Peter Ocheret

Frequent creative refreshes: - Meta says to do it 2x a month - We say 4x a month/1x a week Most DTC brands don't hit 2x, much less 4x. But if you want better performance, frequent refreshes are a key lever to pull.

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The simplest AOV boosters I've seen work for most DTC brands with multiple similar products: Pack your products in a bundle Increase variety by increasing the bundle size (E.g. flavor) Name the bundle a special name (E.g. Ultimate KETO bundle) Test the quantity/discounts to hit the sweet spot for max Revenue per User

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TikTok Shop AOV is WAY lower than website b/c: 1. Discounts are CAPPED which does not incentivize higher cart sizes (in the below example, you think it's 50% off, but the coupon is maxed at $20 discount) 2. Upsells/cross-sells in the CART are below the fold and ppl will rarely scroll below the "checkout button" 3. These are largely impulse purchases. If TTS doesn't incentivize higher AOV, brands are stuck in low AOV purgatory. If I'm TikTok, I start considering a solve for both of the above.. honestly pretty easy Despite TTS low AOVs, we're noticing 2.5-7x higher conversion rate than the DTC site. B/c of this- TikTok Ads performance has been higher driving to the Shop (vs website) for every client we've touched on TikTok in 2024.

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btr media | Adam Mellott "We're spending more money at a higher ACOS. How is it possible that our TACOS is improving?!" Here's a scenario: ▶ New brand coming into season in Q2 ▶ Strong brand presence in respective categories, products in retail stores ▶ Brand's Ad Sales% of Total OPS is VERY high ▶ SP, SD CVR% exceptionally high vs. Sponsored Brands What does this suggest? ▶ We can assume branded SV is heating up due to seasonal demand ▶ Opportunity for efficiency cleanup via SB ▶ Opportunity for proper Defense campaign segmentation ▶ Possible significant % of SD budget to VCPM Views Remarketing What did we find? 🛑 Heavy budget allocation across Auto 🛑 No Rank strategy utilization 🛑 Improper branded negation across nonbranded strategies 🛑 Heavy % of budget into SP Defense strategies 🛑 Competitors owning SB TOS across high SV category keywords, top converters What adjustments did we make? ✅ Immediate brand negation across all nonbranded strategies ✅ Immediate pausing of SD VCPM (93% CVR... 😒) ✅ Breakout of SP Defense, which included all brand products + heavy budget decreases, drawing a line between branded vs. nonbranded ✅ Isolated TOS strategies (SP, SB) across high SV top converting kw's to remain top-of-mind in the category + general brand equity & education + organic rank improvement ✅ Extraction of converting ST's via Auto, relaunched across SP broad/phrase/exact with profitability-focus Short-Term Results: 🏆 +$316 increase in avg daily spend MoM 🏆 +$2,014 increase in avg daily ad sales MoM 🏆 +$7,143 increase in avg daily total sales MoM 🏆 -$1.09 DECREASE in ROAS MoM due to Rank, TOS utilization 🏆 -15% Ad% of Total OPS improvement MoM 🏆 -10% decrease in TACOS MoM Evaluate, Identify, Explain, Strategize, Execute, Educate. ☑ Evaluate account ☑ Identify issue or opportunity ☑ Explain reasoning ☑ Strategize & craft solution ☑ Execute properly & thoroughly ☑ Educate through data 🚀 #amazonads #amazonadvertising #amazonppc #ppctips #btrmedia

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”Digital ads are only going to get more expensive” - me for the last 10+ years. Use them to grow your other channels while you can. A/B test your email lead capture, your first purchase offer, keep campaigns and flows hyper-personalized, provide value and keep open and click rates up. Invite them to in-person events, get creative! Run ads - don’t rely on ads. What you do ~after~ someone clicks your ad is everything. #dtc #marketing #digitalmarketing

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Instacart not having negative keywords as an option is the best example of what "machine learning" actually costs brands to support. The best solution I've found? Take their auto applied keywords and make their bid the lowest possible (30 cents). I built a really solid ads structure supporting each of our Target sku's and woke up to us bidding on "Ben and Jerry's" as a "optimized auto applied suggesition" for our Vanilla Ice Cream Whey. Gee, I wonder what sophisticated dev team decided "auto bid on product title". Yeah, in the world of CPG there could neeevvverrr be issues with that. Who leads this team and how much do you make. (Hint: too much). Happy Friday to everyone except overpaid leadership that don't actually understand what they're building and get paid boat loads of money for it.

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Want an easy way to pay less for conversions in Meta? Implement a best-in-class CAPI integration. Below is an example of one brand we worked with that helps illustrate how shifting away from a poor CAPI solution to a better integration dramatically improved their performance. After retooling and maximizing our CAPI integration, we immediately saw CPA’s drop by 33%. More interestingly, we also saw CPM’s drop by 18%. This is because Meta rewards advertisers with high estimated action rates to be more competitive in the auction. If you're interested in learning more about how to improve your CAPI integration or other ways to win in Meta's auction, I've shared two resources in my comments section to help.

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Pro tip for all DTC founders: Share your product on Reddit. Reddit users are brutal, and the active ones are nerds. Meaning? They'll take the time to research your product, and then kick your ass for any issue they find. Half-assed products WON'T survive the heat. You'll find areas of improvement really quickly.

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Shein & Temu have entered the building... What does that mean for DTC brands? The Chinese-backed marketplaces are spending BIG on advertising, pushing up ad costs across social and Google. Their main competitive advantage... Price & Speed. 💵⏩ They use their massive manufacturing capabilities to react to trends FAST. They can do something that takes a normal retailer 6 weeks in 1. And for half the price. How can you compete with that? BRAND. Brand is your best defense for this type of threat. 🤜 Review your marketing funnel and ask yourself “Where can I elevate my brand experience?” ⚡Product ⚡Website ⚡Packaging ⚡Creative Identify how you can wow the consumer at every touch point. THAT'S how you can compete against powerhouses who control price and speed

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DTC Companies with AOC's lower than $100... focus on bundles to increase your cart value. Change your shopper's habits to buy more at a time. For better or worse, this is becoming the only way to negate the avg. acquisition cost of a new client. Requires a little creative thinking but it can be done.

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Pop Quiz: Which email A-B test variant drove more DTC eCommerce conversions? Hit 👍 for A - BOGO50 Hit ❤️ for B - 25% OFF There are a lot of options for what you can A-B test in your emails: → Frequency & cadence → Call to Actions (CTA) → Promotional Offers → Send Day of Week → Personalization → Segmentation → Subject Lines → Email Content → Email Layout → Send Time → Headers → Footers You should always let your data and goals drive that prioritization but I think offer testing is something that tends to not get tested enough. In some cases, is discounting even helping or hurting your brand in the long run? There's only one way to find out. Test it. So let me know with your vote and comments. Who do you think was the winner of this test?

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How to increase a DTC brand's bottom-line profit with a lower MER (All savvy DTC brand founders and marketers understand this, but most don't)... Absolute contribution margin dollars are far more important to profitability than MER. MER is merely a relationship between revenue and ad spend, whereas absolute contribution margin is the actual dollars that contribute to and increase bottom line profitability. Many brand founders find this counter-intuitive, but the reality is that if taking a lower MER allows you to scale ad spend and top line revenue enough to offset the margin decrease caused by the lower MER, the result can actually be an increase in absolute contribution margin dollars and thus an increase in bottom line profitability. Check out the example below. If the ad buyer for this brand feels confident they can spend more than $380,292 at a 2.5 MER, then dropping MER from 2.75 to 2.5 actually drives more contribution margin dollars and more bottom line profit. Find this confusing? It's okay - you're not alone. Consider sending me a DM to learn how my team of DTC-focused Fractional CFO's at Free to Grow CFO can help.

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DTC brands are so damn good at compelling storytelling. But they tend to struggle when it comes time to scale with paid ads. The problem is also their strength: Brands are so damn good at telling compelling stories organically, but they reach a point 1 or 2 years in where they need new customers to grow, so they turn to paid ads to get the job done. The challenge? Paid ads don’t have the luxury of an organic story. You can’t make a new customer love your brand in 30 (or even 5) seconds. You can’t tell the same story you’ve relied on organically and expect the same outcome. And because in marketing we’re told over and over that growth needs to happen INSTANTLY, it’s easy for marketers to get stuck in a cycle of ads that have surface level messaging made for quick wins and not sustainable growth. - Our product comes in pink now. - The new [product] that TikTok loves. - It’s sold out 7 times, but it’s back now. - Our product literally does XYZ. So buy it. BUT if you want to see the same impactful growth from your ads that you have from organic, you have to go deeper. - Connect your product to real problems. - Make a promise you can deliver on. - Tie it to a genuine emotion. Paid ads hook new customers in by tugging on heart strings or providing a solution to a real problem. Organic makes them fall in love with the brand story. Combine the two and you’ve got a damn good growth formula.

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Big Internet companies are making suboptimal decisions to push market valuation. We see more and more ads in search results, in news feeds, everywhere, and not enough care for the people who are actually creating content. Ahrefs intends to stay independent and focus on helping people to make useful content and to make it more accessible, with the ultimate goal of building a search engine that shares profit with content creators. https://ahrefs.com/ Ahrefs #SEO #BusinessStrategy #Marketing

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Most DTC brands obsess over the wrong metrics: MER, CAC, COGS, etc. There's one metric that truly matters in the retail space: Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC). It’s the time between spending cash on inventory and receiving cash for the sale of that inventory. The lower that number is, the better. For example, Amazon has a negative cash conversion cycle (-20 days). They get money from their customers before they pay their suppliers. CCC for top retailers: 1/ Walmart: 3 days 2/ Costco: 6 days 3/ Target: -0.76 days You probably don't have as much leverage over your suppliers as these giants. But getting even slightly better payment terms can make a huge difference. Everything is negotiable. Obsess over CCC, and you’ll have a much better business. 💪

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How can you leverage paid social or influencers when selling at retail but not on DTC? I've been leveraging 🥕 Instacart for a while now! One great feature that not many people know about is Instacart landing pages (with UTMs). Here is the breakdown 👇 1/ Create an Instacart landing page 2/ Add Instacart UTMs to this page based on your campaign (you can build UTMs within Instacart) 3/ Push the traffic to this page and download the attributed $ from Instacart backend. In the first comment, there is the full breakdown!

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The 6 biggest profit-killers I see in ecommerce businesses right now: 1. Fundamentals Your business was never going to work because your margin, LTV, or TAM just don't work. This is DTC public enemy number 1. Solution: radically change your business. Or pick a different one. 2. Channel Strategy Like 1, but with a key difference: your business can work, but it's a bad fit for DTC. Plenty of DTC businesses make way more sense in brick & mortar (just ask Isaac Medeiros) or with an Amazon-first strategy (just ask Bryan Porter). Usually this is about some combo of margin & LTV. I have personally operated businesses like this and it's incredibly hard to make the shift once you start. But get this wrong and the whole thing doesn't work—again, even if they business CAN work in other channels. 3. Ignorance You want profit, but you just aren’t experienced/knowledgeable enough yet to operate effectively. You don't need to feel bad about this: experiential capital is a real thing, and I've gotten as much of mine from failure as from success. This is where smart friends journeying alongside you are an unparalleled resource. Especially if they'll be honest with you. The top reason I've been able to learn from my failures is 10 years of processing the ups and downs with Taylor Holiday. 4. Bad Ideas The proliferation of DTC educational content is AWESOME. It's one of the reasons I'm bullish on the industry as a whole. But some of it is also just wrong. Avoiding bad ideas is really hard. This is honestly why I point people to ADmission from Common Thread Collective as often as I can: there no educational resources whose quality of ideas I trust more. No affiliate link because I don't want anyone to mistake this for a sponsored post. It's not. Hit up Grant Zanini for more info on ADmission. 5. Growth It is so so so so so so so hard to say “no” to growing your topline more. Now add 20 more “so’s” if you raised money. But slowing (or even reversing) growth is often the fastest way to grow profits. Profit is the foundation of your valuation. So it's worth doing. 6. Inertia This is the sneakiest enemy of all. - You keep doing things because that’s how you’ve done them - Software bloat - The employee you kept for 6 months too long because it’s hard to fire them - The hidden waste in a blended ROAS number or "creative testing" It’s really hard to stay relentless about your pursuit of profit. But that’s actually the most important solution to all of this: Commit to the reality that profit = value in a DTC business. Then go after that with dogged focus.

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This is my top performing post of all time and a constant reminder: ➝ 99% of brands in DTC would be better off working with targeted micro-influencers vs. macro-influencers. We help 8-9 figure ecommerce brands scale paid media — creative volume is the #1 lever we pull to accomplish that. Without micro-influencers, you're missing the most important piece in the sustainable creative volume equation (unless you're pouring tens of thousands into a content agency). 10x the impact, 1/10th of the cost:

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“Brand bidding: the kindergarten of Google Ads”. Here's how we spent $7M on Google Ads and turned cold traffic into new customers @scale for DTC Brands [Not a penny spent on Brand Bidding] Many marketers stick to brand bidding as their safe bet in the realm of DTC and eCommerce. Brand bidding is an amateur's game. We chose to defy the norm—and it paid off big time. For DTC & Ecommerce brands, the true challenge lies in acquiring new customers at scale, not just targeting those already familiar with the brand. This has been our focus for years—converting cold traffic into loyal customers, bypassing the allure of brand bidding for a more ambitious goal of sustainable growth. Over the last 6 months, we’ve profitably spent over $7 million on Google Ads without a single dollar going towards brand bidding, for DTC Brands in the health and wellness industry. Instead, we focused on what truly drives growth: customer acquisition at scale. Our unique funnel transforms cold traffic into loyal customers, turning skeptics into believers. How do we do it? Through relentless optimisation and a deep understanding of consumer behavior. Our proprietary funnel guides potential customers from initial interest to purchase with unparalleled efficiency. The results speak for themselves. We generated staggering revenues for this client, as evidenced by our real Google Ads Manager screenshots. Here’s what makes our funnel unique: 🚀 Huge Conversion Rates: Achieving over 15% conversion rates, significantly higher than industry averages, (On cold traffic!) 💰 Extremely High Average Order Value (AOV): Maximizing revenue from every customer. 🎯 Precision Targeting: Only targeting cold traffic to ensure we’re bringing in new customers, not just re-engaging existing ones. 📈 Scalable Growth: Designed to scale seamlessly, allowing for consistent and sustainable growth. 🔄 Continuous Optimization: Using data-driven insights to refine and improve the funnel constantly. While others pour money into targeting those who are already familiar with their brand, we excel at converting complete strangers into customers. Our approach is bold, innovative, and, most importantly, profitable. And here’s the best part: I am offering our unique funnel for FREE! Yes, you read that right, for FREE. We want to help you move beyond brand bidding and tap into a scalable growth strategy that works. Let’s connect and explore how we can replicate this success for your brand. If you want to have access to our unique DTC customer acquisition funnel for FREE: 1) Like the Post 2) Comment “FUNNEL” 3) Be sure we are connected so that I can send you the Funnel directly by DM Let’s grow together. 🚀 #DTC #ecommerce #GoogleAds #CustomerAcquisition #digitalmarketing

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