About This Episode:

Not all online businesses need the same amount of traffic. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss how consideration, target market, and budget impact traffic for both startups and industry leaders.

Check out the full episode to learn:

• What a traffic moat is, and why established brands want to create them.
• What startups should focus on when it comes to generating traffic.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon MacDonald: Hey, Ryan, I assume that our listeners are aware, but not all businesses online need the same traffic. So surprise, surprise. So much depends on consideration, target market budgets.

All right. So. If you’re selling a 35 watch band, your conversion paths are pretty likely to be short, but if you’re selling a 25,000 B2B server, or maybe even a SAS product of all things, we haven’t talked a lot about here, but I have a feeling we will do more. You most likely have some complicated paths to conversion.

And I think, you know, we really have not spent a whole lot of time tackling these issues. And I think there’s potentially a more unique [00:01:00] traffic source and pattern there that that we should discuss.

Ryan Garrow: I agree. And I think it seems logical that when you’re looking to drive traffic in a High consideration industry with high dollar value deals or lots of margin in those product sales.

It really still does, when you boil it all down, come a lot of times down to just budget, which in turn comes down to, were you already successful before you started spending money? or where you’re at now. Like it’s difficult unless you have an investor with really deep pockets willing to blow a bunch of money on the internet to hopefully win to be able to compete sometimes when you’ve got a large incumbent brand there.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: I just got the call this morning actually with a company that’s launching into a B2B space. They’re only going to have a couple thousand dollars of budget and they’re competing against It’s the web stronts and the Grangers of the world with essentially the same products in their little small slice of the industry there.

I mean, I, I painted a pretty bleak picture for them. I was like, it’s going to be tough. Your competition is already spending six, [00:02:00] seven figures a month on Google capturing demand. You’re going to be priced out of the ad auctions in just a thousand dollars. It’s like. You know, a pea shooter against a tank to a degree.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Why even bother in those cases?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And I tell them most of the time, don’t, I was like, you can pay me and you know, I’d have no problem taking money, but you’re not going to be happy. So there’s probably better places to spend your money. You know, startups in these spaces have to get somewhat creative for their traffic and lead flow while larger businesses or industry leaders really have to focus on creating traffic moats around what they’re doing.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. So. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard that term traffic moat before what what do you mean by that because I don’t even know how an industry leader would create one. What is that? What are we talking about here ?

Ryan Garrow: Before today? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it. But I was sitting down creating notes.

I was like, how do you explain some of these strategies I would talk about? I’m like, I think of it as like, okay, you’ve got this castle, you know, And you’re, Oh, you’ve got, you can build a moat around it and it helps protect you. And we talk in business around, you know, how do you build moats or, you know, be in blue oceans and keep out the bloody [00:03:00] waters.

If you consider your traffic, your advantage on as a B2B large sales product or a SAS product, then you want to protect that. You don’t want to just make it easy to, to steal that traffic from you. That’s what I think you’re trying to accomplish in a perfect world. And you’re always going to have people trying to take it from you because they’re going to see your size.

They can estimate your profit. You know, we know a lot of what SAS margin products look like. You can see their traffic and do backup math and calculations and be like, Hey, I want some of that profit. To start creating this mode, you got to think through your search funnel and then at each layer, figure out kind of how you’re going to protect yourself.

What’s going to keep the startups from coming in? I usually start with Google Bing and say, okay, you’re capturing demand. And if it was me, I would almost do the opposite of what a lot of e com brands get advised to do. But I would say increase your bids, increase your CPA goals, meaning like be willing to pay more for a CPA than maybe what you can actually capture.

Okay. If you can get a CPA of, let’s say 80 on Google and Bing, [00:04:00] and I can handle 120, 130, I might go up there anyway. Just because it’s going to make it that much more difficult for a startup with less money than me to compete and I’m playing the long game.

Jon MacDonald: Well, it’s almost like that story you were just talking about, right?

In the sense that somebody new who’s entering that marketplace can’t possibly compete spending a couple grand when their competitors are spending tens of thousands.

Ryan Garrow: Google many times will set a minimum CPC in a lot of industries to help give you that moat to a degree. But like I might be bidding a hundred even though I know I can handle.

I can take it for 50 or do really well there just because I’m competitive and I want to win. And I want a monopoly if I can get it, but I want to keep them out. And I want to focus really hyper focus on quality score because that’s the area that small competitors can jump into these auctions and beat you.

You know, if you’ve got a very large Google ads account, that’s not getting a lot of attention in many areas, you may have three to five out of 10 scores. Meaning that if I’m a small competitor, I’m going to get hyper focused on that. I can get a [00:05:00] 10 out of 10 and outbid you for less money. You might be bidding 100, but I might be able to get that same click for only 30 because I’ve got a much better quality score.

Large brands can’t take their foot off the gas and allow for those creaks to come in. So you really do have to pay attention to those details. If I’m advising an aggressive business, you know, somebody like myself. I might say you need to find a way to get a second entity in that auction That you own and control not something that you you don’t break any rules by doing it, by the way It’s just you have to be very clean about it.

Jon MacDonald: Okay,

Ryan Garrow: you can’t have the same credit card on there You can’t have the same billing address You need to make sure google sees that second entity bidding in that auction as a Second entity as a competitor to you, even though the ladies may be flowing up to you at the end of the day So some of them might be that you create a best of list We had a client that did this in a much simpler industry He was selling t shirts based undershirts and he created this huge ecosystem where he became a like a t shirt guy And was like doing all of these reviews of undershirts funny [00:06:00] enough, he won every best of list.

He’s like, Oh, that’s got the best quality. It’s got the highest thread count. It’s all these things.

Jon MacDonald: This is the old mattress play. All the online mattress brands done this for years.

Ryan Garrow: Yes. And it, I think it gets overlooked in its simplicity. Like you’re just going to create this entity that you like, but it can bid because it’s Collecting review. And you might even set up, realistically, you might set up affiliates, affiliate links to your competitors.

Jon MacDonald: Why not make something off of it?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. You send them traffic, you might as well at least make some money off it. Yeah. And so, but you’re gonna win most of the awards on there. So that could be one way to do it.

Sometimes you will acquire or create a reseller of your product so that you know, if you’re selling this piece of sass and this. Ryan’s, you know, store is going to be one of the resellers of that. I can own that. There’s nothing against that rule. It’s a separate business. Maybe my wife owns that and she’s the reseller on there, but it’s my, I’m controlling the budget goes in and the reseller gets some of the revenue share just like a normal one would.

And then sometimes in the B2B like online sales, you would buy [00:07:00] it. You can buy a competitor and

Jon MacDonald: Oh, that’s a good idea.

Ryan Garrow: control it that way. One of our clients, and we pulled this from Fossil Watches. Where I don’t know, 10 years ago, they, they owned the watch market in the U S I mean, they owned like the top 10 brands.

They made all the watches. They had a fossil. They had watch station. They had all of, I mean, they could, they basically came to us during certain periods of the year and said, we want to own watches, wallets, and belts for men. I’m like, well, what do you, what do you mean own it? We don’t want to see any competitors anywhere in the auction on text ads or shopping.

You have all of our properties. Go make that happen. Like, okay. So if you weren’t organic top three on any of those during holiday, you were not getting traffic for those. It was going to be painful competing with our team on that space. So it’s, it’s thinking big,

Jon MacDonald: interesting,

Ryan Garrow: but really focusing on some of those details within the space. Okay.

Jon MacDonald: So I think everyone right now knows that you’re super competitive. So this doesn’t surprise me, but I love that tactic. You know, it’s [00:08:00] taking something that is legit, Google lets you do it and using it towards your advantage. And I love the buying a small competitor up to be able to do that. I think that’s a great idea.

Okay. So I get that you can create this mode around demand capture and properties like Google and Bing, but so many SAS or software as a service clients that we work with at the good have massive amounts of traffic coming from sources like affiliates or LinkedIn is huge now. How do you put a moat around those?

Ryan Garrow: Well, of course, it’s usually, it’s usually not as simple as controlling Google and Bing because that’s a very direct spend a dollar, get this relationship. But again, I think as long as you’re thinking within the details and minutia of those areas of the traffic, I think you can find ways to really Corner the market and keep small competitors out, even big competitors sometimes depending, but like, for example, affiliates are big in the SAS space.

Many of the tech players in my space have affiliate programs and they’re, they’re nice, but they’re almost table stakes for playing. Like if you don’t have an affiliate program or a partner [00:09:00] program that pays me a rev share, it’s like, yeah, are you, are you even trying to a degree? If I were to create a moat in affiliates for a big SAS company, Or a large player in the B2B space.

I would want to create tiers that, you know, a small competitor just can’t play it. And so aggressive pricing is one thing. So if standard in your industry is 15 to 20 percent of the SAS revenue to a partner, go 30%, I mean, make it uncomfortable for a small company without much money to be like, how would we pay 30 percent or more?

If you’re smaller, oftentimes you have to overshoot the incumbent. to take that partner away. Aggressive pricing can be one thing. It doesn’t have to be an all the time thing, right? You could just be like, I know this guy over there or girl over there is starting to start up a competitor of mine. I’m going to make sure they don’t get off the ground.

Small competitors usually lack a few things, money, time, and clients. And so if they don’t have all of those that you have an abundance of, or at least more than they do, as an affiliate, you want to provide those things to your partners or your affiliates that you know your small competitors can’t do.

You’ve [00:10:00] got the clients they don’t, you can provide leads. For your partners, find a way to engage your clients. Find some needs that your partners that are sending you business will like, I mean, everybody in the partner space loves reciprocal lead flow.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s a key, right? It’s gotta be reciprocal, but 30 percent is intriguing.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. I mean, so I have some competitors that will just do it for Revshare and that’s fine. You know, there’s many agency owners that will take, you know, 15, 20 grand a month in rev share from partners. That’s great because that’s going right to the owner’s bottom line or affording employees that maybe you’re trying to build up when you’re as big as LP 10, 15, 20 grand.

It really doesn’t. It’s not bad. We’re not going to turn it down. Don’t get me. Don’t hear me to say that.

Jon MacDonald: Shop in the bucket. I get it. Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: It’s a drop in the bucket for us. But so it’s when you can give leads that keeps me from saying, Hey, all things being equal and you’re giving me leads, guess who’s going to stay the predominant partner for us.

You know, there may, if you’ve got more cash, you could provide cash for a certain tiers that you hit. You know, we’re working with a partner right now to try to do some of that for some of our employees. Like, Hey, we’re going to do a set of incentive trip for some of the [00:11:00] lead flow that they’re going to be getting.

Well, that’s unique enough that a small competitor to them is not gonna be able to come to me and be like. Yeah, we’d like to, you know, give your employee a 100 gift card. Cute, not gonna turn it down, but at the day, they’re probably not gonna pay attention because they have this big cruise trip coming up with this partner.

Inviting them to events with your client. So if you’re already doing some events with your clients, where they’re just gonna be in the same spot. Invite a partner that you like, that you want to keep from going to a smaller competitor. Just getting them in the room with your clients is going to be valuable to them.

Again, if you’re inviting me to just meet with your clients because you’re there and you’re saying that Ryan’s valuable and logical position does good stuff.

Jon MacDonald: I mean, I feel like that’s the only time we see each other face to face anymore since COVID is like those events, right? Come see our clients. That’s an interesting one too.

Ryan Garrow: LinkedIn is tough because I feel like it’s been evolving a lot and it seems to be, it’s a pretty even playing field. Anybody can post anything they want. There’s no restrictions to being able to post a piece of content there. You don’t have to pay to play there. And so it is fairly [00:12:00] flat, democratic, even playing field space.

Most bigger businesses though will have a content team to help. And I think that’s the resource that becomes more valuable is if you have a solid content team regularly posting. The key is engaging thought leadership pieces. And this is going to take some work because there’s a lot of garbage on LinkedIn.

Like it’s just I don’t want to see another case study. I I don’t I just don’t care great You have a business you’ve probably done something good and you can spin the numbers most case studies when I get in them It’s even some of our partners I’ll go into the case and be like don’t you want to put this in front of your clients?

I’m, like no your case study is garbage because you one partner in particular talk about How they increase conversion rates. I can increase conversion rates. Like we talked about, like, not, and it wasn’t you, it wasn’t Jon, by the way, but it was like, I could just cut off your non brand traffic and conversion rate goes up.

So how can you tell me that making this little change just magically increased conversion rates across 5, 000 clients? Maybe, but you’ve got to give me some real data there and your case studies are fluffy. So,

Jon MacDonald: yeah, I think, you know, LinkedIn’s becoming more like, in some ways, like Reddit, where the community will come after [00:13:00] you in a way, they’ll call you out.

If you do things like that, and it used to be that you could post whatever you wanted to LinkedIn and everybody was kumbaya. Everyone was great with it. And, you know, high fives and likes and thumbs up everywhere. And I’m noticing as a lot of folks who were on Twitter left Twitter wanted something more business minded as Twitter has gotten away from business have really come on and said, you know, like, I love this, but you got to bring value.

And if you’re not bringing value, then I’m Or you’re trying to fake bringing that value, then I’m going to call you out on it. And I think that’s fair. And I love seeing that. And I think there’s a lot of ways to make LinkedIn work for brands. But you’re right. It’s tough because anyone can post anything.

And you are at the whim of the likes and follows, if you will, that are on there. And you got to deliver value. It’s the only way to do it.

Ryan Garrow: Yep, giving me a picture of you and partners at happy hour.

Jon MacDonald: [00:14:00] Like, yeah, this isn’t Facebook.

Ryan Garrow: I mean, no, it’s like that. There’s a time and place for that. And I get it. And you want to call them out, but it becomes the easy button.

I think it’d be like, I’m going to go to face facing and I tagged you and it’s great. And yes, you need to tag partners and give them some of that. Especially if you’re a leader in the space, your team does a phenomenal job at this. I mean, there’s so many times that we come across clients, we share, they’re like, yeah, Jon is everywhere.

He’s such a big deal. And I’m like, he is. Yes. But I also know that he’s got a great team behind him, you know, pushing that out there. Like it doesn’t just happen by accident. There’s a lot of intentionality with what your team does and how you’re repurposing content. You write books. To give yourself more things to talk about and do so.

I think Jon MacDonald is a great person to go if you’re trying to think about LinkedIn. And he does it from, yes, he’s a leader, but he does it with a very small team. So you can adopt Jon’s strategy as the market leader. But also maybe think about it too, as an incumbent, like you just have to be very intentional. So LinkedIn is somewhat challenging as the market leader because of that.

Announcer: You’re [00:15:00] listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of the The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers.

And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes.

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon MacDonald: I think it is, and I think too many people lean on the business instead of the individual, but LinkedIn. nobody follows businesses. They follow people on LinkedIn. And so you can’t just post from your company account and ask your team to like it. Not going to do anything. You really have to engage and be part of the community.

Similar to Reddit, as I mentioned, where you have to be part of the community. You can’t just pop in and promote yourself. Doesn’t work.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, [00:16:00] I wouldn’t even go to those stories I have there with I was trying to solve some Amazon problems. I went in there and I could see people doing I’m like, Oh, this is Stay away from that part of Reddit.

Yeah. But yeah, another example to look at too is Barb Brewis from No Commerce. I think he does a great job of being really authentic on LinkedIn. Yeah. Historically, he’s really built up a good following, and so you can duplicate what he’s doing. And No Commerce, I would argue, is one of the, one of the market leaders in the post purchase survey space.

Yeah. So they’re trying to keep their selves insulated, and so the whole team has to be going. Like, if you don’t have, I’ll say this, if you’re a large entity, In the B2B, SaaS space, and you don’t have a LinkedIn strategy for your organization, I think you have a problem.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Because it’s not like your business needs to post. Again, like you said, nobody cares. But your C level VPs, directors all have something that they are strategically posting about. And you have to be willing, I think as a big company, to let your people become elevated. There’s a lot of leadership, I think, to get worried like, Oh, if they get too big for me, they’re going to demand more [00:17:00] pay, or they’re going to get recruited.

I’m like, well, anybody can recruit anybody on LinkedIn. I know who the best people in e com are across the board. It’s not a question. If you want to hire the best here, here, here. I know who it is. It’s, it’s more about, are you going to create some value and encourage them to be part of your company is how you should be thinking, not like afraid of them getting picked off because they’re being helped in their LinkedIn strategy.

Jon MacDonald: You have to understand that you’re going to be helping people with their personal brands and that’s okay. You want that. And yeah, they take that when they, when they move on. Hey, at the same time, I think that obviously we do it. So I think it can be fairly, really valuable. And any other points for like a large brand wanting to create a moat around their traffic? You mentioned a few large names earlier, but

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, I would say events can be a great moat for trackers. If you’re in the SaaS or B2B space, you’re probably involved in events, or there are industry events that you probably need to be at if you’re not. That is a great source of traffic and lead flow and you need to create a mode around that.

I don’t think it needs to be a booth at every event because I think a lot of times that’s [00:18:00] a waste of space. The expo, we rarely do, and I can’t say logical position is perfect at this, but we rarely have a booth because that’s not often where the money’s made. Sometimes you have to have a booth and that’s fine, but even just making sure your logos on the event guide.

So you have some branding and awareness and you have a person there that is willing to go out and meet people. So when I’m going to events. I find that the the companies that are most successful have the right person at the right event. I often don’t like multiple people at events if I’m the same company. Just a personal preference of mine.

Jon MacDonald: Okay.

Ryan Garrow: Because I find that they, you’ll have maybe one person that’s good at events and they put somebody else to tag along. They end up latching on and not covering double the space. They cover maybe less space than one person would alone. And so one person that really understands how to just network. And I’ll say this. If I go into an event not knowing if it’s going to be good, it’s already failed.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Like your event is made the two weeks to a month before you even show up. Where you’ve got meetings already [00:19:00] booked. You’ve got partners already engaged. You’ve got events outside of it that you’re attending.

Like we have a person or he loves conferences. Like he, it is hands down. He loves it more than anybody else on the planet. And he wants to meet every single person. He’s phenomenal at these, but he, he doesn’t plan yet. He like, it’s like two days before he’s like, Ooh, I got to get to a happier on Tuesday because I don’t have one yet.

And then what am I doing after happy hour? So he’ll do it. But he does it in much more condensed than I would prefer, but he, after every event, so that’s one of the people I will go to an event with because he’s fully autonomous, but I, and he stays out later, like my bedtime, usually in an event about nine o’clock and I’m done. You’ll take the early morning coffee.

Yeah. He handles the 9am to 4am or 9pm to 4am shift and it’s great, but we leave an event and Everybody knows it’s amazing if you’re going to do an event, you don’t necessarily need to do all of you know what he does and stays up late, but he has an impact. And so if you’re going to be in an industry leader and keep those away, you need to have some of that.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. And I think, you know, you have to have the right personality for that, right? If [00:20:00] you’re just a by nature and introvert. And don’t really like those things, then don’t, don’t go because you have to engage.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, don’t force yourself into that.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. You’ve got to be willing to sit down at a bar with a beer and talk to somebody you’ve never heard or, you know, even a glass of water.

You don’t know them. You’re going to meet them and they may be a prospect. They may not, doesn’t matter. And the final point, I think for large brands. is going to be you need to have great relationships with the other top companies in an industry. And so if you have the, like the top three companies in an industry solving problems together for the same group of clients, you’ve essentially created an unbreakable cartel scenario.

Like always one of my goals, you know, there’s like, I want to be able to have a cartel or I kind of friend, lead it up to a syndicate. Now you get the best of the best. And once you get them together and then they’re solving problems for these clients, those clients are not going to leave, right? A group that’s working really well together to help them grow.

And so when you have the scale to be able to pick up the phone or email The other really large company helping them and say hey, we’d like to help [00:21:00] solve this problem with you And we’re going to we have the resources just to give you and not ask for anything in return We just want to make sure this client’s taken care of that goes a long way And that’s going to come back and create this circular system of referrals Which will keep going around and around and it makes it very challenging for You know, a competitor, small competitor to try to jump into that flywheel because it just won’t be an entry point.

Jon MacDonald: Well, I’m glad I’m part of your cartel. Excuse me, syndicate. How would you suggest the startup do just that though? I think the vast majority of brands are chasing the market leader, right? So if you’re not part of that market leader cartel, how do you make that happen? What do you, what do you think you need to do?

Ryan Garrow: It’s obviously tough as you would see, like the reason the big companies are big is because they’ve done some things right. And so you’re trying to undo something that’s been done very well. And so I think against the grain, probably I would tell a smaller brand to think small, not as in you don’t want to take down a big competitor of lofty goals for your business. But you need to get very specific and targeted.

Jon MacDonald: Okay.

Ryan Garrow: And I have this [00:22:00] conversation regularly with partners trying to partner with me at logical position saying, you know, we want to partner with you. I’m like, okay, great. Yeah. Everybody wants to, cause we have a lot of clients and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you can’t come to me and say, well, we can’t, we built this tech to do all of these things that probably take place.

Or of 10 of your partners. I’m like, well, you’re not going to replace 10 of my partners. You have 50 clients I can’t afford to do that. Number one, you might be the best and i’ll need to pay attention to that And help you along the way if you are the actual best in certain niches, but be hyper specific around what problem you solve for my clients that I can go to them with My account teams and say hey i’ve got this partner That’s going to solve a very specific problem that is not probably being solved as well by other partners More specific is more better because you can always expand on that.

But if you’re telling me you can solve all my problems I’m just not going to listen, it’s not going to help. And another thing I would do is if you’re a small business at startup, you’ve got some clients that are probably pretty passionate about you, they’ve taken the gamble on you and they like your tech, [00:23:00] usually you’ve started that because of relationships, double down on those, follow those customers to their events.

Doesn’t really matter what event it is, you want to be by their side. Number one, you’re playing defense to keep in front of them and build a relationship, keep the competitors out, but you also want to see who else is there and what’s the potential. You know, a great example was early on in my partnership career.

I followed one of our clients to outdoor retailer, which is a, that’s an amazing event. I love it. Everybody listening should try to get to outdoor retailer because it’s just super cool.

Jon MacDonald: The kegs come out at like two, it ends up being a party.

Ryan Garrow: and there’s all the coolest stuff coming out next season is there.

Like you can see all the new shoes, all the new stuff going on trucks. You see, you know, vehicles that haven’t come out yet because they’re outfitting them for products. Just do it. It’s super cool. And it’s in Denver, usually, which I like, I think they started moving it around, but it’s just a cool spot.

When I went there with this client, number one, we had a ton of fun. We rented an Airbnb with. They’re they’re team and I stayed with them. I kept them and deep in the relationship, but I also leveraged that relationship to open up new doors and outdoor retail. So I was just [00:24:00] walking the floor saying, Hey, how you doing?

What are you doing for marketing? What’s going here? I saw, you know, opportunities for clients or new companies come on board, but also I was like, Hey, you service the same companies I’m trying to talk to, and we don’t compete. I’m going to partner with you. Yeah. So I created some great partnerships there and I wasn’t supposed to be there.

So they don’t allow agencies in Dow to a retailer unless you, you might be able to, if you spent a disgusting amount of money at the time though, they were like specifically. No agencies.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. And so the hack for us was we would go every year and speak there and we would have a client speak with us. And that was always the hack to get into those conferences because if we can have a client get us a badge and a speaking slot and then we would do it with them and we would basically turn it into a case study and they would talk about their experience and we would provide value. Right. Of how to do something and how it turned out for this brand out there. Retailer love that.

Ryan Garrow: Oh, yeah.

Jon MacDonald: [00:25:00] They always loved it.

Ryan Garrow: And it’s unique enough because your competitors weren’t thinking like that because there was, there was a wall around that event saying it’s really difficult for an agency to get in.

So don’t try. I was like, well, I’m not going to, I usually don’t take no for an answer. So I’m like, what can I do? And great. So think through things like that, where it is a walled garden, keeping in mind. You out on purpose along with your competitors, no matter how big they are, then figure out what can I do?

Sometimes it’s just, Hey, I’ve got clients there. I’m going to have, find some, look at the list of sponsors and be like, Hey, I see you’re going to be there. I’d love to throw an event for you and some of your clients. I’ll cover the costs and we’re just going to do. A happy hour across the street. Yeah, you know, I did that at, it used to be called IRCE.

Jon MacDonald: Oh, yeah.

Ryan Garrow: It used to be good. Now it’s garbage. I don’t even know what it’s called now, but it’s, I don’t even, don’t even waste the time going at this point. And IRCE, if you’re listening or whatever you’re called now, you can call me and we can talk through it. But it’s not great. But then it was, and I said, I had Brent Baum, Ross, the CEO of Listrack.

I had one or two people from Google on stage. And I just opened up a [00:26:00] bar across the street from McCormick Place over there in Chicago and just said, Hey, invite some of your friends and come on in. I literally whoever who cares that I had some budget spend. It wasn’t a ton, but it was great. Met some phenomenal companies, but I had to think outside the box of how to get companies outside of the event that I couldn’t pay for because I was small at the time.

I couldn’t make it happen. Love that. And I think you need to think through partnerships. You know, big competitors can really do more in partnerships. Then you can, if you’re small, but partnerships becomes a way that you can level the playing field. If you focus more on the relationship piece. I think a lot of large brands that I see in the SAS space gets large enough that the partner team isn’t maybe necessarily as important as some of the other things in the organization.

And so it doesn’t get the attention and therefore they don’t attract the top talent into the partner space. Not always, but many times. And so their partnerships in that ecosystem become more of just an affiliate relationship essentially, where you get a, you’re a number and you get a newsletter and commission payouts.

But if you have somebody that’s really good in partnerships and building relationships where they come into your [00:27:00] organization with existing relationships, that can do a lot to move the needle because I will often do more for a partner that is just a good person and have a good relationship, even if I could make more money from a payout or something from a larger partner in their space.

I think you just have to get a little more creative in that space. And then I would say when you’re looking at the search, you are going to look at marketing online. And I think you have to play a spot in that to a degree. But if your budget is such a small magnitude, it’s hyper focused. And so you might only attack a small sliver of the market.

And, you know, if you have a tenth of a percent of the market right now, getting to two and three percent would be huge anyway. Yeah. Very targeted landing pages. And think through the entire search funnel, because you don’t have the shotgun blast to hit everything in the funnel. Across all search terms and so you need to think kind of that ClickFunnel, like if they need to see this piece of content on LinkedIn, then how do I get them in?

A first party list of remarketing, so I can say, then I get them on, you [00:28:00] know, meta and then I can get them on the display network around Google and then I can get a YouTube video in front of them. You can be big to a very small group of people with the, with the budget, but doesn’t even have to be big.

Yeah. You just have to be highly intentional and that’s where you’re thinking small. Like if I’m going to create a POS system for aftermarket auto, that’s a massive mark. You cannot spend enough money at SEMA to have an impact for that as you launch. And so what you need to do is say, I’m going to be aftermarket for this particular subset of products.

Maybe it’s going to be chrome wheels for cars between the sixties and seventies. And those are one really good at, and I will know the product better than any other partner trying to service them. So when I get in front of them or get on a phone call, they know that There will be nobody that knows the products I’m trying to sell better than them and you land and expand from that say, okay, I’m the best at this.

Now I’m going to add on the ancillary products that maybe they have or spend this other retailer that’s trying to sell those. Similar enough things will look at them and say, Oh, you [00:29:00] do work with them. I know them and you’re doing really well. Great. Let’s try that as well.

Jon MacDonald: I love it. It all comes down to face time, right? Being willing to have that conversation, meet up with them in person and share the love, right?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Well, and just making sure that you’re not, you know, once people are getting insight, like you’re taking advantage of, you know, like Jon’s team and making sure the conversions are good because it’s, you offline around, The SAS product, the conversion doesn’t happen on the site necessarily, like getting somebody to sign up for free.

I do that all the time. I have so many emails with free Adobe. Don’t tell Adobe, Jon. I know you’re looking at Adobe things that I had to edit a PDF. So I’m like, God, I got to get another email address because I just need to edit this one thing.

Jon MacDonald: Stop killing our conversion right over there.

Ryan Garrow: But it’s, it’s after the fact. So you guys make sure you’re, you are thinking through that full funnel, not just. Oh, we got a free trial. Therefore, we’re done now.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah hundred percent.

Ryan Garrow: Don’t ignore that.

Jon MacDonald: Awesome. Well, this has been enlightening to talk about more traffic for larger brands and how that complicates things and how to build that moat of the traffic moat, thinking about all the other ways you can, you can make [00:30:00] this work. So I appreciate your time today.

Ryan Garrow: No, thank you, Jon. Maybe I’ll have to trademark that traffic mode thing.

Jon MacDonald: Love it. Have at it.

Ryan Garrow: Thank you.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 125): Larger the Brand, More Complicated the Traffic appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

While analytics, interviews, and surveys offer valuable insights, nothing compares to watching how users actually engage with your site. That is where heatmaps come in. However, not every heatmap software is created equally.

This week on Drive & Convert, Jon talks all things heat maps! From their various uses to which heatmap tool is truly the best, join us for an episode that is a researcher’s dream. 

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. The value of using heat mapping tools
2. How Hotjar stands out from its competitors
3. Other tools you can use to see what your site visitors are doing

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon Macdonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer: You’re listening to drive and convert a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e commerce growth engine with Jon McDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan: Well, hello, Jon. Good to connect again. I am. Excited about what we’re talking about today. Cause it actually came up last week between us and it happened to coincide with our schedules. This is fun. When real life mirrors podcast life, you put on here that we, you wanted to discuss heat mapping and the software out there and, and what’s the best one for people that want to really dig into research and we’ve always at logical position, like historically, I’ll say eight years ago.

We, in the SMB side of the business, we had some clients that were really into data and bogged down our team with lots of questions. And one of their solutions was, well, you’d like data, you need to go look at heat mapping. Because what we found out is once they got a heat map, they became silent. And then all they did was watch their screen and watch people on the site.

And they just were so

Jon: fascinated with it. And hopefully they would learn some stuff in the meantime. Right? So, I mean, it sounds like a win win.

Ryan: That would be the hope. I don’t honestly know if these clients actually came away with anything, but they were super distracted and let us do our work. But it was out of that, we actually learned a lot of the value of heat mapping because it’s like, wow, there’s a lot of things you can solve by just understanding where people are getting lost.

So it’s like dipping your toe into conversion rate optimization or DxO. It just comes with understanding of what are people doing on the site. Right. And so I’m excited to actually learn the actual reasons behind heat mapping, not just kind of distracting clients and getting some of that data, but it was, it was fascinating last week to hear some of your answers to our team’s questions around heat mapping and understanding some of the traffic patterns and interactions on the site and how you can learn a lot from your, about your customers through it.

So yeah, now that transparently there are probably close to a hundred heat mapping. Systems out there or claim to be like Shopify alone probably has quote unquote, I’m using air quotes here free heat mapping softwares that are like, you know, I don’t, I don’t even want to get into it probably, but they’re, they all say the same thing, but you know, why are we having to talk about the best?

Is it only because there’s like over a hundred of them that say they do the same thing?

Jon: Well, look, that’s, that’s a great observation because there are tons out there. So, we really do need to talk about this in part because there are so many options. They’re not all the same. You’ll have to trust me on that, but they’re not all the same.

But I can see how it looks that way based on someone who doesn’t live in these tools on a daily basis. Right? And it’s also partly a topic of conversation today because we get asked this question at The Good so often. Much all the time. Like you said, it came up last week. I guarantee you it came up at least last week for our team as well.

So here’s the deal. A researcher is only as good as their tools, right? So if you want to make the best decisions, you need to arm yourself with the best information, analytics, data, user interviews, surveys, they’re all helpful in their own ways, right? But there is a Powerful insight in observing people using your site or your app, and that’s what heat maps are all about, but you need to have quality data that you can trust, and when you have that, this gives you a clear, a really comprehensive and ideally unbiased view of the visitor’s experience on your site.

Ryan: All right, so, I mean, conceptually, I understand heat mapping, but I guess, is there a primary value of that other than just seeing where a cursor moves on a site?

Jon: Oh, for sure. I think that’s where, if you’re just looking to distract somebody, perhaps, right? Then yeah, there’s value in just seeing that, right?

And living in that data, I think. is extremely valuable, you know, learning by observing that stuff is great, but there are dozens of little variables that affect how and when your visitors decide to take action, right? For instance, a visitor might read some content, explore some images, the page before finally taking that next step, these footprints, let’s call them, right, can provide key insight to help you optimize the experience and drive more convergence and opportunities.

communities. Unfortunately, You can’t get that type of data out of the box in things like Google Analytics. That isn’t just a bad tool. What can you get

Ryan: out of GA4? Well, I mean. Okay, maybe that is a

Jon: slight ding on GA. I think GA4, step back. We’ve had a whole show about that. It is a challenge, right? But. Yeah.

Regardless, even when GA was amazing, it wasn’t going to provide you everything that you needed. So if you have customer tracking set up, it tells a fuller picture, a fuller story. All you can do is tell what’s happening. It won’t actually show you what’s happening through that tracking. Right? Therefore, you need some more specialty tools, right?

You gotta have the right tool for the job. You gotta see exactly what visitors are doing on your site. And those tools really come down to heat maps, scroll maps, click maps, and session recordings.

Ryan: I got it. So it’s these tools don’t just track a cursor. They actually, I didn’t even know this, they do a lot more than these things.

They do a lot more. What else do these things do that I don’t even know about?

Jon: Well, okay, so you talked tracking cursors. That’s mainly session recordings, okay? So, session recordings are better known as where the user has moved their cursor. Okay, so you’re going to see a composite of the user’s path that the cursors are taking, and that can tell you a ton of information about how complicated your user interface is for the visitor.

For example, does the visitor move their mouse all over the page looking for that next step or do they go directly to it, right? So that’s where it can be really, really helpful. But there’s other things that these do high level. We’ll start with heat maps, right? This is where people pay attention. So there’s a really famous Nielsen eye tracking study that made pretty big waves when it proved.

Really what we all suspected anyways, but people don’t read on the web. We actually scan, right? How often, if you look at an eye tracking heat map, which is another whole tool set in and of itself, you will see a very predictable F shaped pattern. We start at the far left hand side, scan to the right, and then drop down and to the left, and we repeat.

Now, when we scan to the right, often we’re not reading to the end of the line. We get what the first few words said, like, I’m not interested, or get to the first few words. I get the idea of moving on. Now, again, this is in Western cultures. There’s other directions in other cultures, but they all have the same underlying concern.

Okay. If you’re reading right to left, you still don’t read the entire way. You follow reverse F pattern. It’s very similar. The result is that some spots on the page get the majority of our attention. That’s just naturally what happens here. Other spots get ignored, right? And I really think what we can do is use this to learn whether design elements are effective.

And how to optimize the page. And I think that’s key. It’s a data point. You know, typically this data is shown in areas that receive a lot of attention as warmer colors. This is where heat comes in, right? Heat map. It’s typically red, orange areas that receive little attention or cooler, like green and blue.

So that’s where the term heat map comes in. Most folks know that, but it’s important to call that out because almost every tool is going to show you those same type of colors, but the accuracy of that is going to, is debatable, let’s just say.

Ryan: So, like, but I’m, I know that when I’m on a site, it’s not accessing my camera and actually watching my eyes.

Right. So they can’t, like, zap me and figure that out. So the technology is, Well, it’s,

Jon: there are different types, heat maps that we’re talking about today. You’re correct. It does not use a camera. It uses your mouse movement. Now the key to understand out of all of this is you can get pretty darn close to eye tracking with mouse cursor tracking.

The reason we’re able to do that is because whether you know it or not, your eyes are following your cursor around your screen. And so I got to go try that later today. You don’t pay attention to it yourself, but yeah, you got to look where your cursor is going to click or where it’s pointing. Right. So your eyes are going to naturally go there.

Now, when you’re reading, Typically, unless you’re, you’re my mom, you’re not following the cursor along with every word that you read, right? Most of us, you know, give that up when we’re seven or eight years old, we start, stop reading with our finger, right? Same thing on a computer, you’re not following the cursor while you’re reading.

Now, as we get older, that tends to happen again, but I digress. The majority of the population on your site, that’s not happening to that’s where I tracking can really come in and it requires different tooling than what we’re talking about today, but the output could look like a heat map. Okay. So, okay.

There’s another data point that’s really good out of these tools, and that’s called scroll mappings. And scroll map is whether people consume your content or not. That is what you want to understand here. How do you understand that? Well, let’s just say you design long, beautiful pages. But you want to know, does anybody read them?

Do they actually make the experience better for your users? Well, scroll maps can help us understand where people scroll on a page and how long they spend at each section of that page. Okay, so these maps use the same hot cold color grading as heat maps. It’s probably why they’re always lumped together, but it’s a different view on that data and provides a different data point.

If users spend a lot of time in one area, the map is going to show it as red or orange. Okay, if they never scrolled that page at all, it’s going to go home. Cold like blue. So scroll maps are really powerful tools to help you optimize your pages because like heat maps, they tell you what users care about and offer insight into improving the, those pages.

Ryan: So yeah, it gives you insight on where to put the more important information too. It’s parts of the page. You don’t want, if you do a thing in F shapes, don’t put really important stuff on the right side. There, there’s a reason there’s a right, right, right. They never get there.

Jon: Exactly. You’re hiding information down where people aren’t going to scroll.

So maybe you need to change the order of that information so that your most important point is made right up top. Are you sure people are going to see it? There are ways to influence getting people to scroll further down the page, but this can help you to understand where they’re not consuming the content.

Let’s just say. Now, okay, the last tool that these provide is what’s called click maps. And this is whether people are close to converting. That’s really what you’re looking for here. Okay. The click is one of our most valuable signals because it represents engagement with the content. Some cases, a click indicates that prized conversion, right?

Add to cart. Check out whatever that might be. But if people are clicking your call to action, it’s a sign that your page is at least decently optimized. If they click elsewhere, well, it might mean that they find something else more valuable or maybe they just need more information, right? So click maps show where somebody clicks on your page and they reveal whether your users are interested in what they’re looking at.

That making sense so far?

Ryan: Yeah, I guess so. Click map. You could also in the well because they can click on things that they don’t do anything. And I think that’s an important delineation because you could put analytics events on every link on a page and technically see where they do that. But I think I’ve seen you audit a site In real time, where it was like people tried to click on a mirror in a picture, like they weren’t selling the mirror.

They were selling a couch. And so those clicks were important because it’s like they wanted that. So I was like, you should sell mirrors instead of couches because you have a good mirror.

Jon: I mean, that, that was, I remember that talk. I think it was the talk I gave at an LPX event at Google’s headquarters, right?

Announcer: You’re listening to drive and convert a podcast focused on e commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon McDonald, founder of the good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers and Ryan Garrow of logical position, a digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization.

Optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Ryan: Yeah, in New York, that was like one of my favorite

Jon: ones too. That was a great talk and it was a great event. I remember that gentleman ended up working with us in the end, but it was, it was interesting because he went home and he emailed me. Within 12 hours, he’s like, Jon, I’ve changed the image. Can you run that heat map again?

It was pretty funny. I was like, sure, let’s have people focus on the product you’re selling. It makes a lot of sense. But you would have never known that if you just relied on a heat map, click map, you know, if you, if you had not. Um, excuse me, if you had only relied on a heat map, not a click map, right? So it’s the combination of these tools that’s really important.

So there’s also a bonus one that a lot of these tools provide, and that is onsite surveying. Now it’s not a heat mapping, but some of these tools also provide onsite surveying. So that can be helpful when you pop up out of the corner of the screen and ask, you know, a couple of really pointed questions, you might get some responses to that.

If I’m saying that right of those is debatable, but it is something that we’ve used at the good quite a bit as well.

Ryan: And this isn’t a pop up for like get 10 percent off for giving me your email pop up. This is a, did you like this image or did you find the information you needed? Like what kind of things would I need to ask in this system?

Jon: Yeah. Oh, I think that’s exactly it. You’re asking very pointed questions or are you missing any information? here. Yes or no. And if somebody says yes, then you can have a question. Okay. What questions do you have? That’s a great way to collect that information. It’s a very poor way to offer customer support.

I will caution you that the vast majority of people who are going to answer these surveys are people who are really looking for or need customer support. So that’s why I say they’re effective when done correctly. The majority of blank brands Ploy these don’t do it effectively.

Ryan: Got it. Okay. So, you know, we don’t, we are talking about the best, so I assume there is a best of all of these that come together.

Like, are they in one tool or are they like.

Jon: Yeah. Yeah. I guess kind of burying the lead here a little bit. I could have let off with this, but I mean, you know, we generally recommend Hotjar and sometimes new clients ask us to use their preferred tools, but I’ll be honest, our team almost always resists and that’s how confident we are in Hotjar and providing value there.

But Right now, hands down, it’s the best heat mapping software on the market for professional researchers. Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t free options out there that, as you said earlier, might distract. The data is not always amazing and not always accurate. And it might be a representative sample that is very, very low quantity.

So take that all for what it is. The investment, if you’re going to really actually use this data to use hot jar is super minimal. So it’s well worth it. If you’re, if you’re going to be looking at the data to get the tool, it does it. Right.

Ryan: And I will say we don’t take sponsorships here. So hot jar, if you’re listening, yeah, Jon got a high five because we’re not being paid to do this.

So it actually is a true opinion of what the best product out there is. And that’s pretty telling now, you know, they do all these things, but so do competitors. Is there something that makes them stand out more? Like as like the specifics of each one,

Jon: right? Yeah, definitely. As I was saying, there’s, there’s deeper reasons to use hot jar, right?

Cause there are competitors out there that are free. Here are some of the features I really like out of hot jar. First of all, it gives you separate instances for each map. So I talked about all those different types of heat maps. Right? Click maps, scroll maps, heat maps, generally following the cursor, et cetera.

But having access to all these different types of data is great, but a lot of tools pump them all into that same report. And this really just ends up painting a really muddy picture and makes accurate analysis really difficult to see. Their point of view is, well, when you overlay this data, you can gain more insights, but The reality is it muddies the data in our opinion.

If I want to overlap it, let me overlap it. Don’t do it for me. So hot, hot jar will separate all these different types of maps and data, and it helps our team focus on the information we’re looking for. So there’s really no misunderstandings there.

Ryan: Got it. So if I have a session of scroll map from, let’s say, Bob over there, I can also see, Oh, I’d rather, I’d really love to see like the heat map on in addition to that scroll map from that person and overlay them if I want to.

Jon: Well, not down necessarily to a person level, right? None of these will do personally identifiable information. Oh yeah, PII,

Ryan: can’t do that.

Jon: Right. So this will do it in aggregate. Get it. Okay, so it will do all of your viewers between a certain timeframe, right? Now you also do have to have enough traffic to your site to write.

So if you only have 10 visitors coming to your site, it’s probably going to withhold that data because it doesn’t want you to see what only 10 people can do. It’s kind of like Facebook and ads where they won’t let you run an ad to a group that is too small because you’re clearly targeting one or two people and you might get 10 in there.

But. They don’t want you to be able to identify individuals. I get

Ryan: that. Okay, that is an important note then. So even these free tools, like if I’ve just started and I have three people to come to my site a day, can I get free heatmaps and some of these things?

Jon: You can install the snippet. The data most likely won’t be there.

But let’s be honest, if you don’t have enough traffic to do, to get heatmap data, You’ve got bigger issues on your hands. You should probably give Ryan a call and just get traffic going.

Ryan: There’s a decent amount of you living. Yeah. Heat maps are valuable, but what would be your horrible ballpark back of napkin?

If you don’t have this much traffic, heat maps are worthless or, or these tools.

Jon: If you don’t have 5, 000 visitors a month sessions, not just visitor sessions. So if you can get 5, 000, then. Okay, it might make sense to start looking at your heat maps, but in all honesty, you really want 000 before this data is really going to be something you’re going to have the resources to even act on unless you’re independently funded.

Maybe you’re wealthy. I don’t know, but most brands I talked to, that’s not the case.

Ryan: Okay,

Jon: good to know.

Ryan: Even the free ones like. There’s very little value, less than 5, 000.

Jon: Yeah, I would say that’s accurate.

Ryan: Okay,

Jon: so Hotjar also does filters for session recordings. So not only can you see session recordings individually, meaning as its own data set, right?

Not individual users, just to be clear again. But session recordings can take a while to sort through, especially if you have many of them, you can watch them at speeds faster than real time, which is great, but they still take a while to watch. All right, this means we end up spending a lot of time at the good watching dozens of irrelevant recordings for each page, often without learning anything valuable.

It’s a major time suck. So highly recommend filtering. What this means is Hotjar, fortunately, well, it lets us filter our recordings to reduce the number of sessions that we end up having to watch. We can quickly drill down to the sessions that have the most impact on whatever we’re trying to learn. So again, if you have enough data, you have enough sessions, now we can slice that data to just get close to what we want to see, as opposed to having to watch everything.

Ryan: Okay, we want this certain page and the people that spent at least 30 seconds on this page with activity, not like they went to the page for two minutes and didn’t do anything. Exactly.

Jon: Exactly. Okay, also keyboard shortcuts are available within Hotjar. So this provides quick navigation. Now, maybe you’re just a nerd like me, or maybe you love keyboard navigation.

I’m the guy who’s in Gmail all day using the keyboard. If I can not touch my mouse, I would love to. The idea here is when you’re watching these session recordings, Hotjar really enables you to stop and play and go forward and backwards using keyboard. Now, this is just a huge time saver, letting you bounce around a quickly between recordings and find the information that you need.

However, some competitors allow for these kinds of actions, but you have to click their buttons, which takes huge attention away from the video. Because now, instead of watching the video, what happens? You have to look over, find the button and then click it and go back. Just takes forever, right? When you really get into the research and you’re watching a lot of these.

Yeah, you want keyboard navigation. Let’s be honest. You’re you’re, if you’re going to be a pro, you’re not using your mouse for this. It’s just unfortunate, right? Have you ever seen a really good CPA use Excel? They never touch the mouse, right? It’s a similar type of thing. So as far as we know, I think that

Ryan: I don’t have to watch my CPA.

That would for sure

Jon: put me to sleep. See, it would be the same thing here. But I’m promising you that eventually that payoff is here. If you start watching enough of these, right? But they’re the only tool that provides this. Which is shocking to me. Right. So there’s a free tip for all the hotjar competitors out there.

Go put keyboard shortcuts in there and at least maybe you might have some, you know, maybe some crossover at that point. The last thing I really like about hotjar, and now you mentioned this with the mirror and the couch, right? And this was a company that sold interior furnishings and they were selling a couch that was an image on a product detail page for a sofa and they had a mirror.

It was basically just the sofa in the mirror in the background and I don’t know why they put the mirror there, but for some reason they did. And people were just rage clicking on the mirror cause they’re like, give me this mirror. Give me this mirror. Right? So they just kept clicking and they were getting frustrated.

Hot door allows you to identify these moments of rage, right? Where users can become so frustrated. The way they click repeatedly. thinking, well, this will make the site work. I don’t ask me, I don’t get it, but I’ve definitely been in that rage before. So it, this often really can get confused by slow page speed or broken elements or confusion around what’s clickable, what’s not.

Okay, so often we’ll see rage clicking when a page isn’t done loading, even though someone’s clicking on a button, right? Where a slow page load and the button’s not active yet, but it’s displaying, people start clicking on it because they know what they want to do. That’s a great telltale sign. There’s an error there.

And I would classify page speed as being an error at that point.

Ryan: So for sure, rage clicked.

Jon: Well, that doesn’t surprise me, right? These are really serious moments of frustration. I think they were a must avoid. So hot jars, click map, show you where users rage click and helps focus on that frustration point.

Ryan: Dang. Okay. So insightful. Like, I think if you have more than 5, 000 sessions a month, you, you know, likely should be paying attention to these things. Like it makes sense if you’re going to take the next step in the brand and continue to grow. If you’re less than 5, 000, it’s focused on traffic. Don’t get distracted.

There’s better things to be doing with your time than really analyzing. You know, a few hundred sessions a month, it just doesn’t make any sense at that point to understand, especially, I think, you know, a lot of these tools came out pre like Shopify taking off to like Shopify from a conversion standpoint.

And like, just simply like the templates, if you don’t mess them up, they’re going to function well enough to get you to that 5, 000. Yeah. You really don’t probably have to worry about this yet. And so those, those free versions. Who cares? I mean, you’ve said it multiple times and I have to like, you get what you pay for.

If you want something free, guess what? You are the product or their, their products inferior at the free level. And it’s just not going to make any sense.

Jon: If you don’t trust me, just go sign up for a free trial of, of hot jar and give it a shot for a little bit and see what happens. Right. There’s nothing to lose in doing that.

Ryan: And if you’ve got lots of sessions and you’re trying to figure out how to use these keyboard keys to try to navigate stuff, you probably should just be talking to Jon and let him push the buttons for you. Like, like I do with my CPA. Like, I don’t want to know how my CPA navigates Excel because that’s just really boring to me.

So get an expert.

Jon: I need to get, you know, what makes that interesting is a little offshoot here. There’s some great Instagram accounts. of people doing Excel hacks that I think will blow your mind. You

Ryan: would, I won’t watch my CPA do Excel, but we have, we have real Excel nerds at our company that I constantly have to ping, like, okay, I need to figure out how to do this V lookup or I’m trying to put these two things together.

Like, Gero, how long have you been in digital marketing and you don’t know how to do Excel things? Like, it’s, it’s surprising how much digital marketing is Excel. Like it, it’s crazy. Crunching data, right? Yeah, it hasn’t updated in what, 20 years, really? And it’s still one of the most valuable business tools in existence.

Jon: I would agree with that. That is, is a big reason that Microsoft is where they are.

Ryan: Yeah, I love Excel. Like if they had no other product, I would be a Microsoft customer.

Jon: Well, next time one of those digital marketers on your team give you help for saying, asking them a question, say, well, that’s why you’re part of the team, right?

You got all this great experience that I don’t have.

Ryan: You know how to do Excel and I don’t. I mean, I know it’s dangerous, but not that some of the levels of complexity with Excel. Our formulas is and astounds me. Yeah. But Jon, thanks for the education. We now know which company is best for heat mapping and all of the things that fall under the large broad stroke statement of heat mapping.

Jon: There are more than most people think. So thanks for interviewing me on this today. I appreciate it.

Ryan: Yeah. Thanks for the information and we’ll continue to keep. Pushing people over to Hot Chart to grow their business.

Jon: Love it.

Ryan: Thanks Ryan. Thank you.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon McDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe@driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 114): What is the Best Heatmap Software for Researchers? appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

After walking 100 miles across a wall in Europe (for vacation!?), Ryan is back and wondering what walls brands can build that will net them better traffic.

In this week’s episode, Ryan tells Jon all about what he learned from reading a recent study on zero-click searches. They discuss the amount of clicks that go to organic listings vs. Google-owned properties and ways to pivot focus to optimize your marketing budget.

Listen to the full episode to learn:

• How to find a middle ground between SEO and other marketing strategies
• What has been the impact of AI in Google search results on click-through rates
• How focusing on smaller areas can help you drive traffic
• Why Ryan would walk 100 miles while on vacation

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:

You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:

Ryan, welcome home. I am told you recently went on a 100-mile hike in Northern England along Hadrian’s Wall. Since we’re talking, I assume you made it home, which is good.

Ryan:

Yes, we made it home safe. My body may not agree that it’s all fine and good, but it was a great trip.

Jon:

I have to ask, what would cause one to go for almost a 100-mile hike in ancient ruins?

Ryan:

Your dad is turning 70 and he decides that’s what he wants to do for his 70th birthday.

Jon:

I hope when I turn 70, I want to walk 100 miles too.

Ryan:

Yeah. I think part of it may have been he knew my mom wasn’t going to do it, so he’d have a chance with his kids just to himself. Me and my siblings took him off on the Wall and hiked for… We were off there in England for 10 days, hiking for six. It was good.

Jon:

All right. Well, that sounds fun. Well, to bring that back home to why we’re here today, with all that thinking, did you develop any new traffic driving strategies, anything on that drive portion of the Drive and Convert? Heck, maybe you figured out conversion optimization as well.

Ryan:

I wish. It was actually pretty good to be over in England, and I learned this about myself. If I go enough time zones away and I have everything turned off, I can’t work if I wanted to because nobody else is working at that time, and so that was actually really good for me. It was a good mental break, fully unplugged, which rarely happens because I’ll go away for a long weekend with the family and that’s never fully unplugged unfortunately.

Jon:

I hear that.

Ryan:

Yeah, it didn’t solve any of the world’s problems unfortunately when it comes to driving in a CRO. Good luck. But it was interesting because you’re hiking this wall that it’s 100 miles long and so somehow the Romans figured out the narrowest point on this island of Britain and built a wall across it. It took them six years to build it and I’m sure a tremendous amount of resources. I mean, it would take a lot of resources now, but I mean, you’re talking thousands of men in six years and you’re thinking, “Okay. Why keep the Scots out? What was the purpose behind this? Why not just go up? You have the Roman Empire behind you, just go up and destroy them.”

When you read the history, it came down to the complexity of conquering Scotland because it wasn’t like a single country. It’s a bunch of little fiefdoms and a bunch of little tribes essentially 2,000 years ago, and there weren’t enough resources up there to justify it. You weren’t going to get anything by taking it over really, and there weren’t enough resources because weren’t concentrated enough. You couldn’t support an army up there. You’d have to constantly be bringing supplies and everything up in there because you couldn’t go take over town and take all their food. You had to be like bring it all with you.

So Hadrian’s like, “All right. Fine. We’re just going to build a wall, keep the Scots there, and that’s the edge of the Roman Empire. Done, set, move on.” So fascinating, but it also got me really thinking along around where do I need to do that personally? Where in business do we need to be doing that? Because it’s most of us in business and in life don’t have unlimited resources and have to make determinations of what makes sense now versus later or just never. You’re talking the Roman Empire, arguably one of the most dominant empires the planet’s ever seen, decided that this little area of Britannia at the time, Scotland now, wasn’t even worth deploying enough of their army to go take it over and just be done with it.

Jon:

Obviously, Scotch had not been invented yet.

Ryan:

Good point. Yeah. If Scotch had been there, it would’ve made more sense probably.

Jon:

Well, okay, so you didn’t solve the world’s problems, but I actually thought that conversation was going to go a different way. I assumed you were going to say that Google is the Roman Empire because they own everything and wall off whatever they want. So that’s not the case. It sounds-

Ryan:

It’s true. Yeah. So coming back and processing all of this, I started to do some research on all of this around how can I advise some of our clients to be putting up walls when it makes sense in their business? I came across this cool study that had some very interesting patterns on what Google’s doing and how are they directing traffic once the search happens because it’s ever-evolving that Google’s… We know it’s constantly testing service and traffic is going many different places and there’s a lot going on constantly. So I was like, “Okay.” Well, just fascinating seeing what the data is telling us at the end of the day because all we do is look at numbers and data and make decisions based on that.

Jon:

Well, to start with, what report are we talking about then?

Ryan:

With many of you listening… I mean, I’m making assumptions here. So there’s a gentleman named Rand Fishkin.

Jon:

Oh, yes.

Ryan:

If you haven’t heard of this gentleman, you probably should. You should see what else he’s done. He was the founder and CEO of Moz, which there’s always debate, but I would say one of the top SEO tools created. Years ago, it was the best, and it’s still easily one of the best. Every couple of years he does this study about where the clicks on Google go and analyzes the trends and offers some of his insights on how that’s changed and where it needs to go and what you as a branch should just be aware of.

Jon:

What stood out to you that you felt like it was worth talking about today?

Ryan:

Well, there’s a couple of things. Probably the most fascinating to me was as he analyzed the data, just was it last month, I think, AI did not have the impact I thought it would. So I thought that AI was going to be like, “Okay. That’s going to answer so many questions that there’s going to be less clicks going to paid search and AI is going to kind of take over all of this. So Google controls everything.”

Jon:

I foresee a end of year where we were wrong episode again going straight here because I do recall you saying AI is taking over search and it’s going to keep all the results on the page there.

Ryan:

Yes. It wasn’t even that long ago that I said that, and I guess I probably should have gone and polled Rand more or sooner to find out what he thought because he’s done more of the research. But AI, there’s many different numbers around studies around how many searches AI is showing on. It’s anywhere from 15 to I think somebody said 50%, and I’m like, I still haven’t seen close to 50%, but it also has to do with certain searches. You can see there’s voice searches that are being done that they can’t analyze in Rand’s model. So there’s a lot of things they just don’t know or they don’t have transparency in.

Jon:

So what did you think the AI results were going to do?

Ryan:

I thought that AI results were going to trump a lot of organic clicks because if you’re getting the answer right there on Google, I don’t need to go anywhere else. Like I said before when we talked about AI, I’m one of the paranoid people that needs to know where they’re pulling their answer from. So I’m going to click on that result to understand, okay, do I trust this site or is this some clickbait site that’s designed to get me to click and waste time chasing… Medium, for example, great clickbait site, questionable articles, but again, that’s where I went with it.

On the AI side in particular, what they’re seeing is that it probably hurt Google more than it helped them. So important metrics to Google are searches per searcher and clicks per search because the more clicks that happen and the more searches that happen, the more chances Google has to make money because if nobody clicks, Google makes no money. If you look at separating mobile and desktop out, on mobile devices, when AI is being the changing differentiating factor, the searchers per searcher dropped dramatically with the rollout of this AI.

So there’s no real reason given yet because we’re still analyzing data, but the hypothesis moving forward is it’s causing people to stop searches and not have to search again because they found the answer they needed and then they’re done and they move on. In fact, for a while it’s been about 60% of searches done on Google don’t end up in a click. So we have something like 8 billion, 8.5 billion searches a month done on Google, and 60% of them don’t even end up in a click, which is fascinating to me that Google would not be trying to figure out, “How do I take that 60% and move that to 58%?”

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. It seems like a lot of money left on the table with ads. But also, I mean, how many times have you used Google to just verify a word is spelled correctly? You know what I mean?

Ryan:

More often than I’d like to admit.

Jon:

Right. So I think I look at that and I’m like, “Man, that might make up at least 20% of my searches on Google.” So with that in mind, I’m skewing that average already.

Ryan:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. When I’ve got kids that they all have a Google Home in their rooms, they get to ask Google stupid questions and they get to hear dad jokes on Google if I’m not around and then play music.

Jon:

Yeah, the worst is my wife’s car has Google in it and my son continually asks it to tell jokes, and the jokes are dad jokes, but they’re funny like, “Yay, whatever.” But yeah, after a while it’s like, “Oh, I’m sorry. My wife’s Google search is going to… History is just totally jacked up.”

Ryan:

Yeah. I pay for my family Kindle Unlimited for all the kids so they can all read books because they do love reading. I would say at least 25% of my four kids and the hundreds of books read per month by them, 25% are joke books.

Jon:

Okay. Fair enough. I bet. Hey, sounds funny. Nothing else. I bet it’s entertaining.

Ryan:

Hey, we laugh a lot, but not bad.

Announcer:

You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:

So, do companies need to be Hadrian and start building walls around AI here? What do you recommending?

Ryan:

Transparently, I’m not even sure if AI would stay in the wall.

Jon:

Fair enough.

Ryan:

That may be a problem there, but I do think some brands need to be thinking about beyond this AI thing, putting walls up around certain areas that they’ve been investing in for a while on Google based on where these trends are going. Specifically, I think SEO was going to be the one that gets impacted the most. It’s not because of the AI taking all the clicks, which is where my hypothesis would’ve been two months ago. It’s really around Google directing those organic clicks to other areas.

Jon:

Are you saying don’t do SEO? I mean, coming from a traffic person, that seems like really weird and odd advice.

Ryan:

Which I would agree with if I’m actually saying… I can’t say that, that not do SEO. The second most interesting point I found in this article, interesting for me is being proven wrong, and so that’s why the AI one comes in there, but from a practical standpoint for clients I work with and companies listening to this, it’s the sheer amount of traffic. Google is driving to Google properties instead of organic results. So we’ve seen this for a while, but I guess I just hadn’t seen the numbers around what volume of these. So the numbers that Rand came up with in this study, almost 30% of all clicks on Google go to a Google property, and so that’s YouTube, Google Maps, Google Hotels, Google Flights, Google App Store. I mean, I’m guilty of that, flight checking for business trips and personal trips. I get Google alerts on flights and I’m there. I’m in the Google Flights because it’s so much easier than going into Delta and then going into Alaska separately.

So the share of clicks being given to organic or going to go, I wouldn’t say given, I guess Google can’t technically just give them, but they impact it a lot, is at an all time low, and so only… It’s around 70% of the clicks that happen go to organic now, and that’s decreasing in the US pretty aggressively. It caused me to start thinking about how you might be investing in this. So if you know that the share of clicks to organic listings is decreasing and you’ve got some significant competitors already ranking above you and that would be like Amazon, Walmart, target, GNC, if you’re in the supplement world, if you’re behind them on important non-brand searches, is it going to make sense to be pushing into that to try to rank higher and outrank somebody that’s so far ahead from an SEO standpoint? That’s where I think maybe we need to start digging a little deeper into the minutiae and decide what does or does not make sense around that.

So, don’t hear this to say don’t invest in SEO anymore. That can’t be what’s heard. So if you’re cutting me up to blast me on LinkedIn, I’m going to get you because I’m recording the full thing here. But I think there could be potential for a lot of brands on focusing on Google properties and where Google is wanting to push traffic. So I’ve said this many times and I think most people understand, it’s Google’s world. We’re living in it, and you’ve got to make your brand fit Google’s world not make Google fit your brand because that’s an uphill battle you’re going to lose every time.

In fact, in that study, Rand quotes a guy, won’t remember who it is, but a few years ago he put a tweet out that said, “Google has the most phenomenal SEO team in the world. They have never been hit by at a Google update ever and lost SEO traffic.” Good point. I mean, even though the EU antitrust thing came out recently and penalized Google and cost them I don’t know how many hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, they are still going this direction within the US and knowing full well they’ll probably get something similar to what happened in the U, but it’s far enough down the road in the legal world that there are still billions upon billions of dollars to make in the meantime.

Jon:

Well, and data to collect in the meantime, which will only help fuel them moving forward. You have to think about eventually. I believe I saw this report when it came out too or overview it. One of the major ways they’ve collected data has been Chrome. I thought that was really, really interesting. Everybody knows it, but it came out and I guess there was some leak around the algorithm for Google. It came out a while back.

Ryan:

That was an interesting one. If you haven’t looked at the Google leak docs or a summary of it, you can find a good one on search engine land.

Jon:

I’ll have to check that out. I think I saw something around an overview of that for the short one, and it wasn’t surprising to me, but it’s like, oh yeah, Google’s watching everything you do at every single step. There are a lot of places across the world now where they’re being slapped on the wrist for doing that, but the US hasn’t so far not been one of them.

Ryan:

It’s hard you have… When you look at Chrome… I use Chrome and I like it because it syncs everything across all my devices. It makes it easy to store my passwords. It makes it easy to autofill. I mean, they’ve created a phenomenal ecosystem that it’s painful for me to find. If somebody forced me and says, “You have to migrate and use Firefox,” I’d be like, “I put my whole life on all my devices is on Chrome. Now I got to redo things.” So yes, all that, it’s Google’s world Live in that and understand that and start placing some bets, I would say, in the Google realm and where they want clicks to be going.

So still, yes, SEO. Most companies out there don’t need to wall off SEO entirely and throw it over into Scotland and say, “No, we’ll do that later.” It’s probably putting a wall down the middle of SEO in reality and separating that and saying, “Okay. There are different pieces to SEO. If I can, I’d like to be able to potentially split that budget and split the focus of my team from SEO and say the things that I know work well long-term are going to be backlinks, quality content linking back to me to increase my domain authority.” That hasn’t really changed in the last 20 years. Put some good content out there, but the line would be keep doing that.

Instead of focusing a lot of on-site content, I might say, “Let’s get that content team maybe to start doing some things on YouTube.” Maybe put some question and answer things that I would’ve maybe written in a blog, but instead of that, maybe put it on YouTube. But if you’re writing it from doing everything on YouTube, it may not be that hard to have a transcription put on your website. I mean, you are king of reusing a single piece of content in multiple areas. I mean, if you want a case study and doing something once and using it 20 times, Jon MacDonald is the guy for that, for sure.

Jon:

I will say two things on that. One is I would defer to Ross Simmonds. He runs a great training or has in the past called DREAM: Distribution Rules Everything Around Me. Yes, he’s a Wu-Tang rap fan, the song CREAM: Cash Rules Everything Around Me. But he was saying here so many businesses have a glutton of content, but they don’t use it, right? They get it out there and then they let it die. So I learned a lot from him. I would redirect people to go check that out. But also my team at The Good, they’ve done an amazing job of helping reuse content. So I can’t take all the credit for that, but I do appreciate it. We do put out a ton of content. I have so many lists of things I’ve yet to promote that I’m supposed to get out there, so I’m the backlog when it comes to that.

Ryan:

Yeah. I mean, if you see the content your team’s put out, I would guess if I didn’t know already, I would’ve said, “Man, you have a large team, five, six, seven people helping you put content out.” In fact, you have a very lean team that does a phenomenal job of hitting out of their weight class based on [inaudible 00:19:05] they have.

Jon:

Thank you. I’ll pass that along.

Ryan:

Yeah, great job there. So take a cue from Jon and his team as you’re looking at your investment in SEO. SEO and helping things onsite can help your paid search. So you’ve got to do some to get your paid search to work better, get the now traffic. Start doing some analysis on YouTube at your competitors. Do some searches on YouTube that say, “All right. If somebody’s trying to solve this problem on YouTube, what does it look like?” There’s a lot of YouTube, Pinterest DIY things. I go there to figure out how to fix a home project before I go to Home Depot to figure out what I got to buy to make things work. If you’re in that space, answering those questions can be of benefit and can rank higher where Google wants to send that traffic and then come back. Just found out today that Google is really excited about feeds going into YouTube. So they want to make YouTube more of a shopping destination.

Jon:

Interesting. Okay.

Ryan:

It’s been a challenging integration in shopping into YouTube. They’ve done some shoppable videos that have just never gotten anywhere.

Jon:

Well, and are those still available? Because I remember when those came out a decade ago and people were super excited about that.

Ryan:

They were excited because Google told us we were supposed to be excited about it and nobody did anything. I don’t know if there was one purchase that it was done through those. There’s probably was. I don’t know how many we tracked, but it probably wasn’t nearly what we expected. Google is going to test and measure enough things that they’re going to get people to shop because they’re using YouTube more and more. The TikToks, the vertical videos are being a big thing we talk about. Instagram, that type of interaction where you’re scrolling a feed, they’re really trying to get YouTube to operate that way. People that are scrolling it, therefore you’ll see a lot more easy ways shop and convert inside the ecosystem. Similar to Facebook or Instagram Shop is what I expect to have come out fairly soon, maybe holiday.

Jon:

Oh, okay.

Ryan:

Be prepared, but they’re hot and excited about feeds going into YouTube. So knowing that’s Google’s goal and where they’re going, if you don’t have content there, it’s going to be much more difficult for you to just pop up your product in an unrelated video because you’re remarketing to them. But if you have native videos that are yours and you have a page on there, much easier to fit that in there. I would assume influencers are going to be heavily incentivized as they talk about products to have those shoppable. It’ll be easy to track the conversion. Again, there’s so many things Google can do to incentivize influential people and brands to start participating, and I’m seeing that happen. There’s a lot of cash flying around from Google to make that happen.

I would be focusing more on YouTube and leverage that as somewhat of an SEO standpoint and understanding those clicks are going to come organically. But again, it’s difficult to bucket that under SEO if I’m a CFO because that’s not an owned click of yours. They still have to come to the site for that to be considered, I guess, SEO optimizing for search engines. So YouTube, if they can convert there and send sales, it’s going to be much easier to see it as a channel, more of a social channel, but be there and be aware of it.

I think that’s also going to play into some of this AI consideration and how you’re looking at AI. So if we take this back to AI and SEO, AI is not taking SEO clicks as we can see. But a good example would be a client of ours, Dynojet. Think about this, if somebody is searching for, “Does fuel tuning make my motorcycle go faster?” If I just bought a motorcycle and I want to go faster, I need to know how to do that and I’m like, “Okay. I heard about fuel tuning.” If you ask that question, you’ll get an AI answer. Dynojet who we did the SEO for actually shows an article answering that question that they reference. It took time. Their domain authority is high enough. I don’t have to click as a searcher on that, I already know fuel tuning does do that.

Okay. So I need a fuel tuner. I just got the bike. I’m not going to do that now. Maybe a month down the road I save money and decide I need to see how much a fuel tuner costs. I go search Yamaha R7 fuel tuner. Oh, great, I’ve got… Here it is. Oh yeah, Dynojet, I remember that name from the search I did and the AI popped it up. I may not remember it was AI. I may not remember how it showed, but Dynojet resonates. Think of it as a branding play, high up the funnel. So that part is SEO. That may be something you need to focus on more. If you can’t build the backlinks to overtake your competitors, maybe you get really good at designing blog content that’s schema markups so that AI picks it up.

Jon:

Yeah. Or answering very specific questions like that.

Ryan:

Yes. Another company I invest in has done a great job of that scaling article creation to answer very specific questions because you can figure out the search volume if you go to… Semrush is great resource for that because they have an API access into the Google keyword planners. They know the search volume. You can say, “Okay. I know there’s this many searches for how to make the best cookies.” Great. I sell flour for baking and I know that there’s 300 searches for that a month, great, I might be able to use AI by writing this article and get the answer to 200 of them. They’re not going to click, so you can’t see the click traffic, but if 200 people out of 300 don’t click anywhere, which is about the average on Google and they just see your answer, well, they need to go buy flour next time, maybe they see that and remember the name. “Oh yeah, that name sticks in my head for some reason. I don’t know why, but since I remember it, they must be a good product.”

Jon:

Interesting. So what’s your overall punch line here?

Ryan:

So I guess the punch line is going to be… Unfortunately, it’s like most of my answers, it’s going to be an, it depends answer for the vast majority of you out there. There’s not one answer for everyone, but each brand needs to start re-looking at how they’re investing and their time and money and be willing to put up a wall to focus on something more effectively, more strategically. As I look at the rest of this year, we’re doing our holiday planning now for a lot of our clients and gearing up to our holiday event in a couple of weeks, in a down economy, there’s going to be a smaller pie, less searches happening for that particular product, less people are going to buy it. The more you focus on something that is working, the further you’re going to be ahead of your competitors in that specific area, and I think that’s going to give you the ability to win more often in a smaller arena because you have more expertise in this particular area.

So whether that’s going to be paid search and you really want to focus on the shopping campaigns or performance max and you’re really going to get into the feed and make that work really well and test to measure what your feed is talking about or how you’re talking about images and all of that, great, do that. If you’re going to focus on SEO, maybe you put a wall around all of your social content. You’re not going to invest in social content very aggressively right now because you’re going to invest everything in SEO because that’s where you think you have the best opportunity to win based on where you can see your competitors investing. Or maybe you’re going to the opposite of that. You’re going to throw SEO over into Scotland and it’s going to be social content, social ads, and you’re going to go all in with influencers and affiliates and make that work first.

I think a lot of small brands get bogged down with all of the things you can be doing across the internet to market your brand and drive traffic to get it to your site. You could do a little bit in 10 different areas and you’re going to get nowhere. I see that probably more often like, “Oh, I’m going to spend $100 in paid search. I’m going to spend $100 in paid social. I’m going to do one article a month on SEO and I’m going to record one video every two months.” No, that’s a terrible idea. You’d be better off putting all of the resources into one area that you think you can win best at right now and make that your core. Once you win that, it’s going to make it much easier to like, “Okay. I’ve got enough resources to expand. I’m going to land and expand one other area.” Maybe it’s paid search first and you’re going to go into paid social and then you’re going to go into SEO.

Jon:

I love that approach. I just had a conversation this morning with somebody where I was talking about how NBA players have one solid move they’re known for, right? You could be a really great three-point shooter and nobody talks about anything else that you do or a great-

Ryan:

Play horrible defense.

Jon:

Exactly. Or you’re just a defensive specialist, or you really only have to succeed in sports and/or business. You have to have one thing that you know gets the job done. If you have that one lead gen source that works for you, stop messing around in 20 different things. Take most of that budget, 80% of that budget and put it under that one item that works and run with it and watch it grow. But you really only need that one thing and you have to figure out what that one thing is that works for you. For us at The Good, it’s been content for all these years, sharing our expertise as you talked about. So I love your approach here. Wall everything else off and throw it over to Scotland and handle what you’re good at. That’s great advice.

Ryan:

Yeah, looking forward to seeing it work for a lot of you.

Jon:

Well, I appreciate you sharing. I’m glad you came back in one piece and with 100 extra miles on your feet if nothing else, but time to come home and sleep.

Ryan:

Lots of that. Well, I wish more. Four kids have decided that that’s not what’s happening. It’s summertime. They need to play.

Jon:

There you go. All right, Ryan. Well, I’ll let you go. Enjoy and thank you for sharing.

Ryan:

Thanks, Jon.

Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 113): Where Did Organic Click Share Go? appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

Every day we make a million little decisions without ever giving it a second thought. This is because our brains are wired to take shortcuts and make quick decisions. If you understand and follow the shortcuts your users are taking, you can shift the focus to enhancing their experience and help them achieve their goals on your site quickly and efficiently.

This week, Drive and Convert takes you on a journey through the six heuristics for digital experience optimization and how they come together to create a better digital experience for users.

Check out the full episode to learn:

• How to build trust, confidence, and credibility
• How to create a smooth path to purchase for users
• What heuristics are and the potential outcomes of utilizing them

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon Macdonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You are listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan:
So Jon, we’ve previously discussed you’re moving the entire market of CRO into what you’re calling digital experience optimization, which I think sounds a lot cooler, and I think it encompasses more of what you’re supposed to do with what we used to call CRO. I’m excited about this shift and what you team is really leading the charge on. But a lot of what we’ve talked about so far is what it is, and how it differs from CRO, and how we’re moving people, instead of thinking button changing and A-B test specifically on one page. You’re having us, I don’t want to say think at higher levels, but that’s probably what you’re doing. You’re making me learn words like heuristics, and allowing people to think more about how people think. So we’re thinking about thinking, rather than just making changes on a website just because, and then trying to test that. So I’m excited because today you’ve told me you’re going to give me a psychology degree in the heuristics portion of DXO.

Jon:
Love it.

Ryan:
And I love learning, so I think this is going to be fun. And so let’s chat about heuristics.

Jon:
All right.

Ryan:
But you have to start not only leading into this, I practiced the word, so hopefully I’m still pronouncing it right, but what are heuristics? And why do we need to be aware of it when all I want to do is sell things online?

Jon:
Well, so far you’ve said it correctly every time, to the best of my knowledge, so A+.

Ryan:
Yes.

Jon:
You’re starting off with a gold star, we’ll go from there. Okay. So yeah, what are heuristics? I think it’s a great place to open this conversation, because I think a lot of people have heard the word but may not know exactly what it is. So in this context, what I want to talk about with heuristics are mental shortcuts. And I think these are going to be the key to unlocking optimal performance in your role and in your digital property, your website, app, etc.
Heuristics are, in short, they’re mental shortcuts used to solve problems quickly and effectively. Okay, so they’re shortcuts. It’s the easiest way to think about them.

Ryan:
Okay. My brain is lazy, so you have to give it the way to get something easier.

Jon:
Exactly. Your brain is using heuristics all day every day, and you don’t know it. And that’s why. Heuristics is why you don’t know it. They allow you to speed up your analysis to make informed and efficient decisions without having to do a ton of thinking about it. You’re wired to take shortcuts and make quick decisions. This is inherent to all of us. So flip that and think about your customer. They play a crucial role in how your customers are navigating, and just overall perceiving digital experiences. So that’s why this is super important. And yeah, it is higher level, but I think it’s really important to understand this.

Ryan:
Okay. So shortcuts in my everyday life happen without me even thinking about it. I don’t consciously try to say shortcuts to getting a spoon to my mouth, but I may try to create shortcuts in my everyday business world and simplify that.

Jon:
Exactly.

Ryan:
But how do you take this application of shortcuts and making my brain take the easy path when it comes to DXO, or digital experience optimization?

Jon:
Right. Well, this is where the psychology comes in for in heuristics one-on-one. I think you really need to understand that mental shortcuts are what your customers are relying on. And if you can understand this you’re going to shift the focus squarely onto their experience. So it really helps you to get in the mindset of what are your customers going through, whether they know it or not, okay? Because if you ask somebody to tell you about their experience of something that happened five minutes ago, they’re not going to give you an accurate description because they don’t remember most of it. They weren’t trying to remember it. But if you ask somebody in the moment, and a good example of this is user testing. If you ask someone in their moment to talk about what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, they’re able to do it. But you can’t expect them to remember that. We’re inherently bad as humans at recalling, because of mental shortcuts, our thoughts from even a minute ago at times.
So I think ensuring that we understand and adhere to these shortcuts really is going to aid users in quickly and successfully accomplishing their goals. And that’s what we want, because at the same time, removing these barriers that really just interfere with these heuristics it builds a subconscious level of trust with your customers. We’ve talked a lot about trust signals in the past. This is why they’re important. So, as you know, I unpack more of these behind the click, so we’ll talk a little bit about that, I’m sure. But fundamentally, heuristics and digital experience optimization are just a way to frame common experience optimization challenges and turn them into a trustworthy experience. So, take a negative and turn it into a positive.

Ryan:
So I’m seeing some of this in the digital world with, I don’t know if you come across as much, but the Google AI answer to things, where I don’t have to click into another section.

Jon:
Yeah.

Ryan:
Now, I am an optimist at heart, but I’m a pessimist when it comes to Google giving me information without looking at the source and digging deeper. But I would imagine as Google builds trust in their answers to me, I’m just going to start accepting that, which can of be dangerous. But it’s like, “Google give me the answer and I don’t have to think anymore.”

Jon:
Yeah, I think that’s a good example. I also think there’s a little bit of nuance in heuristics, in that often it’s a shortcut that you’re not thinking about. So you’re actively judging that answer when Google shows it to you, so you are thinking about it, right? And that might be because it’s new. It might be because there’s some unknown there. But when you utilize and recall that answer in 10 minutes from now, do you remember whether you clicked on something or whether you got the answer from Google? Either way, you’re probably not going to be like, oh yeah, that was an AI answer Google gave me, or I had to click on something to go get the answer. Probably you’re not going to care. What you’re going to remember was that you got the answer, and you got it from Google. And that’s what they’re banking on. And that’s how they’re using heuristics here, is they’re thinking, what’s the outcome people want? And they’re not going to care how they got there. They’re not going to be thinking about that later.

Ryan:
Interesting. Okay. You’ve mentioned, I believe your book mentions it as well, but there are three outcomes of using heuristics. And so what are those three outcomes?

Jon:
Correct. So there are three outcomes to digital experiences. It helps make them feel familiar. It does what it says it will, and it functions intuitively. So if you meet heuristics you’re going to do those three things. And we can break them down quickly here. But the first, this feels familiar. So from the classic, I don’t know, navigation menu to the ever-present search bar at the top right of the page, there’s really this certain rhythm to digital experiences that we all know, right? Customers have developed this strong expectation of how websites and apps should function. I mean, the whole book, Don’t Make Me Think, was about this, right? It’s right there in the title. So when a digital experience adheres to these norms, customers are going to feel a sense of familiarity and control, and that subconsciously reduces the friction and makes them more receptive to your company. So by not introducing barriers you’re actually helping them mentally to feel more familiar and be more comfortable with your brand and your online experience.

Ryan:
Got it. So for example, you would not put your Add To Cart button to the left side of a product image on a website.

Jon:
Yeah, exactly.

Ryan:
That would make my brain be like, something’s wrong here, can’t trust this, can’t check out.

Jon:
Well, exactly. Say you wanted to go add that item to cart and you went to click on the Add To Cart button, it’s not where you think it should be. All of a sudden, ooh, why is it over here? Now you start asking questions. Wait, if they’re making me do this, what’s wrong? Why is it over here? This doesn’t feel familiar. You start to ask more questions, which inherently is pulling you out of the subconscious and making you question things that now you’re going to have a negative connotation with. So don’t make them work and don’t make them think. And that goes in line with cognitive overload. All of this goes in line with cognitive overload of really putting a mental load on people that are on your site, it’s the overarching expectation of a bad experience when you do that, so.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
Okay, so the second one does what they say. So I think this is important, because not only is trustworthiness in here, but customers crave predictability in transparency. So you’re going to have to honor your promises, whether that’s about your pricing, your refund policy, your product features, making sure you’re honoring that is essential. When you introduce things like unexpected fees, convoluted purchase processes, like moving that Add To Cart button we just talked about, or hiding your terms and conditions, all these things violate customer’s trust. So you want to be upfront about all the costs, and keep the interaction straightforward to build confidence and credibility with your customer base. So I think this is important because the minute you set an expectation and then don’t fulfill it, you have now made them think, as I mentioned earlier, and it’s generally going to be in a negative fashion. So, want to make sure you do that now. Do what you say you’re going to do.
And then the third is your site needs to function intuitively. So intuitive design is crucial, especially for SaaS products because users are, let’s just say, they’re already familiar with countless digital platforms. We all know how to use different types of, I’m going to sign up for a CRM. I know what it’s going to do and how generally it’s going to work. So you don’t want to force your customers to relearn fundamental workflows for your product. I think leveraging common design patterns and visual design cues is important here. This is why I mentioned when I do tear downs of sites, when something pops out to me that’s out of the norm I call it out because your customers are looking for that information and they’re having the same concern. So that’s really the secret to me doing live tear downs is just what stands out to me that is different? That’s what I should touch on. But when your product functions in a way that feels natural to customers they focus on the value you’re providing, rather than the mechanics of using that interface. And that’s really where you want to get to.

Ryan:
And I can hear the creatives listening to this, or in my line, cringing it. I don’t want to be just a standard site that everybody forgets when they leave, or whatever, because everybody wants to have this cool looking design for their website. But the problem I can see with that is, again, you’re causing people to have to think things, and that’s not what you want. You want your branding or your product to maybe stand out, but the actual site itself should not cause me to think. I should just be, ooh, cool product, click buy. Simple.

Jon:
Right. Now, don’t get me wrong, brand matters. And maybe your brand is disruption and you want people to have to explore and figure things out, and you don’t care if they buy off of your website. That’s okay. There’s a lot of really high-end products out there that the website is built in that way. And it’s built in that way because the people who are buying that are probably not buying it off the website. If you’re buying a $200,000 sports car, you’re not buying that on the website. But that experience needs to be really cool for the brand, because as an aspirational $200,000 car owner, which I’m not, but let’s say I was, that would be I would go check out the website. It could be fun for me and I could get more affiliated with the brand, if you will. So there are examples where branding like that really matters, but as a designer you have to really care about the consumer. And if you care about the consumer and designing for the consumer’s experience, you’re going to take heuristics into play. And if you don’t, you’re really doing everybody a disservice there.

Ryan:
That was a great example that I don’t even think you had prepared before I asked a question, but that’s a good way to think about it. If your goal is transaction and to make it simple, great, but if you have a multifaceted approach to selling whatever you have, someday I hope to be able to buy a $200,000 car.

Jon:
I’d be afraid to drive it.

Ryan:
But yeah, I want to go drive it is what I want. Not site, forget that. But, okay. So how do we unlock these outcomes which improve it? So, I guess, tell me how to do what you just told me I need to do.

Jon:
Okay. Yeah, let’s get to the meat of this because I know you’re itching to deploy some of these tactics. So how do we do this? Well, okay, over 15 plus years at The Good we’ve developed, of course, a model for this that we have put together themes of common optimization issues and opportunities, with the user at the center of that analysis. And there are six heuristics in that model that we’re looking at. You know I love my models, the patterns. I like to say-

Ryan:
You’re much more organized in your thinking than I am.

Jon:
Yeah. I see bad websites everywhere because like the kid in… Oh, what’s that movie where it’s like, “I See Dead People.”

Ryan:
Oh yeah, I see bad sites. Yeah.

Jon:
Yeah. So I like to put things into order so that it helps me to be able to use the internet without getting super frustrated. Okay. So the first thing is priming an expectation setting. You can apply a tactic like explicitly mentioning free shipping early in the journey to reduce customer abandonment rates, or sharing, I don’t know, estimated delivery dates. That is going to set the right expectation. Or you can prime somebody to say, “I’ll give you free shipping, but it’s going to be free ground shipping.” And if you want, when you get to checkout you see free shipping, but they know I can upgrade to overnight or today or whatever I want. And then on the flip side of that, having an estimated delivery date there is going to set expectations about when I would get that. So you want to prime and set those expectations.

Ryan:
And I have noticed, by the way, a trend of brands I buy from, on the delivery date, specifically extending the delivery expectation so they can over deliver.

Jon:
Yes.

Ryan:
That’s an interesting tactic. I’m expecting it on Thursday and you’re going to get it to me on Tuesday. Tuesday was probably the norm anyway. And you gave UPS or FedEx a buffer date, and then I get to be happy I got it early.

Jon:
Okay. So I got a new iPad about a month ago or six weeks ago now, and I ordered a case for it from the manufacturer. I had the prior version, I loved it, so I got it again. And they said, “Oh, it’ll ship June 26th.” Well, let’s just say we’re recording this, it’s after June 26th. So I sent them an email and I said, “Hey, this hasn’t shipped yet. When should I expect it?” And they replied, and they said, “Oh, I see you ordered the new iPad case. Those are expected to ship on June 26th.” And I replied, and I said, “But today is past June 26th. That was my whole reason for emailing you.” So they set an expectation when I ordered it and did not meet that expectation, and they gave me an improper expected delivery date and now I’m like, should have just cancel the order? What do I do?
So the second thing is trust in authority. So to follow this heuristic, you really want to do things like mitigating bugs. Build trust by featuring social proof, or consider adding additional educational, like how it works type of content for more complex products. So build that trust in the authority.
The third is ease. Ensure your interface is just easy to use. Pretty simple. Well, it’s harder than it sounds, but the concept is pretty simple. You can use things like reducing content, so addition by subtraction, build in clear navigational elements, maybe do something like a mega nav so that I can see everything via the navigation and get where I want to go quickly and easily.
The fourth is benefits and unique selling points. So this is where you’re going to highlight the benefits and unique features of products and services, to try to persuade users to purchase them here instead of someplace else. Okay. So what I mean by that is not just your competition, but maybe you sell DTC and in retail. What can you do to provide more information so that they feel comfortable just buying it from you today? Okay. What are the benefits of doing that versus going into the store? Do you offer a cheaper price? Do you offer expedited shipping? Do you offer more colorways that are unique to being online so that I know we can’t get that color in retail? So test things like that. Test faster shipping or product quality highlights, things of that sort.
The fifth item is directional guidance. So support users in finding and discovering what they need through visual hierarchy. Way finding is a good example here. Guiding them to the next best step in their journey. So hold their hand through the entire experience. Predictive search, or even allowing them to sort lists go a really long way here.

Ryan:
God, I wish there was an easy button for sorting on most websites. Like, most popular. I was like, what does that even mean to me?

Jon:
I don’t like most popular anyways, Ryan, because what’s going to happen is your most popular product is always going to be your most popular product. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy because you’re going to have it at top of the search or top as soon as somebody goes to the category page. And then guess what? People are going to be like, oh, that’s the most popular product, they’ll click on it. So then they buy it at a higher rate, and then you never give a chance to any other products. So you better make sure that most popular product is your best margin product as well.
So then there’s incentives. This is the sixth and last one. But with incentives, notice what I don’t say here. Okay. So you really do want to provide additional motivation, increase confidence and urgency to make the users purchase the product. But this is not discounting. This is offering things like expedited shipping for VIP customers, or doing types of guarantees, giving them some type of incentive. Ideally it’s not a subtraction of a dollar or percentage off, it is an addition of something like expedited shipping or guarantee.

Ryan:
Wow, that was a meaty six points. Some of them probably much easier to execute. But as I’m looking at this list as a brand, do I just go down in order, or should I put some more thought process into where my brand should be thinking about ordering these or what I should bite off first?

Jon:
Honestly, you could do any of them. And start with whatever’s easiest for you to get moving on, because any of these are going to help in equal proportion. But I would say that if you make a promise on your site you should fulfill that promise. That seems like a great place to start. Adding trust, okay. That’s something that you can do along the way and build that up. But you can always be eliminating bugs, making it easier, adding content to help people make decisions. I think that any of these can be done, but they’re ordered in this manner because typically if you start with the first then you’ll end up having less to do at the bottom of the list.

Ryan:
And I think it’s important for people to remember this is DXO, or digital experience optimization. It’s not you’re getting to a point and you’re done and you forget about these six things.

Jon:
Right.

Ryan:
You’re constantly making improvements. It’s like your conversion rate. What’s a good conversion rate? Well, it’s one that’s getting better. I think you’ve built that into my brain.

Jon:
Exactly. It’s a win. I’ll take it.

Ryan:
It doesn’t stop. So optimization means it doesn’t end.

Jon:
Right. Yeah. Just look to get 1% better on these every day. What is the one little tiny thing you can do for each of these every day? Don’t expect to knock them all out at the same time. You’re going to set your source up for failure that way.

Ryan:
Yeah, or just frustration that you can’t get it all done in a day.

Jon:
Oh, there you go.

Ryan:
So, there’s a common theme here. We’re noticing you got to be thinking and constantly improving, but at the end of the day if your customer, those people who have come to your website, whether you’ve bought them there or you’ve earned them there, they’re getting stuck in the journey. You have to figure out where your site is slowing them down and causing them to not have a smooth path to purchase.

Jon:
Right.

Ryan:
Is that an oversimplification, or is that pretty much encapsulating it?

Jon:
No, I think that’s exactly it. And until that happens not much else matters, quite honestly, right? Armed with user research you’re identifying common patterns or pitfalls that your users are experiencing, and then group those together based on the six areas I mentioned today. And then you can prioritize the themes from there, based on the impact and to your performance. And really, I guess, just develop a plan to test each of those improvements. But you’ll have a much better plan and a roadmap for moving forward if you look at this model and follow those six. So yeah, overall, if you take one thing away from today, it’s that the power of heuristics is being able to strategically and efficiently identify your digital challenges in a way that is centered on the user experience. And that’s the key. If you’re concerned about the consumer’s user experience, the rest of these become so much easier to tackle.

Ryan:
If you’ve listened to this the challenge would be you have to just do something. You got to take a step somewhere, 1% a day. So when this releases Jon always has a post about it on LinkedIn. Go find him on LinkedIn and put a response in that post of what you did that day when you listened to this. I’m actually going to do it for myself, and I will be there in the comments.

Jon:
Love it.

Ryan:
I’ll say, what point did I do of the six Jon mentioned? And let’s just see how people can encourage each other in taking a step towards making your site not get people stuck in the mud.

Jon:
Love it. Awesome. Let’s do it.

Ryan:
Let’s do it.

Jon:
I am on LinkedIn for hours a day, so hit me up. I can’t wait to respond to these and encourage you on.

Ryan:
Jon might be the easiest person to find on LinkedIn.

Jon:
Almost to the point where it’s annoying, so yes.

Ryan:
Yes. Thank you, Jon, for educating me on heuristics, and now a new word I can pronounce easily.

Jon:
Hey, and you got an A+ as a student today, so thank you.

Ryan:
Thank you, Jon.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 112): Solve Common Optimization Issues Using Heuristics appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

Just like Google is changing, Ryan’s stance on broad match is changing too. In this week’s episode, Ryan gets candid about his opinion on broad match and why he now believes it to be valuable… in certain situations.

Google has used AI for its broad match keyword feature for years, but haven’t always been forthcoming about it. Now that there is transparency about how the feature works, Some interesting use cases have become clear. Google isn’t just throwing ads around, there is calculation and intent behind search results when this feature is in use.

Check out the full episode to learn:

• How your brand should control keyword match types
• What user data Google uses to assume intent when showing ads
• In what ways the different match types have changed

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer: You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. Jon: Hey, Ryan. So you’ve been on a broad match killing soapbox for years. I don’t have a better way to say that. Ryan: Yes. I have. Jon: But you’ve been pretty vocal about it. Although I will say recently, it seems like you’ve possibly been changing your tune on broad match a little bit, so you thought it’d be a great topic. I’m really intrigued when we change opinions, because usually, that means something juicy is happening. We have our reasons for doing it, so love to chat about that today, too. Ryan: Yeah. Broad match has been the dumpster fire of Google Ads for years, and there’s just no other way to put it. It was just … wastes disgusting amount of money, and we’ve, as a sales org, at Logical Position, have just sold against that for years. Because it’s the easy button, and Google makes it very easy to start with broad match. So I’ve had to not like it, because I’ve seen the waste that it’s done. But after spending some time down at Google a couple of weeks ago, we read at their Google Cambridge office with some clients, they actually had a big session just on broad match and what it’s doing now. Again, I’ll put an asterisk by all of this, because it’s still early on in this. But usually, when Google does a session, they’re trying to ram something down your throat, because there’s incentives around it for the team that’s pushing it at you. Jon: Okay. Ryan: In this case, they talked to us before the presentations, and our team got together and actually has been doing some tests around this, and adding it into accounts, and watching to be able to back up some of the things that Google’s saying. So there’s some very smart people at Google, and I do think they’re doing some valuable things when it comes to broad match now, not for everybody, but it’s for sure there. Jon: Okay. I know that you don’t change your mind without good reasons, so that’s good to hear. How have broad match types changed, then? Ryan: Well, the names of match types in Google haven’t changed. We still have broad, phrase, exact. There’s only three of them. We have eliminated, over the last few years, modified broad. That’s essentially phrase match now. But I guess I should probably start with the foundation, make sure everybody listening is on the same page with us. If your search is furniture store, that’s the actual search term for the exact match, furniture store. It’s been that way for years. You’re going to show for furniture store. No surprise. That’s the exact match keyword. Somebody searches furniture store. You show. But it does now have the same meanings. So that exact match keyword will also show for somebody searching home furnishing shop. Jon: Interesting. Ryan: That is a pretty big change that’s now in there for exact match. We still like exact match. It’s still functioning very good, and we’ve seen Google keep that thesaurus pretty much in check. Jon: Right. But they might want to check a dictionary, because that’s not the definition of exact. Ryan: It is not. So Google’s thesaurus on exact and what they think exact means, obviously not there. It is no longer exact exact, but it’s the closest Google’s going to give us. Again, Google makes money with clicks, and if they think somebody’s going to click an ad because of that, they have some incentive to show it. If you don’t want to show for home furnishing shop, you would need to be exact match negativing that out, but it’s there. It’s the closest we’ve got to exact. Then, the next layer up is phrase, which, in reality, is more like the old-school broad match keyword of yesteryear with some pretty loose thesaurus is on there. But if you have a phrase match keyword for furniture store, that’s going to show for searches that include the meaning of the keyword, not just … It has searches that include. So it’s not necessarily it has to be in the right order. So if you have a phrase match, furniture store, in your account, it would show for cheap furniture stores. It would show for living room furniture deals. Jon: Interesting. Ryan: It would show for, what store is the best place to find a bedroom dresser? Jon: Wow. Okay. Ryan: That’s a lot of different searches rolling up into a phrase match that used to be, by the way, you had to have furniture store in the search term together. Nothing could come in between. Things could go on the end, but you had to have furniture store in the phrase of the search query. That’s the name phrase match. Now, it’s like it has the same meaning, we think, or the same intent, but it’s going to be all over the place still. So that’s still a very broad version of a term. Jon: Right, but there’s a third one called broad. Ryan: There is. Jon: So how do we get more broad than that? Ryan: Well, now it’s just instead of having the meaning of the terms in there, it just relates. And so the term furniture store would show for home decor or cream-colored leather sectional. It relates, but it has not even nearly the same intent in my opinion. If I have a physical storefront selling furniture, and somebody is looking for a cream-colored leather sectional, I may not even have that in inventory. I may have wood furniture, and I put a keyword in there for furniture store, because I sell furniture. I can now show ads for cream-colored leather sectional, which is not ideal, because that’s also maybe an e-comm intent. Somebody wants to buy that online. So I can have shopping ads up there, as well, and I’m, with this search, probably showing text ads for that. Jon: Interesting. Okay. So besides Google not knowing how to exactly define broad phrase and exact according to what a dictionary would, it sounds interesting. You just have to be able to speak their language, and as we’ve said a hundred times on this show in 111 episodes, probably more than a hundred, it’s Google’s world, and we’re just living in it. Ryan: Exactly. Jon: So fair enough. Okay. We’ll speak their language. So Google still goes way beyond a keyword with that broad match settings. Right? So what’s changed to make you think positively about broad match now over what it was before? Ryan: Well, the simple answer is just AI, and that seems to be everybody’s simple answer right now. All you have to do to raise your stock price is- Jon: Right. So that everyone’s favorite answer these days, if nothing else. Ryan: AI, my stock price goes up 40%. This is great. Jon: There you go. Boom. Done. Ryan: Yeah, and all the holdings I have in my stock portfolio, if they would just mention AI on their next earning call, I would be a very happy person. Jon: Cash out and retire. Ryan: The larger answer is Google’s had AI behind the scenes for years, but they’ve been very late to the game in talking about what AI is doing and where and how it’s working. That’s kind of been on Google’s end that they’ve missed that boat in letting us know. But the recent transparency around it, about how broad match keywords are leveraging AI, is actually pretty cool. It’s not been something Google’s spent a lot of time and energy of actually talking about. In fact, I think this was my only Google presentation in 15 years that actually dove into what is this keyword doing and then how to understand what it can show for. Before, it was like, “Broad match keywords.” I’m like, “Okay. Well, what does that mean?” “It means broad match.” I was like, “Great. Pretty excited about that definition, Google. I’m not going to use it.” So we didn’t. Some key things now, based on our recent understanding of what Google’s doing in AI, about what broad match keywords are. And so not only is Google going to use that keyword, but they’re going to look at other keywords in the ad group to decide the context of that keyword. So, for example, if you have a keyword, a broad match keyword in your account for pink socks, and then the search term is salmon socks, Google’s going to look at the other keywords in your account and in that ad group, like red socks, blue socks, and purple socks, and they’re all broad match. Google says, “Oh. You’re showing colored socks,” and Google knows that when somebody searches salmon socks, they’re generally understanding that that’s referring to the color, not pictures of salmon on socks, the fish. Jon: Got it. Okay. Ryan: And so Google has data around this, and they’ve watched clicks and say, “Most of the time, salmon is clicking on socks for color, not fish.” They’re also going to look now at previous searches, and this is the fascinating one to me, probably most fascinating, is that they’re going to say, “All right. This user has done these searches in the past. Therefore, we know what they intend on this search,” or they think they do. And so if you’ve got a keyword in your account … The example they used at this event was Chicago versus New York baseball. So if that was a term you were on, and that was a term you were trying to show ads for, they would say, “Okay. Somebody searches Chicago versus New York.” So they forgot the baseball piece, which was pretty important in your keyword. You’re trying to show baseball-related things, but this user had previously searched baseball scores. And so Google says, “All right. Based on their previous searches, this user is interested in baseball scores, and then we know that when they search Google versus New York, they’re looking for the baseball score. They’re not trying to figure out the food scene between Chicago and New York. They’re looking for baseball.” So they would show an ad for that. Jon: Okay. No. That’s really helpful, because in the past, you probably would even get Chicago versus New York pizza coming up. Right? Ryan: No. You just, you wouldn’t get that search. And so I think that is a really good one. Now, there’s a lot of thinking that has to go into all this by the way, and a lot of asterisks, because you’re not actually getting search queries for most of these terms now. Google is keeping a lot of that held tightly, and you don’t get to see it. Some of that, again, it’s probably on purpose so that you can’t sculpt the traffic as much as you want and eliminate searches. Because Google says they’re good, you will believe them, and trust them, and it is great. IRS doing your taxes, you’re going to be paying more generally, but there is value here. So another one is going to be user location. This is pretty easy. If you’re trying to show ads for restaurants in New York, and somebody looks for restaurants near me, and Google knows they’re in New York, they’re going to show an ad. Pretty basic. They’ve probably been doing that for a while. But again, you’re going to start showing based on user location if that seems to be part of the intent of your ad. Then, the other real, I think, big piece of AI in this is Google going to the landing page and trying to understand the context of your business. So this becomes more important as you’re designing ad groups now, to make sure they’re sending it to landing pages specific to the keywords in your ad group, not just sending everybody to the homepage. Because if you don’t have a bunch of content on your home page related to these keywords, it’s going to be difficult for this piece of AI to really do what it’s supposed to do. Jon: Yeah. Definitely not going to convert. Ryan: Yeah. For sure won’t convert. If you’re sending all your traffic to your home page, call Jon and I immediately. Pause the podcast, and we’ll help you. But again, this, I think, is a dumb example, because if you’re putting this in your ad, you’re way too broad. But if you had the keyword shoes, is the one they brought up, you put that broad match keyword, shoes. I’m like, I don’t know why that makes sense for anybody unless you’re spending gobs of money. But the search term was Run Far Footwear 1000, which is a brand of shoes and their specific model. Your landing page that you had sent the shoe ad group to was for ultra marathon shoes, which are a different subset of running shoes, that included the Run Far Footwear 1000. So it actually included the search query, but you just decided to make an ad and a keyword shoes, not even running shoes. You would show an ad for that, which would be appropriate. But again, if you are selling shoes of a specific type, and that keyword is in your account, again, call me. Because that’s terrible. But the idea is that Google has that ability to look beyond the ad group and say, “Oh. The intent is to sell these running shoes. Let’s show ads for that.” Jon: I think that’s going to be great for folks who are just starting out and don’t know much about Google. So I feel like that’s a win for beginners, probably a loss for folks who have an agency running their account or are a little more advanced. Ryan: Well, it can be, but also, it’s not that Google is always going to do that and do that difficult work for you. So Google is making it very easy to get an ad set up and run, which is part of their role of saying, “Hey. Every business should be able to get an ad up without an agency to start.” I mean, if you’re only going to spend 100 or 200 bucks a month, don’t pay an agency to do that. You have to get going on your own. But if you’re selling running shoes for men, women, and trail running, you’ve got all these segments on there, you’ve done a good job merchandising, if you put the keyword shoes in your account, you’re going to show for a lot of crap. And so you don’t necessarily want to put that keyword in there when you’re only spending one or 200 bucks a month. Jon: Not to mention that’s going to be more expensive per click to do such a broad term. Ryan: Yeah. Well, you might get some cheap stuff, but it’s going to be cheap stuff that nobody else wants, that nobody else that can spend good and have experts working on their behalf is going to compete on. So there’s a lot of moving pieces here still. I think that it’s still fairly early on for most companies moving into broad match at scale. And so I withhold my opinion on the value for small advertisers still, because I haven’t seen it work yet. Announcer: You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you. Jon: Oh. Okay. So these other keywords, the previous searches, using user’s location, and having context of that landing page you’re sending folks to. Should everyone just be using broad match now? I mean, it seems like it’s better. Ryan: It’s better. I’ll say that. It’s for sure better. So I don’t want to kill broad match. Yeah. I’m off that kill broad match soapbox. Jon: Okay. Ryan: That’s not my goal anymore. Jon: Keep it alive, but maybe at an arm’s length. Ryan: Yeah. It’s, for sure, not for everybody. I would say a brand still has to be very careful and controlled how and when they deploy broad match keywords. And so I would probably boil it down to building from the bottom of the funnel up still. So if you haven’t maxed out exact match keywords for your brand … We go back to the running shoe one. Run Far Forward 1000, if there’s still a bunch of those searches left, and you sell those, and you want to sell more, capture those first before you start moving into a broad match of shoe and try to sell some Brooks, or Saucony, or ASICS, and all the other shoes you have. Get very specific where you have the margin to play and you know the lifetime value of those customers. If you know that people that buy Run Far Forward 1000 shoes from you are more likely to buy another pair of shoes in three to six months, sell more of those. Adjust your ROAS goals before you start moving into some broad match keywords. If I had to … You’ve got a gun to my head and tell me, “You have to come up with an idea of when broad match makes sense,” I’ll tell you if you’re spending less than 10 grand a month on Google, broad match probably doesn’t make sense yet. There’ll be exceptions across the board, I’m sure, but that’s a general rule of thumb. It’s probably even higher than that, but for sure, if you’re spending less than 10 grand a month, and you don’t have an agency working for you, it would be difficult for me to advocate for broad match keywords. I’ve had an analogy for a while that I’ve used to kind of explain Google Ads management, and I think it applies in this case. AI is powerful, and there’s a lot of great things you can do with it. But it’s kind of like a Formula 1 car. It’s very complex. It can be fragile, but man, if it is working for you, you are going extremely fast and doing some really cool stuff. But just because you have a driver’s license, doesn’t … You conceptually know how a car works, accelerator, brake, steering wheel, road, gears. Great. It goes forward. Maybe you can change the oil. If you’re my wife, you can’t drive manual, so you have to stay on automatic or a one-pedal car. But knowing how to drive a regular car does not mean you could get behind the wheel of a Formula 1 car and drive, let alone compete in a race. I mean there are 20 humans on the planet that are qualified to drive that type of car in a race. And so I don’t think controlling broad match keywords is that extreme. There’s definitely more than 20 people on the planet that can do it for you, but there’s so many moving pieces and so much analysis that has to be done to protect your brand from that. I cannot, in good conscience, advocate for somebody starting up on their own deciding that broad match is a great one. Google defaults to broad match. You have to actually go into Google Ads, find the settings to turn off keywords to say, “I don’t want them all to be broad match in my account. I want you to use these settings that I set.” And so if you’re going into a Google Ads account, you’re running it, go into settings. It’s under additional settings, even below that on your campaign, that you have to go unclick broad match and make sure that, “If I put phrase match and exact match in, I want you to use those, Google.” It’s tough. It’s not an easy button for people for sure. Jon: So how should brands control this key match, keyword match types, then? Ryan: The best is going to be controlling your bids and making sure that you’ve got them in the right order. So I still advocate for tightly-controlled ad groups, and so most brands should have exact and phrase in their ad group and know exactly what people are searching for and where they’re going on the page. So staying on that Run Far 1000, you would have an ad group with phrase and exact on that, landing on the product page for that Run Far 1000. If you had Run Far Forward as a brand, you would land on a category page for all the Run Far Forward shoes you have on there, phrase and exact. You would bid the exact match higher than phrase. So you would know maybe it’s $2 for exact match as your bid in the same ad group, and then your phrase match would be bid at, say, $1.50. That would ensure that the exact match gets all the exact queries there, and then the phrase match would pick up the things that are extra that have the same meaning. Maybe somebody may mistype and say, Run Far Forward 2000, and maybe there isn’t a 2000 shoe. I don’t know. I don’t wear those shoes, but it would be the same meaning, or ultra marathon run far forward. Those types of things would show for the phrase match, go to the right landing page because of that. Most companies don’t put broad match in there. But if you’ve got enough spend, and you’re hitting thresholds that say, “Hey. This ad group is not spending anymore. I can see impression share. I’m at the top most of the time. I’m getting above 80% impression share on this exact match keyword,” great. Let’s start putting some broad match campaigns together, possibly, or broad match keywords where you keep the bids down lower. And so I would say if I was going to go broad match in that account, I would say broad match would have a bit of a dollar. Then, I would say I’m going to use negative keywords to sculpt out those exact match keywords that I know should be hitting the exact match ad group. So there’s a lot of work that goes in to say, “Google, I want you to start using this a little bit and to try to take advantage of some of your AI there based on past searches you’ve done and all this. But if they search exactly what I want to be showing for, make sure that goes to the ad group, and I can see the search, the impression, and I can see the conversion so I don’t have messy data.” So what I’ll see a lot of times is you’ll have mismatched bids all over the place, because somebody sees a conversion go to a phrase match. I’m like, “Oh. The phrase match is working really well. This is great.” They’re going to bid phrase match up. It gets up to $3, $3.50, and then you’ve got exact and phrase competing against each other. Because the phrase can take the exact, and all of a sudden, exact match search queries go down to zero. It’s all going to phrase. Well, you’ve just given Google permission to take more money from you. And so that phrase, they’re going to do it, because you gave them permission. Then, if you have broad in there, it can suck broad match out, and then you’ve got messy conversion data. It becomes very difficult for a company like you, Jon, to understand, how is this keyword converting? This traffic is going to the Run Far Forward page and not converting. Well, you’ve got a bunch of messy data. They’re actually searching for ASICS. They’re not converting, because they’re not on the page. Jon: There’s a lot to think about here. Okay. So I’m with you in understanding why you’re no longer on the soapbox of killing off broad match. I’m still confused why Google refuses to read the dictionary, but I’ll speak their language. It does seem like it could be helpful for folks who are starting out in Google to get more success, to kind of help accelerate things. I can see why Google would do that, and it does seem to give you more flexibility overall. So that’s positive, but all in all, okay. I hear you. I think that as a user, this could be helpful for me, so I do appreciate that. Ryan: Yeah. The past history stuff is good, and the problem I would have with a new user starting off on this would be you don’t get the search queries. And so when you don’t know what they’re actually searching for that’s converting, it becomes difficult to say, “Oh. I know that we’re competing really well on purple running shoes, because I have some.” They’re actually searching red, and getting to your site, and not converting. So you just don’t get the transparency that I love and have grown to love on Google. Jon: That makes sense. Ryan: So you have to accept that, and it is what it is. Also, when you mix all this in with Performance Max, it even gets more complicated, which is a whole nother conversation. But when you have broad match in your account, Performance Max can take precedent, and take those queries out, and put them in broad match. So if they’re converting really well, broad match can suck those in and create text ads for you. Because it’s converting well, because it’s helping Performance Max accomplish its goals. Jon: Right. Right. So last question on my side. When does this roll out for everybody? Is this something … Ryan: It’s already out. Jon: Because I know you just heard about this. It’s already there? Okay. Ryan: It’s been out for a while, and Google’s just now being a little more transparent, I guess, and at least telling some of their larger agencies like us what it’s doing and giving us access and some transparency into that, which I love. Because it helps us understand what to expect from a broad match. Whereas before, it was across the board, pause broad match, because the thesaurus is so loose, almost guaranteed it’s wasting money. Now, it’s like, “Okay. We’ve maxed out at the bottom of the funnel. We’re moving up into that intent, creating demand.” I think it’s going to be some of the areas that are trying to push into social media, creating demand when you can’t, when you’ve maxed everything out at the bottom, like, “Hey. Let’s go run some broad match,” because it’s going to be better, generally speaking, than running a display ad. So it’s going to be the layer before that. So that’s why you’ve got to have enough spend to accept the fact that it’ll be some lower return, and it fits into most of the larger brands. When we’ve ran broad match in larger brands … So a quick example. We were able to spend only 10% more by adding broad match in year over year. This is ’24 versus ’23, but conversions went up 25%. We actually dropped the CPA, the cost of acquisition, I think 15%. It was somewhere around those numbers. Jon: Wow. Ryan: But it was pretty powerful in being able to add that match type in when the spend was high enough, and they could actually leverage all of our analysis and leverage we added to control it. Jon: That’s great. Well, a lot of interesting stuff here, Ryan. I appreciate you sharing that with me today, and as always, I’ve walked away learning something new and poking fun at Google a few times. So all in all … Ryan: It is Google’s world, and we do like it. Because it grows businesses. Jon: Yeah. There you go. Ryan: It’s just, it’s challenging. Jon: Yes. It can be. That’s why we have you here. Right? Can tell us some of this. Ryan: Hopefully, I stick here, stick around and keep helping. Thanks, Jon. Appreciate it. Jon: Thank you, Ryan. Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 111): Google Broad Match Is Back appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

This might be surprising to hear from one of the pioneers of conversion rate optimization, but CRO is out and DXO is in. In this episode, CEO Jon MacDonald dives into what Digital Experience Optimization(DXO) is and why it’s the best way to produce results. DXO is an evolved approach that brings together a range of tactics needed to build a better digital journey. 

Digital Experience Optimization involves looking at the digital journey as a whole to see not just how customers engage with you but why they make certain decisions. Through the process, meaningful changes are made to your website or app to meet the needs of your users and business.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

• What Digital Experience Optimization is
• How CRO differs from DXO
• The benefits of using DXO
• How success is measured when using DXO

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan:
Well, hello, Jon. Excited to connect today because we’re going to talk about something that I would consider bigger than CRO or maybe it’s a topic that encapsulates CRO, but it’s a broader topic that I don’t think I’ve ever heard about before. So if I’ve not heard about it, chances are a lot of other people haven’t either.

Jon:
Okay. Well, that’s great. I’m excited to talk about it then.

Ryan:
Yeah. So we do have probably, to a degree, an unproductive emphasis on conversion rates in our day-to-day within e-commerce. I think we oversimplify it when I’m talking about math equations on traffic, conversions, retention, profit. It’s yeah, just increase your conversion rate. It’s really simple, right? It’s important and do it, but it’s easy to do, and I am raising my hand as somebody that’s been guilty of this, but getting focused too closely on just certain metrics and getting too deep inside the jar that I can’t read the label correctly, to put it in one of your metaphors, but it likely leaves money on the table.
Back in the day, it was people looking at bounce rates, like, “Ah, bounce rate is the end all be all. If they can’t stay on your site, they can’t transact.” Okay, well, we’ve hopefully gone beyond that and we don’t focus as much on bounce rates, but you’ve been talking a lot about this term digital experience optimization, and not as much as I would say, at least reading some of your content recently and your LinkedIn posts, not as much about conversion rate optimization, but you’re a CRO company. So why are we taking it into more a digital, what are we calling it, a DXO?

Jon:
DXO, yeah. Look, I’ve been saying this for the past few months that CRO is out and DXO is in. The reality is we have been a conversion optimization firm for over a decade, and that’s typically the industry you would know, but I promise that websites and apps won’t reach their full potential under the current industry expectations and the implementations of conversion rate optimization. So I’m here today, and I’ve been on the soapbox for a little bit, but you’re right, we haven’t really talked about it. I’m here to propose a better solution, and that’s DXO or digital experience optimization.
This evolved approach is really just bringing together all the diverse disciplines and the tactics that are needed to build a better digital journey, not just focus on conversions, but really re-centering the focus on what matters most, and that is the customer.

Ryan:
I like it. So we’re not going to focus as much just on the actual site itself and conversion rates for conversion rates’ sake, but we’re going to say, what are they trying to accomplish? Who’s the person or people that we need this site to serve?

Jon:
Yes.

Ryan:
I like it.

Jon:
And you may have noticed the trend leading up to this with Behind The Click, my last book, which is all about the why you’re doing different tactics and the psychology behind these folks who are visiting your site or using your app. The reason that I wrote that book was a lead in to this. I had noticed in the industry that everybody’s now focusing on conversion. It’s the hot topic of the past year, year and a half, ever since COVID, right? Reality, e-commerce had a boom in COVID, everybody wanted to focus on conversion, and then when numbers started dipping post-COVID, they were like, “Oh, we better focus on conversion.” They doubled down on it, and ad costs and customer acquisition costs are so high. Everybody’s focused on conversion right now, and I really think a lot of folks are missing the point.
Now, it also really is creating a whole bunch of issues for brands who shouldn’t be focused just on conversion. Now, I agree, everybody wants conversion on their site, but there are brands who, they’re not a good candidate for conversion optimization. They don’t have enough traffic. They don’t have enough conversions happening already. They don’t have the resources, the budget to put into conversion optimization.
So as I started looking at all of this, I realized that that singular focus on conversion is really hurting a lot of brands more than it’s helping, and they need to be focusing on that entire digital experience and optimizing that. So CRO was just a subset of that focusing on conversion, but there’s way more to the picture.

Ryan:
Yeah, because we look at the market of e-comm brands, the vast majority of them are not at a size that are going to pay for true CRO. They don’t have the data. It doesn’t make sense to say, “Yeah, let’s go do a bunch of user testing and do all these A-B tests.” When you have, let’s say, 1,000 visitors a month, that’s just not there. So you’re saying that DXO can be a solution that can work for every company, no matter your size and where you’re at, you can still leverage DXO and improve the experience of the consumer. So what’s the differences we’re seeing? If we’re seeing that CRO is kind of a subset, transparently, what am I going to be able to explain to somebody like, “Oh, you need DXO”?

Jon:
So DXO is really the process of making meaningful changes to your website or app that meet the needs or meet the needs better of your users and your business, and this is achieved through stuff that you might have heard me talk a lot about here, but data analysis, research, strategy. Experimentation is part of that, right? But DXO is really a foundational approach that involves looking at a digital journey as a whole, and not just how customers engage with you, but why they make different decisions. Again, going back to the book, Behind The Click, and talking about the why, it analyzes behaviors from the moment they enter your app all the way through post-conversion.
So my point of view on this is conversion optimization is just too small of a lens. DXO is bigger than, I don’t know, tweaking colors. Maybe it’s just a little bit of copy, some images on your website or app. Now, look, digital experience optimization does improve the look and feel of your digital product or site, but it can also change how you think about and address your customers, improve your culture of experimentation in your business, skyrocket buy-in from stakeholders, and using data to make more informed decisions.
So I think to summarize that, put it more simply, digital experience optimization, it crafts comprehensive user-centered journeys. It address the needs of the consumer at every single stage that they would take of that journey.

Ryan:
Yeah. So when you’re talking about journeys, I visualize this crazy roadmap almost of like, “Hey, all these places, they enter the site and then they go here,” and I visualize a thing that used to be awesome in Google Analytics, the universal one, and then figure out, “Oh, is that the digital journey we’re mapping or is this more about finding personas and understanding people?” How can I visualize this better, I guess, in my head when you’re talking journeys to what you mean about the consumers on the site?

Jon:
Well, and that’s how I broke it down in the book to have four different parts of that. So there’s four specific areas that consumers are looking at, and I think it’s really interesting because the first is that discovery phase. This is where consumers are understanding they have a problem, they’re doing some research. Maybe they see your ad or they find you on Google or get a referral. Then that second phase is information gathering. This is where consumers are really going to jump in and say, “Can you as a brand solve my specific pain or need?” They might have 100 tabs open with your competitors and products-

Ryan:
Or you’re Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
Or you’re just, “Let’s use the first thing that comes along.” Only after they’ve done all of that do they start making a decision and start to actually think about conversion and buying. Then there’s the whole post-purchase phase. What happens after somebody purchases? Are they going to regret that purchase? Are they going to tell other people? The challenge with all of this is that conversion rate optimization is defined as singularly that process that increases percentage of users who performed a desired action or buy off of your website.
So out of those four, you’re really only getting a subset of one of those four steps that people are going through. You’re not even getting one-fourth. You’re actually getting less than that because that step has multiple things that they’re going through. They’re information gathering, they’re starting to really make a decision, and then they convert. So it’s one action out of this entire journey.
I think that that’s really the challenge is because most people when they hear conversion optimization, they immediately go to, “This is A-B testing.” They immediately go to, “Oh, well, I’m going to find ways to alter my site through A-B testing that are going to tell me how to get people to convert at a higher rate,” and that’s all they focus on. You often hear something like conversion rate optimization program and a testing program used interchangeably, and that’s why because it is only testing is the reality. We’ve always done more than that at The Good, but we’ve never really talked about all these other things that we do because the clients that came to us always wanted testing. That was what they knew. So we’re trying to educate folks on what the entire journey looks like.
So when compared to DXO, CRO is actually very narrow and very limiting, and I think we need to get away from that. In fact, I think this might get me in some hot water. I know you love your hot takes, but I think the reality is I’m tempted to go as far as to advocate that conversion rate optimization, as it’s currently defined and understood by the industry, should not exist anymore. We should simply remove it from our vocabulary, and I say this as the founder of one of the industry’s first conversion rate optimization firms. So if I’m moving on from this and leaving a decade of history plus behind, it’s not for nothing. This is something that we need to be doing as an industry.

Ryan:
Damn. I’d say that’s a pretty big comment coming from the CRO brain that I would say dominates quite a bit. So I mean-

Jon:
The DXO brain.

Ryan:
Yes, the DXO brain. Now, if I take a step back personally though and start thinking about my digital journeys now, I would say that the DXO would go even beyond the website, and I would think that your social channels where you’re higher up the funnel, you’ve got to be probably considering the experience there in addition to the website because, I mean, the reality is my decision to buy often happens before I even get to the website, and at that point, the website can only screw it up by not having a normal checkout process. If you just put me on a Volusion site maybe that’s 20 years old, you might not get me, but other than that, I saw this thing on social, my friend said it to me, said I had to have it, I’m like, “All right. Yeah, I definitely need to have that.” My wife buys things for our new pool this summer that I don’t know how she got to that site, but it’s like, “Yeah, you’re buying.” “Okay. Great,” but that is, I mean, I don’t know if CRO, I mean, as a CRO founder, have you ever talked about social profiles and the actual CRO process? I mean, is that something completely out of left field and I’m crazy?

Jon:
You’re not crazy, first of all, which I’m sure you appreciate hearing, but I think-

Ryan:
I got one. I’m going to take … I mean, you’re going to meet my wife later today.

Jon:
Love it. The reality is that happens in that discovery phase. That is the first phase. Now, I’m not suggesting that The Good is going to become a social ad company, but I will say that the research that we do and the customer understanding should filter back up to what is driving the traffic because there needs to be a connection between what promises are made in that traffic generation technique, whether it be social or ads or whatever it might, videos, whatever it is that somebody saw, and when they get to your site, there needs to be a thread there. If that thread’s not there, they’re probably going to be confused and leave because, again, they’re doing that discovery of, “Well, what is the pain point I really have and are there solutions for this out there?” And then they come across the search results that it may have 10 different options, and then they start going into information gathering mode.

Ryan:
Got it. Okay.

Jon:
So you do have to have the social or ads or video marketing, whatever you’re doing needs to have a thread through it to the site and what you talk about. Now, DXO can focus on the site. In fact, it does improve the look and feel of your website. It goes beyond these superficial changes, but it incorporates user feedback and behavioral data to drive decisions. So that’s where a site might look good, but also work well, and that’s something that … I like to think of this as it’s a great way to build those hard-to-measure qualities like trustworthiness, reliability, and maybe safety that your customers really need and the things that they’re looking for each of those steps in the journey, but off of the site, it also helps you to prioritize your ideas and improvements you want to make.
So you probably have hundreds of ideas you want to try, but each of those change comes with a cost and resourcing, workforce, time, money. So how do you choose which ones you should do? What’s worth exploring? So DXO is really meant to help you kind of zero in on those ideas that are more likely to move the needle. So that might not be just on site. Same thing. It will help you form a deeper understanding of your customers. It’s going to give you that more profound comprehension of your customer’s beliefs, their preferences, what their needs are, and of course, all of that’s going to help you convert better, but it also is going to help you to have more relevant ads in the end.
It can also help you create a culture of user-centered and data-driven decision making. It’s no secret that, I don’t know, data-backed decisions are better than gut feelings, and some may argue that, but as a computer science and just general science believer, I think probably data is the way to go, but a strong DXO program is going to use real-world data from your ideal audience to guide that decision making, and that’s not something you just would use on your website, although this all does get applied. I mean, where The Good comes in is we are experts at taking all this information and applying it to your website or app.
Lastly, you really can save time and resources by validating your design decisions before you do them. So it enables you to validate or maybe even invalidate data and understand what you should implement before you do it. What are customers going to want and how do they react? So you’re not wasting money digging a hole that you have to fill right back up. Unfortunately, CRO likes to say they validate decisions, but really, what they’re validating is, will this make somebody take an action? And that’s all that CRO does. This is much more holistic than that.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Ryan:
So as somebody that has lots of ideas that get shot down by my significant other before they get off the ground, walk me through how DXO could actually practically help me prioritize an idea. How would that realistically work? Like, “I think we should do this.” “Well, DXO says that’s a bad idea, but you should try this version.” How does that play out?

Jon:
Yeah, maybe that’s the next book, How DXO Can Save Your Marriage. I think the reality there is, look, if you’re going to measure the performance of your digital experience, it’s a tall task, especially compared to just focusing on conversion rate and that singular metric, but DXO is going to set you off for more success as a whole. So there are five areas that we generally want to look at at The Good to understand if we’re being effective.
So the first is data foundations. Do you have these clear goals? Do you have ownership and maybe good data to form the backbone of any decisions that you’re making? So first of all, is there data? Do you have the data that you need? So this immediately eliminates those SMB’s e-comm sites, which is a huge problem with CRO. Those folks shouldn’t be doing CRO to begin with. This immediately upfront just eliminates them because they don’t have the right data.
The second is user-centered approach. So does your company have a comprehensive roadmap of what should be optimized based on what consumers are looking for? Not just what your CEO thinks you should do, right? It’s really based on that data and that research. And then third is resourcing. Are you giving optimization the resources, the support, the adequate capabilities? Are you moving along at a decent pace? These are all questions you need to ask yourself if you’re going to be successful.
Fourth is toolkit. Do you have the necessary tools for planning, for measurement, analytics, et cetera, and even running tests. It’s true you do need tools to run tests, not just A-B tests. You could do user tests, et cetera. You need all the right tools to do that. And then the last is the biggest, I think, because once you get this, you’ve kind of unlocked the ability to level up everything I just mentioned even more.
So I put this last on the list because if you’ve knocked out the other four, at least enough to prove it out, you’ll get the fifth one, which is impact and buy-in. So you’ll increase the relevance of data-backed decisions, and you’ll have stakeholders utilizing that data and championing it throughout the company, which will then feed back in to let you collect more data, to take in more user-centered approaches, to have more resources to do all of this, to get the right toolkits. You can see how this all kind of feeds itself over time, and it’s not something that a small e-comm site can do.

Ryan:
So are you saying that small e-comm sites can’t do DXO or they have to use DXO because they can’t do CRO?

Jon:
Well, I’m saying that the reality is they often don’t have the resources to be able to optimize the entire digital journey, and that’s why they think CRO is going to solve their problems like, “Let’s just focus on the conversion.” The problem is they try to do that, but then they don’t have the right data. So it’s kind of this weird catch 22. What I recommend they do, and this is something you’ve heard me say for years now, Ryan, is talk to your consumers. That’s what you need to do. That’s the first step. Don’t worry about converting them yet. Talk to them and then alter your site based on what you learn. If you just do that, you probably won’t need conversion optimization for quite some time.

Ryan:
So you would be throwing that in the bucket of DXO like, “Hey, you’re actually just going to talk to your customers because you’re going to get better data from them than you would measuring the conversion rate of 200 visitors.” Got it. That makes a lot more sense.

Jon:
Right, and you’re now starting to take a user-centered approach. You’re going to go out and use that data to help you get more resources. Then eventually, you’ll be able to get the toolkits and you’ll have that buy-in from your team.

Ryan:
I love it. I think that makes a lot of sense because you don’t have to be small to talk to your customers either. I mean, big companies can and should be doing it. It’s like they’re paying your bills and they’re keeping your site going and keeping your employees employed. Just talk to them. They’re not scary.

Jon:
They are the real boss.

Ryan:
They are. I think this is really cool. I’m excited to see how this plays out in the market too when there’s a new term, DXO. Did you trademark it? Is that why we’re changing?

Jon:
Well, we had our conversion growth program before. We now have the DXO program, which is something we’ve been working on for almost two years to revise our service offering, to broaden it a little bit to where it incorporates all of these things that need to be part of it, and that is really proving beneficial. The clients that we’ve been doing this with for the past four to six months are really finding that there’s a lot of value here for them that’s not just in measuring that singular metric, and that makes me happy because, again, as a mission of removing all the bad online experiences until only the good remain, well, I think if we just focus on the conversion, we’re missing that point.

Ryan:
No, I love it. As an advocate for small brands growing and getting the opportunities that big brands do, like, hey, I love working with big brands. We have a lot of really big cool ones that it’s fun to work with, but I also like, as the entrepreneur in me, I want all business owners that are small to have a shot at getting big. I think this idea of your DXO process for all size businesses is awesome. Excited for this.

Jon:
Thank you.

Ryan:
So anybody can do DXO, you just got to take the steps. Listen to Jon. I assume you have more content on the website about DXO if somebody wants to dig in a little deeper.

Jon:
Yeah. I mean, I think that there’s a couple of ways to do that. First is my last book, Opting Into Optimization is a great lead into this because writing that book is kind of what helped me realize there needed to be a shift here, and then reading Behind the Click, of course, will help you to take that a step further, but even just following what we’re doing at The Good, signing up for our insight emails. We call them The Good Question now. Each week, we’re answering a question that somebody submits and diving really deep on it. So all helpful content. We don’t sell through that content. It’s never a sales pitch. It’s more of a how can we help you with this, and so that’s a great educational tool. We have that encyclopedia of DXO, if you will, up on our site, 15 years worth of thinking. Go check it all out.

Ryan:
That’s awesome. Thank you, Jon. Appreciate it, and yeah, go check out Jon’s site If you haven’t signed up for his newsletter and you’re on episode, what is it, 110, you’ve skipped a few things. You got to get in there and catch back up. So subscribe to Jon’s email list. It’s great.

Jon:
Love it. All right, Ryan. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 110): What is Digital Experience Optimization? appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

Google is constantly changing. In just the last year, digital leaders have seen the sunset of Google Optimize, a transition from Universal Analytics to GA4, and countless algorithm changes. Now, we’re bracing for Google’s latest wave of updates to payments and AI implementation.

If you’re involved in digital marketing, own a business, or interact with any Google product, this episode is a must-listen. Jon and Ryan, seasoned professionals in the field, delve into the implications of Google’s latest updates and how they directly affect you.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How ad payments on Google are changing
2. How Google is using AI
3. How broad match keywords will change the way your ads appear
4. What to look for to maintain integrity while using Google Ads revenue tracking

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:

You are listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:

Hey, Ryan, as I’ve said before, and I’m sure you’ll hear me say it time and time again, we have a job because things are constantly changing. The internet’s changing, devices change, user technology changes, preferences change. If those things didn’t change consistently, businesses wouldn’t need experts to help them navigate the world of digital commerce and driving traffic and converting it. So I’m thankful for that. I’m sure you are.

Ryan:

Yeah, me too.

Jon:

… as well. Yeah, but you put some notes together today on one thing that I didn’t mention, which is big changes in the world of Google, and now that I say it, it really does seem like we’re talking about this a lot, right? Google is consistently changing. Heck-

Ryan:

They are.

Jon:

… in my world, anyways, they killed off Optimize, Google Optimize, which was sad, but I get it. Okay.

They’ve totally ruined, in my opinion … I’m probably not the best to talk about this, but Analytics, it’s nowhere near what it was.

Ryan:

I’m very public about my distaste for GA4 and the fact they ruined one of the best.

Jon:

So we’re not alone.

Ryan:

Prob- … no.

Jon:

Now look, they seem to have this outsized impact on the digital world due to their size. Of course, everybody and everyone is using them, right? And also their position in the marketing funnel, because if you want to drive traffic to your site, you almost have to use them, right?

So I know you want to talk about this today, but usually when we talk about Google changes on Drive and Convert, it isn’t an insignificant change. So I’m interested to figure out what is this? What happened? Give me the lay of the land.

Ryan:

Yeah, it’s … again, constant change is good for us “experts” if we want to dub ourselves that … at least we know more than the average bear … but we were hanging out at Google Boston last week with some clients and prospects, and there’s so much going on, and I feel like the two wonderful letters of AI is really forcing change quickly, and I want to say some of it can be good, but a lot of it I feel is change for change sake, in that Google was kind of behind the ball when it came to AI with Microsoft and ChatGPT. And so it seems to be a lot of reactionary things, and if you don’t say AI and shareholder meetings or quarterly results, your stocks are going to drop, so they have to talk about it, and that’s pushing a lot of stuff around.

But one of the most frustrating things has been a very quiet change that I haven’t been able to find any documentation of Google actually officially saying this is going to happen, but it’s happening to our clients, and Google is forcing merchants to not use credit cards to pay for ads. And-

Jon:

Whoa.

Ryan:

… seems like … all right, no big deal, you can still pay for ads. ACH, that’s pretty common. No big deal. The problem becomes when that credit card reward system became part of the marketing equation or the justification for certain spend levels, because it brought it to break even or it was a source of revenue to the business owner. It’s not insignificant when you’re getting checks from your credit card company for 40, 50 grand a year that’s tax-free.

Jon:

Yeah.

Ryan:

Cash back rewards are significant. We even have a partner that we have pretty deep ties with that gives 3.3% cash back on a marketing spend, which is-

Jon:

Really?

Ryan:

… significant for a lot of merchants, with daily limits in the seven figures. It’s for some large advertisers.

But Google sent a few emails to some of our … I wouldn’t even say large merchants in the last two, three weeks saying, “Hey, because you’re in this cool program,” I forget there’s some initials around it, but essentially it’s a high touch program, where you can call somebody at Google if you have a billing issue, or if you want to talk to a Google expert with a Google email address about strategy and ads, you can do that.

And the first advertiser that came to us angry, was … he didn’t know he was in this program, and so then he was being told because he’s in this program, he can’t use this credit card, which brings him somewhere in the neighborhood of 20, 25 grand a year of tax-free income. And he’s like, “I called Google and I can’t get out of the program, and I don’t even use the benefits, because I didn’t even know I was in it, and even if I was, I’d rather have the cash than call a billing person, because I have logical position that’s going to help me do that.” I was like, “Good point. No way out of it.”

And so when you look at Google’s earnings, they probably have merchant processing fees north of $4 billion a year.

Jon:

Whoa.

Ryan:

These reward cards are higher cost to use for the processor, so they’re probably paying close to 3% on some of these aggressive cards.

Jon:

Okay, so let’s pause right there. When does this take effect?

Ryan:

It’s rolling out immediately.

Jon:

Okay, so I should go and buy Google stock today is what you’re saying because-

Ryan:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:05:30].

Jon:

… as soon as this rolls out and they get two billion or plus of extra revenue, that-

Ryan:

Pure profit.

Jon:

… that’s not insignificant, right?

Ryan:

No, if you’re going to add four billion of pure profit to the bottom line because you’re not letting people process on cards, that’s a lot. You might want to sell short some of these high reward cards that are being used for marketing spend, because they’re not going to get that usage any more.

Historically, very large merchants have been on invoicing with terms of payment 30, 60 days, depending on your size, and it made sense because large brands … I’m thinking multinationals … usually don’t have cards to pay for $6 million a month ad buys, because their limits on the cards aren’t that high. Or just became cumbersome, and so too much risk to have a card with that a limit out on the internet. And so they went ACH, and just pay it by debit, and it was easy.

Smaller merchants, one of them spending 50 grand a month on average, is being forced into this. And that’s generally not a massive advertiser, and so for them to be forced into this with the guise of, “Oh, you’re getting all this great service,” that you’re not using, “and you’re going to get these wonderful 30 day terms.” I’m like, “That’s exactly what a credit card is. It’s 30 day terms. I get the invoice and I pay 30 days later and don’t pay interest. It’s great, and I get the rewards.”

So big changes, and it feels like another step in driving a knife into the small entrepreneur advertiser that’s trying to start up, and that cash back ends up becoming some of the lifeblood of sustaining a business, maybe as you’re pushing for growth, because you don’t have as much margin, but hey, these cash back rewards can buy groceries for a month, because hey, we’re growing the business and living lean.

Jon:

Yeah, this sounds frustrating for SMBs especially. It’s way less convenient, that’s for sure. But okay, we live in their world, so we got to do what we got to do.

Ryan:

And I guess Google doing this is one thing, but I have a feeling that if Google releases earnings and there’s an extra billion dollars of pure profit to their bottom line to their shareholders every quarter, Meta is going to follow suit. You can’t just not have that competitive advantage, where that billion dollars is profit, but you can use that to develop more products, to invest it in AI, which probably drives your stock even higher, than it would if you had billion dollars came back in a dividend.

So I foresee a world in which credit cards are no longer used for marketing spend, at least on the major platforms that need to save on those processing fees.

Jon:

All good things come to an end, huh?

Ryan:

They do. But that’s one that … I mean, how long have we been using credit cards just for stuff in business? And I think there’s going to be a reaction towards this that’s going to hurt people using rewards cards. I love getting free cash every month.

Jon:

Who doesn’t?

Ryan:

I won’t complain.

Jon:

So I haven’t heard much about Google and AI, because Microsoft, ChatGPT, all that stuff sounds very noisy, right? ChatGPT, everyone talks about it. It is synonymous with consumer AI, if you will. I assume Google’s using it. Did they talk about all that in Boston?

Ryan:

They did, and they touched on it in some interesting ways that I wouldn’t normally have expected AI to be entering into the marketing realm. We’ve known about Performance Max, and some of the “AI” being rolled out within that system. It was called Bard, and then it’s the Gemini, and they’re changing the name again. I think Google spends more time naming their AI than they actually [inaudible 00:08:56].

Jon:

They’re changing Gemini again? Oh, jeez.

Ryan:

Yeah, it’s going to be something else. I don’t know what it is, or when the date’s released, but Gemini’s … who knows? But YouTube is where Google is really trying to force advertisers into the space. They tried to compete with Reels and Instagram, and that didn’t go as great as they wanted. TikTok’s taking a lot of eyeballs, I think, from YouTube. And YouTube still has a lot of people searching for information, but they’re struggling to get people to want to hang out there, or scroll like they will on Instagram and TikTok. They’re really struggling to figure out the addictive factor that keeps eyeballs and time in sight that then attracts advertisers.

You can really surgically pick the videos you want to be on, the channels you want to be on, as an advertiser, which is good, but it’s not as good for just, “Hey, I need mid-upper level branding, because people are there and I know a lot about them.” And so what they’re doing on YouTube, is they’re forcing advertisers, without necessarily telling them, that they’re editing their videos into vertical videos.

So for a while we’ve been shooting YouTube to fit on computer screens, and to a degree now, we’re doing it for TV screens and commercials through streaming TV and all of that. But TikTok, Instagram, Meta are all apps on a phone. They need to be in a vertical format to fit on the screens. And so what Google’s AI is doing is saying, “Hey, we’re going to take your videos, and we’re going to shrink them down and edit them and crop them into a vertical video,” and they’re using AI to really do some … it’s actually really cool tech … to reformat that video and make it function, because shrinking that and changing the size down to a vertical video, it’s not an easy thing to do. And so it’s still in betas, and it’s not something that they’re really pushing out to the public aggressively, and they may never, but there’s a lot of ad sets there.

And so if you’ve been in Performance Max campaigns or some YouTube campaigns, they’re going to be doing that on your behalf unless you opt out. And so there’s a lot more spend that can come from Performance Max campaign, if you have vertical video slots on your older videos that they can put in there.

Jon:

And it’s harder to opt out these days, right? They’re not making it easy.

Ryan:

No, no, and if you don’t know what’s happening, how would you know needed to opt out?

Jon:

Sounds like the mysterious Elite program that nobody knows they’re in?

Ryan:

Yeah, exactly. Oh, you’re in this great Elite program with all these wonderful contacts at Google, and you’re like, “Well, I didn’t know it was there, and I obviously haven’t needed it, but I’ll give up my credit card for you. Thank you, Google.”

So in this one, you’ve got to opt out, if it makes sense. Obviously there’s certain brands that you want to be testing certain things, and you want to make sure you’re there, and seeing it. You just need to be able to see the data to decide if it makes sense to opt out. And so in Google Ads, when you look at all campaigns and the main page of it, you can add columns if you have all of your campaign showing, by the way, you can’t just pick certain campaigns and then show this column, but you need to be able to see the views and your cost per view, the CPV, and then you can figure out how many video views are happening on your account, and you can start trending it over time to see, “Okay, is Google finding more spots for my video? And if they are, am I seeing revenue increase proportionally to that spend?”

As of now, I haven’t seen a lot of that. In fact, one of the merchants that was there with us in Boston had spent … I think the Performance Max campaign spent about $8,000 the previous 30 days, and I think just a little over half was actually spent on shopping ads. The rest was spent on video display and text ads, because of the structure within their campaigns, what they all allowed it to have happen. And the shopping campaign was responsible, the shopping portion of Performance Max was responsible for close to 90% of the revenue. And so the vast majority of the other spend was on things that didn’t translate into revenue for the brand.

So things to be aware of when you’re analyzing this and seeing if some of these video spots are worth it for your brand, just make sure you can analyze the data.

Announcer:

You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency, that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes.

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:

That goes hand-in-hand with my next question here, which is that I’ve heard broad match keywords are changing, again, I’m not sure how you change-

Ryan:

Again.

Jon:

… broad to mean something new, but what’s changing here?

Ryan:

Yeah, it’s well-known that Google has a very loose thesaurus when it comes to broad match keywords. You go through search query reports, and you’ll see some interesting things.

Jon:

That’s a kind way to put it.

Ryan:

Yeah, I don’t know. And some of the dots they tie up, I’m like, “I don’t know how that made sense to them, but we need to sculpt that keyword out of there. That traffic app is wasting money.”

And within the AI settings on the bids, Google does have a lot more freedom to bid up on terms when they see fit, so there’s a lot of freedom a lot of advertisers inadvertently give to Google. To see this, you can go to your search query report, it’s under insights. You can see search terms, then filter by or sort by average CPC. It’ll put the most expensive one on the top, and that’ll probably … you might want to call me after you see some of those CPCs you’re paying for. I’ve seen people paying 40, $50 a click for $5 products, and you’re like, “That’s a problem.”

Jon:

Yikes. Per click.

Ryan:

But the big change is the wonders of Google AI on broad match keywords. You’re going to start seeing Google decide, with their AI, that unrelated searches you may be showing ads for, because that person had recently searched for the products you’re trying to sell … they’re not searching for it now, and the search query you’re putting an ad in front of them now is not related, but their AI has decided that it is a good time to show those ads.

And again, I’m kind of a control freak when it comes to Google Ads, and I am a big advocate for SMB advertisers and being able to grow and pushing to become large advertisers. But if Google’s designing a lot of their AI for large advertisers that are trying to push into that mid-funnel more aggressively on Google, that’s really what this is designed for.

If you’re spending five million a month on Google Ads, you probably need to be pushing into that space, and that AI has a lot of value in saying, “Well, this person searched for a beige couch three days ago, and now they’re searching for home decor, so we’re going to show your ad.” You’re like, “Well, I don’t sell home decor, but they were interested a couple of days ago. Maybe they’re interested again, and they can come back to my site and see if they need the beige couch now.”

And so that type of thing makes sense. If everything else is taken care of, and you’re building the funnel from the bottom up, and you’ve covered the bottom well, great. You do maybe need to bid on some of those terms like that when you know that the audience is great, and it’s going to attach it to that broad match keyword.

For small advertisers, that can be very costly to be bidding up on terms that really don’t make sense, and they’re not showing the intent right now of what you’re trying to show for. And so I would advocate for most small advertisers and small … I’m going to say anybody spending less than 10 grand a month on ads right now would be in that bucket … probably don’t need broad match at this point. And it can only hurt you rather than help you, if you build out your appropriate keywords and exact match and then bid below them a couple of phrase match, which still has a lot of tendencies on broad, but it doesn’t use the AI to start showing your stuff. It’ll help keep your cost down, let your budget go further, attracting people that are further down the funnel.

If we go back to that beige couch searcher, as a small advertiser, if I’m looking now for home decor, I’m not trying to go look at a couch. It’s just not what I’m trying to do. I’m looking for home decor. I’m looking for … my wife has a full closet, I call it her shelf shit closet, because she loves decorating shelves, and buying stuff to every season evidently I’m told, you have to change out your shelf decor. News to me, because if it was up to me, we would have nothing on our shelves, and I wouldn’t spend any money on that. But then people would think [inaudible 00:17:29].

Jon:

I was going to say, the shelves over your shoulder, I don’t think they’ve changed since you moved into that room.

Ryan:

Probably because she’s focused more on the ones out there that people see, instead of where I hide in my office here.

Jon:

I just don’t have any shelves. I have a generic gray wall behind me, so hey-

Ryan:

Yeah, I have a generic-

Jon:

… you win there.

Ryan:

… blue wall behind me, and my decorator wife told me today that I need something behind to snazz up the wall. So I’m like, “Okay.”

Jon:

Well, I will keep an eye out for those shelves with lots of trinkets on them.

Ryan:

Yes, trinkets. That’s exactly my design style, design aesthetic.

But as a small advertiser in that example, I’d rather not show for that. If there’s enough … I’m not maxing out a hundred percent impression share on people searching for beige couches. I’d rather save that money and find somebody that’s searching for a beige couch right now, if all things are equal. They didn’t buy last time, I’ve got remarketing that can follow them around, if I’m doing things right. I don’t need to be showing on unrelated searches to what they’re trying to do right now, and try to distract them, or try to get them in and cause confusion.

So broad match keywords struggles. I liken it to like, if you give Google free-range within your account to do what they want, I’m doubting they’re going to have your best interest at heart, like the IRS doing your taxes. It turns out you might owe more if they’re doing it. Google’s goal is not to make you more money as the advertiser. It’d be nice, but I understand that their goal is to increase their shareholder value. That’s what they do, and that’s okay. It’s their world. But you want control as a small advertiser. There’s very few circumstances where under 10 grand a month, you need any broad match in your account.

Jon:

So does this kind go hand in hand with revenue tracking? It seems like ad revenue tracking has been changing a little bit, too.

Ryan:

Yeah, you look at GA4, there’s all kinds of problems right now with revenue tracking. Just there’s so many things. I know I’ve done an episode recently on GA4, and you’ve got to find something else.

And unfortunately it’s a paid thing, but if you’re paying for it, chances are it sticks around in a format that’s usable, rather than the free tool that Google gave us, which we have to understand that if something’s free, you’re the product. And so Google gave us free analytics that is wonderful. And then if they want to kill a free product they made zero dollars on, and they had a … oh, at one point, I guess that I didn’t mention last time that I found out about, totally off script here, Universal Analytics is deleting all of their history.

Jon:

Yes.

Ryan:

So it’s going away. Gone. Maybe we mentioned that a [inaudible 00:20:01], but that is a massive thing. There’s so much value there.

Jon:

We just found that out-

Ryan:

A decade plus.

Jon:

… where they sent us an email and said, “You got to download all your data if you want it,” and I’m like, “We have a decade of data and analytics plus.”

Ryan:

So much data.

Jon:

“What are we going to do with it?”

Ryan:

And then you can download it, but how are you going to look at the data? Did you download it? I don’t even know what format it comes in.

Jon:

Our team did, and I believe it’s like a CSV file or something, but it’s really weird, maybe XML of some sort. But the reality was that the team looked at it and was like, “Wow, if we want to set up some reports, maybe you do Looker Studios, something like that with it, is it worth it? What are we going to it for?” Because now instead of just checking year-over-year data, which is what we would use it for, you have to set up a whole new system to do that. And the team is like, “Is the value of that for us going to be worth what it’s going to take to set up a whole new system, just to be able to look at the data.”

So we’re now using all the data from HubSpot and other tools that we have access to, because HubSpot gives us honestly better data than GA4 at this point, especially because we can tie it back to individual contacts who are in our database and have offered up their information by filling out a form, subscribing to email, et cetera, so the data, it’s just better at this point.

Ryan:

Yeah, it’s again frustrating, but you can only get so mad about a product that you were given for free that you didn’t even have to be spending money on Google Ads to get it. And storing that is such a massive amount of data Google … they are paying to store for us … that I get it. It doesn’t mean I don’t have to be frustrated about it, and they can’t let me pay, “Hey, do you want to pay?” They should have given me an option, be like, “We will keep the data for you, but you have to pay 50 bucks a year.” I don’t know, I’m making a number up. There’s probably a number that they would’ve been like, “Yeah,” but then it probably would’ve been a headache to track and whatever. So it’s going away.

And so looking back over your previous revenue numbers, we’ve done a lot of analysis for brands around pre-COVID, post-COVID, because we went in such an oddball time period. It’s really difficult to figure out what should be the normal for your brand at this point, and are you doing better or worse than what should be normal? Now, I don’t know.

It used to be 10% growth was normal, and if you saw a blip down or up, you’re like, “Hey, we can see that you’re doing better or worse.” Now it’s like, it’s all over the place, and we’ll lose that data and Universal Analytics.

But we were talking about revenue tracking, and Google Ads has some valuable things in being able to target new customers, and if you go into some of your settings, you can tell Google Ads, “I’d like to bid more on new customers than past customers,” which is a really good thing to do for most brands. We tell brands they should be separating their goals into brand and non-brand. People on brand are generally not new to brand. Non-brand searches are generally new to file, and they’re going to have more lifetime value, or you can bet on that with email coming in, so you can change your goals.

And so if Google’s saying, “Hey, yeah, I want to be more aggressive in this campaign.” Let’s say it’s a non-brand, somebody that’s an existing customer may search a non-brand term, and that’s on my email team to, “Why are they searching this? They should be buying through email.” But again, bid more. The problem is, we came across, one brand came to us saying, “I can’t understand this. I go into GA4, that I’m using for revenue tracking,” I think they run BigCommerce platform, “and revenue’s matching up generally speaking to what my merchant processor shows.” I think in this particular URL they sent, they had me analyze for them, it was like 150 grand in the month of April, and their Google Ads were responsible for somewhere around 60 grand. Organic was 75 grand, and then everything else was filling in around that.

You go into Google Ads, and instead of showing 60 grand, it was showing 140 grand, and their conversion tracking was right. We saw the conversions line up, but then the revenue was way off. We’re like, “This is not making sense.” We were looking under the hood for a while, because they were essentially saying Google Ads was responsible for over 90% of the site revenue. And we’re like, “That can’t be possible, but we’re using the same pixel GA4 in ads and the GA4 pixel for itself.” They had been adding $60 or so of additional revenue for a new customer to get the Performance Max campaign to go find new customers and get more excited about it. It was adding that revenue into the campaign. So it’s essentially this monopoly money saying, “Hey, your average conversion value was,” I’m going to make it up as I don’t remember, “like $85, but with this $60 of Monopoly money, it’s $145.”

And some of their conversions were only $30, but it looked like it was a $95 conversion, and so it was just adding that money into Google Ads to make the pixel look better. And so it brought up … it’s not an easy setting to find or understand. We had some pretty powerful minds looking under the hood for this, but it reminded me that this wasn’t set up by them recently. It was probably set up by a previous agency that had done it, because they had wanted to get more aggressive. Great, all brands should probably go look at Google Ads and see if their settings have that in place, because you could be inadvertently, maybe not even intentionally, just seeing a better return in your Google Ads because of this. Google should probably have two columns that says, “Real revenue, fake revenue, but exciting revenue for you, because it’s a new customer,” but that would add a lot of transparency, and you might change goals and not spend as much whatever.

And so they thought they were doing much better as far as the return on ad spend, because that’s what was being reported back, was they had spent X dollars and got this great ROAS, but then they went under the hood and they’re like, “I can’t imagine that Google Ads was responsible for 90% of our revenue, considering all the other things we have going on.” It’s like, “That’s true, it didn’t.”

And so these settings could have been two years old, three years old, where you were testing something, somebody forgot, or that person moved on, or the agency turned over. So again, a really important, I think, metric to be aware of, that isn’t necessarily a recent change, but I think a forgotten change, that you can add Monopoly money into your Google Ads revenue tracking that can be difficult to uncover.

Jon:

I love how you keep calling it Monopoly money, as if this is a game, when I think so many businesses, they’re making it … especially small to medium businesses, they’re making a lot of decisions based on these numbers, and if you don’t know what numbers you’re dealing with, you’re going to make some assumptions there, and it’s unfortunate, basically is where I’m with this.

Ryan:

Well, in this brand, they’ve got … they’re not an unsophisticated team. They have 15 URLs, I think, on BigCommerce doing somewhere in the neighborhood of three, four million a month in revenue.

Jon:

Wow.

Ryan:

And so it’s a decent-sized online brand. It’s just they were completely baffled on, “Why are these numbers so far off, and this URL’s fine,” and so it’s difficult to find this, and you can inadvertently think you’re doing a lot better than you are, and get excited and spend more money, and all of a sudden you’re losing money in Google Ads in reality. But because of some of the settings, it looks like you’re making tons of money.

Jon:

Now, I know at all of these events … I’ve been to a handful of them. There’s information they talk about that they don’t want you to share. So I’ll ask, is there anything else that you can and want to share, or do you need to wait and do more in another episode down the line, or is there anything else you can share?

Ryan:

I’ll give a nugget of stuff. So as you’ve searched Google, if you listen to this, you’re probably in the e-commerce space. You spend all day in front of a computer searching Google doing various things. You’ve seen a lot more and more of those AI answers to questions, where it takes a second to populate, and I keep it enabled … you can turn it off if you want … but I keep it, because I’m trying to figure out and understand how to use that and leverage it for my brands and my customers, and make sure that I’m not missing the boat when it comes to what Google’s doing with AI.

But that being said, AI has taken a very high priority spot in the front page of Google at the top, which has historically been preserved for-

Jon:

It’s above even ads.

Ryan:

It is. It’s been preserved for ad slots for a long time. And it’s surprising to me that Google’s willing to put those AI snippets in there, to supplant some of that revenue. They have to be losing some money there. And so there was a VP-

Jon:

Well, maybe that’s how they’re making the money back is by making you pay with ACH.

Ryan:

That’s true. Yeah, merchant processing fees are paying for AI. It’s believed by many in the digital marketing industry that advertisers are being hurt by this, and the bigger problem that people are worried about, is not necessarily the advertisers, because Google’s not going to cut their arm off on the advertising side. They’ll find a way to keep money flowing, even if it’s taking away the merchant processing fees. But it’s the organic results. And there’s been a lot of controversy lately. If you go to Search Engine Land and look, there’s some very high up people at Google that have been very open after they’ve left Google, about how Google is not necessarily following the mantra, “Do the right thing,” that they’ve been trying to do since the beginning supposedly. And the ties between organic results and paid search, and people moving away from SEO results or organic results as far as the results pages.

And so they’re not giving any data around the AI results, and where it’s taking its traffic from, which is an indicator that if they did tell us, people would be pissed, otherwise they would tell us. If we were happy, like, “Oh, people are finding what they want, and then they go to the website, and buy things, and spend time there,” everybody’d be happy if that was the case. Unfortunately, it doesn’t feel like that’s-

Jon:

Yeah, I’ve often wondered, I was like, “Can you cite your source?” Because I want to know what page or article you got that info from, which sometimes it seems to do.

Ryan:

Sometimes it does that.

Jon:

Not always.

Ryan:

In fact, my wife and I, we were searching for something this morning, and there was the AI result, and she was staring at it. I’m like, “Well, you just click there and get more information about it from that page.” I’m like, “Oh,” because it pulls a snippet out of there, that it feels like, “Oh, this is the snippet you want to see,” and then you can go to it.

So it’s AI driving the result, but it’s kind of like what we used to call position zero in SEO, where it answered a specific question, and the schema told it was there, like, “Oh, it’s not an organic number one,” I guess, air quotes there, “it’s the position zero,” and that seems to be what it’s doing, where it’s trying to answer very specific questions so you don’t leave Google. So it’s them trying to do that Instagram, TikTok thing, “Well just stay on Google, go Google something else now, refine that search, and try to,” that’s probably what they’re trying to do is keep you saying, “Oh, I’m on Google. I got the answer to that, but oh, that drove this question. Now how do I type something else in, to get to a search that I can now click on an ad, or a shopping result of some sort?” But yeah, it’s been-

Jon:

Makes sense.

Ryan:

Shashi Thakur, if I’m even pronouncing his name right, is a big VP at Google that was very coy, and avoided the answers on how that AI has actually been impacting organic results.

Jon:

Interesting. And this was presentation they gave while you were in Boston?

Ryan:

No, this came up in conversation around that, and if you go to Search Engine Land, you’ll find some stuff on it as well.

Jon:

Okay.

Ryan:

So the podcast is … we can be done, and you can go off and do the searches now you’ve listened to us, so-

Jon:

There you go. Well, on that note, I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to go to Google right now actually. I might be a little upset about some of these changes, but that’s the way it is, unfortunately.

Ryan:

Yeah, and I predict a lot of this, that the rich, I think, are going to get richer on Google Ads, and this new AI space where we are now. We’re very close to a period of time in which you can’t launch a brand on Google, and if we’re not already there, you’ve got to have influencers and social ads that are going to help drive your brand to be big enough to be able to leverage Google second, where it used to be, I can go to Google first, capture existing demand, and then move on to the social avenue where I’m going more mid-funnel. It’s going to be challenging out there.

Jon:

It is already challenging, and it seems like it’s getting more challenging. So misery loves company on those type of things, but this is interesting. A couple of pretty significant changes here. Thanks for, A, always staying on top of this stuff, and then coming back and sharing it with everyone, and especially with me. I really do appreciate it, because I didn’t make that trip out to Boston with you, and I had no idea that these things were coming down the line, so good to hear. So I appreciate it.

Ryan:

Yeah, thank you. Anytime. We’ll keep it coming.

Jon:

All right. Thanks, Ryan.

Ryan:

Thanks, Jon.

Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 109): Google is Changing… Again appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

Each holiday season is different, so how do you prepare for one? As a business, it’s important to use data-driven strategies and think creatively when planning for your holiday campaign. In this week’s episode, Jon and Ryan share a few ideas on how to think about the holidays and what you need to do to stand out from the competition. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why each holiday season is different
2. How to define the holiday season
3. How to use data to determine holiday periods
4. How to prepare for the holiday season
5. When to start advertising for the holidays

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, hit us up on Twitter. We’re @jonmacdonald and @ryangarrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert. A podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
Hey, Ryan, it is June. That means the holidays are upon us. Wait, just joking. It means you should be planning for the holidays, as we all know.

Ryan:
Yes.

Jon:
But I’m interested in your take on this because I know you and the folks at Logical Position start planning for holidays, rightfully so, six months early. And you’re meeting with Google, et cetera, quite often about these things about now. So I’m interested, what are you learning? What are you hearing? What adjustments do people need to make this year? I realize that a lot of e-commerce brands right now are in the thick of it. That’s post covid, for sure. Everyone’s gone back to shopping, at least partially in retail and not as much e-comm. And overall spending at least in the United States, with economic factors is down a little bit. So this holiday season is something that I think every brand should be prepping for now and starting five, six months ahead if you can. So with that, I’m interested, how do you prep for holiday? How should you prepare, basically? I’d love to learn from you on that.

Ryan:
This is, I don’t even remember anymore, probably my 15th or so holiday season.

Jon:
We’re just old. Yeah, it’s been a while.

Ryan:
We are.

Jon:
How about that? We’re experienced.

Ryan:
Back in the stone ages when we started this, every year you kind of think, okay, it’s Christmas, it’s Thanksgiving, it’s the holiday period, Q4, we already know what we’re doing. We’ve done this before. And having gone through every one of these in the past, every single one is going to be different. You can have the same business. You might have the new site, you might have new categories, you can have new competitors. Your organic results change, which impacts your paid search results, positive or negative. Your email list, your promotion period. I mean, there’s so much that’s dynamic and changing year over year, that every year you need to come to the table kind of with a blank slate of what are we going to do this year? You want to look back at the last two years probably, to get an idea of where the trends are in your industry as far as when did search volume start increasing in Q4?
Did it increase before Halloween with search volume, but conversion rates dropped, so people were doing research, then they came back and purchased later through email that they signed up for through remarketing. There’s just so many variables that will be different year over year, and a lot of it depends on how are people feeling about the economy, because that determines how much of a deal focus do I have? As we were talking before we turned the recording on, in 2020, if you were e-comm, if you had a website, you did good. It was not difficult to get people to take action at that period. And people had very little price sensitivity. It was probably just a lot of clicking and buying because hey, they got it. I’m on it. I’ve got money. The government’s funding a lot of things. Who cares? ’21 still had some pretty good traction. ’22, we lost some of our covid excitement in money, and conversion rates were lower. People spent less per order. It was just down a little bit.
And so all three of those, very different from an experience standpoint as an e-commerce brand. And then going into ’24, even if couple months ago I figured guaranteed recession by the end of the year. No way, it’s not going to happen. Then we look at the stock market now, we’re like, “We’re back into a bear market.” So there’s probably a lot going on with how people feel about the economy. The reality can be different for each group of people in the US, but there’s going to be vastly different feelings and probably different spending abilities within the space as no matter what the economy’s doing, we are spending more on some basics. It’s food, rent, mortgages. Those costs are up.

Jon:
Yes, inflation.

Ryan:
You have to come in with lots of data when you’re preparing, and at least have a plan to start with, knowing that whatever you plan, it’s going to change once you get into it and you start executing it. For whatever reason, Facebook or Instagram, I can’t remember which. I don’t spend much time on social, but when I do, I just scroll randomly and I like to laugh or look at stupid things. Really have nothing to do with friends or family. I’m the weird social one.
Somebody showed me a Mike Tyson fight with a quote. One of his early fights in the early 90s where he had a quote, “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.” And that’s really how you need to look at holiday. You’re going to have a plan, and then something’s going to happen to change it, and you have to be able to roll with the punches with that and adjust and pivot. Have backup plans on your plans. You should know who your competitors are. You should have an idea of when they’re going to start running promotions based on competing against them last year and how you’re going to compete with that or not compete and hold money back until later. Was it the ’21 holiday season where we had all of the inventory issues, everything was stuck on a boat or stuck in China?

Jon:
Yep. 2021, yeah.

Ryan:
’21, I think. Because my wife and I did I think, almost all of our shopping for all four of our kids, by the middle of November, we were done. I was like, “Honey, if we don’t get it now, we might not get it.”

Jon:
I remember that conversation, and I was jealous because I hadn’t even started.

Ryan:
Yeah. It’s like in certain holiday seasons, you got to decide, all right, we’re going to go and get everybody quickly and be done, and if we run out of inventory, we just get to turn it off and we take a couple weeks off before Christmas. Again, plans you have that if you start selling quicker than you expect, why would you not take the sales? Why would you hold to a plan that says, well, we were only going to spend this much money before November 15th. So? I mean, take the sales when they’re there. So start preparing now. Have the conversations with the CFO and the finance team. What did you spend last year? If you’re the owner, have it with your wife or your husband that helps talk through the finance things with you. Make sure you know what you’re planning to spend. Have some excess that you can pull through if things are going really well and there’s more sales to get. No reason not to spend more.
So just go. Look at the calendar dates, have a plan, make sure your team knows when the dates are that you’re turning things up, or you’re starting to get some influencers playing in through social. If you make the plans now for holiday, know that some of the SEO things you’re doing now will be having an impact later in the year. So right now, you probably wouldn’t be focusing your SEO on summer terms unless you’re already focused on summer ’24. But if you’re focused on holiday now, hey, be getting some content out. Be getting the links built to your winter pages now, even if the inventory’s not there.

Jon:
That brings up a really good question for me, which is how do you define the holiday period for online businesses, right? Because most people hear holiday and they think, well, it’s Christmas, it’s that week. There’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday. That’s really the big ones. I was even just talking to a very large furniture retailer today, and they were saying, “Hey, we try to turn every single day holiday into a week long event or two week long event, because all of our furniture sells. We’re just conditioned in America, to buy furniture around holidays.” Which blew my mind because I’m like, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense.” But furniture stores have done that to themselves. They’re always saying, “Big President’s Day sale.” “Memorial Day week.” They do all of these types of things.

Ryan:
But they need an excuse.

Jon:
Right. It reminded me of a TV show, I forget what it was called, but it’s about a kid growing up in the 80s, and his dad and his grandfather owned a furniture store. The Goldbergs. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this show-

Ryan:
I have not.

Jon:
… it’s a hilarious sitcom. And the grandfather used to always run… For years, he would always run a going out of business sale. He had no intention of going out of business. It just drew everybody in because they’re like, “Oh, there must be great deals.” He would sell a lot of inventory and then be like, oh, a week later, back to business.

Ryan:
Back to normal.

Jon:
Nobody would ever question him about it. No one ever questioned him, like, “Wait, you’re still here. I thought you were going out of business.”

Ryan:
Or it feels like my college day is like, “We need an excuse to have a beer. Oh, we’re going to celebrate Memorial Day today.”

Jon:
Yep. Yeah so I guess, how do you define the holiday period for online businesses?

Ryan:
Good question because yeah, when I say holiday in this period of time, I’m usually talking about holiday prep for Cyber 5, Black Friday, Christmas. But if you’re in the aftermarket automotive space, your holiday period really isn’t until mid to end February in through May, usually. Tax return season. That’s their Super Bowl, their holiday season. And Super Bowl, that’s another one. That’s a big one for TVs, electronics. So holiday in its simplest form is when you see on your site, elevated conversion rates and generally increased traffic or searches with increased competition. Because for most companies, the holiday is not just theirs. You might have a friends and family sale, that can be a little bit different. Yes, it’s a holiday period for the brand per se, but Google Ads team probably doesn’t have to really ramp up strategy to getting involved in this. That’s more for email, loyalty, fulfillment, merchandising.
So holiday, you can look at analytics and figure out… I recommend people look at a 12-month period. If you’re preparing for your year, look back the previous 12 months. Look by week. Set your analytics by week and just look at conversion rates by week. And what you’ll do is you’ll see some outliers that are like, “Oh, those are the holiday periods generally, we can look at.” And overlay traffic just to make sure that there were some traffic peaks as well there, because you don’t want just a random, hey, we had 100 people that randomly got an influencer to come to the site and ended up doing really well. Because that wouldn’t be a normal holiday for you. And so each holiday period is probably not going to be the same or need the same level of preparation.

Jon:
Yeah. I was going to ask you, should you prepare for them all the same? I mean, I assume the answer is no.

Ryan:
Yeah, you know what? They’re not all-

Jon:
Beyond assets and the language you use, right? But what are other ways you’re preparing?

Ryan:
Yeah, so if you look at… The gifting business is big in the holiday periods. If you’re focused on gifts, and that’s the main reason people come to your site, like gift baskets, for example. You look at Valentine’s and that’s a very condensed gift basket period where you’ve really got a couple weeks leading up to the holiday, and then two days before the holiday, nobody’s going to buy a gift basket a day before, usually online because of the fulfillment issues, you’re not going to get it there. So you’ve really got that two week window. And you also have to change that window a little bit because if you target men buying for women, your window is smaller and closer to the event. And if you’re targeting women buying for men, and this is obviously using the heterosexual relationships, women will usually research longer and have a longer window in there and then be done earlier than the men in the buying process.

Jon:
Okay.

Ryan:
So, understand your market. Understand the holidays. There’s not a lot of Valentine’s searches beginning of January, this doesn’t happen. But there’s going to be Christmas gift buying searches in October. So know the difference of that. A lot of it’s going to be in your data. If you look year over year and you look at your Valentine’s peak, you’re going to see, oh, January 20th nobody cares about Valentine’s yet, they may be looking for Super Bowl. And then once they get past Super Bowl, they’re looking for Valentine’s.

Jon:
So as a side note learning here, takeaway for me personally, is to start preparing for Valentine’s Day earlier.

Ryan:
Yes, but there won’t be many as many deals.

Jon:
Yes. But I also will be a much better husband because of it.

Ryan:
Yeah. At Valentine’s if you’re requiring a deal, your wife might have something to say about that. Just spend the extra 10% and get it out of the way.

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
So how do you start the conversations with your clients about preparing for this? Because I imagine you’re having a lot of these conversations, you’re starting to now.

Ryan:
Mm-hmm.

Jon:
So I hear from a lot of our customers, “Hey, if you’re optimizing for conversions now for holiday, you’ll see some gains. But if you come to me in October, forget about it. Let’s just wait until next year and call me in June.” Right?

Ryan:
Mm-hmm.

Jon:
So how are you preparing people now? How are you starting to have those conversations?

Ryan:
Well, it’s fairly easy to get into holiday prep conversations now, largely because Google’s forcing something called GA4 on everybody next month. And so that conversation alone says, “Hey, you’ve got to have GA4 ready to be capturing data, and you got to have your tech stack really ready to go for this new system.” And this is a great time, a lot of companies are thinking more about attribution than they have in the past since GA4 is already “weird” to them at this point, because it looks so different. So hey, you might as well also start looking at an attribution system if you’re going to be investing more in social, to see how that’s pushing searchers down through the funnel. Triple Whale, Northbeam, even little data, some modified attribution light. That’s an important thing to have in now.
And so when you’re preparing for holiday, most companies like you’re talking about, have a tech freeze or a code freeze. They’re not going to make changes to the site or implement anything other than modified price changes or inventory adjustments once October hits. And even as a smaller business, you probably don’t want to do anything either. That’s a best practice I would probably adopt. Don’t decide to randomly change platforms October 15th, if the holiday period in Q4 is important to you.
And so preparing now, getting all of the things out on the table that… I start usually with a giant wishlist of if we could do anything, nothing’s impossible, what do we do? And what does that look like? And then the finance team usually takes half of that and says, no way. And then you’re left with something else. You’re like, “Okay, how do we push piece this together, figure out what’s more important than other things? What can we execute in time can’t execute in time?” And then even delivery or supply chain for some industries is still an issue. Don’t ignore that. Hey, we might not have this inventory, so we can’t necessarily base a holiday period on that one product or that leading the way.

Jon:
Right. So I’m sure you have some general rule of thumbs around these, right? You’ve seen enough of these industries. So for gifting things, how soon should you start preparing?

Ryan:
So every year it seems, at least for the last five, it’s always been Google’s pushing everybody to ramp advertising up sooner. And the first few times they did that, I’m like, “No way you need to start advertising in October for holiday, that’s just Google doing a money grab.” And I think the first few years it probably was. But the last couple… I think there’s been a lot of data we’ve seen, that by pushing your spend earlier in the holiday season allows you to capture eyeballs sooner. The power of audiences and remarketing lists in Google Ads in particular is pretty massive, especially in this new world of performance max campaigns where the more data you give it, the more audiences you give it, the better chance it has of actually working for you and finding these users again or finding like audiences.

Jon:
That’s a great point. I never thought about that, where the retargeting aspect alone could be valuable. Because retargeting is much cheaper, and so you have a much further spend down the line.

Ryan:
Yeah. Or if somebody’s been to your site in October and you have kind of these general research terms for whatever product it is you’re selling, when that person comes back in, let’s say the first week of December, doing a search for a product, you can bid more aggressively on them than a competitor could because you’ve got some data that says, this person searched this, they’ve already seen my site, they’re more likely to find me again and buy from me. I just have to make sure I’m there. And so those bid modifiers become massive levers for you.

Jon:
Am I also accurate in thinking… And maybe I’m not, but I would think that if you spend earlier, it’s going to be cheaper because you’re going to have less competition earlier in the season.

Ryan:
Very true.

Jon:
Come November, everyone’s going to be advertising. If you start in October, that could be a month of advertising at a much lower rate, so your spend goes much further too.

Ryan:
Yes, exactly. Well, you might be spending a little now, but it’ll allow you likely to spend more later because you’ll have more data points for these customers, your conversion rates can be higher because they’ve already seen you or heard from you. Or if you got them in October and they happened to sign up for some lists or emails to get holiday discounts coming, things like that. I know discounts can be good, can be bad in this world, but if somebody’s researching… And it’s pretty obvious if I’m searching, let’s say on gift baskets. All right, if I’m looking for a holiday gift basket in October, I might not be executing that purchase then. But if I’m seeing the page and it’s like, “Hey, sign up for exclusive holiday inventory or specials.” It doesn’t have to be discounts. Like, “Oh yeah, I’d like to hear about exclusive holiday specials.”
Because your special might not be a discount. It could be this basket is in a pre-release and only you get access if you’re on our email list. And we’re going to email you when it’s available. And it’s a really cool basket that maybe has something that nobody else is going to be able to get. So exclusivity can work really well because sending an email, keeping them from searching in November means you’re not paying for those clicks through email. I mean, email’s cheap. You’re keeping them away from your competitors. So getting creative I think, is going to be something I really want brands to start thinking about this year rather than trying to brute force something on Google and keeping some of your money for that potential. It’s like, well, you should be thinking, how do I keep somebody from searching Google? Because then your competitors don’t have a shot at them. It’s not a conversation a lot of brands I’m coming up with now, or talking to now have even thought through that. It’s so conditioned like, well buy them on Google. Buy them on Google. Buy them on Google. Why?

Jon:
That’s another great point, right? If you’re on Google early enough, you’re able to capture that lead at that point and then reconnect with them, right? Yeah. So make it make an add into an owned list that now you can hit up for free later and hopefully keep them off of that competitive search.

Ryan:
Yes. And don’t do the easy button discount. Think about being creative, so it’s not just sign up for 10% off. May or may not be compelling enough.

Jon:
Okay. We have a whole episode on that, I’m sure.

Ryan:
We do. Probably have a few of them.

Jon:
Probably multiple of me ranting about that. So you found your holiday periods.

Ryan:
Yes.

Jon:
Do you need to do anything more than that? I mean, are they going to just spend on Google no matter what? So now what?

Ryan:
Most of the companies I’m talking to you on Google, they’re going to spend no matter what. But again, thinking creatively is one, but then you want to be able to set the expectation for what that spend is going to do and be able to get some flexibility with your finance team. I think flexibility is extremely important in a holiday period because you’re going to go in with a plan until you get punched, and then you have to be flexible and pivot and change your data and change your goals. So a rigid goal that finance says, “This is all you can do and don’t do anything different than this,” almost guarantees frustration and failure across all channels during a holiday period.

Jon:
Yeah. And I’ve heard a lot of horror stories of AmEx cutting people off during holiday, things like that. You have to call and talk to everybody. And when you say finance, immediately I thought, CFO, finance role, whatever. But I have seen a lot of direct to consumer brands last Christmas basically saying, “Hey, my ads just got cut off today because my card got declined, because it was a $100,000 charge that AmEx wasn’t used to seeing, they assumed something was wrong.” And you have to call them and give them a heads up before that, “Hey, I’m going to be spending a lot of cash on ads that’s going to generate revenue because it’s holiday season. I need you to make sure this is going to be okay. Tag my account, do whatever you need to do.” And usually that resolves the problem. But I think that that’s something brands need to be doing as well.

Ryan:
And have a backup card. You shouldn’t have a Google Ads account without a backup card that’s working. Somebody have expired backup cards. I see that more often than I should. But two valid cards on Google Ads to make sure that you don’t go down and can easily back up their coming on.

Jon:
And if you need a backup card, call Ryan, he’ll help you out.

Ryan:
Yes. Got lots of contacts for those. To simplify that conversation, a lot of times I tell marketing teams leverage a well known finance graph, the supply demand graph and talk through that with your finance team because it usually helps put everybody on the same page where you’re looking at a general supply demand graph and you say, look, as we get more aggressive and move down the demand chain, we’re going to get less margin per order, but we’re going get higher volume of them. And I get really complex on this when I’m presenting on stage with visuals. But to keep it simple on a word picture, just think about you’re moving to the right on that. And yes, that marginal utility, the next order is going down. Some of you listening are stuck way over on the left side of the supply demand curve on from a marketing standpoint, and you’re taking way too much margin per order.
You need to experiment, and even in a non-holiday period pushing to the right, because you probably could just maximize profit rather than just talking about how you maximize orders and market share to say, hey, if you’re getting… I’ll make a number up. You’re getting a 10X, you spend a dollar and get 10 and your margin’s 50%. Yes, you’re getting 100 orders at 10X. Good job. You might be able to get 500 orders at a 6X, which would give you drastically more profit within your business and fill your email database for nurturing and lifetime value and getting people on your email list before they search on holiday periods. I mean, there’s a lot you can do when you’re getting a higher order volume. So leverage that and try to get finance or executive buy off on Google itself as a marketing channel. Google Ads shouldn’t necessarily be looked at in a holiday period as a profit driver. It is a customer acquisition module that gives you a high volume of customers that you can often bank on at pretty reliable rates for lifetime value through email and loyalty.

Jon:
Interesting. Because I think if I’m a CFO, that’s not the argument I want to hear, right?

Ryan:
No. CFOs and I may have a lot of tension on some calls. Because it’s a marketing channel. Marketing historically on PNLs has driven profit. If it’s not driving profit, what kind of marketing is this? And it’s funny because we’ve swung so far from finance side onto marketing drives profit rather than, let’s go back 50 years where very famous marketer said, “50% of my marketing is wasted. I just don’t know which half.” When you’re marketing in TV, newspaper, billboards or magazines, you really didn’t know what was causing all of the sales, down to which view or which specific ad? Was it this magazine? Was it this billboard? Was it this TV commercial? Because TV was just nationwide TV or small regional TV, you just didn’t have a lot of options. Now in marketing, we’ve been spoiled with so much last click attributed revenue, that we’re starting to move back away from with the iOS updates, which I think is good. But finance teams haven’t adopted or adapted well to a world where maybe Google Ads is not a profit driver.
And I look at certain industries are like, play catch up. Some lead the way, some fall in line afterwards. The ones that have multiple really large advertisers tend to evolve much quicker and get to a point where everybody else is going to get to eventually. And that’s where I go with our gift basket world, which is just a brutally competitive world where we really cut our teeth in LP with this finance team of a company called Harry & David, that just… Their finance team was really smart. I mean that that CFO went off to do some really cool stuff, Michael Schwindle. Really, really smart CFO.
We worked with him to create some of his models around how do I look at Google Ads and customer acquisition because of my email team and lifetime value team bringing them through loyalty? They knew during a holiday period… Because gift baskets are pretty gift dependent. There’s also sympathy gifts, but that was put off in another bucket because if your dog dies and I send you a sympathy basket, I don’t necessarily want to be reminded in a year that, “Hey, you bought a sympathy basket for Jon. Do you want to send him another one?” No, no, [inaudible 00:24:13].

Jon:
Yeah.

Ryan:
I’m not going to go sending another gift.

Jon:
And that’s unpredictable, right?

Ryan:
Yeah. So sympathy had to have a little bit of profit or that wasn’t a bankable customer necessarily in how they nurtured. So if you buy between November 15th and December 20th, that was a gift person. If you bought two weeks before Valentine’s, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, graduation dates, Easter, holiday person. That person could take it to the bank, they were going to come back and buy two times over the next 18 months through email.

Jon:
Wow. Okay.

Ryan:
Very, very profitable over email. So they would say, we’re going to invest on new customers because our email is so set, we’re willing to lose some money on that first order because of how good we are after that first order. They had a set budget saying, hey, we can invest this much money because we know the return and it’s a better return than we could get if we put it in buying a building or putting it in the bank for some interest rate or buying a CD. They just knew.
So having those conversations with finance, trying to get some of that flexibility built in saying, hey, we might not be driving a lot of profit on that first order by unit, but we might over a larger volume, produce more profit. Or we might be banking on, hey, we’ll break even because we’re going to take market share, we’re going to take it from a competitor and we know that we’re going to be able to get them to come back and buy in the next three to six months. They’ll buy a gift now, but we know they’re going to come back and buy something for themselves later.
In fact, yesterday I got a great email from a company called Sonos. They sell some great speakers, I have some of them. And they have two pretty different product lines. So if I’m putting wall mount speakers and I’m buying those, generally speaking, those are going to be for me. Because I’m putting them in my house. I’m not going to randomly buy you some Sono speakers not knowing what your house looks like or where they could go, right?

Jon:
By all means, buy me Sonos speakers. I will never complain.

Ryan:
That’s true. That’s true. Most people wouldn’t. But I’m going to do it, sorry. But they have these really cool mobile speakers and their name is really good. So for 150 bucks you can buy a mobile speaker. I’m going on a trip to Mexico with a bunch of adults, we’re celebrating a 40th birthday. Take those down there because they’re super fun to have at the house you’re staying at. So that’s pretty obviously, hey, if… That’s a gift, often or could be. But if you bought that for somebody during a holiday period, it’s probably not for me, but you might nurture me with, “Hey, get one for yourself.” Or maybe you need one of these TV speakers. And if you nurtured me with a picture of parents with their kids on a couch watching a movie with one of their soundbars, I’m like, “Oh, I do need that.”
So again, thinking through how you just leveraged that, well, you might not make a lot of profit on that first order a little, but if you nurture me properly, I can really be a great customer. And it doesn’t have to be nurture with discounts, but nurture in a unique enough manner that I’m like, “Oh!” The fact that I open an email when all I do is get spam and delete it and unsubscribe from lists, means you’re doing something reasonably well. Can get me to open it and the chances are higher than I’ll make an impulse purchase too.

Jon:
Yeah. Sonos is actually great at this too where, unrelated, if you open the Sonos app and they have a deal running, they push everything into that Sonos app. So that’s the app you’re using to play the music. So you are always getting upsold for new speakers, new versions, like the move and that you’re talking about all these ones that are coming out.

Ryan:
Yep.

Jon:
It’s really interesting to see.

Ryan:
It is. And it does highlight too, that if you can get people into an app for an experience, it’s good. But at least have a reason for it. I think too often now, there’s so many companies who are like, “Got to have an nap, got to have an app.” Because they hear about Sonos. Well, Sonos has a real reason for me to get an app, because it’s controlling music, going to speakers, and I want to play this speaker different than this speaker. But if you’re a clothing brand, a fast fashion, you’re like, “Yeah, I have to have an app.” I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t know.” Don’t just have for having-

Jon:
Have a purpose.

Ryan:
Purpose. Just understand why it’s-

Jon:
Well, yeah, that’s where I keep hearing a lot about Tap Card and these folks that will turn your Shopify store into a mobile app pretty easily, working with the Shopify API and everything. And it’s fine. I have no issues with brands having a mobile app, but there should be more of a purpose there than just replicating exactly what’s on your website because I’m not going to download an app that’s going to live on my phone if I just want to make a one-time purchase.

Ryan:
Yeah. I don’t want your push notifications.

Jon:
So give me some reason to… Right.

Ryan:
I’ll let one brand post me because they’ll sell me that are exclusive, that I can’t get elsewhere.

Jon:
I love it.

Ryan:
But if I’m buying my pants from you, I don’t care. You’re not going to get on my phone. You’re not going to send me push notifications. I’ll go to your website.

Jon:
So we now know the holiday way to your heart, Ryan, is trough Jordans.

Ryan:
Red Jordans. Yep. I just bought a pair of Red Jordan 5’s.

Jon:
Nice.

Ryan:
The new speaking Jordans.

Jon:
Oh, I love it. I can’t wait. When are we doing our next event? I want to see this.

Ryan:
August. We’re doing that.

Jon:
August.

Ryan:
17th.

Jon:
All right.

Ryan:
I’ll have them on.

Jon:
All right, Ryan. Well thank you for sharing all about holiday analysis and adjustments. I think there’s a lot of great stuff here. It’s a perfect timing to start thinking about this, I’m convinced. Need to start thinking now, June, July. Don’t let this go too far. So thank you and we’ll chat soon.

Ryan:
Yeah, thank you Jon. Appreciate the time.

Speaker 1:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 084): Holiday Analysis and Adjustments appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

Sharing winning tests isn’t just a way to celebrate success with previous clients. The patterns and insights from winning tests can offer a lot of ideas for other brands looking to improve their conversion rates and boost sales. 

In particular, Jon and Ryan talk about three areas of a site that tests work really well in: category pages, social proof, and website copy. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How personalization can improve category pages 
2. Why you need clear and specific labels on your navigation 
3. How to leverage different types of social proof 
4. How small changes in copy can lead to big results 

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, hit us up on Twitter. We’re @jonmacdonald and @ryangarrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better eCommerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan:
Hello, Jon. Today, we get to talk about one of my favorite things. It’s no secret, I like winning just generally. My wife is frustrated most of the times playing games, but winning is fun. I’d much rather win than lose. And you document your wins really well. Your team has tons of them. Today, you’ve given me some notes around some of the wins you’ve had recently. So it’s really cool that we get to look through some of these and give some insights to some people listening about what you guys have done in the past. It’s going to jumpstart ideas. I love these things because I can see, oh, that works for that company, it may not work exactly that way for me or one of my clients, but it can get my brain churning. It’s like we’re going to brainstorm, but we’re going to brainstorm only with really good ideas.

Jon:
Hey, I love it. That’s really the goal of this. Right? You know that I’m never one to say, “You should copy your competitors,” or a blanket statement that a test is going to work perfectly for you. That’s not really what this is about. This is more again, jump starting the ideation process, giving you some examples of what has worked well. We do have a library of winning tests. So every single test that we ever run, we store in a database that we formed and we maintain all of the mock-ups, designs, the results, everything goes in there.
So we’ve got this massive database from over a decade plus of running tests that we’re able to sort and see, “Hey, what are the common themes across tests that typically work?” Or we have a new client and they’re having a challenge. We’re able to search our database for that challenge and see what has worked in the past that maybe I’d create some ideas for what we could look at here. So what I’ve given you is three different kind of areas of a site that we often find tests work really well in. So those are category pages, social proof and copy or copywriting. So just three areas. And then I gave you a few mock-ups and some tests that we can look at. I’ll have to do my best to describe what the test was, but I think we’ll be okay.

Ryan:
Yeah. And we might sometime have to do kind of a bloopers reel of like, “Ah, here’s what we thought was going to work.” And oh my goodness, it was terrible because I probably got some on the paid search side too. But one of my favorite… I don’t know. Recently, I’ve just been on this tear on category pages because there’s so much value from an SEO standpoint that it’s coming up constantly for me. And your team does phenomenal stuff on category pages because they should be a very highly trafficked page for a lot of eCom brands. Some of them still have some work to do to get that traffic there, but another conversation.
Today, we’re talking about some of the wins you’ve had there. So how have you featured categories that have really, I like saying forced, but you’ve encouraged people to go through the funnel process without any restrictions, let’s say.

Jon:
Well, I think that’s a good point because I think at minimum, a category page is really just about getting people to that next step in the process. It’s an intermediary step that often gets forgotten about. Right? People are just like, “I’m going to throw all my categories up there and somebody will find the one that’s for them, and then I’ll lead them to a product detail page or into the product page.”

Ryan:
Well, they’re doing so much on shopping that all the traffic’s going to product pages. They don’t think about categories. And I’m like, “No, that’s your slightly below the very tip of the funnel. Category is important.”

Jon:
Right. And if you look at a funnel and you forget any step in that funnel, that’s an exit point, a potential exit point. So you want to plug that hole. And I think categories, if you look at it and think of it as offering kind of a road sign about where the visitors to your site should go next, I think that is really the best way to think about it as, yes, it’s a pass through page, but you need to keep people moving in the right direction or they’re going to get frustrated and leave. So orient them where they are on your site and give them what they need to get closer to where they want to be. That’s really the goal. A category page should just send people in the right direction. And if it’s done correctly, the results can really be extraordinary.

Ryan:
Yeah. I have yet to see a checkout button on a category page. I mean, maybe that’s coming, maybe there’s a reason for it. I doubt it, but it’s get them to the page.

Jon:
Well, yeah, people aren’t ready to buy at that page. Right? They need more information. All they’re doing, again, it’s a path to the conversion to along the journey to pass through page. So I think ignoring it is a challenge, but I do think that there is a lot of opportunity here as well. So one test that we ran here was where we promoted categories and offers on the category pages that this test resulted in $2 million from creating a better landing page just around page search.
So I know you’ve talked a lot about driving page search category pages can be beneficial. So what we saw was that users were getting lost on the category page. Right? And what that means is there were just so many products on the category page, they just didn’t know what to do next. Right? So what we did is we dug in to find the experience and adjusted based on how people came to the page. So this is something that some would put under personalization, but really, what we were saying is if they clicked on a certain ad, they should see something a little different than if they just came via the homepage or other, some type of path on that journey. Right?

Ryan:
So a different category based on if you come from navigation versus from an external traffic. Interesting. Okay.

Jon:
Exactly. So for example here, visitors couldn’t see the product categories clearly, and they just weren’t getting a sense of urgency delivered by the homepage hero banner. So if they came via the homepage, they saw something that was trying to create some urgency around that banner on the homepage, but they’d get to the category page and there was no urgency left because that message was not carried through. Right?

Ryan:
Got it.

Jon:
And same thing if you’re running an ad, you want the messaging in the ad to align to the messaging on the page you’re driving that traffic to. Right? And Google appreciates that too. That’s a part of how it gives you a better score. What do they call that, ad rank score? Or what is that score?

Ryan:
Yeah, got to have similar content on the landing page that you do in the ad text.

Jon:
So the test we ran here was to guide users towards promoting categories from top paid search landing pages. So each of those landing pages that had a category, specific category in them, drove them to a landing page that was acting like a category page. And the goal here was to increase engagement and visibility of their products to that new user audience. So people who came from the homepage saw a message that aligned with the message off the homepage. And people who came from ads saw a message that aligned with the ads.

Ryan:
Now, is that a call out, like free shipping today?

Jon:
So really, what we did here was to create a special section, a banner at the top of the page. Right? So not like a free shipping bar. It was below the navigation, but before the listing of all the products on that category page. And what we did there was call out special categories.

Ryan:
Like subcategories of the main category. Okay.

Jon:
Exactly, to help filtering a little bit, but also, those categories were ones that were mentioned in the ads. So what would happen is you say, “Hey, this line of product has a small, medium, and large variant.” And in your ad, what you’re promoting is that you have a sizing that fits for you when most competitors don’t.

Ryan:
Got it.

Jon:
Okay? So your competitive advantage here is that you offer better sizing and more customizable product. Right? That is what aligned with the content we put on the landing page. And so doing this, not only did it produce a lift in transactions, but the revenue impact came in at over $2 million.

Ryan:
Holy smokes.

Jon:
So from doing a little bit of personalization, putting a little bit of effort into some landing pages here, this brand sell $2 million in additional revenue. So I think the goal here is to ask yourself as you design your website, how are people getting to that page? Then cater that on onsite experience to them. And some people call it personalization, but I don’t think it goes that deep. So rather than leave all that work to the shoppers to figure out, just make it easier for them to get to that next point in the funnel. Right?

Ryan:
Yep. For me personally, I have a pet peeve, right or wrong, the infinite scroll on a category page. If you’ve got 500 products in a category and you don’t have solid filters, or I’m just going to scroll that, if I’m trying to get to your footer, for example, and I can’t get there, I just hate that. But it also tells me, 500 products, there better be a subcategory somehow to better filter quickly. See, oh, I want this piece of your products where there’s only going to be a hundred, and then maybe there’s another sub cat. I don’t know, but I can see how this would be a great place to test for a lot of Shopify collection companies.

Jon:
You have provided the perfect segue into the next test I want to talk about. And I’m not sure you knew that, but you just did. If you did know it, amazing job.

Ryan:
I’m going to take credit, but I actually didn’t. It’s logic, I think, but I’ve been through this all day.

Jon:
Okay. I agree. And that’s why I put this one next because proper categorization in the menu around categories really can have a huge boost. And so you’re saying there needs to be not only the categories, but proper subcategories or variants along the way. And so we ran a test that had over a $100,000 in revenue gains based on just having the proper categories added to the navigation. So what we did here is one client came to us with a menu that basically said things like shop, discover, connect, rewards, wholesale, really generic terms. Right? We talk about this all the time.

Ryan:
Yeah, we do. Let’s discover. I don’t know. I’m going to go discover. It’ll be great.

Jon:
Yeah. What are you discovering? How are you connecting, right? I don’t want to connect with you. I want to buy your product. I’m on your website. What else do you want me to do, give you a call? And I don’t know. So on top of that, the shop dropdown listed product categorization with labels of things like collections, themes. It really was not helpful to the end user. I don’t know what a collection is. I don’t know. What do you mean theme, right? It was so generic, it wasn’t helpful. And this is where I think Shopify can get in the way because there’s so many Shopify themes out there that you can apply that are trying to be something for everyone, that if you don’t customize it, you’re going to end up with very generic terms in your navigation, et cetera, because they don’t know how you’re going to use that theme.
So they give you some starter content in the navigation. If you don’t really go in and customize that, you’re left with something like collections as a navigation item. And to your consumer, that doesn’t mean anything. So what we knew was that this wasn’t clear enough for new visitors. Right? It felt obvious to us. We ran some testing, user testing. We found that out very quickly. And we had an opportunity to raise the awareness of the product catalog. And really, we did that by just surfacing the top categories in a persistent navigation. So what we did was we added top product categories into the top level navigation of the menu. So what I mean by that was instead of saying things like shop, discover, connect, rewards, wholesale, et cetera, we actually now say things like, “Here’s your category one, category two, category three.” Right? So it would be like T-shirts, shorts, shoes. Right?
So it was, okay, I’m a consumer. I’m on your site. I saw a pair of shoes on Instagram I really liked. Now I know what I’m going to click on a category and get there. So the goal here is to eliminate an extra step in the funnel. That’s really what we’re doing at a high level. And I think that’s what people should take away from this. That old nav was injecting extra steps into the funnel for no reason. People didn’t want it. They didn’t want to discover. They didn’t want to connect. They weren’t concerned about rewards. You’re concerned about rewards after you’ve purchased before. Right? So let’s not put that in the main navigation. The first goal of your navigation, let’s get that first purchase out of people. So what we found was that we increased the conversion rates, but we also saw about $100,000 in revenue gains just from running that test. So definitely look to eliminate steps in navigation and drive people right to the category pages.

Ryan:
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s just a punchline for all online businesses. Right? I tell people all the time, if you’ve got somebody looking for your shoes, you don’t send them to the homepage to then find your shoe category. You send them to the shoe category page because there’s a step in there. I hate extra steps. If I can take one step, I’m not taking three.

Jon:
There you go.

Ryan:
Just generally.

Jon:
Makes sense. And this is where I say it’s really hard to read the label from inside the jar because you’re so close to your categories, your products, you just know everything. It’s easy for you to be like, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to click on shop, and then the right categories or whatever.” As a consumer, you’re like, “Well, I got to wade through all this to get to that.”

Ryan:
And I do think that’s where it is important to have almost an external web person helping some of these conversations. If you’re a small business, I get you want to start with a theme and make it easy on Shopify or BigCommerce, but it’s probably even worth paying a few hundred dollars to have somebody help modify it. Even I did that with my businesses. I know I’m not the best web developer, period, but it’s also helpful to have somebody else. Well, you don’t know my business, so if you’re doing this, what are you asking me? I love it. Great help, removed frictions. And I will add, if you have a shoe category at the top, and then a bunch of subcategories, let me click shoes just because I like to. And then take me to that category page where I can visually see your subcategories maybe [inaudible 00:13:39] better.

Jon:
Yes. And don’t just have those scroll products on that category page. Have filtering. Please have filtering.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on eCommerce growth. Your hosts are John MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with eCommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors and buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Ryan:
Okay. So the next point you have here is all about the social proof. And in knowing that other people like it, therefore, I will probably like it. In fact, I was just in a meeting yesterday with our Amazon team. They came down from Seattle to talk to us and we had lunch with them. And I was hearing from our head of Amazon how he searches and buys products on Amazon, and he actually probably spends more on Amazon daily than anybody else in the company. And he talks about how he looks at reviews and the social proof, because it’s Micah, he’s got science behind his brain and how it works. It would blew me away, but he uses social proof constantly in how he tells our clients about it. So we know it’s undeniable, but how are you leveraging that social proof to improve revenue?

Jon:
Well, right. I think that’s fair. Have you ever clicked on a product link and you were like, “I’m going to buy this product,” but then you saw zero reviews and you’re like, “Yeah, I don’t know. Do I want to be the first?”

Ryan:
Yeah. Do I want to be that guinea pig?

Jon:
Right. You’re not alone. Our stats say 60% of shoppers take time to read product reviews before purchasing a product, 60%. So I’ll take my chances on that. Better than half, right? I’m going to take my chances and I’m going to say, you need reviews. Right? And this goes back to the psychological phenomenon that people make decisions based on past experiences and the collective actions of others. Those two things combined. Right? So you as a consumer, know that your past experiences matter. So you inherently believe others’ past experiences matter too. So you want to understand what type of experience they had. I think that’s fair. Right?
And so positive experiences from past customers really, the goal here with social proof is to gain more confidence in purchasing your product. And that’s all you should really be thinking about. So the first test we ran here was to elevate customer quotes. Right? So if you have good social proof quotes from your reviews, you could use those throughout the site. And we did this and it gave us a 19% boost in conversion rate, 19%. Now, I’m not saying we went from a 1% conversion rate to a 20% conversion rate. I’m saying this is a percentage gain in conversion rates.

Ryan:
Yeah. One to 1.2 is still… That’s 20% more sales.

Jon:
That’s right.

Ryan:
That’s great.

Jon:
I think the key here is just even a little bit of social proof can go a long way. So just adding quotes to the homepage gives people confidence to continue down the funnel that they’re not going to be the guinea pig. Right? So one of the tests we did, the goal was really to increase add to carts and transactions by just putting these quotes throughout the site.
So we added the quotes from the reviews throughout the customer journey, and there’s two ways to do this. One was just on the homepage. A lot of you see that a lot. The second is a really underutilized one. On your category page, now this is mixing both of these, but on your category page, we do something we call quality tiles. And quality tiles is interspersed in between products. Every third, fourth, or fifth product tile have a tile that is a quote from a consumer. And it’s not a product you can click on. It is just adding that in to the tiles, so that as you’re scrolling through, all of these products on a category page, now you’re being reassured that other people love these products too, and you’re having that social proof effect come into play. The combination of those two things boosted conversions, as you said, 19%.

Ryan:
I love that.

Jon:
So, big gains there.

Ryan:
For most merchants on that, is there an app that can take some of that automatically? Or is it, all right, I like this code, I found it, and I have to go get my graphic team to create the image?

Jon:
There is not an app, but that’s a great idea. If anybody wants to build that, please send it to me. I will use, start sharing that with our team. Maybe we’ll build that. This is something that we actually have as part of our test library of code. We have this prebuilt for Shopify, so we can deploy these quality tiles, if you will, pretty quickly. Yes, you do need to create the graphic with the quote, but there isn’t anything out there that does this automatically that I’m aware of.

Ryan:
Got it. There’s power of different types of reviews. The reason I like Amazon reviews is it’s very easy to filter and sort.

Jon:
Yes.

Ryan:
And I think some of it is because Amazon doesn’t have a horse in the game and they’re like, this is what it is. Who cares? Find it. But as I was sitting here listening yesterday in these Amazon conversations, Micah is like, “100% of the time, I go to the one star reviews first because I want to see how recent they were and what were the problems. Because if it’s a major problem, it was constantly happening, I’m just going to go away and get another one.” If it was a dumb thing, it was like somebody in garbled English was like, “Don’t like.” I’m like, “All right.” So you obviously… or a competitor or somebody. But responding to those as we’ve talked about before, yeah, one star reviews suck as a brand, but when you’ve showed that you’re making it right, can’t remember the study, but I think those are almost more valuable than just a five star review.

Jon:
They are. I look at those. I encourage brands to look at one star reviews or negative reviews of any kind as an opportunity, not a detractor. It’s an opportunity for you to step in and say, “We hear you. Here’s how you get ahold of us. Just so you know, we have a satisfaction policy.” Other people are going to see that and they’re going to be reminded that you care and you are available. If they have an issue, you’re going to help resolve it.
That’s what most people want to see out of a one star. Because if there’s just a bunch of one stars like you’re saying with Micah, if he’s seen a ton of one stars with no responses and it’s the same issue over and over, then yeah, you’re not going to buy that product. And you shouldn’t, because it’s pretty clear what’s happening. But if you’re grand and you’re responding to each of those consumers, then I think you’re in a good spot because you could very easily say, “Hey, you know what? Yes, we had a defective batch. Everybody that got that batch, we are replacing them for free. Here’s how you get ahold of us.” People will be okay with that. They’re going to understand mistakes happen.

Ryan:
I love it. So this next social proof one, it has to work because it’s worked on me. It just makes me mad that I’m like, “No, that’s great.” But when you put best seller badges on products, what are the numbers you saw around it that I probably helped contribute to these numbers?

Jon:
Yeah. I’m sure. Here’s the thing. I mean, badging is great, and it’s one way to do this. This is just even simply elevating best sellers. And putting badges on them is one way you can definitely do that. We did this a little more subtly, just to make sure that it would even work at all. And doing this resulted in $287,000 of additional revenue. I promise you it did not cost us near that to build out this text. So, big return on investment here. But I think you said it right. Customers want options, but they don’t want too many. That infinite scroll, et cetera, creates too many problems. So this is one way around it, how to narrow down what customers see and want to basically cut in decision. That’s what we’re trying to cut through here, by elevating these.
So we want to offer some guidance and show what has sold the most. And there’s ways to do that. But this acts as social proof, and we’re putting it under that category because it really shows your product’s worth buying because other people have already bought it. So that’s the social proof aspect of this. So really, what you’re doing is you’re not having consumers go out and search for the best option. They can see it because it’s right in front of them. And that’s really the goal here.
So telling people what the most popular items are makes them more confident. So what we did with this test is we just elevated what were the most popular items, and then we included the social proof around stars and how many reviews each of those have. So it wasn’t always the best seller. It was often even the most reviewed products. Because the products that have the most reviews often are best sellers, but also, it means people like them the most. So you’re more likely as a brand to have a better experience for your consumers if you’re selling a highly reviewed product, more of that and you’re boosting that. So again, just raising what were the most popular items. So simple, $287,000 in additional revenue.

Ryan:
Got it. So you just don’t want the category page to bubble up anything, any product it feels like. You want to have some control there. And often it’s like, “All right, you’re on the category for this. You can see all of my products, but I know you’re going to want one of these three.” So make sure those three are up at the top.

Jon:
Yeah. And there’s two sides to every coin. Right? So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and in the sense that you’re pushing the highest selling product and it’s going to sell more because you’re pushing that upfront. So you have to consider that as a brand, and that’s part of why you should test this on your site.

Ryan:
Got it. I love it. Okay. So we’ve got social proof. So obviously, making sure that you’re getting reviews, number one, and then making sure people can easily find what they probably want or what you’re trying to encourage. And then after we’ve already fixed the categories and fixed some of that navigation to help some of these phenomenal ones, we’ve already generated probably $10 million for these brands that are listening, but we’ve got another one that has to do with website copy. So what are you actually saying on the site that’s going to have an impact for conversion? Because you should have content on your site, product descriptions, category descriptions, content everywhere. And so where are you showing your wins on website copy? Because I don’t pay much attention to website copy. I just say, have to have it.

Jon:
Whoa. Here’s the thing. You’re not alone in that. Most consumers are just skimming content. I don’t know about you, but I don’t read nine tenths of the internet. I skim. I’m looking for what’s important for me. And we’ve done so many eye tracking studies that back this up. You have a paragraph of copy. You can see the left side of the paragraph is bright red. A lot of eyes are happening there. By the time you get to the end of the paragraph on the right, you see that it’s completely void of the eyes. Everyone starts reading the sentence looking for that key point, and then by the end of it, they were like, “Yeah, there’s nothing here for me.” And they just move on.
So they’re skimming the content very, very quickly. So how do you play with that? How do you use that to your advantage? Well, what we did was twofold. We found one of our clients that they sold handcrafted, really quality goods. And what we found was that if we included the care instructions in there that were buried in copy before, but we raised those up into their own section higher up on the product detail page, we saw a 21% increase in conversion rate.

Ryan:
What? How to take care of something, or what… I would never have guessed that.

Jon:
But here’s why. It really makes it clear that this is a specialty craft good, that it’s something that needs some care, and that means it’s more valuable typically. Right? You’re going to care for that Birkin handbag way more than you are for the one you bought it.

Ryan:
Ross, dress for less.

Jon:
Yeah, whatever. Here’s the thing, is that before we did this, the value of the product just wasn’t clear to people. Right? So how do we make sure that a value is communicated by adding more of a story to it around care instructions? We could really portray each item as something worthy of delicate handling. In turn, this increased the add to carts and purchases.
So what we did is we added this copy around how to care for an item right below the product price and on the product detail page. And the idea behind this was elevating that content, clearly calling it out in its own section would make it more valuable. And it did. It increased conversion rate by 21%. We saw way more cart ads and it also even increased the average order value. So there was a ton of value here out of this test.
And I think this is a reminder that customers, they won’t automatically know that your product is quality. You got to tell them this and show them. So I think that this is something that it’s a small tweak with copy that can have a big result. That’s really the end goal of why I’m telling you this, not so that you go add care instructions to your page. Maybe it works, add as a test, but really just saying, there’s such a small gain that could be done here and really just small changes make a big, big difference.

Ryan:
Yeah. Well, I think on this one, know your product, know your audience. If I’m buying a T-shirt and you’ve got extensive care instructions for a $30 T-shirt, I’m like, “Yeah, I’m not going to do that. Nope, next one.” But if I’m spending $200 on a T-shirt and that’s my market, I’m like, “Okay, I do want to know that there’s some specific instructions. I’ve got to dry clean this because it’s such a good…” I don’t know, whatever happens to be that’s really cool.

Jon:
Yeah. Maybe the print would come off or it has some detailing to it or something. Right?

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
Hand wash, right? Clothes that you have to hand wash, you typically feel like they’re more valuable.

Ryan:
Yep. That’s why I don’t get-

Jon:
I thought they were more annoying personally, but yeah, exactly. We’re on the same page here.

Ryan:
If they can’t go into my washing machine, I’m sorry, it’s not me. I’m not fancy though. My wife may be on the other side of that.

Jon:
There you go. Exactly. Yeah.

Ryan:
Okay. But then you have another one too about focusing on some benefits that led to astronomical numbers.

Jon:
$5 million in additional revenue. 5 million.

Ryan:
Man, I got to get my kids to learn how to write well.

Jon:
Yeah. Well, hey, I think that writing, it’s an unsung hero of just… It’s a life hack to be able to write well. But here’s the thing. By adding this benefit focus language to long shipping lead times. So what we’re doing is we’re taking a negative and trying to make it into a positive. Change the sentiment around that. So we want customers to understand what they’re waiting for. Right? Because normally, you would see, “Oh wow, six weeks, nine weeks. Wow, I’m not waiting nine weeks.” And they move on. Right? But what we did is we made a simple change and this is what made 5 million in additional revenue. So I’m telling you this for two reasons. One is this is the power of iterative optimization, right? Small changes over time in learnings can really help make a big difference. You just don’t know what’s going to work until you try it.
So you got to test and iterate. And copy is an amazing place to do this because it’s so easy to do. Right? Changing copy typically does not take a huge technical lift. You can do it fairly easily. So what we did here is on a product detail page, it did say as shown in the prices, $1,200 or whatever, and it takes nine weeks. But then we just added a simple change to that. We said, “Made for you, ships in nine weeks.” And now, you’re changing something that was, “Oh, I have to wait nine weeks for that,” to, “Oh, they’re going to make it just for me? How cool is that? Oh yeah, I’m going to order it with whatever features I want and they’re going to manufacture it and ship it to me.” It’s a total change in the psychology.

Ryan:
Total psychology, Jon MacDonald, the psychologist.

Jon:
$5 million.

Ryan:
5 million.

Jon:
I promise you, we did not charge that client $5 million. So the return on that is a massive.

Ryan:
That’s massive.

Jon:
Massive gain.

Ryan:
So made for you.

Jon:
Made for you.

Ryan:
That makes nine weeks palatable. So that’s a great, I think, just a way to look at, “Hey, there’s an issue with something on the site.” Hey, shipping in this case like, “Gosh, we’re nine weeks right now. Our competitor is two,” for example. How do we make nine weeks sound better or express the value of that better, I guess in that just saying, “Hey, this is custom.”

Jon:
Right. Exactly. You could say, “Hey, you know what? If the two weeks is an off the shelf, you’re going to get something that’s in a box and you’re going to have to assemble it. You can go to IKEA today and buy a sofa. Or you could wait nine weeks and have a sofa that you customized just for you with the exact fabric you wanted, et cetera, and it will ship to you in nine weeks because it’s made for you.” Which one do you want?

Ryan:
I would’ve gladly taken nine weeks when we were building our house, because I think we were at 12 months for a couch. I was like, “Please, can I get my couch?”

Jon:
Stories of what happens when you build a house in the middle of a supply chain meltdown.

Ryan:
Yes. It had nothing to do with the customization, but just nobody could get anything. Okay. So lots of really cool wins for seemingly made up numbers by Jon, but I know they’re not, when you can change the copy on a website for 5 million, but you’ve got categories focused on that. That is such an easy one that all of these are relatively easy, but changing the categories, changing your navigation, making sure that it’s following some logic and you’re removing some steps, you can kind of get people to where they want quicker. Social proof. If you’re not getting reviews, pause, go get a review company. You need reviews. But then helping people see the best sellers easily, bubbling them up can be something to test on your site. And then your tile, “your map maker,” let’s automate creative those tiles for those category pages. But you’ve used tiles for a lot of other things too, which I like, at the previous podcast.

Jon:
But in terms of reviews, this seems like an easy ad for any of the reviews platforms. None of them are doing this. So add that in. You have the data.

Ryan:
I mean, even my wife on Canva can make a review tile probably pretty easily like, “Hey, take this product overlay, the textable review.” It’s not even have to be clickable, it’s just going to take up space. It’s going to be great. It’s going to increase conversion and print millions of dollars according to Jon. It’s going to be great.

Jon:
Yeah. There you go.

Ryan:
And then copy. Don’t ignore copy in what you’re calling out. You can take negatives and turn them into positives. You can just simply increase the value of your product by talking about it better and bubbling that up closer to the top on a product page.

Jon:
Yes. Awesome.

Ryan:
Jon, you’ve just made us all lots of money.

Jon:
Yes.

Ryan:
Well, maybe not us.

Jon:
Again, well.

Ryan:
Listeners.

Jon:
Yes. Here’s the thing. I want to reiterate one thing before we sign off for the day, which is that we don’t encourage brands to focus unhealthy amounts of energy at competitors and copying what they’re doing. But I think what the goal is today again, is to spark some ideas for you of ways that you can incorporate some of these things into your site. Take these as examples around category, social proof and copy, and just say, “Those are three areas I know I can improve on.” And that’s really the goal here. So take the lessons from today, figure out how you might incorporate that into your specific store and for your specific customers and go from there. But yes, big results in all three of these. Really excited to share those, and I appreciate you walking through those with me today, Ryan.

Ryan:
Yeah. Or you could just take the easy button and hire Jon’s team to do this for you. That’s another option for anybody listening.

Jon:
Always an option.

Ryan:
Jon, thanks for the time.

Jon:
Thank you, Ryan.

Ryan:
Bye.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 083): Winning Tests and What the Learnings Can Teach You appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

So much energy is focused on driving traffic to a site via different platforms, but Jon and Ryan share why email should be the most profitable traffic acquisition channel. 

In this episode, they discuss how you can set up your account and create automatic email flows. Ryan puts emphasis on not buying your email list. They also dive into examples of automatic email flows, such as a welcome series or an abandoned cart email, before sharing 5 points to help you successfully scale your email marketing campaign. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How to utilize free email systems like Klaviyo and Mailchimp
2. Why you need to keep growing your email list 
3. Why you need to segment your customers and personalize their experience
4. How to leverage your email data for your other marketing channels
5. Why it’s important to test your email marketing campaign

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, hit us up on Twitter. We’re @jonmacdonald and @ryangarrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
Hey, Ryan. So much energy is focused on driving traffic to a site via different channels and I know that the short term goal is always to convert that traffic into paying customers. A lot of why we have Drive and Convert as a podcast, but look, the long term goal is always to grow a list that you can continually remarket, generally done via email, because after you have that list, you can produce more profit, have more company value, recurring visitors. So let’s just say that email is a more profitable marketing channel in a business than a lot of other ones. That fair?

Ryan:
Yeah. I would even probably even go a step further and say email should be your most profitable marketing channel that you have. If it’s not-

Jon:
Yes, I agree.

Ryan:
… there’s probably problems in your email and/or your other channels that are producing more profit based on ROAS profit. Overall profit might be slightly different depending on what you’re doing to grow, but profitability per channel, if you’re spending 10,000 on email, it’s probably producing a lot of profit.

Jon:
This flies in the face of my whole pop-up hatred, but I will say I agree.

Ryan:
Pop-ups may not be the profit generator, but people think they are.

Jon:
Well, I will agree that email should be your most profitable traffic acquisition channel, so look, it sounds really simple, but it never really is, so will you have five points for a successful email and how brands should be thinking about this? And so I’m interested to learn more about this and maybe I’ll come to the dark side. We’ll see, but I get this question a lot. When you’re just starting a business, new e-comm site, you don’t have any emails, so if you are not going to do a pop-up, well, I just want to put that on there.

Ryan:
Yeah. You’re not going to do a pop-up.

Jon:
Okay. How do you get that channel going? What do you do?

Ryan:
Okay. Step one, don’t ever buy a list. I get that a lot, like, “Oh, I get these emails of [inaudible 00:02:13] and data providers.” I think daily, my email probably gets four or five of companies trying to sell me big commerce users, or Shopify users. Buying a list is maybe illegal even depending on where that list is sourced, but don’t buy a list. It can be frustrating, but starting a business is a grind and unless you get lucky, it can happen quicker, but it takes time and it’s going to be a struggle and a slog to get an email list built and building a business. But if you don’t have an email list, you’re not doing email, most of the points won’t be for you yet, but you need to start somewhere and so you’re going to start small and a lot of email systems for e-commerce when you’re small are free.
They use the freemium model. Mailchimp’s been one that’s been around for years. They weren’t built for e-comm, but they have a free one there. Klaviyo, which was generally built e-comm first, does have a free one, up to 500 emails a month, so if I’m starting an e-comm business now and we start with Klaviyo, it has some really good out-of-the box automatic flows that you can just enable. You say I want to enable it and then you make it yours, you personalize it, but there’s abandoned cart emails, there’s some welcome series that you can get going pretty easily and there’s even some other things that would be kind of classified as an email, like this new shop app, which in many ways, drives me crazy.
I understand what they’re doing and I get it, but it doesn’t mean it’s less frustrating for me, but it does do some emailing and automatic flows out of that, just abandoned cart things. So just know you’re going to start small and it’s not going to be exciting. You’re not going to flip a free email program on and get $10,000 in revenue a month likely, but it’s going to be there, get it going and so just start, essentially.

Jon:
Okay. All right. So there’s going to be a big gap here, because as you said, really, this episode is more for brands who have an email list. It doesn’t have to be a large one, but they got to have something to start with. So maybe in another episode, we’ll cover how to build that list if you’re just starting out. We talked a little bit today about how not to, but let’s go into, okay, you have a emails list, you’re up and running. How do you scale it? So this is you’re past that initial market validation. You have an e-comm site that is doing some revenue. At least you’re moving forward. You’re collecting emails that way. What do you do from here?

Ryan:
Keep acquiring customers and I get a lot of brands and it needs to be said though. A lot of brands will be like, “Oh, we’re trying to save money, so we’re just going to run an email and let our organic run and we’re not going to have acquisition channels running.” Well, unfortunately, once you stop adding customers to an email list, it starts dying. It’s like if you’re not growing, you’re dying. That’s the same mantra you would have as an email list. If you’re not adding to it, it’s going to die, because you always will be losing and churning customers, whether they opt out of the list, or you get stuck in forever spam, so they never see it, or they just ignore you over time. So you’ve got to have a lifeblood of continued new customers coming into your email database to make it work.
And some of that is logic, where the lifetime value of a customer, they buy now, they’re going to buy a few times in the next six months and they gradually peter off potentially and they get new brands that they buy from, but lifeblood, so keep acquiring customers and set appropriate goals. I don’t know how many times I’ve talked about goals in this podcast or just in life over the last 15 years of digital marketing, but set acquisition goals that allow scale for new customers. You’re not trying to generate profit from Google Ads, or Facebook ads, or TikTok ads necessarily. You’re trying to acquire customers, because your email list is where you’re going to get way more profit. And I say it probably two or three times a day. Email on its worst day is going to be better than Google or Facebook on its best day from a return on spend standpoint, so take less profit now to get way more profit later, because 100 new customers now with a little less profit is better than 10 new customers at a higher profit per customer, so acquire customers.

Jon:
Okay. Okay. So yeah, I totally see what you’re saying, because just the return on that spend is once you have the list, you own it. It costs you pennies to send another email blast versus having to go back to Google and spend thousands just to get in front of those same people, so it definitely makes sense.

Ryan:
And if you’re building a business for a goal of exit, or even just to give it to your kids or something, there’s more value to a business that has a larger email database that I can nurture and buy with the business.

Jon:
Yeah. That reminds me, I recently saw somebody get sued, because they sold a business and said it had all of these emails, but they dove in and 80% of them bounced right away, so yeah.

Ryan:
Ouch. Mm-hmm. Yeah. When you’re buying a business, look at their email system to see what the value of that is first.

Jon:
Yeah. I was wondering how that got passed due diligence. So number one is to just acquire more customers. Makes sense. What about number two?

Ryan:
Number two, once you’ve got customers in your database, or you’ve got a database you’re working, segment your customers. All customers are not equal. Even just you and I, you live in an urban household, your buying habits, your lifestyle habits are going to be different than me that lives on nine acres in the deep suburbs.

Jon:
I was going to say that’s pushing it.

Ryan:
Suburbs. I might not be considered a suburb. I’m unincorporated, so it’s deep, but my taxes are better.

Jon:
There you go.

Ryan:
But you’re going to nurture each customer different based on what they bought, based on where they’re located. If you’ve got a massive list, you may be segmenting based on geographic, because people on the East Coast have different ways of saying things than people on the West Coast. If you’ve got a big enough database, you have to be thinking through that to get the best return possible. Most email systems for e-commerce will help create those segments automatically and they’ll start putting them together and then you go in and you can refine them or say, “Hey, this is a better segment based on what they purchased.” Men versus women in the gifting space. If you have people during a holiday period, like right now we’re leading up to Mother’s Day, if somebody’s buying a gift now and the shipping address is different than the billing address, that’s probably a gifter.
You might want to message that person differently than somebody that bought it and going to their same address. Not always, because I’ll buy something and it gets shipped to our house and it’s for my wife on Mother’s Day, but if I’m buying for my mom, it may get shipped to her. So look at that data, segment them differently and make sure your message is different For those. Most businesses will have customers that are VIPs and those customers, you probably want a message differently based on what they bought, or maybe they get different levels of customer discounts. I know we hate discounts generally, because it’s [inaudible 00:08:52] erosion, but if somebody hasn’t bought in six months and the average customer buys every month, that person’s at risk of churning, so send them 10% off. Looking at certain segments of how you need to be messaging people different. If everybody’s getting the same email in your database, something’s wrong.

Jon:
Yeah. Yeah. It doesn’t have to be a discount. You could easily just send them a promotion of some sort that’s special for them. Free gift with purchase, free expedited shipping. Something that others won’t get, so yeah, you’re never going to get me off that discounting soapbox, so [inaudible 00:09:20].

Ryan:
Nope. Nope. There’s better ways of making your price look more attractive. It’s not complicated. We have a whole podcast on it. I think we have a couple on it [inaudible 00:09:28].

Jon:
There you go. Yeah. I’m sure we do. I’m sure we do.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
Okay. So today, we’re talking about you have an email program, you’re trying to scale it up. You’ve got five ideas. First, was acquire customers. Second is segment your customers. Third is…

Ryan:
Use your email data to guide acquisition channels. Now, I think of all my points, this is the one that is least utilized, because most people see acquire customer, nurture customer, go acquire more customers and that’s the model, but they don’t turn the circle in reverse necessarily and say, “Great. This is working really well. People are buying this. How can I go find more of those customers?” So email systems are a trove of data that is often overlooked in how customer A purchased product C and then they purchased product D, E, F, G. Well, great. They moved to a valuable customer segment of ours. How do I reverse that? I probably need to get people to buy that product, so maybe I can get more aggressive on the product that starts that relationship.
So I go back to the Google Ads team and say, “Hey, I want more people buying this product. What can I do? Can I get more aggressive on my return on ad spend goal, or do I get top of funnel on Facebook or Instagram to find people that are going to buy that product?” Go to your acquisition channels and try to reverse engineer those acquisitions, so you can build more valuable customers in your email database. There’ll be just commonalities you don’t expect and I think it can be the channel that came from, time of year can be a big one.
We worked in the gift basket space for years and that is a hyper-competitive one, but that group of the analysis that team did on customers was crazy and their email team led the organization essentially on every other channel, because the email was the most valuable piece of that company. They knew that if somebody bought a gift basket in the two weeks leading up to a holiday, except in the Christmas time period where you’ve got three to four weeks, that was a holiday purchaser and that value of that customer was massive. They would come back and buy two more times over the next 18 months through email, which for them, was almost free because their email list was so massive and so they could say, “Yeah. We were willing to lose money on that first order, knowing they’re going to come back and buy two more times.”
And so that can be hugely valuable to see that and get that insights. Whereas if I bought a gift basket August 3rd, there’s no holiday around that. They don’t know if I’m buying the gift basket for a birthday. They don’t know if I’m buying for a funeral. The potential for bringing up that purchase next year and getting a repeat is low, because we don’t know what that was tied to. You can base it on somewhat of the basket purchased, but just because it says sympathy basket, you just might have liked what was in that basket and you were sending it to somebody for a birthday, just because that happened to be better.
So push that data and challenge acquisition teams with some of that information. I like this especially for SEO teams and this is, I think, where it’s probably not utilized often at all, but when you’ve got these really valuable customers that you can see in your email database, they’re active, they’re buying regularly, having your SEO team go and create long-term content strategies around those most valuable customers can be huge, because if you’ve got that insight and you’re leveraging it and your competitors aren’t, you might have some really high ranking blogs or pieces of content that can capture the eyeballs of those customers when they’re upper mid-funnel before they go search and acquire them without the really competitive high cost per click that would be down at the bottom of the funnel.

Jon:
So understanding your email data and using that as a research tool for your other marketing channels, yeah, that’s really interesting. You’re talking about the gifting space and using that as a way to control every other medium that you’re marketing on. That’s awesome. And you’re right, you start out by saying this is one that you don’t see utilized very often and I agree. I don’t see it utilized at all. I never hear about companies doing that. It’s a untapped marketplace.

Ryan:
Yeah. Most companies will set a return on ad spend goal on their acquisition channels and leave it and it has no bearing on the type of customer coming in. It’s like, “Yeah. They bought. Great.” What type of customer is that going to be? Is it more valuable or less valuable?

Jon:
I love it. All right. So what is number four?

Ryan:
Number four is the basics we talk about, you and I constantly. Test and measure. Test and measure. If you’re not testing something in your email, you’re falling behind your competitors, so you’re going to have tests whether they fail or succeed. It doesn’t really matter in my mind, as long as you’re constantly testing, because you’re going to be getting better and better. When you realize something doesn’t work, great, you’re better off than somebody that didn’t do that test. And you’ll figure it out more and more, but it’ll be from hero images to calls to action, to promotional things in the emails, to how you’re segmenting your lists.
Even releasing test products through email. You don’t have to put a product publicly visible on the site. You could have it on a page that’s hidden from navigation, but available only through email to say, “Does this resonate?” Before I go make a massive investment in purchase a container shipment of these, does it work through my email list? Takes very little risk, but you get a group of customers that already like you. If they don’t buy it, chances of people that don’t know you and don’t trust you buying it is much lower.

Jon:
That’s interesting. I like that approach. I think a lot of the platforms like Klaviyo, et cetera, have a variation of A/B or multivariate testing within them as well.

Ryan:
Yes.

Jon:
And so that is something I think that you should be doing as a brand. Now, you need to have enough emails for it to make sense, but even HubSpot has this. We do this with our weekly email sends at The Good. We do A/B testing with our email sends. And again, you have to have enough to on your list to make it worthwhile, but they handle all the math and you just set a threshold and then it sends the variant out that performs better for clicks or opens. Whatever you wish. So yeah, there’s some ways there to test and measure for sure. Okay. So acquire customers, segment those folks then use that data to help guide other acquisition channels, then you should test and measure. What’s number five?

Ryan:
Number five, it’s not necessarily email, but it’s being bundled in almost every platform. It’s SMS. You’ve got to be texting, you’ve got to be testing that and so most email systems have it built in. SMS does not make sense probably for every business out there. Certain B2B businesses, maybe not. Most direct to consumer businesses should at least have some data that they’ve tested to say, “Does it work or not and have you tested it?” You’ve got to do some double validation to make sure that they’re okay to text. So I would say generally, small businesses, which in my mind would be anything under generally 10 million a year online would probably be fine using your email system as your SMS system as well. Keeps your data all in there.
Larger brands, you may need to start segmenting your systems and getting an attentive in there that’s SMS focused only, because of the advantages there of deliverability potentially, or just how you’re messaging somebody on such a small screen in text can be different than maybe you want to be messaging some email things, so test. And my wife and I used SMS in our local retail store really just for VIPs and I was like, “Hey, we’re going to have a special night event with champagne. Come shop the store. It’s exclusive to you only. RSVP here so we know you’re coming, so we can make sure we have enough champagne or snacks.” For me, I hate SMS, personally for me. I don’t like being nurtured on the SMS. I find most of them annoying and so maybe it’s a fault of the SMS people that are giving me bad texts and bad content.

Jon:
I will say I’ve had a lot of success and I love SMS for subscription-based products. “Hey, your next order’s coming up. Click here if you want to change the date or change the order of some sort.” There’s a really great case study up on our site about Olipop, the direct to consumer soda brand that did that through SMS and it’s their number one sales channel. Now, they send a renewal text out and it converts at such a high rate that it becomes a retention tool, where a email can get lost and it doesn’t feel as immediate. With text, it feels immediate still for consumers, most of them, and what happens is you send it and you say, “Hey, your order’s coming up. Do you want it?”
Now you’re getting in the good graces of that consumer, because your product isn’t going to going to just show up at the door and you’re like, “Oh, shoot, I didn’t want that right now.” Now, you have the option to push it back and retain that customer. They would’ve just canceled, because maybe they’re on vacation, or they’re not going to be home that week. Whatever it is. So there’s some great options there for utilizing SMS as another channel. But I think you make a great point that it doesn’t make sense for all businesses, because I see so many small brands collecting SMS info and not doing anything with it.

Ryan:
Or what they do with it is just annoying and it’s like I signed up with one, just because I want to be able to be in it and if it is working, I want to be a part of it, so I can advise brands on it. But a few of them that I signed up for was 100% discounts and it was every week. And the product I did, it was a workout product, a pre-workout thing I’d take in the mornings before I work out, or have a more difficult workout and it was weekly. Just the boxes I buy are either I buy two for two months, or one for one month and they last me about that, but it was every week, didn’t matter when I purchased, “20% off today. 10% off this week for random day of whatever it was.” It was just annoying.
I’m like, “You are not looking at my data at all about when I purchased last, when I’m going to purchase again, when it’s time to get another box.” It was just a blast discount, because they saw the revenue likely and said, “Oh, every time we send an SMS, we get revenue. This is great.” And then they just kept abusing it and discounting their brand. So I’m like, “I’m never paying full price for that brand, because I know I’m going to get a text next week.” And if I ever opt out of the list, because it’s annoying, I just go back to the website and give them my phone number, get the coupon, opt out again. It’s just so easy to abuse that.

Jon:
Well, it’s still in its infancy, I think. I think there’s still a lot of good options there for brands who are of a decent size and are going to do the right things with it, but I do think it’s a channel that can convert quite well, because there’s not a lot of noise on it.

Ryan:
Yep. Just know that I think you have to do is if you don’t have a unique strategy outside of email for it, you’re probably doing it wrong, because it’s not the way you’ve used email. And I think that’s probably how a lot of them are doing it, or they’re just like, “We don’t want to come up with a strategy, because we’re lazy, so we’re just going to give them a discount and blast every week and everybody gets the same text.” No. It’s segmented like email. Everybody gets different text messages and if you’re giving a discount, again, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Jon:
Stop hitting that easy button, right?

Ryan:
Yes. It’s not good long term.

Jon:
All right. So that was five. I think you have a bonus for us as well. What’s your bonus way to scale email?

Ryan:
You’ve got to have a bonus. Jon does, so I got to keep up with him. So for me, it’s app push notifications. Not everybody has an app out there and not every email platform can do push notifications, but if they do, like for example, we use Klaviyo a lot at Logical Position. They can do app push notifications and so we’ve got a decent amount of clients with apps and push notifications can be so awesome. It’s like text, but it’s easier to get into notifications for an app. Can easily get that when they give it to me, or I can get a notification without much difficulty and so I liken it to SMS essentially. You got to have an app though to check out and so if they’ve given permission for that notification, it’s extremely valuable. My best example personally is Nike. I give Nike permission on the sneakers app to notify me when there’s a pair of Jordans coming up that I might want.
Even if I’m not in the market to buy, I like knowing, because maybe I will go and buy them again on some secondary marketplace. But great delivery rate. It’s pretty simple now to get an app up. If you have a business account or a business email for longer than a year, you’ve got people messaging you about their mobile app abilities constantly, or if you’re in e-comm, if you’re on Shopify, tap card can get you a quick app. But again, it’s the same idea. Don’t abuse it and understand those customers are likely different. If they’ve downloaded your app, they’ve taken the time to go download it, because they want to have a deeper relationship with you as a brand, that’s a really special thing that I think you need to not abuse.
So again, test and measure how people are going to interact with you. Those people already like you enough to put an app on their phone, that’s not a discount customer. Nike’s never had to push a discount for me to go buy a pair of Jordans. I just know I want them. So test that. You have an app. I think your push notifications going to those same customers, keeping that data in one spot can be pretty powerful.

Jon:
That’s great. All right. So five. No. No. Six with a bonus ways to scale your email, which should be your most valuable channel, acquire customers, segment your customers, use your email data to guide other acquisition channels, test and measure, use SMS and as a bonus, use app push notifications. Ryan, this has been really helpful for me. Lots of great stuff in here today. Thank you for sharing.

Ryan:
Thank you, Jon. Appreciate it.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 082): 5 Points to Make Email Your Most Successful Marketing Channel appeared first on The Good.