November News from Embryo

It’s coming to the end of the year and what a busy year it’s been. For Embryo, we moved into our newly expanded offices, took the whole company to Palma and gained 24 new team members. November has been no different, we’ve been out and about and developing, here’s what we’ve been up to.

What We Learnt

As usual, working in the digital, the industry is constantly evolving which is why we pride ourselves on using our curiosity to dig deep and discover the insights that others miss.

Black Friday

The last weekend in November and the trending day has always been a keen focus for retailers and shoppers. However, data is actually showing that interest in the event has been in decline for quite some time, and this year paired with the cost of living crisis Google showed that trend data is 50% less than in 2019.

However, Embryo manages paid media for many retailers who still took part in Black Friday campaigns, so here’s what we found:
• Embryo had over 20 accounts running Black Friday promotions spending over £500,000 across the four days
• 31% of campaign revenue came between 6-10pm on Friday itself, despite offers running month-long for the majority of our clients
• Google CPCs increased between 15% and 40% during BFCM
• Meta CPMs increased between 40% and 80% during BFCM
• For a home retailer, we generated £421,992 from a spend of £41,336
• For a high value sports retailer, we saw a 300% increase in revenue over the weekend

Analytical Anomalies

This month we saw across the analytics industry that certain websites are being impacted by incorrect processing of traffic attribution which is causing big spikes in direct and unassigned traffic. Fortunately it was a known issue by Google which they worked on and retrospectively applied the correct attribution once they’ve fixed the issue.

Where We Went

November was a busy month for events for team Embryo, here’s a rundown of where we’ve been and what we got up to.

Careers Evening

One of our ultimate highlights of the month was our first-ever careers evening event. The event saw over 50 people join our team at our office to learn more about the business, speak to our team and hear from our heads as they showcased their departments.

Feedback for the event included:

‘Thank you for this lovely evening and chance to get more understanding about values and internal processes structure in your agency.’

‘A lovely event that not only brought people together but a good understanding of what each aspect of marketing is.’

‘Callum Leonard and Harriet Tuite, appreciate your brilliant talk on paid marketing and all the insights you shared and thanks for answering all our burning questions. Cicely Ward it was great meeting you and the rest of the team, thanks for organising such a brilliant event.’

UK Search Awards

We’re very proud to say that earlier this year, Embryo was shortlisted for 13 categories at the prestigious annual awards. So when the ceremony finally came around, 20 members of the team went to London for the celebrations. The evening was fantastic, mostly due to our team winning the award for:

Best Use of Search B2B (PPC Large) – TIO, Unprecedented PPC Practices Yielding Transformative Results

The judges said: ‘The campaign demonstrated solid objectives, brilliant creativity, and a unique use of Google Scripts for automation to bring the best results. The team have managed to design a sustainable strategy that suits the client’s objectives, and they’re a worthy winner.’

Prolific North, Northern Agency Guide Launch

Each year, Prolific North publishes a Northern Agency Guide, showcasing the best agencies in the North. For a third year in a row, Embryo has been featured, and if you have a copy of this years publication you’ll find us on page 44. To celebrate the guide some of our team went to the launch event in Manchester’s Northern Quater, where they had a great evening mixing with other professionals from the industry.

We Partied with MYP

As the digital partner of the young professionals network, we sponsored two of Manchester Young Professionals’ events this month, including their Christmas party and Charity Ball for the Prince’s Trust. Both events were fantastic evenings and as usual, our team loved supporting a very worthy cause and meeting lots of new people.

So there’s our company updates, if you’d like to stay in the loop with more of our team happenings and learnings then be sure to follow us on social media.