Cyber Week 2022 Retail Media Strategies That Drove Enormous YoY Growth
The holidays this year certainly began merry and bright: Cyber Week 2022 was a huge success for Rise Interactive e-commerce clients that are active in Retail Media.
How did we secure this kind of success amongst the noise? In true Rise fashion, we applied insights from historical and real-time data in unique ways to give our clients an edge.
Here’s how we tackled Cyber Week 2022:
The Strategic Keys to Success
1. Focused spend on top-of-funnel leading up to Cyber Week, and leveraged Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) insights for smarter DSP targeting. Before AMC was available, we used proxy metrics like branded search volume and conversion rate to infer the impact of pre-Cyber Week top-of-funnel spend on performance during Cyber Week. In 2021, we learned that ramping up spend on upper funnel tactics in the weeks leading up to Cyber Week had a positive impact on these metrics — and we applied that learning while also adding AMC analysis to our arsenal in 2022.
This year, we translated 12 months worth of insights from AMC, which provided an understanding of how DSP spend is contributing to the bottom line across each of our clients. It also equipped us with the optimal DSP approach to target the right audiences and frequencies we needed to drive success. For one CPG brand, we drove 250% more revenue YoY, at 3x ROAS, on Cyber Monday — which we partially attribute to pre-Cyber Monday DSP investments.
2. Diversified into non-Amazon RMNs, which provided additional reach. In 2022, Rise clients focused their budgets not only on Amazon, but also newer networks like Target, Wayfair, and Macy's to reach incremental audiences. Our partnership with Pacvue (a software solution that allows us to manage e-commerce success through holistic retail data) helped us drive greater ROAS on less saturated networks like Target, for example.
3. Team + technology strategies to take advantage of real-time opportunities. Speaking of Pacvue, we used their capabilities and keyword research tools to identify search terms that would allow us to capitalize on low competition throughout each day of Cyber Week. For clients where we observed stronger performance in the afternoon and evenings during Cyber Week last year, we leveraged scheduling rules to heavy up spend later in the day.
Deciphering Cyber Week
After the whirlwind of Cyber Week, you may be wondering: How can I use Amazon DSP to drive revenue? What are the key differences between how KPIs behave on Black Friday and Cyber Monday for my brand? How am I streamlining my tech stack to keep a pulse on the big picture in real-time? Taking time to analyze and learn from the data is one of the most important parts of future-proofing your strategies (and one of our favorites!). Here’s what we learned:
1. Much stronger ROAS during Cyber Week compared to evergreen performance across platforms. The data showed a 50% increase in efficiency on non-Amazon RMNs and over 400% efficiency ROAS improvements on Amazon when compared to a “normal” time period.
2. Non-Amazon RMNs provided reach and scale, but fell short on efficiency in comparison to Amazon. Historically, we’ve seen that non-Amazon networks generate a lower ROAS during Cyber Week for the exact same set of products on Amazon. In fact, ROAS was generally half of what we saw on Amazon, and with less of a performance bump when compared to periods of time outside of Cyber Week. However, reaching incremental audiences on RMNs outside of Amazon contributed to overall revenue growth across our clients. Here’s a quick overview of the data for non-Amazon RMNs:
3. Cyber Monday versus Black Friday: Less volume, but more efficient overall. When compared to Black Friday, Cyber Monday overall had 34% less spend, but 40% higher ROAS. This data reflects a similar trend we’ve seen YoY for Rise e-commerce clients overall, and speaks to the elongated nature of Cyber Week: Gone are the days of consumers waiting for Cyber Monday for the best deals. Now, digital marketers are seeing a definite tension between the high volume of Black Friday, and the efficiency and engagement of Cyber Monday, which means that navigating the balance between days will require budgetary discipline.
Preparing for the Next Cyber Week, Now
Now that Cyber Week 2022 has concluded, we’re able to see a holistic view of what strategic approaches did or didn’t work in real-time with key audiences. As a result, we’ll be able to apply these insights and observations to strategies for next year and beyond.
It’s never too early to future-proof your retail media strategies: Contact us today to learn how Rise can evolve your approach!