Drive and Convert

Drive and Convert

By Jon MacDonald and Ryan GarrowBusinessEntrepreneurshipMarketing
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Drive and Convert episodes

  • Episode 16: Discounting for Conversion Rates

    So many Ecommerce stores offer discounts. Should you? Today Jon breaks down why discounts are probably doing more harm than good for your brand, and offers some better alternatives.

    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...

    25 min
  • Episode 15: Buy on Google and Your Brand

    Google recently dropped all commission fees on their "Buy on Google" platform. On the surface-level this seems like a very intriguing offer. But Ryan here is to explain why "Buy on Google" may not be the best thing for your brand.

    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...

    27 min
  • Episode 14: The Future of CRO

    How can you prepare your businesses for operating in a future that has yet to be determined? Today, Jon explores the future of CRO. With such a high volume of transactions happening on Amazon and Shopify are we nearing the end of incremental improvement from CRO?

    For help with your CRO visit:

    https://thegood.com/

    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...

    25 min
  • Episode 13: SEM Budget Forecasting

    Today, Jon asks how to determine what your SEM budget should be...and Ryan explains why the answer may actually be to have no budget at all

    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...

    26 min
  • Episode 12: CRO's Role in Ecommerce Growth

    In every business there are tools specific to that industry or type of business that will help them grow. Ecommerce is no different. CRO is one of the most important tools to grow an Ecommerce business. Today, Jon dives into the role CRO plays in Ecommerce businesses.

    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:

    30 min
  • Episode 11: What Makes SEM Difficult to DIY Well?

    There are so many folks selling “search engine” services these days. And a lot of that is “snake oil” –– especially when you talk about “search engine optimization” or SEO. And this no doubt bleeds over into the SEM – or “search engine marketing” field too. Today Ryan unpacks just exactly why SEM is so hard to do yourself.

    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'...

    25 min
  • Episode 10: Optimizing Category Pages

    Today Jon takes a look at how to improve your category pages on your website. He'll explore what you should know about headers, footers, navigation, bread crumbs, and more!

    For help optimizing your category pages:

    https://thegood.com/

    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...

    35 min
  • Episode 9: Amazon: Fight or Join?

    Most Ecommerce brands are starting to feel like they can’t beat Amazon and thus, they must join them. Ryan unpacks the benefits of joining Amazon and the things you need to watch out for if you do.

    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 ...

    26 min
  • Episode 8: Selling on Social

    Ryan unpacks the different social media platforms and how you can use them to sell your product. He explains where you should start and then where you can test the waters next. Jon and Ryan also provide an update about what you need to know about the recently released Facebook Shops.

    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...

    34 min
  • Episode 7: What Makes CRO Difficult to DIY?

    Jon explores the nuances of CRO and explains why it can be so difficult to take a DIY approach with it. He also offers a few tips for those just starting out to improve your CRO without spending a whole lot.

    [The Mom Test book]:

    (https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/dp/1492180742/ref=sr_1_1)

    For more CRO help visit The Good:

    https://thegood.com/

    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...

    30 min

About Drive and Convert

From the publisher's feed

In this bi-weekly show, hosts Jon MacDonald (The Good) and Ryan Garrow (Logical Position) share their best advice for helping businesses drive high quality traffic to their site, and making sure that…