bryan 🧉

I publish @northbeam performance marketing benchmarks every week in The Media Buyer. Join 124,000 other marketers 👇 themediabuyer.northbeam.io

Stop relying on last-click. It makes no sense. Yes, it's a reliable way to attribute revenue to ads. But it only catches the absolute "last mile" of the customer journey. Why are we pretending that's some type of proxy for marketing performance?

High AOV is the only thing working right now

Some guidance from true masters of Black Friday Cyber Monday execution.

Wake up and smell the multi-touch attribution, my dude. The fastest-growing brands in ecommerce history love @northbeam This is the measurement stack I see across 99% of them:

Does anybody use any desktop iPhone emulators? I want social media apps on my desktop, but I want the mobile app interface. Does this exist? Or do I just use some kind of mirroring?

People who use @northbeam are just built different. Northbeam is trusted by the fastest-scaling ecomm brands in history: @comfrt, @ridgewallet, @grunsdaily - the list goes on. What else do I need to say? I'll try anyway:

AI is driving at least 10% of all organic search visits to brand websites we're tracking right now. I'm gonna run this analysis again post BFCM and I bet it's 15%-20% Explained:

The AI hack-pocalyse is here Feels like I get emails like this every week

look mom I'm finally playing sports @theisaacmed

It feels like Black Friday came early this year. This week's data from @northbeam: Nothing is moving like it's supposed to. This data is from right before Election Day, so post-political spending release isn't visible yet. Still, Meta conversion rates are dropping even while CTR is improving? This feels like people researching but holding off on buying until they see a BFCM discount. Why don't you just give them a discount, then? Why do we have to wait until after Thanksgiving? If Amazon can do Big Deal Days on a random weekend in October, you can start giving away your BFCM discount now, who cares? AppLovin performance has been chaotic since Oct 1, but I'm not really concerned about that. Usually BFCM on AppLovin is pretty decent because it's a more captive audience. TikTok is going wild, though. More people are on TikTok Shops than ever, and since BFCM is truly an Amazon holiday, TikTok benefits. The TikTok -> Amazon customer purchasing pattern is biblically powerful. Except this year, it feels like more mainstream advertisers are catching up. I expect TikTok performance to continue to improve through the end of this year into next. TikTok has my attention. It's capturing more share, Shops is taking off, and brands are starting to take it more seriously than ever. Especially as a source of high-quality creative and content. Next Thursday's charts are gonna look nuts.

In college, I took a long shot and applied for the IRTS Fellowship: an all-expenses paid media internship in NYC. For a random farmboy from West Virginia, this seemed unlikely. They pick 30 from more than 3,000 applicants every summer. Somehow, I got in. And it changed the course of my life. For the last twelve years since that summer, I've made a point to go back to IRTS and pay it forward. I meet with other IRTS Fellows, chat on panels, and do my best to teach about the wealth of ecomm/tech/SaaS opportunities for students. This week I had the pleasure of talking about @northbeam on a panel with a bunch of other former Fellows. IRTS surfaces some of the smartest, hungriest, and most under-represented talent in media. Every year I meet students who are more driven than the year before. This is truly an S-tier pipeline of talent. Sales, marketing, production, content, journalism: they have all the skills that ironically are more important than ever in this AI era. If you are looking to hire absolutely killer young talent, let me know.

screaming. this is the AI Golden Age of Memes

This hand was quite a jumpscare @elonmusk

If you've ever wondered "How are those @northbeam users maximizing their BFCM spend?" This is one way: xitter.gq/BryanBumgardner/status…

How to scale budgets, manage cost caps, and grow profitably on the big weekend: