DTC951: Site Speed Fixes, Strategy That Scales, and Ad Concepts

Good morning,

Here’s what you’ll find in today’s DTC:

• 🐢 Fix Your Site Speed Before BFCM Starts
• 🚀 The Strategy Shift That Separates Scaling Brands
• 🤔 How Many Creative Iterations Do You Actually Need?

You’re reading this newsletter along with new subscribers from: Scenario IQ, Reign Bridal, and SILKE London. 👋

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‍🏃 Page Speed Might Be The Difference Between A Sale or A Bounce for Black Friday

Black Friday means a major spike in traffic.

But if your site is too slow, chances are that even with that increased traffic, you’ll lose out on conversions.

The harsh reality: When page load time jumps even a few seconds, shoppers bail. The longer it takes your site to load, the more visitors will bounce.

The Pilothouse team shares that as page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds, bounce rates rise to 32%.

1 to 5 seconds? 90%. 🤯

Not only that, but CPCs also rise, and Google’s algo starts treating your ads like low-quality inventory.

Why? Because Google factors in landing-page speed in Quality Score, meaning slow pages raise CPCs even before someone bounces.

Smart Bidding also downgrades slow pages, reducing impression share right when competition peaks.

This means a few extra seconds can erase a campaign’s profitability.

If you want your BFCM campaigns to stay profitable, page speed is the one lever you can still pull today.

How to Win Back Speed Today (Five Fast Fixes)

1️⃣ Compress Every Asset: Convert images to WebP and keep hero images under 200–300 KB. Run all assets through TinyPNG or Squoosh.

2️⃣ Defer Non-Essential Tools

• Load chat widgets, heatmaps, and marketing pixels asynchronously
• Trigger them on scroll or first interaction

3️⃣ Reduce Page Weight

• Remove unused sections, animations, and autoplay video. Remember, every extra MB adds ~1 second on 4G!

4️⃣ Validate With Tools: Use PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to gauge site speed.

Aim for these metrics in your Core Web Vitals Assessment:

• Largest Contentful Paint < 2.5s
• Total Blocking Time < 200ms
• Cumulative Layout Shift < 0.1

5️⃣ Measure Marketing Impact

• Track ROAS, CPA, and bounce rate before and after your changes

The takeaway?

A slow site during Black Friday doesn’t just lose conversions. It makes every click more expensive.

Google rewards fast pages with cheaper clicks, stronger engagement, and better placement in the auction.

So make sure to optimize your site speed before Black Friday kicks off.

Every second you save puts money back into your pocket. 🕜

💁‍♀️ Your Creator Bottleneck Is Costing You Growth

Growth stalls when creative velocity stalls.

Not because your product is weak, but because you don’t have the creator pipeline to keep up.

Too many channels. Too much content. Zero time to chase creators. 😫

Sound familiar?

• ✨ You need Spark Ads, but have no Spark-ready UGC.
• 📈 You need TikTok Shop growth, but have no high-GMV affiliates.
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• ▶️ You need Reels, but can't get creators to reply fast enough.

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‍🎧 How Pilothouse Builds Strategy That Scales

Most DTC brands aren’t short on effort but lack strategy.

They’re stuck in the tactical spin cycle: chasing hacks, optimizing in circles, burning time and team on things that used to work.

In this episode, Dave Steele, CEO of Pilothouse, and Duncan Ferguson, Strategy Lead, unpack how Pilothouse breaks that vicious loop and why a proper strategy isn’t optional once you pass the $5 million mark.

For DTC brands trying to scale past tactics and actually build leverage.

In this episode, we dive into:

• What is the ‘tactical spin cycle’ and how to escape it
• How to recognize a good strategy vs. a bad strategy
• Why your team’s best practices might be killing growth
• When you need to stop optimizing and start repositioning
• How to unify Meta, Google, email, and more into a single system

▶️ Watch the full episode on YouTube here.

🎧 Or click here to listen on Spotify.

Zach Stuck shares that optimizing your ad strategy isn’t just about creating different iterations of the same ad for different platforms, but generating new concepts as well.

He shares that his team put out fewer iterations in Q4 than Q3 and focused on generating net-new concepts instead.

‍🛍️ The NRF Predicts Record-Breaking Holiday Sales

The National Retail Federation expects 187 million people to shop between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, 3 million more than last year.

Black Friday remains the biggest shopping day, followed closely by Cyber Monday.

And for the first time ever, NRF projects holiday sales will surpass $1 trillion.

Learn more here.

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DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.

Please note that items in this newsletter marked with * contain sponsored content.