Drive and Convert (Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow)

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...

What is the future of digital marketing and online experience?

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

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

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

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

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

In this episode, Ryan and Jon experiment with a "mailbag" format, where they answer questions that were submitted directly by Drive & Convert listeners. The conversation covers a wide range of topics, which makes it the perfect listen for a dog walk, office commute, or spin bike session.

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 the patterns and trends they saw related to traffic generation in 2021. They also cover some of the expectations they have for traffic acquisition this year and how brands can put themselves in a position to take advantage of those market dynamics.

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.

Jon and Ryan provide valuable insights into the world of Microsoft Ads. The discussion kicks off with an exploration of recent developments at Microsoft, including the company's rebranding of Bing Ads as Microsoft Ads and its strategic investments in AI. 

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. 

It can be difficult to convince new customers to purchase from your site the first time they visit. Instead of driving traffic and new visitors to your site, why don’t you focus on the customers you already have?

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.

Creating a well-designed SaaS website requires a strategic approach. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss the key fundamentals of creating a SaaS marketing website that not only attracts and engages users but also converts them into customers.

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.

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

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

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

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

Jon and Ryan explore the challenges brought about by the shift to GA4 and how it has impacted Google Ads. Thankfully, there are some steps that companies can take in order to turn things around. 

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.

A lot of emotions are involved in exiting a business, and Ryan emphasizes the importance of legal advice and research along the way. 

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.

Larger companies get most of the press and excitement with their 6 and 7 figure marketing budgets, but the majority of clients we work with are smaller. And smaller companies have to do things a little differently than the big guys. What impact does a small budget have on driving traffic? How should small budget brands compete online?

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...

How can new websites drive traffic and create demand for products?  

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.

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

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

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

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

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

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

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

Soon enough, Google will be launching its new Performance Max campaign option. The addition has received mixed reviews from agencies and in-house teams alike, but ad managers will need to find a way to adjust their strategies in this new environment.

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.

Traditional conversion rate optimization is built around achieving statistically significant results through a combination of research and testing. It can be expensive and time-consuming, but it also carries a >90% confidence level.

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.

Industry benchmarks are an obvious starting point for anyone looking to set goals. Unfortunately, comparing your conversion rate to the rates of other companies (or the industry as a whole) is meaningless.

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.

We've made it through Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss the benefits of taking a break post-BFCM.

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.

Once the excitement of the "shopping phase" dissipates, building a new home can be a taxing experience. There are often challenges with supplies, logistics, team members, timeline, budget, and a host of other variables that make the ordeal more stressful than anticipated.

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.

Digital experiences are always changing and evolving. 

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. 

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...

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

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

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

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

How does one break down optimization into some key principles? In episode #24, Jon started talking through his eight laws of conversion. The first four were:

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

This week on Drive & Convert, Jon and Ryan discuss preparing for holiday 2024 and the recommended tech stack for success. 

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.

The 2021 holiday season is here, but recent events have made it so that paid acquisition can no longer be considered the "easy button" when it comes to attracting potential buyers to your store. As a result, many brand owners are scrambling to figure out how to generate site traffic effectively and affordably.

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.

What’s more important–delivering a seamless journey for users or sticking to the branding guidelines driving this unique approach? This is the question people hope to answer when trying to choose between brand-first and user-first CRO. This week, Jon and Ryan suggest a third option: the best outcomes come from aligning user goals AND brand goals. 

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.

What is a good return on ad spend?

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.

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...

SEO confuses a lot of people. In this week’s episode, Jon and Ryan tackle three big SEO myths that frequently come up when they’re talking to prospects and clients. 

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.

Anyone who guarantees they can increase your conversion rates with just on-site optimization alone is either lucky or lying. 

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.

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

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

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

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

In the Ecommerce world, it's almost always about the data. But what works well for large organizations may not work well for small ones and vice versa. A lot of that has to do with how much data you have, and large organizations tend to have more. So where should different size organizations starts as far as collecting data and making use of it? And why do we even need data in the Ecommerce world?

According to a research by Adobe, 2021 brought the first ever $200+ billion online holiday season in the US. Assuming this year follows similar trends, optimizing your website before Black Friday and Cyber Monday can help your ecommerce brand win big. 

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.

One of the largest groups of online shoppers often surprises brands and marketers... adults over 55. While it's a mistake to ignore this key group of shoppers (and their disposable income), it's also tough to connect with them when there's a lack of understanding around their needs and habits. So, to fill that gap, the Good surveyed Active Agers on a large variety of ecommerce practices, attitudes, and their general outlook on digital commerce.

 
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.

As the coronavirus pandemic is changing the game for businesses around the world, Jon and Ryan offer some timely advice on what you can do to propel your ecommerce business forward instead of just sitting on the sidelines.

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...

Are your marketing goals lining up with the goals you've set to grow your business overall?

Many business owners or executive teams set goals for their online marketing to drive profit to the company. Unfortunately, the current digital marketing landscape makes it difficult to reach digital marketing goals that have a focus on profit:

• Generally speaking, digital marketing has increased in competition and the real estate available for paid ads has shrunk (mainly on Google which controls a vast majority of search volume).
• This has forced companies to further emphasize customer lifetime value activities (such as email and loyalty programs) to drive business profit.
• Instead of driving profit from the first order on paid search, companies now may only break-even on that initial order (some companies even lose money on the first order-on purpose).

The solution is to focus less on marketing ROI and focus more on the overall business objectives, like increasing market share:

• Revisit the goal every two months to see how email and loyalty channels are impacted by the increase of new customers.
• In theory, both of those channels will be driving much higher volumes of sales at extremely profitable levels. Even if profit doesn’t match up exactly, the sales volume will be making a noticeable dent in competitors.
• Customers that buy from your website through non-brand search and shopping are customers that were likely going to purchase from a competitor if you didn’t get them.
• They didn’t have any brand or site loyalty when making the search.
• Over time, investing in non-brand search/shopping more aggressively will also have what we call, The Halo Effect.
• Don’t let any changed goal continue for more than two months into the new year without analyzing the data to make sure that it is driving the intended outcome.
• Having goals that don’t drive the business in the right direction aren’t necessarily bad, but can have unintended consequences when left unreviewed.

LINKS

"I Have Bad Goals, You Have Bad Goals, We ALL Have Bad Goals" by Ryan Garrow

TRANSCRIPT

JON MACDONALD:
Ryan, I know you've spent a lot of time communicating with business owners and marketing teams about their goals with online marketing. To put these goals in perspective, we have to discuss overall business goals, and that's to me where things get really interesting, because their current marketing goals are not driving the online business towards an overall business goal. The business or individual usually has set a bad goal and the best time to review those I would think is at the beginning of a new budget year, which is typically the start of a calendar year. Ryan, today let's talk about setting more appropriate goals to online marketing and align that with business objectives. How does that sound?

RYAN GARROW:
Sounds awesome. It's one of my favorite topics actually. I get into this all year actually. I'll be talking to business owners as they're thinking about becoming a client or working with us. Or even if I'm just out having a beer after a conference, I always love talking about goals. It's been a big part of my life, and how I operate so I'm constantly setting goals, revisiting them, and business strategy and goal setting go so hand in hand that it just becomes a topic I naturally get to probably in almost every conversation with business owners or marketing teams.

So often, I find that there are well intentioned people throughout an organization that set what seems to be an appropriate goal for their team, and then they get down the road 6 months to 12 months, and maybe they hit their goal, but it drove the business in a completely different direction then it actually been anticipated. Without all the stops in place, you really revisit that goal and decide, "Is this actually working and are we actually accomplishing what we're trying to accomplish?" It can be very fascinating conversation in that process. I'm excited about this topic for sure.

JON:
I recognize and maybe our listeners don't know, but you run several online businesses yourself, right?

RYAN:
Yes, my wife and I have probably more than our fair share [laughs] that we run.

JON:
I would think one is a fair share so the fact that you have more than that is awesome. That speaks to the fact that you put a lot of what you preach into practice, right?

RYAN:
Yes, there's actually not a scenario in which I will advise a business owner or marketing team to do something that I'm probably not already doing or I haven't learned from and therefore advise them correctly based on my own misgivings or wasted money.

JON:
I imagine in your day, you've probably set a bad goal or two.

RYAN:
The list is ongoing and my wife likes to remind me of those [laughs]. One funny one recently, I was so mad at myself for this one. We were launching a brand and we decided to launch it on Amazon. Partially for the education, but also because I had been built up as a digital marketer to fear Amazon, and that just made me mad that I was scared of Amazon. That's why I go, "Forget it. We're going to launch a brand on Amazon and see what happens. We have to understand the landscape." Our team was deciding to start up an Amazon ads department. I said, "All right, we'll launch on Amazon, you can have my money. I'll set a wonderfully appropriate goal to make sure we hit our objectives."

Initially is like, "All right, I'm going to share the upside with this team and we're going to have a profit share." They know my margins because they need to know that to run the digital marketing through Amazon and help create the pages and all that. We had this wonderful goal that every dollar of profit we got from ads, they were going to get, I think it's something around 20% of that dollar, whatever that looked like. I can't remember exactly the goal.

My goal as a business owner in launching this business was to dominate the competition. I was not in the game for profit. I want to spend down to break even to get customers, I want to understand the Amazon ecosystem, but my goal really in this is it's an organic fertilizer. I want to take down Monsanto. A pretty lofty goal considering how many billions of dollars they have.

JON:
Yes, no kidding.

RYAN:
Profit was secondary to me, it was like, let's get the product in the hands of people. I want to know their feedback as well as saying, "Hey, the more people that get it, the better my opportunities for repeat business, et cetera, et cetera." We get three months down the road, and I'm just frustrated with growth, like, hey, we went up aggressively. When we started the marketing it was exciting. My partners and I were looking at numbers daily. It was actually when the Apple Watch which we all had had the Amazon ping every time you got a sale, which was great. We'd have a glass of wine at the end of the day and our watch would go off and we're like, "Yes, we just got a sale. This is awesome."

We were excited, but it flat-line so quick, and three months in I was talking to the team and I was like, there is way more search volume here on Amazon than what we're capturing. I could see our search rank and where we are ranking the competitors and their sales volume based on reviews and all these other metrics we had to look at. We were not moving the needle forward according to my overall business goal of becoming one of the largest houseplant fertilizers in the marketplace. The teams like, "Oh, the numbers are great. Look at we spent $5,000, regenerated 10 $12,000 of profit. You cut us a cheque on the side for $1,000. Isn't this great?...

Last year, Google moved people over from Smart Shopping to Performance Max, and they said Performance Max would be the “one campaign to rule them all.” The struggle now, especially for smaller advertisers, is not having enough data points. And the more data you give an algorithm, generally, the better it’s going to be able to accomplish your goal.

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.

Product descriptions may seem straightforward, but if done right they can significantly improve conversion rates. Today Jon explains why product descriptions are one of the most effective changes you can change to your website and how to write great product descriptions that will convert.

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...

What’s the best type of navigation to use for your website? Jon and Ryan reveal that there is no one-size fits all approach to this question. 

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 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:

With that advent of smart shopping campaigns, it has become ridiculously easy to start spending money on Google shopping ads and to see some return. But one area that's become overlooked is text ads. Ryan explains why you shouldn't be sleeping on text ads if you want to push your brand further.

Today, Jon & Ryan talk about how Digital Marketing and CRO work together to create a scenario where one plus one really equals three or four. When these combine it It becomes an explosion of revenue and profit. Today the guys why it is that these two things work so well together.

As business owners, we’re always worried about missing out. Many businesses owners we talk with seem to regularly have FOMO (fear of missing out) when it comes to marketing: Are my goals right? Was optimization right? Was there an area of the market I didn’t pay attention to? During holiday periods, which is when we are recording this, everything is intensified and I find most business owners are stressed about this more. Especially in a year like 2020. Today we dive deeper into the details of how a business owner can uncover where they are missing out on valuable traffic, and therefore revenue… and if their FOMO is valid.

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

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

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

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

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

There is nothing more frustrating to a business than losing out on a sale because their website was optimized for one audience and, in turn, alienated a whole second subset of shoppers. This can be seen in ecommerce brands that have a direct-to-consumer and wholesale operation. However, the two audiences are on completely different customer journeys, making it difficult to create a digital experience that delivers to both.

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.

Ecommerce businesses are navigating the biggest transition of this year with Google Analytics 4 (GA4). In this D&C episode, Jon and Ryan acknowledge some initial challenges with the platform's interface and data comparisons, but they remain optimistic about its potential. 

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.

Feeds are everywhere: Google, Bing, Walmart, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram. Anytime you see a product image and a price on some sort of app, it's probably coming from a feed. And even though they've been around for a while, it's more important than ever to understand how you can use them to your advantage.

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.

If you haven’t already started testing cross-selling and upselling options in your store, you might be leaving money on the table. In this week’s episode, Jon and Ryan talk about what the tactics are, their benefits, and how exactly to implement them on your website. 

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.

Marketing leaders love to redesign websites. Putting a fresh coat of paint on your brand's online presence feels like a meaningful project to undertake. It certainly is a significant effort, but it isn't always the best decision if you're goal is to improve your sales performance.

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.

Many brands default to discounting as the "easy button" for juicing their online sales, but doing this too often can put you on a price-cutting hamster wheel that is increasingly difficult to get off of.

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.

Ecommerce managers are juggling a million things by the time Q4 rolls around. They’re busy preparing holiday campaigns and gearing up for the coming year. However, optimization should still be top of mind during Q4, and the perfect way to ensure this happens is through a website audit. 

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.

In this episode of Drive & Convert, Jon and Ryan delve into the rise of video as a powerful tool for digital marketing. They discuss the impact of platforms like TikTok, the changing landscape of video monetization, Apple's influence on tracking and privacy, the growth of Connected TV, and the importance of creative content in video marketing.

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.

There's currently lots of frustrations in the E-commerce world around ad performance. What we all expected to happen in 2021 is not happening. Cost per click is up, sales have dipped, and the data is telling us that there is a lack of volume of sales –– but is this just poor advertising channel performance? Or is this pandemic hangover as more folks rush back to retail? Today, Ryan and Jon unpack these questions.

Google is always changing, so why is the news about Performance Max Campaigns any different? 

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.

There's no end to new platforms popping up and claiming to be the next great source of traffic to your business. First there was Yahoo. Then Google. Then Facebook. Then Twitter. Then Instagram. Then TikTok. Then… well, the list goes on and it will forever be growing too.

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...

Getting others to promote your brand is infinitely more effective than promoting yourself. Face it, the glowing recommendation from a friend might be the only thing to convince brand loyalists to try a new product. 

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.

Clients at The Good are interested in how firms like Logical Position are still getting results for their clients –– and why optimization is more important than ever to make the most out of the traffic they’re already getting. The challenge I’ve seen, and I’d like to address today, is that I haven't seen anybody really talking about optimization when it comes to iOS15 updates. And that's what Jon and Ryan focus on today.

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

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

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

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

The benefits of experimentation are well-researched and documented. But that doesn’t always equate to an increasing conversion rate.

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.

There is one major driver of successful and innovative companies: experimentation culture. It begins with a willingness to ask the right questions and stay humble about the answers – data will drive your decision-making, not opinions. But, it's easier said than done. 

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.

People have a lot of options when it comes to subscriptions. And now more than ever, people are conscious of where and what they spend their money on.  

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.

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. So how do we understand who they are? And what do we need want to know how do we convert these people? Jon's got the answers!

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 ...

2024 was the year social ads made a serious comeback, and the focus on social selling will continue into 2025. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss how YouTube is poised to impact the marketing stack in 2025.

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.

There are a lot of companies right now that are seeing poor year-over-year performance in their traffic and sales data. On top of that, there is international conflict in Ukraine and signs of an impending economic downturn. 

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.

Believe or not, the 2021 holiday season is right around the corner, and it's shaping up to be another big year for ecommerce brands. Hopefully your preparation is well underway, but there is still time to take steps that will help you make the most of the extra attention and higher purchase intent.

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.

Direct-to-consumer is all the rage right now...and for good reason. Removing wholesalers, retailers, dealers, and marketplaces generally reduces costs and provides a better purchasing experience. BUT, the strongest brands find a way to balance a DTC model with other external sales channels. When considering this option, many brand owners are justifiably concerned about introducing channel conflicts to their business. So, today we're going to talk about channel conflict and how to manage it effectively as a fast-growing ecommerce brand.

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

After more than a decade in the business, the CRO experts and UX strategists at The Good have identified patterns while working with clients. Through their experience, they discovered that when you optimize specific areas of a website, you consistently get an improved conversion rate and increased revenue. 

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.

This week on Drive & Convert, Jon and Ryan discuss the July 2024 Amazon Prime Day event and its effect on the ecommerce landscape. 

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.

The digital journey doesn’t end at the checkout.

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.

Psychology plays an important part in business no matter what business you’re in or how you’re getting sales. The best tactics to convince us to spend money are the ones we’re not aware of. Retail stores have been using music, scents, and merchandising to get us to spend more money for decades if not centuries. Those tactics online now have a name and its Dark Patterns. Jon explain just what Dark Patterns are and why your brand should avoid using them.

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...

A lot of CRO firms try to close a deal with an ecommerce brand by promising them that they will run “hundreds of tests,” sometimes over the course of just a few weeks! While that sounds like a great bang for your buck on the front end, it's probably not the best option for your company long-term.

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.

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about how too many ecommerce brands lead by sharing information about their company, their team, or their mission before they tell a prospective customer how they can help solve their problems or address their needs.

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.

It’s no secret that the iOS update in 2021 hurt Meta. 

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.

Have you ever wondered what goes through your customer’s mind when they make a certain purchase decision?  

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.

It seems most brands are using email popups on their website. Today Jon dismantles this practice with passion, explaining why they're bad for everyone, and offering better alternatives.

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...

From struggling marketplaces to recent stock turmoil, Jon and Ryan explore the factors impacting traffic and sales in the ecommerce industry. They take a deep dive into how competition, economic factors, and changing consumer behavior are reshaping the e-commerce landscape. 

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.

Most marketers are used to digging around in Google Analytics to review their website traffic from organic search, social media, and email marketing, but far fewer dedicate time to analyze their referral traffic – often to their own detriment.

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.

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 ...

Aligning your online experience with user expectations is crucial. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss how to leverage the priming & expectation setting heuristic to increase conversions.

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.

Most business leaders understand that you need a significant amount of traffic to run an optimization program that gets results. However, having 100,000+ sessions per month doesn't necessarily mean that your site is ready to optimize with 100% confidence. Not all traffic is created equal, and you have to attract the proper quality and mix of traffic to stand up an optimization program that gets results.

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.

It's hard to talk about E-commerce and driving traffic without thinking about Amazon. How do you find new customers there? Should you run on ads on Amazon? Ryan has the answers!

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

Today, is the first in a two part series about the first four principles of the world of Conversion Rate Optimization. What are these fundamental truths, and how can I break down optimization from a high level to not focus so much on the tactics? Everybody goes directly to the tactics, but what are the overarching things that a brand needs to know and be thinking about? Today, Jon breaks it all down.

A seamless and compelling customer experience is crucial in today's competitive digital landscape.

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. 

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

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

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

Most brands are already deep into their holiday planning, and there is some really fascinating data that Ryan is seeing from Logical Position clients that's driving Q4 strategies. But, there is still so much unknown. How will a second Amazon Prime Day impact the holiday season? What about all the ecommerce buzz around selling at Walmart? Are there still supply chain issues or do some brands actually have too much product?

 
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.

Ryan is excited to dive into the often overlooked remarketing options for re-engaging those prospects who don't convert on their first visit to your commerce website.

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 ...

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...

Ryan explores whether you should or shouldn’t use PPC automation tools to assist you in your paid search efforts. The answer isn’t so simple.

For all your PPC needs check out:
https://www.logicalposition.com/

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 ...

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...

Digital marketing can start the fire, but CRO adds fuel to the fire. Yet, it seems every business has this bank of excuses on why CRO can't happen now, or why it doesn't make sense. Today Jon overcomes these objections and explains why CRO can be of such a high value to your business.

This week on Drive & Convert, Jon and Ryan discuss how to quickly validate ideas so you can launch site updates with confidence.

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.

During Q4, new channels seem to become more attractive to brands, especially if they are missing growth targets. Amazon is the largest ecommerce channel out there, but simply having your products on Amazon doesn’t mean you’re going to boost sales or profitability.  

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.

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. Today Jon and Ryan chat about Google Shopping, but more specifically the effect it has on other channels.

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 name of this show is Drive and Convert for a reason. At its core, online business is about driving traffic to your site and then converting that traffic into customers using an outstanding product, engaging copy, and intuitive design.

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.

Today we're tackling the hot topic of Facebook and how Apple's ios 14 update has affected its performance. Based on analytics, it appears like the data might be going in a negative direction, and many people are jumping ship to other platforms. But should you? Today Ryan tackles the question of whether you should be re-directing Facebook traffic to other platforms.

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

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

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

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

With Cyber Week just in the rear view mirror, we’ve got a lot of questions for Ryan...Outside of revenue, how does a brand know if they were successful for Cyber Week? How do they know if money was left on the table? Or their goals were misaligned? What were the common missed opportunities in search engine marketing? What does a brand’s data say about their Cyber Week performance? When a brand looks back at their ecommerce data for Cyber Week, what should they be looking for? We've got even more questions, and we’re very fortunate to have access to Ryan who has answers!

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...

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

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

Check out the full episode to learn:

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

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

For many brands, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a lot like eating right and exercising regularly. You know that you SHOULD be doing it. You know that it has lots of benefits over the long term. But it's still difficult to find the time to make it happen on a regular basis.

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.

The future is impossible to predict, but we can always prepare for it. As the year comes to a close, Jon and Ryan shift focus to 2023 and talk about one thing you do control: your budget planning. 

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.