Happy Sunday! It was a pretty hectic week with tons going on and man I’m exhausted. So I took today to replay chill and hope you got time to do the same.
Here are three random things I learned this week or are in my mind. But before we do, there's a cool resource I want to tell you about:
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1. Digital Is For Scale, IRL Is Great For Depth
We had a great event outside of our NY store this last Friday, and at one point we had a line going around two blocks. I guess there were 400 people in one at one time. In-person, this looked like a giant number of people. We may sell hundreds of thousands of units of something online, but seeing a few hundred people line up to try your products and experience the brand themselves hits differently. Digital is great for scale, but IRL is great for experience. As you scale digital efforts, don’t neglect IRL and interacting with your customers face to face.
2. I Don’t Think I Like ABO Testing
We switched to ABO for creative testing about two weeks ago. I don’t think I like it very much so far. I could see us switching back pretty soon. I used to love looking into the account a few days after a test and see what Meta has decided to put spend on. I no longer get that signal and it was one of my favorite once. I now have to purely look at efficiency metrics, which only tells one side of the story. I also don’t like how we automatically spend the same even if it’s performing terrible, thus harming overall efficiency. Plus if it’s performing well now, because the budget is spread evenly, it’s not getting as much spend as it would in a CB0. So I can either scale it and just hope it has enough data, or keep sprinting on it in ABO and let it get more data which takes time.
Plus, I haven’t found it to help with false negatives. We had a few ads we were very excited about in CBOs that we then forced spend to in ABOs. They did not do well at all.
I may give this another week and then it’s likely back to CBOs. Might even test in ASC again.
The only place where I want to force spend is in wildly net new creatives that are intended to resonate with new audiences. I could see a world where we give them a minimum spend in a CBO.
Always curious and testing. Never dogmatic.
3. Don’t Generalize Test Results
I think you should be very careful about generating test results from other brands and blindly adopting them. That’s why I hate how most brands do creative strategy; by simply looking at what other brands are doing and adapting it to them.
For example, we’ve had no lift on many “best practices” CRO tests. I think a lot of these things would be deemed no-brainers. But because we have a lot of traffic I wanted to gets them before going live and we saw either no results or a negative lift even.
It’s not the worst to see what others are doing and try to use it as inspiration. But please, test everything for your brand.
Jones Road has found a lot of success with Pinterest. I’m sure since talking about it on the podcast, other brands have launched there. The smart brands like Ridge are going to test it with a holdout. But many brands are going to blindly launch it because I said it worked for us, and that is a mistake.
Spend less time looking at competitors and seeing what others are doing in the space, and more time talking to your customers and testing things for your brand based on hypotheses and trends from your data.
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Enjoy the last few hours of the weekend and have a great week ahead!
-Cody