Black Friday and Cyber Monday might be over, but your work isn’t done yet.
Ideally, on Black Friday, you generated a lot of leads. Countless shoppers bought from you for the first time, and countless others clicked on your product detail pages for the first time.
But how do you figure out whether you successfully engaged the right shoppers? Or whether you started your Black Friday campaigns at the right time?
Plus: among those shoppers who engaged with your brand, which might be ripe for re-targeting soon?
Here’s how to audit your Black Friday the right way—and be sure you aren’t missing any key opportunities in the process.
The essential Black Friday Amazon auditing package
Now that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are over, the hard questions about strategy are surfacing.
You or your clients are certainly asking: which of your campaigns successfully drove NTB sales in the short term?
Which will end up paying off, in terms of generating repeat purchasing revenue in the long term?
Thankfully, deep analysis in AMC can answer these questions easily. Here are a few queries we recommend for your Black Friday audits.
FWIW: all of these queries are available in Intentwise Explore, our platform that levels up AMC, and can be customized to your needs with a single click.
Tentpole phase overlap: One big question of every tentpole event is, did I start my ad campaigns at the right time?
It’s obvious, but: to get the most out of Black Friday, you need some kind of lead-in strategy, to raise awareness of your brand.
But building the perfect lead-in strategy involves a tricky balance. Start your pre-tentpole campaigns too soon, and you’re throwing money away. Start them too late, and you won’t have enough runway to win over shoppers.
Intentwise’s tentpole phase overlap query takes every shopper who bought from you Black Friday, and tells you when they first saw your ad.
Our query automatically maps your ad performance based on the day of first exposure. How did ACOS compare on ads 14 days out from Black Friday vs. 7 days out? Now you can see that data instantly.
Plus: If you want to get sophisticated, you can run even deeper comparisons of this data. Compare how your tentpole phases looked this year to last year, or even the year before.
Remember, AMC now gives you 25 months of advertising traffic data by default. And if you want to compare sales over time, you can go back a full five years, with AMC’s 5-year lookback data.
Speaking of, we recently published a whitepaper on this data set, which you can read here.
New To Brand customers: For most businesses, the primary goal of tentpole events is to acquire new customers. You sacrifice some profit margin in exchange, ideally, for bringing a lot of new people into the fold.
But which campaigns actually drove those NTB sales?
With the New-To-Brand Customers query, you can instantly track which campaigns had the highest NTB rate during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping weekend.
It’s worth noting, however, that, by default, this query will only surface the customers that Amazon considers to be New-To-Brand. That means anyone who hasn’t purchased from you in the last 365 days will automatically be considered NTB.
If you want to see a truer reflection of your NTB metrics, you can also pull in AMC’s 5-year lookback data.
With this 5-year purchase data at your fingertips, you’ll be able to assess with certainty how many of your tentpole customers truly have never purchased from you before.
What percentage of your tentpole buyers had purchased from you a couple years prior, fallen off, and then re-entered your ecosystem because of a deal?
On Black Friday, did you successfully bring some cold customers back into the fold?
First-touch attribution. Any brand that allocated some of their tentpole budget toward high-funnel ads like TV streaming ads or online video DSP is going to want to understand their effectiveness.
The problem is, you can’t get a good sense of the success or failure of high-funnel ads based on ACOS alone.
Amazon by default gives credit for each purchase to the last ad a customer sees before purchasing. That means your streaming TV ads, even if they brought people in the door, won’t get credit.
If you want to assess the effectiveness of your upper-funnel campaigns, we recommend flipping around your attribution model. Run a first-touch attribution query in AMC, and see how many of your high-funnel campaigns were the entry point in a customer journey that ended in a sale.
In fact, the key to assessing the incremental value of high-funnel campaigns is to examine both first-touch and last-touch attribution together, and then try to find the difference between the two of them.
If there’s a big discrepancy—a campaign whose performance shifts dramatically depending on whether you use last-touch and first-touch—then you know that’s a story you need to uncover.
Understand long-term LTV. Remember, the point of Black Friday isn’t just to make one-off sales to new customers.
You want to turn shoppers into brand loyalists—especially because, depending on your margin, you might actually lose money on deal ASINs.
Tracking the LTV of your Black Friday shoppers over the coming months and years is essential. Keep a list of which ASINs you had promos on, and then run LTV queries to see how those customers that bought deal ASINs are continuing to interact with your brand.
How often are they repeating their purchase, and how much are they spending? Once again, AMC’s 5-year purchase data lets you get a truly long view of these campaigns.
If you want to see the LTV of your Black Friday customers from last year, the year prior, even 5 years prior, now you can.
Next step: Layer on re-targeting audiences after Black Friday
Once you’ve done all of this auditing, it isn’t hard to build a portrait of who to re-target next. In Intentwise, for instance, we offer an audience of shoppers who viewed your product details page but didn’t purchase.
Limit the date range to Black Friday, and push new ads on these shoppers in the next couple weeks, as holiday spending continues to escalate.
For the long-term, try an audience of customers who purchased during BFCM. You want to run these ads around the moment it’s time for these Black Friday shoppers to re-purchase.
Pitch them on an upsell or cross-sell, or try to convince them to Subscribe & Save.
