You're (Probably) Doing Creative-Testing All Wrong

Today In Digital Marketing is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. This week, Tod touches on:

• DTC: Why Testing Saved this Cosmetics Brand's Ad Campaigns
• SEO: How to Handle Temporarily Out-of-Stock Products
• SUPPLY CHAIN: Will Santa Claus be Coming to Town?
• COMMERCE: NRF Predicts Holiday Sales to Rise 10.5%
• GOOGLE: Adds New Merchant Features Ahead of the Holidays

Below is the transcription from this weeks topics

DTC: Why Testing Saved this Cosmetics Brand's Ad Campaigns

Source: Pexels

It's not easy to be in the ad market these days — especially if you're a DTC brand. You don't have to tell that to Jones Road Beauty.

A month ago, all their ads were struggling... clickthrough was at an all time low of around 0.6% and cost-per-click was climbing up to nearly $4.

The company made some changes and today they've more than doubled their CTR, slashed their CPC by half, and now enjoys a 35% lower cost for acquisition.

You might be asking — okay, what changes, exactly?

On the podcast today, we were joined by Cody Plofker, the Director of E-Commerce at Jones Road Beauty. Here's what he had to say:

I think the answer was really simple. But not everyone's doing it — testing everything. Testing in a really methodical way.
We just got away with not having ideal creative. And it's funny, because everybody's now like "Creative is king." And "You have to invest in creative now."
It's always been important. It's always been super important.
We could get away with not having it be ideal. We could just "media-buy" our way through it.
Now, we don't really have that opportunity.
So definitely creative testing — having that be the main focus.
However, I see — and I've totally made this mistake myself — so many brands and agencies testing really small things like colors, or font. Or frame versus no frame.
Instead, we've taken the approach that let's test really big things. Let's do [fewer] tests. Let's work on making better creative. And then when we do test, let's test things that are drastically drastically different than what we've done before.
Big risks. Be willing to play on the outskirts of the brand guidelines a little bit.

The podcast has a bit more as well, so be sure to check today's episode and check out Cody's fantastically detailed tweet thread with specific examples of their tested creative.

SEO: How to Handle Temporarily Out-of-Stock Products

Source: Canva

So that's promoting your product, but what about if you can't even GET your product and are caught up in the supply chain issues, forcing your online store to show a lot of Out of Stock messages. That's bad for your customer experience, but it also might be hurting your ranking in Google.

In one of his weekly SEO hangouts, Google search engineer John Mueller shared four tips for handling out-of-stock products online that won't affect user experience and are SEO-optimized for Google.

So should you leave your out-of-stock products listed online?

Yes, is the short answer.

Quoting Mueller:

It is something where what works best for us is if we can keep the URL online for things that are really temporary, in the sense that if the URL remains indexable and with structured data you tell us this product is currently not available.
Then we can at least kind of like keep this URL in our index and keep refreshing it regularly to pick up that change in availability as quickly as possible

Mueller also suggested adding a back-in-stock link on the home page to make Google crawl and rank the pages more quickly, especially if the site had been down for a while.

SUPPLY CHAIN: Will Santa Claus be Coming to Town?

This year, it may not be the Grinch who stole Christmas, but the supply chain.

According to a new study, supply chain woes of retail executives are not likely to ease any time soon:

• 98% of surveyed retail executives say they are experiencing supply chain issues.
• 100% predicted that disruptions in the supply chain will affect the holiday season "significantly or somewhat" and last through 2022.
• To mitigate costs from the challenges, 59% of executives increased pricing or shipping costs, and 36% took a margin hit to maintain prices.

It is not the same for every retailer - Target, Walmart, and Amazon have highlighted efforts to mitigate the challenges, promising shoppers they will be stocked for the holiday shopping season.

The study was conducted by First Insight and the Wharton School's Baker Retailing Centre.

COMMERCE: NRF Predicts Holiday Sales to Rise 10.5%

Source: Canva

Despite the supply chain woes, holiday sales are predicted to rise, according to the National Retail Federation.

Holiday sales during November and December are forecast to grow between 8.5 percent and 10.5 percent, compared to 2020. Up to $226 billion is expected to be generated by online sales and other non-store sales.

Quoting NRF:

Consumers are in a very favorable position going into the last few months of the year as income is rising. Retailers are making significant investments in their supply chains and spending heavily to ensure they have products on their shelves to meet this time of exceptional consumer demand.

GOOGLE: Adds New Merchant Features Ahead of the Holidays

Source: Canva

Google today announced new features in Merchant Center to support retailers running promotions, sales and price drops, including a "Deals" feed in the Shopping tab.

Additionally, the company plans to integrate with Shopify and WooCommerce so that merchants can showcase their deals across Google surfaces.

Here’s what you need to know about the new features.

The “Deals” feed

• Deals badged products will now appear in a new tab in the Shopping section.
• This feed can be found by selecting "Deals" from the menu or by searching for terms like "deals" or "black friday."
• If a product has a deals badge, it is automatically included and will be highlighted based on the the offer and discount.

Source: Google

New ways to track in Merchant Center:

• Merchants can view which of their products are eligible for a deals badge in Google Merchant Center's products tab.
• Additionally, a new dashboard provides impressions, clicks, and click-through rate data for Shopping ads featuring deals badges.

Source: Google

With the new features eCommerce marketers now have multiple places in Google to showcase deals.

Retailers running promotions, sales, or price drops need to maintain their product feeds to be eligible for these organic ways to reach shoppers.

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/11256948

Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com