Market Insights and Future Predictions!: April State of the Industry

[00:00:00] Taylor: Welcome back to another state of the e commerce industry report. I am here with the provisioners of the incredible data that we look at to try to make sense of the macro environment in which we all are doing business. I'm joined as always by Jeremiah. For the CEO and founder of no commerce yard and CEO, founder of Veros and Steve recook, who is today in his vest. That means he means business. He is senior data analyst here at common thread collective. Gentlemen. Good to have you back. Anything new going on in your worlds that you want to share right off the bat or should we just jump right into the data, Jeremiah, how are you feeling about the nuggets so far?

It's been rough for you. You've gotten real quiet on Twitter.

[00:00:39] Jeremiah: Yeah, I, I still have hope they can come back to be clear. I've seen them come back from being down 3 1 in two series in the same playoff run. So, you never know, but anyway, it's good to see you all happy to kind of dive in on

 And I hope, I'm hoping that Jeremiah's illogical connection to his love for the nuggets doesn't undermine his data authority, but we are excited to dive in today. We have some exciting stuff because each month when we get together, we are. It's fun to open the spreadsheet, see everybody's data and start to begin to construct the narrative based on what we're seeing. And we all obviously walk in with our sort of experiential anecdotes what we've been hearing in the market, what we've seen, and there's been a lot of news, actually, maybe not the sort of travesty that was the alleged meta issues in the previous periods, but we just watched Shopify stock get crushed.

[00:01:30] Taylor: Meta stock get crushed. There's a lot of suspicion about the future in our space. And so we're excited to discuss that today. And one of the things that we wanted to start with was we wanted to always explore the share of wallet data that we see for media spend, as well as the overall performance of brands in our space.

And for that, we use Veros data. So Yarden, why don't you first remind us again, who is Veros? What is the data you're sitting on? And then let's dive a little bit into first, if you could tell us about overall store performance in the Shopify ecosystem, and then let's get into the share of wallet conversation.

[00:02:04] Yarden Shaked - Varos: Yeah, so, basically Vero's is a platform that brands used to benchmark their digital marketing and you know, revenue performance against other brands in their category and understand real time market trends. so we have 6, 000 brands using Verus about 6 billion of ad spend annually and 20 billion of revenue.

This is all anonymized aggregated first party data. So it's very, so it's very clean. And then going into April's performance. Revenue still putting up. Big numbers. Interesting trends is eight and nine figure brands accelerated in April. So last month they were up 18 percent year over year.

And in April, they were up 28% year over year again, same trend that most of that growth. Is coming from repeat revenue. So 43 percent growth on the repeat revenue side and 9 percent growth on the new revenue side, or seven figure brands Decelerated a bit going from mid forties last month to up 27%. This month also mainly from repeat revenue, but a little less of it's a little less significant in the, in the, in the magnitude of it. And then from a, from an ad performance side of things again, similar as trends, I mean, meta spend decelerated a bit but still up 17 percent year over year, but, but definitely down from, you know, the Q1 trends that we see and CPM and ROAS relatively flat ROAS is up a bit Google for the first time search in a while had spend increase actually and row as is, is down a bit and TikTok had a great month in terms of year over year row as percentage that's also partially because April was just a abysmal month, April, 2023 was abysmal month last year for TikTok so, for April, 2024, that year over year data is nearly double the row as of what they were seeing a year before.

[00:04:07] Taylor: So a lot there, we're going to dive in to break it all down. First, let's talk about the revenue growth for stores. So we you mentioned that we are seeing strong growth specifically coming out of the larger stores. And one of the things that happened this, this week was Shopify. their earnings in Q1, their stock got pummeled because investors didn't like the guidance that they gave around future earnings.

But it was around, I believe the number that they gave for Q2. Let me make sure that I'm referencing. It was low to mid 20 percent range in Q2. So that maps pretty consistently with what we're seeing on your side as well. Right.

[00:04:42] Yarden Shaked - Varos: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 27 and 28 percent for seven figure and eight or nine figures.

[00:04:47] Taylor: So while the market may not like that from a high growth standpoint, what I see and what I feel is that we are seeing a consistent pattern of stability, almost 20 ish percent growth for stores. And we've seen this now for a couple of months in a row where we're in this range eight figure stores were a little lower than that, but this is a really solid month.

And so maybe there's just this sort of like level setting relative to the expectation of what these This environment and consumer product is going to yield for us going forward. How do you feel about what we've seen on the trend for growth in the industry? And how confident do you feel about it going forward?

[00:05:20] Yarden Shaked - Varos: Yeah. I think that that's that's a good way to look at it. I'm curious. Maybe the Shopify team is seeing a similar, trend on the repeat purchase side and they're forecasting that that is going to catch up. at some point and then cause the overall revenue to start decelerating past that you know, 20, 30, 40 percent year over year growth. so I, I think that's the one, like the question is, are they, you know, is, is 25 percent of the new normal or is 25 percent this like synthetic number that in reality, you know, the, the, the numbers underlying it for new customer growth is going to start. Going down and down and down. So I think that's the that's the big question.

What we're worrying about.

[00:06:08] Taylor: So maybe Steve, we're going to jump to you. We were going to do this in a different order, but I think this is an important setup where. We have seen this pattern where if we look at growth between new versus returning customers, we are seeing stronger growth out of returning customer volume, then new customer volume. And this tends to be, we've used the phrase before canary in the coal mine to a little bit of a concern about the future, that if new customer growth doesn't maintain pace, that eventually that's sort of a leading indicator to what will be a lag in returning customer revenue. But what are you seeing on the new customer acquisition efficiency and new customer growth front.

On our data.

[00:06:45] Steven Rekuc: so what I looked at actually was a. The percentage of meta reported revenue, that is like, if you take meta and. That the revenue they're, they're getting a tribute on seven day. And then look at that as a percentage of new customer revenue. Obviously you want to the majority of brands and basically all brands are trying to use meta to drive new customer growth. you, you would hope that as you're increasing reported revenue from, from meta, that you would also be proportionally increasing the new customer revenue should go hand in hand. we actually saw was since the introduction of Advantage Plus in August of 2022, we've actually seen an increase of meta reported revenue faster than new customer growth. So metas was grabbing a larger share, either grabbing a larger share of new customer revenue, you're grabbing more organic, know, customers that would have converted organically, or you're grabbing More repeat customers that were going to come back anyway, but Meta is just taking credit for them now. And I think it's probably more that, that ladder.

[00:07:57] Taylor: So this is such a report important graphic for people to really, I think, linger on when they get this month's edition is to look at this, to look at how much revenue meta's reporting versus the trend of new customer revenue growth. And if we think about the structural setup of ASC, this is really important. Is that historically, the way that you would think about exclusions in your campaign would be. There was an opportunity to add the audience that you wanted to target. And then an opportunity to add the audience that you exclusively didn't want to target. And you could build everything from a website visitors to lists of customers for different period to engage viewers, to all sorts of different exclusions that people would try and layer on there to really ruthlessly exclude existing customers. And now that happens where meta says, okay, at the account level, What is you want to list as your, your audience exclusion. And then on ASC, you get to toggle to a percentage of the spend that you want on new versus returning customers. So people will, one, I think there's sort of this ambiguity of like, Oh, what should I set this at?

Should it be five? Should it be 10? Should it be 20? And meta will give guidance of, you know, doing it 10 to 15%. So just in that one change, they went from hard excluding all existing customers to introducing a percentage back in. And then there's this little insidious feature where they tell you that the 10 percent relates to the budget that you set.

So let's say you said a 10, 000 daily budget, and you say 10%. That means they can spend up to a thousand dollars on returning customers. if you're running cost controls as an example, and the budget only spends 2, 000 that day, a thousand of it could still be spent on returning customer revenue, which really means 50 percent of your daily budget is now under those returning customers. So there's these little mechanics by which. Especially on a seven day click one day view, there's an incentive for meta to put their ads in front of the customers that they know are most likely to repurchase, which is in many cases, the existing customers. And so we're seeing this like fracture between a real consistent relationship between new customer acquisition and meta at revenue.

And now those things are starting to bifurcate a little bit.

[00:10:05] Steven Rekuc: That's right. And that's also why I think we've seen a drop in efficiency lower AMER uh, year over year consistently. And it looks like we've, that trend is kind of reversed a little bit since February. We're finally seeing a little bit more. The drop in Meta reported Reddit Meta attributed revenue. Dropping that with respect to new customers, and at the same time, we're seeing an increase in acquisition marketing efficiency ratio a M. E. R.

[00:10:32] Taylor: Yeah. because this is our data set, I can say that internally at CTC, there's like A movement away from a SC because of this. There is a, there's a growing contingent that's interested in BAU because of this lack of battling over their return customer revenue. And so more and more our media buyers in particular are pressing and pushing to move out of a SC structures because of this conflict. And also we've seen a lot of incrementality tests through partners like House and Measured that we work with, with customers, where oftentimes A SC is not as incremental as BAU in some cases. A again. These are not, I'm not ready to say that this is like a large data set that we've analyzed in some detail, but I know that there is a narrative movement, a way of this, and a lot of it has to do with so often we're trying to drive AMER, new customer revenue, and there's a challenge in that process.

[00:11:17] Steven Rekuc: That's right.

[00:11:18] Taylor: So, so with this though, the other corresponding really interesting item though, is that. The meta marketing machine doing a great job of getting adoption of ASC. when we look at the share of wallet, the corresponding problem here is that ASC utilization, generally not inside of CTC, as I'm referencing in the last few weeks. But over the last year is growing and it is really doing a great job of capturing some demand. So Yarden, this sets up our next conversation, which is about advertising share of wallet and some of the big industry changes that are sort of happening underneath our feet. So why don't you give us a little bit of the view into April's share of wallet, and then some of the trends that we've been seeing over the last year, as it relates to both advantage plus and P max, and then meta and Google generally.

[00:12:04] Yarden Shaked - Varos: Yeah, sure. So yeah, for this issue, I mean, we built a bunch of share wallet views to analyze all this within Vero. So, there's, there's a few different things going on. So, first of all from a high level, I mean, meta. In 2024 has been really growing share wallet as related to what it has spent compared to Google and to tick tock just to put some numbers around that. I mean, tick tock is, is, is. hovering around four or five, percent. And then Google if we take, you know, p max and non p max together is around between you know, 15 to 20% usually and then, you know, meta takes meta takes the rest so you know, nearly you know, 75 to 80 percent of, of shared wallet.

So, so they are. The, the behemoth here for sure. And I, you know, it's something that we're seeing is a trend that continues to grow, but we did want to take layer deeper in terms of what is going on, you know, both Google and meta they're pushing as much as they can P max and advantage plus, and so what is the adoption there. So the, the interesting thing about the adoption is As a percent of of the total spend that's going on from each platform, so MetaSpend and then AdvantagePlus MetaSpend and GoogleSpend and PMAX within, within that they both hover around a third of the spend and And, you know, MetaAdvantage Plus since the start of the year has been growing, you know, from uh, 32 to 36%, you know, which we're looking at a lot of spend.

So, so it is significant and Google in that time has come down from that same 36 mark down to 33, 34, but, but they're, they're generally similar. The most interesting thing that's going on is I'd say a couple of things for around a year now or half a year, they haven't been able to scale past that third.

So, we're not seeing it get near that, you know, 50 percent mark or more in terms of adoption in e commerce. And the other thing is that what we're seeing is in PMAX. It's basically advertisers are taking their current spend that they have in Google and putting a portion in PMAX. So, Google as a whole is, you know, somewhat stable in terms of share wallet, it's down, but that's because meta spend is up. But it's really that PMAX is taking share from search and from the other main Google channels where in meta, it's not the story. In meta advantage plus spend is growing. So there, you know, I nearly 34 35 percent of meta spend, but meta non advantage plus is also growing and that is constantly taking share a wallet in 2024.

So meta has been able to figure out a way to scale both of those where Google it's basically holding that same pie and you know, eating into it with the PMAX spend.

[00:15:10] Taylor: So I think that this is like, we need people need to anchor in this. And I think if you are, especially, I would say if you are finance crowd, maybe the investment crowd, I think this is like one of the bigger stories underlying the ad ecosystem in our world right now is that if you look at the net change, okay.

Meaning the amount of Delta between. Facebook's gain and uh, Google's loss of share of wallet between May of 23 and May of 24, you're talking about an almost 20 percent change in Meta's favor. And almost all of that is coming out of Google. Which is the, really the only other subsequent player in the space, like TikTok and Pinterest and YouTube.

They're all tiny players as it relates to the share of wallet. And it's happening because the one ad product of all of these that's gaining share of wallet significantly is advantage plus inside of meta. Like if you look at the trend line for meta, non advantage, plus it's basically flat. You look at Google P max, its share of wallet is basically flat. But what's happening is Google non PMAX is declining and meta advantage plus is growing. And so meta is capturing more like in may, if you just look at the comparison against Google meta and Tik TOK, just those three, like Google's up over 80 or meta's up over 80 percent of share of wallet, that's like an exorbitant amount. And so I think this is really. And this matches, I have a bunch of tweets. Like I went back and look, cause I, I, this is a thing I've been seeing on our customer side for a long time, April 8th, all the data I'm seeing is that Google is losing share of wallet. P max is a disaster for them. April 9th, a couple of Google spend declined data references.

This is from there. I was from North beam. There's a bunch of places where it is clear to me that our customers and the people using these products, they're being pushed to P max. So P max is becoming more of the ad account. But people don't know what to do with it. And that the incrementality results that I'm seeing for them are not good. And this has really become a problematic issue for people wanting to allocate more dollars into Google. And so they're moving away from it and opportunistically. Meta's advantage plus grabbing and displaying more impact because again, it's pulling the returning customer revenues. Rojas is looking good there and they're selling this Rojas.

Like the big study that meta went out with is that across all our brands, ASC has a better Ross than BAU. it's like, okay, that's a great marketing statement, but, but, but, but we're saying it might be, might not actually be in the best interest of people. So really fascinating shifts in the share of wallet right now.

And Google's got to figure out the marketing relationship and product clarity as it relates to PMAX.

[00:17:54] Jeremiah: one, one interesting point too. So this is on the, the. Self reported attribution side of things. We look at a bunch of different trends. So the question, how did you first hear about us was answered about 16 million times on our platform last year. And so we have a bunch of different data that we look at.

The, this does not necessarily indicate the impact of paid, but what is really interesting cause it's kind of hard to distinguish paid versus organic oftentimes, but we actually see in terms of people self reporting that they discovered a brand on Google. We actually saw a significant rise last year as all of this was rolling out.

So I'm looking at the numbers here Q1 around 6 percent of, if you kind of dive down to pay channels, so excluding. organic like word of mouth and some of those things. And Google drove about six and a half 7 percent of impact in Q1 and by Q3 and Q4, Q3 and Q4, it was about nine and a half percent.

So it was a pretty massive increase in the number of people reporting what they're finding brands on Google. And another thing that's interesting is we look at the time to purchase. And so that's another question that we ask is how long did you know about this product or know about our brand before purchasing?

And Google is one that happens very quickly. So I wouldn't necessarily expect a time delay on that to have the same sort of impact that it could on something like a TikTok or a YouTube. So I do think that's really interesting data. I don't know what that means if people are pulling out of the paid ad side and or I mean, honestly, the, the real impact of Google is organic search.

I think that's where Google is so powerful. And so, I don't know that, that, that, that necessarily says much about the paid environment, but it is interesting to see it's driving a lot of impact. Perhaps it's just on the organic side, but there's something happening here where. The, the total impact of, of Google driving discovery is a bit mismatched with at least on the soft report side, a bit mismatched with what we're seeing from the ad spend side of things.

[00:19:50] Yarden Shaked - Varos: Yeah,

it's worth noting, like, I think we forget a lot that like when, when, when we hear things and social media and people going back and forth, it's not 50 50 meta Google and Tick Tock does not have a huge shot. I mean, Tick Tock is right now sub 5 percent of what we're seeing. YouTube is 1%. Pmax is, is small. I mean, so Pmax is, let's say a third of Google's 15, 5%, Like these are all small, small, small things. And the trend is actually the opposite way. Like the trend is going more towards meta in 2024, where people are going more towards what they know. So I, I think we need to remember that, like it's probably too much time is These tiny channels and they're not necessarily we would have thought that they're like scaling like crazy. And yeah, advantage plus is, is scaling. Sure. But, but so is, so is meta. And it's really kind of like between between the two and the other are really small fish. And that's not to say that money can't be made there and, and it can't be efficient. It definitely could, but. I think we just, we need to always remind ourselves of the scale of, of these things by the numbers,

[00:21:10] Taylor: Yeah. And this is why I think this behavioral data is so much more important to anchor yourself to then what are people talking about on the podcasts? Like this morning I was listening to a podcast with a brand that's awesome. And they were talking about this like internal initiative to move away from meta and diversify.

And this is like a very common swan song. Like you hear everybody talk about this if it's a song. It was happening broadly. Like you, the way you hear these narratives, you would assume that these percentages were moving the opposite direction, but it is not, it is really important to like, take the things people are telling you publicly, and then go look at the data and realize that the share of wallet is moving towards meta and there are all sorts of reasons why, but like that is the actual behavioral trend is that even the behemoth is continuing to capture more of the present share of wallet.

[00:21:59] Yarden Shaked - Varos: Yeah.

[00:22:00] Taylor: So whether that poses consolidation risk or not for brands, I think is an interesting conversation. And one that I get why people would discuss it. But the reality is, is that like, it's just a matter of the functional benefit or the financial benefit of moving the dollar somewhere else. You, you can't diversify for the sake of a loss.

Like it just, it's not possible in an era where capital is not available. and so I think that's, it's really important. I think this is what we want to do in the DTCCI is to say like, Hey, I know people think I like work for meta or something, but I actually am agnostic to the platforms. I don't care. I just want to tell you though, that this is where people are spending their money.

That's, it's just the reality of

[00:22:38] Jeremiah: What one point on that though, if, if ASC is doing what we think it's doing, which is spending more on returning customers, the, the one caveat I would say there is in some regards then, and maybe it just comes down to knowing how to manage it better, but. It's, it's kind of just a tax on, on your returning customers.

I mean, and not to say like email and SMS and all those are kind of that way as well, right? Like you're basically, you have to pay something in order to, to reactivate these people. And so it's, or to activate these purchases. So I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing. That's just kind of part of the journey, but I do wonder how much of like to your point, more, more ad spend is going to the platform.

But if at the end of the day, the ad spend is just becoming less efficient for you. Over time, then it does make sense that why some brands would be looking at diversification. Yeah,

[00:23:30] Taylor: make sure that really what you're talking about is incrementality, a buzzword that everyone's super into these days, because you can't have an incremental purchase from an existing customer. Like that still is possible to generate, right? Just cause they were an existing customer.

It doesn't mean that they were automatically already going to come back through some other medium, but it is important to ensure that you are protecting against that. And I think view conversions are a big piece of this story. Like there's all sorts of parts of it that contribute, but yeah, people have to be clear with the utilization of the product.

But to me, what, what happens is that at the end of the day, what governs all of this is actually like dollars in your bank account. And. People, this is, this is like, I think with set aside all of the attribution layer of the entire universe and just say that if people didn't have more money to spend, money would move away from the things, right?

Like it's just, there is no more, there are no dollars to spend if dollars aren't being generated. And so what I tend to believe is that if you want the greatest attribution signal in the world, I actually think the share of all it is, it is, it tells you where the money gets made. And that you, if you follow that indication, you will find where people who have to make money, spend money. and that is the sort of end result of that reality.

[00:24:39] Yarden Shaked - Varos: Right. I will but Taylor to push on that though, I think that there is a, like, there can be phases where the money is, the money comes in more actually, when you bring in repeats. Customers. And then at some point, it turns on you, right? If there was fired all its employees tomorrow, we would get a lot more money in our bank account. But at some point, the thing would stop working and then no one would pay us anymore. Right? Like so. So there is there. There is that. And

[00:25:10] Taylor: That's cost cutting. That's not what, that's not what we're saying that what you just described is the wrong metaphor. That was cost cutting. This is revenue. The question is just revenue from who, and I think it's important. Like new customer revenue is up 9 percent year over year. It's not, it's not down now.

Returning customer revenue is up more. Now, one of the questions I have, and this is like, there's a. yeah, there's a maturity cycle question here, which is as brands get a larger percentage of their addressable market as people who are already customers, what tends to happen is the percentage of your revenue in every given period of time becomes more and more from existing customers than from new customers to the point that when you get to.

A giant retailer like Lululemon or and Taylor loft, like in any given period of time, like 85 percent of your revenue comes from people who are already customers. And so there's also a part of like the maturity phase of new DTC businesses that especially for those eight and nine figure brands, the reality is they have at this point, millions of customers. And so the pool changes and the product roadmap changes and things like that. So there is a part of that, that is natural, that I think that like, sure, we'd love to see a ton of new customer acquisition happening, but one, I like the idea of holding new customer acquisition constant and expanding your percentage of returning customer revenue over time. So 9 percent is like. I don't, I don't mind that. Now, again, we should, there can be ways that you bring revenue forward off that returning customer base that is challenging. But so there's a lot, there's a lot in the puzzle that you have to just be careful of ensuring you're not at the end of the day, what we're saying is don't spend money.

If it doesn't generate an incremental purchase now who that incremental purchase comes from, there's probably a hierarchy of where you would want it to be, but an incremental returning customer purchase is still new revenue. That's not the same as firing your employees.

[00:26:55] Yarden Shaked - Varos: Yeah. And

[00:26:57] Taylor: which I don't think I don't think you should do that.

You already know

[00:27:00] Yarden Shaked - Varos: matches up that larger brands are seeing, you know, higher percent of their growth, like way larger percent of their growth coming from repeat purchases than the smaller brands.

[00:27:10] Jeremiah: Taylor, I think that's a really good point and something that I haven't really been thinking about as we're looking at this data, but you should over time have a higher percentage of your revenue coming from returning customers unless you have a brand that nobody really wants.

[00:27:22] Taylor: Yeah, totally. And so much of this is like, there's different business models where again, the classic example, just because it is like, if you're selling Ridge wallets, it's very different every month. You have to go get a bunch of new customers. If you're selling, if you're Missouri quilt co, almost all of your is like the customers you already have, you're selling them more and more yarn over time.

Like, it's just, it's just different. Right. Okay. So with that, one of the other big things that we've been trying to keep an eye on is how these big cultural moments impact purchasing. We know that these seasonal highlights or peaks tend to drive disproportionate value capture for our customers. So we want to give them insights how into how these big consumer moments like Mother's Day and Father's Day are shaping up.

So Jeremiah, what have we seen as we know that April represented the Beginning of the period where we started marketing for mother's day. It's now two days away. Hopefully Jeremiah, you've gotten some gifts. You know, we know you struggled with that in the past, but hopefully you've gotten ahead of it this year, given the data that you had access to. But what did we see about mother's day? As we ended up wrapping up April,

[00:28:23] Jeremiah: Yeah. So, this year's looking different than last year, which is interesting because Valentine's Day looked exactly the same. But we are not seeing the same trends this year from Mother's Day as we did last year. So, in 2023 Mother's Day gifting really kicked off. In mid April in terms of the percentage of people buying gifts.

So what we look at is the question of who is this purchased for? And we're looking at about a half a million responses a month. In the context of that, then we look specifically at significant other as one of the recipients and a family member as a recipient. And so looking at those two things grouped together.

Last year we saw a big rise. Starting around April 20th and then really hitting peak. about April 25th, 26th and kind of holding study. It's interesting as this year we saw a steady rise from mid. And so the peak there was about 30 percent of purchases going towards Family member or significant other.

This year, though, we saw that rise start at around the same time, but it's been much slower. So it went from about 15 percent of purchases to about 20 percent that are going towards family members. So much lower than last year. So we'll have to see how that plays out for May. Is there a big jump and you know, the first two weeks of May leading into Mother's Day and did basically that delay just happen this year compared to last year?

But what is really interesting is AOV is up significantly. So last year during that time frame, we actually saw a slight drop in AOV. So those kind of early Mother's Day purchases were actually a little bit lower than average compared to a normal baseline. And this year it's gone up significantly.

So what it looks like is that people Are maybe not buying as maybe or not the shopping maybe didn't start as early, or it has started, but they're just buying more expensive gifts potentially. So there's a little bit of we just kind of have to, like, wait and see how this plays out. But what's really interesting is we've seen some pretty massive increases and so the typical is around 100 dollars, 110.

We have seen significant other AOVs hit 170 for the week of April 29th. Which is kind of wild. So, that's and that's a pretty good sample size. It's thousands of people that we're looking at there. So, not sure why it's looking different year over year, but there definitely is some difference there.

But yeah, we'll just have to kind of see one more quick thing on Mother's Day last year. We saw the peak hits a week before. So basically the Sunday Sunday before is when it started to drop. So about a week before Mother's Day. Is when the gifting dropped down and it still was at a fairly high level compared to average and then started immediately ramping back up towards Father's Day.

[00:31:04] Taylor: super interesting, hopefully All of you have taken our previous advice that there are still Mother's Day sales to be had all the way through Sunday. Get those digital coupons and things that you can show that it's on its way. You can manufacture a shipping delay. Maybe we could get a few brands to print out like, Sorry, we delayed your shipment.

It wasn't your spouse's fault. Fault emails or something signed up, but that demand should carry all the way through the final hours of the 12th. So those are the kinds of things we want you to take away from this. Terms of thinking about the actions, Steve, maybe as you're writing about this and thinking about this, what would you give people to do to think about this relationship between meta and ASC and new customer revenue?

What, what actions should they take in terms of thinking about how to Look at their own data and see if maybe some of the things that you're seeing are coming to life in their individual store.

[00:31:56] Steven Rekuc: Yeah, I would certainly consider taking a look at your, your growth in new customer revenue with respect to the growth in meta reported revenue. So if you're trying to, as you should be, use meta to drive new customer growth and meta reported revenue. And we typically recommend using a seven day click, one day view that is growing faster than your new customer revenue. you're either grabbing organic customers that would have converted anyway, organic new customers, or you're probably grabbing returning customers. I would see that that take a look at that growth as well. So the chart that I'm using actually is meta reported revenue versus new customer revenue.

And that's kind of a really good signal to take a look at.

[00:32:43] Taylor: One of the things that we try and do with every customer is pull one day, click seven day, click one day, click one day view seven day, click one day view reported revenue and run a correlation between that and new customer revenue. And just to try and find for yourself, the strongest relationship, if your goal is, To create a relationship between those things.

If what you want is to have meta drive new customer revenue, then we should assess how well it's currently doing that. And the reason we use those the end of the day, you have to pick an optimization setting, and those are the only four that you get to choose from. And so at some point you have to make a selection. This is distinct from attribution. This is about optimization. You have to select which we'd like to optimize for. And so make being, for example, a Conscious about why you made the choice that you made related to the business objective that you have. And maybe your business objective is bigger than new customer revenue, in which case don't do that.

Look at it against total revenue or whatever factor you're trying to create. But understanding that relationship is important because I think in all these cases, and I'll even say this for PMAX is that. I think there are ways in which you can bend and shape and merge the product into alignment with your business strategy, in both cases, but it requires intention and thoughtfulness and clarity of what you want the product to do. And I think right now the default settings might be at conflict with some of those goals and that it's our job as marketers to understand all the features and benefits to be able to bend it to our will. Yarden, Jeremiah, anything else to leave us with as we reflect back on the month of April?

[00:34:11] Yarden Shaked - Varos: I did want to hear about a consumer confidence. Do we have anything there? I actually this morning sat and read the, the government report. So I wanted to know if Steve had any, any thoughts there and how it correlates to the main one.

[00:34:26] Steven Rekuc: Yeah, I did not read that report this morning. Unfortunately but we kind of see the trend of the sentiment about the economy kind of dropped a little bit this month. We're still relatively high. It's still, I think, the fourth highest month we've had since we started the survey last March. We've been up, but it did drop down.

I think some of the numbers that we saw that were reported in April the CPI rising I think we talked about it on the last podcast, kind of, because that just happened. That kind of negatively impacted consumers view of the economy and I thought that view of the economy actually jumped ahead of what we saw happening in the stock market.

Like, we've seen a bigger drop in the sentiment. About the economy than we did in the stocks, and they've kind of been correlated around a 0. 9 percent or 0. 9. In as a piercing correlation coefficient, so that might actually, there still might be more to happen respect to that.

[00:35:27] Taylor: Yeah, and that maps, so the, the Michigan's consumer confidence fell further in May. They had an initially a pretty high expectation, 76 on their scale, and it fell to 67. So it does feel like some of these whether it's the inflation numbers or the, the lack of sort of obvious interest rate cuts and, General sentiment is still choppy.

I don't know that there's a lot of great indications that we have a super bullish narrative, but again, for us, that's showing up as 15 to 25 percent growth. So what we need to do is we need to make sure that our expectations are calibrated. That's the word I'm looking for to an expectation that sits in that range. I think it can continues to be possible and consistent with the data that we're seeing. But yeah, consumers are a little, they're a little bit suspect right now.

[00:36:10] Jeremiah: Yeah. One thing that I just wanted to say too is like, it's it's up, so like we, we saw a pretty good upward trend for about six months from, you know, last fall to the spring. And then now it feels fairly flat. And so it's, it's not like it's going down, but it's also not going off. It's just as I don't know.

I feel like it fits.

[00:36:30] Taylor: We're chopping along. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:36:32] Jeremiah: Yeah. And I would say my personal sentiment is like that too, right? Like I I'm looking at stocks and like, do I want to invest in stocks? I don't think I do. Like there's, there's not like a, there's nothing that feels great, but also nothing feels terrible right now.

[00:36:43] Steven Rekuc: The

[00:36:47] Taylor: what we got to get ourselves to is like, you know what, you know, what's nice, the sameness for a bit would be kind of, kind of be all right. I I'm okay with it. No more hysteria in either direction seems, seems all right with me.

[00:36:58] Yarden Shaked - Varos: I, I'm, I'm waiting for, for a hit and start recovering. I don't like this in between phase. No one knows. It's been, it's been too long and too, too, too shaky.

[00:37:10] Jeremiah: Yeah.

[00:37:10] Taylor: that's only because everybody logs into Veros when hell breaks loose. So that's what, that's what you're looking for. 

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