Growing Ecommerce – The Retail Growth Podcast

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&...

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...

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...

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 b...

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...

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-driv...

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...

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...

Welcome to episode 24 of Growing Ecommerce. In this episode, Mike is joined by Kirk Williams - his own professional hero. Kirk is a PPC and digital advertising expert who runs his own PPC micro agency, ZATO Marketing. In this episode, Kirk and Mike ponder about the Google advertising space, both the challenges and opportunities moving forward, as well as the role of data collection and privacy in...

Welcome to episode 23 of Growing Ecommerce. In this episode, Mike is joined by his colleague from smec, Markus Harant. He is an online marketing expert who leads the Programmatic Advertising and Analytics team. Markus talks us through the technology behind programmatic , ecommerce use cases, how to view these campaigns, and What's going on with the dichotomy between brand and performance? If...

Welcome to episode 22 of Growing Ecommerce. In this episode, Mike was lucky enough to speak with Ginny Marvin, Google Ads product liaison. She supports communication and the working relationship between Google's product team on the one hand, and the advertisers and partners who use that platform on the other hand. In this episode you get introduced to Google’s latest resources to help you ste...

Welcome to episode 21. of growing ecommerce.  In this episode, Mike is joined by Karin Schallauer, smec’s product marketing team lead who just came back from K5, one of the biggest ecommerce conferences overall in the German-speaking region. Tune in as Karin and Mike take you down the ecommerce landscape and discuss: Managing marketplace, supply chain, personalisation, and digital transformation S...

Welcome to episode 20. of Growing eccommerce.   In this episode, Mike is lucky enough to speak with Max Hallerstede, CEO of Hallerstede gmbh, a long-running family business in Germany that Max helped bring online under the ecommerce trading brand Kofferworld. What's so special is that Max is a real pro in logistics, purchasing, and pricing and he talks to us about: How years of consultancy he...

Welcome to episode 19. You can think of it as part 2 to the previous conversation with Christopher Rogl in episode 15 - Performance Max: One campaign to rule them all. In this episode, Mike Ryan gives you a brief context for the PMax, a framework for smarter PMax retail campaigns, and ideas for bringing that framework to life. Mike, smec’s portfolio strategist keeps you up to date with: What are P...

Welcome to episode 18. In this episode, you get a deep dive into the story of healthy ecommerce growth and everything from attribution to efficiency metrics like MER and ROAS through the prism of challenges modern brands and retailers face daily:  the dense ecommerce playing field, the volatile media buying landscape, and the conundrum of profitable marketing efforts.  Mike, smec’s portfolio strat...

In this episode, you will get all you need to stay on top of Meta & Google earning reports, DTC Media Buying, and Retail media and marketplace networks. Mike, smec’s portfolio strategist, keeps you up to date with all the changes in the online retail environment keeping the most common challenge of retailers in mind: traffic acquisition. Looking at the direct-to-consumer business (DTC), the qu...

Competitive differentiation is key to marketing a diverse product portfolio, and it depends on the customer segment you target. It requires in-depth understanding of your customers’ concerns and behavior. Questions we had to ask: What are the jobs our customers do, how can our products support, and what are the competitive alternatives?  Here we look at how Sean McGinnis, KURU footwear President a...

Performance Max campaigns are a new way of automatically purchasing Ad inventory across Google’s entire network. PMax will replace other campaign types such as Smart Shopping and Local Campaigns later this year – leaving advertisers in a scramble to experiment with and understand this new technology. This podcast episode keeps you up to speed with the features, challenges and opportunities of PMax...

Inflation is here, so is the rise in demand, disruption in the supply chain, and changes in the ecommerce universe. This podcast episode looks at the rise of inflation in the macroeconomic environment and its impact on consumers and online retailers. It aims to provide reasoning to decisions we can take now to deal with the changes in the macroeconomic environment. How did we get here? Is inflatio...

This episode looks at smec’s recent participation at NRF 2022,  Retail’s Big Show taking place in New York.  How have companies coped with the disruptions in operating environment ?  How are industry leaders keeping their pace with data collection? What are the main differences in customer experience? Listen to Ralph Mayr, smec's product manager, Michael Weichselbaumer, smec's director o...

ROAS is a seemingly mundane marketing metric, calculated as the ratio of revenue to advertising costs. And yet it is so much more than that. In this episode Mike Ryan will talk about ROAS, it's alternatives and why you should consider ditching this metric for something more effective. Read more in this article: https://bit.ly/3KbV3zz About Smarter Ecommerce (smec): Smarter Ecommerce (smec) em...

What does the future of ecommerce hold? How can retailers thrive in 2022 and beyond? Listen to Brian McBride, former chairman of ASOS & CEO of Amazon UK, Tristan Horx, futurist at zukunftsInstitut, Jan Radanitsch, CEO at smec and podcast host Mike Ryan, Head of Retail Insights at smec, as they talk about how to prevail as an online retailer in the ever changing world of ecommerce. About Smarte...

Join pricing expert Ralph Mayr, data scientist Katherine Munro, and campaign strategist Stefan Stopper for a discussion of holiday promotional strategy, tools, and tactics. This panel discusses challenges and opportunities to profitability including supply & fulfillment, promotion timing & discounting, and the role of automation in marketing campaigns. About Smarter Ecommerce (smec): Smart...

Matthew Strelitz, Director of Performance Marketing at the Miami HEAT, explains how the HEAT’S ecommerce model differs from other sports franchises. Their DTC approach has scored big in terms of securing a robust revenue stream in the face of a pandemic-induced sales slump, as well as rewarding internal innovation, enabling agile product launches to capture the latest on-court heroics, strengtheni...

Mihai Popescu, Head of Digital Marketing at Esprit, shares lessons learned from building teams and driving growth in four fascinating business models: hotel comparison, product comparison, a B2B marketplace, and an iconic apparel brand. Along the way, he offers advice on hiring and OKRs, in-housing and partnerships, and marketing measurement.  About Smarter Ecommerce (smec): Smarter Ecommerce (sme...