We dove deep into the user experiences of 15 top AI tools, documenting over 100 monetization touchpoints, upgrade pathways, and conversion tactics. What we found were five distinct patterns that drive revenue for these leaders.

These strategies aren’t just for AI. They’re blueprints that any SaaS tool can adapt to accelerate its own growth. Here’s what we learned.

The data behind the patterns

Our analysis covered tools spanning text generation (ChatGPT, Claude), search (Perplexity), design (Ideogram, Leonardo.AI), video creation (Runway), and productivity (Grammarly, QuillBot). Each tool was examined across four critical areas:

• Monetization elements: Upgrade CTAs, limit notifications, premium feature gates, and more
• Monetization pathways: The specific user journeys from free to paid
• Pricing and payment screens: Where users actually convert when they decide to upgrade
• Missed opportunities: Places where tools could be driving more conversions

What emerged were five clear patterns that high-converting tools use consistently.

Pattern #1: The progressive squeeze

The strategy: Start with subtle hints, then gradually increase conversion prompts as users become more invested.

Who’s doing it: Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity have mastered this approach.

How it works: These tools begin with gentle upgrade suggestions embedded in the interface. A small CTA in the sidebar, a mention of plan limits in account settings. As users engage more, the messaging becomes increasingly direct.

Claude exemplifies this perfectly. New users see a subtle “Free plan” indicator and a small upgrade CTA. After several conversations, users get friendly notifications about approaching limits. Only when limits are actually hit does Claude present the strong upgrade push with clear urgency messaging.

ChatGPT follows a similar pattern but with more touchpoints. Multiple upgrade opportunities appear once logged in, but the real conversion push happens when users try to upload files or access advanced features.

Why it converts: Users invest time and mental energy before hitting any hard walls. By the time they reach limits, they’re already committed to the tool and see clear value in upgrading rather than switching to alternatives.

The missed opportunity: Many tools go straight to hard limits without the progressive buildup, losing users who might have converted with a gentler approach.

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How Top AI Tools Turn Free Users Into Paying Customers

Pattern #2: The feature tease

The strategy: Show users exactly what they’re missing by displaying premium features prominently, then gating access.

Who’s doing it: Ideogram, Grammarly, and Leonardo.AI excel at this approach.

How it works: These tools don’t hide their premium features. Instead, they showcase them prominently with visual cues like lock icons, blurred previews, or “Pro” badges. Users can see the feature, understand its value, and often interact with locked elements that trigger upgrade modals.

Ideogram shows locked features upfront on the dashboard, displays private galleries as gated sections, and lets users click through to see upgrade benefits. When users generate images, editing options appear with clear visual indicators of which features require upgrading.

Grammarly shows blurred premium suggestions alongside free ones, lets users see statistics with tone analysis grayed out, and provides partial feature previews that create curiosity about the full experience.

Why it converts: Curiosity combined with FOMO creates powerful motivation. When users can see exactly what they’re missing and how it would solve their problems, the upgrade decision becomes much easier.

Implementation tip: The key is showing enough value to create desire while maintaining a clear visual hierarchy between free and premium features.

Pattern #3: The moment of need

The strategy: Present upgrade options precisely when users are most invested and would benefit most from premium features.

Who’s doing it: Runway, QuillBot, and Character.AI time their conversion prompts perfectly.

How it works: Instead of generic upgrade CTAs, these tools interrupt workflows at strategic moments when users are actively trying to accomplish something and would most benefit from premium features.

Runway waits until users want to export in 4K resolution or remove watermarks, both of which are moments when they’re already committed to using the generated content.

QuillBot triggers upgrade prompts when users hit word limits mid-task, not during idle browsing.

Why it converts: Perfect timing equals the highest conversion rates. When users are already invested in a task and premium features would immediately solve their problem, the upgrade becomes a logical next step rather than an interruption.

The psychology: This taps into the completion bias. Once users start a task, they’re motivated to finish it, making them more likely to pay to remove obstacles.

Pattern #4: The transparent countdown

The strategy: Create urgency and build trust by clearly showing usage limits, remaining credits, and reset timers.

Who’s doing it: Perplexity, Grammarly, and Copy.AI have perfected transparent limit communication.

How it works: Instead of surprising users with sudden limits, these tools constantly communicate remaining usage through progress bars, countdown timers, and clear messaging about when limits reset.

Perplexity shows “2 queries remaining today” with each search, giving users clear visibility into their usage without anxiety.

Grammarly displays credit counts and refill timers for AI features, so users can plan their usage accordingly.

Copy.AI uses a prominent word count progress bar that updates in real-time, showing exactly how much of their monthly limit has been used.

Why it converts: Transparency builds trust while creating healthy urgency. Users appreciate knowing where they stand and can make informed decisions about when to upgrade rather than feeling tricked by hidden limits.

The trust factor: When users trust that limits are fair and clearly communicated, they’re more likely to see upgrading as a reasonable business transaction rather than being forced into paying.

Pattern #5: The omnipresent nudge

The strategy: Place multiple upgrade touchpoints throughout the interface without being intrusive.

Who’s doing it: ChatGPT, QuillBot, and Ideogram have mastered multi-touchpoint conversion.

How it works: These tools strategically place upgrade opportunities at different points in the user journey, including header CTAs, sidebar reminders, settings page options, and feature-specific prompts. The key is making each touchpoint feel contextual rather than repetitive.

ChatGPT places upgrade CTAs in the dropdown menu, file upload tooltips, model selection interfaces, and account settings. Each serves a different user intent and provides value beyond just asking for payment.

QuillBot integrates upgrade opportunities into the workflow, for example, in premium mode selectors, feature benefit explanations, and contextual prompts that feel helpful rather than pushy.

Why it converts: Repetition without annoyance increases recall and provides multiple chances to convert users at different readiness levels. Some users need to see upgrade options multiple times before they’re ready to act.

The balance: The key is ensuring each touchpoint provides value or information, rather than simply asking for money repeatedly.

The standout performers

While all 15 tools showed growth-focused design, three stood out for their sophisticated monetization strategies:

Claude excels at the Progressive Squeeze, building user investment before presenting upgrade opportunities. Their limit messaging feels helpful rather than restrictive, and the upgrade pathway is seamless.

Ideogram masters the Feature Tease, showcasing premium capabilities so effectively that users understand the upgrade value before reaching any limits. Their visual hierarchy makes premium features aspirational rather than frustrating.

Perplexity nails the Transparent Countdown, creating urgency without anxiety through clear limit communication and value-focused messaging.

Common missed opportunities

Our analysis revealed several patterns where even successful tools leave money on the table:

• Timing failures: Many tools show upgrade prompts during onboarding when users haven’t yet experienced value, rather than waiting for engagement.
• Value communication gaps: Some tools gate features without clearly explaining the benefits, leading to confusion rather than desire.
• Conversion pathway friction: Several tools send users to generic pricing pages rather than contextual upgrade flows that maintain momentum.
• Limit surprises: Tools that suddenly cut off functionality without warning create frustration rather than conversion motivation.

Applying these patterns to your SaaS growth strategies

These AI growth strategies aren’t limited to AI tools. The underlying principles work for any SaaS looking to improve free-to-paid conversion:

Start with your user journey mapping

Identify key moments where users experience value and where they encounter limitations. These are your conversion opportunity points.

Audit your current upgrade messaging

Are you using the Progressive Squeeze, or do you jump straight to hard limits? Are you showing users what they’re missing with Feature Teasing?

Review your limit of communication

Do users understand their usage limits, and when they reset? Transparent Countdown reduces churn and builds trust.

Optimize your touchpoint strategy

Map where upgrade CTAs appear in your interface and ensure each serves a specific user need rather than just asking for payment.

Test your conversion timing

Are you presenting upgrade options when users are most invested (Moment of Need) or just when it’s convenient for your UI?

What does this mean for your growth strategy?

AI tools are teaching us that successful monetization isn’t always about restricting features; it can be about showcasing value, building trust, and timing conversion opportunities perfectly. The tools growing fastest aren’t necessarily those with the best AI models, but those with the smartest user experience design.

These patterns work because they align business needs with user psychology. Instead of seeing limits as barriers, users experience them as natural progression points toward greater value.

The AI boom provides a unique laboratory for studying growth tactics at scale. These tools process millions of users and can iterate rapidly, revealing what actually drives conversions versus what we think should work.

As AI capabilities become more commoditized, user experience (including monetization design) becomes the key differentiator. The tools implementing these patterns now are building sustainable competitive advantages that will persist even as the underlying technology evolves.

Taking action on these insights

The most successful SaaS companies will adapt these AI growth strategies to their own products before their competitors catch on. Start by analyzing your current monetization approach against these five patterns:

1. Map your user journey to identify Progressive Squeeze opportunities
2. Audit your feature visibility to implement Feature Teasing where appropriate
3. Review your limit of communication to adopt Transparent Countdown principles
4. Time your conversion prompts to leverage the Moment of Need psychology
5. Optimize your touchpoint strategy using Omnipresent Nudge best practices

The data from these 15 AI tools provides a roadmap, but implementation requires careful testing and optimization for your specific user base and value proposition.

Ready to apply these AI growth strategies to accelerate your SaaS growth? The Good specializes in analyzing user experiences and implementing conversion optimization strategies that turn insights into revenue. Our team has helped dozens of SaaS companies optimize their monetization flows using data-driven approaches just like this analysis.

Get your personalized monetization strategy audit. We’ll analyze your current user experience against these proven patterns and create a prioritized optimization roadmap tailored to your product and audience. Schedule a consultation with our team to discover how these AI growth strategies can accelerate your revenue growth.

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How Top AI Tools Turn Free Users Into Paying Customers

The post 5 SaaS Growth Strategies That Work (Based On Analysis Of 15 Top AI Tools) appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

Jon and Ryan discuss the challenges and importance of wisely selecting and utilizing marketing experts. They cover the pitfalls of deceptive marketing claims and the importance of carefully selecting and evaluating external experts, agencies, or vendors.

They also explore the ongoing debate surrounding hiring internal or external marketing experts and teams, providing examples and practical tips for making informed choices that align with your business’s needs and resources.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How to meticulously select marketing experts
2. How to approach the use of AI and automation in marketing
3. Why you shouldn’t trust marketing collateral
4. How to find experts that align with your company
5. How to make the most of conferences and events

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 ecommerce growth engine with John McDonald and Ryan Garro.

Jon:
So Ryan, you have been involved in conferences or as you said earlier, the gauntlet of conferences the past 2 weeks Outside of the sunshine, because I know at least one of those was in Palm Springs, so lucky you. It rained in Ryan Portland while you had nice weather. I’m assuming because the weather was nice and knowing you, you found time for golf. And because we both like good food, I’m sure you had some fancy dinners in there. Were these conferences helpful? I’d like to know beyond sunshine, golf, and fancy dinners, which all sounds amazing to me. Mhmm. What’d you take away from these? What do you really wanna talk about today with these conferences and events that you’ve been at?

Ryan:
I don’t think my wife listens to my podcast. So hopefully, she’s not here because if she you know, baby, if you’re listening to this, they’re they’re terrible. They’re not fun. I had terrible food. For people not my wife, I I do enjoy the sun, especially when you leave Portland in February. Yes. I think the last 2 Mondays I’ve left for the conference. It’s been raining on my way to the airport, or snowing on the way to the airport.

Ryan:
And so I went to Palm Springs, Vegas, and then I head to San Diego next week. There’s some wonderful things about conferences. And then there’s some other things that I think as a brand, there’d just be I would be frustrated Mhmm. As a brand going to some of these and walking the expo floor just because there’s just everybody is saying the same thing. So how do you filter through that? How do you understand what’s true and what isn’t? Because everything in a conference looks shiny and great. Everybody’s putting their best foot forward. There’s no skeletons in the closet. There’s no, unhappy clients that none of these vendors have ever had.

Ryan:
So it’s like like, how do you how do you work your way around that and and understand that?

Jon:
Well, that that okay. So that’s a great place to start then. You’ve been walking these ecommerce conference floors, talking with brands quite a bit over the past couple of weeks. What are your biggest takeaways then?

Ryan:
For me, it’s becoming more apparent than in the 15 years in ecom and online marketing. Not much has changed. I mean, companies are still looking for an easy button to grow, and there’s no shortage of companies promising that they are the easy button that will make all of their problems disappear. That hasn’t changed at all in 15 years.

Jon:
Surprised surprised.

Ryan:
Yeah. It it shouldn’t be surprising, but it it’s also frustrating to see the same companies promising same things, and I have to believe that there’s a lot of overpromise under deliver that come out of this conference Jon. Like, the q one is all about ecommerce conferences, it seems like every year.

Jon:
Yeah.

Ryan:
Just gets more and more intense in my idea in my world, just how condensed it all is. But also on that, as I’ve sat through some of these conference talks and some thought leadership things I’ve been a part of and seen. From my perspective on the marketing side, driving traffic is is only getting more complicated. And with, you know, Google Analytics changing, maybe better, maybe worse depending on your opinion on that. It’s changing. It’s causing all of this traffic and the and the tracking of traffic that we, you know, got really excited about over the last, you know, decade, decade and a half of being able to track things. It’s it’s still not perfect and it’s getting maybe less perfect with this. So the traffic driving and and attributing it is getting more and more complicated.

Ryan:
I think companies are getting generally better at marketing themselves at conferences. I think there’s always some that are just like, well, I’ll have a booth and I’ll get business. Other ones are getting little more creative with offers and and how they’re presenting things at their booth to kinda be shiny and, attractive. And and it’s almost like they’re getting better at the dating game the longer they’ve done it. And I think companies need to be better at at understanding that and kinda protecting themselves as they go talk to these companies there. Because I don’t know if there is a company out there that’s not been taken advantage of by some expert or agency or vendor in the marketing space online. Like, it I think that is the consistent thing across all 5th grade. You’ve been taking advantage of.

Ryan:
I hear there all day every day. Right. Like, I don’t trust agencies. Okay. Well, great. There’s all always bad ones.

Jon:
Yeah. I mean, I think the there’s the personal aspect of it with an agency. You’re dealing with other people where when you sign up for a SaaS tool that’s supposed to help you or a a Shopify app or something like that and it doesn’t do what it says it’s going to do, you kind of unsubscribe and then forget about it because it’s a faceless app, right, in most cases. So I think that is the big difference in why people feel like taking advantage of because instead of reading it on a marketing site, they were told by somebody during the sales process what was gonna happen. So I can totally understand that. I hear I hear that nonstop, especially in CROs. It’s become more commoditized that folks are saying, hey. I’ve tried CRO, and it didn’t work for me.

Jon:
I was like, okay. What would you try? Well, we ran a 100 a b tests on our site. And I’m like, how a 100? What were you doing? Like, who are you working with? Well, these folks out of India said they could do a 100 AB tests and and, you know, $500 a month. And I was, like, wow. Okay. Yep. You get what you pay for. But

Ryan:
Yes.

Jon:
I think that opportunity, you’re right, is there for all consulting type engagements. Okay. So you listed off quite a few things there, which is awesome. I think that’s a lot of good takeaways. What’s a company to do with all of this?

Ryan:
Well, I think it is, you know, for all the good things, bad things within conferences, they’re a good place to meet a lot of people all at once. And that part is really good. But I think it’s becoming more important for brands to find their experts. And I think all companies have different sizes and even in the same vertical, there’s just gonna be different experts that you resonate with that are gonna be your people.

Jon:
Mhmm.

Ryan:
And so I think you have to find those people. You know, all things being equal between 2 competitors, the one with access to or using experts is going to be the one that wins. They’re getting better advice. They’re out there learning more, and they’ve got experts bringing that insight into their organization to help them compete. And I think the the smaller you are, the harder it’s gonna be to find experts. And so, you know, you may need to go, you know, into a conference and dig a little deeper, and you don’t have the resources that a larger brand has. Larger brands can afford to hire experts and maybe fire them easily and hire another one if it doesn’t work. They could also bring them into the company, hire internally.

Ryan:
Mhmm. But, you know, larger brands have to filter through a lot more crap probably because of their budget. Everybody’s like, yes, you’re our target market, so pay us. And they all wanna be paid. I’m boiling this all down. It you have to find your experts. Right. And the wrong ones can hurt you, so you have to, you know, there’s that mantra within hiring, like, hire slowly fire quick.

Ryan:
If you’re hiring external ex experts or agencies or vendors, that’s the same exact thing. Like Yeah. Take your time hiring. Don’t make an impulse decision. And if it’s not working, you need to be away walk away quickly. Place them.

Jon:
I’m seeing a trend, and maybe you’re seeing this too, as there’s a lot more agencies that are claiming to be experts. I’m seeing a lot of bigger brands, especially now even smaller brands, I suppose. That’s starting to be true on the smaller end. But they’re hiring individual experts for individual needs. That need could be, hey, I just wanna drive Google Ads. I’m gonna go to the Google Ad expert agency, or I need help on Amazon, I’m gonna go directly to that Amazon agency that only claims to be an expert there. I’m finding that that’s happening more and more when we’re brought into the situation that we’re ending up teaming up on this almost super team of folks who are maybe smaller agencies or or midsize agencies that are experts in one unique thing, and they’re kind of bringing us all to the table together. It has its pros and cons, especially a big con if you don’t have someone on the client side to manage all of those agencies.

Jon:
Right? If you’re just expecting them to all share amongst each other, that’s gonna be your problem. But I think it’s interesting. Like, there certainly is no shortage of these companies out there claiming to be experts, or I think the big one right now is everyone’s saying they have the best AI, which I think is hilarious because, you know, most of them aren’t even AI truly. Right? So

Ryan:
Yeah. Well, I mean, a couple of good points. I mean, I think we’ve gotten mature enough as an industry that we do likely have more experts than we had 15 years ago. I mean, 15 years ago, you’ve been doing this for a year. You you might be considered an expert, but you’ve only got a year of experience. Now you’ve got, you know, people like us that have, you know, might as well be dinosaurs in ecom. But we have the insight and expertise. Then and there’s more people now that have stuck with it long enough to be considered an expert, in my opinion.

Ryan:
So there are, you know, more experts to see through or hear from, but the AI the AI piece, you know, just blows me away. I was I was in Vegas yesterday walking the conference floor for an Amazon event, and it was a pretty big one. I would estimate somewhere in the neighborhood of 60% of all the vendors exhibiting there had AI on their back drop.

Jon:
Wow.

Ryan:
You know, I mean, it was, like, I think there was a shipping company that was, like, yeah, we do logistics. Okay. Well, they they get LTL and ship freight and AI was on their backdrop. I’m like, pretty pretty sure you’re not using AI. Well, we’re gonna find the best routes. Like, it’s going from China to the US. It’s it the boat goes west to east. It’s not complicated.

Jon:
Yeah. Unless it’s your boat, you’re not finding the route anyways. Right? Like

Ryan:
No. It’s like somebody else is doing it. There are subs there are some vendor of yours. And it was funny even we had a obviously, Jon conference in Vegas, there’s gonna be some drinking. And so myself and one of my, colleagues at logical position, we sat down and there’s a competitor there that’s an automated system. They’ve been around for a little while. And they’re claiming to have the best AI specifically, and they were focusing on Amazon ads. And we’ve seen their system work, and we’ve seen change issue.

Ryan:
We we know it fairly well. We compete against them on multiple arenas. And confronted in an environment where they had had a couple beers and the truth serum was there, they actually admitted they don’t have AI. It’s more of a, you know, a marketing change that somebody looks in their equation and tweaks it.

Jon:
Like it Mhmm.

Ryan:
AI is not being used as readily as people are saying it. But if you don’t say it, it it people won’t pay attention because everybody wants to be on the cutting edge. So as a a company wants to use a vendor that says, oh, they’re the best. They’ve got the newest technology. Like, which I get. But just saying the, you know, artificial intelligence, which some people using AI might even know what that that’s what it means.

Jon:
Right.

Ryan:
So there’s you have to be careful. I think yeah.

Jon:
I agree. There’s a ton of SaaS apps out there and service providers saying they they use AI, and it’s not AI when you get down to it. And I think it’s true. It’s because people respond to it, clients respond to it, thinking, oh, you must be ahead of the curve. I wonder how long that will last, quite honestly, but it has worked the last 2 years maybe. And then I think right now, if you think about the economic conditions, especially in United States but worldwide, the only companies really getting funding are those that say they have AI, and there’s really not a lot of funding to go around. So if you’re not saying that you have AI in there, you’re you’re probably not gonna get funded. So I think that’s also influencing a lot of these SaaS brands that want to grow and need outdoor outside funding.

Jon:
Excuse me. They really are forced to to say they have AI just to be part of that circle.

Ryan:
I mean, yeah. I’ve used chat gpt to help come up with some proposal things or help I used to help me brainstorm. I think chat gpt is phenomenal for brainstorming. But that doesn’t mean that Ryan Garo has AI. It means that I’ve used chat gbt to prompt some things. Cool. I guess, be careful.

Jon:
Yes. Yes. Alright. So knowing all of this, and there’s a lot of truth serum that should be out there in the future, hopefully.

Ryan:
Mhmm.

Jon:
But what does a brand do to sift through all of these things to find the experts they really need?

Ryan:
Well, outside of taking him to Vegas bar and buying him a couple beers and asking questions.

Jon:
Might be worthwhile quite honestly, and you get a free trip to Vegas. Right? So

Ryan:
Yeah. It might make sense for your brand depending on how many extras you’re hiring. I’ve come up with on the plane ride back, I came up with a list of what I think, 6 things every company can do to help them find their marketing experts, you know, and and really focusing on external ones. I’m not gonna go in how to hire an internal expert and do that whole interview to but every company is gonna have some external experts.

Jon:
Fair. And so what strikes me here is that you were so bothered by what you saw. That on the flight home, you were like, what are 6 ways people can avoid this situation? I mean, that says a lot to me already as a service provider that the skepticism that is introspective here, right, of our own industry. I can’t imagine what the what the brands and clients are out there thinking. Like, that is, you know, that that that strikes me as this is a challenge that we have to confront because there are so many I don’t know if I wanna call them bad actors, but I think under that type of umbrella. Right?

Ryan:
Yeah. And I think, you know, that it’s the salesmanship game, like, the sales side, marketing side of lots of companies will push the envelope to Mhmm. Get attention and get people in the door to at least talk, which I I kind of understand that to a degree. But it’s when you’re, you know, selling somebody something and setting expectations that are not gonna be realized and you’re aware of that, like, you just can’t do that. Like, one of my goals, and I’ve probably told this to you multiple times, I wanna put the bad actors, the snake oil sales people in my industry out of business.

Jon:
Right.

Ryan:
And I feel like I’m doing an okay job, but it’s like whack a mole, and there’s a lot of them there. So I’ve I’ve the more people I can educate on just how to be looking at vendors, even if you don’t work with me, that’s fine. Let’s just keep you from, like, losing money, hopefully by picking the wrong one. So the 6 things I came up with we’re gonna start with, don’t trust marketing collateral just because of what I just said. Like, understand that companies are going to say things to get you interested or peak interest, and that’s fine. Like, you know, who was it? Oh, Gatorade says be like Mike years ago. Like, I understand that if I drink Gatorade, I’m not gonna be able to dunk a basketball like Mike. You know, I my mom tried to make me believe I could do anything and that, you know, yes, you’re only 5, 6, but you’re gonna be able to dunk.

Ryan:
It’s gonna be great. You know what? It’s not gonna happen.

Jon:
Fair enough.

Ryan:
I didn’t take that Gatorade commercial to believe, like, hey. I’m gonna dunk like Mike, but I’m like, hey. Could it make me better? Probably. Let’s investigate how it can make me better or rehydrate me better. So there’s no checks and balances on the on the people that are printing the things that go to conferences and sit behind the the booth or whatever. Mhmm. The guy printing it or a girl printing it, they’re not thinking, like, this isn’t AI. Why are you putting this on there? There’s, like, yeah, Whatever you’re paying me, I’m gonna print whatever you tell me to print.

Ryan:
So just know there’s no checks and balances there.

Jon:
Yeah. And there’s no industry standards around this. Right? It’s not like you’re like, the FDA does food and drug, right, where, you know, at the end of every drug commercial you see on TV, there has to be all these disclaimers. If Yeah. Consultancies had to put disclaimers at the end of all their ads, oof, I mean, there’s some hilarious. I’ve I’ve been seeing a whole bunch of hilarious meme, if you will, accounts on LinkedIn lately, and one of them is all about ad agencies. And it’s really funny because one of them this morning I just saw said, ad agency of 5 grows to 25 for the client meeting thanks to friends and family. It’s true.

Jon:
It’s like you just had all your friends and family come in and sit in the office while you had the client come in for a meeting and, you know, to look big. Right?

Ryan:
Mhmm.

Jon:
And I had to laugh at that because it’s so true. Like, that’s the type of stuff that happens because there’s no regulation around this. Right? It’s unfortunate.

Ryan:
Yeah. I mean, even as I was walking around meeting some potential partners, in the space, because that’s why I was there to try to find companies that would help our clients grow. Like, I’m walking around and and I’m telling people about logical position. And as I was back reflecting, they have no idea if I was lying saying that we have, you know, 8,000 clients. Like, we do, but how would they ever verify that? There’s not you can’t even go to LinkedIn to see all these companies are said we work with them.

Jon:
Mhmm.

Ryan:
They can see that there’s up to 900 people maybe that say they work at a logical position, which is great, but I also know that there’s a bunch of fake people on LinkedIn that send me messages about their business coming to the US, and I can help them with a new project. I’m like, I know that this model is not working out of India. So be careful.

Jon:
Yeah. So start by not trusting that marketing collateral. That’s number 1.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on ecommerce growth. Your hosts are John McDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with ecommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garo 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:
The what what’s number 2?

Ryan:
So number 2, somewhat along that line, but be careful with AI. And people claiming II, even if they have some AI or automation in their systems from a marketing perspective, when you’re driving traffic, you really don’t need AI Mhmm. Or or significant automations. You know, Google and Microsoft both have significant investments and products in the AI world. Like it’s documented, like Microsoft gave $13,000,000,000 to chat gpt to be able to leverage all that. And now there’s Elon Musk is mad because it’s making money instead of being nonprofits. Whatever. But obviously, Microsoft has AI.

Ryan:
Google’s had AI for well over a decade publicly, and they’re now I think they’re changing the name from Bard to something else now, but Mhmm. Google’s got AI.

Jon:
Gemini. Right?

Ryan:
I think it’s going to Gemini. Yeah. They’re changing the name to now it’s Gemini. So if you have this AI in the platform itself that’s driving traffic and then you’re Jon stick another AI on top of that, like, and I don’t know what happens with 2 AI robots fight. I mean, we don’t have battle the bots on TV anymore, but who knows? But why would you have bid optimization on top of Google Performance Max bid optimization? Like Yeah. That does not logically make sense.

Jon:
It gives me the vision of having 2 Alexas talking to each other. Right? Yeah.

Ryan:
They’re gonna have a great conversation, but if they’re not working for you at that point, who knows what they’re gonna do? No. And I and I go back to, you know, being in this every 15 years, we can go back to some of those, you know, automated systems of 10 years ago. That 10 years ago, they were pretty good. Like, there were some good you know, it wasn’t AI, but it was they were automatically building certain things out in Google Ads that made them more efficient than our team that was, you know, all human powered. Mhmm. Now 10 years later, those agencies are gone or they’re a fraction of the size of their former self just because Google and Microsoft saw what was happening and said, hey, we need to make certain things easier for our clients, which are the advertisers. The agencies are not clients of Google. Well, I mean, our money goes there, but that’s not their focus.

Jon:
So Right.

Ryan:
Understand that. Like, AI is not going to be, you know, the difference in driving traffic generally more efficiently. And it’s important to note too that AI is not the expert. You know, yes, if you have an automated system doing some stuff or an artificial intelligence helping learn or or look at some data for you, great. That in and of itself is not going to help your business get to the next level. It’s going to be the account manager helping work with you or your team to interpret some of that or help direct the AI. And so if that company yeah. You know, you can have a Ferrari sitting in your driveway.

Ryan:
But if you’re gonna take it to the track and you don’t know how to drive a Ferrari on a track, good luck. It’s Yeah. You’re not gonna get anywhere. You know, I would be a terrible race car driver even though in my head I’d love to race cars. Don’t put me in a formula 1 car and expect me to be able to drive that. So, you know, understand AI and its role in what you’re trying to accomplish. And that, you know, most companies should just oversimplify it when they’re analyzing. Do we need AI in this? Knowing there’s AI here and here.

Ryan:
Specifically, this is an Amazon conference that I was just at. And Amazon is not to the level of automation and AI that Mhmm. Google and Microsoft are. They’re kinda behind on their ads platform by they’re catching up very quickly, but I would still put them maybe 2 years behind. And so there’s probably some automation that still makes sense and some in some a a I in my air quotes here on my podcast. That can still move the needle and help a little bit on Amazon, but that is not going to be the case, you know, in a year or 2 years when Amazon’s, you know, system catches up

Jon:
Right.

Ryan:
Relatively quickly. Amazon is throwing a lot of money at their, advertising platform, and I think it’s developed extremely rapidly.

Jon:
Okay. So start by not trusting marketing collateral, then be careful around AI because you probably don’t need it. What’s the third one?

Ryan:
The third one, as you go to conferences as a brand or an ecom business, you want to go there, you know, with the goal of learning, not necessarily going to say, I’m gonna go here to find, like, a new paid search agency.

Jon:
Mhmm.

Ryan:
That would be a bad goal. You wanna go and say, I’m looking for some help on paid search. Great. There’s a few vendors here. I would go in, and I wanna ask the other companies that are not paid search companies there, who do they partner with for paid search within their organization? Who do their clients use that does good work even if they’re not there? If they’re there, that’s kind of a bonus to say, hey, I’d like to actually talk to them. Hopefully, they’re not side by side because that may prove that there’s some relationship there that may not be giving you truth within that. But I think, you wanna come out of that with 3 to 4 companies you probably should be talking to around that for that particular vendor you’re looking for. And then don’t ever sign up with one of those companies at the conference.

Ryan:
That would be a a bad idea almost across the board. Probably getting drinks. They’re probably paying for talks, that make them appear smarter or more capable than they actually are. So just be careful. Everything looks better at a conference. Take a week after that to digest it, make some reference calls, things like that. But go in with your eyes open always to that.

Jon:
Okay. Alright. What about number what are we on? 5? Yeah. 4.

Ryan:
I think we’re on 5. Yeah. 44. So the 4th one is understand you get what you pay Ryan then prioritize based on your resources. Mhmm. You know, for example, I’m not gonna be able to hire John McDonald level CRO talent for $500 a month. Like, John McDonald is a verified expert. He is going to charge a premium on his skill set because he is that good and he can demand that.

Ryan:
Somebody’s telling you they’re gonna charge you $500 for CRO, you’re going to get that level of CRO.

Jon:
We can just shut the show off right now. Thank you.

Ryan:
Yep. Done. I just dropped my mic. Oh, wait. I could bring that back. And so it’s interesting when you’re looking at marketing online. I generally advocate for brands building their traffic from the bottom of the funnel up. Like, capture the very bottom of the funnel, then add a level, then add a level, and your return on ad spend drops as you move up.

Ryan:
Conversion rates drop as you move up the funnel as well, but built Jon the bottom up. And you may need to hire your experts from the top down. And what I mean by that is you likely can’t afford the best paid search agency talent if you’re making less than $1,000,000 in revenue. Mhmm. You know? There are some very good agencies out there. Their minimums will be prohibitive if you have a small spend on Google and Microsoft. But you might actually be able to hire a great fractional CMO that can help you set better goals and understand how to actually grow and develop a brand that can help feed top line revenue and brand demand and help guide some of that paid search efforts down further down. So understand where you are in the growth segment in your space and what your resources can afford and what would be the best.

Ryan:
And then what I would do if I’m smaller on the smaller brand side, I would set a goal to get that net ex next expert. So if I started by hiring that fractional CMO, I would say, okay. I’ve got that figured in. I can see my p and l. Maybe the next expert for me, I’m a see fractional CMO and I agree that it’s a paid search expert. Mhmm. Okay. Great.

Ryan:
Let’s see when we get to this level of revenue or this level of spend, it makes sense to bring on an expert to handle that piece for us. And then as I move up the funnel, I file another expert.

Jon:
Yeah. One of the things that I always enjoy hearing when I’m on the phone with a potential client who has reached out to us is when they say, we have done all of this other work, and we are now ready to optimize. When I hear that, I’m thinking this could be a good fit for us because I realize that there are a lot of steps before you should optimize. And if they have taken those steps, all the better. But if they’re just trying to scattershot different services to try to find whatever is gonna work for them and they haven’t had a plan and they haven’t really followed a path to unlock working with additional experts, then probably not a good fit. Right? To me, I need somebody who’s gonna be a little more methodical about it, and that’s what you’re saying as well is unlock the ability to hire that next expert, but don’t let it stop you from hiring the first one. And I think that’s really good advice, Ryan. I like hearing that.

Ryan:
Well, thank you. And it feeds in well to what you do and what we do. And and I think the next point would be understand what you and your team are best at.

Jon:
Mhmm.

Ryan:
And then find comp find talent that compliments you well. You know, for example, I know that I’m great at driving top line growth. Like, I’m passionate about it. I’ve done it a lot. I just I enjoy it that if that’s one of my core competencies. And what I’m often not good at is creating operational processes that will build the efficiencies in the middle of the p and l. Mhmm. Right? If you want me to be like, okay, our operations are struggling here in the manufacturing process.

Ryan:
Ryan, can you go in and try to look at that? I’ll be like, that mean I can look at it, but it’s definitely not gonna be where I’m gonna come up with a great idea because I’ve got experience here of what it is. And I think an important asterisk to all that is also be aware of yourself and that just because you really like something doesn’t mean that you’re going to be the expert your company needs in that area.

Jon:
Mhmm.

Ryan:
You know, I really enjoy, you know, shooting hoops. You know, I’ll get in the backyard. I’ll shoot hoops. I enjoy it. It’s fun. It’s relaxing for me. It’s actually how I do some of my thinking. But if I needed a point guard for a team, I know I’m not gonna be great for that.

Ryan:
Like so watch for that in your business That you can maybe participate with that expert Mhmm. But don’t be that expert if it’s just something you enjoy that you know you maybe aren’t the best at.

Jon:
Okay. Great. So okay. So what’s what’s the final point here? I think you have one more. Right?

Ryan:
Yep. The final point is is a really challenging one that comes up often, and it’s a a debate that will rage as long as we have businesses. But it’s internal versus external. You know, does this expert or this talent need to be an internal person, human that you’ve hired or an internal team or does need to be an external team? And I guarantee there’s not a perfect answer for everybody. But I’ll give you my opinion for what it’s worth. If you’ve gotten to this level in our podcast, maybe my opinion matters, but I keep it pretty simple. If it’s core to your business, think internal. And then I would be external for almost everything else for various reasons.

Ryan:
But, you know, an example would be if you can’t run Google Ads or Meta Ads for your business for whatever reason, maybe you’re selling guns or cannabis, SEO is going to be very core to the survival and growth of your business. I would say hire an SEO person that has proven expertise, in various areas of SEO. You can look and you can externally see their work very obviously. If they work for that, you can call references. Obviously, they’re an expert. I may actually give that person equity within the business to make because there isn’t as likely to be a career path for that person if they’re leading SEO in your organization. Usually, you don’t go, you know, SEO chief marketing officer.

Jon:
Mhmm. Right.

Ryan:
You’re gonna be probably leading the SEO because they’re so important to that. But let them maybe hire some external experts to do the actual work that they’re leading and setting strategy for.

Jon:
Okay.

Ryan:
If you’re building a brand, you know, your voice is going to be very core to the business. You know, so email and social community management may be much more core than the ads piece. So you would lean into having the community management email communication be internal, whereas the ads piece or even just executing a loyalty program could be external. You know, we had a the last comments, dude wipes was there. That is a phenomenal brand story if you haven’t. They understand who they are and what their who their target market is, and they attack that very well and have some great humor for it and very specific reasons for that humor.

Jon:
Yeah.

Ryan:
And so internally for them, communicating and nurturing that community, 100% an internal expert talent. Executing ads may not need to be as internal or a core competency that they own internally for them. And so just understand that within your business and what you’re trying to do and what you’re trying to execute. I also warn brands, because I’ve seen it a lot over the years where you’ll have internal employees build up a resume internally and then leave to an agency, get promoted, come back to a branch. So there is that zigzag between brand and agency that just happens in in many roles. And if that role is likely to do that for you, it may help to have external in particular because it will keep the consistency there. One of our brands we worked with, every probably 8 or 9 months, they would lose the person in charge of paid search. And they just would say, hey.

Ryan:
I’ve paid search for this well known brand. I’m leading all these agencies. They would go to an agency and be a director and lead teams that were going leading agency brands. Just very consistently. Because we were their paid search agency executing this a lot of that strategy, it was very easy for them to keep their paid search operating at a high level because the agency executing was consistent. And then we would be able to work with a new person and say, okay. Here’s what we’ve been doing. You may or may not like it, but let’s maybe figure out what makes sense for what your goals are as the new head of paid search Mhmm.

Ryan:
Managing us is going to be. So every brand will be different on this internal, external, but, hopefully, that can give you some direction on that.

Jon:
That’s great. Okay. So your let’s call him Garrow’s 6 tips for finding and using marketing experts. So we’ve got start by not trusting marketing collateral. Be careful around AI. You probably don’t need it, and most brands aren’t actually using AI to begin with even if it’s in their marketing. Don’t go to that fancy conference and just say, I’m gonna sign a contract and, use only the 3 or 4 that you see there. Do your homework.

Jon:
Understand you get what you pay for, and then prioritize based on that. 5th is know what you and your team are best at. Find that talent that compliments you well. And 6th was internal versus external. Right? So when should you hire internal versus farm it out? Did I get all 6 of those right?

Ryan:
I think so.

Jon:
Awesome.

Ryan:
You were paying you were paying attention.

Jon:
Sometimes they do. Right? Awesome. Well, thank you, Ryan. This was very helpful. I appreciate it. And, it’s always good to have you have to go to these fancy conferences and bring back all this great information. And next time, I’ll join you for the, sunshine, golf, and fancy dinners. How’s that?

Ryan:
I think that’d be great. You should join me for sure.

Jon:
Alright. Sounds good, Ryan.

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

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 103): How to Find and Utilize the Right Marketing Experts appeared first on The Good.

Not because I don’t see its value, but rather because it gets thrown around as clickbait, and use cases are often completely misrepresented.

I’ve intentionally not brought up AI in The Good’s articles or newsletter because I don’t want to contribute to unhelpful conversations. But, it’s time to cut through that noise.

Today let’s talk about how to leverage AI, not just as a buzzword, but as a practical tool for boosting your efficiency, generating ideas, and ultimately making the digital world a better place.

We covered AI in UX optimization on a recent podcast episode of Drive and Convert. Listen to the full episode below for more context.

AI can either help or harm your digital improvement efforts

As a digital leader, finding ways to streamline processes and improve user experience is crucial. Especially as the holiday season adds chaos to the mix.

AI can be a tool in your toolkit to help your digital improvement efforts. But, if used incorrectly, it can also harm them. Why?

• AI is trained on biased information: The tool is trained on certain public information and data sets. That public information and data are biased toward certain users and populations.
• AI can state false information as fact: AI can be extremely convincing, while at the same time being completely wrong. Outputs aren’t fact-checked and can be misrepresented.

There is also, of course, the question of the ethical use of AI and how it might be plagiarizing creators, which I won’t get into today. I encourage you to do your own research with the mindset that you can and should be using AI to support your work. But, you should be doing it in a way that helps, not harms.

So, let’s start with an overarching caveat that the human touch is still pivotal to user experience optimization and digital experience improvement in general.

When using AI, researchers and strategists have to use critical thinking to create the correct constraints, requirements, and prompts for AI tools and then sift through the output to select relevant points.

It can’t replace real user research. The behaviors and motivations of your users are unique. The same way we wouldn’t recommend you copy everything a competitor is doing because their audience and goals are almost guaranteed to be different to yours, we don’t recommend you replace AI with talking to and testing with your own users. Instead, it can help make those processes more efficient.

With that in mind, here are a few ways you can use AI to support your digital optimization efforts.

Leverage a ‘brainstorm buddy’

If you’re a remote worker, AI can and should become your virtual brainstorming buddy.

The same way you would lead a team in a brainstorming session or go to a colleague for ideas, prompt AI with specifics on what you are looking for, and watch the ideas flow.

To get the most out of the tool, you’ll need to be specific, provide constraints, share guidelines on your audience, and ask questions. The more precise the instructions, the more relevant and useful the suggestions generated by the tool.

If you don’t like the ideas generated, continue asking questions and iterating on your prompt until it sparks inspiration. Remember to use it to brainstorm, not to do the actual work.

Here are some specific examples of AI as a great brainstorming buddy:

• Ask for examples of use cases you are trying to create in your work
• Build a list of competitors
• Use it as a search supplement to Google
• Share your own ideas with the tool and ask it to identify blindspots

Create initial prototypes for validation

You can use AI as a tool for creating prototypes. It is a low-effort, high-impact way to get validation on your ideas before you write any code or invest in design.

Once you get initial feedback on the prototypes from users, your designers and developers can take the AI prototype and use it as a guide or inspiration for the final product.

Some specific use case examples are:

• Upload a sketch of a wireframe and use an AI-backed tool to create a higher-fidelity prototype
• Modify a Shopify template based on prompts you give the tool and create an initial artifact that you can hand off to a developer
• Feed the AI tool your product or landing page and have it generate initial filler copy with higher value than lorem ipsum
• Boost the realism of your imagery by sharing some of your product images and using AI to generate them in situ before you invest in a photoshoot

This gives you a starting point and a way to avoid a time and cost investment in something you aren’t sure will deliver results.

Improve your copy

We know from years of testing that users don’t have the time or patience for walls of text. And most of the time, neither does your internal team.

AI can be a great tool for improving your copy and making your point faster.

A few specific examples include asking AI to:

• Shorten your copy while retaining the essence
• Extract key points
• Tailor your content to specific personas

It’s like having an extra set of eyes that only focus on what matters.

Gain internal support

You’ve got the data and research, but how do you present it in a way that resonates with executives who might not be optimization experts?

AI can be a great support in translating long presentations or source material into a first draft of digestible information for your higher-ups.

For example:

• Run your reports through AI to simplify and clarify
• Get key points tailored for any team members or leaders who might be unfamiliar with the intricacies of optimization

Quickly translate comprehensive work into bite-sized insights and “need to know” highlights that allow for quick decisions and cross-team visibility.

Note that as the digital product owner on your team, you should still be privy to the comprehensive report you’re consolidating. Don’t skip the details; that is where the nuggets of gold are for improving your digital experience.

But, AI can help you keep that information high level for people who don’t work on the day-to-day of your site or app.

Visualize personas and the customer journey

AI can be used as a creative partner to turn theoretical ideas into something visual.

For example:

• Create visual representations of your personas as a supplement to some of the more fact-based research you use to build that profile
• Describe your user journey (steps from research to buying to conversion) and ask AI to draft a journey map that you can iterate on
• Ask for draft designs of specific website pages based on your user personas

Small companies can even use AI to create brand assets to get them started.

Support your user research

There is a nuance that comes with user research that AI just can’t understand yet, but you can leverage the tool as support on both the front end and back end of user tests.

Generate ideas for questions or tasks with AI, and then when you have your research, AI can look at large sets of data to find focus points. Strategists and human brain power can then analyze those areas for insights.

Specifically, try using AI to:

• Draft interview questions
• Draft tasks for user testing
• Feed videos into AI and ask for a simple sentiment analysis
• Tell AI to extract themes from user testing scripts or videos
• Ask it to categorize themes

A drawback of this approach is that if you rely too much on the tool, you can lose a lot of the value from your research. And you also won’t learn about user testing as you do it.

So, just remember it’s user testing, not AI testing. The goal is to leverage AI to supplement human insights and not let it hinder you as you build your expertise.

Start by using AI in small user experience optimization instances

All of this is to say, if you haven’t already, you need to start using AI now. It will put you on the path to becoming an expert (which will be crucial as the functionality of the tool improves) and increase your day-to-day efficiency.

You still can’t rely on AI to solve your complicated customer and user problems. Instead, use it in your toolkit and start getting familiar with how it can support your work.

AI, like most efficiency hacks, is not the silver bullet. But it can serve as a trusted sidekick.

Its power lies in practical, targeted implementation across your processes. Complement that with a solid understanding of your users and the tool can enhance, not replace, your optimization efforts.

The post How Can I Leverage AI In User Experience Optimization? appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

AI is a pretty buzzy term, and it can mean different things to different people. In this episode, Jon and Ryan engage in a lively discussion about the use of AI, with a specific focus on its application in UX and optimization. 

They start by differentiating actual AI tools from AI enabled applications. Then, they delve into the practical applications and potential benefits of ChatGPT, touching on its affordability, effectiveness in idea generation, and visual design capabilities.  

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What you can accomplish with a free version of ChatGPT
2. How to write specific prompts for brainstorming and ideation
3. How to use ChatGPT to write codes and create prototypes for your website 
4. Why AI is important for rewriting and condensing data, information and website copy
5. How to apply AI in visual design and user research

Check out Tldraw in action!

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.

Ryan:
Jon, we have some exciting stuff today. Not only are we in the middle of holiday, which is chaotic regardless of where you fall in the e-comm ecosystem, but it’s fun and the data’s exciting. But you’ve put together some notes and things around AI in CRO and optimization of your conversion rates that I’m excited to get into, because I know probably more than most about what you do, and I probably wouldn’t have come up with an idea of how to bring in my ChatGPT system into CRO, but I bet people want to and you probably have to answer this question all the time.
I’m excited because I want to be able to use AI where I can, I guess, and where it actually makes me more efficient, rather than distracts me and sends me down rabbit holes, which maybe, I need to go down sometimes. But AI is a pretty buzzy term and it probably means a lot of different things to different people. So, when you hear AI, do you just cringe when people are talking to you about CRO? Or is it like, “Oh, this is going to be great and we can probably do a lot of good things”?

Jon:
I normally cringe because let’s be honest, when most people say AI, they’re probably talking about ChatGPT. That’s what the public knows about. And in fact, most of what we’re going to talk about today can be done with ChatGPT. So, I’m going to put that out there. Just know that’s probably the only tool you really need at this stage. And then, there’s a ton of SaaS apps out there, things like that, that say they’re an AI tool, when really, maybe they’re using the ChatGPT API, or they’re pulling from some other AI service, but they’re not natively AI, they’re not really AI. They maybe are AI enabled in some way. They’re thinking about user experience optimization, digital journey optimization. We do this with User Input, which is our user testing tool that we have.
You take your videos and we can provide sentiment analysis on those. We’re doing that through AI. That transcribes it, looks for sentiment, tells you, “There was a positive reaction at this time. There was a negative at this time.” But that doesn’t make it an AI tool. It is just using AI, it’s AI enabled to some degree, to make a function that would be much harder to do on our own. So, when I’m talking about AI, I really want people to understand how they could actually use AI to help them. It’s never going to replace them. Let me step that back. Maybe one day, but we’re not close. We’re nowhere close to replacing a human in understanding other human interactions and being able to optimize a digital purchase journey. It’s just unlikely to happen at this stage.

Ryan:
I feel like as a service-based business, if you don’t claim some level of AI, you’re automatically at a disadvantage because people aren’t going to trust that you’re advanced enough or efficient enough because you’re not using any type of AI.

Jon:
Yeah, that’s a good point. I’ve intentionally not brought up AI on Drive and Convert because it just has felt like a buzzword. It’s felt like would be just going after listeners and to try to get some buzz, instead of actually delivering value. And I kind of still feel that way with The Good. We use AI internally, but we don’t really talk about it. It does make us more efficient in a lot of ways, but we’re not out there promoting saying, “We’re an AI optimization firm.” Are we? No. There’s humans behind everything we do. To say anything else that I feel would be disingenuous.
So, yes, there’s a lot out there. I feel like it’s confusing for the general population. I think that we’re at the cusp where it’s a tool and you need to use the tool appropriately. And if you’re not learning about the tools right now, then yeah, you’re going to be behind in pretty short order. So, it might be something you’re going to want to at least study up on. So, really, today I’m scratching the surface with this, right? I’m not getting too deep into it, but I’m thinking about ways that if you’re optimizing your site, what are ways you could use, let’s just say ChatGPT for the most part, you could use AI, ChatGPT to help you perform better, think about maybe different things that you wouldn’t have come up with yourself or take the hive mind, if you will, right? That entire knowledge base, that ChatGPT has behind it and offer up some suggestions?

Ryan:
Perfect. Okay, so step one is going to be getting a ChatGPT account, I assume. For most of what you’re talking about, is the free version going to be applicable or do you need to jump in and start paying for one [inaudible 00:04:57]?

Jon:
Yeah, you could use the free version, but the benefits of paying right now are that you can open an instance of ChatGPT and start training it on particular things, so you won’t have to repeat yourself every single time. So, you open a new ChatGPT session and you say, “I want to talk about this ideal customer profile. And I want to talk about this type of product line. And I’d love for you to write a product description that’s geared towards that ICP.” Then, you wouldn’t have to, every time, come back. You’d just say, “Oh, here’s another product. Write the description targeted towards that same ICP.” If you have the free version, every time you leave the chat window, you’re going to have to come back and start over, and that’s where it gets a little more time-consuming and just annoying, but it’s a great place to start. Could you do this? Yeah, most of this you could do in the free version, I would think.

Ryan:
Got it. But for 20 bucks a month, if you are optimizing your own site, 250 bucks a year is not something that should break the bank if you’re really leaning in to leverage these tools, because it also can do other things for you. It doesn’t have to just be for your CRO.

Jon:
Well, I mean, one of the things it can do now if you pay is it can generate images. So, that is an area I’ll talk about today, and that you do need a paid account. But again, $20 to play around with it. If you find it’s not useful for you yet, then just stop paying for it, right? 20 bucks is-

Ryan:
Yeah, you don’t have to prepay for a year, so easy.

Jon:
Yeah, exactly. If 20 bucks is going to hurt you, then you probably should just stop listening now and go back to some of our earlier episodes about more foundational things you can do.

Ryan:
We’re assuming you’re advanced at episode 95 by now, and not just jumping in. Okay, so you’ve got your ChatGPT ready, you’ve paid your 20 bucks because you’ve gotten to that point where that’s okay in the business. And it’s on the business card where you’re getting rewards, so that’s good.

Jon:
There you go.

Ryan:
Where are you going to start with this? What’s step one when you’ve got your prompt open?

Jon:
I would say idea generation, and I started here because this is the highest level.

Ryan:
It’s also my favorite. You got a brainstorm buddy. If you’re working at home that’s the part I hate about working at home, by the way. It’s not as easy to be like, “I need to come up with some ideas that aren’t mine to juice my brain up.”

Jon:
I would argue it’s more efficient too, because knowing you, I bet you miss the, let’s call it water cooler chat. Like, “Hey, how was your weekend?” That’s great, but I would say this is more efficient than in-person brainstorming even because you’re able to say, “These are the type of things I’m thinking about,” and you start circling it and then it starts helping you come up with those ideas. So, in this case for idea generation, I would really just prompt ChatGPT with constraints or themes to focus on. So, give it some barriers, and then ask it to find alternative suggestions or blind spots, those themes or constraints.

Ryan:
So, I’ve got my Shopify site and I’m like, “Am I going to prompt it with this URL? I want to improve conversion rates or I want to improve conversion rates on PDP pages for e-comm.”

Jon:
Right. So, the more specific you get, the better information you’re going to get. And you really can’t say, “Hey, I want to improve conversion.” You can, but what you’re going to get back is probably not amazing. But what you could say is, “Here’s my product detail page for this product and I want to tailor it more for this particular profile that we’re targeting in an ad campaign we’re running. And here’s the visuals for the ad. So, here’s the ad. Now, can you help me rewrite the copy on this page to be more tailored towards that audience?” And so, you give it some constraints. “I want you to write tailored copy. I want you to do it in a way that is in alignment with the entire digital journey.” So, starting with that ad that they saw and they click through, so you’re giving it constraints.
So, just start prompting it with more constraints and you’re going to get better stuff back. So, really, here what we’re looking for though is to find alternative suggestions. So, we’re looking for it to help you brainstorm and not necessarily do the work for you. So, in that sense, what you could say is, “Here’s my PDP. Here’s the ad campaign. How could I improve this copy?” It’s really good at copy, that’s why I keep going back to that. That’s probably it’s best is text. But we’ll talk later, there are ways to even use it for visuals quite a bit. So, one other thing you could do here is have it share examples. These are concepts maybe you’re interested in learning more about. So, you could say, “Hey, here’s my PDP, I’m tailoring. I want your help tailoring it for this audience. What are the competitors I should be thinking about?” Or, “What are other PDPs targeting this same audience?” So, then, you start kind of digging in and start asking it some more questions. You can get more examples that you can learn from.

Ryan:
So, using it in that sense, almost like a Google like, “Hey, who else seems to be targeting this product with the same persona?”

Jon:
Well, that right there, why do you think Microsoft owns a big portion of OpenAI? That’s exactly what they have it for, is to, eventually, try to overtake Google in search engine because they want to use ChatGPT or AI, essentially, to improve their search engine.

Ryan:
Got it. Okay. So, I’ve got some ideas of the PDP page and some of the copy. By the way, how many times do you think people have to rewrite that copy within ChatGPT to get something usable? Most often, I found the first one is like, sounds good, but that’s definitely not what-

Jon:
Again, the more constraints you give it, the better it’s going to do.

Ryan:
So, training your own, which is another reason for the $20 ChatGPT.

Jon:
Right.

Ryan:
It gets better and better knowing what you’re looking for and what your tone of voice-

Jon:
Yeah, exactly. Because then you could say, “Here’s all of my products.” Upload a CSV file of all your products and all the product descriptions, and it will learn how you write. Now, is it going to be perfect? Unlikely. Again, it’s still early. ChatGPT’s been out a year, I think. If you asked your toddler to write, probably not going to be great, even if you gave it a bunch of examples. You’re going to need some help. So, that’s really where it’s at, but it’s getting way, way better.

Ryan:
Okay. So, it’s got ideas. And then, you put a note in. The next one is what you refer to as prototyping. I mean, I understand what a prototype is, but what does that mean as you process through AI to get to the final product?

Jon:
Well, what I’m talking about here is let’s just say you have a new PDP and you’re trying to put all the content together that goes into it. So, you maybe want to run user testing on that before you launch it or build it into an actual template. So, the idea behind the prototyping stage here is what can you do before you have actual code written? Which ChatGPT can actually help you write some code. But the reality here is I’m saying, what’s the least amount of effort you could put in to get a high-impact feedback? And a prototype is really going to help you do that. So, you could have it write realistic copy, and so you feed in a prototype, you take a picture of your prototype or upload an image that has lorem ipsum, and let it write the copy there instead. It can replace it and do that.
I’ve mentioned visuals a few times. You could have it boost the realism of all your mock-up visuals. So, ChatGPT, if you pay for it, can now generate images, including ones that will match your brand tone and style. So, again, you got to provide enough constraints, maybe give it some examples, but it can certainly do that. What’s awesome is I saw this recently, you can actually upload a sketch of a wireframe. So, take a piece of paper, pen, draw it out, and it will turn it into a higher-fidelity wireframe or mock-up that you can then utilize for testing. And it can even do some visual design. So, you say, “Here’s my brand style guide and here’s a sketch of this page. Can you turn that into a wireframe or can you turn it into an actual page that I can use for user testing, a visual?” And it will do that.
And you can also take that even a step further and create actual functional prototypes. There’s a tool out there called tldraw, T-L-D-R-A-W. It’s a AI tool that allows you to turn your sketches into functional applications without any programming experience.

Ryan:
Holy smokes.

Jon:
So, that’s where I would go is you create a sketch of your application, it analyzes it, and then it uses AI to generate functional code for that. And you don’t have to know anything. So, we’ll put in the show notes. There’s a whole Instagram video that the company did, and we’ll include that in the show notes. But is it perfect? No. But is it way better? Say, I don’t know how to code at all and I want to start doing some user testing on a mock-up. This is amazing. This is a great way to do a clickable wireframe prototype that could be the entire customer journey of a website or a SaaS application I want do, or a mobile app. And now, I want to take it to market and do UX testing on it. And it would certify for that.

Ryan:
Dang. And I also like that their name starts with TLDR, which is appropriate. Like too long, didn’t read. That’s pretty much what I do a lot of. But coding would generally indicate you may not be on a Shopify platform. In a template, you’re somewhat limited.

Jon:
Well, it can write to Shopify template specs without a problem. I have clearly seen people who fed it a template file and said, “I need to make these changes. Can you make them?”

Ryan:
Perfect.

Jon:
It’s done that and it does it pretty well. Is it perfect? Not always, but it’s functional. It’ll pass. Maybe you have a developer look at it if needed, but you’re spending 15 minutes of their time looking over that template file versus two hours of them writing it. That’s a heck of a productivity boost.

Ryan:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, I would challenge a lot of Shopify template listeners out there that you can modify Shopify templates because they were modified from Shopify code to make it look like that. So, there is code in there. You got to be careful when you slow it down though. So, that’s where a developer is going to come into play. If you get this really cool, beautiful visual PDP, but it loads in 15 seconds, it doesn’t matter how good it could convert because it’s just not going to.

Jon:
Yeah, and look, I mean, is ChatGPT going to have your style of visual design that you want at this high level? Absolutely not. It’s not. But would it do a prototype that then you could hand to a developer and say, “Here’s what I need. Make sure the code’s cleaned up and ready to go”? Yeah, you could totally do that.

Ryan:
Huge cost savings there. You paid 20 bucks and some of your time to get it [inaudible 00:15:31].

Jon:
20 bucks a month. So, imagine how many times you could get a page out of it over a course of a month, right?

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:
Okay. And then, copywriting is what it’s known for. And so, outside of prototype or revamping a PDP page and giving it some ideas on there, are there pieces of the site that you find that ChatGPT is going to be better at versus… Truth be told, I know brand owners that have done it for their mission statements, and it’s not always for that, but-

Jon:
Just what you want a robot writing.

Ryan:
… where do you guide… Keep them first.

Jon:
Yeah. Well, I think in the simplest form, I like to talk about how brands often have these walls of text. They’re just paragraphs of text they put up on the site and nobody’s reading it. You do all the heat maps, eye tracking studies.

Ryan:
[inaudible 00:16:56].

Jon:
People read the first couple words and they’re like, “Oh yeah, I’m not reading all this,” and they just skip right through it. So, what we’ve actually done is use it to shorten the text while keeping the main points. So, you say, “Here’s a paragraph of text,” might be 100 words, “shorten this to 20 words, keep the main points.” And it usually does a pretty good job of that. Or, “Give me bullet points out of this.” That works really well too. So, you have a couple of good options there. You can also use it to, again, make copy persona specific. Mentioned this a few times. So, you describe those personas, ask it to rewrite the copy to be directed at that persona. That works really, really well.
In a slightly different approach, if you’re trying to gain support internally, this is a really cool trick. You can use it to rewrite your reports for clarity. So, you’re saying, “Hey, I have something that’s really technical. It has a lot of data about why we did something. I need you to rewrite this to target a VP level who doesn’t understand data science.” And it will do it. It will help you rewrite that copy. And I think this is a cheat code for service providers or consultants, but I think that it’s really great for gaining internal support. So, if you’re an e-comm manager, VP of e-comm, and you’re trying to present to a C-level who does not truly understand what’s being said to them and you really want them to get the results out of it, then I think this works extremely well for that.

Ryan:
Got it. So, it’s almost like condensing, here’s why we’re doing CRO. Here’s some of the results. It’s going to tell your story better than probably you would on the first pass through.

Jon:
Yeah. We’ve had clients who take our reports and run them through and say, “Give me the key points of this slide for somebody who does not understand optimization.” And I don’t know the exact prompt they used, but they told me they did this to present it to their executive team and that it worked extremely well. Because they were like, “I understand this information, but how do I present this to the executive team? And I don’t want to rewrite all these slides all the time.” So, they decided, “Oh, we’ll just paste it in and see what happens.” And it worked really well for them.

Ryan:
Dang. Yeah, telling that story ends up becoming so important from the marketing team to the exec team to justify and explain things. Like, yes, you do need CRO and you need it all the time, not just two months here, two months there. Anyway, I won’t do your sales for you.

Jon:
No, by all means, please continue.

Ryan:
Your next point here is my favorite part of, honestly, on AI, what people use AI tools for. But it’s visually, what can it do? The stuff it can do with images-

Jon:
It’s getting so much better.

Ryan:
… boggles my mind.

Jon:
Have you seen the latest trend where somebody took… He said, “Give me a picture of a happy kitten.” And then they said, “Make it happier.” And then, “Make it more happy.”

Ryan:
Oh, yeah. People do this all over LinkedIn. “If you like this, I’ll make it work harder,” or, “I’ll make the beaver-“

Jon:
Yeah. And so, there’s this whole meme of people now taking things and making them more. The first one that somebody did it was, “Make this kitten happier.” And they were just playing around with it, and it turned out that ChatGPT was coming back with these descriptions and these images that were hilarious. And the kitten kept getting happier to the point where the last one, it looks like something out of space. And it’s like this is the ultimate embodiment of happiness. There’s nothing in the world that is possibly happier than this. It is beyond the realm of physical, and it starts getting into this really theoretical stuff that was hilarious in the end, but it all started from a picture of a kitten that they were like, “Can you just make the kitten happier?” And then it’s like, “Sure, here’s a happier kitten.” And then, they’re like, “I wonder, could you do happier?” And it just keeps going.

Ryan:
That’s crazy.

Jon:
So, basically, the point here is there’s a lot of ways to use this for visual design. I think the first example I really like is persona illustrations. It really makes something that’s theoretical, concrete. What I mean by that is you prompt it with a description of your persona and then ask it to share a visual representation of it. Again, if you’re selling through to executives, this is great. You’re giving them a visual image of the persona you’re trying to reach and talk to, so that could be helpful.
And journey map. So, I really like the idea of asking it to feed it something, a site, et cetera, and then say, “Describe all the steps in a journey from research, to buying, to conversion.” And it will tell you what the steps are along the way. And you could even feed it that and say, “Create me a journey map, a visual representation of all these steps,” and it will do that for you.
So, other UX ways to use this, we’ve talked about drafting designs of pages. I think that’s a really valuable one. It works surprisingly well. Comes with risk as, again, not being as specific to your brand or your persona, but again, that’s all in the constraints you give it. It depends how much time you want to spend feeding the information and training it, and I’ll put that in air quotes. But you can ask it to provide a visual design for specific pages of your site and feed it information to occlude on that. “I need a product category page. Here’s all the images and descriptions and titles of the products. Go.” And it will create one. Does pretty good. It’ll get you part of the way there to at least something to start with.
And the last is kind of what we were talking about with the kitten, right? It’s AI-driven images and brand assets. So, I’ve seen a lot of smaller brands do this. I don’t see as many large brands do this because it’s not a resource constraint for them, but if you’re a brand that’s starting out on e-comm and you need some visual assets and don’t really have a design budget, maybe you want to use them in ad campaigns, et cetera. If you can get good at describing what you want, they work really, really well in a pinch. So, you can easily get some graphics together that way.

Ryan:
Have you ever used it to increase how large or the pixelation of an image? I see a lot of that where you get a really small image to start with. You’re like, “I like this, but it can’t be used in a vector.”

Jon:
Right. Yeah, I-

Ryan:
I assume it can do that.

Jon:
I haven’t tried it, but I imagine it could. I don’t see why it couldn’t. It can generate new images, so you could just say, “Hey, take this image and increase the resolution of it.” It would probably be very good at that. I don’t see why it wouldn’t. Now, it’s going to guess a little bit. Is it going to be the actual data that was there when it was a larger image? No. But I would imagine it’d get close enough. Somebody who hadn’t seen the image before wouldn’t know.

Ryan:
[inaudible 00:23:33] your vector and it’s too small. Use ChatGPT, “Give me a big image.”

Jon:
Yeah, there you go. Yeah, user research is really the last area that I would use this for in UX. I’ve mentioned it a few times already today, but I love to use it to draft interview questions. So, again, this is dependent on the prompt used. All of this is. I mean, that’s a huge preface for all of these. It’s like crap in, crap out. So, you really got to work with it a little bit. But you have to make it detailed enough to have it come up with great interview questions, but you can ask it to draft those for user testing. It’s not awesome, but it will do it, and I think it will only get better if you spend more time training it.
You can have a draft test tasks for user testing. So, not just the questions, but also, what you want people to do along the way. So. You’re saying, “Hey, I want you to add something to the cart. Take the next step along the user journey.” So, see how these are kind of building upon each other? You have it map out that digital journey. Then you say, “Hey, can you have some tasks that a user would do in user testing along that user journey?” Then, “What questions would you ask as they’re completing those tasks?” So, now you’re starting to get a whole user testing program together. You have that journey you want someone to take. You’re giving them tasks to get each of that step together, and then you’re having questions that you can ask them at each step as well to get good user feedback.
We talked a little bit about sentiment analysis. Then, you take all of the response videos and you feed them in and say, “Tell me what the overall sentiment is of this,” or, “What’s the high point and low point of the sentiment?” And then, you could go in and instead of having to watch 50 videos front to back, you can now just go to those time codes that it gives you and says, “Yeah, at minute 1:05, there was a positive sentiment, but at minute 3:05, it was negative.” Wow, you probably want to watch that two minutes. What the heck happened in that two minutes that somebody went from happy to being upset?
You could tell it to extract themes. So, user testing scripts and videos. You could say, “What’s the theme coming out of these?” And it will tell you, “Oh, well, a lot of people talked about the product detail page,” or, “A lot of people talked about the add to cart button.” Then, you kind of have some idea of where to go optimize first. And this is kind of along those lines, but categorizing issues from the interviews. So, use the transcripts and have it pool all the themes on ideas of what should be optimized. It’s really good at this type of work. Really good.
Give it lists of things and tell it to pull themes out and comb through that data. ChatGPT can do that in seconds and it saves you so much time. So, that’s a really good way to do it. My biggest concern with all of this is that folks will use it and aren’t really learning about user testing and user experience. Instead, they’re relying on ChatGPT to come up with all the answers. I think that’s the unfortunate part of doing this is you get really good at ChatGPT and not very good at user testing, because you just rely on it to give you the answers.

Ryan:
It’s user testing for a reason.

Jon:
Right, it’s not ChatGPT testing.

Ryan:
It’s actual users. Yeah, I mean it’s limited by the publicly-available information, and I’m guessing all of your user tests over the past 15 years are not publicly available to ChatGPT necessarily.

Jon:
No, but one thing that I’m not ready to fully announce yet, but I will say that we are coming up with… One of the things that OpenAI allows you to do now, they just announced, was create your own ChatGPT. And so, we are going to be doing one that feeds in our 15 years of content that we’ve put together. So, I’ve been on so many podcasts, we’ve written so many things, so many webinars, case studies. Every week we write at least 2,000 words. I have two books plus that I’ve been part of and written. All of that content, all the videos I’ve recorded, et cetera, can go into this. And then, some people can ask it questions, and it’s trained on all of that data already, so they don’t have to train it. They get the 15 years of The Good’s brain as a basis point.

Ryan:
And you’re just going to give it to everybody for free, right? It’s just going to be wonderful.

Jon:
We’ll see about that. I want to try it out first, but it’s in development.

Ryan:
You’ll be able access Jon’s brain through a ChatGPT. That’s pretty crazy.

Jon:
Yeah. And so, that’s really the idea. That was part of the basis for coming up with this. If I did that tool, how would people use it? Here are some ideas of how people might use that type of tool. And all the stuff I talked about today would be things they would use the JonGPT for or TheGoodGPT, whatever you want to call it.

Ryan:
Well, you can get some bracelets like WWJD, what would Jon do?

Jon:
There you go. Well, unfortunately that one’s probably taken.

Ryan:
That one might be taken WWJonD. What would Jon do? So, with all these things, I mean, you’ve told us how essentially to use ChatGPT. So, if I pay 20 bucks, I don’t need to work with any consultants, right? I mean, it’s done for 20 bucks.

Jon:
Yeah, I wish you luck with that. Here’s the thing, it has come a long way, but let’s keep in mind it is a year old. It is moving very quickly. Again, is it going to replace a human? Look, if I had to invest in some type of really long-term mutual fund around that idea, I would say yes. But I think probably not before I retire. I think that it’s very likely it will be able to do a lot of things, but I also think that there’s nuance in a lot of optimization that will be really hard for it to just completely take a human’s job. Now, segments of that for sure. Data analysis, all the stuff we talked about today, yeah, for sure. If that’s all you do, then you probably need to start broadening your skillset to be more valuable. That is how I would look at it.

Ryan:
The e-commerce industry as a whole has been using AI for a long time. It’s not new. I’ll say it’s like new direct-to-consumer is what AI is. It’s been B2B for a while. Google’s been using it inside their algorithms for a very long time. You’ve been using it on the backend within your systems for a long time. We use it at LP. It’s not new inside of our businesses.

Jon:
Right. What’s new is you’re giving the consumers of the work product a way to engage with that AI, so you’re moving it forward a little more, right? That’s what’s really happened. You’re right. Google Analytics, a lot of that was AI based. What do I mean by that? Well, in the sense that if you weren’t paying for Analytics 360, you weren’t getting 100% accurate data. You were getting data that was partly accurate, and then partly extrapolated from that by an algorithm, right? An algorithm can be artificial intelligence in that degree. So, now I can ask ChatGPT to pull in my analytics data that I feed it through a export and I want it to answer questions for me. That’s moving it forward another step towards the consumer, and that’s when it’s becoming more and more valuable.

Ryan:
Yeah, I think some of the minutia of extracting of data and analyzing that is what’s really becoming the biggest use case of AI that I’ve seen. Being able to look at large sets of data, and instead of doing that manually, it’s like, “Okay, I want you to condense this and focus where I need to spend my analysis. You see all these conversion rates year over year on all these landing pages. Where might my problems be?” Okay, well, that’s very simple for ChatGPT to look at all of it and be like, “I’d focus here.” Great. Now, we get the strategists and human brainpower to go look at those areas.

Jon:
Wonderful. Well-

Ryan:
I like it.

Jon:
… there’s hopefully enough in here for people to get started. Again, most of it, I tried to keep the ChatGPT because I think that’s the most accessible option. I’m sure there’s way more we could do here, but this is scratching the surface and hopefully we’ll start people down the right path.

Ryan:
Yeah. Well, congratulations on getting the busiest term in our podcast headline yet.

Jon:
Win.

Ryan:
So, hey, we may be off on a hockey stick growth. We’ll see.

Jon:
Thank you, Ry.

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. 095): How to Leverage AI in UX Optimization appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

What is the future of digital marketing and online experience?

Jon and Ryan unpack the valuable insights gained from recent events with Google and Logical Position to try and answer this question. 

They discuss the challenges faced by smaller businesses in the ever-changing landscape of attribution models and the importance of thinking outside the box when it comes to driving brand growth. 

From exploring alternative methods of customer acquisition to diving into the world of AI and attribution, this is everything you missed at the Google and Logical Position events!

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How GA4 will impact SMBs and larger brands
2. Why it’s important to constantly analyze data 
3. What the future of attribution and AI looks like
4. What additional strategies and resources to consider 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:

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 thanks for the invite. Last week. You had myself and some of my team members come and join you and the rest of the Logic physician team at two amazing events. I know you want to recap on those, but I really thought it was cool. We went to the Portland, Oregon Google office, which I know has been kind of a myth in Portland that they had an office.

Announcer:
Yeah, it’s not been easy to find.

Jon:
It was kind of like where is it? Yeah, it’s not. They were hiding it intentionally for a while. I saw they have a window display now on street level in their building, so at least you know it’s in the building. But it was intriguing. It’s definitely a massive office for the number of people that were there and on the employee side, in a great presentation room. We had some really good speakers from Google and Logical Position. I heard nothing but really good feedback on that event, so that was great. And then the very next day, we got to spend a whole nother day together and do the Logical Position partner connect event at LP’s headquarters outside of Portland, which I also thoroughly enjoyed. Of course, the LP office is beautiful. If anybody listening ever has a chance, you’re in Portland, Oregon, stop and say hi. I think Ryan’s one of the only people that’s always there, but…

Ryan:
It’s not quite Google’s office though, but it’s nice.

Jon:
That’s fair. A different scale, but I will say it is a very nice office, brand new, and you guys always do extremely well with these events, well-run and just great to catch up with a bunch of partners. There were folks that we all know and love there in the DTC and e-comm world especially. So I’m happy to chat whatever you’d like to about this today, but what are your initial thoughts on those two events?

Ryan:
The initial thoughts, and I think the takeaway I get every time I get around a partner community like this, I’m always impressed. It doesn’t really matter what event it is. There’s always going to be some very smart people, very committed groups of partners that are very vested in helping brands grow. It’s not even necessarily about their product or program, but it’s, Hey, these companies here that we’re talking with or the account teams we’re working with, they’re trying to grow or help clients grow, and how can we be a resource for that? And it comes across through how they’re answering questions and interacting with the teams that it’s just cool to see, to know that there is a community like that.

Jon:
Yeah. The amount of conversations I witnessed that were brands helping each other as well was really interesting, saying, oh, I’ve had this issue. Oh, me too, and this is what we did to solve it. So the cross-pollination that was happening there was really exciting. And just the fact that if you had an issue with one of the things that the partners helped solve, brands would come up and talk to the partners, and the partners just were helpful. That was really the key goal there I think.
Again, yes, obviously [inaudible] are showing up and partners are showing up for sales, but the reality is everybody there was not blatantly selling. They were trying to be helpful, a part of the community, which was really good to see, especially these days. There’s a whole bunch of these private events going on. I see them all the time on Twitter and Instagram, everywhere else, and it’s always no agencies, no agencies. All they want to do is sell, so this was really refreshing to come in and see. And I wish some of those folks who host these private events that refuse to allow agencies because they just don’t want somebody there selling would see what’s possible.

Ryan:
I think that’s really what we lost out on during the COVID lockdowns and the loss of these events. It was that face-to-face interaction where you can solve problems. And thankfully, I guess during COVID, there was so much being sold and transacted online that you really didn’t need as much of this. And I think it’s much more necessary as we’re in just weirder times. I can’t even say it’s good, bad. It’s weird. Where there’s a lot more potential for issues that we can now solve face-to-face, get clients interacting with clients, getting partner A, talking to partner B, talking to client C, saying, hey, look at how these things work together. And yeah, that’s a good solution for that. And oh, you got to go talk to that person over there for that. Just great.
And I think you and I have been partnered for over a decade now, and we’ve got a lot of the same partners, and so it’s very easy I think for us to see which e-comm vendors slash partners are actually in the ecosystem for the long haul or for the right reasons, not just to sell their product or service, but actually are there to help regardless of if they’re the solution or not. And I think that’s what we were able to assemble this last week was a lot of that. Google’s always going to sell. When you’ve got 90% market share, it’s not hard to push that agenda. But overall, every time I get into those group meeting things, I’m always impressed.

Jon:
So let’s, I guess focus on Google first, the first day. What were your major takeaways from that event? I know Google spoke. I would say the overarching theme I heard was AI, which obviously is a buzzword, all industries, everyone’s talking about it, but I think they hit it home for me that they’ve been doing AI as long as anybody, and it’s already baked into their products and has been.
And I kind of thought basically what they said was, look, this is not new to us. The reality is we’ve been using this. We just didn’t call it AI and we weren’t as public about it because the public didn’t care as much. And now that it’s a buzzword, they’re able to come out and say, we’ve been involved in AI. At one point, they put a timeline up, and I was shocked to see how far back that timeline went with things I recognized and had no idea they were involved in, like TensorFlow, which we’ve used for some projects here around heat mapping, is an AI tool. And I’ll tell you what, I had no idea Google owned that, and not even owned it, but that they were the major contributor to it.

Ryan:
Yeah, I think that’s where I don’t think I’m surprised that Google has AI and has been using it. My surprise is how bad they missed the boat in talking about it. Usually Google’s at the forefront pushing things, even if we don’t want them. Performance Max, enhanced CPCs, you name it, because it’s Google’s world and we get to live in it. So whatever they tell us to do, hey, we’re leaving Universal, we’re going to GA4. All right. I don’t necessarily like GA4 because it’s not as easy for me, but at the end of the day, it probably is better. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what I think. Google’s going to do it.

Jon:
Yeah, it’s going to happen anyway.

Ryan:
Yeah, who cares?

Jon:
Well, that’s funny you say that. Even around Performance Max, it was very clear, all made possible by their AI initiatives.

Ryan:
Yeah. And they just, in my mind, failed miserably at branding their systems around AI. I think if we go back five, six years ago, I think people were really scared of AI and there was a lot of that Elon Musk, like AI is going to destroy the world and here comes Terminator 4, whatever one that is. But now with the ChatGPT version of AI for us was like, huh, this is really useful. AI is great. And so maybe it just took that to brand it, but it makes me feel like Google’s behind the ball because Microsoft was very visible about, hey, we’re going to buy ChatGPT. Isn’t this great? We’re baking it into everything. Well, Google’s got BARD now, right? B-A-R-D I think is their version of AI now that they’re trying to brand their systems with.
So no surprise AI’s here and Google’s been using a lot of it, but I’m going to be fascinated and interested to see what Google does with this over the next year or two and how they strive to compete with Microsoft’s version, and I would expect Amazon to have a much more public-facing AI of sort involved in the Echo and whatever that happens to be that I already know is being used by every major organization in the technology world. So it’s just going to be how do you brand it and bring it to the forefront and tell people how to use it and interact with it.

Jon:
Yeah. One other big takeaway I had a little more on the lighter side maybe, was that as an example of that AI that’s been released for a while and they just didn’t call it that. Do you know can Google search a tune, a music song by humming it? And that they have it trained to recognize patterns. And if you go to Google search and search for a sound, click a little microphone icon on the search thing and then hum a tune, it will tell you what matches that and what the song likely is. So I was like, wow, okay. I get that that’s the outcome and it’s cool, but why didn’t you say this is powered by AI? I think people really would’ve picked it up more. I also had no idea you could search by humming.

Ryan:
I didn’t either.

Jon:
I thought that was pretty cool.

Ryan:
Even if I hum off-key, it can still pick that up because I guarantee my humming is off-key.

Jon:
It was funny. Everyone was walking around trying to tunes into their phone to see if it worked.

Ryan:
Yeah, it was cool.

Jon:
It was entertaining.

Ryan:
And then Google’s office, they hid it within downtown Portland, but they spent a lot of money and there was a lot of very cool features condensed in that space, from a speakeasy to that music room that was soundproofed, plus music, individual studio. It feels like everybody at Google, Portland office must be a musician as well.

Jon:
Yeah. If not, they leave there learning how to play an instrument. Yeah, I thought it was really interesting. There were obviously people there getting real work done, but it’s true that Google takes care of everybody at all of their offices. They had a huge arcade, they had several kitchens stocked to the brim at one point. I was joking around, the lady was giving us a tour and you were digging through drawers, pulling snacks out, and I was like, “Oh, there’s Garrow helping himself.” You were like, you shrugged your shoulders.

Ryan:
Part of it is you’ve got this big group going through and they’ve never been to a Google office and I’ve been to tons of them, and I know that Google wants you to enjoy the snacks and all the things they have there, and so somebody to a degree has to break the ice and be like, see, look, I’m eating a bunch of their snacks. You can too. I didn’t even ask permission. It’s fine.

Jon:
And nobody batted an eye. They really didn’t. You’re right. They want you to enjoy yourself. And yeah, there were restricted areas we could not go that were all behind locked doors with badge-only access and they were very clearly marked, but the rest of the space, it was like, enjoy yourself. You’re here. You’re going to be here all day and use whatever you want. And yeah, a beautiful office. The amount of detail is just ridiculous that they put into the space.

Ryan:
Yeah, the upside down Mount Hood chandelier was pretty cool.

Jon:
That was very cool. So they made basically Mount Hood upside down with hanging lights and when you stood back, it clearly looked like Mount Hood. It was really well done.

Ryan:
Yeah. It probably could have been a bunch of other mountains, but evidently, it was closer to Mount Hood. And I don’t recognize Mount Hood upside down, but I was told it was, so I believed it.

Jon:
There you go. That’s what Ryan remembers from the tour. Awesome.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Driving Convert the 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:
One takeaway I had on the presentations, which were well done. AI was a big focus. YouTube was a big focus as well, but all of them had one central message that I walked away with is that you’re no longer going to be able to rely on attribution. Attribution is very difficult and almost impossible with all the privacy changes that have taken place. They are very upfront to say, we are going to have to very quickly be stopping real attribution. And what instead is going to happen is it’s going to be our AI, our formulas telling you what is that data, and it’s all going to be based on models and AI versus actual onsite data.
Now, they have first-party data and they really want you to have that first-party data of collecting the conversions that are happening on your site and the consumer information, but understanding exactly what somebody clicked on to get to your site and being able to have that attribution span over more than that initial session. So if a user comes to your site, leaves, comes back 30 days later, they’re not able to cookie them and truly understand that they were on your site before.
So the attribution is only going to get worse and their models are only getting better, but at the same time, you’re going to have to rely on those much more. And I thought that was really interesting because in order to get those models to work well, you have to spend more, right? Because it’s more data helps the model produce better data. And so if you’re only spending a hundred bucks a day on Google or YouTube ads, you’re probably not going to get the same clarity in that data, the same resolution of data as you would if you spent a thousand dollars or more, right?

Ryan:
Yep. And I’ve been saying this for a while, and I think GA4 and the first-party data is unfortunately a situation of the rich are going to get richer, and you’ve got the larger brands that are going to have so much more data to work on and make audiences on and use conversion pixel data to further enhance Google’s system to go find more customers. It’s going to be very, very difficult to start a business using Google traffic from now until the foreseeable future, until there is some change.
And that’s sad to me because I’ve helped bring a lot of brands from zero to something using Google traffic and it’s just not going to be very easy to do. It wasn’t easy before, but now I’m going to put it pretty close to zero being the chances that you could come to Google and try to drive a brand. You have to think outside of Google to drive a new brand out. And not the end the world and it is probably better, but you really do have to think through why are people going to buy from me? What kind of traffic can I capture? Because it’s not just going to be throwing an ad up on Google and expect people to come to your site and then you can get some transactions. Being an entrepreneur is just sad for me, kind of like the end of an era. Yep.

Jon:
Well, and I don’t think it’s just a Google issue, right? The same thing is happening at Meta, right?

Ryan:
Mm-hmm.

Jon:
Because they have the same privacy concerns, and what I mean by that is they’re limited in the same ways.

Ryan:
Yes.

Jon:
So I think that this is where you have to almost find an offline channel to have that initial pop and get known. And you still unfortunately, even without that data resolution, you still have to be feeding the Googles and the Metas, et cetera in order to get traffic. Just, it will be much harder to know where they came from and be able to adjust your spend accordingly.

Ryan:
Yeah, and I do believe it’s going to make startup businesses have better ideas and execution out of the gate. You’re not going to be able to just, well, let’s just try this on Google, see what happens and try to get better. No, you need to have an influencer plan, a social media plan, a Google plan, SEO plan. You’ve got to have a lot more things figured out to be able to launch. So not necessarily bad, but unfortunate that one of the major channels that’s helped a lot of brands grow is just not going to be available for smaller spends and smaller companies.

Jon:
Definitely makes sense. So what about the Logical Position Connect event? That was an amazing event the next day, some great conversations, good speakers, lots of the partner system was there. What are your initial thoughts on that?

Ryan:
We had really solid content. Feedonomics did a couple presentations around marketplaces this holiday, how to optimize a feed. You had Mountain release a new tier for brands using their connected TV platform, shopper-approved, all we saw but has some good data behind the power of review stars when you’re showing them on Google. Meta actually was on stage talking about data behind the holidays coming up. Northbeam went into that power of attribution in this new world of first-party data that we had learned about the day before with Google. Natalie on your team blew minds around conversions and how to make those better. She might be taking your job, Jon, about those presentations and talking. Got to watch out.

Jon:
I’d be happy to have someone else doing some of the speaking with me.

Ryan:
And then Cha-Ching releases their new platform and ways of acquiring customers. So I think there was just a lot of ideas that I think got the juices flowing around what we can do this holiday season for both our account teams and for our clients. And I started the day talking about this great guy, Wagner Dodge, that if you haven’t heard that story, you can Google it and figure it out, but the importance of really having a plan for your business this year or for holidays, but essentially going at it understanding that you’re probably wrong and the plan is not going to play out as you expected it to.
So how do you constantly look for how your plan is wrong and adjust in real time because the data’s going to be coming at you so quickly? That was my plan by bringing all these various partners together and the content we had was to get our clients and account teams thinking about, okay, there’s a lot of extra things I haven’t done yet. How can I make sure they fit in here, here, here? Or if I’m planning to go here to the right and it turns out I’m going to the left, how do I change things and where do I go to get those resources and what do I look at in the data?

Jon:
Yeah. And I would say you accomplished that goal, so kudos to you for that. I was at our table most of the day at the goods table chatting with Logical Position clients and some of your account managers there that I’ve known some for a decade, as you said, and it’s good to always connect with them. But I kept hearing over and over people walking out of the presentations and saying, oh, and they were talking about the content, which was great. You can always tell when a content is not helpful because people just walk out and they’re just quiet and heads down walking kind of like, oh, I wasted my time. And this, they were walking right by our table and stopping and chatting with me at times, but they were also walking by and chatting more about the content, and it was clear that people were engaged and I thought that was awesome.

Ryan:
Yeah. I think we did a good job having the content ready. I always think it can be better, but that’s just me. I always want to push the envelope, but I think it did a good job.

Jon:
Yeah.

Ryan:
It’s what we intended.

Jon:
I will say your events team did an amazing job, so kudos to the events team over there. I don’t know their names unfortunately, but they really did a great job of making sure everything was dialed in as much as possible. The food was on point. There were snacks out the day, an espresso bar in the morning. I could go on, but-

Ryan:
Can’t forget your snow cones.

Jon:
You guys did a great job.

Ryan:
Kona Ice.

Jon:
Oh yeah, that’s right. You had a snow cone truck, which was great because it was like a hundred degrees outside.

Ryan:
Oh, it was so hot. And my kids, that’s one of their favorite things in the world is Kona Ice. And so everywhere that they have the truck, I don’t know how many are in Sherwood or how many franchise truck owners there are or if they’re all the same company, I don’t even know, but I know there’s always one or two in Sherwood in the summer. And if we pass one, automatic five bucks per Kona Ice because my kids are going to go and we have to get one.
I’ve never had one. And so I go and Emmy, our VP of marketing was like, “Hey, we’ve got to get a shot and get people to get out there, so go out and get a Kona Ice and we’re going to record you so we can get everybody upstairs to come down.” Because we had it there for an hour. And so I went down there and sent the video to my kids of me having my first Kona Ice and my five-year-old can’t quite read yet and she incorrectly but also correctly calls it cone of ice. And so she was so excited she had to tell all her grandparents that dad got his first cone of ice down on Wednesday or on Thursday.

Jon:
I love it.

Ryan:
But yeah, it was very cute and it was actually really good. So there may be another $5 cone of ice coming every time we see a truck.

Jon:
That’s amazing.

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
Well, did anything stick out on the presentations to you? Any of the partners, anything that makes sense to talk about?

Ryan:
Mountain is impressive. And a few months ago, I didn’t know much about the platform other than Ryan Reynolds had invested and had a really cool commercial with Steve-O, but getting into their tech and understanding what they’re doing with connected TVs, I’m just very impressed with their path forward and how they’ve really set their tech in place first to actually accomplish what brands coming to them are trying to do. It’s not like come into Mountain and fit what we’re doing and if you don’t like it, go away. It’s no, hey, I know you as an e-comm brand need a ROAS. Therefore we’re designing our connected TV platform with a ROAS in play. I was like, oh, that’s weird. Because the other video thing we think of is YouTube, and that is by no means the case of how YouTube is operating. YouTube is top of funnel, top of funnel, top of funnel, just spend the money because eventually it’ll come down the funnel.
And Mountain’s taking a very different approach and has been executing it pretty solid. So I’m very bullish on Mountain this holiday season, especially with some of the things they’re starting to do with smaller clients, because video has been historically a platform for larger brands with more money to spend on the content and the ads that it takes to actually drive a return. Anybody, not anybody, but a lot, if you can spend a hundred thousand on YouTube, you can probably start driving stuff down the funnel and get a return on it. If you can spend a thousand dollars on YouTube and that’s your max, a lot of that’s going to be lit on fire for a while before it starts getting traction. Mountain’s got some plans to allow that a thousand dollars a month spend to actually do something.

Jon:
That’s great. I mean if you just think about political ad TV spending alone and the millions that go into that, you can see what it takes to actually advertise on TV, even for a short amount of time.

Ryan:
Oh yeah. And forget about advertising on YouTube during a political cycle. You’re not getting through that clutter. Just turn your YouTube off for that time period.

Jon:
There you go. One business that was there, one partner that was there that I found interesting, if nothing else in the name alone was Cha-Ching. Can you tell us a little bit more about

Ryan:
Cha-Ching. Yes. In fact, if you Google them, you won’t find them. They’re just starting out. They haven’t even officially launched in the US

Jon:
Oh, okay. I thought it was because of the name, but yeah. I was like, is there a possible name worse to Google than The Good? Because if you Google The Good, there’s so many things to come up with the good something, right?

Ryan:
Mm-hmm.

Jon:
It’s really interesting. But yeah, I would imagine Cha-Ching is the same way if you Google that, but you’re saying it’s because they haven’t launched.

Ryan:
Part of it’s they haven’t launched. Part of it, in reality, they probably should have been doing some SEO for a while before their launch that they weren’t, but whatever, neither here nor there. But it is a very interesting take on customer acquisition and the first pass of their presentation, I had to send back to them and be like, you’re getting a little aggressive going after big tech is what they called it, the Amazons, the Googles, the Facebooks. They’re bad, they’re trying to steal money and we’re going to go against them and we’re going to fight the power. And I was like, I don’t know if that’s your play. I don’t think you’re going to take down Amazon, Meta, Google at this point. 5, 10 years maybe. I’m not going to say you can’t do anything, but at least right now, that’s not going to be why people are going to come to you because they think they’re going to take out Google.
But I do think there’s a play for them in being some additional things beyond that, especially as we enter a holiday season that may not be as big as last year. Maybe it is, but there’s some questionability as to whether we’re going to continue growing year over year in this holiday season. If Cha-Ching can get some eyeballs, they may be a way you can add additional customer acquisition channels that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. And they’re trying to move your marketing dollar from spending on Google from an acquisition standpoint to the buyer, saying, hey, buyer, instead of spending 30% of this sale by buying you on Google, we’re actually just going to give you the money as the brand because we’re going to buy your sale anyway. And good idea. We’re looking at kind of as an affiliate, and I don’t think people are going to stop searching Google, so I don’t think it’s moving money from Google, but I think it has a shot around will people go there because they can get a big rebate?

Jon:
Yeah. These two-sided marketplaces are hard to start and so they’re working hard to make it happen, so kudos to them. And I had a couple of conversations with the team there and the fact that they’ve got so much cash behind them, they’re really trying to incentivize people to get there, I think is intriguing, because most people go into two-sided marketplaces without the budget necessary to make it happen, because you need to catch that initial wave.

Ryan:
Yeah. They think that the rebate alone is going to get eyeballs there. Like, oh, I’m giving away 40% of a hundred dollar order because I was going to give it to Google. Why would they not come? Well, how do you tell them that you’re there? And I’ve talked to them at length and said their biggest struggle is eyeballs for sure, and said, “Amazon buys traffic from Google. So you have the entity that has 50% ish of e-comm sales in and of itself is buying traffic to keep their flow of buyers coming in. That says something about the need to acquire eyeballs.” And Amazon needs to keep growing to keep shareholders happy, so yeah, I can see why they need to do that. So Cha-Ching has got a lot of money behind them, which is helpful, and I believe that money is the biggest driver of those eyeballs in addition to their partnerships. They’ve got some really good partnerships that I think are really going to help push that thing forward.
And so I’m telling LP merchants, we’ve got an agreement that makes it a no-risk thing for our clients. I was able to remove the risk so they don’t have to invest any time, energy, money to do it. We’re going to do it. We have an easy way of accomplishing it so that if it does work, you can get there early, have more data than your competitors and hopefully be able to push on it harder than your competitors. And if it doesn’t work, hey, you didn’t take any time or risk any money to make it happen. So I’m hoping it does because I think it’s going to be a really cool platform.

Jon:
Yeah, that’s great. Awesome. And then anything else you think that listeners should take away from this event at LP?

Ryan:
I think our clients, a lot of them took away from the Northbeam presentation and then conversations with a company called No Commerce. Being in this brave new world of GA4 and first-party data, I think that’s been a, as you see Google removing some of the transparency to that attribution path, we got glimpses of it with data-driven attribution over the last year or so, where Google is saying, Hey, we’re just going to use the data-driven pixel. You have no idea what the data-driven is, but we’re telling you this is what it is.
Now that we’re fully into that and Google hopefully helps transition us with that data-driven pixel, the secondary platforms helping us with attribution I think are going to become more important in justifying certain things. It’s one thing to see Google tell you Facebook had this much credit, Google Ads had this much credit, SEO had this much credit only because you have to run that through a filter of, okay, Google needs me to spend more money on ads, so they do have an incentive in GA4 to tell me that ads had a bigger credit. And I don’t know how to look through their system to see where that might be inflated or not, and so I don’t think Google’s nefarious in doing that, by the way, but that’s a thought that comes through my head as a brand owner.

Jon:
Well, they own the algorithm, right?

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
They own that black box and they’re not going to tell you what’s inside that box.

Ryan:
No. And so having a Northbeam, Triple Whale, No Commerce coming and helping you explain the different layers within the funnel and where you can be pushing to grow your brand, I think is going to be a bigger and bigger thing over the next year or two, that if you’re not looking at that, I think you’re going to fall behind some of your competitors that do have insights of those platforms.

Jon:
That’s great. So I have one last question for you, Ryan, and this was the second of these events and it continually gets better. Are you planning on doing more?

Ryan:
TBD. Just coming out of it and all the time and energy it took off of me and the team. I’m like, “No, we’re done with these.” And then I get a month or two down the road, I’m like, “God, that was really fun.” And then we got to go golf and wine taste after with all the partners and some of the clients and that was fun. So I imagine I get wrangled into doing another one of these. My wife would tell me like, “No, you were way too stressed leading up to it. We shouldn’t do any more of these. It’s a bad idea.” And then I have a very short-term memory.

Jon:
Yeah. Well, that’s required at times, right?

Ryan:
Maybe you need to put one on and I’ll just join yours.

Jon:
I have some suggestions off podcasts of what we can continue to do here. I would love to chat with you about that.

Ryan:
I’d love it. Okay, then something in the future between us for sure.

Jon:
There we go. All right. Well, thanks for sharing Ryan, and thanks again for putting on the events. I know how stressful it was, and I would say being there, you did a great job and the team, through the events team at LP made sure everything was dialed in, so it was great to see. Thanks for getting me access to the mysterious Portland Google office.

Ryan:
Heck yeah.

Jon:
I know everyone loved that. And yeah, I hope we can do something again.

Ryan:
Looking forward to it. 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. 088): The Future of Attribution and AI appeared first on The Good.