How the leading DTC brands are leveraging Rockerbox to understand the changes to marketing and user behavior during BFCM/Holiday

We all know that holiday, and specifically BFCM (Black Friday Cyber Monday) is the most important time period for most ecommerce brands

And while everyone closely tracks their CPA and ROAS, many forget to factor in broader changes to user behavior and marketing channel mix.

Ranging from changes to:

• Time to conversion (due to discounting and seasonality)
• Path to conversion due to marketing mix and branding heavy ups
• Impact of different changes in funnel position changes due to more users in-market

Rockerbox clients are able to answer these questions and derive a much wider set of insights on how user behavior and marketing performance varies during this time.

Here’s just some of the key questions they were able to answer leveraging Rockerbox, and the resulting insights:

Key Questions:

Marketing Performance:

• Impact to CPA- how did CPA change due to heavy discounting coupled with increased spend (and mitigating against diminishing returns)?
• Impact of discounting- if used different discounts across channels, did that change the improvement on CPA of each channel?

User Behavior:

• Changes to path to conversion- were users taking more vs less time to convert and interacting with different marketing touchpoints?
• Impact to marketing mix- were users converting from different channels? 
• Impact to top and bottom funnel- are users entering the funnel from different channels?
• Impact of branding heavy ups- did it result in users entering the funnel from different channels (first touch) vs converting from different channels (last touch)?

Example Resulting Insights:

Impact to Share of Conversions by Channel

• Combination of heavy-up to branding channels (OTT, Video) and discounting across all channels directly pulled conversions from steady-state bottom funnel channels with evergreen discount offers (like Customer Referral and Email)
• Increase in conversion share was directly proportionate to heavy-up in spend

Impact to Top of Funnel and First Touchpoint in Path to Conversion

• Activating video for the first time during BFCM and heaving up OTT performance shifted where users were first discovering the brand and increasing the top of funnel
• Whereas pre-BFCM, first touchpoint was primarily across Paid Search and Paid Social.
• And instead during BFCM, Paid Search, Paid Social, and Paid Shopping all became more prominent mid and bottom funnel touchpoints 

Impact to Path to Conversion and Time to Convert

• Thanks to a once-a-year 10% discount, and the broader shift in buying behavior, users converted 62% faster than October.
• However, even prior to BFCM in Nov, users were already converting faster just by the nature of the holiday season