Cyber 5 2022 is in the books! 

In this episode, I’m joined by two OMG Commerce veterans to unpack the juicy tidbits and key takeaways from BFCM. 

Bill Cover is a senior Google Strategist with 6 years of experience at OMG and over a decade of experience in eComm. Amber Norell is the Amazon Director at OMG. For 8 years, she has helped large brands with scaling on Amazon in the most competitive niches!

This year’s data was both fascinating and surprising. Some speculated that high inflation and economic concerns could squash the holiday sales rush and turn Cyber 5 into a downer. However, the data tells a VERY different story. 

Here’s some of what we covered:

• How did Cyber 5 2022 compare to last year? 
• How did BF compare to CM? When we looked at Amazon sales versus DTC sales, the answer was different. 
• Did Prime Early Access - Amazon’s sale in October - impact Cyber 5 or holiday sales in general?
• What was the level of discounting this year vs. last year?
• How did ad costs change during Cyber 5?

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Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG commerce. And today is not just any old episode, this is a special edition, special Black Friday, cyber Monday holiday edition where we're recapping how the cyber five, if you will, or Turkey five or Black Friday, cyber Monday, how that shook out this year compared to years past. And I have some amazing guests, some very special guests that I know you'll be excited to hear from. The first is Bill Cover. He's a senior Google strategist here at omg. He's been with us for six, yeah, six, got it. Six years. I'm having trouble with my, I was trying to see the mirroring on my, yeah, so six years he's been with omg, but he is been in the advertising community and e-commerce community for what, an additional decade or something like that Bill. Yeah, give or take 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. So really excited to have Bill here. So Bill's going to be sharing perspective on all things Google and all things DTC, so basically non-Amazon. And then also delighted to have with us our Amazon director, the world famous Amber Norell. Amber how's it going?

Amber:

Good, Brett. Super excited to be here today.

Brett:

Now a little caveat, you guys hear my voice a lot and you may be like, you don't sound normal. And that's because I'm not got hit pretty hard with the flu. I, I'm feeling better ish, but my voice is just a mess. But holiday will not wait it, it's peak season, we gotta talk about it. So we can't keep delaying this. But I'll also say Amber has been on the weather too, so if we say something silly, if we say something that doesn't make sense, I'm going to totally play the sick card and blame this on the flu if I say something that's incorrect or incoherent. So hopefully we'll avoid both of those, but just a little caveat there. Alright let's dive in guys. So I'll look at this from both perspectives, Amazon perspective, and then also the off Amazon perspective. Start with you, bill. What are some of the key takeaways? How did this Cyber five or Black Friday, cyber Monday compare to last year? And I wanna give this caveat every year for the last several years has been weird. We had the covid year, then we had supply chain issues last year. All the goods were stuck sitting outside the port of Long Beach port this year we're got inflation and all kinds of craziness. So it's like three not normal years stacked up back to back back. But what are you seeing from a comparison standpoint this year versus last?

Bill:

Yeah, you bet. And I think if anything, you could make the case that this year should have been the year to normalize because the last couple years were very quarantine heavy and supply chain issues like you mentioned. But I think going into it, a lot of analysts were thinking this may not be as exciting as the years before, but the news is out this Black Friday, cyber Monday was better than last year from a monetary standpoint and sales standpoint. So sales are up, I'm sure we've all seen the stats that Black Friday sales were up 9 billion in the US popular stat that's out there on the internet. We are also seeing the same when we

Brett:

Look, they're up to 9 billion though, not up 9 billion. Is that

Bill:

Right? Yeah, my bad. Thank you for correcting me there. And we are seeing the same with our own data that when you assess all of our clients as a whole or a sample set of specific clients, or even anecdotally talking to various specialists on our team everyone did very well. Not everyone that would be a blanket statement, but the majority of businesses did very well. This Black Friday compared to 2021,

Brett:

It was essentially across the board, very few exceptions where someone was down this year versus last year. We did have a few that I saw that were down this year versus last year, but they were typically clients that were outta stock. So even though last year was the big supply chain nightmare, sometimes stuff happens this year too, where there were a few clients where some key skews were outta stock. And so that impacted sales.

Bill:

And I don't think anyone who did not do better than last year was expecting to do better than last year. You have to work for it. And I think retailers are savvy enough to understand that now you have to give an offer that's compelling to consumers and meet them where we're at because they're looking for a deal this time of year. And I think that retailers understand that and the ones that provided an offer where there is perceived value, they won out.

Brett:

And what's interesting, we got the Salesforce numbers in front of me, so I'm just going to mention these. So according to Salesforce, black Friday was a 15 billion day, so that was a record up 12% year over year. Cyber Monday was a 12.2 billion day, day up 8% year over year. And everybody's numbers are a little bit different. We looked at some numbers from Adobe, which is different dataset, different clients they're pulling numbers from. And Cyber Monday was actually a little bit bigger than Black Friday according to that. But regardless, record breaking days, record breaking holiday pretty substantial year over year growth for sure. Amber, what about on the Amazon side? What did you see this year compared to last year?

Amber:

Yeah, so I think the main thing that stood out was that there was a less notable lift between Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. So you obviously will see a lift on Black Friday, but we would see an extreme lift on Cyber Monday. That did not happen this year. It was more level and even keel. Also looking year over year to bill's point, we were expecting to see more normalization we're in a recession and instead we saw a pretty significant increase over the daily average from the week prior, which was not something that we were expecting.

Brett:

So what kind of lift, comparing those weeks, the week over week lift, what kind of lift were we seeing?

Amber:

So taking a look at 2021, the daily average for that week prior we saw about a 37% increase during the four days of Black Friday through Cyber Monday weekend. This year we saw an 87% lift.

Brett:

Wow, interesting. And one thing, and we were kind of talking about this earlier, but one theory there is that last year there weren't a ton of discounts because retailers had limited inventory. So they're like, Hey, this is all we got. We're not discounting it. Also, people understood, hey, if you want to get this buy Christmas or by the holidays, you gotta order now. So people started shopping earlier and they were less discount sensitive, but this year more inventory, less concerned about getting it and time for the holidays. And so people waiting back to the traditional, the traditional shopping approach of let's wait for a Black Friday, cyber Monday, or at least the Turkey five of Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday and see what kind of deals we can find. And we definitely saw that huge year over year lift.

Amber:

Absolutely. Yeah. And I would say a lot of the clients that we work with, they've even adopted that shift. Even ones that were vehemently opposed to running any sort of discount, they are finally understanding that we need to have a meeting of the minds with the customer and they're willing to do that one-off promotion, which has been just awesome.

Brett:

Yeah, I mean customers expect it. They kinda frown upon a business that doesn't do any discount over Black Friday, cyber Monday. It's kinda like, what? What's wrong here? So yeah, what did we see? Did we see a lot of people discounting for the first time in terms of our client set for Black Friday, cyber Monday, and any other insights on the impact of promotions?

Amber:

Yeah, so I would say there was a definite increase in our clients who are running promos. We've always encouraged it during this time of year because it is something that's expected overall conversion rates, cost for advertising, the performance is much lower than if you're running a promotion. So that was definitely something that we saw some of our clients that just did not have the margin or had very strong map policies that they weren't able to discount at all saw an increase in C P C and ad performance, not going as strongly as if they were run running promotions.

Brett:

Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. Cool. Yeah, and so I think you got a stat on with promotions versus without promotions. What kind of an increase did we see there?

Amber:

I believe we saw 170% increase with promos on Cyber Monday versus an 82% increase without promos on Cyber Monday.

Brett:

So basically you're taking your increase in cutting it in half if you didn't provide a discount of some kind. It is interesting though, you will probably see a lift even without a discount because people are just shopping and their wallets are out and they're ready to buy, but probably cut your growth potential in half without having those discounts. Yeah, super, super interesting. What about surprises for the holidays so far, or for the Black Friday summer Monday bill, and we'll start with you on the, I think you already mentioned a few things, but what were you surprised to see this year? Yeah, maybe you weren't expecting.

Bill:

Sure. So CPMs were much, much higher this year. When you look at CPMs just in our client base CPMs, were up 50%. So going from say $10 in 20, 21 to $15 in 2022, we always expect CPMs and CPCs to rise a little bit, but that's quite a jump. Also on that note, and this is all just this next part is just anecdotal, I don't have global numbers, but Facebook CPMs were much higher. The spike was much higher than Google Ads CPM spike, so Facebook was super expensive this year during cyber week,

Brett:

Which we always expect that. So CPM is a supply and demand kind of game. So the platforms are going to raise the cost of ads based on how many people are entering the auction, how many people are bidding, things like that. I think those numbers you share, were kind of across all Google channels. So those numbers may not line up for you as you're looking at your YouTube costs or Facebook costs or whatever. Everybody's, as you're kind of aggregating across all Google channels, that's where I see those numbers, but still about a 50% increase year over year. That's significant. So that means conversion rate's gotta go up significantly. That means AOVs gotta go up significantly to be able to weather or absorb that increase in CPMs. And what do we see on, in terms of CPCs, how much should our cost per click

Bill:

Go up there? Yeah, so CPCs, and we're talking probably a hundred ish clients, so this is pretty good data. CPCs went up 15%, nice year over years.

Brett:

Yeah, we're talking millions in spend. So this is not a small data set. So okay, so CPCs went up 15%. That's a little more what we're used to that. That's not unusual for a holiday lift to be in about that 15 to 20, 25%, but the CPM lift, that was super interesting for sure. Great. Other surprises, bill?

Bill:

Yeah, when I asked the team for which channels were performing best, of course branded ads performance Max that's not a huge surprise. Performance Max was definitely part of the conversation for which channels perform best. One channel that I personally really like and that a lot of people were seeing very efficient and positive results from was Discovery. So Discovery ads, both top of funnel and remarketing were performing on par better than Par during cyber week.

Brett:

Can you explain Discovery? Yeah, you bet. Where those ads show up.

Bill:

Yeah, so Discovery Ads on an Android phone, when you swipe to go search Google, it's below your Google search page and it's basically a feed, right? So Facebook is a feed style format. So this is Google's feed style format where it recommends different articles, news articles, and there's some ads mixed in there and things that you are interested in. So for me, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Kansas City Chiefs and maybe something about Tesla or something like that. And then intermixed in that is Ad Space. So the ads are also things that I am that Google perceives that I'm interested in because of how the targeting works and that sort of thing. And Discovery ads are a very media format, so you get to do a very big image, you get to do some rich copy and click through to a nice landing page. So we've seen a lot of good results from Discovery, but a lot of specialists were leaning into that during cyber week.

Brett:

And then some other placements that also can show up in the YouTube app as an image, it can show up in Gmail, it can show up across the Google Display Network. Really just a great versatile, useful ad unit. So Discovery Ads coming up big this year. That's awesome. What about you, Amber? What were some of the surprises we saw on the Amazon side this year?

Amber:

Yeah, so one of the biggest surprises we saw this year was reporting going down in the campaign manager on Black Friday, cyber Monday weekend. So Saturday and Sunday having a lot of struggles with sales coming through and spend coming through. It was really difficult to gauge what performance actually was. Obviously you're running out of budget, so you want to increase, but our team was very conservative and cautious with that knowing that there was a reporting error in the system. But I know that was a huge pain point for sellers this year, and a lot of them just abysmal results on Saturday and Sunday,

Brett:

Which is just terrible. It's like, Hey, this is only the busiest weekend of the year, have you fly blind for a little while? Does that sound good? Does that sound helpful? So what do you increase? What do you change when you don't really have accurate numbers? So that was a curve ball for sure. What other surprises did we see?

Amber:

Another big one that popped up this year was the first year that Amazon kicked off their event on Thanksgiving. So they had promotions running all during Thanksgiving. A lot of deals that day, prime Exclusive started that day and their language in their coupon setup actually said it would start on Black Friday. Our team caught that and checked out the date, saw that it started on 1123, and were able to proactively adjust everything, make sure there was no coupon stacking or anything like that. But from the consumer standpoint, something that I noticed was there were thousands of sellers with just 70, 80% off discounts where they had coupons, they had lightning deals running, they had prime exclusive discounts. So definitely a curve ball that came up this year.

Brett:

Super interesting. Bill, any other, I realize I may cut short. Any other surprises this year versus last year? No. Or what were some of the other big takeaways? I know you did something really cool. You interviewed all of our top Google ad specialists, so they're the ones in the accounts managing all the details and hey, we get super excited. We treat this weekend, it's a Super Bowl, it's our Super Bowl for e-commerce agencies. It's just a lot of fun. We're all online, we're all chatting throughout the weekend keeping tabs on things. But what was some of the feedback that our specialists gave some of their key takeaways?

Bill:

Yeah, you bet. So one of the questions that I asked our lead specialists this year was what's a tool or a feature or something that everyone should adopt? And some of the most popular answers included rules for adjusting budgets and scheduling ads, search add extensions using a combination of countdown extensions countdown for sale launch, and countdown for last chance to get a deal using sitelink extensions. Of course, using promo extensions. They also recommend using tools to watch your numbers during the day. So for us internally here, we get a tool from Google that allows us to monitor every hour how spend is doing compared to budgets, so forth. But if you don't have that, then using something like Triple Whale or North Beam, like say if you have the North Beam hourly updates, then you can watch your spend as it goes throughout the day and make sure that your budgets are lifted so that way you're capturing all of your branded traffic and all of your profitable traffic. You can also watch your sales of course through that and just mapping out all of your creative schedules, your promo schedules, because some retailers might have varying promos throughout the days or weeks. And so mapping that out, making sure you're ready.

Another thing I should have said, this was one surprise, the Black Friday, cyber Monday specific text in ads, it had a little more trouble this year serving right out of the gates.

Brett:

Interesting.

Bill:

And so what we learned, and we learned this with early promotions, so our clients who had promotions in early November allowed us to kind of see what was going on. If we were to stop Evergreen ads cold and launch save Black Friday or some sort of promo ad cold, it had a lot of trouble building that momentum. So what we learned early in November was to overlap those ads and to run Evergreen for say, half a day, a few hours a day, whatever as your Black Friday or Cyber Monday ad ads are ramping up and Y you're not losing out on that messaging because with your Evergreen ads, you can still put site links and promo extensions under those Evergreen ads. So users are still getting that promo messaging with an Evergreen ad is just through a site link.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. I love all those tips and tools to use there. And I think that's really what it comes down to is one planning, really mapping it out and planning, and then two, using as many tools as you can, or not as many, you don't wanna overload but the right tools to really make sure, is this working? Can we make adjustments? Do we need to make adjustments now, having the right tools in place to really maximize the weekend because, and I love the hourly reports because one hour over the Black Friday, cyber Monday weekend is the same thing as whole day other times of the year or half a day or something like that. And so really good tips, Phil, really good insights. I appreciate that. Let's switch back to Amazon. Let's talk about prime early access. So we had our first ever primarily access deal in October. A lot of people wondered, Hey, is that going to pull forward a bunch of holiday shopping? How is this going to go? How is this going to impact Black Friday, cyber Monday? And a bit of a spoiler, you already saw that Black Friday, summer Monday's been great. So primarily Access did not torpedo Black Friday, cyber Monday. But can you tell Amber, did it have any meaningful shift in holiday shopping? What's your take on how primarily access impacted the holidays?

Amber:

So I don't know if I can definitively say that the primarily access sale is the key contributor to the change in shopping behavior where we saw that increased lift, but I do think it played a role. I also think it set up a lot of our clients for better success with organic traffic. They got that initial boost of sales and then maintained that ranking maintained bestseller badges leading into Black Friday, cyber Monday, which was amazing. I can also say, and I'm literally going to knock on wood here, this was the smoothest year we have ever seen in terms of operational performance listing suspensions, takedowns. Normally I am pulling my hair out on Black Friday, cyber Monday trying to get listings reinstated because Amazon's team is looking at things so closely. And it just seems like that kind of happened during the prime early access sale where they were taking a closer look at the catalog and pulling those listings at that point. So we were able to combat that early and things were just really, really smooth sailing from that perspective.

Brett:

That is amazing. And it kind of feels like merchants should catch a break right after three years of <laugh>, pure madness everywhere. It makes sense. Maybe we get a little bit of Slack this holiday season. So yeah, super, super interesting. Bill, did you guys notice anything on the Google side, on the D two C side? Did we notice anything? Prime access, primarily access related? Do you notice anything around that time period? Any trickle down from that or any other impacts that you noticed? And it's okay if not

Bill:

Based on memory. I think we did get a little bit of an organic or natural lift during primarily access. I don't have the numbers in front of me. I came prepared for if you were to ask if primarily Access pulled sales forward this year and created a lackluster Black Friday Cyber Monday. And I'd have to say no, right? The data speaks for itself, it didn't, so

Brett:

Totally. Yeah, and I think that's been the trend has been, or what merchants want to have happen is, Hey, let's get shopping to start earlier and earlier. Let's start in November. Whatever helps the merchants have a more predictable holiday season. But it just kind of appears like unless there's this massive global supply chain issue where everyone's talking about, Hey, you better order early or else, then people are probably going to stick around and just wait for the biggest discounts, which they know are going to be a Black Fridays ever Monday. So yeah, I would totally agree with that. Same sentiment, bill. I know Bill, you already answered the advertising cost question and it definitely went up this year on the Google side. What about for Amazon, Amber? How much did ad cost go up this year?

Amber:

So the performance this year on advertising costs was pretty similar to 2021. Overall. We saw an improved roaz on Black Friday. It kind of stabilized during Saturday, Sunday, and then the best return was on Cyber Monday. So nothing crazy there. C P C was relatively stable, but as I mentioned earlier, that was a little bit higher on products that weren't running any sort of promo.

Brett:

Okay. So the A ad cost went up more if they were not running a promo?

Amber:

Exactly.

Brett:

Interesting. And why do you think that is?

Amber:

I think you just have to get so competitive and the conversion rate drops so significantly if you're not running a promo at that time that you just burn through spend.

Brett:

Yeah. And does Amazon reward for higher click through rate like Google does? So having a discount or promo, does that impact your ad cost at all? On the Amazon side?

Amber:

It'll impact ad placement, it'll impact, got it. Organic ranking, all that good stuff.

Brett:

Got it, got it. Okay, cool, cool. Awesome. Well, I know Bill, you already touched on this a little bit, but guys, what takeaways, right? So it's been a super interesting holiday shopping season so far. We'll see how it closes out. But any takeaways, any pieces of advice for you, bill, just that you haven't already mentioned but any takeaways that we can share with our listeners?

Bill:

Yeah, you bet. So I actually asked all of our specialists team this question, what was the one specific thing that all e-commerce brands should do to increase success during Black Friday Cyber Monday? I got a variety of answers. Things like aim for brand lift, use search at extensions, make the sale simple. One of my favorite answers was one of our lead strategists or senior strategist, Greg Macock, he said, put out your best offer of the year. And that doesn't necessarily mean your biggest discount of the year, but your most compelling offer and your most valuable offer. And I think that's good advice.

Brett:

That's what people expect. I think shoppers are more savvy than ever. We can sniff out if it's not a real offer if you've just been kind of manipulating the numbers to make it feel like a big offer. We we're pretty good sniffing that out as consumers, so that's awesome. Really good stuff. Bill what about you, Amber? Takeaways, tips for next year and beyond?

Amber:

Yeah, and I think this even applies to Prime Day this year. We just saw such great success with D S P so it does obviously take a specific type of account and client and goals, but if you're kind of at a ceiling and you wanna kind of push there and maximize your retargeting efforts, we saw an average 12 x return on Black Friday Wow. Across D S P clients. So if you're not running D S P for Prime day, get on it.

Brett:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Awesome, all guys. Very good. Any closing? Dang it. Lemme try that again. Any closing thoughts or final words of wisdom?

Bill:

Actually, one, in terms of methodology and getting the most out of cyber week when it comes to the weeks leading into cyber weeks. So we're talking about going all the way back to, say the beginning of October. What we found we had have a client that saw a lot of success with Performance Max and just in their account in general. And what that team did was they started preparing in early October and ramping up momentum on Performance. Max and I haven't spoken enough about Performance Max. I think that's something that I need to cover a little better here before we go. With Performance Max this year, we found that a higher spend on or a higher budget limit on Performance Max allowed Performance Max placements to be higher quality. It allowed the campaign to go out there and find higher quality placements along all of Google properties and so forth. And so we also found a way to eliminate some of the lower quality placements early on. And so ramping up that budget going into Cyber Week allowed us to get good momentum. It brought in some really rich top of funnel cold traffic, and then we flip that upside down and we prioritized remarketing during cyber week. So we deprioritize top of funnel. We don't turn it off, but we deprioritize it and we prioritize remarketing because those lists are primed and they're ready to go. And we saw very good results where we followed that methodology.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. I'm so glad you pointed out Performance Max because it is rocking for us right now and we're talking about millions in spend. I think over the last couple months we spent about 5 million on performance Max alone. And so we're seeing good results with a amount of data. So if it's not working for you, you should reach out to omg. We'd love to chat with you. And also, quick plug, I completed a Performance Max Blueprint with Smart Marketer, Ezra and the gang over there. So we'll link to that in the show notes. Check that out if you want more training on Performance Max. Awesome. Thank you, bill. Amber, any closing words of wisdom?

Amber:

Yeah, I mean, I feel like every time I've been on one of your podcasts, Brett, I've said it, but double check your promos. Like I said, I saw a lot of coupon stacking this year, which was insane. And then Amazon has been making a ton of changes to their ui, to their interface, adding new dashboards, betas be cautious, going into to peaks with bid automation and budgets. That's not something we wanted to roll out right before Black Friday, cyber Monday, and we didn't with the reporting going down. So just always be super cautious within your account.

Brett:

I love it. Bill. Amber, you guys are the best. Thank you so much for coming on. Super fun. Thank you. Awesome. And hey, if you're listening and you're like, dang, wish I had someone like Bill run my Google Ads account, or holy cow, if I just had someone like Amber running my Amazon efforts, how much more would my business grow? Well, good news, dear your listener. You can reach out to OMG Commerce. So shameless plug we are accepting new clients right now and Bill and Amber are two of the best. But we've got a team loaded with really smart people and we'll love to help you on the Google, Google side, email side, Amazon side, wherever you need help there. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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