Welcome to Episode 2. of  Growing ecommerce. Today, we are  joined by Scott Kennedy. He's a senior director at Franklin Sports where he's responsible for ecommerce analytics and tech capabilities. In the US, Franklin is synonymous with baseball and baseball for many is synonymous with stats. It is a numbers game, so it's only fitting that Franklin is a remarkably data driven organization and Scott is at the forefront of that. We discussed that data culture in quite some detail, getting into employee mentoring and we discussed Amazon advertising, the amazon data landscape, and the balance of retail and direct to consumer at franklin with advice for smaller brands too. 

1. Effective stock management- 12:30
2. How to build a data driven organization  - 15:05
3. Amazon for direct to consumer ecommerce businesses - 23:01
4. How to build competitive advantage in online retail  - 29:45

About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):

Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.

The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.

As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.

Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:

smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbh
Newsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

Welcome to Episode 33. of  Growing ecommerce. Today, we are joined by Arend de Ruiter from bol.com,  a dutch retailer and retail platform generating over €5 billion in annual revenue.

Arend leads SEA measurement and data activation at this retail giant. We discuss what it's like to advertise 60 million products, how to approach segmentation in supersized accounts, and how to deploy automation in this huge oil tanker like organization.

1. Advertising 60 million products - 10:30
2. What is the right amount of segmentation - 14:32
3. SEO and SEA management - 16:32
4. Full funnel marketing and KPIs  - 24:59
5. What technology to focus on? -  39:00

About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):

Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.

The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.

As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.

Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:

smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbh
Newsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

Welcome to Episode 32. of  Growing ecommerce, the last episode of 2022. Today, we are joined by Philip, Ivelio Vellin who is an expert in analytics and tracking.

This time, Mike and Phillip talk about google analytics 4, the complaints, the benefits, and how to get it right. They discussed cardinality, data retention, migration strategy, consent mode, and model data plus server side tagging. 

It's a great introduction to the topic and now is actually an opportunity to update your data strategy as Philip explains why this is core to succeeding next year and beyond. 

1. What is GA4 and what makes it different? - 03:00
2. What is cardinality? -10:48
3. How do we benefit from GA4? -15:00
4. What is a consent mode? - 16:55
5. GA4 in ecommerce? - 22:25

About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):

Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.

The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.

As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.

Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:

smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbh
Newsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

Welcome to Episode 31. of  Growing ecommerce. Today, we are joined by Tim Aton, COO at Range Leather, where in a classic scale-up fashion, he wears a lot of hats. From paid, and owned media channels to product merchandising to managing shipping and wholesale teams. We discuss approaches to blended ROAS, meta advertising, Facebook in particular, and how is life looking post-iOS 14. Then we move on from marketing and discuss the interplay of marketing and operations.

1. Meta & Facebook advertising - 7:12
2. Life post-IOS 14 - 15:41
3. Blended ROAS in ecommerce - 18:48
4. Interplay of marketing and operations  - 28:59

About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):

Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.

The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.

As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.

Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:

smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbh
Newsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

Welcome to Episode 30. of Growing ecommerce. Today is a special episode as we break the usual format. Long-time listeners will know we did a Q4 peak season panel back in 2021 and we did it again. Time Mike is in the hot seat joined by his colleague, Agnes Zottl. Many thanks to Maria Holzinger for stepping into the moderator rule. They discuss big-picture environmental trends, what it means to have the most automated Google Ads peak season ever, and how to profit this holiday season.  You can have a look at the full interview here.

1. Beating Bestseller bias - 03:32
2. PMax - the self-driving car - 09:07
3. Stock and non-stock challenge for retailers - 11:13
4. Holiday season advice for retailers -  15:21

About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):

Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.

The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.

As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.

Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:

smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbh
Newsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

Welcome to Episode 29. of Growing ecommerce. Today, Mike is joined by Mike Taylor, co-founder of Vex Power (vexpower.com) which offers courses for marketers who want to improve their technical skills. He also offers consultancy, growth and experimentation and he's a popular instructor on LinkedIn learning. Microsoft Excel for marketers and memetics (Marketingmemetics.com) are one of his big hits over there. They discuss Mike's stance on testing. When is it a waste of time? When isn't it? And his critiques of personalization. This time, you get walked through marketing, mix modeling, generative AI, and a broader definition of memes.

About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):

Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.

The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.

As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.

Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:

smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbh
Newsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

Welcome to Episode 28 of Growing Ecommerce. In this episode, Mike shares one of his monologues to reflect the changes in advertising, and tackles the ongoing need for modernization, including testing, and account structure. Mike looks at the recent changes in the google ads universe and talks about what it means for ecommerce experts as google becomes the merchant center of gravity.

About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):

Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.

The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.

As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.

Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:

smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbh
Newsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

Welcome to Episode 27 of Growing Ecommerce. In this episode, Mike is joined by Inderpaul Rai, Head of Acquisition at ufurnish.com. Indy has had a remarkable career spanning from small-scale SEO to award-winning paid work on the agency side, to enterprise in-house teams and all the way back to a startup environment. We discuss all that, and along the way we talk about what a modern partnership-driven affiliate model looks like, plus the importance of paid and organic search harmonisation – or in other words, taking a total SEM view. Also, culture is a topic that Indy radiates, and this gets a spotlight as well.

1. Career highlights and lessons learned - 2:39
2. Modern partnership-driven affiliate model - 24:19
3. Paid and organic search harmonisation - 28:00
4. What is next in digital marketing? - 36:31

About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):

Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.

The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.

As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.

Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:

smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbh
Newsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

Welcome to episode 26. of Growing Ecommerce. In this episode, Mike is joined by Alex Greifeld. Alex has a long background in ecommerce and until recently she was a director at Tapestry, which collects brands you'll know from the luxury space like Coach and Kate Spade. Now, she's acting as an ecommerce growth advisor, so she's a really perfect fit for this podcast.

We talked through age-old debates like retention versus acquisition and newer ones like Return on Ad Spend versus Marketing Efficiency Ratio, as well as Customer Lifetime Value versus first-order profit.

Listen to the new Growing Ecommerce episode and learn more about:

1. Product, forgotten P of marketing - 02:39
2. Customer Retention Vs Acquisition - 04:19
3. ROAS vs MER? -17:13
4. CLV vs first-order profit? -26:51
5. What's next for ecommerce - 36:31 

You can hear more from Alex by subscribing to her very popular ecommerce newsletter, No Best Practices: https://nobestpractices.co/

About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):

Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.

The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.

As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.

Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:

smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbh
Newsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/

Welcome to Episode 25 of Growing Ecommerce. This time, Mike is joined by Katherine Munro, a data scientist at smec. If you have a stereotype in your mind that data scientists are brilliant, then Katherine will not disappoint you. She is a fountain of knowledge – disciplined and scientific as you might expect, and also incredibly creative in her thinking.
We catch up about some current projects she’s working on and then dive into CLV, or Customer Lifetime Value. What is CLV exactly, what are approaches to calculating or modelling it? How can we use it in an ecommerce setting? We talk cohorts, categories, and KPIs.

1. What is it? How to calculate or model it? - 04:19
2. How to use CLV in an e commerce setting? -17:13
3. The value of CLV for your business? -26:51
4. Beyond CLV - 36:31 

About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):

Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.

The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.

As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.

Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:

smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbh
Newsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/