A data-driven Black Friday/Cyber Monday Facebook ads strategy | Hacker News Reader

A data-driven Black Friday/Cyber Monday Facebook ads strategy

sumo.com

62 pointssharemywin16 comments

These guys may be able to provide a plan to get you more clicks and purchases, but they definitely aren’t the ones to tell you how the business of selling stuff works. For example (from the article):

We have that there to remind ourselves that everything in ecommerce (in all business, really) comes down to only three factors: - How many visitors you get - How many of them purchase (conversion rate), and - How much money they spend when they do (average order value)

Multiply the three together and, voila, you’ve got a formula for how much money you’re making. That’s it. That’s the whole game.

No. That's the formula for revenue. Not for income. And to show you how shallow their thinking is, later in the article:

At least 20% off (anything less than this tends to be ineffective unless your discount is at least $100 in raw dollar amount).

Don’t bother with coupon codes. Just mark down your site (or a particular collection, if that’s your style). This makes it easier for your customers, especially on mobile.

If you don’t discount much, you can keep that sale discount down at 20%. If you give people 20% often, you probably need to go higher to get people to take advantage of the offer.

Indeed, giving away your profits does tend to motivate a customer. Unless, of course, your competitor is paying people to buy stuff.

So give these guys consulting money, give Google and Facebook ad money, and give your customers your profits. Everyone gets to declare a big victory, except the person making the sale.

They're also (anecdotally) wrong about coupon codes. As a consumer, I am most easily "converted" by a tasteful, non-spammy email campaign (maybe 1 or 2 emails a week) that offers short-term, deep discounts on products that I already want to buy. And I don't mean stuff like a LABORDAY25 discount. I mean "You're a valued customer! Enjoy 30% off for the next week, use code NERDPONX30 to save!"

I know the economics of every industry is different, but if you're just interested in moving a lot of product (whether it's digital or physical), it seems like the good old "randomly mail people sweet coupons" works great. Lyft, for example, does a great job of this. Lucky Jeans and West Elm have great sales but they send me too many damn emails, so I never bother.

We are speaking about how to manage a BFCM sale and the data definitely says that coupon codes are a significantly worse alternative to a site-wide markdown. It is all about friction reduction. Asking users to type in a coupon code adds a step that doesn't need to be there. This doesn't mean that coupon codes are never useful, but in this particular case we would recommend making the experience as seamless as possible.

Your critique makes sense knowing you're on HN, but this site is built for marketers and not startups/one-man shops, etc. Most readers go in knowing they want to drive sales, and that profit isn't something they're directly concerned with. (I work in marketing, we drive sales, and someone else tells me what product to sell more of because it drives more /profit/. I can never see profit numbers, only revenue).

This is a marketing company, writing a post about marketing. All marketing does is drive revenue. Profit is not a function of marketing, but of another group (operations?).

They're telling you how to drive sales, not profit, and don't claim otherwise. There are similar articles that talk about increasing profit margin that never discuses marketing.. would you fault those for claiming to increase profit but not talk about revenue?

Again to reiterate the point about WE DO CARE ABOUT PROFIT! Every client has different goals as to when they realize that profit (on the intial order vs. second or third order for example) but our ROAS targets with our client are built off of their total cost of fulfillment to ensure we are making them money!

> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. [0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've used mindsumo a number of times for their wp plugins, but this is not the forum for a hard sell or typical lead gen. I'd cool it a bit.

Also your reply doesn't respond to anything in my post.

FYI ROAS doesn't take into account profit, so thats a bad example.

Can't blame them. This article was probably written by one of many ghost writers and content producers. They seldom have niche expertise or any hands-on experience. In fact, people with hands-on experience are rarely, if ever, sharing it for free online.

If you're taking marketing advice from anyone online, you need to know two things: a) Have they actually applied this stuff themselves?, and b) Do they have a paid course or program? Because that's where the real juice is

Nope written directly by our lead strategist who has personally managed tens of millions of dollars. You will be hard pressed to find people with more hands on fb media buying experience than our team. No paid courses or programs here.

This all makes for a great argument for REALLY knowing your numbers. I'm amazed sometimes at how little grasp of both unit economics and OpEx some clients have.

I'll just say that for us an agency (with the strategy I outlined in this post or really any other at all), the better a client understand their numbers and has clarity about goals, the better we can build a strategy (including the discounting strategy, which you bring up here) that makes sense to meet those goals. From there it's just a matter of tailoring the strategy to the best practices.

What I don't get with any of this stuff is that it actually works. Maybe I'm weird, but every time I see that ads actually work and people actually buy stuff as a result, it's a shock to the system. Perhaps that's from enjoying a predominantly ad-free existence online, but I can't for the life of me think of a case where I've actually clicked on an ad, let alone completed a purchase.

I'm much more used to clicking on links that are organically ranked high in DDG or Google, when I am specifically looking to buy something. I have to admit, I barely make a handful of purchases per year, so perhaps I'm just totally disconnected from this whole topic.

I'm the same. I block ads aggressively, and never intentionally click ads. I also don't really engage in the whole Black Friday/Cyber Monday circus in any other way.

It's always weird when the data contradicts our experiences (I wrote that article, and I myself bought my first ever products from Facebook ads just a few weeks ago), but I suppose that's precisely the reason we check the data.

People with HN accounts are in like the 99th percentile of internet users. There are a lot of non technically oriented "ordinary users" out there who do blithely click on things and buy.

My friends often complain about how early the holiday season starts. The advice in this article sort of explains that phenomenon: competition drives up advertising prices near the holiday, which makes earlier days more valuable for advertisers.

Edit- plenty of cynical fodder there to equate “holiday season” with “days with holiday-themed advertising”

Bingo.

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