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

Check out the full episode to learn:

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

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

• Why identifying your target audience’s needs, behaviors, and pain points comes first.
• How to deliver a seamless experience that connects with your customers, answers their questions, and shows them how to take the next step.
• The importance of regularly testing and validating your website with your audience.

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. Why YouTube's roster of influencers and the YouTube Shopping program are attracting media spend.
2. The four unique ways YouTube can track attribution.
3. How brands should get started with YouTube in 2025.

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. what the priming & expectation setting heuristic is, and how it works.
2. how to determine if you are violating this heuristic.
3. examples of tactics that leverage this heuristic.

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. Why prioritizing time away from the business is important.
2. When during the business cycle it's most valuable to step back and think. 
3. Tips for making the most of your time away.

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

In this episode, Jon and Ryan explore why experimentation results don’t always map one-to-one with the real-world outcomes you expect.

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. How post-launch variables make attribution less than clear.
2. Why experiment segmentation means test results aren’t summative.
3. The effect of false positives.

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

In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss what brands need to do in order to have success on Amazon.

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. How to determine if Amazon is right for your brand.
2. How to get started on the platform.  
3. Tips for setting realistic expectations.

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. The process of smoke testing (and where the name comes from).
2. The benefits of using smoke testing for quick validation.  
3. The 5 steps of the smoke testing process.

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. What companies like Google and other industry leaders are predicting for the 2024 holiday season.
2. Why it's critical to start planning earlier than ever.
3. Ryan's recommendations for building a holiday tech stack.

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. The importance of optimizing the free trial experience for SaaS brands.
2. How to gain an understanding of the factors that motivate your users to buy.
3. Proven strategies to encourage your users to convert from free to paid.

The resource Jon mentions in the episode can be found on thegood.com here.

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. Pricing tactics used by brands leading up to, during, and after the event.
2. Consumers' perceptions of deals and discounts.
3. How the event may impact the upcoming holiday shopping season.

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

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

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

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

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

Listen to the full episode to learn:

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

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

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

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

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

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

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

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

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

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

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

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

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

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

Many factors influence conversion rates. In this episode, we discuss why benchmarking doesn’t work and introduce a better way to measure optimization efforts.

After conducting a study of hundreds of optimization experts to uncover the key factors that influence the success of digital products, Jon and his team at The Good identified five competencies that set high-performance teams apart.

In fact, teams that excel in these five Factors are 60% more likely to meet their annual performance targets and twice as likely to rank “excellent” in customer satisfaction.

Listen to the full episode to learn;

• Why traditional benchmarking is ineffective.
• Why the 5-Factors Scorecard™ is a better way to measure success.
• How the 5-Factors Scorecard™ can help you decide where to invest to improve your digital experience and determine what steps you need to take to grow your impact in your organization.

To get your scorecard, go to https://thegood.com/5factors

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

Well, we have some good news. Ryan is about to launch a community where like-minded business owners can connect, share insights, and troubleshoot challenges – without hidden agendas or sales pitches. 

Grow with Garrow is a Slack-based community for entrepreneurs seeking guidance and support. In this episode, Jon and Ryan dive into the purpose and power of Grow with Garrow, emphasizing the importance of community, hard work, and actionable advice.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why there is a need for an ecommerce community 
2. What people can expect from Grow with Garrow 
3. Why hard work is essential to business success 
4. How Grow with Garrow will be different from the email list 

Ryan is offering a special discount code for the Drive & Convert listeners. Get 50% off for the first three months with the code: driveandconvert. 

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

Many companies focus on tactical or superficial changes, but true optimization lies in understanding the why behind customer behavior. Jon’s new #1 bestselling book, Behind The Click, focuses on this exact topic. 

Jon and Ryan share some of the psychological principles found in the book and how brands can leverage these insights to create compelling digital experiences.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why psychological principles are important in crafting digital experiences 
2. What heuristics are and how companies can leverage them 
3. How heuristics are different from mental models 
4. How to create subconscious trust 

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

In this week’s episode, Jon and Ryan delve into the aftermath of the iOS update. They discuss the challenges of navigating changes in social ad strategies and the evolving role of influencers in social media marketing. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How strategies for running and optimizing social ads have changed 
2. Why influencers are still a big factor in social ads
3. How influencers can help smaller or newer brands 
4. How social shops are performing 
5. Why feeds are important in running social shops

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

Jon and Ryan delve into the strategic considerations and practical implementation of website elements to effectively cater to both B2B and B2C audiences. From prioritizing primary audiences to creating tailored customer journeys, they explore the challenges and opportunities of maximizing revenue without alienating either group.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why you need to refer to your data 
2. How to tailor messaging, design and user experience for both audiences
3. How to prioritize audience segmentation
4. How to leverage menu navigation and landing pages for both audiences

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

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. 

Jon and Ryan discuss the importance of post-purchase optimization and the impact it has on growing an online brand. They share real-life examples and explain how to handle customer feedback, utilizing psychological principles and the significance of the post-purchase phase in driving future orders.

Jon also offers a glimpse into his upcoming book, Behind The Click. 

GET FIRST CHAPTER FREE AT: thegood.com/BTC

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why the post-purchase is an important part of the customer journey
2. How to utilize customer reviews for improvement
3. How the onboarding process can make or break the digital experience
4. How to respond to negative reviews
5. How the post-purchase experience impacts future orders 

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

They also delve into the potential and opportunities for advertising on Bing, shedding light on the unique advantages of the platform, such as lower competition and potential arbitrage opportunities.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why companies should consider leveraging Microsoft Ads
2. What are some key differences between Microsoft Ads and Google
3. What strategies to use when running campaigns in Microsoft Ads 
4. How Microsoft Ads differentiates itself from other platforms 
5. Which other platforms to consider outside of Google and Microsoft Ads

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

So it should come as no surprise that the evolution of AI, automations, and online tools has also shifted some perspectives and progressed certain ways of thinking.

In this special episode of Drive and Convert, Jon and Ryan share what lessons they’ve learned in the past four years by revisiting some of the earliest episodes of the show and talking about a few recent ones. 

Here's a brief look at some of the topics they changed their perspectives on:

1. No to external automation -> Yes to platform automation 
2. You shouldn’t benchmark -> Multi-KPI benchmarking can provide great value
3. Pull back on socials -> Platform shops are performing really well  
4. Look at Google Analytics -> Try exploring other tools
5. Test everything -> Validate your decisions

Find out what else they changed their minds on! 

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

Well, you’re not alone.

In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss "Behind the Click", Jon’s upcoming book, which focuses on the psychological principles behind each purchase decision. Jon discusses the inspiration for the book, his approach to writing it, and the overview of the content. He also offers insights into how brands can utilize the information presented in the book to optimize their digital experiences.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What ‘Behind the Click’ is about
2. What heuristics are and why they’re important
3. How to ethically use the insights and strategies in the book
4. What phases of the customer journey are included in the book
5. How to write books effectively and efficiently
6. How to get your copy of ‘Behind the Click’

Get your free chapter: http://thegood.com/btc/

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

They explore the critical importance of feeding the right data into analytics and the impact of setting appropriate goals to stay ahead of the competition. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What challenges companies are experiencing with Google Ads
2. How to leverage Google Ads Pixel
3. Why companies need to review and adjust their goals 
4. How to optimize product feeds
5. Why you need to test and measure any changes

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

In this Drive and Convert episode, Jon and Ryan discuss actionable steps that you can take to help your future self and your team use the data you collect.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How to organize the data you’ve collected 
2. How to identify patterns and insights from data
3. How to map data observations to areas of your business 
4. Which areas you can improve based on data

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

They recommend exploring complementary tools and focusing on trend identification to unlock GA4's full potential. Ultimately, embracing GA4's learning curve and exploring alternatives can empower ecommerce businesses to thrive in the evolving data landscape.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. The biggest roadblocks businesses face when switching to GA4
2. Why you still need GA4 for your website 
3. What data you can get from GA4 that wasn’t available in UA
4. How to overcome the hurdles of Year-Over-Year analysis
5. What alternative tools can support or replace GA4

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

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, connect with us on LinkedIn. We're Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Sharing insights and experiences from their own journey in the ecommerce space, Jon and Ryan explore how brands can leverage video to drive conversions and growth.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What type of video content you can leverage in digital marketing 
2. How to track ROI for YouTube spend 
3. How video is being utilized on different platforms  
4. What challenges small brands encounter in video marketing 
5. Why it’s crucial to have quality and creative content 

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

This week, Jon and Ryan explore eight benefits that a November audit can provide your business. You can level up against the competition by continuing their optimization work through the end of the year – when other brands are at a standstill.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why November audits are often misunderstood
2. How to fit in a November audit during the holiday rush
3. The benefits of conducting a November audit 
4. Why its an especially good year for a Q4 website audit 

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

There is no shortcut to achieving increased rankings on a search results page over a short period of time. 

So, whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been in the business awhile, you need to have a strategy for SEO. 

In today’s episode, Jon and Ryan share that while there are no hacks, there are proven ways to build the right strategy that will get you in front of the right audience. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why there is no “hacking” SEO 
2. Why website optimization is crucial to SEO 
3. What role quality content has for SEO 
4. Why backlinks are still valuable 
5. How long it takes to see results from SEO

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

In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss how to acquire and retain subscribers with proven strategies including personalization, various types of subscriptions, and tactics for increasing your number of subscribers. They also cover how to look at things from a consumer perspective in order to fully understand what needs companies can address with their subscription services.  

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. The different types of subscription services 
2. Why personalization is important 
3. Why brands need to identify where customers churn
4. Seven strategies to increase subscriptions 

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

Just like the question posed in our last episode, there is no simple answer to this. In this week’s episode, Jon and Ryan delve into the importance of tailoring your ROAS goals to your unique brand. They also touch on the aggressiveness of marketing strategy, customer lifetime value, and the benefits of aiming for a lower break-even ROAS. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How brands can optimize their ROAS goals
2. Why brands should consider influencer marketing and dark posting
3. Why there is no one-size-fits-all approach to ROAS
4. How analytics can help in determining ROAS 

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

In this week’s episode, Jon and Ryan discuss why there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. They delve into the definition of conversion rate and the countless variables that affect it. In the end, their advice is this: a good conversion rate is one that is constantly improving. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What variables affect conversion rates
2. What conversion rate actually means
3. How to measure conversion rates
4. What are the challenges in measuring conversion rates
5. Why you shouldn’t measure yourself against ecommerce benchmarks 

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

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, connect with us on LinkedIn. We're Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

This is exactly what Jon and Ryan explore in this week’s Drive and Convert episode. They also cover how the lack of educational information on a PDP could make it difficult to convince customers to make a purchase. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why landing pages are crucial for building trust and educating customers 
2. Why alignment between ad messaging and landing pages is important
3. How landing pages should be optimized for Google Shopping traffic
4. How context and personalization can improve landing pages and PDPs
5. How to create and optimize landing pages 

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

In this week’s episode, they discuss powerful strategies for driving traffic and sales and how brands can leverage Google's algorithms to their advantage. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How the decrease in search volume on Google affect transaction and sales volume
2. What methods Amazon uses to drive traffic beyond search traffic
3. How brands can leverage Google's algorithm to increase product discovery
4. Why testing and experimentation are crucial for staying ahead of the competition

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

This week, Jon and Ryan share how you can leverage nine proven strategies to help you increase average order value. By improving the average order value of your website, you can grow your business without having to invest heavily in additional marketing and advertising. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How to find out your customer’s needs 
2. Nine proven tactics to increase AOV (with examples)
3. Why social proof is such a powerful tool
4. How to execute limited offers properly
5. Why it’s important to remember post-purchase offers

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

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

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

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

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

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

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

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

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

They also delve into the importance of tracking your raw data, channel mix metrics, and evaluating subscription and consumable products. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How to determine and evaluate significant ecommerce metrics
2. Why you should focus on long-lasting customer relationships
3. What value can you get from post-purchase surveys
4. What is the “first-touch” metric
5. How to improve your own ecommerce metrics

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What attribution models are being removed from Google
2. Why Google is sunsetting four of its attribution models
3. How these attribution changes could affect transparency and Google algorithms
4. What alternative options do big and small brands have 

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

However, customer research and experimentation can help determine the most effective navigation style. Jon offers 10-pointers for website owners to test or steal, which are based on what has worked well for other brands. They stress the importance of designing navigation based on what customers want, not what the brand wants.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why website navigation is crucial to a website’s functionality

2. The different types of website navigation

3. How to improve your website navigation 

4. 10 stealable tips for website navigation

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

For more information, read the full article at: https://thegood.com/insights/website-navigation/ 

In this episode, Jon and Ryan also talk about failing and growing throughout the experience and seeing everything as a learning experience. Every business exit is a little different, so there is no defined timeline for going through the process. Ryan advises that you should do it when it feels right, and the numbers will work themselves out. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why it's important not to burn bridges and end things on a positive note 
2. How relationships with employees change 
3. Why doing more research is important 
4. Why you should invest in a good legal team 
5. What to look forward to after exiting an ecommerce business 

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

In this week’s episode, Jon and Ryan highlight the significance of leaning into rapid testing in the absence of data to validate statistical significance. They also discuss other validation tactics, such as surveys, user testing, heatmaps, and many more. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How to use the confidence/tolerance relationship to your advantage
2. The benefits of rapid testing
3. Validation tactics beyond testing
4. How social listening and session recordings work
5. Why eye tracking is simple yet effective 

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

In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss what conversion tracking looks like in this new world of Performance Max and how you could help your system and ads perform better once you get some of the right data points.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What conversion tracking looks like on PMax
2. How the PMax algorithm works 
3. What eCommerce advertisers should focus on tracking
4. Why Google Analytics is still the best source of data 
5. Why you need to test and optimize your feed

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

Unlike studying your competitors, studying your customers is directly applicable. The better you can serve their needs and create better shopping experiences, the higher your conversion rate will climb. In this episode, Jon and Ryan talk about alternatives such as goal-setting, iterative learning and experimentation.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why industry benchmarks should not be your starting point for setting goals
2. How you should approach measuring conversion rates
3. What the flaws of self-reporting among competitors is
4. What factors affect conversion rate
5. How you can work on continuously improving your conversion rate

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

They also discuss brand voice, compounding effects, domain authority, and site traffic. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why small brands and startups should still invest in SEO
2. Why SEO is like growing your own apple tree
3. How SEO is different from paid search
4. What the minimum budget for SEO is 
5. Why you still need SEO even when you have a SaaS platform
6. Why not all traffic is equal 

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

In this episode, Jon and Ryan explore the different tests that The Good team has had success with time and time again. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How annotating in Google Analytics can help you in the future
2. What variants and control are in A/B testing
3. What tests to run on your ecommerce website
4. Why these five tests are effective 

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

In this week’s episode, Jon and Ryan share that the first step for new business owners is to gauge the size of the existing demand and the competition. 

And in setting expectations, they remind startups that what works for bigger brands might not work for them. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Which traffic drivers are best for startups
2. Why you need to think of traffic before CRO 
3. What are the best platforms for creating demand
4. How Shopify and Shopify Collabs can help  

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How cross-selling and upselling are different
2. How other brands are using them to their advantage
3. What downselling is 
4. Where you can use these tactics on your website 

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

They give suggestions on what every ecommerce business should invest in and what they can do without in the coming year. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why you need to invest in customer acquisition
2. What role affiliates and influencers can play in 2023
3. Why social ads should not be a priority for next year
4. Why you should still invest in SEO

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

They discuss why there is an argument over brand-first and user-first CRO, finding a middle ground between the two and what CRO is ultimately about.  

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why branding is important
2. Why customer experience can’t be replaced  
3. How to blend user goals and brand goals

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

They also discuss the value of rapid testing on ads to optimize your content, running tests with influencers, and testing on your own. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What data and results businesses can safely share with each other 
2. Why building a group or community can be advantageous
3. How rapid testing works on ads and segmenting your audience   
4. How to run your own ad testing to get the data you need
5. The cost of testing various ads 

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about how to optimize your website to drive more revenue for your brand this Black Friday and Cyber Monday. They cover the importance of website audits, how to improve user experience and why you should re-evaluate your sales strategy. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why website audits are necessary
2. How to leverage user experience to improve site performance
3. Re-evaluating your sales strategy

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

With so much automation in the marketing world, some campaign details are out of our control. But, you can still optimize the inputs to a feed and that can be the difference between a shopper clicking on your product over a competitors. 

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about the importance of feeds for ecommerce brands. They discuss why feeds are so important and how to optimize yours for more traffic. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why feeds are so important right now
2. Where feeds begin and how they work
3. How you can optimize your feeds for more traffic

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about why social proof is one of the most powerful tools of persuasion sellers can employ and how to use it to improve your conversion rate.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why social proof is so effective
2. Different types of social proof that can increase conversions
3. How to collect and deploy it on your website

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about the massive changes in Google Ads that are coming over the next few weeks. They cover the importance and scale of this particular update and why it matters to you.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What advertisers should be thinking about as they switch to Performance Max
2. The results brands can expect from the new campaign type
3. How to prepare for the switch
4. The impact this has on brands moving forward

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon cover the proven steps you can take to build a culture of experimentation in your own company and share examples of brands already putting the steps into action.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How to start developing a culture of experimentation
2. Mindset shifts you need
3. 6 steps to building an experimentation culture
4. Real-life brands that put this practice into action

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

 
In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about how Amazon's "most successful prime day ever," and their announcement of a second prime day in Q4, will impact the holiday season for ecommerce brands. They also cover what brands should be doing now to prepare for a great Q4.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What really happened on Amazon Prime Day
2. The impact of a second Amazon Prime Day
3. If your brand should be selling at Walmart
4. How to prepare for Q4, now

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

 
In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about the findings and insights from The Good's latest research report published in collaboration with Age of Majority. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How to understand and engage adults 55+ 
2. Surprising (and unsurprising) insights about this group of shoppers
3. How to build trust with Active Agers
4. The best ways to connect and build trust 

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon provide a detailed overview of what Performance Max offers, how it fits into the existing set of tools and tech and what acquisition teams should be doing to prepare for the upcoming launch.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What is performance max in Google Ads and why you should take it seriously
2. How it is different from the existing toolset, and what that means for your campaigns
3. What advertisers need to be doing to prepare and take advantage of this new feature
4. Informed predictions about the long-term impact of Performance Max

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about the perils of high volume or high velocity testing programs. They also revisit the concept of "rapid testing," including why it's a different (and better) approach than programs built entirely on volume of tests.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why, when it comes to testing and optimization, more doesn't always equal better
2. What risks come along with high volume and high velocity testing
3. How to know the difference between a good deal and a "too good to be true" deal
4. How “rapid testing” is a similar, but better approach to optimizing your site

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

Some industries are being hit harder than others, but there are plenty of brands that are feeling anxious – and rightfully so!

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about the current macroeconomic trends and how they are influencing the behaviors of both consumers and brands alike. There is a lot of reason to be pessimistic, but Ryan still has optimism about the rest of 2022, and he's here to explain his position.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What impact stimulus checks, inflation, and international conflict are having on brands
2. Why poor year-over-year performance isn't the end of the world
3. What has Ryan feeling optimistic about the back half of 2022
4. What you should be doing today to set yourself up for success

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about how to know if your brand should invest in a full-scale redesign or commit to an ongoing testing and optimization program. There are merits and flaws to each approach, so you'll want to listen in to figure out which option is right for your business, and what you should do to get started.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How to know if you should be pursuing optimization or a redesign
2. What considerations to keep in mind when redesigning your site
3. What you should know before diving in to optimization
4. The best step to take after you've made a decision between the two

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

Ryan is currently living through this experience, and although going through life with a spouse and four kids all living in a barn while their home is being built, he's managed to learn a few important lessons about what it takes to build a successful business along the way.

Listen to this episode if you want to learn what building a home and building a business have in common, and maybe jot down a few tips from Ryan to prepare yourself for the day when you're ready to build your own new home.

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How to allocated paid acquisition spending across channels
2. Whether to sell pre-selected bundles or allow customers to build their own
3. How to improve discoverability with a large product catalog
4. Whether you should race to take advantage of emerging ad channels
5. How virtual/augmented reality may impact ecommerce behaviors

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How to drive traffic in a world where privacy provisions are ever-increasing
2. Whether you should focus your optimization on your desktop or mobile site
3. How to reach that coveted "1,000 customers" milestone for a new brand
4. How to allocated your paid acquisition budget across multiple channels

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about how much traffic a brand needs to start taking optimization seriously. They also discuss the difference between traffic and qualified traffic, and what impact that has on CRO efforts.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How much traffic you really need to start optimizing
2. Why many brands overestimate the quality and volume of their site traffic
3. What counts as "qualified" traffic in terms of optimization
4. What you should do if you're not getting enough qualified traffic

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon assess the current landscape around marketplaces and provide a balanced recommendation for ecommerce brands who are considering adding marketplaces to their growth strategy for 2022.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How big the opportunity for "marketplaces" really is
2. What surprised Ryan and Jon about marketplace activity in 2021
3. How to determine if joining a marketplace is right for your brand
4. What opportunities and challenges are on the horizon for 2022

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

You don't need to sterilize your brand or devolve into some kind of faceless, robotic corporation, but there is a way to serve customer needs first while still sprinkling in some of your brand's distinct personality.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why going "brand-first" is seldom the best approach
2. What customers care about most when they visit your site
3. How you can maintain strong brand positioning without losing sales
4. How the most successful brands are balancing customer needs with company messages

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What traffic generation strategies did/did not work in 2021
2. What emerging trends or technology will impact acquisition in 2022
3. What channels look particularly attractive to brands right now
4. How to set yourself up for success in 2022 and beyond

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about the relationship between SEO and CRO, including how business owners should be thinking about balancing their efforts between attracting websites visitors and converting those visitors into buyers.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. The "Chicken or The Egg" challenge for SEO and CRO
2. How active CRO tests might impact SEO efforts (& vice versa)
3. What are the risks of running these campaigns in parallel?
4. What most people are really worried about when they ask this question

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about referral traffic as one of the most commonly misunderstood traffic sources and highlight why failing to dig deeper into the quality and sources of your website referrals could mean leaving money on the table.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What referral traffic is and how it is categorized in your website analytics
2. Common issues with tracking referral traffic and how to fix them
3. What referral traffic data can tell you about your marketing efforts
4. How analyzing referral traffic can uncover ripe opportunities for growth

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about the merits and challenges of another optimization approach known as Rapid Testing. It requires less time, traffic, and resources, but also provides less confidence in the efficacy of the results.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What separates Rapid Testing from traditional CRO methods
2. Which businesses are a good fit for Rapid Testing
3. The benefits and challenges of implementing a Rapid Testing program
4. What kind of results are typical of a successful Rapid Testing program

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about how work/life balance doesn't always translate to a true 50/50 split. Instead, it usually requires investing heavily in one area of life (Ex: Career) for a period of time, and then slowing down to focus more time and energy elsewhere (Ex: Family) to get back toward a more "balanced" position.

Similarly, a brand's allocation of resources across multiple traffic generation channels can (and should) ebb and flow over time. For example, if you continue to hammer on paid search long enough, you'll eventually run headfirst into diminishing returns. The world's most successful brands acknowledge this, and take a more balanced approach to driving leads to their site – and Ryan's here to help us understand how they do it.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why balancing your traffic generation efforts is important
2. The different types of channels you should consider investing in
3. What a healthy allocation looks like for most brands
4. How to know when you're over/underinvested in a specific channel

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon review the most common reasons why ecommerce brands don't invest in CRO, and why that might be holding them back from reaching their potential. If you're directing most of your spend toward acquisition and ignoring conversion or retention, you may want to listen in to get an outside perspective from two industry experts.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why most brands fail to invest in CRO
2. What information gaps or misconceptions hold them back
3. What a reasonable testing and optimization budget looks like
4. Why more traffic doesn't always equal more revenue
5. Realistic expectations around cost, timing, and impact for a CRO program

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about the macro trends that are going to influence consumer behavior and what savvy brand owners should do to make the most out of their holiday campaigns. If you're worried about supply chain issues, record-breaking ad prices, or increased competition from big retailers, then you should listen to this.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What economic trends are influencing consumer behavior
2. How to stay competitive as ad prices increase
3. How to separate yourself from big box retailers like Amazon and Walmart
4. Which strategies are going to drive qualified traffic to your site this year

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about Jon's second book, Opting In To Optimization and review some of the key concepts that are covered inside. The book condenses more than a decade of experience optimizing sites for some of the world's most recognizable brands into a tight, actionable playbook you can read in a week.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How to build a culture of optimization inside your brand
2. How to better undersand your customer's needs and challenges
3. How to use psychology and research-driven design to convert more visitors into buyers
4. How to protect your profit margin while chasing ambitious growth goals
5. How to convert run-of-the-mill customers into raving fans

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about what brands should be doing NOW to set themselves up for a successful holiday campaign. You'll have a playbook for locking down everything from traffic generation to conversion optimization and post-purchase support.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What you should be doing NOW to make the most of BFCM
2. How to come up with a compelling offer
3. Why holiday shoppers are different from your usual customers
4. Why personalization might not skyrocket your sales, but segmentation could
5. How to use cross-sells, upsells, and post purchase offers to maximize AOV

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about when brands should start taking SEO seriously, as well as what they should be doing to make the most out of their efforts and what they can expect to get as a return on their investment.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why most brands (understandably) start with paid search instead of SEO
2. When (and why) brands should start giving more attention to SEO 
3. How do stand up a high-performing SEO practice the right way
4. How to find an external service provider you can trust
5. Why SEO is a smart investment for your business

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about the psychology behind discounts, why they are so attractive to consumers, and how you can achieve similar results with alternative strategies that don't undermine the value of your products or position you as a "bargain brand."

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why discounts are so compelling for consumers
2. The downsides of habitual discounting for your brand
3. When discounts are the correct pricing strategy to use
4. Alternatives to discounting that work just as well
5. How to assess and improve your current pricing strategy

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

Read the blog:
https://thegood.com/insights/overcoming-channel-conflict/

So, how do you decide which one to test and how to gauge the success or failure of these new exciting ways to spend your marketing dollars to generate business? Luckily Ryan is here is to break it all down for us.

TRANSCRIPT:

Jon MacDonald :
Hey Ryan, welcome to another episode of Drive and Convert. Today we're going to talk about shiny new traffic sources. Right. There's no end to the new platforms popping up and they're always claiming to be the next great source of traffic for your business. So, we're going way back first though is with Yahoo, then Google then Facebook then Twitter then Instagram now everyone's on TikTok. I mean I'm not but everybody is supposedly. Definitely feeling old these days based on these stats.

Ryan Garrow:
Yeah. Me neither.

Jon MacDonald :
But look, the list goes on and on. And I'm sure I've left a lot off of that list over the history and it will forever be growing too, right? So, what I'd love to get schooled on today from you is how do you decide which one to test? And how do you gauge the success or failure of each of these new and exciting shiny objects to spend your marketing dollars on to generate revenue? It's a lot, right? But look, with so many social networks and traffic sources popping up seemingly every week, how do you know if it's a good place to spend money?

Ryan Garrow:
The real answer is, always it depends. But that's always the answer we give everybody no matter what we're talking about in the digital marketing world. It's my least favorite answer but it has to be the one you give every time and with context. And when you're looking at all of these wonderful platforms and companies that you can spend money on the ads, I think the first step is to really understand what the platform is. Who's on it? What are they trying to do? What's their goal of being on that platform?
Because we all really understand Google and that was always a pretty easy one. Like I'm on Google to find something either information or a product that's why I'm there. And it makes a lot of sense logically saying, "I get it, if I am selling that product or I provide an answer to that I want to show when they're searching for that." There's a lot of intent there. If you're selling houses you might not necessarily want to spend a lot of time on TikTok, generally. TikTok is skewing. It's getting older, I think, as young people blow platforms open like in Facebook and Instagram did and then older people take them over because I think they're being cool by getting on them.

Jon MacDonald :
I saw a stat today about Facebook that something like 70% of people over 60 are on Facebook, which is the highest user percentage base. It's crazy.

Ryan Garrow:
Oh, [crosstalk 00:02:57].

Jon MacDonald :
We used to tell our customers you want to convert older folks and high income, you would advertise on Microsoft Bing. Because they're using Internet Explorer out of the box and not changing the default search engine, right? So-

Ryan Garrow:
Correct.

Jon MacDonald :
... But now it's definitely Facebook too. Like it's crazy.

Ryan Garrow:
What's sad, well I'm not going to say sad, but you have to advertise through Facebook to really target Instagram. You have to use that Facebook ads platform like Joyful Dirt, which hopefully I'll be able to bring this back later to talk about one of my issues with the Joyful Dirt brand. But Joyful Dirt doesn't have anything going on on Facebook really. Instagram because we're targeting millennial plant moms generally, I mean obviously anybody can buy the product, but we get very little and to no interaction on Facebook and it doesn't work when we market on there.
But at least you're understanding that, right? If you are selling arthritis cream you want to be on Facebook. And we've got a company that sells arthritis cream and does really well on Facebook. So understanding who's on it, where it's going, and then also just how they're interacting. If it's short-form video like TikTok, then if you're not prepared to make short-form video you're probably not going to be tremendously successful in that space. Do you have a personality? Like if you're just a brand throwing ads up randomly on TikTok with no face to the brand, I can't imagine it's going to do well.
And I think in early on you've got these platforms that you have to really get into the platform, I think, and understand how you're interacting. And so if I was going to spend my money on TikTok step one is I would go join TikTok. Like I'm not there, I don't want to be there but that would be understand who's there. And in theory until you get in there you won't even know that, you have to get in there and start watching TikTok. You know I was never a Snapchat person either, I just wait for Instagram to copy their stuff and then I'll see if I like it. But again, understanding where the ads are being put there can really help you figure out does this conceptually make sense for my brand?

Jon MacDonald :
So I'm hearing from you if I could summarize two things, one is know who your target audience is and where they're at and what platform and then that's a good place. And then B is test it, right? You really don't have a choice you just need to test it. Throw some money at it and see what sticks if you think you have a good understanding of your consumers being on those channels.

Ryan Garrow:
Yeah. Like once you can advertise in there and decide that this is based on who's on it, who my demographic is or target market is go spend some money. And it could be that you're trying to open up a new audience, so it's you're testing it for that. Like if you want to sell to teenage kids TikTok may be a great place to start pushing into.

Jon MacDonald :
That's great. Okay.

Ryan Garrow:
I mean it's gradually older, but.

Jon MacDonald :
Yeah. So how do you test the traffic then?

Ryan Garrow:
Well, once you're on the platform and you've seen what it looks like, my lens that I look through is I want a light money on FIRE budget. And I have to be comfortable with it just not working, because we don't know. It's a new traffic source for you, it's a younger platform often, because we're talking about the shiny new ones that haven't matured like a... If you're not advertising on Google and Facebook I probably don't recommend that you start looking at the shiny new ones yet.

Jon MacDonald :
Right. Yeah, start with the basics.

Ryan Garrow:
Yeah, start with the basics. And then, okay great. It makes sense to do this so you need to have a budget in mind that if it goes horribly wrong and you lose it all and you get no results, it's not going to sink your business. If you're doing a hundred thousand a month in revenue you're not going to go onto a brand new channel for the first month probably and spend $50,000. It just doesn't line up, doesn't make sense unless there's some crazy reason that you believe in your core that that's there.

Jon MacDonald :
Maybe you like lighting money on fire.

Ryan Garrow:
True. Maybe you do. And I've got a great thing I can sell you, I'm sure, somewhere that's going to run 50,000 bucks. And so have that budget first.

Jon MacDonald :
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ryan Garrow:
Then you need to make sure that you can track the traffic. Just by going off on advertising there you have to be able to tag the ads to make sure that when they go to your website or wherever your call to action is, Google Analytics can see th...

The article Jon mentioned on how to write production descriptions that sell:
https://thegood.com/insights/product-descriptions/

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

Ryan:
Jon, you recently wrote an article that kind of put my head in a spin around product description.

Jon:
Sometimes that's too easy.

Ryan:
I know. Spinning my brain's not necessarily the most difficult thing to do if you're in the space, but you wrote an article about product descriptions and how they can significantly improve conversion rates. And that surprises me because I personally ignore those all the time and I focus on other aspects of marketing and driving traffic as per usual. But that for me, is kind of like a side, just put it in there. As long as it's in there and then we can manipulate it going into Google shopping, where it's going to have an impact on your traffic. Just get something in there, period. Obviously I was wrong on this in my opinion. And I'm probably not alone in that. I'm excited today, Jon's going to school us on product descriptions and what you should be doing as an eCommerce business to leverage that to improve conversion rates. Jon, kick us off, explain at a high level, of all the things you could be focusing on on your site, why product descriptions in your mind, are one of the top things you can be doing to improve conversion rates?

Jon:
Yeah well, I think you basically just said it best in your tee up here where a lot of people just don't pay attention to this. And I think it's really, really forgotten. And that's a challenge in that as you're optimizing websites, it's one of the first places we go because most people forget about it. But look, we've learned over a decade of running AB tests on hundreds of product detail pages that optimizing your product descriptions is just one of the highest return, lowest investment improvements that an eCommerce manager can make. And look, they're key part of your potential customer's decision making process. I think the stat that my team here at The Good always says is that 87% of consumers rate product content extremely or very important to deciding to buy.

Ryan:
Wow.

Jon:
87%.

Ryan:
Way higher than I would've thought.

Jon:
Right. Well, that's exactly the problem is most people don't think about this. And so if you're not optimizing product descriptions, you're certainly leaving money on the table. That's why you should focus on this.

Ryan:
If we're going to improve it, if we just assume that for example, my product descriptions are just terrible because I didn't focus on them, what are the areas I need to be looking at as I'm staring at my product description? And where do I start? I guess would be the best question.

Jon:
Well, I think there's four main areas that everyone should be focusing on and we can chat about today, but we can break these down. But the first is the real job of a product description. Most people think the real job of the product description is something that it's not. And we'll dive into that a little bit. The second is that it's an effective product description template needs to be used, so we can talk about what goes into those and what items you need to check the box to really make it great. And then how to write one that converts. It's not just having the content, you need to also be thinking about how you're writing that content.
And then we can really talk about frequently asked questions around the product descriptions that I get, because I get a lot of questions about it. Once we start optimizing, people start thinking about it, a lot more questions come up than you might imagine. Partly, that's why we're doing the show today, it makes your head spin a little bit. That means there's a lot of questions there and you're not alone in that really. Maybe we can just break those four down and discuss each pretty briefly.

Ryan:
Yeah, I'm excited for it. What's the real job of a description of a product? In my mind, it's to describe the product. It's a blue t-shirt, congratulations.

Jon:
Yeah, right, exactly. If you just said blue t-shirt, how many sales do you think you're going to get? Let's just poke a hole in the idea that the job of the eCommerce product description is just to describe the product. I think that that's not right. Given the name, it makes sense that most folks think this, but product descriptions aren't there to just describe what's on your eCommerce site. They're also there to qualify. Do they help your visitors quickly assess, is this for someone like me? Do they persuade? Is it a compelling description? Is it customer centered on the reasons they should be considering that product?
And then it's also there to surface. And what I mean by that is to help people find the product. This is the third one on purpose because a lot of people will stuff keywords throughout in terms of search engine optimization in optimizing the product description, but look, SEO keywords and search terms, and if you use those in a natural way, you'll get the page to show up and you want it to show up in search engine or even Amazon results if you're talking about optimizing your product descriptions on Amazon, which should also be done.
Here's really one way to really think about this, product descriptions are a bit like your 24/7 in store retail associate for your online store. We often talk about if you wouldn't do something in a retail store, don't do it on your website. Let's take that analogy a step further and say, "How would associate talk about the product?" If you walked into a store and said, "Hey, I'm looking for a t-shirt," what questions are they going to ask to help you find the right one in that store? As a virtual retail associate, the product description can have that same kind of impact. And if it does its job well, it's going to draw visitors to your goods and then increase the conversions on those. And if it's done poorly, it's just going to frustrate visitors and push them away and hurt sales. It's very, very similar.

Ryan:
I like that. I think a lot of people, at least in what I think through is I don't think about qualifying. I'm like, you got to my page, you click on my products from Google shopping, you saw the price, just go buy it. And then if I'm in the jar looking at the label in the wrong way, from that perspective and I step out, I realize, okay, well I know conversion rates on shopping traffic is generally lower than category page traffic and so I'm like, oh well, possibly because my category is doing a better job describing a product or qualifying that person coming in and I'm just leaving that there rather than pulling it through and looking at qualifying them.

Jon:
Yeah. You're not alone on that. A lot of brands look at a category page as an opportunity to convert. I look at a category page as an opportunity to help somebody to the next step in the funnel, which is get them to that product detail page. And that's where you can really convert and sell and make sure people are getting the right product for them.

Ryan:
Okay, I concur. Tell us then okay, once I decide that it's more than just describing a product, what's a template look like that's going to help me through creating this product description that is going to be more t...

The site mentioned for checking your organic rankings:
www.semrush.com

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

Jon:
Hey Ryan. So traffic to a website comes from many different channels and avenues, as we all know. And for most companies though, that largest source is always Google, the infamous Google traffic source. Now, from previous conversations with you, I know that Google shopping, spend and traffic can have a really positive impact on organic traffic in Google. Which always has blown my mind when I've heard that, because I heard from you recently too, that there are several types of search engine optimization that can have an impact on paid search. Not just on on-page. So this really confused me, because I thought Google kept everything separate. You can't spend money to grow rankings within Google. You can buy your spot with an ad, maybe do some stuff around shopping to get surface there. But I wasn't aware that those two really correlated with organic. So I'm looking forward to hearing about how search engine optimization can help your paid search. And I guess more simply, what are you talking about? Can you fill me in on this?

Ryan:
Yeah. So I don't want to confuse people kind of with the title or how we're putting this out there, but you can't spend money on paid search to have Google increase your rankings. That's been a myth disproved multiple times over, and Google has been very, I think, above board in how that works. But we do know that spending more on shopping, where people discover your product more, they will come back and buy through organic and direct, and those channels will start producing more revenue. But what people I think overlook are the fact that there are two types of SEO that people need to be aware of. And you should always as a business owner be investing or planning to invest in both SEO and paid search. I don't think one is greater than the other necessarily long-term, but you need to have both.
And the type of SEO that people talk about or think about when they say SEO is what we've been doing generally for 20 years, building our rankings in authority with back links that are of high quality, putting content out on the internet that Google recognizes as valuable and they will give you more authority. You spend now on SEO with that's either your time or money, hiring people to do that. And then four to six months you see the results in increased traffic. That's generally what people think about with SEO. What they tend to overlook is the SEO that gets results actually within two weeks of you doing it. And that's the on-site SEO work.
And so there's things you can do on your site to improve it that when Google re-indexes that you will move up in rankings. And this type of SEO will help organic traffic, but also have an oversized impact on paid search. And so because it dabbles both of those buckets I like to focus on that SEO before I even go to the SEO that people normally think about. And so on-site SEO at its simplest form is improving your category pages for Google.

Jon:
Okay. So you're talking content, better imagery, things of that sort?

Ryan:
Yeah. The content, the tags, the titles, things on that site that Google indexes and sees have a lot of benefits around your website and traffic generally. And so, if you do a search for your product, and so if you sell Nike shoes and that's the broad search that has lots of traffic, you will notice on Google most of the organic results are for categories of Nike shoes. It's not one specific Nike shoe like a shopping ad would be. Because Google, based on that search, knows that you don't know which specific model you're looking for or if you're looking for men's or women's. You're looking for Nike shoes. And so often the high volume terms are going to be category pages that Google is going to be indexing and sending traffic to until people get more and more specific with their searches.
And that's how people generally move down a funnel, is I gradually do my research... Forgot, okay. Now I know I need to be searching for men's Nike shoes. Then I see that page. I'm like, "Oh, I need to be searching for men's Jordan Nike shoes." And then I'm like, "I really want to search for Jordan 4 men's shoes." And then that's when I'm getting to more and more specific and even adding color onto that, and people will do that through a search funnel. But the biggest advantage is saying, "All right, I have this category page and I need to have a description on that page about what's on that page that Google can see." And it doesn't necessarily matter for searchers because if I'm searching for Nike shoes and I'm on a page of Nike shoes, I can see they're Nike, I can see they're shoes. I don't need to read that text to see it. And so putting that on there though will have an outsized impact on quick increase in rankings.
And so I like to start this by telling people to go to SEMrush, or some site like that to be able to see what is Google doing with your organic site, how are you average ranking on there? There's some wonderful reports on SEMrush. It's the one I use because it's probably simple enough that we to dive into very, very quick. I don't get super deep on a lot of my analysis. I get high-level and figure out some strategy and then move off of that. But SEMrush has some great things they've done from an organic perspective. They scraped these results pages, and they know generally where you're ranking. Obviously you rank in different parts of the country differently, and search intent and my previous search history is going to impact my organic results. But generally we know that hey, you're ranking here on this keyword. And SEMrush also brings in the average volume of searches a month.
And so to start to see where your site could have a quick impact on this, you go to SEMrush, click on your organic rankings, sort it by volume. And you'll start seeing where your site is ranking. So if you're ranking on number 70 for a term with 10,000 searches, you're still getting zero traffic because you're stuck somewhere on page seven. But it'll also show you which page is ranking there. And when you see that you're like, "Oh, this page is ranking for that. And I'm seeing the term 'Nike shoes' goes to my Nike shoe page. That's great." You can click it actually in SEMrush and pull it up. Very simple. And you can see there's nothing on that page other than my title that says, "Nike shoes," in text that the search engine can scrape and understand.
And so you take those category pages and you write that paragraph of text. You maybe make sure that your title is short and appropriate for that search. You make sure the H tags on the site are appropriate for that, and it's not including random other characters or doesn't have your brand first. It doesn't have sizes first maybe, if you're looking at shoes. That information on your site will raise the ranking within two weeks. And it really depends on your competitors on what they've done or what they're doing. But within two weeks, you can assume that you're going to have more value to Google. They're going to raise you up there. And that's by no means a bad thing when you're getting quick results on S...

https://www.logicalposition.com/

TRANSCRIPT:

Jon:
Hey Ryan. So we get companies contacting us all the time, that don't have large, six or seven figure marketing budgets, and many times, those large clients get most of the press and excitement, but the majority of companies that end up investing in marketing are going to be smaller, and smaller companies have to do things a little bit differently. I want to ask you today, what impact does a small budget have on driving traffic and how do those small budget brands compete online? They obviously want to compete, they have to compete in order to grow, and I want to know what's the magic, how do they make that happen? I'm excited to talk to you about this today, and I guess I'll start pretty broad, in e-commerce, is there such a thing as too small of a budget?

Ryan:
Across the board as a broad general rule, no, but if you're really going to do something with your budget, then yes. I mean, you have to have enough budget to start moving things around and collecting data. And I think that initial starting budget, if you're a smaller business, is going to be important to determine how quick you can grow, how aggressive you can be, where are you going to find that opportunity to take the next step in the digital marketing evolution of your business? And I challenged a lot of business owners in this space, as I'm talking to smaller ones all the time. Like for example, yes, you can start with $100 a month budget, it's your money, and you can market it however you want, invest it however you want.
But if you're e-commerce, you're e-commerce so that you can sell everywhere and have your online store open all the time, even when you're sleeping. And so if that's the case, $100 is not going to get you very far in marketing across the internet. And so if you're going to do something that small, you really need to be hyper, hyper, hyper-focused, which does limit your potential and opportunities to find little pockets where you can really dominate or win. And so I would generally say less than $1,000, there may be better places for your money than trying to drive traffic with it online.

Jon:
Interesting. I was going to ask, and maybe you've just answered, but I'd love your take on this too, if I only have $1,000 a month to spend, is it worth doing it or am I just throwing my money away, when we're talking about driving traffic through traditional paid media sense?

Ryan:
That's a difficult one because most business owners that are coming up with this $1,000 and you're smaller, that's a meaningful number to them probably, but they probably don't have the expertise to really make that $1,000 do as much as it can. And so you probably have to bring an expert in, and that costs money as well, because most people in the digital marketing world are not working for free. And so you have to figure in an expert generally, and I'll probably come back to that point, but for most businesses, I would say that you have to look at it through a lens of time and money.

Jon:
Okay.

Ryan:
Anybody can learn how to do digital marketing. You have to be able to study, you have to be able to go in and make some mistakes and learn it, but anybody can figure it out. It's definitely not the most complex thing you could be learning. But if you have more time, then you should be doing some of that work yourself and learning it and getting it to it like, "Can I get some basic things done?" If you have more money, than you need to hire people and your budget should probably be a little bit higher to be able to invest and push traffic.

Jon:
So we should be saying, when we say budget for today's conversation, should I be thinking about it as budget including the expert or budget just in what you would spend to drive traffic in these channels?

Ryan:
I think businesses should be looking at it together, but I think most business owners are thinking about, "Okay, I can spend $1,000 to drive traffic. Let's go put that on Google and make it work." I do believe though, the Googles in particular and I'll focus on Google for right now, but Google in particular has done some pretty cool things helping small e-commerce businesses get going. If you've got a feed and you're on a smaller platform, like if you're on Shopify, it's very, very simple to get up and running on Shopify and get your products going to Google. And then there's what Google is calling smart shopping campaigns that allow a business really to say, "Google, here's how much I'm willing to spend per day, and here's the goal I need to get out of it." It does not take an expert to get that up and running.
And in fact, I tell companies, do not pay an agency to manage smart shopping campaigns because there's nothing to do. It can be a small piece of an overall structure, in fact, we at Logical Position do use smart campaigns in a small piece of a campaign occasionally, but we have to do a lot more work in the reporting and strategy on that type of client, to be able to justify charging management fees on smart campaigns.

Jon:
Okay. That makes sense.

Ryan:
Small budgets use more automation, I think, is the name of the game. Use things that are set up to make sure you don't just waste a bunch of money, and I think that's where a lot of small businesses, what keeps them from starting often is that fear of, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to go waste money trying to drive traffic because I don't know how to do it right." Doing some research, I think, can help keep that option to a minimum, that is just going to go out there and be a big waste.

Jon:
Let's say a company hasn't driven traffic on Google. How do they decide what that starting budget should be?

Ryan:
This generally comes down to, what's the business doing as a whole? If you're doing $100,000 a month on your website and you haven't been spending money, you probably have a larger amount you could start with then if I'm only doing $1,000 a month in sales. It's a threshold there of starting to look at it, but I generally say, in e-commerce, at least $1,000 to start with on Google. And then start thinking about it through a lens of, "I know I'm not going to be starting out at the gate if I'm doing it myself in a perfect world scenario." So there's going to be some learnings. I look at it through the lens of what's my light money on fire threshold, to let me get things going, and I've done this with new platforms on some of my brands.
Nobody knew what they were doing yet, across the entire platform. Pinterest is being one of them. A couple years ago, it was just wide open. Nobody knew what it was going to do. I think they're getting some more structure in place and it's driving better traffic, but I went onto it saying, "Look, I don't know what it's going to do." My light money threshold at that point was, I think about 2,500 bucks, so I talked to Pinterest like, "Look, we can go a thousand a day for two and a half days if you want, or we can go $100 a day for about a month. I'm okay with either, whichever one you think is going to work better for me." And that was my light money on fire threshold, that I wasn't going to be mad, I was just like, "Yeah, that did suck, but I got some learnings." Pinterest didn't work for us at that point in time on that business, we'll continue to be revisiting it.
But all that to come back around to it can't be a budget that if it doesn't work, it's going to...

1. It's hard to read the label from inside the jar.
2. People come to your website for only two reasons: to purchase, or to research.
3. Your goals are aligned with customers, both of you want a conversion.
4. Competitive research is not data.

Today, Jon and Ryan pick up where they left out and give you Jon's final four laws of conversions.

www.thegood.com

Connect with Ryan:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryangarrow/

For help with your Amazon Advertising:
https://www.logicalposition.com/amazon-advertising-management

TRANSCRIPT:

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

Ryan: Well, Jon, welcome to the Drive and Convert podcast. You've done a lot of writing, to say the least. You've got some phenomenal content out there on the internet and as somebody that reads most of your content and speaks to you often, it's always good to read. So if you're listening to this, go find Jon and all of his content on his website. I highly recommend it. You will come away as a smarter human. But one of the fascinating concepts that at least for me seems fairly unique to your brain and at least the content you're putting out is the idea of there are seven different types of people that you're going to find coming to your site. And if you can understand who these people are in each one of their buckets, you're going to be able to help each one of them convert because they're all going to look at your site a little bit differently or want to do slightly different things.
But I guess step one is just, how do we understand who they are? And then we want to know how do we convert these people? We've got them to the site. We know who they are, now how do we convert them? So I'm excited to hear about this because I can never get enough insight into how to make my businesses and my clients' businesses work better. But can you kick us off just by telling us who are the seven personas that you're seeing on the internet coming to websites?

Jon: Well, thank you, first of all, for the kind of compliments on the content. I'm blushing over here if you can't see that. Yes, there are seven and a lot of people think, seven that's a lot. But the reality here is there might be some overlap in these as well, right? And these are all different types of people that you really need to address on your site. And so many people don't do that, that it really led me to write this content. So the first set of folks coming to your site are what I call lookers, right? These are people who are just looking. They're browsers, if you will, right? They're not after any one thing in particular, they're having fun just looking around. They want to see what you offer that maybe will catch your attention.
Honestly, they may even have been just searching around Google for different types of products and ended up at your site, not necessarily by mistake, but they ended up there and now they're just looking at what you have to offer. Really you just need to understand that not everybody who approaches your site's going to buy. Most e-comm sites know that, right? Because their conversion rate's not a hundred percent or else we wouldn't exist. But the reality here is that you still need to address this audience.
A second one to be thinking about is bargain hunters. These are people who are only at your site because you're having a sale or some type of offer.

Ryan: Hopefully, it's not a discount.

Jon: Exactly. That would be my point of view. But that's what they're looking for there. They're trained, as we have said, several times, they're trained to look for that sale. And so there are people, and there is a segment of folks who will only buy if something's at a perceived bargain, right? And they really want to see if they can find the bargain. Sometimes it's the thrill of finding the bargain that really gets to them.
The third you really want to think about it as the buyers. Now, it seems pretty obvious, but some people are really on a mission. They know exactly what they want and they're there to get it. So they searched for the model number, they found your site, and they are ready to buy. And so you really want to facilitate that. A fourth is researchers. Some folks are just researching. They have a general idea of what they're after, but they want to compare those options and the prices. So, a lot of people will go to Amazon for this, but now, a lot of people are doing that on brand sites as well. They go to Amazon and they find the product they want but then they end up on your brand site after they've done that research. They find the model number on Amazon, they Google it to find more details about the brand behind the product. Amazon isn't always the best at having product details, right? So a lot of times you'll end up on a brand site trying to do that and that's what these folks are.

Ryan: Now, what would be the big differentiator on the researchers and the lookers? Because a lot of similarities between the two, but what would be the key differentiators in your mind?

Jon: The key differentiator is the researcher knows what they want. They know what they're looking for. The lookers are ... It's kind of like wandering around a mall versus going right into the Apple store. You're at the mall but you beeline it for one shop because you know that you need something from that shop. Where you might just go to the mall to hang out, right? If that's even a thing, post-COVID one day, we'll see.

Ryan: Someday we'll get back to a mall, maybe.

Jon: New customers is another one. People don't really think about that often. And this is really where some visitors are just going to be new customers. They enjoyed their last visit. Maybe they were a looker on their last visit and now they're there to find out more and potentially become a new customer. Perhaps these are people who you should really be thinking about post-purchase, like they just purchased. What happens at that point, right? So these could be people who are buying from you the first time. And it's an audience you really need to be thinking about because you need to make them feel welcomed and appreciated.
One that a lot of people don't think about is dissatisfied customers. Everybody has them. I don't care if your net promoter scores is perfect or you don't hear about these complaints. Everybody has a dissatisfied customer or more. And that's okay. These people are there for a number of reasons and it might not always be that bad. Maybe they're just dissatisfied because it didn't fit the way they thought it would, but they still like the product, they're there to return or exchange. For some reason, a previous purchase didn't suit them and now they want customer service. And the goal here is to make it easy for them to get that and perhaps even do self-service where possible. And the last one, seven of seven, we blew right through these, but we'll dive into each in a second, but this is loyal customers. So some of these are your best customers. They come back, they love shopping with you. They love your product and then they're going to be repeat customers. So, that's the seven. To run them real quick, it's ...

TRANSCRIPTION:
Jon:
With Cyber Week just in the rear view mirror, I've got a lot of questions that I've been wanting to ask Ryan. Outside of revenue, how does a brand even know if they were successful for Cyber Week? Or how do they know if they left money on the table or if their goals were even just misaligned? And what are the common missed opportunities in search engine marketing that have been happening over Cyber Week? And what does a brand's data say about their Cyber Week performance? And I keep going here, but when does a brand look back at their e-commerce data for Cyber Week and what should they even be looking for? So, I've got even more questions, and we're very fortunate to have access to Ryan who has answers on things like this. Ryan, let's start with the big overarching question that is likely on the minds of e-commerce brands right now. Outside of revenue, how does a brand know if they were even successful for Cyber Week?

Ryan:
Yes. A lot of great questions, Jon. I would say revenue, most likely, is most important to brands. And so, we do have to look at that, but it gives you a very one-dimensional picture of what happened. The year 2020, almost anything goes and expectations have to be adjusted very quickly, almost in real time, of what we think is going to happen, we test it, we go, "Oh, that didn't happen. Great. Do this, this, or this." I think looking back on Cyber Week is going to be important for a lot of brands to really decide what you're going to do for the rest of the holiday season. Because for most brands, you rate in the middle of your holiday season, you still got a good solid couple of weeks left of really high conversion rates, high traffic rates, and a lot of time to make up for missings on Cyber Week or continue what was successful in Cyber Week, and really make it a holiday to remember for an e-commerce brand.
Step one, when I'm looking at data for a holiday season, I have two buckets of companies in the e-commerce world in my head. Either you have good goals or you have bad goals. Those are the only two buckets I look at. And thankfully, it doesn't really matter which bucket you're in, you can look at a certain metric that's going to help guide the rest of your analysis. Let's say you have great goals, and you are shooting generally in my world, you have great goals if you are shooting for a non-brand goal specifically. And so, let's say you had a breakeven goal during Cyber Week. And if you had a 50% margin after discounts and everything, you're going to shoot for a 2X. If you were above 2X during Cyber Week, either the whole week, or sporadically, or consistently, that tells me you left money on the table.

Jon:
Let's talk about that for a minute. When you're talking about a 2X, a 2X of what?

Ryan:
Your spend on Google, it's your acquisition market. That's generally where you can leave money on the table. Your organic traffic is set. You're not going to do any organic work and SEO work in the middle of Cyber Week and have it move the needle for you. Your acquisition market is going to be Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon if you're on Amazon, and that's the leverage you can push and pull and move stuff real quickly. And so, generally, brands are going to go into Cyber Week with a goal. Generally, they'll set a goal for budget, set a goal for revenue. What are we going to spend on each channel? And what do we expect from each one?
If you were above goal, I'm going to tell you left money on the table. Now, a lot of marketing teams, a lot of agencies are going to go back to the exec team and be like, "Look how amazing we are. We spent your money and we were above goal. Aren't you happy with us?" I would be furious with my marketing team, and I'm the marketing team for my brand. So, I'd be mad at myself that, "What are you doing not spending more money to capture more customers?" I didn't want to shoot for, let's say, 4X on my non-brand. That's great that you did that. You got us more profit, but I would rather have customers than I would profit on my non-brand terms.

Jon:
So, using Cyber Week as a way to build your rolodex, if you will, right? To build up that customer list that then you can go and get more sales from later.

Ryan:
Yeah, that's what I do with every week, it's not just Cyber Week. My goal on every week of every year on marketing is more customers. And so, that's where I set my goals, that's how I use my acquisition marketing with Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Pinterest being a new one, that's pretty lucrative now. If you're not looking at Pinterest, you should be looking there. You're probably too late to holiday season with the setup times in there. But again, all acquisition market where I have a non-brand, new customer acquisition channel, I want more customers. And that's where I set my goal. And I don't want to overshoot that. If you're under the goal, and this is an asterisk, but you probably capture the market you could have. Now, there's a lot of things that go into that, was your conversion rate garbage because you weren't working with Jon? If so, then yeah, you might not hit row as you left money on the table, because you weren't converting as well as you could have.
This year's obviously unique. And there's no scenario in which you can say that 2020 is not a unique year, period. Based on what we've seen the previous 10 years of my e-commerce time. But another wrinkle coming into this year has been Smart Shopping. Google has been a big advocate for pushing for this. And so, Smart Shopping and Google has a big push this year. It was around last year, but it was a very small percentage of advertisers we were seeing with Smart Shopping. This year, a lot of advertisers in Smart Shopping, my gut tells me they're going to go back and look at all their Smart Shopping campaigns and that was a lot of missings. There was a lot of money left on the table with those.
Generally, it's because all of your search queries go into one bucket. You can't effectively, in Smart Shopping campaigns, separate out brand and non-brand at scale. Small little tests you can do, but it doesn't work at scale. And so, if you have a goal, it's going to include brand searches, non-brand searches, remarketing display, there's a lot of things bucketed into that campaign. If you did not adjust your goal for a promotion week like Cyber Week, you, for sure, left money on the... If you're shooting for... I'm going to make this up again, say a 5X. Your blended goal, 5X, in your Smart Shopping campaigns and you're like, "All right. We're going to ride that into Cyber Week." And the only change is going to be a promo.
Your competitors probably had a promo, they probably adjusted their goals down to capture more market share, knowing the competition was going to go up. And so, the smart campaign that's trying to hit the target row as a five in this campaign is not going to be able to adjust well against all this increased competition, increased click costs, increased conversion rates to really understand how and where to play well. It just doesn't react necessarily quick, and it's got to have a lot of data to make decisions. And so, I'm guessing, if you were in a Smart Shopping campaign, chances are you left some money on the table.

Jon:
And do you feel l...

Read more about Dark Patterns:
https://thegood.com/insights/dark-pattern-ecommerce-ux-design/

Transcription:
Ryan:
Jon, psychology plays an important part in business, no matter what business you're in and how you're getting the sales. Now, the best tactics to convince us to spend money are the ones we're not really aware of. And retail has been doing this probably for hundreds of years, even though I haven't been involved in it, using music's sense merchandising of how they put products on the shelves to get us to spend more money. And all of that research and data is out there for the taking, but I would venture a guess that most of the public is unaware of actually what's happening in those retail environments to commit us to spend money. When it comes to e-Commerce though, and the way our economy is moving to transacting online, I'm finding a lot of these "psychology tactics" are much more in your face, or at least I'm more aware of them.
And maybe it's because I'm spending too much time in front of my computer talking to e-Commerce business owners and looking at e-Commerce sites. But I see it all the time, and a lot of times it just bugs me and you have a term for it called dark patterns. And that's a new term to me, but probably not to you because you work in the CRO world, but you recently mentioned it on LinkedIn. And I wanted to learn more about it because it fascinates me, the intricacies of psychology because studying sales my whole life and now having a retail store with my wife, it's just always there. And I think most of them I see online are garbage, some plugins on Shopify sites that maybe should never have been put on in the first place, but I want to learn about dark patterns. And I learned from one of the best in the world, who should be you.

Jon:
Awesome.

Ryan:
It sounds evil, but I just want to know more. How do we use our powers for good?

Jon:
I'm looking forward to it.

Ryan:
Jon, why don't you just take a moment and give me a high level of what do you mean when you say dark patterns when it comes to e-Commerce and e-Commerce sites?

Jon:
So when I talk about dark patterns, what I'm talking about is similar to, if you think about hacking and in a way that there's white hat and black hat, right. And black hat hacking is when you're doing something intentionally for a negative outcome, it might be a benefit to somebody like it's going to be benefits to the hacker, but you're hurting somebody in that process or you're creating a problem in that process. Where a white hat hacker is really just trying to help. They're trying to do things for positive. Maybe they're looking for bugs, but they're going to report them to the software maker before they do anything to exploit it. So you think about that. Exploitation is really what comes in here to my head when I think about this more than anything else. So, what we're talking about here today is really when an e-Commerce store makes something difficult because they want to influence the outcome that they're trying to do.
So whether that's something through psychology, you talked about in a retail environment, the type of music they play in the background that calms people down, or how they price, where they make things $2 and 99 cents instead of $3, right? You start thinking about all these psychology tricks that come at play well in e-Commerce there's all those psychology tricks. Plus there are ways to actually increase barriers intentionally on a website so that the consumer can't take the action that they're trying to take, instead, you've made it more difficult. Some examples of this really easy one, an email pop-up pops up when you come to the site to sign up for email lists and there's no way to close it. So the only way you can get back to what you were trying to do is to give them your email address, or I like to call this negative intent shaming.
So where the button in that pop-up says something like, no, I don't like discounts or I don't like saving money, right? There's all these types of dark patterns. And it can go even more, really sinister and you make it just impossible to unsubscribe without calling, right? So for years, and it may still be this way, but Skype was an amazing case study of this, where they would claim massive retention rates, but their user rate was super low and usage. And the only reason they had retention rates that were so impressive is because the only way to actually cancel and delete your Skype account was to call a phone number in the U.S. So, if you're an international user where Skype was way more prevalent than in the States, you had to call international, talk to somebody in English only, and say, I need to cancel my Skype account.
Please delete it from your servers. Why won't you just do that when a click of a button? So this is a good example of a dark pattern where the brand really valued retention, so they made it near impossible, right up, maybe to that legal limit. And one of the things you saw on LinkedIn was I had posted to an article it had run in what's called The Hustle, which is a great entrepreneur email. If you're no signed up for a free email, it comes out every morning, just around entrepreneurship and the tech industry and whatnot. And they were saying that there's new legislation coming in that is all about making these dark patterns illegal. And that most things need to be self-service, and it shouldn't be a challenge. So that's really where I was going with this was not only is this just bad to do and lead to a horrible brand image in the longterm, but it's also going to become illegal fairly soon. And I hope it's sooner than later, I have my doubts that would happen anytime in the near future, but I hope it's sooner than later.

Ryan:
So could you also bundle in to that broad, I guess I would probably try to broaden dark patterns a little bit and say it also includes what people think is helping from a psychological perspective, but it's actually just stupid. Well, one of my, I guess, favorite, least favorite was the one that I noticed the most is there's a plug-in on a lot of sites that says, Oh, little Jimmy just bought the pink t-shirt and Oh, look over here, Susie just bought this vase. And Oh, people are buying all over on the site and I can go to some sites and I've seen maybe the analytics behind the scenes and maybe some of my audit. And I know for a fact, there's no way that five people just bought something in the 30 seconds I was on their site.

Jon:
That's exactly it. Fake social proof is a great example of this, right? So it's having a random number of view, people are viewing this product right now, having X number of people who just bought this product from wherever in the world. And consumers always distrust that now, because it's been abused. Right. But it's a dark pattern because what are they trying to do? They're trying to influence your psychology around social proof and having fear of missing out. And you want what everyone else wants and, Oh, well, if so-and-so just bought that product, then it's probably legit and I should buy it too. And we see this more and more, a really good example is well, and we're getting through a lot of good examples. I could go on for days for examples, but another great example is a fake countdown...

TRANSCRIPT

Jon Macdonald:
There's a common saying that there are only three ways to increase the revenue of an online business. You get more people to visit your site while keeping your conversion rate the same, or you can sell to more people who are visiting, thus increasing the average order value. Or you can convert more of those visitors coming to your site into customers. There is a reason that more traffic is first on that list. It's where most e-commerce brands focus because usually they can throw more money at ads and see traffic increase. So it's the easy button for them. But most online businesses are also hooked on traffic. It's like a drug. They think that if they just get more traffic, that all of their problems are going to go away because traffic equals sales, right? But on the surface, that seems right, but my guess is that if we dig deeper, that just isn't the whole story. It's safe to say that everyone wants more traffic, but is all traffic good traffic? Today that's what we're going to find out. Ryan, I'm interested to get your point of view on this as always.

Ryan Garrow:
I'm excited to touch on this one because it comes up in 2020 more often than I thought it would be. And I think it's unfortunate, but it's also nice because I get to help redirect thoughts and how people are coming to that conclusion. But it's always surprising when companies come to me and they're like, we just need more traffic, go find traffic. Interesting. Okay. Let's dig into that.

Jon Macdonald:
It should be fun. Okay. Look having optimized websites for conversions for a decade plus now, I think I know the answer to this, but let's just start high level. Is all traffic, good traffic?

Ryan Garrow:
Hopefully most people in organizations listening to our podcast and they've gotten this far down the road already know that not all traffic is good traffic, and it's not all the same. There's different purposes, for different types of traffic, different purposes for driving traffic to different parts of the page. So, no, it's not all the same. I find a commonality, and this is probably something that's been consistent for a very long period of time. That's why it stays consistent. But companies that have investors or they're chasing investors are constantly talking about site traffic.
They fall into that first point you made I think all the time like. The site is going to convert traffic. We already know that. All traffic on the internet converts at 2%. that's a metric that's been thrown out for, I don't even know how long. I even use it sometimes just to give people a ballpark. Here's what you're going to pay for costs. 50 clicks gets you a sale. At least that's a barometer to start with and most people will be like yeah, 2%, I've heard that number before. When in reality, you know this 2% could be great and 2% could be terrible.

Jon Macdonald:
Right. It's all relative.

Ryan Garrow:
It is. But they say sites are going to convert at this rate. All we need is traffic. Please go get us traffic. I'm always confused. Well, my kids probably get on my phone and click on ads so that's tactically traffic, but I'm pretty sure you don't want my three year old on your site when you're trying to sell something to me. So not all traffic is good traffic, or the same quality.

Jon Macdonald:
That's an interesting approach. It's almost like, I don't want to blame everything on Facebook, but it's similar to their business model where it was just, let's just get as much traffic as possible and then we'll monetize that traffic. But when you're an e-commerce business, you're not selling ads on your site, right? You're trying to sell product. You want qualified traffic, not just eyeballs that can increase your advertising rates.

Ryan Garrow:
Yeah. I was trying to rack my brain going into this. Is there a space in the e-comm world where just high traffic numbers helps and I couldn't come up with an example. On Amazon, you can combine organic and paid and that helps cause you're driving all kinds of ranking increases. On Google, they're separate. Bing, they're separate. But in no scenario in the e-comm world, could I figure out where just a bunch of traffic would be beneficial to me. Maybe there's some out there, but maybe there's different goals that I'm not aware of in the e-commerce world where generally you want to sell more stuff.

Jon Macdonald:
Yeah. And it's interesting. I was just having this conversation with our director of marketing at The Good today about our site traffic. We've grown that real steadily and it's a point of pride for us over the years, but we're very consistent with the content and trying to drive traffic. But we were talking about a competitor had posted on LinkedIn today about how much traffic they're getting and how proud they are. And I was like, man, that's like, two or three X what our traffic is. And I know that competitor is a lot smaller than us. So I was like, okay, all traffic is not qualified traffic. If we're not getting qualified traffic, they could be sending your three-year-old to their site and it's not going to matter. They're not going to have more business from that. That's proof right there that it's not the same.

Ryan Garrow:
Yeah. It takes no skills to find people to come to your site. Anybody can do that. You want to pay me some money, I will get traffic to your site at a cheap cost, but it's not going to be anything relevant. Anybody can put a simple display ad on. A great one would be mobile apps. That's a display setting on Google. They have a massive network of mobile things. If you're running some display, a remarketing and you haven't eliminated the flashlight app on Google Display, that person that developed that app has made probably seven figures and Google knows numbers and nobody at Google has been willing to tell me, but it is a significant number of flashlight app clicks. You have an app to click on a flashlight.
Well, I don't know why you would even have that app anymore, but the number of people that have it and are using it and accidentally clicking ads is astronomical and kudos to that guy. It was just probably one of the greatest inventions of the last 10 years specifically for money making. It's the simplest app, I'd go into the phone, open the flashlight app, and click ads accidentally, and I get paid. So traffic is easy, but if you're getting a bunch of traffic that spends less than one second on your site, what's the point? They didn't intend to come to your site, but you technically go into analytics, have a lot of sessions and a lot of users. If you have an unsophisticated investor, I guess, that only they want to see is you had 1 million visitors to your site last week. Yeah. Guess what? I paid $10,000 for it and I got zero out of it. But yeah, I got a million visitors. not going to any good.

Jon Macdonald:
Right. So ROAS is really important here. That return on the ad spend is really the metric you should be looking for?

Ryan Garrow:
I think it is. I've talked a lot of companies recently that are launching and it's an important for them to get eyeballs when you're launching, even though, you know you're probably not going to get some conversion out of it. But you want some metric that you can track that says that you're getting the right eyeball. And so there's a beauty brand that's launching that's going to be a very high end, very, very high end, very exclusive. We're talking like the Oprahs, the Michelle Obamas, that level. The founder was talking to me about how they...

TRANSCRIPT:
Ryan:
Jon, we've spoke together quite a few times around the country, and then recently just around the internet, since we can't leave our houses. And almost every time we talk, you ruffle quite a few feathers when you're answering questions about email pop-ups. It seems that most retailers and brands out there on their websites, they are absolutely in love with their email pop-up campaign, they think it can do no wrong. And I personally don't like them because they're just annoying and I close them immediately because I'm trying to look at something else. And, but you're distaste, some may say hate, goes a little bit deeper within this space, but so many, again, so many brands are using these. It's just making me crazy.
So, I want to talk about these and get your opinion, the backend and the numbers that are guiding your distaste for these. But even to start with, what do you think is pushing this trend and what data are these merchants seeing that's causing these email pop-ups for discounts or anything just to become the norm? If you don't have it, you're weird almost at this point.

Jon:
Brands, what they're doing is they see another successful brand they look up to have email popups and they say, "It must be working for them. We need to do this as well." It goes in line with all the little Shopify apps that are out there that just spread like wildfire overnight, and then they'd disappear just as quickly once everybody realizes they don't actually move the needle, but they saw their competitor trying it out, so they thought they showed as well. Tons of examples of that. I think that's generally what happens here, first of all. Second of all, the brands see that email is their highest revenue channel, most likely. And so, they say every time I send an email, it's like printing money. So I should collect more emails. And that sometimes even comes down from the executive level, down to that marketing manager who is needing to implement that, whether they think it's right or not.
And third, I think what happens is that brands look at a success metric of how many people do we have on our email list. And they see these pop-ups collect email addresses. And so, they assume they are working. And I guess the goal that they usually have is just to collect email addresses at all costs, right? And they're thinking, "If I get someone on my email list, I can then continue to market to them and the rest will fall into line." And that just is a huge problem. It's, to me, it's the wrong way to be thinking about it. And after optimizing sites for 11 years, statistically, it's not accurate.

Ryan:
Being an e-commerce brand myself, I know that if my email list goes from 10,000 to 20,000, I'm probably making more money from email. So, where are brands missing the logic behind these pop-ups and not equating to larger email database equals more revenue from emails every time I send one?

Jon:
Yeah. I think, I don't have an issue with collecting email addresses. As I said, it should be, and looking at 10 decades of content and data around emails, it definitely can be your highest revenue channel. The problem I have with is the method of collecting, right? So, let's just start with that. I mean, we could, there's lots of directions, we'll, I'm sure we'll go today about the method of doing it around discounts and everything else, but let's just talk about the pop-up form in itself. And what I mean by that is just there are multiple ways to collect email addresses. You can start with those who have ordered and how you have the actual customer contact information that you own, right? If you doing an owned to sale, as opposed to something like an Amazon, then you have that information, people you can remarket to and continue to sell to.
However, if you just put a pop-up on your site versus maybe even baking a form into the page, right? Where customers who are actually interested, will scroll down to your footer and they'll enter their information because they're super interested. Right? I would almost encourage anyone listening to this to set a separate form up in your footer and tag people who fill that form out as higher intent, because they actually are interested in what you had to say. Now, the problem with a pop-up, let's just talk about straight up pop up, not an exit intent, right?

Ryan:
So, you're categorizing your email pops up into different buckets?

Jon:
Yes. Yes. There's different types. And I think that's important here because the one that I want to eliminate from the internet is just the pop-up. As soon as I come to a site, or maybe as soon as I start scrolling or even the timed ones that come up within a couple of seconds of loading the page, those are the ones I want to eliminate. Now, exit intent. Let's put that in a different category. I'm not as opposed to those. But what I'm talking about here is the disruption to the consumer experience, the interruption factor as well. Think of your site like a retail store. Now I know your wife has a retail store, right? If I walk into her store and she jumped out at me and said, "Here's a clipboard, give me your email address." I'm going to probably have a negative reaction to that. Right?

Ryan:
At least she's cute. That does help.

Jon:
Well, Hey.

Ryan:
Popups, aren't as cute.

Jon:
Hey, you know what I mean? You could make, you could put a nice looking picture on a pop-up, but that still doesn't change the fact that I'm there because I have a problem that I'm looking to solve. And I'm at the website because I think that their product or service can solve my pain or need. And all of a sudden now, before I know anything about the brand, something led me there, was it I clicked on an ad or a Google search or someone told me about it, so I have idea that they can help me solve my pain or need. But then all of a sudden I just get there, I still don't know about the value proposition of the brand, I don't know much about their products yet, but then I'm getting hit up right away being asked to give them information.
And I think that that's just disruptive and I can promise you every test we've run where we've eliminated that pop-up conversion rates have gone up on the site and sales and revenue. Now yes, you will collect less email addresses. But I argue that's not a bad thing in this case, with this type of pop-up. And the reason is a couple of faults. So, first of all, the email addresses you're going to collect out of those pop-ups are going to be very, I would argue they're not going to be very effective, right? Because you're getting a consumer who is entering their email address into that pop-up specifically to get rid of the pop-up in a lot of cases, because they... This goes into more things like negative intent shaming, because maybe in that popup, it's a pretty common trend now for a company to say something like, "No, I don't like discounts and offers."

Ryan:
Gosh, I hate that. I had that happen a couple of days ago. And I was like, "Of course I like discounts. I'm not an idiot, but I just don't like you telling me that I don't like discounts."

Jon:
Right. You're you're hurting the brand, right? And you're hurting your customer experience and that's damaged that you now have to repair. So, within the first five seconds of getting into the website, you're already have dug yourself a hole you have to get out.

Ryan:
Yeah. And I think brands are getting kind of like, "Ooh, we're kind of that little unique, give it to the man brand. And we're going to use that humor." [crosstalk 00:07:34] That doesn't necessarily come through because I actually d...

TRANSCRIPT:
Jon:
Hey, thanks for listening to Drive and Convert. Before we jump into this episode, just wanted to take a quick second and let you know that during this episode we had some recording issues and the audio quality is nowhere near where we would normally like to see it. But because the content was solid, we decided to keep it as is and get it out to you. Hopefully you can see through this less than perfect audio, but a big shout out to our editor, Josh, for helping make us sound pretty solid, despite all of the technical shortcomings. We do have some improvements in audio quality on the way, so thank you for listening and on to the show.

Jon:
Ryan, we know that internet traffic doesn't operate in silos. No matter what method you are using to drive traffic and sales, there's always going to be a halo effect. We've all heard this famous quote from 120 years ago, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half." That is still true today, even with all of the attribution and digital advertising tracking we're able to do. But the good news is that with all of the data we have these days, it allows us to know that there is a halo effect and to know how much that halo effect is worth to each brand.
I was recently checking out a presentation you gave [Aclavio 00:01:44] and you showed data for some real clients that blew my mind and I actually just found out one of them is a shared client of ours, which made me even more excited.

Ryan:
Yeah, maybe some of that's due to you.

Jon:
Hey, I'm not going to take credit for this, but the data was a comparison of revenue and performance before and after implementing Google Shopping. I'm talking 1800% increases in revenue in both of these cases. Tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars in newly found revenue.
Now, it seems to me that Google Shopping itself didn't account for most of this revenue gain, but rather that it could be attributed to the halo effect of implementing Google Shopping correctly. Today I wanted to chat about Google Shopping, but more specifically the effect it has on other channels.

Ryan:
Oh, man. It is such a unique topic that doesn't get brought up enough. I'm exciting to really dive into this. I don't even necessarily know if halo effect is a technical term that anybody really uses. It's just kind of how we refer to it internally at Logical Position and what we're seeing.

Jon:
But I do think it makes sense though. You said halo effect originally when we started talking about the topic for today and I immediately got it. Here you are inventing another term, perhaps, that makes a lot of sense. Ryan, tell me. What is the benefit of understanding the halo effect of Google Shopping? Maybe we just start there.

Ryan:
As you're understanding conceptually, and most I think business owners, marketing teams understand that attribution paths generally look like bowls of spaghetti at this point in time, as people can really easily do research and understand what they want from a product as they're finding it and then coming back to business that they had maybe found it somewhere on. What I've learned, through the last decade plus in digital marketing and a lot of that in eCommerce, is that I'm weird in the eCommerce transaction space. I have a very linear conversion path. I see it. I click it. I buy it. Every company on the planet can track my conversion. It's just very simple. If I've bought from you, you know exactly how I found you. Maybe I don't do enough research or I do enough research before I actually go search for the product. I haven't done a lot of analysis on myself, but that's not normal.
What's more normal is my wife buying something, where she'll do research over probably a week and a half and she's got a pretty low threshold for extensive research. If she's going to buy something for $25, she does a decent amount of research to make sure that that's the best deal. But she'll click on multiple shopping ads, multiple social ads, multiple things throughout the process as she goes back and forth between different sites to figure out where she should buy something.
Through that process, what we've seen is that the Google Shopping click, for somebody that is more normal like my wife, is how people are originally going to find you, but it's not how they're, at the end of the day, going to buy from you. It's more of a discovery tool for a lot of people because Google is a research entity for most people in finding the product on eComm. They're very good at it. Google is just phenomenal at product discovery and helping people figure out what they need or want.
Knowing that, most business owners still look at Google Shopping based on last click, because that's what Google Ads has set them up for. Google Ads tracking by default is last click. You can change it to be linear. You can change it to all these other things, which can make sense, but I don't necessarily think it's bad to be looking at that way, but I think you have to understand as a business owner or marketing team that it's doing other things and that attribution conversation... I've been in digital marketing for over a decade, just like you, and attribution just makes my brain hurt.

Jon:
Yeah, there's too many models. None of them are ever accurate.

Ryan:
Yeah. You conceptually know it's there, but you never really want to be like, "Let's really dive into attribution today." That has never come out of my mouth and probably never will.

Jon:
I'm pretty nerdy, but it's never come out of my mouth either.

Ryan:
Yeah. That just doesn't sound fun. No. No, not going to do it. The halo effect is something we've seen and it's an easy way to explain the fact that attribution is happening and we want to be aware of it and know it's there and that helps direct a lot of our goal setting, I think. Knowing that, from a very simple perspective, the more you spend in Google Shopping, the more the other channels on your site are going to increase even if you're not doing anything else to increase them.
The easiest example, I think it happened in May of this year. We were in the middle of COVID and pretty strict lockdown at that time. This company is a B2B company and they came to me I think through a partner of ours and we were talking just general strategy and marketing, what were they trying to accomplish as a business. They sold on Amazon. They sold on Walmart. They sold on Ebay. They sold on their website, but it was very small. They didn't really care about the website much at all and they had an agency that had told them that buying on Google was the best place for them to be, which the Google Shopping actions. At that time it was I think they were the 12% mark, based on their product mix. Then, they had another agency tell them that, "Hey, your product makes us too big. You need to shrink it down because it'll never work with that many SKUs." So, they shrunk down their product mix on their website. All these things are coming together.
Before they kind of have to look at their company now like a before LP and after LP because it was so dramatic, the change. Their website, in the month of April, did $16,000 in revenue and their buy on Google entity did $34,000. They combined did $50,000 in total revenue from Google and their website and they paid $4,000 for that buy on Google, $34,000. That was their total cost of doing that. By no means bad. There's not many business owners that would be like, "Ah, that's a bad idea. Don't take it."
When I told them, I was like, ...

The Essential Guide to Ecommerce Sales Promotions [78 Tactics] :

https://thegood.com/insights/essential-ecommerce-promotion-guide/

TRANSCRIPT:

Ryan Garrow:
Jon, I come across this all the time, and I found myself accidentally suggesting these things to maybe my wife's business or some friend's businesses. When it comes to conversion rates on websites, one of the easiest ways to increase an e-commerce site's sales rate is to offer discounts on products or site-wide. I see it all the time, and I know you have your favorite email popups for 10% discounts and your Reelio spin for discounts on every Shopify site on the planet two years ago.
When you see all these discounts out there, it gets stuck in the back of all these e-commerce marketer's minds that it must be a good thing to do. And I think some companies get addicted to it. In fact, one of my wife's favorite stores is Michaels, it's a craft store, and I get the wonderful job of picking up her orders on the way home from the office. And as I'm looking at these receipts, as I'm picking it up, there is not an order she puts in online for store pickup that doesn't have some crazy discount codes.
It's at least 40% on every order that Michaels is giving away on these orders. And that blows me away how they must have a lot of false front on their pricing to be able to do that and that limits what they can do outside of direct consumer marketing like in Google Ads or things like that. But Jon, technically these discounts increase conversion rates and may, in fact, be increasing new-to-file customers in their database. Given those two metrics, why does a brand need to be careful if they're using discounts on their site?

Jon MacDonald:
Well, I think there's a couple of things to be thinking about here, first of which is that discounting is not conversion optimization. It's margin drain. These brands who are engaging in discounting, what they're really setting themselves up for is to always be a discount brand in the eyes of their consumers. And just like you're saying with Michaels, your wife is never going to pay retail price at Michaels. She always knows there's a discount code or some special that they're running.
Once you dig that hole, it's so hard to climb out of it. It really just becomes impossible. Once you're a discount brand in the eyes of the consumer, you forever are going to be a discount brand. It's just not something that you can easily really recover from. And I think a good way to think about this is the real estate market. A good realtor will tell you, or almost any realtor will tell you, that every house on the block, no matter how ugly, will sell at the right price.
And so my point of view on this is that if you have to discount that severely, you likely just have a pricing problem or you have a product problem. And most people try to solve those by just severely discounting, or what they try to do is to get those new-to-file customers in by offering an initial discount. And those just become really, really complicated to recover from.

Ryan Garrow:
Now, are you saying that 10% sales or sales throughout the year are bad across the board, or does it occasionally make sense to have a sale of some sort?

Jon MacDonald:
Well, let's talk about what sales are, because I think there's a ton of ways to drive e-commerce revenue without using discounts. A sale could be anything that is different than just a discount, right? So you could do different types of promotions. So you could do buy one, get one. In essence, you're basically giving somebody a free product, but you're not calling it a percent off. You could say something like buy three of these, you get the fourth free, something like that. And that also helps you get your average order value up.
And yes, you end up eating some margin there. It's a psychological shift from offering a dollar or a percentage off and instead, helping you to look at other metrics. Same thing with something like free gift with purchase, right? So if you purchase something... You could always say, "Buy this and we'll give you X product for free," or you could say something like, "If you spend X dollars, you get this product for free." There are other ways to do that. I mean, you could do free shipping, which is essentially a discount.
I mean, it's almost an expectation anymore in e-commerce, but it could be looked at as a discount, or you could even do if you spend over $50, you get the free shipping. You could look at free returns. I think a lot of people are interested in making sure that they can return their item without having a charge there. This list could go on and on, and you could do loyalty programs. You could do urgency by saying there's limited quantities. You could give a money back guarantee or some type of service guarantee of we'll make it right.
There's a lot of other things you can do to incentivize purchase that is not a dollar or a percentage off, and I think too many people get lazy and just go straight to that as the original tactic.

Ryan Garrow:
So from a broad stroke over-simplification, try generally to avoid any kind of dollar discount or percent discounts as a standard practice with your site. Are you saying that necessarily like a Veteran's Day 10% off discount would not necessarily be a great thing or tied to a certain event randomly throughout the year?

Jon MacDonald:
Again, I wouldn't do a percentage off or a dollar. I think there's a lot of other things you could do.

Ryan Garrow:
Okay.

Jon MacDonald:
Right? So all those things I listed, you could say, "Hey, if you're a veteran, we do these special things for veterans." It doesn't have to be a percentage off. Free shipping for all veterans this weekend, or we're doing free shipping just because it's Veteran's Day. So there's a lot of other ways you could get urgency and have people to want to take action.
And that's really all we're looking to do with a discount is to create urgency where somebody is interested in the product, but they need to be moved to actually converting, and you want to give them that little extra push. Most people, it's just commonplace or perhaps this laziness, I'm not sure, but we see it so much and it's where people just immediately go to that discount.

Ryan Garrow:
I think it's the easy button.

Jon MacDonald:
Right.

Ryan Garrow:
Even me in strategizing with my wife's retail storefront and her e-commerce site, she's getting more involved in e-com and is trying to figure it out. And so we're like, "Hey, let's do a 10% off sale for this event." She did this event for I want to say 15 online retailers, and it was a great success, but one of the requirements is everybody's got to have some kind of promo to draw in all of your followers on Instagram to this event. And 100% of them did a percentage off discount.

Jon MacDonald:
Yeah, exactly.

Ryan Garrow:
And I advocated for that. So I failed you, Jon.

Jon MacDonald:
Well, that's why we're educating you today, Ryan.

Ryan Garrow:
Okay, so percentage off, dollar discounts, bad. Getting a little more outside the box, creative thinking and how can you incentivize. With other methods, it may in effect just be a discount. It's just presented in a different way like BOGO or free gift with purchase. Free shipping is probably not necessarily an incentive anymore for most companies, but depending on what you sell. There is a unique one that just came up with my wife and I yesterday, abandonment emails with discount...

TRANSCRIPT:

Jon:
Ryan, a few days ago, I sent you an article I read about Google's Buy on Google program and how they were dropping all commission fees for their sellers as part of the program. Now, to me, this seemed like a pretty good deal. Who doesn't like freeways to sell products and utilize a huge platform with lots of awareness like Google search? At least that was my take, but when I asked you about it, you said, and I'll quote, hopefully this is okay, "That product was dead in the water before this change. Some merchants will of course test it, but it will compete for ad presence with their regular Google ads." Honestly, this was not what I was expecting to hear from you at all.
I was really interested in connecting with you a bit more about this and just seeing your thoughts on it and getting some more information about the program out and seeing where and when it makes sense for all of our eCommerce listeners to take advantage of it. I guess just to jump right in, Ryan, on a high level, just so we're on the same page, what exactly is Buy on Google?

Ryan:
Buy on Google is the little colorful shopping cart icon that shows up in Google shopping. When you start filtering and sorting, you actually transact on Google and then the merchant fulfills it. It's basically a Google trying to be this marketplace saying, "Oh, we can trust Google because I'm buying it here." It's a shopping ad set that you're able to get when you push your inventory into Google and say, "Yes, I'm willing to sell this on Google."
Previously, there were commissioned tiers to sell different products. It ranged somewhere from five to, I think, 12%. It was a 12% number that Google [inaudible 00:02:07] because it was less than that Amazon 15%. That came out, man, I want to say maybe three, four years ago, maybe in an alpha-beta four years ago. I think it did cause some Amazon changes within their system on what they were going to be charging to try to have more parody with the Buy on Google scenario. Yeah. It was basically give Google the commission that you would maybe be paying Amazon and we'll push your product out there. There's no advertising costs. Google's the one putting it out there and then you just get the sale and give commission to Google.

Jon:
They're trying to create a marketplace without really holding any inventory or doing any fulfillment. They literally just take the money, take their cut and send everything over to the retailer?

Ryan:
Yeah. From a high level, it sounds like a great idea like, "Okay. I have all of this work. I'm spending all this money in Google ads and shopping and I've got agency fees or employee costs or my time in it. Now, I can just go to Google and you're just going to take a commission and it's a fixed cost, so I don't have to worry about what my return on Google shopping is." That theory sounds phenomenal. There's not many business owners are going to be like, "Yeah. Here, take my products. Sell them for me. I now know that I'm only going to be paying 12% of my revenue for my advertising cost." There's no scenario in which that doesn't sound like a good idea.

Jon:
That definitely makes sense. How does Buy on Google differ from Google Shopping? This is a complete novice asking that question.

Ryan:
It's part of Google Shopping. You only see the Buy on Google when you're in the Google Shopping tab within Google space. It used to be a little more prevalent on the first page of Google, but I believe it's only showing now in the Google Shopping tab. It's one of the filters you can put on there.

Jon:
Okay. Then, really Google Shopping is getting your listing of products up there. Some of them will take you to the retailer. Some of them will just take your money on Google.

Ryan:
Yes. It's always interesting. Google's, as we know, a for profit company. They want to make money. When they came out with this program, it obviously sounded great to business owners, but it immediately put up some flags on our team internally to say, "Okay. Google needs to reward shareholders for their investment and needs to make money to afford employees," and all the things they do around the world that are very good and positive, including paying people. If Google is going to take 12% of the revenue for a sale and not charge for any clicks to the merchant that's selling that, in theory, Google's not going to be willing to lose money by showing those products at 12% when they know from a click cost, they're getting a 20% or a five X return for the merchant.

Jon:
I see. Yeah.

Ryan:
Google's got a lot of very smart people and they do say that they are out for the good, and they will do things to just benefit people. Period. There is an opportunity maybe that they're willing to take less money, but that's not always the case. You just have to start investigating. That's why I challenge every merchant to do with any product in Google is test and measure and see if it does actually make sense for your brand.

Jon:
Spoken after my own heart there, test and measure.

Ryan:
Yes.

Jon:
I've had an impact, Ryan. I appreciate it. Let me ask you this then. If they're not doing any commission anymore, then how are they going to make any money and how could any brand really think that Google is going to list this above their ads?

Ryan:
It's a great question. That's why it's surprising that Google made this move, especially when they just released earnings when we're doing this podcast yesterday where they had the first time that their revenue dropped in a quarter. I don't know how long, if ever, that Google being willing to give up money. When that happens, it's telling us internally logical position that, "Okay. Something wasn't going the direction that Google thought it was going to be going." Either we're in the process potentially of just sunsetting this or moving it to a place where it's not going to be necessarily a focus of Google because if there's no revenue coming in, how are you going to support it internally?
You can't dedicate a bunch of employees necessarily longterm to a product that makes no money. It's either a stepping stone into something different, or they're taking steps to buy some market share to a degree and try to get people using it in broad adoption so that they can monetize it later. We don't necessarily know where they're going because they won't necessarily tell us this despite our levels of... I actually asked the question. I was interviewing, I think the global partner strategy person for Shopping. He's a big guy in the Shopping space. We were talking about the free and fast program that's recently come out and I brought it up and he's like, "I answered something, but not how you want it. Then, we can't have this in the interview because I'm not authorized to speak on it."
Awesome. Thanks. It's a big unknown. I know that if Google is not making money on it generally, it's not going to be something that I, as a brand, am going to get really excited about and try to push all of my eggs into that basket for my personal brand. I might test it. Again, test and measure, see what it does, but my hopes are not high. Also, my hopes are not high, but just because of the nature of the Buy on Google and the data we've seen in it. A logical position... One of the companies I talk about often, I won't mention them by name, but they started working with us in May of 2020 after they had not been doing any paid search with an agency. They had been using Buy on Google with another agency that recommended that this was the greatest thing for...

For help with your CRO visit:
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TRANSCRIPT

Ryan:
All right, Jon, as a business owner and strategist, I'm constantly thinking about the future and how I can prepare my businesses, my teams, clients for operating in a future that has yet to be determined. For me, it's just kind of fun to think through. Recently, one of the things that's been on the top of my mind has been the future of CRO and how do we continue moving the needle to improve our sites, but doing that like five years in the future, what is that going to look like? With such a high volume of transactions happening on Amazon and Shopify, are we nearing the end of incremental improvements in CRO? That's kind of the thought that's going through, and I guarantee you have some serious opinions on this that I have no idea about. So I'm excited to learn from you what you're looking for in the future.
But it also came top of mind because of a recent Google announcement that they're going to start including site experience into their organic algorithm. And so let's just start with that. Based on what you've heard and what you know about Google, what do you expect this to look like when it rolls out?

Jon:
Well, I think that the biggest concern for brands and the biggest concern they should have is that if you haven't been optimizing your site's consumer experience, it's going to severely impact your rankings, and thus your organic traffic is going to go way down. Google was kind enough to tell us now, even though it's not going to roll out until 2021. So we're recording in mid 2020. So they have given you a six months heads up, which is very nice of them.
They also have provided all the tools you need to be able to improve your site experience, including one of my favorites, Google Optimize, which is their A/B and multivariate testing tool set that they've released that's great. So they're not only just giving you the tool sets, but they're also giving you the guidance on the fact that they want you to have a really great consumer experience. Say when they go to Google and search, and then they end up on your site, that they have a great experience and that they love the search results that Google is producing. So that's what Google cares about right now, is they're saying, yes, everybody knows if I need an answer, I can go to Google. But a lot of those sites that rank first have made the experience so poor in an effort to get listed higher that they don't have a good experience on those search result pages.

Ryan:
How much in your opinion, and maybe you can assign a percentage, is the actual act of converting on a site the experience? Can you break that out into its own piece, you think?

Jon:
Well, without question, I think Google has been very upfront about this. Normally they'd never release a specific percentage that anything weighs into that algorithm, but they are saying that it's going to be one of the top factors.

Ryan:
Is the rate of conversion on a site?

Jon:
They can track conversion to some degree, but I think what they're looking at is how long are people staying on your site? How many pages are they looking at? Are they converting is definitely a factor in there, but are they bouncing right back to Google? And I think they're looking at a lot of other metrics too. They're looking at page speed. They have a whole bunch of algorithms and artificial intelligence, AI, that has gotten really, really good at telling things like, do you have a popup on your site where it, as content loads on the screen, that popup kind of moves around a little bit, and just because the page loads slowly and you have this bad user experience, and now people are trying to click buttons and the button keeps moving as the page loads.

Ryan:
I hate that.

Jon:
Exactly. That's the thing that Google does not want, that experience, what you just had, that emotional reaction. If you had clicked on the first item in a search engine result page, and you went to a site, and you had that reaction on that site, Google now knows that that's what's happening, based on their AI, because they can test for those type of experiences. And so really what they're advocating for here is the consumer experience on your site, the user experience. And they're asking you to make sure that you have a consumer friendly experience. And I think that's really what's going to matter.
Now, the outcome of that is naturally going to be higher conversion rates. So I've always been a proponent with CRO that says the goal of the brand is to convert higher, almost always, right? The goal of the consumer is to have a better experience. Those are actually very much aligned, because if you have a better experience, you're going to convert more. And I think Google is recognizing that now, too.

Ryan:
You could take the stance of maybe some of the conspiracy theorists out there, that a higher converting website in the eCommerce space could hurt Google's revenue, since people don't have to go back to Google to keep researching. They're just going to find it, buy it, kind of like how I usually convert, versus my wife, who's all over the place in her conversion path. What would you say to those conspiracy theorists?

Jon:
Well, I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think it's, you know, Google's pretty upfront how they make their money. It's what the ads on the search engine result pages for the vast majority of their revenue. So yeah, they want people to keep coming back to Google, but I can promise you that if I keep searching Google and I keep getting a search engine result as the first second, third, which are the only ones people are really clicking on for the vast majority of times, and the experience is crappy, I'm going to stop going to Google.
So they must know, because they've factored this in as one of the top ranking items in their algorithm, they must know that this is causing a concern, and they're feeling a lot of pressure from tons of other search engines out there right now. I mean, you've probably heard of, what is it, DuckDuckGo. There's all of these other search engines that are way more privacy focused right now. Windows, any Windows laptop comes with Bing as the default search engine, Microsoft search or whatever they're calling it these days.
So I think they're feeling that pressure of making sure that people have a great experience, so they continue to come back and search on Google. That's why they're making it such an important factor. Will it cost them some money? I don't know. I think they must've done that math, but I will tell you that I'm excited that this is new and that they're making a big stance for this, because it's needed. It's really needed.

Ryan:
Speaking of competitors to Google, Amazon controls over 50% of the online transactions in the world. And how much in the future do you think Amazon is going to impact the way we view a checkout or a conversion process? If we play it out, say, let's just say Amazon is going to continue increasing in dominance. You can't do much with their checkout. So are we going to be so conditioned as Amazon Prime members that anything that deviates from Amazon's checkout process is going to throw us for a loop, and we're not going to know what to do? Kind of like the idiocracy model, where we just get dumber, because it's so simple for us?

Jon:
Well, I think that's the internet. The evolution of the internet has been that way for years. And I think we did a prior episode where we...

For all your digital marketing needs:

https://www.logicalposition.com/

TRANSCRIPT:
Jon:
It's a common question that I hear quite a bit. "How much should I be budgeting for search engine marketing and how do I even forecast what I should be spending?" Well, securing the SEM budgets is always a challenge, right? So when you do spend on search engine marketing, you want to ensure that you reach your performance goals, but there are countless traps and ways to actually overspend or even underspend on your search engine marketing budget.
And even if you follow all the best practices, you could still end up with some inefficiencies, so correctly addressing the ways to misspend requires paid search experts to consistently monitor campaign performance and budget spend. And also they need to have a pulse on what the company is trying to accomplish. So luckily for us, we have access to Ryan and he has access to 6,500 search engine marketing budgets to learn from. So today we're going to talk about ad word budgets and how to forecast what your brand should be spending and how to ensure you don't overspend or underspend. So, Ryan welcome.

Ryan:
Thanks, Jon. It's a big one. This topic is constantly top of mind for CFOs and there's constant tension, I think, between marketing teams and finance teams over budgets. And for me personally, it's one of my favorite topics and also my least favorite topics, just because of all the tension around it. It's my favorite because almost every company needs to be educated in how to forecast and plan budgets. But it's also my least favorite because it's always an uphill battle with changing the opinions of business owners, executives, finance teams, even marketing teams that don't understand forecasting and budgeting. It's a difficult conversation to have, but I'm happy we're going to be diving into this and hopefully doing some education. Hopefully making people think about what they're doing and how they can be maybe looking at SEM forecasting a little bit differently.

Jon:
Awesome. Well, I'm looking forward to being educated on this. This is a topic that we were chatting before we started recording, and you have some unique perspectives on this that I've never even given thought to. So.

Ryan:
We both have [inaudible 00:02:32] all kinds of things, Jon. It's great to be able to do this with you, but when this topic came up in our sequence of things we're going to be talking about it. I get all hot and bothered and excited and adrenaline starts flowing and I talk fast. So bear with me, but very similar to how you get when somebody's got a discount email pop up on a site is how I get when somebody tells me what their budget is X number of dollars a month. And don't overspend. It's just, I'm on a personal mission to eliminate SCM budgeting for 99.9% of the population. It just doesn't make sense for most companies.

Jon:
So explain that to me, I'm interested to learn more. Why is that? Well,

Ryan:
we get into the conversation because finance people want to see what numbers are going to be and understanding what's going to be coming in and out of accounts.
And so it's for the last a hundred years of CFO's doing work to prepare bank accounts. Marketing has been a line item on the P and L that they've paid attention to and set goals around on how much are we going to spend? What are we going to do? How much are we putting into magazines and newspapers and TV ads and billboards? So it's understandable, but SEM is in a very unique position that it's not a normal P and L line item. Let me just use an example because here's what normally happens. Finance meeting, all right, the owner is, "What the heck," gets all red in the face. "What the heck is this $350,000 charge for Google last month? You know, we need to cut that down because our retailers are selling less of our product. We need to save money. And you know, if we go into a COVID time, we've got to control all of our money and keep it from going out so we're not spending $350,000 on Google anymore. Every month, a marketing team, we need to cut a hundred thousand dollars of that."
Marketing team reaches out to the logical position says, "Hey, yeah, our wholesale channel is down because nobody's shopping in stores. So we need to cut a hundred thousand dollars of our marketing budget on Google." And that I get it, logically it passes the make sense test that you're going to take that hundred thousand dollars from Google and move it to the bottom line of profit. So you can cover the missing profit from some retailers that aren't selling product.

Jon:
Right. They're looking at it purely as an expense line item.

Ryan:
Exactly. Which again, conceptually makes sense. What isn't considered in that is that $350,000 drove 1.3 million of top line revenue, 10,000 new to brand customers, and also had an impact on two million organic direct traffic revenue.
And so cutting that hundred thousand dollars, most likely won't even save that company money. It'll probably cost them revenue and profit because it's not going to be driving as much top line revenue. And many times in the past, if you cut a hundred thousand dollars of billboards, you may not actually feel an impact in the business at all over the next month, depending on what you're selling, depending on what the billboard's mentioning, but it simply does move that hundred thousand dollars to the bottom line. And that again, logically makes sense. But with SEM, it doesn't operate like a historical marketing channel. It is driving so many other things that impact the business.
And so because of that, it is somewhat complicated to explain that to a business owner over a phone call or, "Hey, we've got five minutes with the exec team. Let's tell them why we need to be spending on SEM." For most businesses, I'll add, will start with the crazy notion that you should not have a budget for paid search. It should be, "Nope. You are going to set your goals and going to spend. And if you can spend more, you are going to take it if you're hitting your goals."

Jon:
Okay. So it's not an expense line item. It's an investment.

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
Okay.

Ryan:
If you're printing money with an investment, is there any reason you wouldn't continue printing money? And the general answer is, "Well, no, if I put a dollar in and I get $10 back, I'm going to go find a bunch more dollars. There's no limit to the number of dollars I can be spending. Because I could take that $10 that I just printed and put it back in and it prints a hundred and I take it out and it prints a thousand." The asterisk to this, which we will touch on probably a little later is it does make sense to forecast sales from SEM, potentially based on historical data for inventory or production. And that's where it does get kind of like a sliding scale on what we can spend based on the inventory we have. And I've got a couple of examples on that.

Jon:
So if you're not budgeting the spend, should you be looking at the back end is what you're saying. You should be budgeting the return on that adspend and what that's going to be in revenue. So you're saying, "I want to make a million dollars. What does the adspend take to hit a million dollars?"

Ryan:
Maybe? But the reality is, is I challenge companies to, yes, you're going to look at this, after the fact on a PNL, as a line item, but in the month itself, the spend on SEM actually doesn't have an impact on cash. Therefore it's not necessarily a normal P and L line item. So easy math example, you're going to spend a hundred dollars on paid search...

For help with your CRO:
https://thegood.com/

TRANSCRIPT:

Ryan:
Oh Jon, most people start businesses because they've got skills, knowledge, and the desire to control their work and what they're actually doing on a day to day basis. I would also guess most business owners want to grow and in every business there are tools specific to that industry or type of business that help them grow. E-commerce, as we know, is no different. You and I both know CRO is one of the most important tools to grow an e-commerce business and it's never a bad time to grow.

Ryan:
Today I'm really excited to dive into the role CRO plays in e-commerce businesses. You, Jon McDonald, knowing more about CRO than anyone I know, can you start us off today by giving us your thoughts on CRO and the growth process of an e-comm business, at a high 30,000 foot level?

Jon:
Yeah, sure. Well I think the best way to think about this Ryan is that there's only a small number of ways to grow your company just at a high level before even thinking about conversion rate optimization. You can get more new customers, you can get your current customers, or even those new ones, to spend more with you, and you can get your average customer lifetime value up by getting those customers that have purchased to come back and purchase again. Those are really the only three mechanisms you have for earning more revenue out of your business.

Jon:
So, of course, traffic generation can hit that first one really well. We might argue, and maybe you could fill in on this a little bit Ryan, but traffic generation, when done well in digital marketing, can help you also increase average order value. Then remarketing, you can resell to the people who have already purchased perhaps and you can run campaigns around that.

Jon:
But I think if you're really looking to impact the first two of those in a major way, conversion rate optimization is really going to be how you're going to get a higher return on that ad spend and how you're generally just going to convert more of your visitors into buyers. So if you're thinking about growth the biggest lever with the highest return on investment, and of course, I'm biased, but I think that the highest return on investment is going to be conversion optimization because with a small investment in making it easier for people to purchase on your site you're going to get a high value back that's going to be sustainable over time.

Ryan:
Well yeah and I think even on a previous podcast we talked about CRO after the sale even and increasing some of that lifetime value in areas I hadn't even considered actually being CRO. Like even some of the things in the shopping cart post purchase which would increase lifetime value had never even occurred to me.

Ryan:
I think it does play in all three, but I think for most people as they're thinking through their entire e-comm business they're going to probably see CRO in those first two buckets of growth. As you're looking at e-comm businesses and you analyze tons of businesses, is there a place in the growth curve of an e-comm business where you really see CRO as being the most impactful? I'm thinking in my head of a bell curve and growth or maybe you're growing up to a plateau like where would you in a perfect world insert CRO?

Jon:
Well I think that you need to have enough traffic to effectively do certain types of CRO. Let's break this down a little bit. Let's look at this bell curve in three chunks. The first chunk would be the folks who are just getting started, maybe we'll just say less than a million dollars in revenue, which is a pretty big gap there. But that first million what you really need to be focused on is making sure people know that you exist.

Jon:
They need to have an easy to use website but normally you're going after those early adopters who are willing to put up with a little more complications on your site than the average customer. So it's really important for that first third of that curve that you are mainly focusing on driving traffic that is going to hit a very specific segmented marketplace that is going to be your key customers that are going to stick with you no matter.

Jon:
You probably aren't going to be converting much on branded terms because people don't know who you are, so when people do find your site, at that point, you want to make it as easy for them to purchase but you're not going to be able to do things like AB or multivariate testing because AB testing and multivariate testing, et cetera, require enough traffic for you to get results in a meaningful timeframe.

Jon:
So in that first third what I usually would want people to do is when I'm looking at these companies I want to see them collecting data. What do I mean by that? Well are they actually looking at great analytics data? Have they actually ever dived in there and customized it a little bit or is it just they just put the snippet from GA on their site and that's all they have.

Jon:
Couple other things to be thinking about there, like you could easily pretty cheaply get things like heat maps and movement maps. You can do that type of stuff to start understanding how people engage with your website and just make changes based on data. You don't have to test it, right?

Ryan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jon:
Just make the changes. The best way to test there is just to do week over week or month over month. Now if you're making changes every day that's going to be hard to really know what worked well, but I don't want that to stop brands. They should still be tweaking their site as much as possible and then sticking to perhaps even larger changes in that first third.

Ryan:
In that space, in that first third, a lot of times the business owners generally don't know best practices on website. They know their industry, they know their products well. But how much would you as that business owner trust your gut looking at small pieces of data like that on a daily, weekly basis where you can't actually get an AB test and have full confidence that this is what is better. You just say hey, go with your gut on that because it's probably better than not going with your gut?

Jon:
Well I think that it goes back to the phrase I say quite often which is it's really hard to read the label from inside the jar. I think that with that in mind that it's still as an owner of a site and a daily operator you're still too close to it and you really still need that consumer feedback. Collecting that data and paying attention to it, even if it's only 100 visitors a day or a week, that's still data that you should be looking at. Where are people leaving, what pages are they getting stuck on perhaps, where are they dropping off in the funnel, that's all good information to know where are the holes in your bucket because they're flowing right through that bucket instead of collecting them as revenue. You really need to know where those holes are and that's really what I'm getting at here.

Jon:
The other thing you can be in this first third of that curve, go talk to consumers. You should email every single person who buys personally. There's not a volume at that stage under a million where you can't email every single person individually and just ask them, "Hey, this is me, this is actually me," just start the email that way. "I'm sending you a personal email. I want to know why you purchased and what your experience was." That's it.

Jon:

For help with your SEM:
https://www.logicalposition.com/

TRANSCRIPT:

Jon:
There are so many folks selling search engine services these days, and that is a lot of snake oil out there. Especially when you start talking about search engine optimization or SEO, this no doubt bleeds over to SEM, or search engine marketing field, as well. The challenge that I see here with SEM is similar to what often happens in my world with conversion rate optimization. There are a ton of free resources out there, checklists, how-to articles, online trainings and certifications, and most of them are too high level and broad to actually be helpful with the e-commerce site. In my view, this really makes SEM very hard to do yourself, especially if you're an e-comm owner.
Ryan, today I'm really interested in your thoughts about search engine marketing and why and what makes it so difficult to do it yourself? I really can't wait to get schooled by you once again. Ryan, let's start maybe with what your definition of search engine marketing is.

Ryan:
It's not complicated, for me. Search engine marketing involves making sure that you are showing up when people are searching for your product or service. As long as there's an intent or a search around that and an active process of putting something in, whether that's voice or typing, texting, it's ... they are searching for it. For me, the biggest ones are obviously Google. Bing, which is now Microsoft Ads. And then I consider Amazon Ads search engine marketing. Yahoo's in there but they usually just get powered by Google and Microsoft Ads themselves. In all of those platforms they are searching for it, and you can design a specific ad in that system to attract that searcher.

Jon:
That's interesting. I just heard something that brought up an interesting point for me. I've always thought about search engine marketing just being on search engines, but there's so many things out there that are search engines right now. YouTube is the number two search engine. Would you consider showing up in results and marketing around YouTube part of this?

Ryan:
I guess ancillary, to a degree, yes. It's part of Google. Google owns YouTube and you advertise on YouTube through the Google Ads platform. When you're capturing searches on Google looking for your particular product, you can also have YouTube ads, as far as remarketing.
The difference I see on YouTube versus general search engine platforms is that a not a lot of people go to YouTube to find the product to buy. They may be doing some higher level research on looking for reviews. If I'm looking to buy a Bluetooth speaker, my dad just bought one for his neighbor, he had to do some research and figure out which one was going to be easiest because she's 80 years old. You can go on YouTube and find some reviews about ease of use or older people using Bluetooth speakers, and see which one's easiest. It's a research process, more, on YouTube, then it'll be, "I need a Bluetooth speaker now. I'm going to go to YouTube and buy one."
Generally that's not how people are trying to transact yet. They can transact with Google or go to the website and buy it, or they go to Amazon and buy from the Amazon platform.

Jon:
That definitely makes sense. It's ancillary there but it's not the main way you would define it. You're thinking Google, Bing, those type of search engines at this point?

Ryan:
Yeah. They're actually searching for the product or service. That, for me, is the big key. In the paid realm, it involves a lot of things outside of a search engine. You can pay for display ads that are prospecting, they're not searching for you yet, or you're remarketing through those ads that can happen across the internet. You have social ads where you're marketing to followers of your brand or trying to find new followers and get your products in front of them for them to try, but they're not actively searching for that product. You're trying to get them to search for that product. So search, generally, I see further down the funnel.

Jon:
Okay.

Ryan:
[Crosstalk 00:04:18] a cut when people are not searching for it.

Jon:
That definitely makes sense to me then.
I know this is a high level question but it is the topic of the episode today. Let's just dive in. What makes SEM so difficult to do it yourself?

Ryan:
Jon, that is a great question because it crosses the mind of almost every business owner as they're looking through a [PNL 00:04:38] and see the charge for an agency or an individual that's managing their marketing, like, "Well, why can't I just save this money, put that in my pocket, or develop something else with that extra money monthly or annually?"
The real answer is because the search engines are constantly changing. What is currently happening on Google or what you currently see on your phone or your desktop when you do a search, is not the way it's going to look in a couple months, six months down the road. That constant change means that you need somebody or something to keep on top of all of those changes constantly. Just from the Google algorithm of ranking organic results, I think there's 500 to 600 changes every single year to that algorithm alone. If you've been in e-comm long enough, you've seen a huge change around the paid side of things. You had Frugal 12 years ago, 10 years ago, where all of your clicks and shopping were free. Then it changed into PLAs, then the Google officially called it Google Shopping and then there was Smart Shopping.
In between those big shifts, there was all these little changes. Constantly new ad sets, new placements. We now have ads that show in Google images. We have Google Shopping showing all over the place and being able to dissect and see which ad types are working versus not working. It's crazy how much development we have to do internally to keep on it, and we have 700 people at the company constantly researching, studying. And then we have that group think kind of thing going on. But that amount of change is astronomical, and I've been in the industry for 10 years.
My general thought is, I've been studying to be an expert for over a decade now, and I'm still, by no means, the smartest person in e-comm marketing. There's people like [Frederic Filloux 00:06:19] whose brains are ... I'll probably never catch him, but if you're a business owner or a marketer and you've not been studying specifically how to be the best possible expert in paid search, for example, you're going to beat ... get beat by somebody that's been studying it to survive or as a career path, or because they're super passionate just about paid search.
I think understanding that dynamic, it makes it difficult to say, "Oh, yeah, I probably should DIY this to either save some money or because I think I can really do it well." I think about it as, you're going to be in a fight with somebody, because that's kind of what paid search is. It's your money versus theirs, your ad versus theirs, for the consumer at the end of it all. You could be a decent fighter, but if you're not a professional, you're not going to jump into the octagon and try to take on somebody that does this for a living and eat, sleeps, trains, and breathes ultimate fighting. It's not going to happen.

Jon:
We don't need to get kicked in the face because you have not been training, right?

Ryan:
Exactly.

Jon:
Let's break that down then. There'...

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TRANSCRIPT:

Ryan:
Hello Jon, and welcome to the podcast.

Ryan:
I was digging through one of our shared clients analytics, and this is a rather large international brand that most of our listeners would probably recognize if we mentioned their name. And outside the home page, the largest volume of traffic to their site is condensed into just a couple category pages. Now that's not unusual for a lot of major brands because of Google's algorithm, on the organic side, favoring category pages over product pages. But it also means that there's a huge opportunity for a brand capturing a lot of this traffic to really make that traffic work better on category pages specifically.

Ryan:
So through this, I'd really love to hear some of your suggestions and best practices on improving those category pages. And maybe even at least some tests people can be testing as they're looking at their category pages to make some improvements. Kind of like our CRI name we coined. What do you think of that category pages and the importance of them? And should we continue down this path?

Jon:
I love it. Let's gain some knowledge on this.

Ryan:
Fantastic. So most of the listeners probably haven't had the amazing opportunity I have of hearing you talk about landing pages as much, and just seeing some of your tear downs. And so as with most of these, let's start at the top and kind of work our way down, and even some of your general best practices, probably, in header navigation can be applied to other places of the site. Especially if you keep it consistent. But do we need to think about mobile and desktop separately in this scenario? Or just pick one and go with it? What's your usual recommendation?

Jon:
I would recommend that we start with desktop and keep it to that for today. The reason being is that even with e-com, I think we're seeing the vast majority of traffic is now on mobile, but still a very, very large majority of conversions are happening on desktop. Now that varies from site to site, of course, but I do believe in what we see here at the good on a daily basis is conversion kings is still on desktop. And so it always makes sense to start there. The other reason is that if you fix your desktop experience and you have a responsive site, that should, for the most part, filter down to your mobile website. And so there's no longer just a desktop and a mobile version of a site. It should be responsive or adaptive for the most part. And so with that in mind, I would highly recommend starting with desktop. And then of course you could look at mobile later, but I think for the point of today's show, we could just stick with desktop.

Ryan:
Yeah. And if you do maybe have a mobile site and a desktop site, you may need to contact us because we may have some abilities to fix that [inaudible 00:03:12], because that's probably a struggle for your business. There's maybe some lower hanging fruit for you, before you get into Jon's conversation about it.

Jon:
The number of sites I still see, it's dwindling. But there is still a number of sites out there that they have mobile on a separate domain. And that's always... It's like M dot, the domain dot com. That's when I know there's a bunch of opportunity there to increase sales and conversions.

Ryan:
God, John knows he's going to make that company a lot of money when they listen to them.

Ryan:
Okay. So let's start right at the header, very top as you're scrolling down this page as soon as you come onto it, a lot of companies do things that are not great in the header. What are some of the things that they're putting in there maybe that aren't needed or that distract from the actual conversion that they're attempting to get these people to take on the site?

Jon:
Well, I think the first thing is that it always blows my mind when I see a header, and these brands invested so much to get people to their site, right? Whether it be content marketing or paid ads or SEO, whatever it is. And then they immediately show them social icons, and show them ways to bounce off the site. Right? Social is great for getting people to your site, but once they're there, keep them on your site. Don't send them back out to those channels. And so really be looking in the header to keep people on a site, as opposed to sending them back off through something like social links or icons, things of that sort. That's the biggest one I see.

Ryan:
Okay. So as far as distractions, social is the biggest issue there. What are the things that maybe companies are missing out on in that header that they should be thinking about putting into them?

Jon:
Well, I think that the biggest thing people miss out on is just communicating very simply what the brand is, what the value proposition is.

Jon:
Now, most people don't think about including that in the header. And I'm not suggesting putting your entire company story there, your entire value prop. But what I am saying is you can communicate these things through perhaps your navigation and the language that's being used there through the utility navigation, through what's the lines of texts that goes right next to your logo, right?

Jon:
So a lot of people will just put a logo up and expect that because they're on your website, they know exactly what you do. Well, think about it through the eyes of a new to file customer. That customer just got to your site by clicking on a link that a friend posted on social. They have a little bit of context, but it would be great to get that reinforced and the first place, especially in Western cultures, folks are going to look is the top left corner of your site. That's generally where people put their logo, but then they miss the opportunity there of including additional context. Could be just one sentence or one line, does not have to be very huge and it can be blended in with the logo, even.

Ryan:
Dang it. I am taking notes. I think I need to go to some of my brands and add some, maybe, lines of contexts.

Jon:
Well, if you want a good example just go to thegood.com and look what we do in the top left hand corner right next to our logo.

Ryan:
No, that's brilliant. And I think as a business owner myself, and working with brands constantly, I'm in the business too often that I don't step out of it often enough and think about the perspective of a brand new user. I clicked on a link, maybe not even necessarily thinking before I clicked, and boom. Logo. I'm supposed to know what you do right before that, but probably I don't.

Jon:
Well Ryan, this applies to you based on what I'm hearing right now, but it also applies to almost every e-com brand and e-com manager. Is that it's, and I've probably said this a hundred times on this show already, but it's very difficult to read the label from inside the jar. Right? You are so close to this, you probably helped to wire frame out the site, design it, define the navigation, lay out all the content. And so you're so close to that, that you know what each link does, you know what the site is, you know your value prop. So it doesn't occur to you that other people might not get that, might not understand it. And it could use a little assistance there.

Ryan:
Yeah. And you've helped me a lot on navigation so I'm going to jump into that in a second. But before that, site search is a often misguided location on the site. Do you recommend that as high up as you can, as obviously as you can in the header? Or do you recom...

TRANSCRIPT:
Jon:
So, Ryan, we've all heard the old adage, "If you can't beat them, join them." Right?

Ryan Garrow:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jon:
So from what I hear on a daily basis in the conversion optimization world is that most eCommerce brands are starting to feel like they just can't beat Amazon, and thus, they must join them. If nothing else, they're looking to have a presence on Amazon so they can at least be found. It's becoming a huge search engine. I'm sure we'll talk about that. But I see a lot of good things that brands get from participating in the Amazon game, but there seemed to also be a lot of downfalls in doing so as well. So today, I'd like to pose the question, Amazon, fight or join? So Ryan, I think start just by breaking this down a little bit. What are the benefits to joining Amazon?

Ryan Garrow:
There are a lot. I mean, the easiest answer for that is volume, volume, volume. I mean, Amazon. There's no statistic that shows Amazon is not dominating the online ecosystem as far as volume of sales. They're over 50% every holiday season. They somehow made July into a shopping holiday because every retailer on the planet has low sales in July until Amazon comes along and says, "Well, I'll just put Prime Day out there." There are sales on Amazon. They have figured out how to remove friction from the purchase process better than any other retailer has so far in at least initially looking at it. The benefits of joining Amazon? There's a lot of volume. You can sell stuff.

Jon:
Okay. So what are the benefits to fighting Amazon?

Ryan Garrow:
Well, you enjoy pain. You like losing. The benefits of fighting it is you get to control a lot more of your brand. Amazon has been trying to do some things to improve that, but you get more control. You get customer data. It could increase your chances of having repeat purchases if they buy from your website. You get to personally handle that conversion optimization after the purchase, and you get to keep some additional margin. Amazon does charge for the platform when you sell. So there are some benefits to not selling on Amazon.

Jon:
If you were to choose to join Amazon, what would be your recommendations? Where should we start?

Ryan Garrow:
Whether you join or fight Amazon probably needs to start with what type of business are you. If you are a retailer selling other company's products through your website or even with a retail storefront as well, Amazon may not be the best place for you. Amazon, largely speaking, is the biggest retail. I mean, Walmart and Amazon are both massive retailers. Other people sell their own stuff on Amazon. Amazon also is a brand. They do have their own products that they sell as well. But as a retailer, it's probably less beneficial. Your margins are already smaller, and you're going to give another retailer some of that benefit. You race to the bottom when you're competing with the same exact product that other retailers are also selling on Amazon.
If you're a manufacturer, I think there's a little more upside. You get to control your brand exposure on Amazon. As a manufacturer brand owner myself, I limit my retailers. I don't let them sell on Amazon. I want to own that and keep my cost as low as possible from an ad perspective. But the big key here too is you need to be able to protect your product. Hopefully, that's with some patents. Hopefully, it's a difficult thing for Amazon to maybe find your factory in China to have them make them cheaper for Amazon because they probably will.
If you make or sell clothing, you better have a powerful brand. I mean, even Nike doesn't sell on Amazon right now. They went down that path and decided not to. I don't know the intricacies of their agreement and why Nike backed out, but Amazon is the biggest clothing manufacturer in the world. Most of the brands on Amazon for clothes are actually owned by Amazon, even if they don't say the Amazon name. It's just clothing would be difficult, but generally, most manufacturers should be considering it, at least in their process. Retailers, there's probably some different things you need to be looking at.

Jon:
Well, we've probably all heard the story about Allbirds, the shoe company, right? That Amazon went out and basically created a knockoff because Allbirds was selling so well on Amazon. As a consumer coming to the site, you really can't tell the difference. I've heard from numerous brands that the biggest downfall has been that they have a product that is easily reproduced or that Amazon... Maybe we should get into this a little bit, but I've even heard from people where they've done direct factory to Amazon shipping. So it's not Amazon Fulfillment Warehouse. Amazon then knows who's making the product, and then they contact those people and say, "Hey, we'll pay you a little bit more. Make it for us," or, "We'll do a much larger order if you make it for us," and then they lose their... The retailer loses the factory, and so it's something where Amazon is a double-edged sword for sure. That's why this is going to be such an interesting topic.

Ryan Garrow:
It is. Amazon basically is going to be frenemies with every company on the planet. They're a necessary evil for certain companies. Google and Amazon are very much frenemies. They both will say that, hey, their biggest competitor is... Google will say it's Amazon. Amazon will say it's Google. They're fighting over that search volume and that revenue from search traffic and paid ads, but Amazon is... I don't know this for sure, but I would argue probably the largest advertiser on Google and driving traffic to the apps into their website.
So you have to go into Amazon with your eyes wide open, understanding that Amazon is aggressive. They are not your friend. They will stab you in the back. They will cut you if they get the chance. So you have to always be on your guard and looking at Amazon as, "How could Amazon steal this from me?" and just being operating as a paranoid brand owner or even a retailer. However you're operating on Amazon, protect yourself as often as possible, and look at it through the lens of, "If I was trying to steal this product from me or make money off of me, how would I do that? What would it look like?" Always use that lens on Amazon to see, "Does it make sense? Does it not make sense?"
There's too much of a risk. There's a problem because even if you have a patent, which I'm sure Allbirds had some protectable intellectual property within their product. Amazon has more money than you, guaranteed, and they can fight you in court, and they can also probably have... They probably have enough smart lawyers on staff that they can say, "All right. Here's the patent. How can we get close enough to compete, but not necessarily actually break that product or break that patent?" It's probably going to get Amazon in trouble long-term, but in the short-term and where we're at right now, they are able to operate that way, and it's been very effective. I don't dislike Amazon, so don't hear me saying that Amazon is bad for what they're doing or how they're operating. You just as a retailer, or a brand, or a manufacturer have to understand what you're getting into in this relationship.

Jon:
Yeah, and I think that goes into why Nike left Amazon because Nike, I believe, originally joined on to fight counterfeits on the platform. The problem was is that it just wasn't effective. It actually made more counterfeits because they had more products on there that people could counterfeit, and then list and say it's a Nike product, and list it for cheaper than what Nike was willing to do. So ...

TRANSCRIPT:
Jon:
Hey everybody, just a quick note before we jump into this episode, we recorded this episode on Selling on Social before Facebook Stores was launched, but everything we discussed still applies and is relevant. But stick around until the end, we are going to record an update on selling on social media with some details on Facebook Stores. So enjoy the episode and be sure to stick around towards the end, and you'll get an update.

INTRO MUSIC

Jon:
So Ryan, it's probably a bit maybe cliche to say that everyone is on social media these days, but as a digital marketer, it's true, right? If you're not selling on social media platforms, are you really even trying to succeed? The more I thought about this, the more I thought at The Good we don't do anything around driving traffic, which obviously would include advertising or selling on social media. So I thought, "Why not learn a thing or two from Ryan and your 6,000 clients experience at Logical Position today?" So Ryan, I'm excited to have you, to school me on selling on social.

Ryan:
Oh man, it's such a big topic and such a big opportunity, I think, that so few brands are capitalizing on, fascinates me.

Jon:
Well, this will be fun then. So Ryan, let's start with the big picture, when I say social, what channels does that really include?

Ryan:
I would say when most people say social or selling on social, social advertising, they're most likely referring to Facebook and Instagram, it's the big 800 pound gorilla in the industry. But there are quite a few other platforms that I would probably bucket into that social platform and the advertising and traffic driving that you can execute there. You've got one that a lot of people forget, and it's probably unfortunate there, but Twitter, you can still advertise on there should you want to. Pinterest has some advertising, Snapchat, you can advertise on. LinkedIn is a social channel that a lot of e-commerce companies forget about, there's still some value to be gleaned out of there for e-commerce, but it is pretty lead gen heavy.

Jon:
Yeah, I love LinkedIn.

Ryan:
LinkedIn is great for our prospecting and finding just people that talk about it, there's a lot there. And I think it's under utilized for a lot of companies, but it's also, I think, confusing to a degree on how you sell on a business social tool. Do you have any e-comm clients that are doing anything on LinkedIn that you know of?

Jon:
No, I don't, but I thought that's such a great one that you could run some highly targeted ads on, pretty easily.

Ryan:
Yeah, if you know who your target market is, and if it's a... Just a conversation with a guy that was selling to doctors today, and I was like, "Well, if you're selling it to doctors and you know that there is a certain role at a doctor's office that always is responsible for finding your product or deciding to buy it, you could target all of those people on LinkedIn very easily." So I think there's opportunity there, I don't think it says much about, on LinkedIn at least, getting click-buy, it's part of the process generally. But with some of the other platforms too, like TikTok, for some reason has just jumped out at me over the last, just two weeks. We've actually had a bunch of clients reach out and say, "Hey, we want to get onto TikTok and do some advertising, how can you help us?"
That came out of left field for us, we're like, we know it's there, but we were so focused on Facebook and Instagram with them that we hadn't been pushing for other channels. So, that was on us to a degree, so I think there's some opportunity on TikTok. And then the other one that I think a lot of people maybe think of differently, YouTube has a very strong social component. But it's because it's run through the Google Ads platform, most people don't bucket it under social, but I think there's a component there that, to a degree, could be looked at that way.

Jon:
Yeah, a lot of people are sharing YouTube videos, right? And it's got a massive comment thread on videos, and they do make social sharing on there easy so that's a good one to think about. Okay, so I had never thought about LinkedIn in the way you're talking about and really hadn't thought about YouTube, so that's really interesting, that's good to hear. And TikTok, I just feel like maybe I'm too old for it, but that's a whole different situation.

Ryan:
You and me both, that's probably why I didn't have it top of mind. I was like, "TikTok, what are you talking about? That's just Gary Vaynerchuk trying to get people to like his social stuff.

Jon:
Yeah, but I mean the minute he's talking about it, it's probably the immediate time to jump into it. Okay, so when I'm thinking about selling on social, are we really talking about advertising or actually selling, right? So for instance, I've seen brands that do Instagram Ads, right? And I've seen brands that actually make their posts shoppable, and you can actually complete a transaction on Instagram now. So are we really talking here about advertising or are we talking about actually selling?

Ryan:
Well, I think it's both. I mean, I like the old adage, always be closing, always be selling. Like if you're an e-comm site, you need to constantly be thinking about how are people going to find me and buy my stuff. And I think if you have the ability, because not everybody can check out on Instagram, or every brand doesn't have that access, let me put it that way, not every site can just flip a switch and automatically be selling on Instagram without leaving the platform. It's still in controlled level, you have to have enough followers or you have to be invited into betas to a degree.
But you want to sell as often as possible, and I think having that extra channel, if you can get that conversion on Instagram without them leaving, you do it. But all of them I think you're going to be advertising on, even if you can have the checkout on Instagram rather than your site, you're still going to be advertising to draw people to that checkout or to your page, and constantly try to find new users. And I think Facebook and Google both have a lot of creepy data, it's not a surprise to anyone, and I think Facebook even gets slightly more creepy, but it is phenomenal for marketers. We can upload a list of our clients, and then Facebook's algorithm can go find everybody on the world that looks like your current customers because they're more likely to be buying. If I buy your product and like it, you go find everybody else that has the same demographics as me, whether it's on a farm, has four kids, has too many businesses, there's maybe 10 of us out there.

Jon:
But all of them will buy.

Ryan:
But all of them will probably buy your product. So be thinking about both, I think, because of the algorithm. A lot of people forget about this, but the Googles and the Facebooks of the world, the dominant ad platforms, they've created a free platform for everybody and they make money by ads, and so they have an incentive to get people to click ads. And so on Facebook, not everybody that follows your brand, Facebook and Instagram, not everybody that follows you will see your post. And so promoting posts, getting your ads out there, you have to feed the beast, to a degree, and make sure that you're leveraging the ad platform appropriately to get the right content in front of the right people.

Jon:
Got it, okay. So where do you recommend brands start then? What channels and how would you best ut...

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TRANSCRIPT:
Ryan:
Hello, Jon.

Jon:
Hey, Ryan. How are you today?

Ryan:
I am doing well. Excited to get educated today by you, on some areas that I have very little knowledge. It's exciting, the world of CRO. When you see the results on my side... I get to see the results of what you do, but I don't conceptually understand it well. So today, I really wanted to dive into the weeds with you about conversion rate optimization, and help our listeners get a better understanding of just what you're going to need to do to help execute some CRO. And then, as we live in this DIY world... I can't tell you how many Pinterest things I see, or YouTube things I see, that I try to execute, and it just, God, doesn't quite turn out the way I want to. Especially when I'm cooking, all the recipes I find on Pinterest, just man, the pictures look so great and then my finished product is not great.

Ryan:
I own a few businesses. Logical Position does a lot of advising on best practices in improving conversion rates, but I wouldn't call what I do on my own sites or what we do at LP to kind of advise clients as conversion rate optimization. So from your perspective, as an expert in CRO, isn't it easy to just watch a YouTube video or find a Pinterest article on CRO and just do something and watch the conversion rate on your site increase?

Jon:
Well, I think that, just like anything else, right... Like you mentioned Pinterest or YouTube videos, how many times did you watch these videos and it had not turn out like you had wanted, right?

Ryan:
Yeah, most of the time.

Jon:
Yeah. I think, it's probably not too dissimilar. Now, look, there's a lot that somebody can do on their own to help improve their conversion rates. Is that technically and truly full conversion rate optimization? No, of course not. But there's a lot that people can do out there, and should be doing, and should be thinking about. I think that... Look, is it easy to do everything yourself? No. Could you focus on one or two areas and do very well? Yeah, maybe.

Jon:
But I think the biggest challenge I have, is we see this all the time at The Good. People come to us and they say, "Hey, I have one staff member I hired who's a conversion optimization specialist, but it's just not moving the needle in the way that I would like. We're not seeing the return on that salary spend or that contractor spend." The problem is that, and we've proven this out over 11 years now, you really need to have a team with a whole bunch of specialists, and it's impossible for one person to be expert in all of the areas that you need for conversion optimization.

Ryan:
What I'm kind of understanding is there is a conceptual difference between CRO, or conversion rate optimization, and, maybe what I would call CRI, conversion rate improvement. They're not necessarily the same thing. I can [inaudible 00:03:21] can change a button and improve our conversion rate, but that's not actually conversion rate optimization.

Jon:
I think we just came up with a new term and I love it, CRI versus CRO. That's awesome. Thank you, Ryan. Okay. Yes. Now, here's how you can do improvements, go out and get these tool sets that all talk about doing an optimization or improving your conversion rate. There's tools out there that can help improve your conversion rate, but they're not going to get to the level that a customized program with a team of experts can do for you. So you think about all those tools like Privy, or there's Hotjar, or Crazy Egg, or... I could go on and on, right? There's tons of these tools out there that each provide a little nugget of conversion rate improvement, but they're not truly doing full optimization, right?

Jon:
If you're really going to optimize anything, it needs to be a scientific process of optimization. It's not just a make these changes and you're done. It needs to be the ongoing iterative improvements where you're making incremental gains, month over month, that compound and grow. That's where the big numbers are going to happen and the massive results are. I mean, you look at this and maybe this might feel daunting to the entrepreneur who's doing a $100,000 on their site right now. But Amazon has a team, a massive team. Last I heard, it was well over a hundred, doing nothing but optimizing the Amazon experience.

Ryan:
Holy smokes.

Jon:
So you think about that, and you're like, "Man, I'm at a huge disadvantage here." But the reality is, they're looking at every little data point. That team has a wide range of people doing different items, you have data scientists to analyze all the data coming back. You have test developers to build out all the tests. You have conversion strategists who can help you to better understand what should be tested. You have experts in user testing, those people who speak to your consumers and understand how to get information out of their heads about what they're thinking.

Jon:
So you have all of these other types of roles that exist that can combine, be like the Avengers, right? But individually, if you just have the Hulk out there or... I'm not a huge comic book guy. Maybe I'm mixing up my worlds here. But, I would say individually, they're not going to be as great as they would be all together.

Ryan:
Interesting. So almost in putting it in terms I can quickly relate to would be PPC optimization. You can know conceptually that I really do need to be putting negative keywords into my account to eliminate some waste, but there's a lot more to that, and there's a lot more specialist in the die that I operate in so often. But also, as I'm looking at all the accounts we work in, the way we operate is very different on somebody that sells $50,000 CNC machines versus a five-dollar mug on their website.

Jon:
Exactly. We talked about this a little bit at one of our recent episodes, where I was interviewing you and I admitted to how I had a button checked in our ads account and it cost me $2,000 that I didn't need to spend.

Ryan:
That was a fun one.

Jon:
Right. But here's the thing, I thought I was doing the right thing by letting Google manage that. And it just kept bidding me up, bidding me up, bidding me up until I spent all this money. Where an expert who's in it every day would know, "Hey, on the surface level, I get why you would want Google to own that and optimize that for you. But the reality here, is there's a much better path ahead if you have experience here." I think that's where it really comes in, is having that experience and it means that you can rely on the tool, right, and you could just have a whole bunch of tools. The challenge is going to be, that you're not going to see the gains that you would if you work with somebody who does nothing but optimization and has a team centered around that.

Jon:
Think of it this way. I spent 2,000 extra dollars I didn't need to spend because I misused the tool, right? I could have spent that $2,000 with an expert who maybe could have generated me an extra $5,000. That would have been a massive return on my investment, by making the investment there, as opposed to clicking a button that I was trying to take the cheap way out, right?

Ryan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative...

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What's covered today:

What is PPC Automation?

Should we use it?

What are the benefits to Automation tools?

What are the drawbacks to Automation tools?

TRANSCRIPT

Jon:
All right, Ryan. Today we're going to talk about PPC automation, or pay-per-click automation. Now Ryan, I've been hearing a lot about pay-per-click automation tools. Now, this is mainly with brands who are doing one of two things. I see it when they're either trying to save a dollar by not working with an agency, and they think, "Hey, automation can help me do all of these things that my pay-per-click agency is doing for me." Or, they're just trying to scale their traffic up extremely quickly, and they see automation as the holy grail of them being able to do that. So, I'm really excited to learn about this, because I keep hearing about it, but I don't know much about it, and so I'm happy to have an expert to discuss this with. So let's just start by defining what PPC automation is exactly.

Ryan:
It's a big topic, and PPC automation can mean so many different things to different people. But high level, it generally means not touching certain pieces of an account, and having some type of computer system make decisions for you, within the Google or Microsoft Ads space, and it's even going into the social world as well. But basically, something gets done without a human touching it. Whatever that looks like, it's from high level computers.

Jon:
So, it's not an all or nothing. Because I was just looking at this as an all or nothing, like you're either using automation to run your PPC, or you're not. But you're telling me that just having some automation built in can actually be beneficial, as opposed to just going full automation.

Ryan:
Yeah. And there's different thoughts on that, just like everything online, even in CRO, I'm sure that it has to do with... Everybody's got an opinion, and it's different than everybody else's, on what works or what doesn't. It's based on their experiences or what they've seen, or what they've been told. And so, you've got extremes, where Google Smart Campaigns are an automation in Google Shopping, that will literally do everything. All you do is give it a budget, and what your return on ad spend wants to be, and it goes and does that. If it can be accomplished in the system, it will do it. If your return on ad spend goal was too high, for example, it's just going to sit there, and not really spend any money. If it's really low, it's going to spend a lot more money, and get you a lot more clients because the potential's there.

Jon:
So you're telling me automation can't solve all of my hopes and dreams.

Ryan:
I wish it could. There's some people that will promise you that, for sure, but if anybody is telling you that, they are lying, or they have an ulterior motive in place for you and your business. And on the other side, there are ways to use automation that help but don't necessarily do even the work in place of a human doing the work. And, as with most things, and my most common answer, which is also my least favorite answer in questions about digital marketing, is, it depends. Where should your business lie in that space around automation, specifically in the PPC realm? It's going to depend on where your business is at in the life cycle, what you're able to afford as far as agency or humans doing work, and what are the long-term goals of the business, or what are you trying to accomplish?

Ryan:
And so, let me take it in a few phases I guess, in kind of explaining what I believe in automation. You've got the full automation, where you're just going to either use a tool, or, for most businesses, use Google's Smart Campaigns in the e-commerce world to spend money for you in Google. I think in some spaces it does make sense, but it also comes with a very large asterisk, where you're having Google do all of this work for you to grow your business, but Google's goals, generally speaking, are different than yours. As a big, publicly traded company, they have responsibilities to their shareholders to grow their revenues and profits, just like you as a business owner have a responsibility to yourself or to your employees to grow revenues and profits. So for most businesses, Smart Campaigns and full automation in Google is not my recommendation, and it is mainly around understanding what's going on in your account and the ability to really scale.

Ryan:
But small advertisers, just starting up, you've never spent before, you really want to see if your business online has some legs to it if you start spending money, I do think Smart Campaigns within the Google space do have a place to play in that. And if I had to put a line in the sand, probably somewhere around $500 or less a month in ad spend to kind of prove a model. My wife, for example, would make me prove something to her before we actually jumped with both feet into a business and say, "Yeah, let's throw a bunch of money at it, and really see if it works." She'd say, "All right, let's kind of see what happens if you just kind of let Google do something on the side here to see what happens with 500 bucks over a couple months, 500 a month for a couple months." I think there's something there.

Ryan:
On the other spectrum, no automation, where you are 100% customized, doing everything either with an employee or an agency internally running an account on Google and Microsoft. That has a place to play, and I think that pool of companies where that makes sense is probably in more of a mid-tier type business model where you're spending a few thousand a month, maybe as high as 10,000 a month, where you're really just one person doing all the work for you, and you can do a lot of customization, because generally when you're at that spend level, you're not the biggest, you're not the smallest, but you're having to compete with some of those biggest, and you need some of that kind of surgical precision to find those specific keywords, or specific searches for specific products that really makes sense for your company, and you've seen the conversion rates that work.

Ryan:
And then, the vast majority of businesses fall kind of in the middle, where you do need some automation, and you do need some human strategy and somebody else, and some humans touching the account as well. And so, focusing on the middle is where it gets most complicated. So, for the majority of businesses out there, it's how much, or what parts of the account really make sense there. Is it an internal employee with some automation? Is it an agency using humans, and some automation? And what goes first? Is it the automation first, with a human checking on it, and making sure it's working? That's going to be a broad spectrum within the space.

Jon:
So, I'm hearing that it makes sense to prove out a business. So, prove out a new product perhaps, somewhere where you're just going to spend a little bit of money, and you want to start and see if there's a good product market fit there. And if so, then it would make sense to expand beyond just automation. But it does have its use cases, which is great to hear. So, okay. So, you've talked a lot about, there's three tiers to be thinking about, right? And that that kind of messy middle is where "it depends" is usually the answer, which makes sense. So, let's talk about some tools around this. What are the benefits to using pay-per-click automation tools? You mentioned one of them being to prove out a marketplace, but in ...

Link:
The Essential Guide to Ecommerce Sales Promotions
(In this article, #51-78 are focused on promotions you can run that aren't discounts)

Outline:
First, Jon cover’s different points after purchase that CRO can have an impact:

In cart, right after purchase
-Thank you page

Email post-purchase sequence:
-Confirmation email
-Shipping confirmation
-Customer service
-Please leave a review – just click here
-Add to general marketing email list sends

He also explains the metrics a brand should be looking at to track progress of post-purchase optimization:
-Return purchase
-CLTV
-Conversion (overall, should go up with repeat customers!)

Jon is a firm believer that companies shouldn’t use discounting in post-purchase communications. However, there may be offers you can make that are not discounts. You do not want to become a discount brand.

Finally, Jon explains that a successful method for getting referrals post-purchase outside of a set loyalty program is just to ask! Very few do!

Transcript:
Ryan:
Jon, today, I really want to move our focus to an area that I think many companies and individuals would not normally think of conversion rate optimization and the impact it can have. I'm talking about post-purchase. Most people generally would assume that once a purchase happens on the website, CRO has done its job, time to move to the next person on the site and get them to convert. But, because I know you, I'm aware that CRO doesn't stop at the purchase. There's a lot more to be done. Can you explain to people, that maybe aren't aware of post-purchase conversion rate optimization, what they need to be thinking about, what they need to be doing, and why it even exists after they've already taken the sale, done what you wanted them to do originally?
Jon:
Right, and I think that's an important point there, Ryan, which is that most people think that conversion optimization stops as soon as you get someone to purchase. I think that's really shortsighted and it's a big problem because so much of the consumer experience and getting people to purchase a second time, is all about what happens when they purchase that first time. So, if you get them to convert, your job's not done. At that point... you got to think of this like a marathon. You just ran a marathon. Most people who are seasoned marathon runners, they get through that finish line. They have a process they still go through to cool down, protect their body, recover a little bit. It's the same thing here. After you've-
Ryan:
... And I just go drink beer.
Jon:
... Right, exactly, and that's why you don't run marathons.
Ryan:
That's why I don't.
Jon:
Learned that lesson the hard way, huh?
Ryan:
Uh-huh (affirmative), I did.
Jon:
Yeah, so exactly, this is it, where we can't just stop and drink a beer. You've got to go through a follow-up process here that can really, really have a massive impact on your overall metrics of your site and success and revenue, and even your conversion rate, because most people don't think about that. But overall, your conversion rate should go up with repeat customers.
Ryan:
True.
Jon:
There's a handful of things you should be thinking about that I think we should talk about today. There's a bunch of different points after purchase that can have an impact with conversion rate optimization, and if you optimize these points, you will see higher revenues.
Ryan:
Okay, so somebody's purchased on my site or client's site. Action's done. Does post-purchase conversion rate start after the product arrives, or where's the first point that we can be making an impact to improve conversion rates in the future?
Jon:
In the cart. It starts right then. As soon as somebody completes the order, gives you their payment, what happens?
Ryan:
Hmm.
Jon:
Most of the time, people aren't really considering the first step, which is a thank you page. What is the content that you're putting on there? Now, there are ways to, even on that thank you page, influence so many extra metrics. You can influence your average order value on that thank you page. There's some great tools out there right now. One of my favorites is a company called CartHook. CartHook has a tool, where you put it onto your thank you page, and it actually shows you complimentary products to what you bought and says, "Do you want to add it to the order?" You're doing an upsell after the purchase. You already got them to commit, and maybe they're thinking, "I bought those shoes, maybe I'll add a pair of socks. Why not?"
Ryan:
Now is that in addition to maybe also having upsell in the shopping cart, or do you usually recommend just get them to commit to something and then try to upsell them later?
Jon:
Right. I think that's a big mistake people make is to do the upsells in the cart. I don't think that's serving the consumers' needs, because serving the consumers' needs is helping them complete that checkout as quickly and easily as possible. You want to get that conversion. That's most important, obviously. So, after you've completed that sale, then, go back and do the upsells. Now, that doesn't mean you're not doing upsells throughout the funnel and throughout the product detail page or categories, things of that sort, right, complimentary products. But I don't think you should be doing it in the cart. That's when you just closed the transaction, at that point.
Jon:
A lot of people like to think of it like retail, where you're at a grocery store and they have all the candy bars and magazines, and you're just standing there in line. It's not like that because online, you shouldn't be waiting around at the checkout. Those items are there at the grocery store line because you're waiting for the person in front of you. You're likely bored, and they're capturing your attention. It's a captive market. Well, when you're in the cart and you're checking out online, you just have one goal, and that's to get it done. So, anything you put in the way there is actually going to become a distraction and annoying for the consumer. Not something where, "You're entertaining me with the latest gossip about celebrities for five minutes while I'm waiting for the family in front of me that's scanning 300 items at the grocery store."
Ryan:
Oh, you follow me at the grocery store, huh Jon?"
Jon:
Exactly. I got one kid. I can't imagine having a whole family like yourself. I think the first step is definitely in-cart, on that thank you page. Pay attention to the messaging. You can run a lot of A/B tests on the messaging alone and see what resonates. But also, adding a tool like CartHook, where you're figuring out all of these additional metrics and how to increase things like customer lifetime value, average order value. All of that kind of even goes back into your ROAS, your return on ad spend. If you start thinking about it this way, the higher your average order value, the higher your return on ad spend.
Ryan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Now, in addition to something like a CartHook offering up some complimentary products, is there any kind of messaging or kind of like, "Hey, I really want to make them feel good about what they just did. They spent money with me..." because most companies are like, "Hey, thanks. We'll be emailing you a confirmation," and that's pretty much the thank you page. Do you recommend adding more to that, or is it just ki...

Contact Logical Position for remarketing needs at https://www.logicalposition.com/contact.

Reach out to Ryan Garrow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryangarrow/

Transcript

JON MACDONALD:
Ryan, good to talk to you again. Today we're going to talk about remarketing and re-engaging your audience, how does that sound?

RYAN GARROW:
Man, nothing gets me more excited, John.

[laughter]

RYAN:
Marketing is a huge piece of online marketing driving traffic, it's an often-overlooked piece of digital marketing. I'm excited to drive into some of these details with you and hopefully shed some light on the mystery that is remarketing for most companies.

JON:
I really want to talk about a few things today, what do you do when someone doesn't convert on your site? You spend a ton to get folks to a site but then when they don't convert on that first visit because let's face it, most visitors aren't going to convert on their first visit, how do you keep marketing to them and close the sale and get that conversion? As my understanding, and hopefully, you're going to school me on this today this is typically what is called remarketing and it can be extremely powerful when done right. I do know that, tell me a little bit about how you and the team at Logical Position define remarketing?

RYAN:
Man, nothing as a marketer can make you more frustrated than somebody not doing what you wanted them to do when they came to the site because he spent all this time and energy sculpting traffic, eliminating waste saying, "All right, they are searching for my exact product and service. They are ready to buy, they're ready to put a credit card in." To get you into the right category or the right product page and then conversion rates on websites dictate that for almost every company we work with over 90% of that traffic goes somewhere else to do something and not take an action, and it just is frustrating.

Especially if you do some of those real-time heat map watching and watching people on your site behind the scenes, you just get frustrated like, "Why didn't you click that? What's wrong with you? You should have just gone and clicked add to cart and buy?" Remarketing ends up becoming the step in the process next. You almost need to look at remarketing as a bunch of different layers. It's not just one simple, "We're remarketing, we're good." There's search remarketing, there's remarketing through email, there's remarketing through display ads.

There's so many different things you need to be doing and be aware of in the e-Commerce space to help bring those people back to the site and take the action you want. Each one of them needs to have a lens of what's the return, am I doing it properly, is it generating the type of return that I need it to be as its own entity? When you look at driving traffic through paid search, and I think one of our earlier podcasts we talked about all traffic is paid traffic.

At this point, it is requiring some level of investment to get that traffic to your site. Whether that's just time, energy, money, thought, something's happening that you're putting out there to bring people in. Paid search, hopefully, there's a return that's making sense with paid search as its own entity, search shopping, Bing, Google, Yahoo, whatever that looks like for you hopefully there's a return that makes sense.

An additional marketing piece needs to be re-marketing, and it needs to have a return that makes sense for the business and for the products and services that you're selling. Within that re-marketing entity, there's different layers within that that say, there's this type of re-marketing and this type of re-marketing and this type of re-marketing and each one of those has different expectations for return. It may be five years ago re-marketing was vanilla and now we have the Baskin Robbins if you're in the Oregon area and you know Baskin Robbins, there are 31 flavors.

There's all these different things you can be doing with re-marketing that for some brands it's overkill, you don't have enough traffic to use all of these wonderful different things. Other brands are using just the most basic remarket and they should be using a really complex additional layers of re-marketing to help drive different types of traffic, different ways, with different expectations. Brands should be doing it and they should be doing it more than likely more complex than they are. I think on average, most companies are not utilizing all the things they can be doing, even just through the simple Google platform of re-marketing, there's a lot there.

JON:
I look at this as two sides. One is what is the data that you need to be tracking or where are the points where you can then have data to know who to remarket to and then on what channels can you be re-marketing? Maybe we break that down. What events or obviously, there's the simple page view. Somebody views a particular page like a product detail page, you can then start re-marketing that product to them. What are some other options there for how to get data to know who to remarket to?

RYAN:
For simplicity purposes right now let's just focus on the Google re-marketing platform. Most companies are at least familiar with it, most people probably understand conceptually what the Google re-marketing is inside the Google Ads platform. All re-marketing is dependent on the data you're putting into these lists that you're re-marketing to.

If you've got really crappy lists, you're probably going to get crappy re-marketing results.

Step one is understand how you are breaking up your data. I would say as a general rule, more granular is better because you can combine those audiences into bigger groups. If you have really granular data sets within your lists in audiences, wonderful, use those, make sure that are in there. You can always make bigger groups but if you don't have the small granular groups you can't get to them. At least set them up there whether you use them or not, at least get them in there.

By granular groups I'm talking about you should have a list for shopping cart abandoners. When I say list, it's an audience within Google ads. Let's have one for shopping cart abandoners, let's have one for product viewers, people that have viewed a product page. Let's have one for people that viewed a category page and people that only view the homepage, what's on the homepage and left.

Site depth would be a good way of looking at that, the deeper they go on the site, the more likely they are to convert through remarketing and the messaging is probably different. What we see when we do this, when we add these in, and we add the audiences in for not only display ad re-marketing, which is an important piece to follow people around appropriately, we'll talk about some of the details on what's appropriate and what isn't later, but also re-marketing lists for search ads.

If people go back and there's a heavily researched product that, "Hey, I found this one, it looks like it's good, then let me go back to Google and do a couple more searches to make sure that I'm not leaving a lot on the table as far as options or price point," you can bid on those people differently based on where they went on your site now. What we see, generally speaking, you're going to have a higher return on re-marketing the further down into the site they went. For example, people that were a shopping cart abandoner that you're re-marketing to are probably going to have ...

TRANSCRIPT

RYAN GARROW:
Jon, we are all working from home, because there's a virus running around the country, scaring us but also driving us to be safe and do different things. I'm not at all making light of that, but it is changing the game for every business. If you're a business that hasn't been impacted by this in a positive or negative way, you might be on vacation somewhere not knowing what's going on. As you're talking to companies over the last week or two, what are you hearing? Have you seen anything work, anything that's been terrible? What's the general gauge of customers that you've been speaking to or prospects you've been speaking to when it comes to business right now?

JON MACDONALD:
Good question. I'm hearing two camps, pretty exclusively, and it seems to be clear cut one or the other for e-commerce. The one camp is, "My sales are going better than ever. People are home, they're not shopping on retail at all and we're picking up the slack." A lot of brands that also sell through retail are seeing this because they still have a demand for their goods and they're still shipping. A lot of them are even offering special deals right now to get people to purchase even more.

I see a lot of e-commerce brands I'm talking with that fall into the camp of, "Things are better than ever," and that's great. I'm so glad to hear that. Then there's the other camp that are saying, either, "I'm already out of stock of items, and I don't know when I'm going to get more," because they're having challenges-- In the United States, we're probably, what? Eight weeks behind where China was with this health epidemic.

You look at that and you say, "Okay, eight weeks before the factories got going again." If they're full scale in eight weeks, we don't really know and then, the ports are really backed up and people aren't able to get the goods, even into the country. If they are, they'll be in China right now. We have a lot of issues with supply chain and I'm hearing a handful of folks that are saying, "This is a problem, I need to stop all spending. I'm not going to drive traffic anymore, because, why would I drive traffic? Why would I spend to convert my site if I can't get any product in the hands anyways?"

I'm not suggesting that's right or wrong. I would love to hear your opinion on that aspect, but that's what I'm hearing. It's one of those two camps. What about your side? What are you hearing on these daily conversations?

RYAN:
Because we touch companies that are all e-commerce as well, we've got probably the full gamut of it. We have some small local businesses that only have storefronts and they've-- Obviously, nothing is happening. I can think of escape rooms like for entertainment, those companies stay with small little companies, didn't spend a lot but we helped them do well but nobody's going to go to an escape room for the near future. They have just nothing, no chance to market.

They've got to do some interesting things. We're advising them in different ways. E-commerce, there's a lot of gut reaction we hear, mainly from smaller clients that it's like, "Pull everything back in, don't do anything. We just got to ride this out and huddle and protect what we do have." Then we have other companies of all sizes, saying, "Hey, this is great. Let's step on the gas. Let's go."

Again, there's supply chain issues all over the place. Some of them are pivoting, some of them had backstop because of the previous issues with China production last year with tariffs, so that has some of our clients. They have a bunch of back stock from that even because they were worried about 25% tariff, so they had loaded up before that. We have, like you said, the full gamut. I don't think we go back to where we were three weeks ago. We're going to have a new normal for almost every business in the United States, no matter what your business is. Just lots of change.

JON:
Yes. Talk about that new normal a little bit, then, I'm interested. What do you think won't change? What do you think will stay the same, and what do you think will change?

RYAN:
What's not going to change is people are going to buy stuff online. People have already been buying online, they're going to continue buying online and so that doesn't necessarily change. What you're buying right now, I mean, if somebody had an online toilet paper retailer, they are probably in great shape right now. That's probably the ones that are like, "This is great, this is the best thing that's ever happened."

I think we're going to have a reaction to that and people that sell petits are probably going to be doing wonderfully well because people are going to be sick of buying toilet paper. I think there's going to be a shift in retail, obviously. I don't know if-- I knew retail was going down and you've probably known this as well, like, it's not been a secret. Somebody told me today, I haven't actually found the article, but JCPenney may have like Forever closed all stores and gone online totally. Probably it was a good decision anyway.

JON:
They were headed that direction before, right?

RYAN:
Yes, so it accelerated that. What I see with a lot of these things that happen-- I mean, this is a very rare occurrence. I did a lot of research and I was preparing for talks around what do you do in a down economy, and you look back at the depression, and you can see how you can spend through that and you can do depressions-- Companies that advertise through recessions, depressions do better.

There's a bunch of studies around that, it's no secret but when you have a cliff that we fall off of, it's not necessarily economic related. You do have to look at it from different lens and the easiest, closest thing I saw was 1918, when it was the Spanish flu, the first H1N1 and it was after World War 1 and the US was already in a recession to a degree and so this exacerbated it, but it was also, we had people that couldn't find work already and then people couldn't move. It was a very similar scenario, kind of a lockdown.

They also didn't have e-commerce, they had local stores. That was basically all you could do. Retail obviously came back from there, but very unique times, but I think what it does is that when things like this happen, it shines a magnifying glass on things that were going really well and things that were going really bad. If you had a store that was already not doing well, it's really not doing well now, unless you randomly got some of the products that people need right now.

JON:
Right. I'm hearing that same thing that the best way to think about this is that your company needs to be able to survive this initial shock. I keep hearing the biggest similarities economically are 9/11. You get through that initial big shock and then we'll get into the recession, and then we can deal with the financial impacts. If you had a business that was having challenges already, you're not going to survive that shock because all it takes is one shock to a weakened system if you will, and your business is going to suffer the ultimate consequence because of that.

If you were able to get through that shock, then you can probably pick up the pieces and we should see-- I'm not an economist, I'm just telling you what I keep hearing is optimism about this coming back up quickly. That, "Yes, we're going to hit a recession for a minute, but then we'll work our way back up pretty quickly." I think the long term effects are going to be more of an issue because of all the bailouts and money we're pumping in, we got to pay that back somehow as a Uni...

TRANSCRIPT

RYAN GARROW:
Jon, usually my goals are around revenue, new clients, employees, you name it, but as a sub-point of some of my goals I find myself penciling in a line that's usually says something around improve website. Usually, when I'm penciling that in, in my head, I'm not articulating it correctly, but in my head, I want to increase the conversions with the traffic I already have, because I've already got some traffic going to these sites. I just want to get more out of it, how to squeeze this lemon a little harder and get more juice out of it, but given the dynamic nature of conversion rates based on traffic type seasonality, I've struggled with even figuring out how am I supposed to be setting a goal around my conversion rates other than just better. I want it to be better.

It's never going to be good enough, everything make me happy that we've got this conversion rate, I just need to be better. As an expert in this field and probably the smartest person I've ever come across in the conversion rate space, [chuckles] should I even be setting goals around conversion rates, or should it be like am I going about it in the wrong way?

JON MACDONALD:
First of all, Ryan, I appreciate this topic. I think it is timely and it is something that a lot of people I talk to on a daily basis struggle with. The reality is, what gets measured gets improved. There should be some goals here, and you do need some data to make data back decisions about how to improve your site. With that in mind, I think it's only helpful to really be thinking about goals, but around conversion optimization improvement there. Yes, there's tons of goals you should be thinking about, but just better is probably not going to get it done because where do you start from that?

RYAN:
[chuckles] Good point. I always keep putting it on there, and I don't actually have anything around it. [laughter] Probably not the way I should be going about this.

JON:

One of the things to be thinking about here is that you really want to break that down a little more. I would think about it in terms of are you looking to increase average order value? Are you looking to increase the amount of people getting to a particular point in the site? A conversion rate, let's just start there. Overall, most people think it's just converting the amount of visitors into buyers, and overall, yes, that's true, but there's so much more underneath that.

Think about, do you want to get people from a landing page to the next step in the funnel, and then from there to a product page and then adding to cart? Then once they're in cart to actually completing that process, and then what even happens after that? How do you get them to come back in order again? You really want to be thinking about all of the different steps that go into this and then just look at improving each of those steps. That is what is going to bring you sustainable growth and conversions as opposed to just saying, okay, I really need to just get more people to buy. We all want that, but unless you're improving every single step of the process that our consumers going through on your site, you're not going to see much of a sustainable growth there.

RYAN:
Got it. There's a lot in that statement from you. As an econ business owner myself, my goal is, click-buy. My thoughts around conversion rate is, all right, well, if I change my button from pink to blue, and test that A/B, one of those colors is going to cause people to buy more, but you're saying, yes, you could probably do that, but it's probably not a great good idea. You should probably start thinking about how people are getting down to that product page or getting into the shopping cart experience. Try to not lose people on the way and that would probably be and you can fix my verbiage, maybe there's a better way to starting your conversion optimization process, rather than just looking at the Add to Cart button.

JON:
Right. I think you brought up something that you've heard me rail on 100 times probably. Maybe that why it's in your mind.

RYAN:
Yes, just maybe. [laughs]

JON:
Is the button color issue. Here's the thing, changing a button color are very unlikely to do much for your site, but if you go online, and you Google conversion rate optimization, one of the first things that comes up is a case study around a brand that somebody wrote this article. It's been handful of years, now it's been out there and it's a running joke with our team, but a brand said they changed the button color on their website and got like $5 million in additional revenue because of that. I call bullshit, first of all.

RYAN:
Wow, I'll do that. [laughs]

JON:
Exactly. Second of all, it's really setting a bad precedent for conversion optimization because it's really not about button colors. You go online, the second thing you're going to find is checklists all over the place of things that you should just do to your site. Here's a bunch of checklists. The problem is, they're not based on data from your specific site visitors.

Now, are there best practices, of course, but do they apply to you? The only way to know that is to truly understand your site visitors. That means collecting data. All of this, I've said already, data back decision making is what's imperative here. If you don't have the right data, you don't have good baselines for where you're at today, how do you even know if what you're doing is working? That's where you have to track every click and movement that people are taking on your site. What's that mean? Well, get Google Analytics, but Google Analytics out of the box, it's meant to help people like you Ryan, some more ads.

RYAN:
[chuckles] It's good for that.

JON:
It's all about driving traffic. It's great for that, but most people, unfortunately, try to use Google analytics as a viewpoint for how to improve their website, but out of the box, it's horrible at that. Doesn't mean it's not good for it, you just have to take a different view of the data and do a little bit of extra work. What does that mean? Well, really quickly, you could just go in if you're an e-commerce site and make sure you have e-commerce tracking turned on. There's so many sites, even some large ones doing tens of millions a year that don't have that box checked, and it's an easy win.

RYAN:
Blows me away.

JON:
Yes. I'm sure you see that all the time too.

RYAN:
I do it, just I don't get it.

JON:
It's all because again, only the marketing team that's driving traffic has really used GA when the e-commerce manager who is actually trying to get more sales out of the site really needs to be paying attention to this data too.

The second thing is, get those heat maps, click maps, scroll maps, understand how people are engaging with each page of your site. You can get all of that data through a handful of tools. The one we love the best here at the Good is called Hot Jar, H-O-T J-A-R. It's a really great tool and helps you have a good understanding of how people are engaging with your site. Now, all of that data can then tell you what people are doing, but you also need to understand what they're thinking. That's where things like doing user testing can really come in.

Understanding. What does that mean? We send people to the site, who match an ideal customer profile and we ask them to complete tasks on the site. While they're doing that, we record their screen and their audio. Now we could do a whole episode on user testing, we probably should because if you're real deep on this and the insights are just ...