The DTC Podcast

How do DTC brands keep Google Ads performance from dropping after Black Friday?

Zavire, Senior Google Media Buyer at Pilothouse, explains why Google results slump once the sale ends. Shoppers have already bought, and every bid, budget, ad and landing page change you made for the sale added risk to the account in the same short window. Conversion lag then hides what worked for days. He covers how to use seasonality adjustments and Google's Promotion Mode beta so Smart Bidding paces through the sale, why he moves budgets and ROAS targets in small steps, and how to run the weeks after Cyber Monday when bigger brands switch their ads off.

Work with Pilothouse: https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse

Key takeaways:
- Your bidding burns budget early or underspends during the sale. Forecast the conversion rate lift you expect and enter it as a seasonality adjustment, so Smart Bidding knows the spike is coming and paces evenly through the event.
- You reached for a data exclusion. Exclusions tell Google to ignore a period, which suits broken conversion tracking. For a planned sale, Zavire uses seasonality adjustments.
- You have no forecast to start from. Use last year's BFCM first, then any other sale you have run, like Memorial Day, Labor Day or a launch, then public case studies from similar brands. A rough number entered beats no adjustment at all.
- Nobody can babysit the account all weekend. Promotion Mode, a Google Ads beta, sets a temporary ROAS target and extra budget for the event and reverts on its own when it ends.
- Every change risks a new learning phase. Raise budgets and ROAS targets in steps, start well before the sale, and put new ads inside campaigns that already have history rather than launching new ones.
- Your audience lists are out of date. Refresh your customer match lists, or connect Shopify's audiences, before the sale starts.
- Your post-sale drop is steeper than it needs to be. Bring budgets and ROAS targets back in steps too, and keep Demand Gen running with non-sale messaging through your shipping cutoff.
- Competitors go dark after Cyber Monday. Many brands turn their ads off right after the sale, which can open a window for cheaper new customers with a smaller offer or a gift with purchase.

About the guest:
Zavire is a Senior Google Media Buyer at Pilothouse, the performance marketing agency behind DTC, where he runs paid search and shopping for ecommerce brands.
https://pilothouse.co

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Sponsors:
Advertise on DTC: https://dtcnews.link/advertise

Timestamps:
02:00 Why Google Ads performance drops after BFCM
06:00 Forecasting and adjusting budgets for Black Friday
08:00 Using Google Ads seasonality adjustments
12:00 How Google Ads Promo Mode works
14:00 Avoiding campaign disruptions and post-BFCM performance drops

How do DTC brands improve customer retention after checkout?

Codee Burton of ShipBob and Mike Fazio of AfterShip follow one order from checkout to the warehouse, the doorstep and the return, and show where brands keep or lose the repeat customer. Eric Dyck asks what to audit at each stage and what to fix first.

See how ShipBob and AfterShip work together: aftership.co/ASxShipBob

WHAT THIS EPISODE SOLVES
Your delivery date is a guess. Codee explains why a promise built on "5 to 7 business days" fails, and the three inputs that make a delivery date hold: inventory placement, cutoff times and shipping zones.
You don't know where your retention audit should start. Mike starts with support tickets. Codee starts earlier, at the receiving dock, with dock to stock, same-day ship rate and pick accuracy.
Your customers hear about delays from the carrier first. Why the brand should be the first to say something, and how proactive messages turn a late order into a good experience.
You're blaming the wrong partner for late orders. How to trace a delay to the warehouse, the carrier or a specific shipping lane before you make an expensive decision.
Your tracking page is a dead end. How brands use it for care content, warranty registration, product recommendations and loyalty offers, and what one Shopify brand saw in 90 days.
Returns turn into refunds. What exchange first needs from the warehouse, how returns move from AfterShip to ShipBob the moment they're created, and incentives that keep the revenue.
You want to add AI agents. Why clean, connected data comes first, and where agents help today.

ABOUT THE GUESTS
Codee Burton is Senior Manager of Client Acquisition at ShipBob, leading the team that works with growing brands when their operations stop keeping up with their growth. shipbob.com

Mike Fazio is Lead Solutions Architect at AfterShip and has worked in post-purchase tracking and returns for eight years. aftership.com

STAY CONNECTED
Get the DTC Newsletter: directtoconsumer.co

SPONSORS
This episode is in partnership with ShipBob and AfterShip.
ShipBob: shipbob.com
AfterShip: aftership.com
The ShipBob and AfterShip integration: aftership.co/ASxShipBob

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 How post-purchase experience impacts customer retention
07:00 Identifying fulfillment issues before they happen
13:00 Using AI to improve shipping and delivery performance
19:00 Turning order tracking and returns into revenue
28:00 How AI agents are transforming ecommerce operations

How do you market a DTC brand to older adults? Johannes Sauer, CEO and co-founder of Cadense, sells an adaptive sneaker to a customer base that skews 60 and up. His answer has been physical therapist referrals, linear TV and a call center, with Meta still doing the heavy lifting online.

Cadense makes a sneaker with nylon pads on the sole that let the foot slide over a snag instead of catching, built for people who trip after a stroke, with multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's, or simply with age. It looks like a regular athletic shoe on purpose. Johannes says Cadense passed ten million dollars in lifetime sales within 28 months of launching on pre-order from its own site. He walks through the clinician program that replaced a failed affiliate pitch, an eight-question checkout survey that 75% of buyers finish, and the channels that come next: senior living, retail and Medicare Advantage.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE
You want to test demand before committing to a production run. Cadense opened pre-orders on its own Shopify product page in September 2023 and had sold two-thirds of its first container by the time it shipped the following March. Pre-orders cash-flowed new colors and sizes for the first year and a half.
You're about to send launch traffic to Kickstarter. Johannes has run three Kickstarters and skipped it this time, so Cadense kept the analytics and a direct relationship with every early buyer.
Your ads can't promise what the product does. Cadense is a class one medical device, so early ads showed walking patterns like shuffling and let people recognize themselves. A recent retrospective study of 705 customers found an 87% drop in self-reported monthly falls, and Cadense always presents it that way.
Your affiliate offer gets turned down. Eleven of the first twelve physical therapists Johannes pitched said they'd happily recommend the shoe but wouldn't take a commission. Cadense sent them a sample pair and a postcard with a tracked QR code and discount code instead. More than 750 PTs in the US now recommend it.
Nobody finishes your post-purchase survey. Johannes opens with gender and an age bracket before asking anything that takes thought, and 75% of buyers complete all eight questions. The last one asks people to describe what bothers them about their walking, and the answers become ad copy.
Your customers aren't reachable online. Cadense runs 60 and 120-second spots on remnant linear TV that send viewers to an outsourced call center. One in five of those callers has no email address.
You assume the adult kids are the buyers. Johannes expected a 50/50 split between customers and caregivers. It's closer to 70/30 in favor of people buying for themselves.
Your audience isn't on Instagram. Facebook takes around 80% of Cadense's Meta spend.
Nobody searches for your product. Cadense spends on Meta top of funnel to create its own Google demand. AppLovin matches Meta on ROAS at a small slice of the budget but hasn't scaled past that.
DTC alone won't get you to a billion. Cadense is moving into senior living, specialty retail and Medicare Advantage, using its DTC track record as the proof point. The pitch to insurers: Johannes puts the cost of a fall to a health plan at $20,000, against a $200 shoe.

ABOUT THE GUEST
Johannes Sauer is CEO and co-founder of Cadense, which he built with Dr. Tyler Susko, whose gait research at MIT led to the shoe. https://cadense.com

STAY CONNECTED
DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer

TIMESTAMPS
02:00 How Cadense created its innovative footwear
06:00 Launching a DTC brand with pre-orders
13:00 Building a referral network of 750+ physical therapists
19:00 Increasing post-purchase survey completion rates
25:00 Reaching older consumers through TV advertising

How should DTC brands use AI for growth strategy? Rafael Gi and Duncan Ferguson of Pilothouse use Claude to diagnose why a brand stopped growing, then make the call themselves.

Raf is head of strategic growth at Pilothouse and runs the audits behind new client pitches, five to twelve of them every two weeks at peak. Duncan leads strategy on the delivery side and builds the systems the team operates. They walk through how a nine-figure brand's growth flatlined, why one client's AOV fell from $40 to $32, a regional market maturity model that took two weeks instead of six months, and what happened when Duncan ran Pilothouse's strategy process in Claude without his own inputs.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE
Your growth flatlined and nothing changed. A brand that had just hit nine figures came to Pilothouse with no idea why growth stopped. Raf found 70% of its media going into three markets. Meta kept spending where the brand already had customers, and there were no new ones left to reach there.
You want AI to find the problem for you. Raf pulls eight to fifteen reports across platforms, then forms a hunch from experience. A frequency of 140 in one area usually means overinvestment, so he asks his knowledge base to validate it or prove him wrong.
Your AOV dropped and you can't see why. One client's AOV fell from about $40 to $32 after it launched a $20 product. Without budgets set by product, Meta spends toward the cheaper item because it moves more volume. Raf confirms it by pulling the spend split between the two products over time.
Your AI setup breaks between teams. If sales and delivery each define a client's "goal" differently, the agent pulls the wrong section of the wrong document. Pilothouse aligns object definitions and the naming of files, folders, agents and skills across departments, and Raf and Duncan share skill files to keep context in sync.
Your audit is too long for anyone to act on. Pilothouse's CEO calls it Claude food and human food. Claude gets the raw data, and the strategist's job is turning a hundred-page output into a ten, five or one-page version a client can absorb and act on.
A data project needs a data scientist and six months. Raf built a regional market maturity model for a nine-figure brand in four workshops over two weeks, doing the processing in Claude on a 178-megabyte dataset. The numbers went through the brand's CFO.
You're wondering whether AI can run strategy on its own. Duncan turned Pilothouse's scaling growth system into a set of Claude skills, then ran it with his own inputs removed. It didn't reach the same conclusions, and it made persuasive arguments that were technically wrong.
Your strategy dies after the handoff. Duncan calls it seagull strategy: the plan ships, hits reality, and the strategist isn't there to see the results. Pilothouse strategists stay to operate the systems, down to finding a JavaScript snippet in a Shopify backend that was distorting how AOV registered.
Customer research costs too much. Raf uses AI for semantic mapping, grouping the words people use when they react to a product, work that used to mean an expensive focus group and people coding transcripts by hand.

ABOUT THE GUESTS
Rafael Gi is head of strategic growth at Pilothouse. Duncan Ferguson leads strategy at Pilothouse. https://pilothouse.co

STAY CONNECTED
DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer

TIMESTAMPS
02:30 How AI is transforming marketing strategy
08:00 Building connected AI workflows across teams
13:00 Using AI to identify ecommerce growth bottlenecks
20:00 Why human judgment still matters in AI strategy
28:00 The challenges of scaling AI automation

What ROAS should a DTC brand target when it sells a high-priced product? Dayne Rusch, co-founder and CEO of Vyper Industrial, used to demand a 5 ROAS on the first order and now calls that target stupid. Vyper sets a new customer CAC goal, checks it every day and keeps scaling while it holds.

Vyper makes premium shop chairs, carts and creepers in Wisconsin, with its flagship chair at $625, and calls itself the Yeti of the garage. Two and a half years after his first visit, Dayne is back with a new 65,000 square foot facility, a new CRO and performance team, and a plan to spend 2027 on brand: national TV, collaborations with Ford, an event that drew more than 5,000 people and a full-time human calling abandoned carts.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE
You set a high first-order ROAS target and growth stalled. Dayne says chasing a 5 ROAS suffocated Vyper's growth and didn't bring in enough revenue to cover operating costs. The target now is a new customer CAC, checked daily, and when Vyper is under it during the holidays, they spend more.
Your product is too expensive for subscription-style LTV math. Vyper is profitable on the first purchase. Its ideal customer buys one chair to test the quality, then comes back for four more. Others come back for accessories that run $200.
You keep testing new channels. Dayne puts the budget into the three he knows work, TV, Meta and email, and says $100K on an unproven app can get you nothing.
Your TV ads sell too hard. Vyper is moving from problem-and-solution spots to brand spots built on collaborations with Ford, Hendrick Motorsports and Realtree, because a partner everyone recognizes lends credibility.
Your site is cluttered with what you think customers want. Vyper rebuilt its pages from reviews, forums and on-site questions about what nearly stopped people from buying. Dayne's LinkedIn post put the lift at 37% on mobile and 67% on desktop with sessions flat.
You want to use AI without sounding like everyone else. Vyper's team uses Claude to cut a two to three hour image task to 15 minutes and to spark design ideas, but keeps the copy human. After a trial of AI replies to abandoned cart texts, Vyper hired a full-time person to call and text abandoned carts.
You can't justify an event on ROI. Vyperfest drew more than 5,000 people. Dayne counts local brand, hiring and team morale as the return, and a second one is planned for next September.
You can't measure brand spend. Dayne watches branded search, organic and direct traffic, and whether new customer cost is falling. He doesn't trust post-purchase surveys on their own.
You are running the same Black Friday as last year. Vyper gives every sale period its own brand look across ads, email and site, splits discounts into blocks and brings back limited editions for one weekend.
Your giveaway prize is eating the budget. Vyper swapped six-figure trucks for a UTV that costs it $20,000, with free email entry to build the list before Black Friday.

ABOUT THE GUEST
Dayne Rusch is co-founder and CEO of Vyper Industrial, which he runs with his brother Dylan. https://vyperindustrial.com

STAY CONNECTED
DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Building Vyper into a premium automotive brand
05:00 How Vyper increased website conversions
12:00 Why Vyper is investing heavily in TV
21:00 Using AI without losing brand authenticity
30:00 Vyper’s Black Friday strategy