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Here’s what you’ll find in today’s DTC:
👀 How the combination of customer feedback and memes can get your audience engaged.
🏆 Learn how CPMs can give advertisers valuable insights into their ad account.
🕤 And…ICYMI this new reporting update in Google Search Console is a huge time saver.
You’re reading this newsletter along with new subscribers from: Teaspoon Tea Co., Happilo, and Nippon. 👋
💬 A Message From Pilothouse Co-Founder Kyle Hitchcox…
Pilothouse’s very best leaders are giving away $65,000 worth of premium consultation. 👀 5x Brands will get a FREE review and actionable recommendations that YOUR team can implement.
Based on your needs, each winner will get actionable takeaways from 2 of these teams: Amazon, Google, Meta, Retention/Email, Conversion Rate Optimization, and Creative/Brand/Content.
The Pilothouse expert team will show you how to:
✅ Improve conversion rates
✅ Get your traffic costs down
✅ Review your product content strategy
✅ Balance new customer acquisition alongside retention activities
✅ Make the most of 2024 and set you up for a strong 2025
✅ And a lot more …
Want in on the action? Follow these steps to be entered:
1️⃣ Connect with Kyle on LinkedIn here.
2️⃣ Follow the instructions on this post.
Good luck!
😂🚗 From Complaints to Cupholders: How Hydro Flask Memed Their Way to a Travel-Friendly Bottle
We’ve said time and time again that customer feedback can be one of your biggest sources of inspiration. ⭐
People running into the same problem? It might be time for some additional education or tweaks to the product itself.
Purchasers using your product in a way you didn’t intend? Add that new selling point into your ads!
For water bottle carriers, a big point of contention was that their handy water bottles (which quickly became an accessory) didn’t fit in car cupholders. 😕
In a series of funny meme-format images, Hydro Flask showcased a major benefit to one of their newer releases!
The memes show customers:
1️⃣ A side by side comparison of the two products
2️⃣ A close up of the new shape designed to fit with the ‘on-the-go’ lifestyle
3️⃣ That new colors are available
Customer feedback + memes = A great way to get your customers involved!
🏆 How CPMs Can Refine Your Audience Targeting
Pilothouse recently reviewed two years of ad spend across all Meta accounts and learned something exciting: analyzing CPMs can give advertisers valuable insights into their ad accounts. 💡
What are CPMs?
According to Meta, CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) measures how much you spend on an ad campaign divided by impressions, then multiplied by 1,000.
So, if you spend $50 and get 10,000 impressions, your CPM would be $5.
How are CPMs usually used?
CPMs are often viewed as a basic cost measure — a way to track how much they're spending to reach people.
Many marketers assume if CPMs go up, it's because of outside factors like more competition or Meta adjusting prices for their own reasons. In other words, it feels like something that's out of your hands.
But here's the thing: CPMs aren't just some random numbers you should ignore.
After analyzing ad spend, Pilothouse discovered CPMs can also be…
✅ A strong indicator of whether your product is a good fit with its audience
✅ A lever you can pull to improve performance through rigorous creative testing and targeting
How, you may ask?
Here's a scenario to illustrate how that works:
Imagine you’re running a brand on Meta, targeting people aged 55-64. What you might not know is that CPMs for 25-34-year-olds are typically 65% cheaper than those for your current audience. But if you’re only looking at conversions and engagement metrics, you might miss this and just keep optimizing your ads for that older, more expensive group.
Even if you’re doing everything right with creative testing and media buying, your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) still might be too high to be profitable.
So what do you do? You keep tweaking your creative, trying to get incremental gains. But when you scale, those gains disappear, and you’re back to fighting the same battle. 🥵
Now imagine this: What if you could get the same conversion rate (CVR) with a younger audience, one that’s way cheaper to reach? Your CPA would improve dramatically. But most brands, when they try to “test” this, just push their existing ads toward a younger group, and it flops.
Why? Because they’re not thinking strategically about persona matching and creative testing. If you only focus on conversions, you end up overspending on the most contested audiences, driving your CPMs up even more.
Here’s what Pilothouse is doing differently to help brands unlock better results:
The takeaway?
By taking a more strategic approach to CPMs, you can unlock new opportunities and stop fighting the same uphill battles.
Start thinking about CPMs as a powerful tool to refine your audience targeting and creative strategies.
🌐 IN THE SOCIAL SPHERE
Google Search Console has finally introduced a sticky filter.
What this means: you can set filters in one report and you can toggle between different performance reports without losing your settings.
⚡ QUICK HITS
🚨 If you haven’t already, make sure to check out the latest episode of our brand new podcast! Listen to episode one of The World’s Best Email and Retention Podcast here!
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DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.
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Please note that items in this newsletter marked with * contain sponsored content.
In this newsletter, you’ll find:
Let’s dive in: 👇
It’s no secret that Twitter’s rebrand to "X" could have a negative impact on the public’s perception of the platform’s stability. The rebrand also carries the weight of lost brand recognition, which could influence a marketer’s spending decisions.
In response, Twitter/X is trying to win back ad partners and emphasize the benefits of their ads. The newly amplified ad campaigns within the app are meant to increase reach and enhance the value of their ad offerings.
Ad partners can take advantage of up to a 50% discount to maintain their alignment with the app. Twitter/X has been reported exploring new opportunities with larger brands.
Despite these efforts, Twitter's ad business is still facing challenges, with total ad revenue down 50% year-over-year. The debt is affecting the business, with Musk having loaded $13B in bank loans, leading to significant interest payments each year.
Click here to read up on further details.
90% of store issues (dead links, broken add-to-cart buttons, etc.) are human errors, and the average store makes thousands of theme updates every month.
Uptime makes it easy to monitor, detect, and resolve issues on your Shopify store through automated UI testing, real-time Shopify platform & app outage alerts, and more.
Brands like Mr. Beast's Feastables, Soylent, OVO, Reef, Nike, Madhappy, and hundreds more trust Uptime to protect revenue and ad spend, by detecting store issues in real-time, saving over 9 hours per month from manual QA testing, not to mention decreasing lost customers due to bad experiences.
With the 2023 holiday season around the corner, if you're not 100% confident in your store protection, then it's time to get Uptime. Plus, for a limited time, DTC readers can get 25% off.
Nudge marketing is a powerful strategy that leverages subtle sensory cues to influence consumer behavior. Colors and audio play a significant role in this tactic.
For example, yellow evokes optimism and red creates urgency in your ads while catchy background tunes and jingles shape consumers’ perception and sway purchase decisions.
Our write-up has all the hot tips you need to make a lasting impression on your consumers and steer purchase decisions.
Imagine this. Instead of being offered a solution, what if somebody simply asked you your problem and then gave you the perfect solution?
If it sounds like magic, we assure you it's not. This is exactly what Bloomreach's Use Case Library does. They’ve collected all of the most common and hardest use cases, so you can explore the limitless solutions to whatever marketing challenges you face.
We don't say this lightly, but this is a resource every marketer should be looking at. So grab your problems, dive in, and start getting solutions.
This week’s All Killer No Filler podcast brings the results of Pilothouse’s latest pod test with brands who seek a jump in their Meta Ads Campaign performance.
The series of tests included a comparison between bid cap and cost cap strategies, pushing the limits of Meta’s campaign automation, and some experimentation with custom frames on ad carousels.
Check out the write up or the full breakdown in this week’s AKNF.
🏠 Build an in-house commission-only influencer marketing program. Like Lululemon & Gymshark but at a lower cost. SARAL installs this system into your brand, automating your influencer marketing. Schedule your meeting here. *
👽 Reddit tests new “Official” labels as concerns continue to rise in the interest of verified content. Users will notice the new label on select profiles.
🧵 Threads adds a Following tab for users to see the content of accounts they’re interested in. Threads’ previous recommendation methods significantly dampened the retention rate of the platform.
🪟 Microsoft’s latest earnings release highlights their cloud services driving continued growth. Search and advertising revenue increased about 8% excluding acquisition costs.
👻 Snapchat’s user base reaches nearly 400M as detailed by their Q2 investor letter. The company also reports more active advertisers in the same period.
Most of us have been there 😞
*Sponsored
Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight, Randy Ginsburg, and Michael Venditti. Edited by Claire Beveridge and Eric Dyck.
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