Guest Bio:

Jon MacDonald is passionate about ridding the web of bad eCommerce experiences until only the good remain. Beginning as a web designer/developer during the dot-com boom, he has worked with dozens of brands such as Autodesk, Apple, Columbia Sportswear, Comcast, Linksys/Cisco, General Electric, Harley-Davidson, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Nationwide Insurance, Nike, Nokia, Red Bull, UPS, Vodafone and Xerox.

Jon's company, The Good, has turned online browsers into buyers for some of the biggest brands in business. The Good has become one of Oregon’s top 20 fastest growing private companies three years in a row, and its founder has been recognized with a Forty Under 40 Award.

Based in Portland, Oregon, Jon volunteers for several causes which affect the eCommerce community and the Pacific Northwest as a whole.

Show Summary:

Today's guest is Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a Conversion Rate Optimization firm. Beginning a decade ago, they have been collecting, analyzing and evaluating the data which goes into CRO since before CRO became a buzz term.

In this episode, Jon explains that while data gathered from site metrics and A/B Testing are vital, sometimes they do not tell the entire story of a company's eCommerce presence. He demonstrates how business practices between the Brick and Mortar world and the eCommerce arena are even closer than they appear and shares how he has helped several traditional Brick and Mortar concerns to not only expand into eCommerce but to use connectivity to enhance the physical shopping experience.

Topics:

How did you get involved in Conversion Optimization?

00:48 We started as a digital marketing firm, building eCommerce sites mainly. Most of our customers were not too concerned with how their site was built, technically, they were mainly concerned with making sure that site would perform after it launched.

01:45 We found we were winning contracts by adding a clause that we would be allowed to optimize the sites for three months after launch, while our competition was using a "launch and forget" model.

02:30 A few years later, we decided to pivot and focus exclusively on Conversion Rate Optimization. We found that there were dozens of firms who could develop sites for cheaper than us, and the clients never looked at the source code and didn’t care as long as it worked. Where we provided the most value was in optimizing the site.

Who are your clients in general?

03:20 We have worked with clients of all sizes but find that a minimum of 10,000 visitors/month is necessary for testing to provide a return on investment for the client. We've worked with Xerox, Adobe, The Economist, Nike, Swiss Gear, as well as some smaller brands that have a retail presence but maybe their online presence is not as big.

When I think of eCommerce I usually only think of pure-play eCommerce that does not have any retail presence, it is just a store that is digital. It seems that the brick and mortar retailers are getting much bigger in the eCommerce space to support retail rather than compete with retail.

04:50 One of the things about CRO that is coming down the line is Personalization and optimizing to have a more personalized site for your visitors. When you combine that with retail data, it's like the perfect gold mine. You are able to track somebody in store in terms of what they purchase and what they like so that when they visit your website you already have a basis and foundation of information to build on. If you know that people in-store often buy a complementary product and they always like that product, you can serve the same on your website.

You can use the gains form online to help offline offers, it's an easy testing environment.

06:20 Testing has become much easier over the years; the tool sets are much easier to work with. We often work with brands that have been doing their own testing for a year, have been trying A/B Testing on their website. Most people who I talk to abou