How to Track Black Friday Performance & Make Last-Min Budget Calls

How do you properly pace throughout the month and how do you capture the high value turkey five Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend to maximize the value of such a high intent period? We bring on Austin and Andrew from North Indian who provides some really intricate data and help backup some of the strategies. I hope you enjoy the listen. We're in the thick of Q4 2026 is absolutely flown by so we're all gearing up for Black Friday Cyber Monday

But I want to start with just getting to spend targets generally in like what brands should be thinking about as they go into Black Friday. What are they ultimately planning for?

Cody Curious, what has your perspective been in the past? Has it changed and what are your recommendations for brands thinking about it this year?

“You have to have your forecast and you have to have your forecast based on your prior years, right?”

Because there's certain inherent like seasonality to the period and there's going to be those like delayed effects and kind of value creation and value capture and you have to know when the time is but you have to look at your performance over the whole period and not just like a one day thing. And sometimes it'll look really bad leading up to it and you're actually exactly where you want to be, you know, kind of role in as talked about this a lot. So you have to know like what are your benchmarks for your brand? It's kind of like that I've never ran a marathon but it's kind of like that, you know, the great runners will like they kind of look like they're coasting a little bit and then they know how to leave it in a tank.

But you know, amateurs will go out a little too hot to early and kind of like shoot themselves in the foot like the goal is to be successful through the whole Q4 not just early October November. Not just Black Friday, you you got to pace it and know when is the right time to push you obviously don't want to miss out on an opportunity. But you also have to know like, hey, you know, we actually want to keep pushing because we know that it's going to look better or whatever and it's probably going to vary by brand.

But there's probably some generalities we can talk about in terms of the timing of that. Conorolean and the X-Cloud team their Black Friday period is a much shorter window because they have a much longer consideration period it's less of an impulse by therefore they can capture a lot of it. Intent and generate a lot of revenue in a shorter amount of time because people are already considering X-Cloud so they have a little bit more control. We're rich on the other hand, there's a lot of impulse buying happening with rich where a great gifting product.

It's a really big post Cyber Monday period as people really begin leaning into gift buying for their, you know, brother and laws and their husbands and their sons. So we ended up having a much larger period that we need to be taking advantage of just because we have a less consideration period.

So I think that all factors into like basically the daily revenue and spend targets in how that sort of accrues throughout the month.

But I do want to like more specifically ask Cody about like the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend in particular, which is like.

“A little bit different, I don't disagree at all that like from a wider lens like you need to be pacing out the month correctly, but as brands go into these like three or four days where they're going to be doing.”

By far their biggest days of the year, would you approach. Spend and revenue targets any differently or does your, I mean, obviously your goals change a little bit from like prospecting to intent capture, so like what does that mean from a media buying perspective or planning perspective. I would say the the channel that is going to be able to increase your budgets the most because some days we're going from, you know, some days you're like 10xing your budget going from. Right, Thursday to Friday, Black Friday right going from things get like you can you can have crazy group it's primarily going to be meta it's going to be anything pro chromatic you're not going to be able to go with like.

You know, TV and be able to like 10x your budget there so it's primarily meta right you just have to have your account ready to go again, I'll talk about a lot of like having the warm up periods earlier in the year having your labor day your October sales early November to see. What your account likes at that moment because we've had times where like big caps crush and big caps allow us to set super high budgets and you know have some guardrails for controlling spend. Sometimes we find it's best to have you know new campaign and sometimes we find that new campaign start off really poorly and having some existing data help so it's better to ramp the budget of there like.

“I think you just have to test into those a few times leading up to it so there's no like one you know one size so it's all but definitely the bulk of your spends got to be in meta.”

And you've got to figure out how you can go from seemingly lower spend and find that balance and I'm curious how you guys think about approaching it but like. Often people will know the day before a sale the whole back so you don't want to blow your efficiency on that day so you kind of want to spend low.

But then the problem is especially with these new like meta flexible budgets then it's hard to kind of catch up and pick that new spend up.

And so often we would under spend first day of a launch or first day of a sale and then over spend so just finding the balance and using these periods prior to it to kind of.

I think the channel mix change is an important one and I think you guys were probably in a similar bucket.

But we go into November earlier November investing slightly heavier in what we would consider more top of funnel channels TV YouTube and stream we really try to front load all of our partnerships spend. Before Black Friday really so as we go into this high intent weekend for consumers like we have as much brand recognition as possible we are as top of mind as possible. And then it's on those Thursday Friday you know through Monday days where we're scaling like the more. I'd call it middle of funnel maybe a little bit of bottom of funnel channels so they become much larger percentage of our budget that'd be meta.

“Apple oven I think is a one that I'd put in that bucket and then you have to be really careful with it but like a Google search in shopping and things like that.”

And would you say like you guys have had a similar sort of transition period at junts road.

Absolutely yeah yeah definitely I think that's the key like TV spend will be really high YouTube you know we've talked about a lot but like YouTube is kind of a little higher funnel than then somebody's other channels but still like a performance channel. So I love ramping YouTube spend into like October stuff like that YouTube you know users customers do take a little bit longer to buy than something like a meta. So I'll I'll push that and ramp it up and again like allow those to run on a little bit lower efficiency but yeah and then those will kind of they'll still increase in terms of the the total dollar amount as you're going into these periods.

But the percentages will go way lower because meta or an Apple oven or just ramping up so much more so yeah approach it exactly the same way. Okay the other question I had like based on what you laid out earlier is the best way to be launching new ads during this period I think this is another tricky one where we've gone through periods in the past. Where like this is years ago like six or seven years ago when we tried to do like a early black Friday sale black Friday sale black Friday extended.

“I think we might have even done early cyber Monday cyber Monday and cyber Monday extended and I think I'm pretty sure I might be miss remembering but I'm pretty sure we had different ads for all of those moments.”

So we were just frantically launching new ads none of them had the ability to scale. So we've since moved to we launched black Friday in early November and like that's our black Friday and we're scaling into it so that way the week of black Friday the ads that we can push the most budget around have been live for multiple days and have a very clear black Friday message like we've just. Simplified it as much as possible to prioritize volume. But that is partial that is in part because we have such a long black Friday period for so for brands that are like have a small or sort of.

Sail period or they have a more exclusive black Friday sale around this weekend which I think Jones wrote did are you guys launching new ads in that period and then is that what you were talking about when you were deciding whether they go in new campaigns or launching to exist in campaigns just curious to hear you talk through that a little bit. Everyone is talking about AI but few operators are actually using it to speed up their marketing and make better decisions at rich we use run a. It's an AI brain for the whole marketing team it watches every creative you've ever run knows what's inside of each one and connected to it actually drove revenue.

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Definitely new ads so especially like last year was the first year we actually did a sale and you know everyone will talk about this on X but like. Oh leave your evergreen ads live like they perform well because they have all the data like yes but when you're not. Having a sale and you're just doing an an offer like we would do as bundle of the mini miracle ones like. The only ads are going to perform well are going to be the ones talking about the offer and not just like our evergreen ads you know and so for us it was important and so.

The question was always like do we just try to have most of our budget be on these new campaign on these new ads with the new campaigns.

Or do we hope to get spend out of these ads go you know going into an existing one.

“Yes, they're the better offer at the moment, but they're also fighting with ads that I've all this existing data you know and I think the same is true even if you are doing a sale.”

It's just hard for these to get spend but I kind of like a combination of both I kind of like having a new campaign or ad set specifically for your new sale. I'm ramping that up and obviously if it performs well then continuing your ramp it but also making sure that you have coverage where those ads are just going into your your BAU you know your business as usual campaigns as well. Well, we launched black Friday early so we're able to launch the clean black Friday ads at scale up so we've really like eliminated this issue of hey we're going into you know the 35 week it's the eve of Thanksgiving and we're trying to launch new ads and we're about them scaling like we basically eliminated that.

But when I think about like our ability to our spend targets and our efficiency goals they're not playing that big of a role we're not counting on and this is my.

Fear for other brands is if I'm trying to count on launching brand new ads with all of my sale messaging or with my new exclusive offer to this relatively short period and I expect those to scale up and be a large percentage of my budget that's what I think is really tricky so. You do this additional sale or the this additional deal drop during this period I would say we largely capitalize on that via retention and e-com and from like a trafficking perspective we're relying on black Friday ads have been live now for.

12 to 14 days or something so we have plenty of learnings they are already scaled it's far more feasible for us to go from you know.

100,000 dollars a day to 400,000 dollars a day or whatever um so I'm comfortable where we've landed but.

It makes me a little anxious thing about other brands we're sure who have a much smaller period who are trying to launch ads that are then that they are then expecting to become a large percentage of their budget so. I just think there's like some optimizations to make there and we've obviously leaned into again the simplification and the volume and the ability to have ads live with learnings. And for this you know true BFCM 35 period yeah yeah no I agree with that we'll do some like you know cyber Monday last chance like but like we'll launch them and like if they spend great if not it's fine like they're just some statics totally yeah and we do a lot of that like.

We'll load stuff into the account for the off chance that like one of the new ads like really hits and scales quickly but for the most part I'm very comfortable with.

“The existing content that we'll have live at this period and just continue to scale behind that. I'll also say I mean I don't remember where we've landed on this in the past but like our precedent now is we will run.”

Like we'll run ads it's like black Friday starts now like in until like December 10. Yeah if it's performing if it's doing well. And you can you can do your early you can do your early black Friday starting in like now pretty much starting in October too. Okay here I got a I got one thing to talk about like hourly tracking so again I think there's like two distinct periods in November. We've hit both of them so far but like one is the larger what is your daily spend and revenue goals and are you accounting for this like latent demand that you're going to capture at the very end of the month and that is.

And effectively run at a much lower MER more aggressive efficiency earlier in the month understanding that you're prospecting all these people we've talked about that at length in the podcast in the past.

“The other extremely important period is then when you get into BFCM so what we're looking at here is how we've tracked it historically.”

In the spreadsheet I pulled it up this morning this is from 2025 so it's slightly out of date but I can briefly talk through like the main things that we're looking at. Because you go from the importance of daily revenue and spend targets and that correct pacing to all of a sudden like we really care about hourly. We need to be understanding where are we throughout the day where were we last year or two years ago or some blended average of the two. And then if we are beating our efficiency targets then then this is how we sort of make intraday budget decisions from a paid media perspective so what you can look at here is we have 2024.

Where we just are looking at hourly spend or sorry we're looking at hourly revenue here in 2024 then we take our growth expectations and we just tack that on top so we would take basically the hourly distribution. Or this actually might be a blend of the two years and in this case we're looking at it could be any day of the week we're technically looking at the Sunday before black Friday here which is when we begin our hourly tracking. So we have some way to get down to hourly revenue from historical results we tack on the like 20 or 30% growth that we're expecting and then we are tracking 2025 revenue or current year revenue on an hourly basis and then the way that we do that is.

“We have dot com we have Amazon separately and then we have Amazon plus dot com obviously our business is shifted a lot we began capturing more revenue on Amazon so looking at them independently as well as blended has been important.”

And then just the last thing that I'll point out here and I'll just sort of reference it is at any given hour throughout the day we'll have a way to calculate last year at this hour what percentage of that day's revenue had we done. If we did a hundred thousand dollars on Sunday and it's and it's noon and we've done forty thousand dollars and we are forty percent of our way to what we will have done that day. Then what we would look at is that forty percent relative to our forecast and where we are in that day is captured revenue.

So if all of a sudden I'm forecasting fifty percent growth on our fifty thousand I expect to be at forty percent of that target I would expect to be at sixty thousand dollars in revenue.

It's just like this like very detailed and granular look that at least we approach it ridge to understand hey if we're in this case we'd be twenty five percent above our goal like okay let's feel good about scaling up some of these channels.

“Particularly if we're seeing good row is on an MTA basis like in an orthing or something like that so that's my quick speel on how we've approached hourly budgeting for the BFC and weekend.”

Any feedback for me, Cody or anything that you guys were doing differently at Jones Road there's a lot of numbers that you throw out there let me just make sure I have it.

Correctly my head and then also for the listener so you're you're really to try to simplify you're just trying to make sure are we on track to hit our goals for the day and you're doing that based on what's our forecast what's our number. What's the growth from last year and where were we at this time last year. Yeah exactly right and so if you were let's just say you're trying to to be flat on a day right you're doing the same thing you're just like hey this time last year where were we all right cool we're on pace we're perfect.

Right we're our spend our MIR so if you're trying to grow 20% use need to make sure you're above where you were 20% last year assuming all of the curves are going to be the same.

“What I would say just in addition to that in some of these things are very obvious right but like the distribution of revenue throughout the day is significantly different on Thanksgiving which is going to be back loaded versus.”

Black Friday which is sort of front loaded in the day or.

Cyber Monday is like famously like extremely back loaded we don't get the day off it's not a bank holiday a lot of people are working cyber Monday coming home and making their purchases so you'll see by far your biggest hours at. Seven or eight pmp st which is like different than basically any other day of the year so understanding what that's looked like historically allows us to understand where we are relative to our targets much earlier in the day with a bit more accuracy than just you know just hoping or assuming there's some sort of like more.

Linear distribution that cyber Monday so I have. Not not feedback but I'll say catch up with that cyber Monday bump is probably one of the top hours in e-com like the most fun highest dopamine hours in e-com because you're just like we're doing okay.

“Cry and then you just start crushing it if you're having a good one like you can it's just accelerates at last like hour or two hours of that night the entire weekend is very exciting let me ask you this.”

Because because I think one of the fun parts of being in performance marketing or paid media specifically or D to C during this period is like yeah the excitement of you've been sewing the seeds all year to have a really large BFCM and like this is the moment that you and your team like really gets a reap the benefits of a lot of that.

So what do your and what that also means is that typically people are meeting much more frequently so what is your team schedule look like.

During a you know day before Thanksgiving Thanksgiving black Friday how often are you speaking to people who are you speaking to and what sort of conversations are you guys having. Probably wasn't the most efficient I don't know just especially as people are you know travel and stuff like it's a lot easier just like be on the computer and front of family on the couch whatever if I have to then like being like guys like here's the time to do meetings. So we were just like be on slack all time all day have just like super long threads about things obviously if we're in the office like we're probably in the office Wednesday you know half day and people kind of go with the families like checking things Thursday you know just kind of checking and periodically but no calls.

Obviously Friday it's like you know you're actually like I at your desk you know like. Hey family you go do your thing but it's mostly a sink and then just if stuff comes up it really just depends like. You know we've had times where we had major inventory constraints so I'm on a phone with you know COO had a supply chain things like that demand planner you know there's a lot of that so. Again it depends what you're selling especially if you're doing an an offer and a bundle it's not just a deal and you have inventory concerns like.

Like hourly demand plan updates right to see how we're facing an inventory and then kind of trying to coordinate those with also then the media buying side and so usually it's like you know I would kind of be in the middle of that and have you know. You know growth team on one end have that. But often there you know they're interfacing directly as well whereas just like I cool how are we looking oh this is going to stock let's pull spend on this let's. We have room to push here we can push a little bit more on this on UK but maybe on EU we need a pull back so like.

That's that's where it gets complicated is you're trying to figure out everything that you shared in your pacing and we got a very similar way to do it so you have all of your your MIR pacing but then you also have to take into account your. Your inventory as well which which brings to the fun challenge. Yeah so we just we just want heavy heavy a sink and then just like huddles as needed.

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We're way less asing or way more of a synchronous team throughout this period. I'll do it with mostly just the paid me to team I'll do our we call it the channel managers but anybody managing.

Ecom retention paid media etc. Those are we'll have meetings each morning just sort of got check on how the day before go what's our plan for today make sure we're looking out for what we need and then historically at least last two years. We've planned we'll put them on the calendar basically like every two hour meetings with the paid media team and that'll come with a scheduled data refresh so we'll go into that meeting like understanding where we're sitting what did the last two hours look like.

“And we'll make any budgeting decisions and the reason I bring up the last two years is 2024 was extremely difficult and there was a lot of conversations like in these every two hour meetings. This is also the year where we ended up spending.”

I've been to spend like 35 40% of our budget on app love and at the time so you can imagine like the massive massive changes in our in our channel budgeting and our channel strategy like on Thanksgiving and on Black Friday and that entire weekend. So that required a lot of conversation last year everything basically went to plan so we we were able to cancel some of the meetings more of it could happen asynchronously or we get on and we say all right everything looks good and we sort of sign off so last year was almost.

Like it was almost uncomfortable how casual everything was but it was a testament to how good the the weekend was I'm curious that sheet you have that's especially you have this opposite the first year with like I think you guys are like heavily using AI like how are you going to if you're going to like use cloud use AI to help with that is it pulling in data you doing it having it do any analysis for that or or you'll just do as us did I was so glad you asked because. You we had prime day recently and we had we had a great example and it was just has sort of a bare bones example we had Victor providing basically hourly updates for how revenue is tracking across our different product categories just on Amazon and I was like oh this is fantastic like the futures here.

A year ago like we had someone on the team managing the the budget tracking sheet that I just brought up and then also manually posting into slack on an hourly basis with those updates which was extremely valuable and honestly I think like more less the only way to do it unless we didn't. spent like engineering time to like build a more automated solution but now we're at the point where with our data warehouse with tools like Victor or whatever agent we decide to use I think we'll be able to have very great granular very robust very automated reporting that will just feed right into slack so I do think.

this year particular with the data warehouse like we'll just be able to be far more intricate which is it was like the main it's an example of one of our initial goals in terms of.

on boarding with the data warehouse is our business has become so much more intricate across all these markets across all these product categories like the Google spreadsheet and the person manually managing it is just not a scalable solution so I think we'll feel like a much more modern business this year. Last question I have for you, before we get Austin Harrison in here and we go deep on North Beam stuff is. when someone should be actually trying to fix something on black Friday I just brought up this app love an example that's probably the most significant change and it's even like a relatively.

topical one like adjusting our channel mix was pretty easy I know other brands in the past have had to adjust sales have had to adjust offers I'm curious.

from your experience and again like recommendations to any listeners like what are the sorts of problems someone should be looking out for and what should they be willing to fix and is there anything that you would.

“suggest they leave be like I think to some degree there's an argument that like black Friday is very late in the game really trying to make two significant of changes might actually be like a net detractor so how do you sort of strike that balance.”

yeah and you're talking about actual day of black Friday. I'm I'm saying day of black Friday yeah. Hopefully you do not have to like change offer stuff like that like really you know child it's hard to be like oh you know got your customers that we said we're doing 20% off actually we're doing 30 like you know you can't really do that like you you're you're you know it's kind of set at that point. I think you have to monitor your spend you have to make sure you don't over spend you actually obviously have to make sure that you're spending enough you have to monitor your efficiency that's why we're we're monitoring this daily you know.

You can definitely make tweaks like merchandising right so obviously you're controlling spend any media buying decisions that you're making.

You know creative right you can sometimes launch some creative I was doing well we don't have many ads like hey can we whip up some statics and launch I'm like great like go go go do that. You know obviously hey this region needs more spend this campaign like definitely do all of that stuff.

“You can merchandise your site hey you know this is performing really well or inventory is as low on this one we need to you know remove it and pull it back like all that stuff you can do emails you should have some emails ready to go that you.”

Aren't sure if you're sending or not like definitely change your email strategy changes you know your segmentation and how much you open it up do that and like we have done like a cyber Monday off or something like that like. You can pivot those things you can pivot when it ends or whatever but it's really hard to like. Completely change the offer on the on the day of I think that's just an L sometimes you might have to take and and you know and just decide how you're going to learn from that for next year. I actually think you know I described my changes with like the app love and from 2024.

I think you're right that like to some degree like those are the most significant changes you want to make on the day of black Friday I do think there's been examples for us where we have introduced. We had another year where we had a mystery product like a mystery wallet. So we did shift from like being mystery wallet oriented to we did this other sort of deal drop with one of our more premium wallets we had to make that change like intro week we made that decision on maybe Monday or Tuesday and it was live by Wednesday so I think there's like.

“I think there's a lot of experience where like you were early enough in the weekend where you can shift and you just have to make sure that everything squared away with the budget.”

But otherwise the most changes you want to be making are you know are you sending that last email are you shifting budget to cross channels. Are you likely remerchandizing the site given what's selling well or what's going in and out of stock. And that's really just what the teams should be focused on for sure agree with that. All right cool let's get Austin Harrison in here. I'm sorry we needed thousands of new ads every month daily emails lots of creative as well.

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All right we're back and we've got two very special guests we've got my long time friend Austin Harrison founder of NorthPM Austin welcome to the show. Thanks for having me get us here. And we've got Andrew Kasuba from the North being team bringing in some data Andrew welcome. Thanks great to be here 100% so cool let me let me kick us off here a little bit Cody and I've already been jamming this morning on. Sort of the intricacies and the nuances of managing paid media budgets or marketing teams at large during Black Friday.

So maybe I'll just kick this to the NorthPM team first.

You guys are working with advertisers who are looking at a ton of different data all the time. They're running across multiple channels. They have a lot of different sources of information that they are triangulating between. So when they're thinking about dashboards that are disagreeing in some way that the reporting between meta and NorthPM or meta and Google analytics begins to deviate. They're making decisions as to how they should best allocate budgets between meta and other channels.

So I'm just curious how would you guys suggest an advertiser think through some of those decisions.

“So my answer to that is you know, the really important time is pre Black Friday, you know, be pre BFCM right how much have you prepared.”

Do you know your winners have you done the creative testing have you calibrated your one day click a cruel numbers your one one day clicks into termistic views numbers within NorthPM. How well do you know your numbers when I mean by that is have you established winners have you tested. Do you know what's profitable in NorthPM when you talk about people looking at other sources of truth whether it's a model or testing like do you know what your one day or one hour let's call it one hour cruel number number is that's profitable right taking that as tough further.

Obviously there's difference between cash and cruel and how the numbers change when you when you flip between those views which Andrew will dig into.

We have in NorthPM last year during cyber week we saw the median customer that came through our system had an ad on the median four point one touch points just on the click basis.

So what that means lot of interactions and in a world where you're looking at platform reported numbers they're going to take credit for the entirety of the conversion. So if you can use a multi touch tool you really able to understand how much partial credit each touch point deserves.

“Generally I think most helpful if you're able to see the entirety of the journey like Northam is if you're just looking at plot or reported metrics you could be over indexing when platforms are taking claim for the exact same conversion.”

100% so one thing is brought up is this like cash in a cruel distinction which like I'd love to jump into a little bit further if you don't mind it's a it's a topic that I'm passionate about so I'd love to see us up here a little bit.

Because I think this is one of the things is extremely nerdy media buying attribution nuances but is like.

Sort of one of the reasons why people overspend tons of money on the day of black Friday and what it comes down to is a platform like meta.

“Is reporting its conversions on the day that the conversion happens and what we're also all saying here is when I spend a dollar on Monday of BFCM week.”

That person might not convert until that Friday what Northam does is it will attribute that conversion to the day that the click happened and the day that the dollar was spent.

And meta will attribute that conversion on Friday when the conversion happened and what it will end up doing is it will inflate the row is reported on the day of Friday because not only is it going to take credit for. You know, row is is attributed revenue overspend it's going to take the attributed row as attributed revenue of conversions at occur on the day of Friday as well as all the conversions that are happening that should be attributed to a previous day. So you end up inflating row is on the day if you are looking at it on a conversion time basis Northam and the difference in cash and accrual is allowing you to split those things up and only give meta credit for the conversions it's driving on that day so you can properly calculate rows.

Do you guys think I got that explained correctly now the the joke I remember that you used to say early on was that you always had your best MDR month in January right and people would say do you how come I can every always have that like really really high in the are and you're like well if you actually looking at cruel. A lot of revenue that finally converted those are touch points those are people that I marketed to like four months ago right and so yeah looks really good at cash and accrual a lot of that moving money moves back in time right because I spent the marketing dollars to get those people might funnel like four five six months or year ago and there and we know with the rich you've got you know considerable conversion like.

“Even though you know you're well depends on which product right like luggage verse EDC or wealth right but you guys have considerable conversion like nonetheless right so when you spend marketing dollars they may not pay off even in that month.”

You may not accrue value from on slater that's a concept of knowing your numbers going into cyber week right is that I know my cruel and on my cash I know there's some overlap in touch points so what can I afford to spend. Depending on your business with an unlimited budget on cyber week because I already know on profitable at a point three one day click accrual northean row as or a point eight CDV clicks into charmistic on a view basis right so once you've locked it in you know you've got common click touch points you kind of have a sense for how it relates to what meta or tiktok or app love it or snap reports so you have some calibration right so that you're really confident.

You could spend you know essentially unlimited budget right is that check out to you Cody and Connor in terms of how you think about it. We talk a lot about cac on this show you can't control with meta charges you but you can control what happens after someone lands on your site that's where our sponsor after sell comes in helping you make every visitor worth more. from card offers and one click post purchase upsells to subscription upgrades and here's the best part rock thanks turns your confirmation page into another revenue stream.

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You know lift is and delay however you want to look at it and then also by channels and I think it's given us a confidence to.

“It's helped us spend smarter to spend more aggressively leading up to things especially on a channel like YouTube I don't know if you see this always but we find YouTube had a had a bigger row s left a bigger delta for us.”

And then also like I think I think it's saved us some money during black Friday because like you know there's almost no there's no lag after that period and I so I think it's like we were able to front load our spend earlier and I think that's helped us. Yeah front loading the spend is I've years like the pro tip which is some people just sit there and wait and they're like I'm just going to spend on cyber week you know like that's versus I mean I've seen Connor the rich do this for years were like they're pretty aggressive.

And like let's say September October like trepying and getting ready and priming the fun funnel knowing that they're going to convert everyone and then obviously they see the overlap and they accrue the value of that investment versus some people just nervous and don't do anything. And they think they're just going to magically convert people inside of a week right I think that's a difference between someone who understands conversion lag and someone who's like I'm just going to capture people in this week right I'm not going to build it on knock it right and it's it's scary right like I don't think it's easy to spend money in September and October.

If you're a return is slightly lower but again if you know your numbers you know your conversion lag and you know you're not being numbers like you know it's slightly lower but I know I'm going to make it up to get that rowized lift. On cyber week so when I combine those two an average them together it's profitable right so it's that kind of maybe Andrew can share some more data on how long you know how much we've seen that the raws lift over time.

“Yeah I think your points are really great too and I would say if you are an working customer going back and looking at how much impact came within.”

Cyber week versus how much was coming from those tech points before is super helpful because I've seen for some customers like the two weeks leading up on the one day never is it looks really rough but as we get into the black Friday week it can be the most effective dollars they spent a whole holiday season so definitely if you have the data. To give a little bit of weight to this when we looked at it for twenty twenty five thirty three percent of all the revenue that we saw coming on cyber week came from touch points that happened before that week so all the lead up all the work that's happening that prior to the start of BFCM week.

I'm a big impact and to the point of Connor Cody and Austin is if you look at those accrual numbers you'll make sure you're only validating what's working right now versus trying to incorporate that in terms of what's effective.

Did you say it was what percentage of cyber week revenue came from touch points outside of that period.

33 percent.

“Yeah a third which I think is crazy and that's like that's really fun data and this is something that like.”

It's really fun to have time refining and frankly it's always a process of refinement like we don't have a perfect now we're coming into this current BFCM period with slightly different hypotheses given what we saw last year. But this idea of us generating intent and capturing that intent with a completely different distribution than we do any other point in the year is really an opportunity for marketers to just. Hopefully capitalize on this period by deploying dollars in a different way and I will say like to Austin's point of like it can be I don't know the words you were but scary or whatever like it can be like it can be a little overwhelming to do it and.

I remember being in a period where like you know October 10th probably and like performance was pretty terrible and like when aggressive and being like. You know it with your team to prepare for that following year and it's like hey this is actually exactly what we saw in our birthday and data from last year. These are the best times for you to spend aggressively when you'll have the biggest delta and row us lift the channels and that just like gave us a confidence that plus our blended metrics to just like follow that plan to a T the following year.

That's well said Cody I'll give you one crazy stat we have a customer you guys would all know. Very big company in the health and wellness space when they spend a dollar on meta okay today.

23% on clicks and we believe almost a third of the value takes over one year to a crew in their data so on just our hard clicks 23% of the revenue.

More than a year not one year to not a year conversion like more than a year which isn't saying right so. That's just a crazy number so sure you get a 33% rise lift in cyber week for money you spent months prior but there are some businesses where you're literally looking at over one year to get.

Probably right cash versus a cruel like I had a great month well maybe you didn't because maybe I mean you did in the bank account right maybe a lot of that revenue is actually driven by.

“Stuff that you did six months a year ago right a lot of people really struggle to wrap their heads around so I'm curious.”

Yeah, this is the stuff that I love nerding out on we're hitting this cash into cruel point we're talking about how you can very easily over spend for the day of black Friday. I'm curious and you do you have any data it's 33% of the cyber week revenue comes from touch point outside of that week do you have any data specifically on black Friday.

So I'm glad you say that because that's exactly what I was just trying to describe earlier is meta will take let's just say you only have one channel and everything's attributed to meta.

Meta would attribute that 42% of revenue to the ad spend on that day and it just shows you how quickly you can inflate that rose if you're not properly thinking about it on in the cool basis. If your CFO gives you $10 million for Q4 where do you put it? Meta says prospecting last clicks is branded search and outdated MMM says TV most marketing operators have more measurement than ever and still no decision more data more dashboards more complexity. I know we've been here at Hacks Cloud we have MTA is hold out tools MMMs and you often look at all this data and you start to analyze it but then you you don't make that final step which is what's the decision like what are we doing because of all this data.

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“All right, I'd like to pivot a little bit here. Cash in a cool I think is a huge reason why tools like North Beam can be so valuable during this very like high impact high intent period.”

The other one for me is speed where there have been a multiple there have been multiple instances in the past where North Beam is just processing the data so that we can make decisions slightly earlier. Remember years ago sitting around in our our Google media buyer telling us that we're not seeing an increase in row is yet and I'm like we're absolutely seeing an increase in row is like we're seeing it right here in North Beam we're seeing in top line Google just wasn't reporting it yet so. I'm just curious like my open question is like how do you know quickly enough that extra spend is working and how are you guys seeing advertisers you know properly make these intro day adjustments.

I mean we have some it's pretty wild what you're seeing today I'm sure you know Cody and Carl you've seen it but there's some new businesses popping up.

These are that are I mean we have a North Beam customer spending almost a million dollars a day I've met on out and they're new new company right it's kind of crazy.

We've got this kind of new kind of group of what we'll call extreme high-spenders extreme accelerators and they're in North Beam 24/7 looking at the hourly data you know. Really aggressively pushing and you know they upgrade their North Beam instance to you know high speed right and so we've got some really exciting stuff there that we're doing. But yeah at the end of the day I know you do it to Connor you'll you'll upgrade speed for that you know periodically to. So we can learn our full data pipeline and give you accurate attribution by the hour and so that just helps you make those decisions quickly.

And a profitable way right to your point making sure that that dollar spent is truly profitable obviously you can look at your blend of numbers two in unison but without the accrual counting without. Understanding really where the dollars are going without running a full data pipeline and just looking at bank account you could over inflate the validity of a channel right without knowing so.

“Yeah, I think being ready to move fast and I know that you guys do that during the week and just being constantly on top of it is really the key.”

The only other thing I'd add to that to is I often talk customers when we're looking at the North Beam data to look at not just one paycheck but all. In fact that's coming from that one day and see what percentage of the total is coming from it awesome kind of set it as well but like I've seen some brands where mid day we're seeing awesome performance as a business. We start to invest more we debt more dollars in and we're just really killing our efficiency so I think one individual channels if they're doing well leaning in and trying to push on that accrual number but also looking at.

Yeah, I think like Conner's talked about it before I feel like it's easy to blend down returns and like just be like art are overall efficiency is in a good spot.

Let's spend more and like your overall efficiency might stay good but like that like marginal incremental spend might actually have not been a great idea.

“So you're really a cruel numbers are important right because yeah you're just you're really not being efficient as a business right maybe you are for like that hour it seems like it.”

But actually the spend net net is not profitable if you yeah to your point right. So Cody I'm curious we've talked a lot about.

Cash and accrual and the values of north beam and being able to look at different channels and whether you're looking at it from like the top down perspective or bottoms up.

I'm curious if you have examples in the past and I've got one if you don't but where you've used north beam to make a media buying decision that you don't think you otherwise would have made. Easy like I think it was awesome the center maybe you did but just like meta reporting right and so when your meta spend is going to go high and I'm black Friday your meta spend is going to go really high like your in platform performance is going to look terrible you know. You're going to obviously right like yes you're trying to get those customers today and they've probably had touch points before but your spend is just going to accelerate so much higher than you know and there is a delay on those meta attributed.

Conversions as well and you know sometimes there's a unreliable delay and things just see more delayed and so having like a you know a source off platform that's automatically refreshing is just going to be so much better so yeah. Sometimes when it looks bad and meta and you're freaking out but blended is good you go look at north beam and as long as things are on track I'm like a campaign or I love a like that is totally helped us to kind of stay the course.

“I think it's a great one the other one for me is just valuing the like for like measurement of different channels coding I spoke about it before you guys jumped on Andrew and Austin but.”

BFCM 2024 Austin I'm sure you and I were talking about it at the time really rough really rough quarter for us really difficult. We're actually I should just say like these few weeks were not exactly what we expected it's when meta was underperforming and we end up spending 35 40% of our budget on app love and and I don't know how we would have made that decision if we weren't confident in like.

Our like for like underlying north beam measurement because we could see north beam versus or sorry meta versus app love and we were seeing basically the same percent new visits.

Significantly better rose coming from app love and and that gave us a confidence throughout this weekend to really go from it being. Our budgeted plan was probably five to 10% of spend and we end up a 40% we end up pushing 200,000 dollars a day through app love and. And just like the speed and accuracy and consistency of the north beam reporting I like I don't see how we could have come to that conclusion otherwise that's a good one. I also do remember your Google non branded search example from years ago where yeah remind me you told me this one where.

It was also during BFCM week I think it was Saturday was the Saturday of BFCM weekend at that period and you slack me on a weekend on a Saturday and said north beams one hour a cruel. Google non branded search return skyrocketed I think it was like at some point on Saturday that weekend and you accelerated spend dramatically. Another example I remember you doing that and totally stock up my head was a couple years ago. Yeah, oh 100% that's the one that really sticks out to me when discussing like the speed of north beam and like just when we're talking about there's only 24 hours in black Friday right and there's only a couple where you can make like really significant budgeting decisions.

So at the time this is probably twenty twenty two or something twenty three years a long time ago but our ability to understand that performance had increased like a few hours earlier is actually really instrumental for us making the budgeting changes that we'd want to do and really captures much value as we can.

“That's why I go back to the speed point which if I understand correctly Austin you guys are leaning further into that can we expect more tools around speed.”

Or measurement is it will it be this year will it be a twenty twenty seven focus. It's this year in fact if we come on on a part two with the engine I would show you some stuff. You know that's that we have not shown anyone so yes more stuff coming there. Every Q4 brands pile money into meta compete against each other in the same auction and battle rising ad costs where your customers attention goes beyond just scrolling on instagram. Holiday movies TV shows and football what if your brand showed up outside the advertising rat race or the entire family is watching.

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CTV through neon pixel is a big part of our media budget all year long at hacks cloud but especially during BFCM.

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But the window to launch before black Friday inside of Monday is closing so go to neon pixel dot code to get a free CTV plan for Q4. Perfect excited and I'm sure all the Northeam customers will will be excited to hear that they'll have even even better tools for this coming BFCM. Yep for sure. Yeah excited to share. Cash and accrual I'm deeply passionate about the speed of Northeam reporting I've often been thankful for.

The other one that I always like is just northeam's ability to identify users more accurately and really how that affects things like.

I know you spent a lot of time thinking about this at Jones Road you guys have a more returning customer heavy business you've had to focus a lot more around your paid channels being acquisition oriented. So what's some of the data point that you look at and how is that affected so many of you guys is marketing strategies. Yeah like percent new visit is a really big one. And again, especially leading up to it talking about robust lift and all those cash accrual stuff like you're going to get a stronger lift there the more true prospecting you're getting.

“And I think sometimes people like mix these up Austin curious your thoughts but like do you have new visits and then you also have new customers and Northeam allows you to see both of them.”

But we want to drive new customers but even you could be driving new customers with a lower percent of new visits more of a retargeting and so I really want to drive especially leading up to those periods.

You know that new visit right and then new and then obviously if you can get new visit and new customer during it great but like always keeping an eye on that and helping to make.

Media buying decisions based on those. No, it's well said the three Northeam out of the third bucket of traffic so there's brand new people right there people that are have never bought something from the business but they've been visiting a lot. And then those return visits right so those are three key buckets and Cody brings up the good point where. Prior to black Friday several Monday if your new visits are really low and you're not driving new people you're not filling your farm right. I can always see with the Northeam customer if they're new visit percentage is just dropping and they're not doing anything to drive it.

It's like okay probably one have as as good a BFCM as they could now. If you're really pushing hard. And you're inside week you want to you know you want people that you want to keep a decently high new customer visit percentage or and or.

New people that have never bought before right and you want to convert them right that week obviously.

Because if it's all return visitors all return traffic or return customers you can email and text them right SMS and email and convert them and you may be over spending. If that's all the ad or ad center campaign striving so that's that's where you're really looking carefully say hey like am I just over spending on retargeting when I can really have more people on text and email. That's that's the big worry that I have I don't know how you see a car I would say black Friday's like the one period time where I'm like okay with spending some money on like retention like you want to value them differently.

And so even if you're going to spend some it's like all right if I have you know 80% new visit I could take that out of point eight row is because that's driving funnel right. But if I have like a 20% new visit or it's a returning customer like I better be significantly more effective and so you can kind of give those things like a multiplier.

“Which is really important to do the other thing that I would add on to that I talk about this with my team all the time is like you just need to understand what you're doing because the other mistake you don't want to make is to say hey.”

I've got this great row is on the these ad sets are these campaigns but some percentage of it some significant percentage of it is coming from existing customers that I'm driving returning customer revenue even at a high row is those aren't the campaigns and ad sets I want to be scaling right like you have to be identifying like what. What results are actually scalable and a lot of that comes down to new visit percentage and then the other thing that I will add is because we've hit this point a couple times now is earlier in the month.

We focus on driving a higher percent new visits because we know that there's a lot of latent revenue that we are generating that we are going to capture that value much later in the period. We've mentioned it briefly and we've talked about it on other podcasts basically once you have passed black Friday you no longer have nearly as much latent revenue that your row is targets need to change significantly because the big buying moment has already happened. So what that also means for us is as we go into black Friday or on the day of black Friday I'm fine with that like true net new visit percentage going down because I'm purely in value capture mode I want to be bringing back the people who I filled the funnel with.

Yeah it's a good call out because yeah that week it's awesome to convert I mean you're going to convert a lot of returning customers too because you have a sale running or whatever the case may be.

“But hopefully you're also converting all those people brand new customers that you've been nurturing for three or four or five six months or like we said over a year so.”

Yeah to your point you can accept a different numbers but but you still need to know what's profitable and and you want to scale the things that are getting those brand new people that convert from the first you know for the first time.

As new customers I think the only other thing I would add on top is I know sometimes people are like locked into a quick model or some version of like a non view based model.

I think that is also super helpful when it comes these weekends to be kind of a deciding factor if I see two campaigns that have similar efficiency on just my click data.

“For me and those views and seeing what's driving that it can be really helpful and to codies point if more that impact coming from that new folks I think that's just giving you better signal where you should be leading.”

So we have one media buyer where if is let's just say it's a meta prospecting both the the click one day click or one hour click a crew is the same.

And new visit percentages the same but Nordbeam's clicks and deterministic views are one of them is much much higher. This particular media buyer has been successfully scaling heavily into that.

“Leveraging that is like almost kind of the tipping the scales right like this campaign is driving a lot more view revenue.”

And then you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, I love and snap TikTok Pinterest a lot of other folks but that can be that kind of deciding factor right where you're like this particular effort is driving way more view revenue whenever the else is equal. Does that make that makes sense. Make subtle sense. Yeah guys this is this is one of my favorite episodes just what I love geeking out on we've been doing it for for a very long time. So let's let's wrap there any any last anything you'll leave the listeners with from the north team side.

My thing is know your numbers like be ready for BFCN like have your numbers by channel like know exactly what you're willing to spend and be really diligent about that. So that once you're, you know, you're ready to be aggressive you're doing the way it's profitable. I would just say be ready to take the opportunity. I feel like BFCN is going to be a lot of ups and downs when it is going well make sure you're ready to click your program the gas because I feel like a lot of friends missed that opportunity sometimes there we go.

Sage advice guys thanks for coming on awesome thanks for having us.