatever however many billions of dollars in GMV Shopify is doing. And I'm like, we're just struggling through all this manual work. So that's my ask. I hope someone at some point solves this problem. They could take my money BFCM next year.
- [49:15]
Jason
I'm not, I'm no like data infrastructure expert, but I think it just gets crazy expensive to have like that often. Refreshing.
- [49:22]
Connor
Yeah, totally. I mean it probably is expensive. I would pay for it. They can take my money. Yeah. And Shopify has got it. Shop. All Shopify has got to do is set up better that default comparison. I don't need to be tracking users. I don't even need like super accurate roas. Like just tell me how many dollars I've spent and how many dollars in revenue I've done at 12:30 on Friday.
- [49:41]
Jason
That's essentially what that dashboard, you know, that I do has, but I just, I wish we had spend in there. Like I wish you had an MER and Shopify like right. I know it's not like everyone on Shopify is using that, but I feel like enough people are that, you know, I don't know why Shopify doesn't have that built in. Also they, they, they, you know, I know they're redoing analytics. They, they bought Peel Analytics. Like they, they, they should build that Shopify. If you're listening, Harley, if you're out there.
- [50:06]
Cody
Well, I don't know. Harley, Harley, Harley Broke both of our hearts by shouting out a couple of our competitors this weekend. After shouting both of us out last year. It was just what a knife to the heart on a, on a Friday and, and simultaneously texting Connor from Carol and be like congrats, that's awesome, dude.
- [50:21]
Jason
It felt like yeah. Chatting on screen. It felt like I was watching like my wife sleep with somebody else.
- [50:29]
Cody
It hurt, it hurt a little bit. But Connor's like the nicest guy in the world so you can't actually like feel anything negative towards him.
- [50:36]
Connor
Yeah, totally. Maybe next year, which Rich will get a shout out.
- [50:39]
Cody
It's coming still.
- [50:40]
Connor
We're still a couple years away, I guess. All right, Awesome. I think that's good coverage of BFC. Did you know that platforms over report performance 65% of the time? In a recent study house found that 82% of incrementality experiments showed that platform reporting was either underreporting or over reporting by more than 25%. And 60% of the experiments showed discrepancies of more than 50%. This is why marketers are moving away from platform attribution towards incrementality measurement in order to maximize their growth and efficiency. This is one of the many reasons that the three of us, Connor, Cody and I all work with Houzz. So what is House? It's a self serve experimentation platform that allows you to configure regional tests and control experiments to measure incrementality and identify points of diminishing returns. What does that really mean? They tell you, hey, These are the 40 zip codes you need to exclude from this campaign and we can look at what results did you drive in the targeted regions compared to that holdout group. Really awesome. We use it all the time. As an example, we just identified a lot of our non branded ring search and shopping campaigns were not nearly as incremental as Google as was reporting. So we've been growing a ring business over 100% year over year and spending less on Google. So we've been able to be more efficient with every dollar spent. House is built with cutting edge methods by PhD economists and data scientists who have built these solutions before at companies like Amazon and Google. The House platform allows you to test all your marketing channels both online and offline. Measure the impact across all your sales channels D2C retail Amazon and calibrate your platform reporting for incrementality with Houzz. Discover your marketing's true ROI and unlock new growth with House. Go to House IO operator spelled H A U S I O slash operators to start your incrementality practice today. I wanted to talk Connor, you kind of mentioned it and I really like what I've heard so far about like how are you guys continuing to clear the funnel in December and like how do plans change coming out of Cyber Monday into like maximizing the next, you know, three and a half weeks or two and a half weeks or so?
- [52:42]
Cody
Yeah, yeah. Well I think like, I think generally like our approach is to always have like an offer that's going to net out your best, you know, margin, whether that's on first order or lifetime value basis. For us it's first order. And so that's what we lead with in the holiday season. Like I want to, I want everyone to come in and buy our, you know, fourteen hundred dollar kind of everything you need kitchen cookware set or the, or the 12 piece set. Like naturally not everyone is going to have the appetite to go and spend 600 bucks on a 12 piece set. So our basic approach is let's try to get as many conversions on that offer as possible. But like we need to switch it up, right? Because what to do the same thing for two months straight. Like if you haven't converted those folks in a month of that offer, you're probably not going to convert them in the next month. So we basically, our offer strategy basically just shifts from being like, and again, not that it wasn't, we did have offers on individual products but you're certainly way more incentivized to go into the sets with how they're positioned against each other. So basically the, the main difference is we're just like incentivizing individual product orders more so in, in December than we are in, in November. And again that's like what I would call kind of like a funnel clearing strategy where I want to show everyone that hasn't converted yet. A new offer that they are presumably more interested in than the set offer because they just haven't converted yet. So. Right, that's, that's our main approach. We're rolling that out in a few days so we'll see how, how that performs. But yeah, I'm, I'm hoping that that refresh is a, is a nice little bump for us.
- [54:21]
Connor
Did you guys do that last year as well?
- [54:23]
Cody
Yep, Yep, we did it last year as well.
- [54:25]
Connor
And what does it look like right now? So is your, your Cyber Monday sales over and then you guys basically just hold out for three or four days and then long launch this second holiday?
- [54:33]
Cody
Yeah, we're actually just going to roll it right into holiday. We're actually still live so. So basically yeah it's, it's great. Offers on our sets like big dollar percentage off and then mainly lower percent off offers on our individual products is, is generally the current offer stack and then we'll transition into a buy more save more on individual products. So basically you can just, if you're going to build up a cart of like let's say, you know, 500 bucks, you're going to get a better offer, a better discount on those individual products than you would have gotten for the most part on the individual product discounts during our actual Black Friday sale. So again, it's like, hey, you didn't want to buy the 12 piece set, but maybe you want to come and mix and match, you know, three to five products that are kind of, you know, these random products and you want to spend 400 bucks and you're going to get a decent discount doing that. Um, but we also still have our some solid sets offers as well. We're not totally taking those away because we'll still get, you know, good, decent volume out of that. We're just kind of giving you know, a little more optionality.
- [55:33]
Connor
Awesome. Do you have any sense of how much AOV will go down?
- [55:36]
Cody
Oh, not off the top of my head. I should look though at. I can look at November, December last year and get a sense.
- [55:45]
Connor
Yeah, I'd be curious. I'm, I'm super stoked. We don't have, I love the going from like these big AOVs, large kit discounts to a Buy More Save More. It just sounds in theory fantastic. We just had this conversation this morning coming out of Cyber Monday, took stock of all inventory and we said two things. One, from an inventory perspective, what makes sense for us to change to add more. We were using the word pizzazz today. It's like okay, we're going to roll out a slightly different gift with purchase. We have a couple SKUs that we can discount further. That'll kind of be the crux of our holiday sale. But we're going to pull a lot of things that we currently do through for the next couple of weeks. And then the second one was like not adding pizzazz. But what strategically makes sense for us to move through from an inventory perspective over inventoried items, out of line items that we just want to clear out so we can discount those even further. Sometimes those achieve the same goal. You can move through over inventory items that you don't want and add pizzazz to a campaign. There's one colorway of pen, for instance, that we have way too many of. So we're going to. We're going to discount that a little heavier and we'll see some amount of volume shift that way, but it won't be making our December by any means. So that's how we're approaching it. I'm a little jealous of how kind of differentiated your guys is Connor. So we might be taking some notes for next year.
- [57:02]
Jason
You're going to say like, how are you positioning the ending? Like your Black Friday sale? Is that ending Cyber Monday or you don't even say that and you kind of just run that through.
- [57:12]
Connor
We switched from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, 6pm Sunday. So that evening we switched to Cyber Monday. That runs through this week. Monday morning next week we'll switch to our holiday sale.
- [57:26]
Jason
Got it. Okay.
- [57:27]
Connor
And that'll have a different look and feel, different content, these slightly updated kind of offers. We'll just kind of refresh everything as much as possible. And then we really expect that it'll, you know, whatever it is, it's the 9th next Monday. That like 9th through 18th period is like really key for us.
- [57:43]
Jason
Okay. I have to ask you this. Why? Somebody on my team asked me why 47% off up to 47% off.
- [57:50]
Connor
Yeah, well, we. We've been doing. We do up to 40% off maybe a little too liberally. So we just wanted some sort of change up. I didn't want to do up to 50% off. So I was like, what is just some numbers that together feel a little bit more striking, a little bit more memorable. And I thought that's why I figured.
- [58:07]
Jason
Just looks different, get some attention with it.
- [58:09]
Connor
Cody, what's. What's your guys's plan for the rest of the year?
- [58:12]
Jason
So we still got or so sales done. We end that Monday. So holiday kits are going back to full price, so those will slow down. We'll sell as many as we can, but those will slow down and those have been a miss. So we're not going to move that many. So I'm a little bit worried about December. We don't have a crazy high forecast. We decided today we're going to do a little gift with purchase. We're gonna launch it on Friday. Just help us hit the month. You know, we're not gonna like reforecast or anything, but we'll run that from Friday, which will be the sixth until pretty much shipping cutoff time. So some, sometime, you know, mid, mid month, maybe, you know, the third week. We've always had really strong December and haven't really been expecting it because we didn't have any offer or anything. But I think that, you know, it's still, still very gifting, CPMs, drop Q5, all that kind of stuff. But acquisition has definitely been a struggle as of late with everything we've been talking about. So just, just want to give ourselves the best chance to succeed. But again, you know, we don't normally discount or do too much, so that's really what we think like our best lever is. But we're going with what we think is a pretty good offer with the gwp, so we'll see.
- [59:18]
Connor
Awesome. Yeah, I think it sounds like a great pivot.
- [59:20]
Jason
Yeah. And always, always fun. I think our team's getting better at pivoting, getting stuff done quickly, turning it around quickly. So it's always nice to see.
- [59:27]
Connor
Did you guys already have the. So the item that you're. That you're using as a gift with purchase, that was something that you have in stock over inventoried. You're like, hey, this could be a great offer.
- [59:38]
Jason
Yeah. And it's our first time ever doing an actual product. Like we've never actually. We've done like minis of things, but not things we, we sell. We've done bags and stuff like that, but we've never done, you know, one of our top products. So excited for that, dude.
- [59:53]
Connor
I'm glad. I've been holding out. I haven't purchased yet, but it sounds like a sweet deal Friday. Yeah, that's awesome. We did, you know we did. Because I, I like this idea. Generally we're gonna start running out of options, but like we haven't done gift with purchase or promos all that strategically to move through over inventoried items. That's something we really started leaning into this year. I love the idea of using gift with purchase for over inventoried items. We just started doing that this year where historically we hadn't strategically promoed or given away products to move through old inventory. We just kind of let stuff pile up over time. So now this year we've been more strategic about that and we're just moving through all this excess inventory. We just did it for travel. We launched Rip Stop Bags 20 to give you guys a sense of how old these have been. Around 20, like 19 or something. 20. 20, like old bags that are great bags. And we did them as gifts with purchase with our luggage this year and it crushed. It was awesome. So I think opportunities like that, especially if you need to pivot at any point, if you need to layer it into Black Friday or December, you want to layer in some gift with purchase. Like at least we've found some opportunity just doing gift with purchase. And it's one of the things we're going to do with our. We're going to reorient it to do like an order value gift with purchase. So while it orders above $100, we'll get this like exclusive holiday bag which I think like is a, is a bit of pizzazz for, for the end of the holiday sale. Uh, you just want to hit test of the week.
- [61:21]
Cody
Yeah, let's do it.
- [61:22]
Connor
All right. You got one for us, Connor.
- [61:23]
Cody
So yeah, so we did. So we had a test of the week. This was like I said earlier in the episode, this was kind of a. This is a test that we weren't planning to run until we were starting to notice our year over year, like blended shopify conversion rate drops. So we launched just like. So first off, we've really been building out the web UX team in the last just three months, honestly, all in the last three months. We hired a director of CRO and a director of user experience. We actually just hired a director of E Com too. So we're really building out our internal function on web ux. So we launched this new experience. We all felt amazing about it. One of those experiences, we were like, just launch it. It's way better. We don't really feel the need to test it. Then we started to see the blended. The blended CVR year over year, not looking so good. So we actually retroactively like set up a test with the new experience which is live on site. It's just our holiday sale collection that has like the sticky nav and it's all organized as a single collection page as opposed to having to like click around to a bunch of different collection pages. And previously that was the setup for our collection page, we would have all of our sets on one page and all of our individual product offers on another with a hero offer in the here in the main section and then like the traditional product collection below that and then like just some value props below that and then a CT at the bottom that was like, hey, if you're not interested in sets, like check out our individual SKUs or individual products and then the same thing, but vice versa on the individual product page. So yeah, we just decided or like, all right, we got to validate whether or not this CVR drop is, is from this big swing we took or if it's just like some other variable that we need to dive deeper on. So we tested it. Luckily, the new experience did outperform. It was like greatly outperforming. It was, you know, 21% lift in revenue per user, which is one of the largest bumps in conversion that we've seen from a test all year long. And yeah, it was just like, you know, going back to what you said earlier, Connor, about your holdout test with like your entirely different, you know, Facebook ad account set up, it was just like a big, big swing compared to what we were doing. We put all the products on a single collection page. We had a sticky nav for easy navigation between all of them. We, we actually did like a two column product collection that you could see four products in the fold versus like what we currently have, which is very zoomed in on like one and a half. We had hero sections before each product collection to like speak to the general usp. We had holiday imagery everywhere. So like one of those big swing tests that, that really paid off and I don't really care that I don't know exactly which variable drove as much because like the whole experience is the variable. Right. And it's like we didn't. That's. That's the swing we should have taken. Maybe at some point we will isolate those variables and, and there are certain things we want to isolate. But yeah, I think it, you know, you know, we're a nine figure brand and we still do tests like that that are like, you know, there's probably like six or seven massive variables that we're changing there and it's just was a better experience that converted better and you know, we'll worry about kind of backing into the, to the individual variables later on.
- [64:25]
Connor
Is it this. Is it the Black Friday sale page?
- [64:27]
Cody
Yes. Yep, it is.
- [64:29]
Connor
Pages slash, Black Friday sale. Yeah.
- [64:31]
Jason
Dude, looks sick page.
- [64:32]
Connor
Yeah, it's really sick.
- [64:34]
Cody
I. This is like One of the, like, most proud pages I've been like, a producer of and like, worked with our team to like, develop this in the landing page we developed for sweepstakes. Yeah, I just. I was like, we need to have. We need to distinguish between the offers, but we also need the offers to all live in the same spot. And I thought actually we took a lot of inspo from Caraway because they do. They do a lot of, like, single collection pages organized by product category. And I thought that was actually very clever. A very clever way to, like, differentiate your products but also have that or your products and categories and offers but also still have them live in the same, like, space versus having to, like, load a new collection page and like, click around a bunch. And also, like, our head of content and our production team just straight up went off on. On the holiday shoot. Like, I thought the content turned out really, really well and it looked really on brand with like, gifting and holiday season. So, yeah, the. The new. The new collection page. This is our. This is our new jumping off point now for all. All sale periods.
- [65:32]
Connor
You know what's funny is our main sales page, if you. If you go to ridge.com, you click shop, the sale is structured very similarly in the sense that you hit the hero. You have a way to select between. For us, it's rings, travel, wallets, kits, and then it just drags you down to that page and it has the banner where you could click through, or there's a. There's a smaller selection below. It's not as. As kind of robust of a collection. I. It's a fantastic flow. We probably. We might have borrowed that from Caraway. Also. Alakai had a great gift guide this year. Very similarly structured. I just think, like, you obviously from a. From a UX perspective, you want to be keeping people on the page as much as possible. It's faster, it's simpler. They can scroll the whole thing and browse through it. So, yeah, yours, your guys, is literally my favorite though, out of all the ones I've seen.
- [66:20]
Cody
Thanks, man. We appreciate it. I fucking love sticky navs, by the way. There is nothing more like, functional in terms of being able to like, pop around a page very easily than a nice sticky nav. Like, we were using it. We used it for this page and it got insane engagement. We used it on our. On our sweepstakes page so people could pop around between, like, shopping versus FAQs versus the Gordon video Explainer. Like, we've. Sticky navs are just becoming more and more prominent in our web experiences and like the use cases for sticky navigation that follows you everywhere is. I love it. It's just there's so much you can do with it. And we've been really happy with how we've been able to incorporate it.
- [67:01]
Connor
Totally well. Killer test. I don't know. Everybody's going to hear this episode in it. Will it be live for the. For the Buy More, Save More?
- [67:09]
Cody
We have a. It's a. It's an iteration of this page. I actually want you guys to give me feedback on it because I'm like, I'm. I've been very critical about our messaging on it and making it clear, like, the differentiation between the sets offers and the Buy More Save More offers. So it'll be something like this. It will definitely be different, though, because it is the Buy More Save More component that is not a component of this offer. So, yeah, it'll be an iteration of this one.
- [67:36]
Connor
Awesome. Looking forward to it. Well, cool. All right. I think that's a great app. Anything else you guys want to hit?
- [67:41]
Cody
That was great. That was fun.
- [67:42]
Connor
Super fun.
- [67:42]
Jason
I'm not going to lie. I can't wait to be done talking about Black Friday. I'm on next year already. Focus on what we can do better. Excited about it?
- [67:49]
Connor
Hell, yeah.
- [67:49]
Cody
All right.
- [67:50]
Connor
Thank you again for listening. Hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to, like, subscribe. Share with your friends. As always, thank you to our sponsors. Motion Rich panel freshens and House.