How To Track Black Friday Performance and Make Last-Min Budget Calls

All right, we are back with another episode of Marketing Operators. This is episode 135. Cody and I go deep on a number of strategies to set you up for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. How do you properly pace throughout the month and how do you capture the high-value Turkey 5 Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend to maximize the value of such a high-intent period? We bring on Austin and Andrew from Northbeam who provide some really intricate data and help back up some of the strategies. I hope you enjoy the listen. We are in the thick of Q4. 2026 has absolutely flown by. So we're all gearing up for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I wanna start with just getting to spend targets generally, and 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 forecasts and you have to have your forecasts based on your prior years, right? Because there's certain inherent like seasonality to the period. And there's gonna 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, 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 wanna be. You know, Connor Roland has talked about this a lot. And 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, like the great runners will like, They kind of look like they're coasting a little bit and then like they know how to leave it in the tank. But, you know, amateurs will go out a little too hot too 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 gotta pace it and know when is the right time to push. You obviously don't wanna miss out on any opportunities, but you also have to know like, hey, you know, we actually wanna keep pushing. Because we know that it's going to look better or whatever, and it's probably gonna vary by brand, but there's probably some generalities we can talk about in terms of the timing of that.

Connor Rowlane and the HexClad team, their Black Friday period is a much shorter window because they have a much longer consideration period. It's less of an impulse buy. Therefore, they can capture a lot of intent and generate a lot of revenue in a shorter amount of time because people are already considering HexClad. So they have a little bit more control. Where Ridge, on the other hand, there's a lot of impulse buying happening with Ridge. We're a great gifting product. We actually have a really big post-Cyber Monday period as people really begin leaning into gift buying for their, you know, brother-in-laws and their husbands and their sons. So we end 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 and how that sort of accrues throughout the month. But I do want to like more specifically ask Cody, um, 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 3 or 4 days where they're going to be doing by far their biggest days of the year, um, 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 a planning perspective?

I would say the channel that is going to be able to increase your budgets the most, because some days you're going from, you know, some days you're like 10x-ing your budget going from, right, Thursday to Friday of Black Friday, right? Going from Thanksgiving, like, You can have crazy increase. It's primarily gonna be Meta. It's gonna be anything programmatic. You're not gonna 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, but like having the warmup periods earlier in the year, having your Labor Day, your October sales, your early November to see what your account likes at that moment. Because we've had times where like bid caps crush and bid 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 campaigns. Sometimes we find that new campaigns start off really poorly and having some existing data helps. 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 fits all, but definitely the bulk of your spend's gotta be in Meta and you've gotta figure out how you can go from significantly 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, they'll hold 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 underspend first day of a launch or first day of a sale and then overspend. So just finding the balance and using these periods prior to it to kind of iron out some of those kinks. How do you guys think about it? And is that like an issue that you've seen?

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 in-stream. We really try to front load all of our partnership spend. Um, 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 a much larger percentage of our budget. That'd be Meta. Apple oven, I think, is one that I'd put in that bucket. And then you have to be really careful with it, but like a Google search and shopping and things like that. Would you say like you guys have had a similar sort of transition period at Jones 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 it a lot, but like YouTube is kind of a little higher funnel than some of these other channels, but it's 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 to buy than something like a Meta. So I'll push that and ramp it up. And again, like allow those to run at a little bit lower efficiency, but yeah. And then those will kind of, they'll still increase in terms of the total dollar amount as you're going into these periods, but the percentages will go way lower because Meta or an AppLovin are just ramping up so much more. So yeah, approach it exactly the same way.

[Sponsor Content] 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 6 or 7 years ago, where we tried to do like an early Black Friday sale, Black Friday sale, Black Friday extended. I think we might've even done early Cyber Monday, Cyber Monday, and Cyber Monday extended. And I think, I'm pretty sure, I might be misremembering, 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 launch 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. Um, 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 smaller sort of, um, sale period, or they have a more exclusive Black Friday sale around this weekend, which I think Jones Road 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 launch into existing 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 Ridge, we use Runneth. 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 connects it to what actually drove revenue. You can plug it into your Klaviyo, Shopify, Northbeam, your whole Google Drive. It reads all of it. So instead of asking what worked last quarter, anyone on your team can ask for 10 evergreen concepts worth testing before Q4 and get them back within minutes. We use it. HexClad uses it. Jones Road uses it. It's the best AI brain for e-com brands on the planet. If you don't use it, you're gonna fall behind. Go to runneth.com and book a strategy session. Mention Marketing Operator sent you and you'll get $1,000 in free credits.

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 offer, like we would do this bundle of the mini Miracle Bombs, like the only ads that are gonna perform well are gonna 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 have 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 creatives and ramping that up. And obviously if it performs well, then continuing to ramp it, but also making sure that you have coverage where those ads are just going into your BAU, you know, your business as usual campaigns as well.

Well, we launch Black Friday early, so we're able to launch clean Black Friday ads at scale up. So we've really like eliminated this issue of, hey, we're going into, you know, the Turkey 5 week, it's the eve of Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving and we're trying to launch new ads and we're worried about them scaling. Like we've basically eliminated that. We do do like an additional, we call them deal drops on top of it for this weekend. And those will have new ads associated with them. But when I think about like our ability to hit 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 we do do this additional sale or the, 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 that 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 a day to $400,000 a day or whatever. Um, so I'm comfortable where we've landed, but it makes me a little anxious thinking about other brands who are, 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, um, for this, you know, true BFCM Turkey 5 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 continuing to scale behind that. Um, 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 that say like Black Friday starts now, like in, until like December 10th.

Yeah. If it's performing, if it's doing well and you get, 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, uh, I got one thing to talk about, like hourly tracking. So again, I think there's like 2 distinct periods in November. Um, 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 you can effectively run at a much lower MER, a 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. Um, in the spreadsheet, I pulled it up this morning. This is from 2025, so it's slightly out of date. Um, 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, be understanding where are we throughout the day? Where were we last year or 2 years ago or some blended average of the 2? 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, um, where we just are looking at hourly spend or sorry, we're looking at hourly revenue here in 2024. Uh, 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 2 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, uh, we have .com, We have Amazon separately, and then we have amazonplus.com. Obviously our business has 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, um, way to calculate last year at this hour, what percentage of that day's revenue had we done? If we did $100,000 on Sunday and it's Um, and it's noon and we've done $40,000 and we are 40% of our way to what we will have done that day. Then what we would look at is that 40% relative to our forecast and where we are in that day's captured revenue. So if all of a sudden I'm forecasting 50% growth, $150,000, I expect to be at 40% of that target. I would expect to be at $60,000 in revenue. If I am at $75,000, I know I'm pacing well ahead of my goal, given the hourly distribution that we saw last year. And it's just like this, like very, um, detailed and granular look that at least we approach at Ridge to understand, hey, if we're in this case, we'd be 25% above our goal. Like, okay, let's feel good about scaling up some of these channels, particularly if we're seeing good ROAS on an MTA basis, like in a north theme or something like that. So. Uh, that's my quick spiel on how we've approached hourly budgeting for the BFCM 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 threw out there. Let me just make sure I have it correctly in my head and then also for the listener. So you're, you're really, to try to simplify it, 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.

Right. And so if you were, let's just say you were 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? Where our spend, our MER. So if you're trying to grow 20%, you just need to make sure you're above where you were 20% last year, assuming all of the curves are gonna be the same.

What I would say just in addition to that, and 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 backloaded versus Black Friday, which is sort of frontloaded in the day. Or Cyber Monday is like famously like extremely backloaded. 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 7 or 8 PM PST, 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 I catch up, but that Cyber Monday bump is probably one of the top hours in e-com, like the most fun, highest dopamine hour. in e-com, 'cause you're just like, oh, we're doing okay, we're doing okay. And then you just start crushing it. If you're having a good one, like you can, it just accelerates that last like hour or 2 hours of that night.

The entire weekend is very exciting. Uh, let me ask you this, 'cause, 'cause I think one of the fun parts of being in performance marketing or paid media specifically, or D2C during this period is like, yeah, the excitement of you've been sowing the seeds all year to have a really large BFCM. And like, this is the moment that you and your team like really get to reap the benefits of a lot of that. So what do your, and, and what that also means is that typically people are meeting much more frequently. So what does 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?

[Sponsor Content] We did, we did async. We just like, it probably wasn't the most efficient. I don't know, just especially as people are, you know, traveling and stuff like It's a lot easier to just like be on the computer in front of family on the couch, whatever, if I have to, than like being like, all right guys, like here's the times we're gonna do meetings. So we would 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 then people kind of go with their families, like checking things Thursday, you know, just kind of checking in periodically, but no calls. And then obviously Friday it's like, You know, you're actually like at your desk, you know, like, hey family, you go do your thing, but it's mostly async. 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 the phone with, you know, COO, head of 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 offer in 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 pacing on 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, growth team on one end have that. But often they're, you know, they're interfacing directly as well. Um, whereas just like, all right, cool. How are we looking? Oh, this is going out of 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 to 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 had a very similar way to do it. So you have all of your, your MER pacing, but then you also have to take into account your, um, your, your inventory as well, which, which makes it a fun challenge. But yeah, so we just, we just went heavy, heavy async and then just like huddles as needed. Most brands treat customer support as a cost, but with AI, every support conversation is now a chance to increase retention, recover revenue, and grow your LTV. Richpanel doesn't just use AI to answer tickets. They allow operators to run revenue experiments inside your support. You can test different win-back offers on refund requests, subscription save offers during cancellations, and product recommendations that turn chats into sales. Plus, they guarantee you're going to save money. 50% of your support volume automated in 30 days or your money back. That's a pretty good offer if you ask me. So go to richpanel.com/demo. They'll build an AI support team live for your business and show you how it can drive incremental revenue for you.

We're way less async. We're way more of a synchronous team throughout this period. Uh, I'll do it with mostly just the paid media team. I'll do our, we call it the channel managers, but anybody managing e-com retention, paid media, et cetera. Those are, we'll have meetings each morning, just sort of gut check on how'd the day before go? What's our plan for today? Make sure we're looking out for what we need. And then historically, or at least the last 2 years, we've planned, we'll put them on the calendar. basically like every 2-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 2 hours look like? And we'll make any budgeting decisions. And the reason I bring up the last 2 years is 2024 was extremely difficult. And there was a lot of conversations like in these every 2-hour meetings. This was also the year where we ended up spending, Meta was dramatically underperforming our expectations. And we ended up having to spend like 35, 40% of our budget on AppLovin at the time. So you can imagine, like, the massive, massive changes 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 were able to cancel some of the meetings, more of it could happen asynchronously, or we'd get on and we'd say, all right, everything looks good. And we'd 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 weekend was.

I'm curious, that sheet you have, that spreadsheet you have, this is obviously like 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? Are you doing it, having it do any analysis for that? Or, or you'll just do as is?

Dude, I'm so glad you asked because we had Prime Day recently and we had We had a great example and it was just sort of a bare bones example, but we had Victor providing basically hourly updates for how, um, revenue is tracking across our different product categories just on Amazon. And I was like, oh, this is fantastic. Like the future's here. A year ago, like we had someone on the team managing 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 or less the only way to do it unless we didn't spent like engineering time to like build a, 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 gran— granular, very robust, very automated reporting that will just feed right into Slack. So I do think this year, particularly 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 onboarding 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, 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. The last question I have for you, Cody, before we get Austin Harrison in here and we go deep on Northbeam stuff, is when someone should be actually trying to fix them something on Black Friday. I just brought up this AppLovin 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 too 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.

Yeah. Hopefully you do not have to like change offer or stuff like that. Like really, you know, it's hard to be like, oh, you know, go out to your customers. Hey, 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 overspend. You actually obviously have to make sure that you're spending enough. You have to monitor your efficiency. That's why we're monitoring this daily, refreshing dashboards just way more often than any other time. You have to monitor inventory, of course. You can definitely make tweaks like merchandising, right? So obviously you're controlling spend, any media buying decisions that you're making. Creative, right? You can sometimes launch some creative. Oh, this is doing well. We don't have many ads. Like, hey, can we whip up some statics and launch them? Like, great. Like, go do that. Obviously, hey, this region needs more spend, this campaign, like definitely do all of that stuff. You can merchandise your site. Hey, this is performing really well, or inventory is low on this one. We need to 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, change your segmentation and how much you open it up. Do that. And like we have done like a Cyber Monday offer 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 day of. I think that's just an L sometimes you might have to take and, you know, And just decide how you're gonna learn from that for next year.

I actually think, you know, I described my changes with like the AppLovin from 2024, um, as being topical. And I think you're right that like to some degree, like those are the most significant changes you'll wanna 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. um, promo during the week of Black Friday. And that ended up really not performing the way that we expected. And that was a big learning for us that I don't think mystery products are right for high, like gifting periods. Um, 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 intra-week. We made that decision on maybe Monday or Tuesday and it was live by Wednesday. So I think there's like a Goldilocks period where like, you were early enough in the weekend where you can shift and you just have to make sure that everything's 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 budgets across channels? Are you lightly remerchandising the site given what's selling well or what's going in and out of stock? Um, and that's really just what the teams should be focused on.

For sure. Agreed with that.

All right, cool. Let's get Austin Harrison in here.

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All right, we're back and we've got 2 very special guests. We've got my longtime friend Austin Harrison, founder of Northbeam. Austin, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Good to see you. And we've got Andrew Kazuba from the Northbeam team bringing in some data. Andrew, welcome. Thanks. Great, uh, good 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 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 Northbeam 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 Northbeam 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, pre-BFCM, right? How much have you prepared? Do you know your winners? Have you done the creative testing? Have you calibrated your 1-day click accrual numbers, your 1-day clicks and deterministic views numbers within Northbeam? How well do you know your numbers? What I mean by that is, have you established winners? Have you tested? Do you know what's profitable in Northbeam? When you talk about people looking at other sources of truth, whether it's a model or testing, like, do you know what your 1-day or 1-hour, let's call it, 1-hour accrual number is that's profitable, right? Taking that a step further, um, obviously there's a difference between cash and accrual and how the numbers change when you, when you flip between those views, which Andrew will dig into. But my, my thing is you've got to know your numbers once you hit Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend, but knowing them starts before Black Cyber Monday. That's why I'm prefacing the answer with with the preparation. So maybe Andrew could present some data to make it a little more clear.

Yeah, I think one of the big things I would push brands to do is if you have a multi-touch tool, start to look at it, right?

There's going to be a lot of signals, a lot of sources that are trying to claim credit for all the conversions that are happening during Cyber Week. And from some of the data that we have at Northbeam last year during Cyber Week, we saw the median customer that came through our system had an, on the median, 4.1 touchpoints just on the click basis.

So what that means, a 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're really able to understand how much partial credit each touchpoint deserves. So generally, I think most helpful if you're able to see the entirety of the journey like Northbeam is, if you're just looking at platform reported metrics, you could be over-indexing when platforms are taking claim for the exact same conversion.

100%. So one thing you guys brought up is this like, uh, cash and accrual 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 tee us up here a little bit. Uh, because I think this is one of the things, this 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, um, that person might not convert until that Friday. What Northbeam 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 ROAS reported on the day of Friday, because not only is it going to take credit for, you know, ROAS is attributed revenue over spend. It's gonna take the attributed ROAS, the attributed revenue of conversions that 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 ROAS on the day if you are looking at it on a conversion time basis. Northbeam, and there's the difference between 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 ROAS. Do you guys think I got that explained correctly?

Yeah. Okay. The joke I remember that you used to say early on was that you always had your best MER month in January, right? And people would say to you, how come I can't every— always have that like really, really high MER? And you're like, well, if you're actually looking at accrual, a lot of that revenue that finally converted, those are touchpoints. Those are people that I marketed to like 4 months ago, right? And so, yeah, it looks really good in cash and accrual. A lot of that money moves back in time, right? Because I spent the marketing dollars to get those people in my funnel like 4, 5, 6 months or a year ago. And we know with the Ridge, you've got considerable conversion lag, even though you're, well, it depends on which product, right? Like luggage versus EDC or wallets, right? But you guys have considerable conversion lag nonetheless, right? So when you spend marketing dollars, they may not pay off even in that month. You may not accrue value for months later. And that's a concept of knowing your numbers going into Cyber Week, right? Is that I know my accrual, I know my cash, I know there's some overlap in touchpoints. So what can I afford to spend? I mean, depending on your business with an unlimited budget, On Cyber Week because I already know I'm profitable at a 0.3 one-day click accrual Northbeam ROAS or a 0.8 CDV clicks in deterministic on a view basis, right? So once you've locked it in, you know, you've got common click touchpoints, you kind of have a sense for how it relates to what Meta or TikTok or AppLovin or Snap reports. So you have some calibration, right? So that you're really confident You could spend, you know, essentially unlimited budget, right? Does that check out to you, Cody and Connor, in terms of how you think about it?

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Yeah. Front loading the spend is, I view as like the pro tip, which is some people just sit there and wait and they're like, I'm just gonna spend on Cyber Week. You know, like that's versus, I mean, I've seen Connor at The Ridge do this for years where like they're pretty aggressive in like, let's say September, October, like prepping and getting ready. and priming the 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 the 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 intent. I'm not going to, right? And it's scary, right? Like, I don't think it's It's easy to spend money in September and October if your return is slightly lower. But again, if you know your numbers, you know your conversion lag, and you know your Northbeam numbers, you're like, you know, it's slightly lower, but I know I'm going to make it up, get that ROAS lift on Cyber Week. So when I combine those 2 and average them together, it's profitable, right? So it's that kind of— and maybe Andrew, you can share some more data on how long, you know, how much we've seen the ROAS lift over time.

Yeah, I think your points are really great too. And I would say if you are a Northbeam customer, going back and looking at how much impact came within Cyber Week versus how much was coming from those touchpoints before is super helpful because I've seen for some customers, like the 2 weeks leading up on the 1-day numbers, it looks really rough. But as we get into the Black Friday week, it can be the most effective dollars they spent the whole holiday season. So definitely if you have the data, And to give a little bit of weight to this, when we looked at it for 2025, 33% of all the revenue that we saw come in on Cyber Week came from touchpoints that happened before that week. So all the lead-up, all the work that's happening prior to the start of BFCM week does have a big impact. And to the point of Connor, Cody, and Austin is if you're looking 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 touchpoints outside of that period?

33%.

Yeah, a third, which I think is crazy. And that's like, that's really fun data. And this is something that like we've spent a lot of time refining and frankly, it's always a process of refinement. Like we don't have it 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 fully 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 went aggressive and being like, did we just kill our Q4? And then like it comes, like you just have to kind of have faith. And I think at the time, like it was a little bit more flying blind. That was like, you know, our first year doing $100 mil. And then now I remember like looking through it with your team to prepare for that following year. And it's like, hey, this is actually exactly what we saw in our Northbeam data. from last year. These are the best times for you to spend aggressively when you'll have the biggest delta and ROAS lift, the channels. And that just like gave us the 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 accrue in their data. So on just our hard clicks, 23% of the revenue takes more than a year, not one year to not a year conversion lag, more than a year, which is insane, right? So that's just a crazy number. So sure. You get a 33% ROAS lift in Cyber Week for money you spent months prior. But there are some businesses where you're literally looking at over 1 year to get almost a third of the return also. So like, sure, we're talking about Cyber Week, but that concept applies broadly, right? Cash versus accrual. Like, I had a great month. Well, maybe you didn't because maybe, I mean, you did in the bank account, right? But maybe a lot of that Revenue is actually driven by stuff that you did 6 months, a year ago, right? Which a lot of people really struggle to wrap their heads around.

So I'm curious, um, yeah, this is the stuff that I love nerding out on. We're hitting this cash and accrual point. We're talking about how you can very easily overspend for the day of Black Friday. I'm curious, Andrew, do you have any data? It's 33% of the Cyber Week revenue comes from touchpoints outside of that week. Do you have any data specifically on Black Friday?

Yeah. So Black Friday is even more of that impact is coming outside of that day. So it's 42% of the revenue that we saw in the median is coming out or coming from touchpoints that happened before Black Friday. So even bigger delta there where that accrual number is going to be even more important.

100%. Okay. Yeah. I'm glad. 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 ROAS if you're not properly thinking about it on an accrual basis.

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All right. I'd like to pivot a little bit here. Cash and accrual, I think, is a huge reason why tools like Northbeam can be so valuable during this very like high impact, high intent period. The other one for me is speed, where there have been multiple instances in the past where Northbeam is just processing the data so that we can make decisions slightly earlier. And I remember years ago sitting around and our Google media buyer telling us that we're not seeing an increase in ROAS yet. And I'm like, we're absolutely seeing an increase in ROAS. Like we're seeing it right here in Northbeam. We're seeing it 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 intraday adjustments? Yeah,

I mean, we have some, it's pretty wild what you're seeing today. I'm sure, you know, Cody and Kari, you've seen it, but there's some new businesses popping up. These are, that are, I mean, we have a Northbeam customer spending almost $1 million a day on Meta now, and they're a new company, right? It's kind of crazy. You've got this kind of new kind of group of what we'll call extreme high spenders, extreme accelerators. And they're in Northbeam 24/7 looking at the hourly data, you know, really aggressively pushing. And, you know, they upgrade their Northbeam 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 too, Connor. You'll upgrade speed for that, you know, periodically to, so we can run our full data pipeline and give you accurate Attribution by the hour. And so that just helps you make those decisions quickly in a profitable way, right? To your point, making sure that that dollar spent is truly profitable. Obviously you can look at your blended numbers too in unison, but without the accrual accounting and without understanding really where the dollars are going, without running a full data pipeline and just looking at your bank account, you could overinflate 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 too is I often tell customers when we're looking at the Northbeam data to look at not just one paid channel, but all impact that's coming from that one day and see what percentage of the total is coming from it. Austin kind of said it as well, but like I've seen some brands where midday we are seeing awesome performance as a business. We start to invest more, we dump 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 holistically from a business perspective, how much is coming outside of what's happening today so that we don't kind of kill that wave that we're already riding of good success.

Yeah, I think like Connor's talked about it before of like, it's easy to blend down returns and like just be like, all right, our 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.

That's why the accrual 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 like not profitable at all. If you, if you know, to your point, right?

So Cody, I'm curious, we've talked a lot about cash and accrual and the values of Northbeam and being able to look at different channels and whether you're looking at it from like a top-down perspective or a 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 Northbeam to make a media buying decision that you don't think you otherwise would've made.

Oh, for sure. It's easy. Like, I think it was Austin that said it, or maybe you did, but just like meta reporting, right? And so when your meta spend is going to go high and on 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 touchpoints 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 an unreliable delay and things just seem 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 in Meta and you're freaking out, but blended is good, you go look at Northbeam. And as long as things are on track on like a campaign or ad level, like that has 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. Cody and 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. Well, 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 Apple. And I don't know how we would've made that decision if we weren't confident in like our like-for-like underlying Northbeam measurement, because we could see. Northbeam versus, or sorry, Meta versus AppLovin, we were seeing basically the same percent new visits, significantly better ROAS coming from AppLovin, and that gave us the confidence throughout this weekend to really go from it being, our budgeted plan was probably 5 to 10% of spend, and we end up at 40%. We end up pushing $200,000 a day through AppLovin, and just like the speed and accuracy and consistency of the Northbeam reporting, I like, I don't see how we could have come to that conclusion otherwise.

That's a good one. Um, I also, do you remember your Google non-branded search example from years ago where—

Yeah, remind me.

Yeah, you told me this one where, um, it was also during BFCM week. I think it was Saturday. It was the Saturday of BFCM weekend, you know, that period. And you Slacked me on a weekend on a Saturday and said, Northbeam's 1-hour accrual Uh, Google non-branded search return skyrocketed. I think it was like at some point on Saturday that weekend, and you accelerated spend dramatically. Uh, that was another example. I remember you doing that and totally stuck in my head. It was, it was a couple years ago. Yeah.

Oh, 100%. That's the one that really sticks out to me when discussing like the speed of Northbeam 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 was probably 2022 or something. 2023 is 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 capture as much value as we can. That's why I go back to that speed point, which, if I understand correctly, Austin, you guys are leaning further into that. Can we expect more tools around speed for measurement? Is it, will it be this year? Will it be a 2027 focus?

It's this year. In fact, if we come on a part 2 with Andrew and I, we could show you some stuff, you know, that's, that we have not shown anyone. So yes, more stuff coming there.

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Perfect. Excited. And I'm sure all the Northbeam 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 Northbeam reporting, I've often been thankful for. The other one that I always like is just Northbeam's ability to identify users more accurately and really how that affects things like percent new visits, tracking new customer revenue, things like that. Cody, 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 points that you look at and how has that affected some of your guys' marketing strategies?

Yeah, like percent new visit is a really big one. Um, and again, especially leading up to it, talking about ROAS lift and all this cash accrual stuff, like you're going to get a stronger lift there, the more like true prospecting you're getting. And I think sometimes people like mix these up. Austin, I'm curious your thoughts, but like you have new visits and then you also have new customers and Northbeam 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. Um, the 3, Northbeam added the third bucket of traffic. So there's brand new people, right? There are people that are, have never bought something from the business, but they've been visiting a lot. And then there's return visits, right? So those are 3 key buckets. And Cody brings up the good point where prior to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, if your new visits are really low and you're not driving new people, you're not filling your funnel, right? I can always see with a Northbeam customer if new visit percentage is just dropping and they're not doing anything to drive it, it's like, okay, probably won't have as good a BFCM as they could. Now, if you're really pushing hard and you're inside of a week, you want to, you know, you want people that, uh, 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 'em and text them, right? SMS and email and convert them. And you may be overspending if that's all the ad or ad set or campaigns driving. So that's where you're really looking carefully, say, hey, like, am I just overspending on retargeting when I can really hammer people on text and email. That's the big worry that I have. I don't know how you see it, Connor.

I would say Black Friday is like the one period of 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 0.8 ROAS 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 onto 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 ROAS on these ad sets or 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 ROAS. 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. Cody mentioned it briefly and we've talked about it on other podcasts. Basically, once you get past Black Friday, you no longer have nearly as much latent revenue that your ROAS 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 a week ago, 2 weeks ago. And I don't really care about new visit percentage as we get closer to Black Friday. And I think that's also sort of an important Nuance that at least we take into account during this period.

Yeah, it's a good call out because yeah, that week it's awesome to convert. I mean, you're gonna convert a lot of returning customers too, 'cause 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 3, 4, 5, 6 months, or like we said, over a year. So yeah, to your point, you can accept 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 to convert for the first, you know, for the first time, right? Um, as new customers.

I think the only other thing I would add on top is I know sometimes people are like locked into a click model or some version of like a non-view-based model. I think that is also super helpful when it comes to these weekends to be kind of a deciding factor. If I see 2 campaigns that have similar efficiency on just my click data, bringing in those views and seeing what's driving that impact can be really helpful. And to Cody's point, if more of that impact's coming from net new folks, I think that's just giving you better signal on where you should be leaning in.

So we have one media buyer where if his, let's just say it's a meta prospecting, um, both the, the click, one day click or one hour click accrual is the same and new visit percentage is the same, but Northbeam's clicks and deterministic views for one of them is much, much higher. This particular media buyer has been successfully scaling heavily into that, leveraging that as like almost kind of the tipping the scales, right? Like this campaign is driving a lot more view revenue. Northbeam measures it deterministically with Meta. We do it with, you know, AppLovin, 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. When everything else is equal. Does that make, does that make sense?

Makes total sense.

Yeah,

guys, this was, this is one of my favorite episodes. This is what I love geeking out on. We've been doing it for, for a very long time. Um, let's wrap there. Any, any last, uh, anything you'll leave the, the listeners with, um, from the Northbeam side?

My thing is know your numbers, like be ready for BFCM, like have your numbers by channel, uh, 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 it in a way that's profitable.

I would just say, be ready to take the opportunity. I feel like BFCM, there's going to be a lot of ups and downs when it is going well. Make sure you're ready to put your foot on the gas because I feel like a lot of brands miss that opportunity sometimes.

There we go. Sage advice, guys. Thanks for coming on.

Awesome. Thanks for having us.