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Black Friday preparation: Advanced data-driven recommendations

Ryan Johnson
Marketer @ SegMetrics
Advanced Black Friday analytics prep

Are you basing your Black Friday strategy on hunches or data-driven decisions?

What often separates average marketers (and businesses) from advanced ones isn’t experience, but data. What looks like genius or luck is often just better data that provides a deeper understanding of what’s going on. This is why advanced marketers prioritize the collection of accurate, reliable and actionable marketing data.

Black Friday is coming. This is the biggest sales day of the year for a lot of businesses — and a critical promotion for many more. How accurate, reliable and actionable is your data?

To help you prepare, here are four data-driven, advanced details to double-check before Black Friday:

1) Are you optimizing your ads with Conversion API?

Fact: Ad platforms like Facebook and Google are notoriously inaccurate. They can’t see who becomes a customer, so optimizing your ads inside Facebook and Google is both costly and pointless. At best, you’re optimizing for clicks — not sales, revenue, lifetime value (LTV) or return on ad spend (ROAS).

This means your ad platforms are only as good as the data you give them. A couple examples of how this can impact your ad campaigns:

  • If desktop users use ad blockers that stop tracking pixels from loading, the ad platform AI’s will think no one on desktop is buying and deprioritize those users. (More drops in sales.)
  • If Google tracks a lot of engagement from oversea users, it will ramp up promotion to more oversea users — even if most of those leads are low-value leads who never buy. (And even more lost sales.)

This brings us to the Conversion API (commonly called “offline conversions”). It enables businesses to send Google and Facebook data about sales that those ad platforms would normally miss.

SegMetrics gives you an accurate, single source of truth for all of your marketing and sales data. No matter where your leads come from or what path they take to a sale, every purchase is traceable back to a real person and a real email. No duplicates, no confusion, no issues with ad blockers or privacy settings.And with SegMetrics’ Conversion Feeder, you can send this accurate sales data back to the ad platforms automatically. With SegMetrics, you can train the advertising AI’s to improve your targeting and boost your ad results.

"Better data means faster growth" banner

2) Can you track the lifetime value of your Black Friday customers?

Making a ton of money on Black Friday is great, but this is just a piece of the long game. The best way to make the most of the extra ad budget and stress is to turn those discount hunters into loyal customers.

That might seem obvious, but this aspect of new vs repeat customers is often overlooked because your typical tools like Google Analytics can’t track LTV so we overfocus on initial purchases. 

How big of a problem is this?

  • As much as 50% of e-commerce sales comes from repeat sales (Investopedia)
  • Repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers (BIA Advisory Services)
  • Increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase overall profits by over 25% (Marketing Tech)

In other words, measuring the LTV of your Black Friday customers should be a top priority. (The right marketing analytics tool makes measuring lifetime value both easy and accurate.)

3) Are you fully leveraging contact tags for your Black Friday automations?

We love contact tags here at SegMetrics. In fact, we wrote a complete guide on why tagging is valuable, what you should tag, and how to think about tag naming. Download our free Ultimate Tagging Guide here.

For any big promotion you run – and especially for Black Friday – we recommend you give your promotion customers a unique tag. A tag name like promotion-BFCM is ideal.

Why use contact tags?

  1. They help you set up automations, such as email follow-ups that offer cross-sell opportunities

  2. They help you uncover deep insights about your customers

Many marketers already use contact tags for automations but miss the potential (or don’t have the tools) to leverage them for strategic insights.

For example, contact tags allow you to track and compare the lifetime value of leads and customers from different promotions.

LTV tracking for Black Friday leads image

You can extract data by wrestling with pivot tables for a few hours or with just a few clicks in SegMetrics. 

4) Do you monitor refunds or cancellations from Black Friday customers?

Tracking orders is exciting, but that’s not the end of the story. During the rush to make purchases and take advantage of Black Friday deals, it’s expected that some customers will get buyers remorse. In the days and weeks after your big event, there will be some cancellations, refunds, and declined cards.

Because many Black Friday promotions are driven by big discounts, heightened refunds can damage your profit margins. Do you have the visibility you need to track these margins?

A cross-platform, full-funnel analytics platform like SegMetrics empowers you to monitor abandoned orders and track them back to the specific campaigns, channels and ads that brought those low-quality leads through the door.

Black Friday analytics dashboard mockup

Even better, with SegMetrics you can measure the customer value of your different channels, campaigns, ads, funnels and offers BEFORE Black Friday begins. SegMetrics can show you want is and isn’t working in your business today and save you from dumping valuable time, money and effort into unprofitable tactics.

This is the power of data-informed marketing in a nutshell. Instead of trying to do everything and hoping that the overall average is net positive, you can confidently double-down on your proven winners — and rapidly grow your business.

Complete your Black Friday setup with SegMetrics

For more details on how to leverage cross-platform data to optimize your Black Friday promotion, talk to one of our marketing analytics experts.

Or start a 14-day free trial and test-drive SegMetrics with your own data. We’ll help you get set up quickly and show you how to use our pre-built dashboards to get instant insights into the effectiveness of your marketing.

 


Ryan Johnson

Marketer @ SegMetrics

Ryan Johnson is a content strategist and product marketing manager with over 15 years experience bringing brands and products to life with integrated editorial and sales collateral, value-based messaging, and GTM strategies.


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