Standing out from the crowd
If experimentation is key, then so is budgeting for it. Smith argued that brands should carve out testing dollars before Q4, so they can apply the results during the holiday crunch. “There’s value, whether it’s in the negative or the positive, before you start scaling into holiday,” she said. “The learnings are valuable regardless.”
The challenge, Kramer pointed out, is maintaining a sense of scale. Meta still claims the majority of ad spend for many brands, which means that promising new channels can drive incremental growth without ever exceeding a few points of the overall budget. “It’s hard to test a new channel and actually get a new channel that’s going to win at scale,” he observed. “How do we test them appropriately?”
For brands without the resources to rigorously test their advertising strategies, Shopify’s Shop Campaigns tool offers one solution. It lets merchants set the price they’ll pay for a sale, with different prices for new and repeat customers, and only charges when a sale occurs. Then there’s Shopify’s Autopilot, which runs cross-channel testing against a merchant’s goals and guardrails, and allocates the budget accordingly.
With costs rising on every channel, Kramer added, it’s more important than ever to send a message that breaks through the noise.
“Our creative needs to stand out more and more,” he concluded. “What I’ve started distilling it down to is: stop trying to fight where we show up, and just show up in those places where a consumer wants to be, and do a better job of getting our message across.”
Featured Conversation Leaders
