December 13 | Sales & Ad Spend Update | 2022 Holiday Ride Along

Updated
June 7, 2023

Intro

Today is December 13th and in this video I'm going to give you an update on the last week of sales and ad spend as we head into this final week-ish or so of the holiday sales season.

You can check out the last video that I uploaded, that I recorded on December 4th, that covered about a week of sales or so. And in that video we were struggling a little bit with our ad spend. This past week that we're about to review has been all about bringing down our ad spend to more reasonable levels, targeting that 25% ad spend of our total royalties. And doing that through being really aggressive with our bit optimizations - specifically around keywords and targets that weren't generating large quantities of orders. Especially up until this point if they weren't already performing and really contributing to our sales or were performing at a really high ACOS. We were being very aggressive in bringing those bids down and focusing more on those keywords and targets that were producing larger quantities of orders.

So let's just jump right into the sales data from the last week or so. So here's the sales data for my account. We're gonna look at from Monday the 5th through yesterday, Monday. And you can see a total of 6,000 sales with $31,000 royalties. And if we look at our advertising data kind of overlaid with our sales data out of those 6,000 orders, 2,600 of those were from paid orders with a total of $15,791 in spend, out of the $31,000 and royalties giving us about a little over $15,000 in net profit. And compared to the previous video, ACOS has been a little bit better, especially as attribution kind of kicks in. There's a 14-day attribution window, if someone clicks on an ad and then comes back later to purchase, which does happen quite a bit during the holiday sales season. So some of these campaigns have definitely improved over time and if we just go quickly through each day, Monday the 5th, $3,073 royalties with $2,300 in spend for about $700 in profit. $3,500 on the 6th with $3,100 in spend. $3,600 on the 7th with $2,000 in spend.

You can see that my spend has slowly decreased over this time period, which has been the goal, this has been all about maximizing profit as we lead into the last week. And then Thursday $4,100 and $2,000 in sales. So now we're starting about mid last week we were starting to get more of that 1 to 1 ratio again with the goal to bring that down to about 25%. So, sales have continued to increase spend has continued to decrease, the cost has been a little bit all over the place depending on the day, but in general is an improvement over the prior weeks when we were being a lot more aggressive. $4,000 on friday $1,400 spend, so increase in profit there as well, closer to that $2,500 - $2,600. And that continues through Saturday $3,900 and $1,600. Sunday $4,500 and $1,591. And then finally yesterday $4,400 in royalties and $1,476 in spend. So that puts us at about $2,900 in profit. So getting pretty close to that 3 to 1 ratio. We're looking at or 25% of our ad spend compared to our total royalties.

And taking a quick look of our top-selling products out of that $31,000 in royalties and $6,000 orders, about three quarters of that is from our main hero product, pretty well dwarfing our next best-selling products over this eight-day window. And over this time frame, the real goal has been to become more profitable over this week as we move into this last week as sales continue to climb up until those shipping dates fall past Christmas when you kind of run into that sales cliff.

So we want to now maximize profits after being super aggressive through black friday weekend and that first week and really maximize that we really bet big on being super aggressive and ranking this hero product. Now it's been decreasing ad spend while the sales increase and trying to maintain the ranking of our product to.

Unfortunately, even though our ad spend has really decreased for the hero product and just across all of our products in general, the ranking on this still remains consistent with where it was when we were being super aggressive. So that's always a worry when you're reducing your bids, becoming more conservative - that your competition can still be putting their foot on the gas, or you lose rank, which can have that negative sales velocity where you keep falling down.

But fortunately I've been able to maintain that rank even with fewer paid orders contributing to that ranking. And again, we did this by focusing on the keywords and targets that were really contributing to our product that were performing well and the ones that were getting a lot of orders and even if they weren't performing quite at the target ACOS. In the previous video we were talking about 35% - 30% target ACOS. We're now I'm looking to bring that down to profitability or break even of about 26% across my product line. That's a matter of just taking those performing, when I say performing the keywords that are getting a lot of orders, and bringing those bids down to a level that they would still be profitable based on the conversion rates they're seeing and what our target ACOS is.

With those two metrics, we can calculate what our target CPC should be, which if you're curious about that and kind of what I look at when I'm adjusting bids, check out the live bid optimization video I did as part of the last update, which is similar to how I've been adjusting my bids throughout this whole week, taking stuff that's performing and trying to bring it down to the target ACOS, making little adjustments each day until we get to this point and anything that's not contributing sales, that's not getting orders were being fairly aggressive in lowering those bid consistently. At this point if it's not contributing sales or hasn't in the last couple of weeks. I'm not really looking to see if it's going to start contributing now as we approach that sales cliff when we're gonna be cutting bids just across the board.

That's it for this video. If you want to be notified when I drop the next update, probably after this week of sales, then make sure to like and subscribe and hit that notification bell and I'll see you in the next video.

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