What I learned from my first Black Week

What did I really learn during the most stressful week of ecom?

Half a week before Black Week started, we changed our marketing spend strategy drastically. And I was in charge. 

The strategy before Black Week, that being almost the entire November and weeks before that, had been to buy as much relevant traffic as possible to our ecom sites. So that we, when Black Week click prices went up, could buy them for less, as we've already had bought them before. Building something up from the start takes much more energy (cost) than to continue on something you've already started. So we went bold with our marketing spend and bought a lot the weeks before Black Week. 

Half a week before Black Week was about to start, the 22nd November, suddenly it became really important to reach the company's COS targets, which weren't compatible to the previously agreed and executed strategy. So we had to pivot. Fast. 

And suddenly I, without previous experience of economy apart from my own was in charge of informing my team members on how much we can spend to downsize and reach November month's COS target. Let me remind you, this was the 22nd November. More than half of the month had gone but still we had to push it our best to try to reach the COS Target that has been set out for the month. 

Learnings

1. We learned that we can downscale Facebook spend the quickest of them all
2. We learned that we cannot decrease more than 40% of the FB spend (or making more than 40% of change within a campaign), otherwise, the Facebook Algorithms will be sent into the re-learning phase.
3. I learned to create a run-rate sheet that estimates what the marketing costs will be for that day
4. I learned that costs consists of fixed costs and variable costs and that fixed costs, as the name implies, are things that are fixed per month (e.g. consultants, tools etc) and that variable costs is the costs that changes per day, for example FB Ad Spend.
5. I learned that we have a difference between the number of sessions I see within Funnel and our internal PowerBI tool
6. I learned that the most hectic period where people are the most stressed, nervous and anxious is before Black Week. During Black Week it's actually surprisingly calm.
7. I learned that usually everything isn't perfect