Drive and Convert

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: It's hard to read the label from inside the jar. People come to your website for only two reasons: to purchase, or to research. Your goals are aligned with customers, both of you want a conversion. 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

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/

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.

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

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 ...

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...

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...

Most online businesses are hooked on traffic. It's like a drug –– they think if they just get more traffic, all their problems go away. Because traffic equals sales, right? On the surface that seems right, but Ryan is here to dig deeper, and explain why that isn’t the whole story. TRANSCRIPT Jon Macdonald: There's a common saying that there are only three ways to increase the revenue of an online business. You get more people to visit your site while keeping your conversion rate the same, or you can sell to more people who are visiting, thus increasing the average order value. Or you can convert more of those visitors coming to your site into customers. There is a reason that more traffic is first on that list. It's where most e-commerce brands focus because usually they can throw more money at ads and see traffic increase. So it's the easy button for them. But most online businesses are also hooked on traffic. It's like a drug. They think that if they just get more traffic, that all of their problems are going to go away because traffic equals sales, right? But on the surface, that seems right, but my guess is that if we dig deeper, that just isn't the whole story. It's safe to say that everyone wants more traffic, but is all traffic good traffic? Today that's what we're going to find out. Ryan, I'm interested to get your point of view on this as always. Ryan Garrow: I'm excited to touch on this one because it comes up in 2020 more often than I thought it would be. And I think it's unfortunate, but it's also nice because I get to help redirect thoughts and how people are coming to that conclusion. But it's always surprising when companies come to me and they're like, we just need more traffic, go find traffic. Interesting. Okay. Let's dig into that. Jon Macdonald: It should be fun. Okay. Look having optimized websites for conversions for a decade plus now, I think I know the answer to this, but let's just start high level. Is all traffic, good traffic? Ryan Garrow: Hopefully most people in organizations listening to our podcast and they've gotten this far down the road already know that not all traffic is good traffic, and it's not all the same. There's different purposes, for different types of traffic, different purposes for driving traffic to different parts of the page. So, no, it's not all the same. I find a commonality, and this is probably something that's been consistent for a very long period of time. That's why it stays consistent. But companies that have investors or they're chasing investors are constantly talking about site traffic. They fall into that first point you made I think all the time like. The site is going to convert traffic. We already know that. All traffic on the internet converts at 2%. that's a metric that's been thrown out for, I don't even know how long. I even use it sometimes just to give people a ballpark. Here's what you're going to pay for costs. 50 clicks gets you a sale. At least that's a barometer to start with and most people will be like yeah, 2%, I've heard that number before. When in reality, you know this 2% could be great and 2% could be terrible. Jon Macdonald: Right. It's all relative. Ryan Garrow: It is. But they say sites are going to convert at this rate. All we need is traffic. Please go get us traffic. I'm always confused. Well, my kids probably get on my phone and click on ads so that's tactically traffic, but I'm pretty sure you don't want my three year old on your site when you're trying to sell something to me. So not all traffic is good traffic, or the same quality. Jon Macdonald: That's an interesting approach. It's almost like, I don't want to blame everything on Facebook, but it's similar to their business model where it was just, let's just get as much traffic as possible and then we'll monetize that traffic. But when you're an e-commerce business, you're not selling ads on your site, right? You're trying to sell product. You want qualified traffic, not just eyeballs that can increase your advertising rates. Ryan Garrow: Yeah. I was trying to rack my brain going into this. Is there a space in the e-comm world where just high traffic numbers helps and I couldn't come up with an example. On Amazon, you can combine organic and paid and that helps cause you're driving all kinds of ranking increases. On Google, they're separate. Bing, they're separate. But in no scenario in the e-comm world, could I figure out where just a bunch of traffic would be beneficial to me. Maybe there's some out there, but maybe there's different goals that I'm not aware of in the e-commerce world where generally you want to sell more stuff. Jon Macdonald: Yeah. And it's interesting. I was just having this conversation with our director of marketing at The Good today about our site traffic. We've grown that real steadily and it's a point of pride for us over the years, but we're very consistent with the content and trying to drive traffic. But we were talking about a competitor had posted on LinkedIn today about how much traffic they're getting and how proud they are. And I was like, man, that's like, two or three X what our traffic is. And I know that competitor is a lot smaller than us. So I was like, okay, all traffic is not qualified traffic. If we're not getting qualified traffic, they could be sending your three-year-old to their site and it's not going to matter. They're not going to have more business from that. That's proof right there that it's not the same. Ryan Garrow: Yeah. It takes no skills to find people to come to your site. Anybody can do that. You want to pay me some money, I will get traffic to your site at a cheap cost, but it's not going to be anything relevant. Anybody can put a simple display ad on. A great one would be mobile apps. That's a display setting on Google. They have a massive network of mobile things. If you're running some display, a remarketing and you haven't eliminated the flashlight app on Google Display, that person that developed that app has made probably seven figures and Google knows numbers and nobody at Google has been willing to tell me, but it is a significant number of flashlight app clicks. You have an app to click on a flashlight. Well, I don't know why you would even have that app anymore, but the number of people that have it and are using it and accidentally clicking ads is astronomical and kudos to that guy. It was just probably one of the greatest inventions of the last 10 years specifically for money making. It's the simplest app, I'd go into the phone, open the flashlight app, and click ads accidentally, and I get paid. So traffic is easy, but if you're getting a bunch of traffic that spends less than one second on your site, what's the point? They didn't intend to come to your site, but you technically go into analytics, have a lot of sessions and a lot of users. If you have an unsophisticated investor, I guess, that only they want to see is you had 1 million visitors to your site last week. Yeah. Guess what? I paid $10,000 for it and I got zero out of it. But yeah, I got a million visitors. not going to any good. Jon Macdonald: Right. So ROAS is really important here. That return on the ad spend is really the metric you should be looking for? Ryan Garrow: I think it is. I've talked a lot of companies recently that are launching and it's an important for them to get eyeballs when you're launching, even though, you know you're probably not going to get some conversion out of it. But you want some metric that you can track that says that you're getting the right eyeball. And so there's a beauty brand that's launching that's going to be a very high end, very, very high end, very exclusive. We're talking like the Oprahs, the Michelle Obamas, that level. The founder was talking to me about how they...

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...

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, ...