This week, in data
We’re recovering from Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days, so acquisition performance is in the red. TikTok and Amazon (the majority of data in “All other platforms”) have great synergy, so those two move together most of the time.
Amazon pulled forward more than $2 billion in ad spend from Black Friday into a random week in October. Their master plan is working, and we’re along for the ride.
Some portion of that revenue should have happened during Cyber Five. Now it won’t, and Amazon guaranteed themselves a cut of that margin.
Amazon is trying to bend American consumers to their will, if you ask me. It only makes good business sense to create your own holiday.
Did you know that Alibaba’s famous “Singles Day” on November 11th of every year brings in more than $200 billion every year?
And that holiday started as a cynical joke among university students. That’s a
Plus, midterms are heating up. Ten billion dollars have already been spent advertising candidates. This ad spend is going to negatively suppress your ad performance.
We can already see this in Meta’s CPMs:
Looking at the average CPMs across all >1000 ad accounts tracked by Northbeam, we can see a distinct increase in CPMs, especially in the last few weeks. CPMs isn’t particularly useful to track, but it’s a rude benchmark for how “expensive” an ad auction has become.
This is shaping up to be a generational Black Friday Cyber Monday, and not in a good way. We aren’t even at the real spike of CPMs, which generally happen around November 1st. Now’s a good time to recalculate conversion lag.
But this isn’t necessarily a bad time to be in ecommerce. Lots of brands are succeeding even in this challenging performance marketing environment. It’s just not as easy as it used to be.
This is a chart showing the distribution of performance of year-over-year comparisons on certain metrics in Q3, categorized by monthly ad spend in each account.
A percentile is included, which shows the dramatic split in distribution happening across accounts.
For example, for accounts spending $200k-$500k a month, the top 25% (75th percentile) of performers saw revenue increase more than 43.5% year-over year.
The median of that same category only saw revenue increase 8.1% year over year.
All across this chart, you can see dramatic outperforming outliers dragging the 75th percentile upwards. Yes, it is harder and more expensive to grow. But there are outliers who are crushing the norm and seeing meteoric growth anyways. Names like Grüns, Bloom, and Comfrt come to mind.
We are in a time of great upheaval. The best thing you can do is stay flexible.
🔥 JOB: Growth Planning & Analytics Associate // David Protein // NYC: join the world’s hottest protein company on-site in NYC.
🍳 Caden Lane is taking us behind the scenes. This DTC brand has launched their own documentary about themselves, and I am sat.
🛰️ Follow me on X. We’re sharing a ton of data and charts over the next few weeks, and you’ll see it there first.
🤔 Is the role of a CMO fundamentally broken? Exploring this with Connor MacDonald, CMO at Ridge.
📍 Pinterest says a huge chunk of their ad impact happens after eight weeks. Not the first time we’ve heard “play the long game” from the smaller ad platforms, but I believe Pinterest in this case.
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