Drive and Convert

According to a research by Adobe, 2021 brought the first ever $200+ billion online holiday season in the US. Assuming this year follows similar trends, optimizing your website before Black Friday and Cyber Monday can help your ecommerce brand win big.

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about how to optimize your website to drive more revenue for your brand this Black Friday and Cyber Monday. They cover the importance of website audits, how to improve user experience and why you should re-evaluate your sales strategy.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why website audits are necessary
2. How to leverage user experience to improve site performance
3. Re-evaluating your sales strategy

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We're Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Many brands default to discounting as the "easy button" for juicing their online sales, but doing this too often can put you on a price-cutting hamster wheel that is increasingly difficult to get off of.

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about the psychology behind discounts, why they are so attractive to consumers, and how you can achieve similar results with alternative strategies that don't undermine the value of your products or position you as a "bargain brand."

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why discounts are so compelling for consumers
2. The downsides of habitual discounting for your brand
3. When discounts are the correct pricing strategy to use
4. Alternatives to discounting that work just as well
5. How to assess and improve your current pricing strategy

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We're Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Most marketers are used to digging around in Google Analytics to review their website traffic from organic search, social media, and email marketing, but far fewer dedicate time to analyze their referral traffic – often to their own detriment.

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about referral traffic as one of the most commonly misunderstood traffic sources and highlight why failing to dig deeper into the quality and sources of your website referrals could mean leaving money on the table.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What referral traffic is and how it is categorized in your website analytics
2. Common issues with tracking referral traffic and how to fix them
3. What referral traffic data can tell you about your marketing efforts
4. How analyzing referral traffic can uncover ripe opportunities for growth

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We're Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan:
Yeah, that's what I do with every week, it's not just Cyber Week. My goal on every week of ...

2024 was the year social ads made a serious comeback, and the focus on social selling will continue into 2025. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss how YouTube is poised to impact the marketing stack in 2025.

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. Why YouTube's roster of influencers and the YouTube Shopping program are attracting media spend.
2. The four unique ways YouTube can track attribution.
3. How brands should get started with YouTube in 2025.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.