Plus a 2019 postmortem.
In this episode, you'll learn a three stage strategy to set your Facebook ads funnel up for success before and during Black Friday.
Facebook Ads are more expensive than ever, and Black Friday is going to bring the muppets out of the woodwork which will drive costs up even more.
You'll the hear answers to:
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
Kurt Bullock 10/29/2020
Kurt Elster: Today on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are going to discuss some in-depth Facebook ad strategies for Black Friday Cyber Monday 2020. It’s right around the corner. Not sure if you’ve heard of Black Friday yet, but certainly you’re going to walk away with a lot of ideas today on what to do. And in the past, we have done several episodes in years past where we really exhaustively walk through like, “This is the strategy. This is what each audience is gonna look like.” We got very technical with it.
This year we’re gonna go higher level and more strategic, and we’re gonna walk through like okay, what can we learn from last year? What’s the strategy this year? And then what are our 2020 specific considerations? So, I think that’s gonna provide a lot of value for everybody and joining me to discuss it is frequent recurring guest, Kurt Bullock. He’s founder of an eCommerce marketing agency, The Produce Department has a ton of eCommerce experience, knows Facebook ads backwards and forwards, and that’s why for years he has been our strategic marketing partner at Ethercycle, and we still greatly enjoy that relationship. Mr. Bullock, thank you for being here. I appreciate it.
Kurt Bullock: Thanks, Kurt. Happy to be here.
Kurt Elster: All right. So, give me… Well, all right, let’s open up with like what is the one key takeaway you want people to have when thinking about their Facebook ads for 2020? The one thing that if they need this piece of advice and then they can just quit listening. Let’s lead with value.
Kurt Bullock: All right. That’s a hard one, but I would probably sum it up as being prepared, because this year is all over the place. We don’t exactly know what Black Friday is gonna look like this year, and so I like to go… Ooh, be prepared.
Kurt Elster: A little dramatic.
Kurt Bullock: Yes. Be prepared. No, I just, I like to have optionality built into what I’m doing. You know, so give yourself options so that you’re not scrambling at the last minute if things go differently than you might have expected.
Kurt Elster: I like that. That is good advice. So, we’re going for a more risk-averse strategy, and one interesting thing I saw on a Facebook group this morning, Mark Arruda from Constantly Varied Gear said, “I don’t know what’s going…” I’m paraphrasing, but he basically said we don’t know what’s going to happen in November and on Black Friday, and we really don’t, because the election is this wildcard, and the pandemic, like it is so different and weird in 2020. And he said, “So, we’re gonna run an early bird sale at the end of October. And then that way we have at least… We know we hedged our bets, we took our shot,” however you want to phrase it.
So, I think I like where your head’s at.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, I’ve got… I’ve seen that strategy. A lot of people are planning on doing things early this year, but one thing that you kind of are playing with is people are in a super high intent shopping mindset near Black Friday, and so you definitely get that benefit when you’re running your ads over that time, and also like if you are running your ads and your promotion too early, most often you’re probably still gonna be doing something over Black Friday, as well, so you’re gonna have multiple promotions running in a short period of time, so you kind of have to hold those two things in tension and figure out what to do. But we do have a lot of clients that have already started doing promotions just to get…
You know, because there’s a lot of concern about getting products on time, and not having things be sold out.
Kurt Elster: Well, yes. Yeah, so the concerns that merchants have, and customers alike have are… Are we going to be able to get our stuff in time? Both can the inventory reach the merchant and the warehouse, because we don’t know, like we’re still seeing bottlenecks and the effects of essentially losing up to 10 weeks of production time in Q2, and once orders start being placed, well, all these carriers are already slammed, so what’s that gonna look like when things hit their peak in the first week of December? What kind of delays and slowdowns are we gonna see?
So, I don’t think it’s going to be like a complete shipping apocalypse, but maybe things will be delayed a few days, but the deadlines that all the shipping carriers gave for this year… They’re essentially the same as last year.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, they’re the same as last year. I was surprised to see that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I thought it would be at least a little bit more conservative than what they did, but I also know like this… It’s no surprise to anybody, so they’ve now, they have been… They’re already weeks or possibly months into hiring additional couriers, staff, et cetera.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: So, and certainly, we’re like, “Oh, some consumers are already shopping.” We knew that some consumers always did shop in October. Now they just have a really good excuse.
Kurt Bullock: Right. Yeah. Google did a bunch of surveying recently and you know, their results said that two thirds of shoppers planned to start their shopping extra early this year because of those inventory issues and just fear of delivery, like that their stuff’s not going to make it in time, so I think it justify… All of that and more justifies moving your start dates up and talking about those things in your messaging, and it also has the effect of… I mean, there’s some real potential scarcity here with all of this, too. Making sure that your products are available on the site and you get first pick if you’re a shopper.
Kurt Elster: So, heading into the holidays, high level, what is the strategy that you’re planning on, that works for Facebook ads in Black Friday, 2020? What’s this look like?
Kurt Bullock: So, super high level is that traffic costs go up in Q4, but purchase intent is at an all-time high, right? So, in the lead up to Black Friday, we want to expose as many people to our brand as we can so that we become part of their holiday shopping list. People that already know your brand are more likely to purchase on Black Friday than somebody that has never heard of you. So, right now in the time from this point up until the time that you launch your promotion is the time to focus on prospecting audiences, reaching new people, and warming up those lists while there’s still less competition. Traffic costs are lower, although we still have election spending and things happening that are jacking up our prices.
But that’s the general strategy between now and Black Friday, is warming up your traffic, building your email list, and getting some mind share in the heads of your customers so that you can secure your spot on their shopping list.
So, that’s pre-holiday. The next stage is gonna be during the holiday. That’s launching your promotions. This is where I’ll usually switch from being so prospecting heavy to really leaning hard on those retargeting audiences that I built pre-holidays. So, that will generally look like targeting my engaged list, so people that have engaged on social media, my email list, people that have visited the website, and past purchasers as well if you choose to include them. Some people exclude those lists, but I like to include them.
And then the final stage is after your big sale, and that’s just keeping up the momentum, talking about giftability and highlighting the last day to ship before the holidays. So, that’s the high level. There’s before, during, and after, right? And you kind of switch who you’re focusing on during those three time periods.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so at the start, I want… So, from now, and ideally starting weeks ago, you’re intentionally doing things to put yourself in a position to have really strong retargeting opportunities during the holidays. Is that like the pregame strategy?
Kurt Bullock: Right. And just another sort of data point on that, I’ve looked back this year at all of our clients’ ad accounts and done a delayed attribution report, so essentially looking at what was the ROAS during let’s say the first few weeks of November, and what you’ll find is that it’s typically low, but if you look at the delayed attribution, we saw in many of our audiences a 1.8 multiplier, 2X multiplier, so essentially if you were getting a 2X ROAS in those weeks leading up to Black Friday, and normally you might be used to something else, we would see that those audiences that you warmed up converted really well.
So, if you had a 2X multiplier, that means they ended up buying during the sale and you could see that they turned out being worth or generating a 4X return on ad spend. To get that, you have to look at your full 28-day attribution in Facebook, and that’s how you can see that data looking back. So, yes, those audiences convert really well come holidays.
Kurt Elster: And the reason I want to do this is number one, it is unlikely I’m going to have luck targeting brand new customers on Thanksgiving and then getting them to make a purchase in the next 48 hours from that point.
Kurt Bullock: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: And on top of that, even if I were to go with that strategy, I would pay outrageously higher than average ad costs because of the sheer volume of advertising occurring during this time. And then we’ll talk about it, but in 2020 this gets way worse than in years past.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: Theoretically.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And then during, so right now I’m focused on build my audience, my prospecting audience. People who are familiar with the brand, or on my email list, or pixeled, or in a custom audience but have not necessarily made a purchase. Or made a purchase two years ago and now we want to get them reengaged. Then during, we’re gonna launch our promos, focus on retargeting audiences from Black Friday until into December, and then like early days in December, and then stage three is just mindshare through December, where it’s like maybe we get repeat purchases. Maybe we pick up the stragglers. Maybe you forgot to get a gift and it’s just about staying top of mind as much as possible, and then also creating urgency along the way.
Kurt Bullock: Exactly. Yep.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so that largely the same strategy as in years past, just now the stakes are even higher.
Kurt Bullock: Right. There’s a little more uncertainty this year.
Kurt Elster: Oh, certainly. Well, that sort of describes everything about 2020. Oh, 2020. Always coming after me. So, let’s… Any more details there or do you want to do your 2019 postmortem?
Kurt Bullock: Let’s jump into 2019 and I’m sure some stuff will pop up there.
Kurt Elster: All right, let’s do that and then we’ll return to 2020 with our 2020 considerations, because I have… I got some notes here and it’s interesting. Yeah, let’s get the postmortem.
Kurt Bullock: All right, so I made some notes last year right after the holidays, and so I’ll be drawing from those here, but in sum, sales started earlier last year than in previous years. I had written that if you had started your sale earlier than Thanksgiving, those were essentially bonus days. We saw clients that had exceptionally high ROAS on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and that was… That’s earlier than we ran ads in previous years. And this year, of course, I think it’s gonna be even earlier than that, but… So, last year we saw if you started early, you got great numbers, and part of that is because the competition was a little bit lower. It’s easier to get the attention of your list and the cost of traffic was a little bit lower because the mayhem hadn’t started yet for Black Friday.
Yeah, so on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, customers were buying, revenue was strong, store conversion rates went up, but overall the cost of acquisition was higher for many advertisers compared to 2018, and if we just look at the specific days, like Black Friday, I saw Black Friday peaked in the morning at 9:00 AM, and then sort of trailed during the middle of the day and picked back up in the PM, but the peak for Black Friday was in the morning.
On Saturday and Sunday, most of our ad accounts saw a dip. The purchasing slowed down. And so, I generally pulled spend down and reapplied that, just reallocated it to Monday, for Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday, it’s a workday, so it was a little bit alarming in the morning to see sales start really slowly, but it picked up and Cyber Monday peaked in the evening, right? As everybody got home from work, got the kids in bed, they were sitting down on the couch, that was when we saw all the peak sales on Cyber Monday.
So, the accounts that did the best I think were those that really focused on… I think the most important thing is having a compelling offer. We had accounts that switched up their offers throughout their promotion period, which worked really well. It allowed us to hit the audience a little bit harder because it wasn’t the same offer throughout the entire promotion. I’m thinking of one ad account in particular, there was an offer running sort of continuously through the promotion, through the holidays, and then they had specific ads running on Black Friday, and another one for Cyber Monday, different ads, different offers, different creative, and that made it so that even though we had already reached most of our audience with really high spend on Black Friday, we were still able to hit them again on Cyber Monday and generate really solid returns.
So, having different offers is helpful. Now, one side note on that, we did have clients that would up… Let’s say they were giving 25% off on Black Friday and then on Cyber Monday they went to 30%, or something that was the same offer but better. That can cause problems. There were a lot of customer service requests there for people that felt slighted. So-
Kurt Elster: Could you exclude recent purchasers to try and avoid that?
Kurt Bullock: You can and that’s a good idea. One, it’s not gonna be surefire, because Facebook only has a… There’s a match rate there, and so some certain percentage of people aren’t going to be matched by Facebook as having made a purchase or making it onto those lists if you’re synchronizing from Klaviyo.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s imperfect.
Kurt Bullock: It’ll work well, but some people… Exactly. It’s imperfect. It’ll work, but people will slip through the cracks. Another way to go is just to switch up your offers so that if you have a discount on one day, then maybe on another day you’ve got a buy one, get one, or you introduce a new product, or something like that.
So, discounts worked really well, but as I was just talking about, I think the ad accounts that were the most profitable were those that got creative with their offers, so we had accounts that launched new Black Friday-specific products, right? A new product on Black Friday, or limited run products, so-
Kurt Elster: That’s… Oh, that kills. You do an exclusive limited edition free gift with purchase on Black Friday, where it’s like, “Oh, you want this one thing? Well, the only day you can get it is today and by spending at least 50 bucks. Buy whatever you want.” And then it’s also usually coupled with a sitewide sale. Those kill. So good. And it doesn’t even have to be an extraordinary thing. It can be like a lapel pin.
Kurt Bullock: Right. Yeah. That did really well last year, and so I think that that’s a great strategy. Another strategy is bundling or buy one, get one, that sort of thing, and I think that that is… Besides offering a new product and not providing big discounts on that product, buy one get one can often provide the most margin if you do that, and that’s something that I like to do in the prep stage, is build it out on a spreadsheet and see what your numbers actually look like if you’re including a free gift, if you’re doing a buy one get one, or if you’re doing some sort of a discount, just to make sure that your numbers make sense. Especially, you could plug in last numbers and see if my cost per acquisition were similar to what it was last year, how would I turn out this year? And that can be your starting point.
So, definitely useful, a useful exercise, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that in our planning stage. But so yeah, I’ve got more detailed things about like if CBO, a lot of people were really concerned about campaign budget optimization last year, and if it was gonna spend all your money in the first hour that you turned it on, or how it was gonna pace. I had really good results with it. Yeah, I mean I didn’t have any accounts where the spend went crazy and then left me dry the rest of the day. I actually saw it, the spend, go up and down throughout the day with those patterns that I just described, with high… In the morning and in the afternoon on Black Friday and spend actually slowed down in the middle of the day, which is what you would hope for, I think. So, CBO worked great last year.
Let me see what other… Well, let me just give a caveat there, too. CBO works really great if you have lots of data. So, with these promotions, if you’re setting up a promotion that is just gonna run on Black Friday, and then you’re setting up a campaign that’s just gonna run on Black Friday, it’s only got 24 hours to optimize, and so I like to use CBO if I’m doing high volume and spending quite a bit. For some of my maybe lower volume campaigns, sometimes I’ll break it out and have it be a little bit more manual, using ABO, which is where you’re setting the budget manually at the ad set level.
Anyhow, CBO worked great last year. I’m gonna use it again this year, so it made things easier for me, actually.
Kurt Elster: And this was like for people who aren’t familiar, this was a big deal. I follow a lot of Facebook ads masters on Twitter, and there was a lot of handwringing and nervousness around campaign budget optimization and what’s it going to do, what’s that end result going to be. And it sounds like you’re like, “Look, it’s positive.”
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, it worked well for me. There were a couple guys that I heard from that they had spend go awry, or it spent everything in one audience and not another. For me, it worked really well, but that’s why I talked sort of about optionality at the beginning. For most of my accounts, if I have any concern, if CBO hasn’t performed well for me in the past during the year, then I’ll build out both version and I’ll just start them up and kill which ever one doesn’t work. If I’m looking to spend 20,000 bucks, I’ll build two $10,000 campaigns and then just kind of kill one and juice the other, just to see which one’s working.
So, let’s see. One more note on there-
Kurt Elster: Give me an example of what’s a promo… You said the offer is really important. What’s a lukewarm offer? What are some offers that people are just gonna yawn and move on?
Kurt Bullock: So, it’s super dependent on your audience, and as the store owner you’re gonna know what your customers really go gaga for, right? What they’re gonna respond to. Whether it’s a certain product that has sold really well during the year, that might be what you go into Black Friday with, is promoting that product. Something that has done really well. I had some clients that you don’t have to discount, but if you are going to discount, I don’t think it’s very beneficial to go with a lukewarm discount, right?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, like 10%, I’m just gonna… I’m like, “Whatever.”
Kurt Bullock: Exactly. Right. Nobody cares about that. It’s better not to discount and just improve your offer in some other way if that’s really what you need to do to make it profitable.
Kurt Elster: Like 10%, depending on where they’re at, that’s not gonna cover sales tax.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: That’s the problem with it, like I think 15, if you’re gonna do straight percentage, 15’s your minimum. 20, 25% is going to be… All right, that’s a good deal. Where that’s a good enough excuse if I was thinking about making a decision, and then 30-plus, that’s gonna really warrant my attention where I might make a purchase I wasn’t otherwise considering.
Kurt Bullock: Exactly. And you know, 10%, you can get that from an email opt-in in most cases, as well.
Kurt Elster: Right. When I make a purchase online, I’m like… I almost expect to get a 10% discount, like there… I will go looking for the coupon, I will guess at coupon codes. 10% isn’t special. Like that’s the minimum. Yeah, I’m that annoying customer who will guess at coupon codes. I’ll ask on live chat. I’m like, “I’m about to make a purchase. Are there any promotions I should know about?” Like one out of 10 times it works. Or sometimes in a retail store I’ll go, “Hey, do you offer a good guy discount? I’m a good guy, you’re a good guy.” And when it works, I feel like I won the lottery. It’s always fun.
Kurt Bullock: I’ve never tried the good guy discount.
Kurt Elster: Try the good guy discount. I learned about it I believe on This American Life on NPR.
Kurt Bullock: Well, all right, so don’t half ass it with your discount if you’re gonna discount.
Kurt Elster: Okay, but I think there’s other way to do it, too, like… All right, if you’re going to do something crazy like sitewide 50% off, do it as a tiered discount, where it’s like, all right, either a Shopify script, or use coupon code whatever to get 10% off purchases up to $25, 20% off purchases up to $50, 40% off purchases $100 or more, and then that way you really up the average order value and it’s a little more fun and interesting than just like straight sitewide single discount. But I also… I love free gift with purchase. And if you’re like, “Look, it’s too late. I don’t have the time. I can’t come up with a free gift to do or I don’t want to do a discount.” The other way to do it is free gift card with purchase. I think that’s clever.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, and I’ve got some clients that have… They can’t offer discounts on some of their brands that they carry, right?
Kurt Elster: Right. Yeah.
Kurt Bullock: They’re prohibited from doing that.
Kurt Elster: Minimum advertised price policy stops you.
Kurt Bullock: Exactly, and so you can sort of get around that by offering a gift card, and so hey, spend over $100 and we’ll give you a $25 gift card or whatever it might be. And that’s another way to kind of get around that a little bit.
Kurt Elster: Smart.
Kurt Bullock: So, that is my… Those were my notes on 2019.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Let’s jump straight to 2020. What’s different? What do we need to… Well, tell me what I should be wringing my hands over and losing sleep about this year?
Kurt Bullock: Right. So, we’ve got election costs, we’ve got everybody pouring money into the elections, that’s driving up our costs right now.
Kurt Elster: It’s gonna be over, though. Yeah, that’s annoying, because while I’m trying… You’re saying hey, we gotta do audience building right now, but oh, I got election money is really ramping up my ad costs right now. So, it’s like November 4th is when I really get to… is when I should really ramp up my budget to build those warm audiences.
Kurt Bullock: Exactly. So, I mean right now, this has been… This week in particular… Well, for those that are listening to this later, I think it’s the 22nd of October. This has been a rough week.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, today’s the 22nd when we’re recording this. This episode will go live 7 days from today.
Kurt Bullock: Okay, so it’s been all over the place this week in terms of performance. Lots of people are reporting bad return on ad spend and elevated costs, so it’s a little bit unstable right now. I have heard from my reps that on the fourth, they expect things to be cheaper. So, anyhow, there’s that consideration. There’s election outcome consideration and if that causes any sort of instability in any way, or just what that looks like. There is also big box retailers right now, there’s… The list I’ve got in front of me, and I don’t know if this is updated or not, but Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Guitar Center, REI, Dillard’s, Neiman Marcus, all these guys have announced that they’re not going to be open on Thanksgiving this year, and so they’re gonna-
Kurt Elster: Last year they all were.
Kurt Bullock: Right. Exactly. And so, this year to avoid the crowds and everything associated with… Well, any negative effects from COVID. They’re shutting down, pointing their efforts to their eCommerce stores, so I think that’s gonna-
Kurt Elster: You said they’re gonna be closed. They won’t be open on Thanksgiving this year. Are stores gonna be closed on Black Friday?
Kurt Bullock: Yes. Many of them will be. Many of these big box stores are gonna be closed on Black Friday.
Kurt Elster: Whoa.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I’m looking up stores. The list of retail stores that are gonna be closed on… The list of stores that’ll be closed on Thanksgiving may as well just be all of them, including like Simon Property Group, so the biggest mall landlord in the country. I’m trying to find who’s gonna be closed on Black Friday. An official… Yeah, all I could… I Googled it and it’s all like stores closed on Thanksgiving.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, that’s what I found as well.
Kurt Elster: Weird.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah. But, so as a shopper, you’re not gonna be on the town. All of the stores are gonna be closed. And so, that is gonna have the effect of driving people to do… They’re all gonna be doing their shopping online. So, that’s a positive for online store owners. The potential downside is that these big box stores are also gonna be promoting those stores with paid ads, and so that’s one more thing that’s gonna be driving our costs up that may look different than it did last year.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Yeah. No, certainly. They’re not just gonna give up on that revenue. They’re going to use their websites.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: And why shouldn’t they?
Kurt Bullock: Right. So, yes, traffic costs, crazy. Prime Day was another consideration. I’m not sure really what-
Kurt Elster: We did… You’re right. You know, I didn’t even… It’s funny you mentioned that. It didn’t even occur to me. At least not recently. When is Prime Day normally?
Kurt Bullock: Prime Day’s… I’ll probably get it wrong, but I think it’s in July, but it’s in the summer normally.
Kurt Elster: That feels… July feels right to me. I’m gonna go with that too, ignoring that we could both easily Google it, but it’s in the summer. And so, they said, “Hey, we’re gonna push it back. Hey, we’re gonna…” They kept pushing it back until it ended up running in the middle of October, which is where… Like by the time you’re in mid-October, a lot of… You’re starting to see sales for Black Friday deferred. So, I don’t know what the results of Prime Day were for Amazon, but we know certainly there were people who made… who did some of their Black Friday shopping right then.
Though truthfully, like most of Prime Day sales is just like let’s clear out the inventory in preparation. Like it just feels like a flea market. It’s a lot of junk. Unless you’re into Amazon hardware, like I bought a few more Echoes, because I need like 25 of those things.
Kurt Bullock: I bought the new-
Kurt Elster: When I say Alexa, I just want to hear a chorus of the thing responding.
Kurt Bullock: I got the new Eero Pros version 6.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I’m jealous. I got… Those are sweet.
Kurt Bullock: They were only discounting version 5, so I had to pay full.
Kurt Elster: So, on Prime Day you paid full retail for an item?
Kurt Bullock: Yeah. I’m moving right now, and I didn’t want to install last year’s.
Kurt Elster: That’s an ideal scenario for them.
Kurt Bullock: Yes, so I paid full price on Prime Day, I believe for those, but I’m excited to get them.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No, they’re cool. If you’re looking… All right, you know what? We’ll plug it. If you’re looking for really good Wi-Fi and being that we’re all working from how now, Eero, the Eero mesh Wi-Fi system, incredibly good. I have it, you have it, we got other friends who have it. It’s awesome.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah. Yep. Yes. All right, more considerations. So, I mentioned Google did some… Well, so Prime Day, kicking off, there’s people have done Black Friday… Sorry, holiday shopping during Prime Day. It also may have the effect of just sort of kicking off the holiday shopping season earlier. That could be kind of a-
Kurt Elster: Interesting.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah. Getting people in that mode. They’re already holiday shopping now. So, I’m not sure what effect that’ll have, but Google did a survey that said 77% of people they surveyed will be browsing for gift ideas online and not in stores, specifically not in store, so there’s gonna be a lot of people looking… Well, doing holiday shopping online they might otherwise do walking from store to store in person, so that would be interesting.
I’m gonna be running more Instagram story ads, which are really good for browsing with gift ideas. See if I can take advantage of some of that. And then Shopify… Sorry, I can’t talk here. Shopify surveyed their Plus merchants about the timing of their 2020 campaigns and I think something like two thirds of respondents said they were planning to start their Black Friday promotion sometime during the week of the 16th, which is two weeks early.
Kurt Elster: From the people I’ve talked to, that sounds about right.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That lines right up with what our clientele is doing. Interesting.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah. So, it will be interesting, and if you’re gonna be starting two weeks before Black Friday, are you gonna just run a promotion for two weeks? You know, the two weeks before Black Friday and include Black Friday? Are you gonna have different… are you gonna separate it in the middle? Just you have to think through that. That’s kind of an interesting thing that we don’t normally see.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Anything else there?
Kurt Bullock: I think that that is primarily it. We’re gonna see shopping patterns I hope come really focus in on eCommerce, but we’re juggling higher uncertainty and instability around this time, as well, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I happen to think that we’re gonna see a really strong Q4 for eCommerce stores, but we’ll see how it pans out.
Kurt Elster: You know, and the other thing we haven’t brought up that will make a difference is as of this time, there’s still no movement on a stimulus program in the U.S.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: And they’re really close to almost not quite passing one, but if they do and people know like, “All right, I got checks coming.” And they were big checks last time. That will make a massive difference. Those stimulus checks, we saw it. It really did make a sizeable and measurable impact in eCommerce. And so, if those show… If we know those are coming, or they show up in the early December, end of November, wow. That would really be something.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah. That would just be putting fuel on the fire.
Kurt Elster: Certainly nothing I would count on.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: Just the way things are going. Yeah. No, there’s that. All right. We’re coming to the end of our time together. Can I pick your brain?
Kurt Bullock: Yes. You may.
Kurt Elster: So, what’s a good budget here? We’ve got… Or like relative, like if you normally spend X, try spending this, or a formula. What would your advice be when you have a client that’s like, “What’s a good budget for this?”
Kurt Bullock: So, I usually think about it in terms of multiples of your normal monthly spend, and that just helps kind of set some… I don’t know. A little bit more realistic expectations. If you’re spending $5,000 a month normally, you’re not gonna be able to spend $50,000 over Black Friday, right? That’s not gonna work. So, I usually think about it, at least not profitably, I think about it in terms of a multiple one, two, three times your normal monthly spend is a good starting point.
So, a lot of our clients, like if they’re spending let’s say 25,000 bucks a month, maybe we’re gonna focus that and go for double, 2X it. That seems to be… That was reasonable. We did that last year, because essentially you’re targeting all of the retargeting audiences you built up for the last 180 days, right? Because Facebook pixel has six months lookback window. And so, you can target all, so that’s why you want to be prospecting in all the time leading up to the holiday, so that you have that really big audience that you can draw from and actually spend what you want to spend.
So, that’s one way to think about it. The other way is if you have a budget, right? If you say, “Hey, we’ve got $20,000,” or whatever it might be for this period of time. Then I would break that down into all right, how am I gonna use it in my before, my during, and my after, and I would probably break that down something like maybe 30% in the ramp up, and then 50% of that budget during the actual promotion, and then save the 20% for the remainder.
Kurt Elster: Okay. That’s actually… That’s really good. For funsies, what are some of the bigger budgets that you’re gonna play with this year.
Kurt Bullock: I have got budgets that… Let’s see. If I’m doing it daily, I’ve got people that’ll be spending $25,000 to $35,000 a day will be probably my highest, my big spenders this year.
Kurt Elster: Whoa. That’s pretty good. I know there’s people who are like, “Well, I spend $6 million in six weeks.”
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: Like I can’t conceive of that, of that kind of ad spend, but like you know, tens of thousands a day, I think for the vast majority of people, that is a big marketing budget.
Kurt Bullock: That’s huge. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of stores will be spending less than that, even if you’re doing… I mean, one, that just brings up one other point. If you’re doing, if you’re having a lot of spend, you can experiment a little bit more, right? And you can take a little bit more risks with what you’re building out. You maybe throw in some prospecting. Maybe you try a different type of bidding than you normally try. Of course, I would have the other one already built up as a backup.
But if you’re a smaller store, you want to take more of a surefooted approach, and to me, that means really probably if you really are focusing on getting the most for your dollars during Black Friday, and that’s the most important thing to you rather than getting new customers, or that sort of… You know, profit over just the total number of purchases, right? Then I would set up cost caps. That’s worked really well for me. And I would also… So, personally I’ll be setting up CBO campaigns targeting your mid funnel, your website, so that’s your engagers, your mid funnel, the rest of your mid funnel’s gonna be like your email list, your website visitors, and then customers if you want to mix them in there.
And then I would also have a dynamic product ads campaign that just is blasting DPA ads to people. Those worked really well last year. But those are gonna be kind of like the most sure thing, and if you have a cost cap in there, that will make sure that your spend isn’t wasted. I mean, if it works right.
Kurt Elster: You know, Kurt Bullock, I’m starting to think you’re good at Facebook ads.
Kurt Bullock: Right on.
Kurt Elster: Talk to me about… Well, contented formats. So, you have years of experience and have spent untold sums of money on Facebook ads. What seems to be some consistent keys to these are ads that work, these are thumb stoppers? Whether it be the format, the content, the message, I bet you have a sense when you look at an ad, either like this one’s not gonna go well, this one’s gonna do well. What are those… What are the red flags or those indicators for you?
Kurt Bullock: So, for the holidays, I break them down into if I’m doing any prospecting, those are gonna look a certain way versus my remarketing. If I’m doing prospecting, we still need to show people the value of the product and introduce ourselves, that sort of thing. But during these promotions, like Black Friday, I focus a lot on just getting people the details of the sale, right? Really focusing on the incentive, right? It’s 25% off, or buy one get one, that sort of thing, and have the product definitely featured in your ad.
Things that I would say don’t do is gonna be things like having a fade-in if you’re doing video. Don’t fade from black into it. You’re wasting a half a second right there. You’ve only got three seconds or less until somebody scrolls right past your ad. So, I like to open with the fire, right immediately. Show them what the deal is. That’s what they want to know if it’s on a Black Friday day, a day like Black Friday, is what are the details of the sale, what sort of products do you have, and just get that click.
So, when it comes to video, shorter videos are working well, like 15-second videos. And then we have-
Kurt Elster: 15 seconds. All right.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, so nice short videos. I mean, last year we had a client, shared client, you and I, that did like home shopping network-style ads, and-
Kurt Elster: Oh, God, those were fun.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, those worked so well, because they were entertaining. So, they drew you in right away, and that’s a really creative solution, right? I don’t have many clients that are doing that sort of thing. But they worked really well. They drew you into the story and then they ran through 10 different products in the process. You know, and so you got to see what was being offered. That was awesome.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No, it was… That was a really clever way to do it. Those were smart. And finally, do you have any downloads for us?
Kurt Bullock: I do. If you visit the website, my website, it’s ProduceDept.co/Q4.
Kurt Elster: ProduceDept.co.
Kurt Bullock: You got it.
Kurt Elster: D-E-P-T.
Kurt Bullock: Yep. /Q4. And I’ll have a lot of these points summarized in a guide that you can download.
Kurt Elster: Sweet.
Kurt Bullock: Otherwise-
Kurt Elster: And I’ll link to that in the show notes, as well.
Kurt Bullock: Okay, great. If you have any questions about any of this, want to bat some ideas around, hit me up on Twitter. It’s just @KurtBullock. K-U-R-T-B-U-L-L-O-C-K. And I’m totally happy to talk through any of these ideas with you.
Kurt Elster: I got that in the show notes, as well. This has been incredibly informative, and you are full of great advice. Thank you so much for doing this. I appreciate it.
Kurt Bullock: Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it, as well.