Aaron Conant 0:18

Happy Monday, everybody. Hope everybody's holiday season's been off to a great start. My name is Aaron Conant, I'm the Co-founder and Managing Director here at BWG Connect. We're a networking and knowledge sharing group 1000s of brands, you know, but other people in your organization know about it. Or if you have other friends in the digital space, you know, I'm always happy to jump on the phone and connect with anybody on my site as well. I connect with about 30 brands a week to stay on top of the newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it is, that's shaping the digital landscape. And it's out of those conversations that we get the topics for calls. But also, you know, we're leveraging, you know, the brands of the network to kind of make recommendations across the board on who's winning the space, and who are the best partners. And so that's where we get our resident expert. So if you're looking for, you know, contacts, if you need any help or service providers across the digital landscape, don't ever hesitate to reach out, just shoot us a quick note, we've got a short list of the the top recommended service providers from across the network and the 1000s of brands in it that participate, you know, and that's everything from Amazon, and Amazon advertising to direct consumer or drop shipping or international expansion or, you know, SEO, you know, performance marketing, whatever it might be. So we try to stay on top of the newest trends, cool things that we get started here. If you have any questions along the way, we want this to be as educational and informational as possible. So at any point in time, if you have a question, just drop into the chat drop into the question section there. Or you can always email me aaron@bwgconnect.com. And for that, you know, we'll answer those as real time, you know, but even an hour after the call tomorrow, next week, you have a question in the digital space, you need a recommendation or just want, you know, some topical information. That's what's going on, just shoot me a note, we'll put some time on the calendar connect. So as I kick off this conversation today, the last thing I want to remind you is like we're starting three to four minutes after the hour, we're going to wrap up with three to four minutes to go in the hour, at least, we're gonna give you plenty of time to get on your next meeting without being late. So probably about 225 26 Eastern time, we're gonna wrap this up. So I was just mentioning to Joseph that, you know, for Perpetua other great friends, partners, supporters, the network for years now. You know, it looking back a couple years, our the data was something people wanted all the time. And now it's starting to become a reality as a whole. And so, you know, we just asked them to jump on here, what are they seen in the space, the newest updates? But also Hey, can you answer any questions that we might throw at you along the way? So don't hesitate to drop the questions. But just I want to kick it over to you. If you want to do a brief intro on yourself and Perpetua. That'd be awesome. And we can kind of jump into the content sound good?

Joseph La Selva 3:01

Yeah, sounds great. And I think you're exactly right. hourly data has been something that has been asked for for a very long time. And it's, it's it's very topical, from the standpoint of retail media has just exploded overall. And Amazon has, has always kind of been the crown jewel of retail media, but everybody else is launching their own retail media networks as well, whether it's doing so independently or in partnerships with other companies. And it almost felt like for a little while Amazon was everybody's kind of waiting for what was next for Amazon. And I think that the move to hourly data here is really going to set not only set them apart from an enablement standpoint and how they enable their advertisers, but also any of the software providers that also help to enable those advertisers. And we'll get into that very shortly. So a little bit about who we are. So very quickly, give some insight as to who Perpetuas is as an organization, and why should we even be topic talking on this on this topic. And so, you know, our mission is to build growth infrastructure for eCommerce that gives anyone who sells online superpowers. And so, you know, we started off primarily serving Amazon advertisers, we've expanded to a number of different marketplaces. And we'll continue to do so until we really live in the entire world of retail media and then broader eCommerce, growth infrastructure. We were recently acquired in April of this year, April 2021. We were required by essentially to be part of their digital commerce portfolio of brands you may be familiar with, with brands within that portfolio, you may work with some of those companies within the portfolio. And you know, one thing that we really like to share on how we set ourselves apart in this in this competitive landscape is our exec team comes from building incredibly easy to use yet sophisticated software platforms to deal with If you look at our leadership group, our founder and CEO Roscoe Hill was an early Palantir employee, He also founded a FinTech company called blend, which recently went public a few months ago. And then we have leadership from a number of other consumer software companies and enterprise software companies like Google, Amazon and a number of others. So that's really how we talk about how we differentiate ourselves. For anyone who's been doing these calls with us for for a while, and has heard me speak before I remember when we had a similar slide before that said, a team of I think 25 Plus globally, and that was only it really felt like only 18 months to 24 months ago, it said that, but now a team of plus 100. Globally, we have offices in Canada in the US, China, Japan, Europe in the UK, a few other different places quickly expanding and so rapidly serving the entire global market, as well. And so So why are we talking talking about this topic? Why is hourly as data relevant to Perpetua because the problem that we're solving is connecting the dots between strategy, tactics and performance for anybody who advertises through retail media networks. So kind of the main concept. And the main idea is that by using the tools solely available to advertisers through these retail media platforms, you can't coherently connect strategy, tactics and performance. Take, take a strategy, as simple as I want to ensure that every time someone searches my brand name, you know, my my products show up in all of the sponsored placement above the fold, that could be your strategy, there is no tactical way to to execute against that strategy, within any retail media ad console. Unless you are, you know, you know, maybe you select all your branded keywords, and you select your, what you believe are the optimal bid prices and try and tweak them from there. And then from a performance standpoint, you're only going to get metrics, like sales and eight costs, and you're not actually gonna get the metrics. They're telling you whether or not you're achieving that strategy. And so we're really hyper hyper focused on being able to close the loop between strategy tactics and performance. That was always the case even when we were only serving Amazon advertisers. But it has become increasingly important as not only are there a number of ad units on Amazon. But now we also serve a number of different marketplaces as well. And so you want to be able to connect the dots in a complementary manner across Amazon, Instacart, Target, Walmart, whatever, whatever other marketplaces you may be advertising on. So that's really where Perpetua is focused in terms of the problems that we solve for advertisers. And so a critical component of being able to coherently connect those dots is, is getting insight into hourly data.

So, in this format, I guess this question doesn't really work. So well, it's I can't see any hands. I can't see anybody's faces who are nodding. But I'm just going to assume many of you have heard of de partie. And for those of you who haven't, or who need a refresher de partings, a tactic, it says specific to PPC bid prices, but de partie has been a useful tool in programmatic advertising for a very long time as well. But a tactic in which you turn on or off or increase or decrease your bid prices based on time of day or day of week. And in reality, day parting serves the idea of trying to hack growth based on based on time of day. And this chart is really why de partie exists. The two metrics at this chart focuses on our traffic and sales. And as you can see, throughout the day, you have significant ebbs and flows in your traffic and in your sales. But there's also a number of other metrics that tell a deeper story that can strongly inform your day parting strategy, and advertisers trying to execute against day parting. It's as it's not new, been it's been happening for a really long time. And so why why is a party important? Why do advertisers want to de Park? Well, the auction dynamics and we're talking specifically about Amazon today, the auction dynamics changed dramatically throughout the day. So in the last chart, I showed, you know, traffic changes throughout the day, there's clearly periods during the day where there's more traffic on Amazon, then there is and other times of the day, and those might be different based on the categories that you operate in and the search terms that are most important. I mean, even if you if, if you're familiar with early Amazon learnings, when they were even just starting off as a company, you know, they saw a massive spike in traffic during the day right around lunchtime. And the insight that they found was people didn't have computers or internet access at home, they were at work and they were shopping during their lunch hour at work. And so they had to adapt to to traffic changes throughout the day. That continues to be a core part of your bidding strategy on Amazon. The other idea is likelihood to buy changes. So it's not just about how traffic changes throughout the day, their different times of the day, where shoppers are more likely to purchase versus maybe be browsing, for example. And again, this is very specific to each unique category. And then lastly, you know, competitor tactics, as well. So throughout the day competitors are going to be pausing campaigns, launching campaigns, changing their own bid prices, trying whether or not they're perfect or imperfect strategies being executed, they're going to be trying to tweak their ad performance as well. And this can be really heavily impacted by the nature of your space, you know whether or not you're in a highly fragmented or consolidated category, whether or not you know how long the the purchase cycles are. And the buyer journeys, if they're heavily impulse driven purchases, or if they there's a lot of research is involved, that creates a lot of browsing needed, do the top players have a significantly higher amount of resources than the Challenger brands in your space, there's just so many different things that can impact how your competitors behave as well. And so with all this being said, you've got these oxygen dynamics drastically changing throughout the day. But Amazon is reporting to you on your campaigns based on daily performance. So if we're looking at a metric, like cost per click CPC, the number you might see in Amazon is oh, well, you had $1.91 cost per click today, and maybe that was better than your cost per click of $1.94. Yesterday. In reality, what you're actually going to see here is throughout the day, your CPC drastically changes by hour, and frankly, really by minute throughout the day. But none of that historically has been available to advertisers. The only thing that they've gotten is the numbers on the left hand side. How are they telling beforehand?

Aaron Conant 11:49

Right, because day gating day parting has been something you know, so everybody wanted hourly data. But what you're saying is up until well, you know, looking backwards, there wasn't actually hourly data reported. So how are people date? Dating day parting? You know, there's, our people want to say it, right. We say day parting here. How are they doing it before? Was it just them testing and learning turning things on and off and seeing what the bid was? Because, you know, there's a lot of different platforms that said, hey, yeah, you know, where they already for you and do it automatically?

Joseph La Selva 12:27

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so like, perfect segue into, you know, why why de partie hasn't really worked for Amazon advertisers in the past. And so one of those is that I really data. And yeah, so certainly,

Aaron Conant 12:42

that's exactly like, if you're not good. They're not giving it to you. How do you figure it anyways? I'll let you go. This is? Yeah, exactly. 10 seconds for this slide.

Joseph La Selva 12:51

So yeah, hourly data is just not existed in Amazon's Ad Council. And so you know, there's been a lot of maybe hyperbolic examples of, of de partying strategies being built, baked based on data. But the reality is, is that your data, no matter how, no matter what way that you believe, to be getting it before you, you weren't getting it directly from Amazon. So there are significant limitations there. The other is even so Amazon's advertising API, which is many, of course, most software providers, all software providers in the space are leveraging Amazon's advertising API to be able to push changes from their software to Amazon and vice versa, both reporting and actual actions. But the reality is, is that that API has not been reliable. You can't make API calls and know exactly when data will be pushed. If you're a software provider, if you've built in house software, it hasn't been reliable enough to say, hey, like, I know that when I make an API call on when to get the data immediately, or it hasn't been reliable enough to know exactly. If I got a click this hour and a conversion six hours from now, it hasn't been reliable to push that data in any more sophisticated of a timeframe than than a full day. I suppose

Aaron Conant 14:12

you need your server ID. So like, Perpetua is this advertising company. So they they know this, this is interesting, they hear you call this out, because I talked to a lot of different people out there and a lot of different service riders, and this is one of the things that they push so heavily. And you're saying it's not quickly reliably, so it's kind of a guess, but maybe they build up data points over time and then get rough estimate.

Joseph La Selva 14:38

Yeah, and I mean, that's that that really leads to the next one, which is primarily strategies are founded in human bias. You know, primarily you end up making day parting strategies based on a specific insight that you might have or an anecdotal insight that you might be primarily working on. I mean, if you use Perpetua software today, we give you the power to day part throughout the day. However, those strategies need to be be founded in your biases primarily. And even if they are founded in data, that data, as I've mentioned, is, is imperfect. And that also leads to your results not really being measurable, because then you are basing your results on not hourly data. So you are making decisions based on hourly changes, the data you're getting in return is not hourly. And so you're primarily looking at like overall changes in your metrics, or an imperfect view of what you believe to be hacked his hourly data. And so you're, you end up getting an incomplete picture in terms of results, which, which may either, it might make you double down on a strategy that in in practice doesn't actually work, or, at minimum, it's not going to give you the best picture available. And so for all these reasons, day parting hasn't worked for Amazon advertisers. That's not to say that people haven't departed and seen results that they're really happy with. But the true reality is that it hasn't been something that can be a fully founded in data and be measurable in a large scale. And so that these these challenges have existed. But the future and what is coming next is Amazon's hourly data API, which is in beta right now. It's actually you might have heard this buzzword. It's called the deeds API, which which literally stands for I believe, faster, easier access to data. And this, this beta is an API that would be available to anyone who is using Amazon's advertising API, and you'll be able to get hourly data. And so to my understanding is that for some period of time, this data will be available via API and not available directly in Amazon's ad console. But I would never be so naive to assume that I know how would continue to work and a longer timeframe. But the understanding is right now for at least a certain period, this will be available to anyone leveraging the API, but not to anyone using only reporting via Amazon's ad console. So what does this actually offer. So it's going to give you hourly impression clicking conversion data, so you know, the core metrics that you're getting through Amazon's ad console, you're going to be able to get on an hourly basis through this API, it will be granular to the keyword or asin targeting type. And if it's a keyword targeting type, brainer to each have exact phrase and broad match. And then it will also be granular to placement. So based on top of search on the product, detail page or rest of the search, so all of the different levels of granularity that Amazon offers in terms of placement. So that's what you will actually be able to get from a reporting standpoint. And then the other small note that is worth making as well. And it may sound like a small load depending on which category you operate in. Because this is really critical for some categories, and then less critical for others, is that conversions will also be attributed to time of click as well as that hourly data comes in. So if you get a click at noon, which ultimately leads in a conversion at 8pm, you will be able to see that conversion. Back backdated to the 12pm. Click so within that hourly timeframe, versus seeing the conversion at eight and assuming that it was part of a click that happened that he and as as I mentioned, that may be very critical for your business to understand with that level of granularity, it might not be so critical. What is almost I mean, this is almost magical, when you look at it when you think of the nature of digital advertising more broadly. I mean, 33% of sponsored product purchases happened within the first three minutes and 70% happen within the first hour of a click. And so you know, if you're a category that falls into either even higher impulse or even shorter timeframe purchases, that granularity of getting it clicking conversion data, data to the right hour, maybe not so important. But it really is kind of almost magical when you look at it from this standpoint, in terms of how quickly the you know the real direct response nature of Amazon ads

Aaron Conant 19:19

why why do you think Amazon's coming out with this now? Like do you think it's just a pressure that they're seeing so you know, brands I'm talking to this is where they're kind of sitting is okay during the pandemic now I'm you know up 100% What I was pre pandemic on Amazon I don't necessarily want to over index more I trying to balance out my my retail media spend you know there every like you were saying like every retailer out there is launching their own you know, retail media, you know, platform. Here neither here nor there on whether it's working or not, right, we don't need to go through other major retailers who seems to be stubbing their Whoa, outside of the food space, but do you think it's, you know, Amazon's feeling some pressure from advertisers to provide more? Or do they see flows of funds going outwards? Or other, you know, to other retailers? Well, I could have done this a long time ago. They just did. Yeah, yeah. Well, I

Joseph La Selva 20:17

mean, it certainly In theory, yes, it can do it a long time ago, in practice, obviously challenging and difficult to build. But here's, here's what I would say, if I were to step step into those shoes of being thinking of their broader Amazon ads product is, you know, where they have put probably the most focus over the last year or so is, is on increased capabilities through their demand side platform, so their programmatic ad buying, this is very specific to the original version of Amazon ads, which has immediate direct response. Very lower funnel, really, you know, hack, marketing, growth, hack growth, marketing, rather than, you know, brand building. And what's going to set them apart is that as every other retailer basically needs to start at the same place that Amazon started with lower funnel advertising, as you mentioned, that's going to put pressure on them, that's going to squeeze them. And so they need more differentiation, because every advertiser is going to be driven towards what is measurable, and what is giving them the best information at any given time. And so hourly data is going to last one of the things we're going to talk about is how much hourly data unlocks more intelligent decision making, rather than daily data, which is aggregated in total, you end up making a lot of you end up spending a lot of money that you maybe didn't intend to spend. And I'm definitely going to get into some some real examples of how that comes together in practice.

Aaron Conant 21:49

Awesome, thanks. Just remind others you have questions, you can email me, you can drop them the chat or the question section there.

Joseph La Selva 21:57

So what exactly all I know, what does this unlock? Well, you can make intraday bidding decisions to optimize against your strategic objectives. So now armed with this data, you know, based on hours of the day, click data and pression data conversion data, you can now start to make decisions that are going to optimize your campaigns more granularly. And one of one of the best examples we like to use to show that is a very common case for you know, sophisticated brand advertisers. So I have even a little bit of a kind of fake text message conversation happening to share here. So a good example is the boss. And the boss, I just uses a very loose term, might be saying, you know, we've got these massive keywords that are really important to us. And maybe in the past, we've been pretty loose on how much money we've spent on these keywords. And so ultimately profitability or a costs or row as hasn't been an important metric for us. And we've just been spending more about getting top placements, more about making sure we're getting a ton of eyeballs. And yeah, that that might still be the main focus. But at some point, you may then also get to a point where you're saying, listen, like what's the lifetime value of this customer. And we need to ensure that our cost per acquisition to get this customer is less than what we're actually getting in terms of lifetime value. And so maybe you get to a point where the boss says, Hey, are our lifetime value isn't high enough to be going with these CPAs. And so it gets pushed down to say we got to drop these CPAs which can lead to the next portion where it's like, Alright, we've now crunched the numbers. For this really important keyword, we've got to ensure that our CPA stays $12 or below. And CPA is not a metric that Amazon is going to give you but it's a it's a metric you can calculate using the metrics Amazon offers. But in this example, all right, we got to get up below 12% The team rallies around it, it says we're gonna get below 12 We're gonna get below $12 Sorry, not 12%. And then potentially, there's maybe their success. I last week you hit 1175 and everybody's high fiving. Everybody's like we're crushing it, you know, we got set that target of $12 for a CPA and we crushed it, we got 1175. And so now we feel really good about the decisions that we're making and how we acquire customers. But then here's the reality is you see your entire last week, CPAs by day and by hour in the day, and they are all over the map. Sometimes you're significantly below a $12 CPA, sometimes you're significantly higher than a $12 CPA. So again, you're looking at this nice pretty average of 1175 and feeling really good about yourself. But in reality, a lot of times there's there's purchases being made that had a much higher than $12 CPA or there's or there's times of the day where it's much lower and you and you can potentially tweak your advertising strategy for better performance. So as I mentioned, CPA or cost per acquisition is not a metric you're going to get from Amazon. And there's, I mean, there's so many different ways to measure CPA if you're looking at it as narrowly as a specific channel, or as broadly as including your entire brand building efforts. But if you were to calculate a very simple CPA using Amazon data, you could take your cost per click divided by conversion rate, and that will actually spit out your CPA. And so if I go backwards, here, I can see that all right, I've got all these different CPAs for different days of the week, in times of the day. And what that leads to is too many hours of the day are spent acquiring customers at an unprofitable rate. And you're ultimately wasting spent. $12 is the highest CPA you're willing to accept, there's so many hours of the day, where you are acquiring customers at a way higher

dollar threshold than $12. And those are not customers, you want to be acquiring that cost. On the flip side, you are subsidizing those costs, because there are many times of the day where you're acquiring customers, way cheaper than $12. And the reality is, is that you probably could be investing, increasing your bid prices to invest in a better placement, and to ultimately drive even more sales while still staying below your $12 CPA threshold. So there's a lot that goes, there's a lot that can happen throughout different hours of the day, that just hasn't been available. And now those types of just average, the the example I gave before of just using average data to feel either really good or potentially really bad about your advertising strategy. Those days are behind us, we're now getting down to the granular time of day reality of your campaigns performance, and where the real magic happens. And this is hyper hyper focused around what Perpetua is solving this problem is connecting our early advertising data with our early digital shelf metrics. Because what we want to be able to do for advertisers is literally price out the entire search results page. So this is heavily focused on sponsored products that will start with only sponsored products right now. But with enough data, you can begin to purchase, you can begin to price out the cost of every single placement on Amazon search results page by time of day, so that you can start making intelligent decisions about when you want to be doubled out, doubling down and increasing your bid prices when you know you need to pull back based on the different costs per clicks throughout the time of the day. And so Matt, being able to map this all out connecting that hourly campaign performance data with hourly digital shelf metrics, becomes incredibly powerful.

Aaron Conant 27:52

It's just so you can it's just going to help people, you know, even budget better across the board. Right? I mean, one of the biggest things that I'm hearing is, especially now as we get to the end of 2021, you know that the data piece, the justification, what was you know, what's the row, as, you know, we gave you a chunk of money, how much money do you need for next year, and people are at a loss, nobody can predict a global pandemic coming in turning the world on its head. And then, you know, tons of people jumping on Amazon in for 2020. People were just, you know, said, Hey, go execute with digital, we'll give you money. And then 2021. It's like, Well, what did you do with it? And you know, people need data, and they're trying to crunch it right now. And then you're trying to predict for next year, this is

Joseph La Selva 28:39

exactly, exactly nothing's going to be more powerful and either allowing you to get an increased budget, or to maintain a budget that you need by being able to say, hey, you know, last year, we made some really smart decisions this year, we're getting at it from an hourly standpoint. And so we're going to become even smarter with those dollars. Are you?

Aaron Conant 29:00

Are you guys building your own database, then? On the back end? And if not be awesome. If you did around what happens year over year? I know you, you won't have it until a year from now. But you could almost add, you know, fluctuations specifically around, you know, cyber five Prime Day, right, whatever it might be that hey, these this bot actually goes up. 25%. Yeah,

Joseph La Selva 29:31

exactly. And so that takes it takes a lot of time to build up that data. But we're already going to have at the end of this presentation, some some nuggets that we already found from being able to use the hourly advertising API based on time of day over cyber five. So some really nice nuggets and insights of what we saw for our customers on Thanksgiving on Black Friday on Cyber Monday. That would be you know, having that data would be really really powerful and sure that that day As that time has already passed now, but I think everyone's gonna be able to see like, wow, that actually is really, really meaningful. And if we would have had that data, we maybe would have made different bidding decisions during those times. So that's, that's actually how I'm going to top off the discussion today, as a bonus of the insights that we found over cyber five is cool. So what does this unlock? So you know, like, what are examples of what you're going to be able to do with with this hourly data. So as I mentioned, understanding cost per clicks, and then therefore, your channel specific CPAs for every search ad ranking by hour of the day, so you'll be able to price out that entire search results paid for all of these sponsored placement. What does that allow you to do? The two big ones that we focus on are identifying opportunities to invest in step changing ad ranking. So everybody talks about getting above the fold placement versus below the fold placement, there are specific times of the day where above the fold placement, versus below the full placement, the spreads get really small, you might be you know, at one point in the day, maybe it's $1 cost per click for below the fold. And then for the first above the fold placement, it's $2. But then there's, you know, maybe a two to three hour window during the day where it's only a 50 cent difference rather than $1. And so you can actually identify the opportunities throughout the day, where you're like, hey, we're typically below the fold. Here's an opportunity opportunity for us to invest this three hour window, let's say where we can invest and get above the fold placement and make get the biggest bang for our buck during that, that timeframe. On the flip side, you might be able to identify where investment in increasing your ad ranking doesn't necessarily drive the best performance, one of the one of the most classic examples of that can can easily be ad rank one versus ad rank number two. And of course, there are so many things that go into this the affinity of your brand, how likely people are to buy your direct competitors, every category dynamic is different. But what we've been able to see and be able to share with our customers is that there are times of the day where ad rank one and ad rank two, the spreads and the cost per clicks between those can get really, really small. And then it could be the case of like, oh, this shouldn't impact our investment decision versus there are other times in the day where the spread between ranking number one and record number two is really big. And you probably don't want to invest to go from number two to number one in that case. So there's a lot of dynamics that you're going to be able to understand to not only double down on your investment, but also in some areas, frankly pullback to get the best robots. Of course, another component of that is being able to understand what time of the day, key competitor budgets are getting exhausted. And so of course, you're not going to be able to see, hey, my competitor ran out of budget exactly at this time. And I know who that competitor is. But people generally know which competitors are dominating on which search terms. And you'll probably be able to see a pretty significant drop in CPCs, at certain points of the day if those competitors are going out of budget. And so maybe that's an opportunity to double down, we see if you say hey, consistently our competitors going out of budget at 8:30pm, or 9pm. That's an opportunity on their most important search terms for us to double down and build up a customer base where they've typically won. It's just it's just one example there. And so ultimately, it's just allowing you to very granularly analyze, and make advertising decisions based on time of day, which everybody as we've talked about a bunch everybody has asked for for so long. And this now becomes unlocked through this through this hourly

API. So what specifically is Perpetua doing to enable brands using hourly data? And this is this is I'm not going to spend much time talking about this because this is this is an hourly API conversation. This is not a what is Perpetua doing conversation. But the way that we're really trying to focus on it is to be able to show you within our console, the daily trends for whatever metrics are most important to you. So you can see for any specific campaign or product, your daily trends based on time of day as almost a heat map for sales spanned a cost, budget cost per click, whatever your metric may be, we will be able to show you a heat map of that based on time of day. We are hyper focused on building a recommendations engine so that you can more intelligently make decisions on how you use that data. So a very, you can use Perpetua to say let's let's say on a certain group of products, you want to target a 20% target a cos our algorithm is good To push you recommendations on how you can tweak your bid prices based on time of day to best achieve that the highest amount of sales within that specific a cost threshold that you've set. And then of course, we want to be able to combine your human intelligence with our ad engine to to get the best available results. And so you can you can sort of see it on the on the screenshot here on the right hand side, all these recommendations have checkmarks axes, and then little pencils for editing as well. So it's not just a matter of like, Oh, I got to go exactly with what Perpetua was engine says that little question mark will actually give you a bit of an insight as to why it's recommend making that recommendation, you can accept, reject, or tweak it yourself. And so we really, really want to enable advertisers to have the best available information to make decisions, and ultimately enabling them rather than just saying, Hey, we've got this data. And now we're gonna start using that data to go into a black box and make ad decisions for you. Now, we want to enable that for you so that you can accept or reject or edit those recommendations. So I promised a short bonus of what we learned over cyber five. And so I pulled a couple of slides of data. And so it's hot off the press. And I think there's a few elements of it that are going to be really impactful. And I specifically chose to focus on cost per click and conversion rate data. So this shows the far left hand side there is midnight, from the turn of Wednesday to Thanksgiving, Thursday. And then at the end of the the graph is midnight at the end of Black Friday. And so a few three insights in particular that that I found was this is aggregated data across all of our customers. But we saw on Thanksgiving after dinner, there was a spike in conversion rate, despite CPC still declining. So I'm not going to try and put a story together here. But maybe there is a spike in conversion rate, because after dinner on Thanksgiving Thursday is when people start to check out products. And it was interesting that we actually still saw a declining CPC at that time. So it could be the case that there's there are budgets running out throughout the day, people turned off all of their ads leading up to Black Friday or significantly reduced their budgets because they didn't think it was going to be such a good time. But we actually saw a pretty large increase in conversion rate near the end of Thursday, Thanksgiving Thursday, leading into Black Friday, despite those clicks, the cost of those clicks, decreasing throughout the day.

We also saw disproportionate growth in conversion rate versus cost per click on the morning of Black Friday. So I'm looking right at the center of the graph almost here at the start of the day, the conversion rate increased significantly higher than the increase in the cost per click. And so there is there was an opportunity for certain advertisers to take advantage in that case to say, hey, yeah, cost per clicks are getting more expensive, that actually gets a lot of advertisers to back out. But the per the change in conversion rate, the increasing conversion rate actually far offset, that change in cost per click. And so for those who are willing to stomach a more expensive cost per click, often saw a better cost per acquisition during during that time of the day. And then at the far right side of the graph here, we saw depressed cost per clicks in the evening as budgets are exhausted, and prior to being increased over the weekend. So obviously, there's a lot of guesswork that goes in for many advertisers as to what's the appropriate budget to be setting on Black Friday. And inevitably, people are going to run out of budget, we saw those cost per clicks, dwindling, dwindling dwindling, until the end of the evening. And then there's a large increase in cost per clicks, likely as those budgets are are replenished or campaigns were turned back on at the end of the day. And then two quick insights on Cyber Monday as well. And you'll start to see these patterns and they kind of emerge together. So again, disproportionate growth in conversion rate versus cost per click on the morning, this is actually say Cyber Monday, sorry, not Black Friday on the morning of Cyber Monday. So again, you see the conversion rate spike for a couple of hours, significantly higher than the change in cost per click. And then again, depressed cost per clicks and evening, as budgets are exhausted combined with a spike in conversion rate. So this one is even more pronounced. Where again, at the end of Cyber Monday conversion rate is increasing. Maybe it's there's the notion that Alright, this is the best deal that I'm going to get CPCs are dwindling quickly. Well, conversion rate is increasing rather quickly. And so again, you would see a pretty strong improvement in your cost per acquisition if you made sure that you kept your campaigns running at the end of the day. or potentially even doubled down on your bid prices at the end of the day. So those were the the fun insights I wanted to share. I think we left lots of time, probably 15 minutes or so that's all that I have. I would love to talk to anyone about what we're seeing from this hourly data, how we could empower anybody who wants to use this hourly data, how Perpetuas thinking about it in general, and what our roadmap looks like. But I will be quiet for now and be happy to field any questions. Yeah, so

Aaron Conant 40:30

everybody have questions? You can drop them in the chat, you can drop them into the question section there. You can always email them to me aaron@bwgconnect.com question comes in and just is around the presentation. Are you able to share this? We can just connect to people afterwards?

Joseph La Selva 40:45

Yeah, connect me with anyone? And then we can we can share it directly?

Aaron Conant 40:49

Yeah, awesome. Next question is around, you know, are you going to be then joined this year over a year? I think this is going back kind of a question that's asking where we can overlay next year's data on top of this year's data to start getting year over year trends as a whole.

Joseph La Selva 41:06

Yeah, I mean, everything. core core to what Perpetua does is accumulating data over time, we want to make sure that it's relevant. And so category specific and account specific and making sure that we are siloing data. So it is it is properly protected for all of our customers. But yes, you will be able to see how this changes over time based on time of day.

Aaron Conant 41:27

This what are what are you seeing overall is changes in paid media on Amazon is still going up year over year? Have you seen it flatline?

Joseph La Selva 41:35

I mean, right now, we're still looking at holistic trends. And so we're still seeing the increases in cost per click, typically that people are seeing, as categories evolve. There are some categories where that conversion rate increase offsets the cost per click increase. And so you're getting a better cost per acquisition, there's categories where it is just overall becoming more competitive without the buyer behavior changing. And so it really is category specific, I guess, just very top line in general. Yes, we see a lot of similar to a lot of folks tracking the space increases in cost per clicks over time.

Aaron Conant 42:11

Other Other innovations you see Amazon coming out with over the next year? I know there's a lot of demand from brands for more transparency as a whole. I think this is an awesome step. Especially when you think about not just what they're providing. But then kind of what you guys are able to do to crunch the numbers to provide a this is how much the placement, you know, actually costs is pretty. Are there other things that are there popping up?

Joseph La Selva 42:38

Yeah, I think it sounds so buzzword II and it almost sounds disingenuous, even even focusing on it so much. But I really do think so everything that's happening with AMC, the Amazon Marketing Cloud and the data clean rooms that they are creating to allow you to aggregate data, so that you can understand how off Amazon campaigns are off Amazon data is impacting purchasing and buyer behavior on Amazon getting that holistic look, I'm not going to try and and pretend that I know all of the different ways that that's going to unlock data for advertisers. But I do think that that's going to be another example of how Amazon sets themselves apart is a willingness to really embrace how other forms of digital advertising impact Amazon, because of a, frankly, a sheer belief in in the overall performance on their platform. Yeah, I

Aaron Conant 43:37

think in terms of Amazon Marketing Cloud, I think probably six to eight months from now, we'll host a, you know, maximizing the potential, the Amazon Marketing Cloud call, and we'll probably have 400 brands show up right is that good talk and there's so much potential that, you know, that people are hoping for, we need to see it play itself out. And you know, what our best in class companies doing to, to utilize everything that that has to offer? Because it's there's a lot of data there. So other things I just if other people if you have questions or chat, you can drop them in there. If not, I mean, we don't have to take up, you know, everybody's day just with random chitchat. But are there. Are there other things that are top of mind for you, things you thought people might ask today? I mean, this is this is new, I think a lot of people are just trying to chew on what we just went through. I think this is you know, having a partner that is able to do this is table stakes at this point going forward. There's so many different people but if you want to win, it's just a reality now. But you know, other key key thoughts or key takeaways, things that you thought might come up today that didn't?

Joseph La Selva 44:54

Well, I mean, a couple things to probably underscore. This is Gonna be focused on sponsored products to begin with. And so if you think about how it's going to evolve and roll out over time is in an Amazon fashion start with their most prized ad unit that still makes up I believe about sic over 60, maybe over 70% of their overall advertising revenue. So that's, that's not new, their playbook, what might be a little bit more new is the fact that this is rolling out through an API first, which makes a lot of sense, given the sensitivity of hourly data and how decisions are made from an hourly timeframe and how it's very suited for an API and for software providers. So that one's less in their playbook, it's not common that Amazon would say, we would make it primarily available to those folks first, rather than direct to advertiser. And, of course, there are lots of advertisers that might have in house tools that leverage Amazon's advertising API. But there will be a period of time where it is not available in the ad console, but available to anyone leveraging Amazon's API. And so I think that that's worth worth underscoring, as well.

Aaron Conant 46:10

Awesome. Love it. Well, I don't have any other questions coming in over email or chat or the q&a. So I think it's a great time, we can wrap it up, give everybody an extra five minutes in their day back. You know, everybody 100% You know, encourage you to have a follow up conversation with Joseph or the team or Perpetua the great friends, partners, supporters, the network, resident experts in this space and you know, really sitting on the leading edge. So well look for a follow up email from us, we'll connect you with Joseph in the team there for sure, especially if you want to copy the deck. Other than that, you know, we'd love to have a follow up conversation with you on our side. You know, that's where I you know, get the topics for these calls, and we find the rest of experts. So we'd love to set up 30 minutes with you look for a follow up email for me. But also, if you ever need any help finding any kind of service providers from Amazon, Amazon advertising, direct consumer or drop shipping, help with content that's huge right now, you know, email or SMS or whatever it might be international expansion, don't hesitate to reach out. We did put some time on the calendar to kind of walk through it or kind of just get you the the top people from the shortlist we have from the brands the network. I mean, obviously in the Amazon advertising space Perpetua, where the file conversation if you're looking for any additional insights there. With that, I think we're gonna wrap it up. I hope everybody has a fantastic Monday. A great week. Everybody, take care, stay safe and look forward to having you at a future event. Thanks again, Joseph. Alrighty, everybody, take care now. Take care. We'll see you already.