Drive and Convert

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 ...

Jon dives into why Conversion Rate Optimization doesn’t stop after the purchase and the different points after-purchase that you need to optimize in order to drive higher revenues. Link: The Essential Guide to Ecommerce Sales Promotions (In this article, #51-78 are focused on promotions you can run that aren't discounts) Outline: First, Jon cover’s different points after purchase that CRO can have an impact: In cart, right after purchase -Thank you page Email post-purchase sequence: -Confirmation email -Shipping confirmation -Customer service -Please leave a review – just click here -Add to general marketing email list sends He also explains the metrics a brand should be looking at to track progress of post-purchase optimization: -Return purchase -CLTV -Conversion (overall, should go up with repeat customers!) Jon is a firm believer that companies shouldn’t use discounting in post-purchase communications. However, there may be offers you can make that are not discounts. You do not want to become a discount brand. Finally, Jon explains that a successful method for getting referrals post-purchase outside of a set loyalty program is just to ask! Very few do! Transcript: Ryan: Jon, today, I really want to move our focus to an area that I think many companies and individuals would not normally think of conversion rate optimization and the impact it can have. I'm talking about post-purchase. Most people generally would assume that once a purchase happens on the website, CRO has done its job, time to move to the next person on the site and get them to convert. But, because I know you, I'm aware that CRO doesn't stop at the purchase. There's a lot more to be done. Can you explain to people, that maybe aren't aware of post-purchase conversion rate optimization, what they need to be thinking about, what they need to be doing, and why it even exists after they've already taken the sale, done what you wanted them to do originally? Jon: Right, and I think that's an important point there, Ryan, which is that most people think that conversion optimization stops as soon as you get someone to purchase. I think that's really shortsighted and it's a big problem because so much of the consumer experience and getting people to purchase a second time, is all about what happens when they purchase that first time. So, if you get them to convert, your job's not done. At that point... you got to think of this like a marathon. You just ran a marathon. Most people who are seasoned marathon runners, they get through that finish line. They have a process they still go through to cool down, protect their body, recover a little bit. It's the same thing here. After you've- Ryan: ... And I just go drink beer. Jon: ... Right, exactly, and that's why you don't run marathons. Ryan: That's why I don't. Jon: Learned that lesson the hard way, huh? Ryan: Uh-huh (affirmative), I did. Jon: Yeah, so exactly, this is it, where we can't just stop and drink a beer. You've got to go through a follow-up process here that can really, really have a massive impact on your overall metrics of your site and success and revenue, and even your conversion rate, because most people don't think about that. But overall, your conversion rate should go up with repeat customers. Ryan: True. Jon: There's a handful of things you should be thinking about that I think we should talk about today. There's a bunch of different points after purchase that can have an impact with conversion rate optimization, and if you optimize these points, you will see higher revenues. Ryan: Okay, so somebody's purchased on my site or client's site. Action's done. Does post-purchase conversion rate start after the product arrives, or where's the first point that we can be making an impact to improve conversion rates in the future? Jon: In the cart. It starts right then. As soon as somebody completes the order, gives you their payment, what happens? Ryan: Hmm. Jon: Most of the time, people aren't really considering the first step, which is a thank you page. What is the content that you're putting on there? Now, there are ways to, even on that thank you page, influence so many extra metrics. You can influence your average order value on that thank you page. There's some great tools out there right now. One of my favorites is a company called CartHook. CartHook has a tool, where you put it onto your thank you page, and it actually shows you complimentary products to what you bought and says, "Do you want to add it to the order?" You're doing an upsell after the purchase. You already got them to commit, and maybe they're thinking, "I bought those shoes, maybe I'll add a pair of socks. Why not?" Ryan: Now is that in addition to maybe also having upsell in the shopping cart, or do you usually recommend just get them to commit to something and then try to upsell them later? Jon: Right. I think that's a big mistake people make is to do the upsells in the cart. I don't think that's serving the consumers' needs, because serving the consumers' needs is helping them complete that checkout as quickly and easily as possible. You want to get that conversion. That's most important, obviously. So, after you've completed that sale, then, go back and do the upsells. Now, that doesn't mean you're not doing upsells throughout the funnel and throughout the product detail page or categories, things of that sort, right, complimentary products. But I don't think you should be doing it in the cart. That's when you just closed the transaction, at that point. Jon: A lot of people like to think of it like retail, where you're at a grocery store and they have all the candy bars and magazines, and you're just standing there in line. It's not like that because online, you shouldn't be waiting around at the checkout. Those items are there at the grocery store line because you're waiting for the person in front of you. You're likely bored, and they're capturing your attention. It's a captive market. Well, when you're in the cart and you're checking out online, you just have one goal, and that's to get it done. So, anything you put in the way there is actually going to become a distraction and annoying for the consumer. Not something where, "You're entertaining me with the latest gossip about celebrities for five minutes while I'm waiting for the family in front of me that's scanning 300 items at the grocery store." Ryan: Oh, you follow me at the grocery store, huh Jon?" Jon: Exactly. I got one kid. I can't imagine having a whole family like yourself. I think the first step is definitely in-cart, on that thank you page. Pay attention to the messaging. You can run a lot of A/B tests on the messaging alone and see what resonates. But also, adding a tool like CartHook, where you're figuring out all of these additional metrics and how to increase things like customer lifetime value, average order value. All of that kind of even goes back into your ROAS, your return on ad spend. If you start thinking about it this way, the higher your average order value, the higher your return on ad spend. Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Now, in addition to something like a CartHook offering up some complimentary products, is there any kind of messaging or kind of like, "Hey, I really want to make them feel good about what they just did. They spent money with me..." because most companies are like, "Hey, thanks. We'll be emailing you a confirmation," and that's pretty much the thank you page. Do you recommend adding more to that, or is it just ki...

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 ...

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...

Jon outlines what businesses should be paying attention to as they begin the CRO process, in order to make sure your commerce website's revenue continues to grow over time. TRANSCRIPT RYAN GARROW: Jon, usually my goals are around revenue, new clients, employees, you name it, but as a sub-point of some of my goals I find myself penciling in a line that's usually says something around improve website. Usually, when I'm penciling that in, in my head, I'm not articulating it correctly, but in my head, I want to increase the conversions with the traffic I already have, because I've already got some traffic going to these sites. I just want to get more out of it, how to squeeze this lemon a little harder and get more juice out of it, but given the dynamic nature of conversion rates based on traffic type seasonality, I've struggled with even figuring out how am I supposed to be setting a goal around my conversion rates other than just better. I want it to be better. It's never going to be good enough, everything make me happy that we've got this conversion rate, I just need to be better. As an expert in this field and probably the smartest person I've ever come across in the conversion rate space, [chuckles] should I even be setting goals around conversion rates, or should it be like am I going about it in the wrong way? JON MACDONALD: First of all, Ryan, I appreciate this topic. I think it is timely and it is something that a lot of people I talk to on a daily basis struggle with. The reality is, what gets measured gets improved. There should be some goals here, and you do need some data to make data back decisions about how to improve your site. With that in mind, I think it's only helpful to really be thinking about goals, but around conversion optimization improvement there. Yes, there's tons of goals you should be thinking about, but just better is probably not going to get it done because where do you start from that? RYAN: [chuckles] Good point. I always keep putting it on there, and I don't actually have anything around it. [laughter] Probably not the way I should be going about this. JON: One of the things to be thinking about here is that you really want to break that down a little more. I would think about it in terms of are you looking to increase average order value? Are you looking to increase the amount of people getting to a particular point in the site? A conversion rate, let's just start there. Overall, most people think it's just converting the amount of visitors into buyers, and overall, yes, that's true, but there's so much more underneath that. Think about, do you want to get people from a landing page to the next step in the funnel, and then from there to a product page and then adding to cart? Then once they're in cart to actually completing that process, and then what even happens after that? How do you get them to come back in order again? You really want to be thinking about all of the different steps that go into this and then just look at improving each of those steps. That is what is going to bring you sustainable growth and conversions as opposed to just saying, okay, I really need to just get more people to buy. We all want that, but unless you're improving every single step of the process that our consumers going through on your site, you're not going to see much of a sustainable growth there. RYAN: Got it. There's a lot in that statement from you. As an econ business owner myself, my goal is, click-buy. My thoughts around conversion rate is, all right, well, if I change my button from pink to blue, and test that A/B, one of those colors is going to cause people to buy more, but you're saying, yes, you could probably do that, but it's probably not a great good idea. You should probably start thinking about how people are getting down to that product page or getting into the shopping cart experience. Try to not lose people on the way and that would probably be and you can fix my verbiage, maybe there's a better way to starting your conversion optimization process, rather than just looking at the Add to Cart button. JON: Right. I think you brought up something that you've heard me rail on 100 times probably. Maybe that why it's in your mind. RYAN: Yes, just maybe. [laughs] JON: Is the button color issue. Here's the thing, changing a button color are very unlikely to do much for your site, but if you go online, and you Google conversion rate optimization, one of the first things that comes up is a case study around a brand that somebody wrote this article. It's been handful of years, now it's been out there and it's a running joke with our team, but a brand said they changed the button color on their website and got like $5 million in additional revenue because of that. I call bullshit, first of all. RYAN: Wow, I'll do that. [laughs] JON: Exactly. Second of all, it's really setting a bad precedent for conversion optimization because it's really not about button colors. You go online, the second thing you're going to find is checklists all over the place of things that you should just do to your site. Here's a bunch of checklists. The problem is, they're not based on data from your specific site visitors. Now, are there best practices, of course, but do they apply to you? The only way to know that is to truly understand your site visitors. That means collecting data. All of this, I've said already, data back decision making is what's imperative here. If you don't have the right data, you don't have good baselines for where you're at today, how do you even know if what you're doing is working? That's where you have to track every click and movement that people are taking on your site. What's that mean? Well, get Google Analytics, but Google Analytics out of the box, it's meant to help people like you Ryan, some more ads. RYAN: [chuckles] It's good for that. JON: It's all about driving traffic. It's great for that, but most people, unfortunately, try to use Google analytics as a viewpoint for how to improve their website, but out of the box, it's horrible at that. Doesn't mean it's not good for it, you just have to take a different view of the data and do a little bit of extra work. What does that mean? Well, really quickly, you could just go in if you're an e-commerce site and make sure you have e-commerce tracking turned on. There's so many sites, even some large ones doing tens of millions a year that don't have that box checked, and it's an easy win. RYAN: Blows me away. JON: Yes. I'm sure you see that all the time too. RYAN: I do it, just I don't get it. JON: It's all because again, only the marketing team that's driving traffic has really used GA when the e-commerce manager who is actually trying to get more sales out of the site really needs to be paying attention to this data too. The second thing is, get those heat maps, click maps, scroll maps, understand how people are engaging with each page of your site. You can get all of that data through a handful of tools. The one we love the best here at the Good is called Hot Jar, H-O-T J-A-R. It's a really great tool and helps you have a good understanding of how people are engaging with your site. Now, all of that data can then tell you what people are doing, but you also need to understand what they're thinking. That's where things like doing user testing can really come in. Understanding. What does that mean? We send people to the site, who match an ideal customer profile and we ask them to complete tasks on the site. While they're doing that, we record their screen and their audio. Now we could do a whole episode on user testing, we probably should because if you're real deep on this and the insights are just ...

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?...

Hosts Ryan Garrow and Jon MacDonald introduce themselves, and share what you can expect from their podcast about building a better ecommerce growth engine.