Six months of learning, six months of opportunity!

Here we are, half way through the year!

That means you have a whole six months of experience and learnings from 2024 under your belt, and a whole six months of opportunity ahead.

Good times!

Depending on the type of e-commerce business you’re working in, the second half of the year is potentially going to be livelier than the first. Competition begins to hot up as autumn arrives, but the opportunities for short term and long term growth are huge, so getting your campaigns fully optimised is critical for a strong end of year, and laying the foundations for 2025’s growth.

This is a great time to review whether you could get a bit punchier on some key KPIs in your campaigns. What could you do to push up your click thru rate? How could you increase your average order value? What opportunities are there to go bigger on your website conversion rate?

Every metric that you push in the right direction will contribute to better returns, giving you more freedom to open up your campaigns and see the growth you deserve.

At this opportunistic time of year, what learnings should you be taking from your campaigns to date? Here are our top 8 areas to review: 

1. What platforms are working best for you? Simply, you should be planning for more of your budget to go to the platform(s) which work hardest for you. However, be careful not to tear a hole in your funnel. If you know that Meta converts at a lower rate, but drives a lot of warm traffic towards Google, don’t starve Meta!

2. What ads have worked so far in 2024? This is the perfect time for a review of all ad performance over the last six months, and to pull out the elements which have been consistent winners. If you’re testing regularly you should be able to identify your golden creative, copy, headlines, CTAs etc, from which you can create even harder working ads for Q3 and Q4.

3. What are your customers buying? Increase your average order value, and you’ll increase your income. What products have customers bought together this year? What upsells have worked? Are there opportunities for ‘bundling’ offers later in the year to push up your AOV? Have you tested moving your free delivery threshold to increase cart value?

4. Which campaigns are you looking to scale? Not that we’d ever call any of the platforms touchy (ahem!) but some campaigns are more tolerant to scaling spend than others, and you’ll want to have an idea of how they’ll respond if you turn things up in the autumn. From our experience, relatively low spend ASC campaigns can be a bit more precious when you knock spend up, and prefer to go very gently, gently, whereas the higher spend campaigns are happier with the bigger jumps. How have yours fared so far this year when you’ve increased spend?

5. Who is buying from you? Do your ads speak to your audience (want to read more on this? Check out Crafting ads that speak to your audience)? Review your customer data from the last six months to see just who is buying your products. If you’re talking to one demographic, but actually your product is appealing to a different one, a change in your messaging could really bump up your campaign performance.

6. What offers are you going to be running, and when? Obviously Black Friday looms large through Q4, but it’s not the only opportunity to see a spike in new customers using an offer. A September offer can bring in much cheaper returns than Black Friday / Cyber Monday, and can also help build audiences for the big one. Go further back than six months for this one and review which offers, at what times, have brought you the highest volume of sales, and the best returns.

7. Which landing pages are converting best? Have you tested whether you get a better conversion rate by running ads direct to a product, to an all products page, or an information landing page, such as a blog? Understanding what landing pages work best at what part of your funnel will help push up your conversion rate.

8. Finally, away from ads, how much are you doing with your existing customer data? You can expect ads to do the most challenging job of bringing in new customers, but once you have them under your wing you’ll want to drop them into your email (in particular) flows to turn them into regular customers or subscribers. Ads will certainly support re-targeting existing customers, but your costs will come down if your Klaviyo is fully optimised.

Sometimes we can be so busy looking ahead, that we forget to reflect on one of the most important assets of the business, our experiences and learning to date.