Drive and Convert (Ep. 100): Our Biggest Lessons From 100 Episodes

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About This Episode:

Digital experiences are always changing and evolving. 

So it should come as no surprise that the evolution of AI, automations, and online tools has also shifted some perspectives and progressed certain ways of thinking.

In this special episode of Drive and Convert, Jon and Ryan share what lessons they’ve learned in the past four years by revisiting some of the earliest episodes of the show and talking about a few recent ones.

Here’s a brief look at some of the topics they changed their perspectives on:

1. No to external automation -> Yes to platform automation 
2. You shouldn’t benchmark -> Multi-KPI benchmarking can provide great value
3. Pull back on socials -> Platform shops are performing really well  
4. Look at Google Analytics -> Try exploring other tools
5. Test everything -> Validate your decisions

Find out what else they changed their minds on!

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

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Episode Transcript:

Speaker 1:
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.

Jon:
Ryan, I have some good news and I have some bad news. The good news is that we have hit 100 episodes of Drive and Convert. How’s that for good news?

Ryan:
That is some phenomenal news. Like, hey, if nothing else, we are just stubborn and keep doing things.

Jon:
I love it. Okay, the bad news, if you’re ready for that. Now, perhaps this is not a surprise to anyone, but we were not always right across those 100 episodes. So we’ll get into more of that in a moment, but I first want to just take a second and thank everyone who has listened to us over the past four years. I can’t believe it’s been four years already, and it really is the listeners that have made this a success. So nothing makes us more happy than to have somebody mention that they’re an avid listener and I’m on sales calls and people tell me all the time how they listened to this and had a call with a former client of ours that we’ve shared over the years and going to re-engage with them and they even mentioned how much they appreciate the show. And so it’s always great to hear that.
But I just wanted to ask if you’ve gotten anything out of this podcast, please, please, please do us a quick favor and give us a five-star rating in your favorite podcast app and ideally, leave us a review. That is the number one thing you can do to help us expand the reach of the show. And so for delivering 100 episodes of value, as a gift to you, I hope you’ll give us a gift back and just leave us a review and help us get the word out about the show. All right. With that out of the way, now why did I call out that I have not always been right?

Ryan:
Because you know my wife.

Jon:
It’s because we’re going to take this … There you go. She should be our guest.

Ryan:
She should be, like, “Let me tell you how Ryan is wrong.”

Jon:
There you go. Let’s just get our spouses on the line and then the show writes itself, right? Because today, we’re going to take the opportunity to discuss where we’ve changed our minds, where maybe just looking back, it turns out that we were wrong or maybe the landscape has just shifted a bit and we decided that that would be a great topic to discuss for our hundredth episode over four years. So much has changed. We’ve said a lot of things on this show that maybe we have new perspective on, and so we can talk about that a little bit. And because I’m such a kind co-host, I’m going to let you walk into the fire first round.
So let’s chat about an episode where you’d like to maybe let’s just say correct yourself and then I’ll do one of mine and we can just go back and forth. Does that sound good?

Ryan:
That sounds great. Excited to talk about where I may have been incorrect.

Jon:
This reminds me of that TV commercial that’s been running during football a lot, where they bring the ref with the instant replay when the two people are arguing. I told you to pack the camping gear! And the husband is like, “No, you didn’t tell me that.” He’s like, “Should we ask the replay?”

Ryan:
Yes.

Jon:
So that’s where we are today. So where do you think we should start?

Ryan:
Well, I think on my side, we’re going to go back deep to one of our first episodes probably where we weren’t even recording very well and we had all kinds of fun issues. But beyond that part, I think in episode six, I was talking about automation in ads.
So for most businesses, smart campaigns and full automation in Google is not my recommendation.
The market has come and platforms have come so far in just under four years that I’ve had to change my mind in what I’m recommending to businesses online. Google in particular, I will say has probably become the furthest, the quickest when it comes to automation. So three and a half years ago, almost four years ago, automation was generally outside of Google and Microsoft and there were a lot of platforms that would help with that automation. And really inside the platform, we were starting to see smart shopping raise its head and we had dynamic search ads, which was really where the platforms maxed out as far as official automation. There was some enhanced CPC things which would send bids up or down, but in general, I was fairly against automation because I wanted control and I wanted brands to be able to control things, see what was happening, move the levers appropriately when that happened.
And now, we have this thing called Performance Max. And Google’s Bard automation has really become an integral part of Google Ads. You can’t advocate for external automation systems now that would fight with Performance Max and some of the automations built within Google. So I can’t advocate for anybody using systems like that. Initially, I did not like Performance Max. If you’re from Google listening to this, sorry, I didn’t like it. I like transparency, and Performance Max is a black box and I just don’t like it.
But the data is telling us you have to use it. It’s giving preference in shopping ads, which are still where you’re going to find new to file customers most on Google so you have to lean into Performance Max. So forget what I said about don’t like automation, you have to use it, and whether you like it or not, whether I like it or not, it’s a part of what you should be doing on Google.
Now, if you are going to lean into that campaign type and the automation built within that, you need to understand how to analyze. Because it’s a black box, you have to know how to pull reports on it. You have to know where your spend is going. And it becomes very important to understand feeds because it’s a real good garbage in, garbage out. If you are using the automated plugins that send your website data into Google so if you’re on Shopify, there’s a free app on Google that if, hey, if you’re a small business and you need to use the free thing, you have to do it. It’s not terrible. It makes things function.
But what makes sense on your website from a title or description perspective may not make sense on Google. In fact, I was just talking to another brand yesterday that sells spark plugs and their titles make perfect sense on their website for their brand. But when you take that from a non-brand search for a spark plug on Google, it makes zero sense. It’s going to be confusing, if anything, and they’re going to get no clicks.
So feed optimization is extremely important when you’re looking into automation, and that’s where you actually have a lot of levers you can control. There’s areas within the feed you can still stuff up keywords appropriately that makes sense, that don’t violate any of Google’s rules. So understand feeds.
And control what you can. You’re not going to get a lot of search queries from Performance Max. It’s okay. It is what it is, but there’s a new Performance Max that’s becoming more readily available as of now in the recording early in 2024 called feed-only where you’re really going to be working on shopping feeds. It’s not supposed to create videos for you. It’s not supposed to create a lot of text ads. It’s a feed focused, basically shopping only automated feed Performance Max campaign.

Jon:
Okay.

Ryan:
If it does what it says it’s going to do, I really do like it, but it’s still unknown exactly what Google is going to be doing with that. But based on what they’ve told us and what it looks like as of now, I like it a lot. It’s going to get preference.

Jon:
The hot take here is that you like automation now. And I do think over the past four years, AI has come a long way from when we had this initial conversation.

Ryan:
Oh, we weren’t even using the word AI I think in early 2020. If you were and you were neophyte, early on ChatGPT adopter, if it was even available maybe in a very limited beta, yes, you have to lean into the AI. And if your company is trying to grow right now, you probably have to mention that you have AI just somewhere in your presentation deck. But use AI, use automation, and use it appropriately and have checks and balances in place that you do check and make sure that it is doing what you want it to do and really focus on lifetime value.
So that’s the last point on this one. If you’re not focused on lifetime value and you have no way to get that, you’re not going to be able to set the right goals in Performance Max to scale, and the aggressor is going to win when everybody is using the same campaign. So if you’ve got 20 competitors, you’re all MAP priced, and if you all have the same goal, there’s going to be some problems. Those that have a lower ROAS target within Performance Max and a higher quality feed will win probably 90% of the time. And so quality feed, have that lifetime value built into your goals so you know that, hey, if I sell something today, three to six months later, I can win and get that profit back.
And if you convert better than your competitors, guess what? You’re going to be able to set better goals or you’re going to be able to get more aggressive because you’re going to get more things. So you can’t avoid companies like Jon and The Good when you’re trying to force automation within your accounts because higher conversion rates allow Google to spend more money for you and you get more revenue out of it. Off my soapbox.

Jon:
I’m surprised to hear that Google set up a system where you spend more money to win. That’s what-

Ryan:
And it’s really always been that way. It’s Google’s world that we get to live on.

Jon:
Fair enough.

Ryan:
So they get to make the rules. And so whether you want to fight against it and beat on a drum against Google, it doesn’t matter. That’s where people go to find new products. And if you want to play, you’ve got to pay for it. You just better have a plan for capturing revenue without them going back to Google again.

Jon:
There you go.

Ryan:
All right. So Jon, what’s your first mistake you want to address?

Jon:
Oh yeah, right. Okay. So we did an episode not too long ago, actually. Well, I don’t know, episode 75, so maybe about a year ago. And the title was Benchmarks are Bull S. We’ll do that so we don’t get the explicit tag here. So in that show, I talked a lot about how you really shouldn’t benchmark.
I think industry benchmark is the obvious starting point for anyone looking to set goals and that’s why we end up here. But unfortunately, comparing your conversion rate to the other companies or just even industries as a whole is just meaningless.
I still believe that comparing your conversion rate or any of your metrics to other companies or even in industry as a whole is just meaningless. So I still hold that true, don’t get me wrong, because increasing conversion rate is only a goal, and I think that’s another thing that I talked a lot about in there. There are lots of different metrics and goals you should be thinking about and if you just look at one of them, you’re really going to shoehorn yourself into just comparing yourself on one metric, which is not going to be helpful.
But CRO as a whole, as an industry has evolved to become more and more commoditized, and I think there’s a lot more here to consider now because of that commodity focus that’s come onto the industry. So yes, you still need to get data to add to your perspective, but performance is due to a number of circumstances. You can cut ads. You can have a low season. We’ve worked with a company that sells gear for forest firefighters, and what we found was in a wet season, their sales are way down because guess what? Nobody is out there using fire gear than they normally would.
So all of this is just to say that benchmarks are just too simplistic to be useful. And so in that sense, they’re still BS, but I think a more sophisticated team here would take a more nuanced approach to considering other factors and conventions. And so instead of benchmarking, I really think teams need to analyze with some of these key conventions in mind. And that’s where I would change my mind on this is I just said, “Hey, all benchmark is out the window.” And I still think one metric, comparing yourself to one metric is not good, but if you are able to look at yourself in a more holistic way, then it can work and it will help you to at least understand where you can improve.
Now, do I think you should look at one metric like your conversion rate and say, “Oh, my competitor is at 2%. I’m at 1%. I need to get to 2% as well.” I don’t think that’s helpful because what happens when you hit 2%? You’re not going to stop optimizing. You’re not going to be like, “Okay, I’m done. I hit that number and I’m going to stop.” So I still caution against that again, but I would start with looking at a handful of metrics that should work for every company, things like demographics. So make sure you’re checking assumptions about your audience.
Seasonality and promotions, uncover when you should run optimizations. You don’t want to run them necessarily in your low season. Maybe there are some more riskier ones you want to try during a low season, but you’re going to learn a lot more during your high season.
Device strategy. So decide to optimize for desktop or mobile or both. Or if you’re going to push to an app, that’s pretty common in D2C now, look at top of funnel versus bottom of funnel. So it needs to play with your acquisition strategy and whether or not people are actually ready to purchase at that stage.
Site search, I’ve talked a lot about, I think we even did a whole episode on site search. So you really want to understand what shoppers are looking for.
And product analysis. What’s driving the revenue? Is it one product? Is it a suite of products? Is it a bundle? So all of this really led our team to rethink a lot of this, and what we did was we came up with a standardized assessment that we’re actually going to be releasing for anyone to use. So in that sense, yeah, you’ll be benchmarking yourself to some degree, help you understand where you can improve. We’re calling it the five factors assessment because actually five factors that you’ll be assessing yourself on. So that’s coming out pretty shortly here at Q1 of 2024. So if you want to know as soon as it’s publicly available, you’re going to want to sign up for Good Question, which is our newsletter. So just go to thegood.com/newsletter and sign up.

Ryan:
Dang, I like it. Benchmarks are not always BS.

Jon:
There you go.

Ryan:
All right. So my next one, Jon, is not going back quite as far as I did the previous time but we’re going to go back to the wonderful world of iOS update, and it had a massive impact on all things digital but it really hit the social channels hard.
It’s a painful situation for lots of e-commerce brands and of all sizes. It’s not just picking on small ones or big ones. It’s not great. And to a degree, as an agency that manages Facebook but also a client of Facebook that spends money, it’s frustrating almost that Facebook wasn’t prepared for this.
At the time, I think this was back on episode 37, I didn’t stick a fork in Meta and say they’re done, but I came pretty close to saying it’s not going to be pretty. The Meta platforms had been tracking a lot of things that likely went beyond some privacy things. So the iOS update I think was good, but it had a big impact on Meta specifically. In fact, I talked to a brand guest within the last week that sold kitty litter subscriptions online, and in ’21, they spent over two million that year primarily on social channels. And last year, that dropped to half a million. Just that particular brand hadn’t evolved, but that’s really what I expected for a lot of brands to have happen because there’s just not going to be stuff there. You have to change and pivot.
And that brand has some things they need to work on, but I also, in that episode said, “Meta is going to be doing some stuff. Probably they’re not going to lay down and just let Apple kill them.” And I think that’s happened, but I really want to go back and clarify a little bit of what we are now seeing in the social platforms because it’s Meta’s. I won’t say they’re officially back, but it’s pretty good. You’ve just got to be doing some other things around Meta when you’re looking at data because it has changed. We do have Facebook shop, Instagram shop that’s come back or come into the play that I think is showing some great promise. It’s not fully baked yet, I don’t think, but it’s allowing people to stay inside the platform and perform bottom of funnel transactions.
TikTok Shop, I haven’t seen the numbers from holiday yet, but I’m expecting just disgustingly positive numbers coming out of TikTok because of how they handle the holiday season on TikTok Shop. And I don’t even think-

Jon:
I was going to say they subsidized a lot of that, right?

Ryan:
They did. For the untrained eye, it’s going to be, “Oh my, gosh, they did this, but they did, if you look at their bottom line of their earnings, it’s going to show that they spent a lot of money to get that, but all of those people that bought on TikTok Shop during the holiday season, TikTok now has your quick checkout information, so it’s going to be extremely easy to click a button and get something shipped. So I think social has come through the iOS update extremely well.
And I did say in that episode to look at GA for insights, which at the time made sense, Google Analytics. We were still in Universal Analytics, but since, we’ve been forced out of Universal Analytics into what’s called GA4 that I just can’t advocate for. You want to have it because free and it’s a good backstop and you need to make the data as correct as you can and make sure that the pixel is tracking from the social platforms post iOS and even Google Ads have the right data so you need to probably look at a little data or field to make sure that your Google Analytics is tracking correctly. But GA4 is rough.

Jon:
Yeah, I’ve heard recently somebody, I don’t want to name names, but somebody was saying it’s GA good for nothing because it really is. It’s really rough.

Ryan:
It is.

Jon:
They took a good product and slaughtered it.

Ryan:
Yeah. They took it out behind the barn and it’s not good. So if you liked Universal like I did-

Jon:
It’s back there with Optimize, right?

Ryan:
Yeah. It’s like why would you do that? But they were forced to. In a privacy centric world online, Universal Analytics wasn’t going to work and this was their best shot at something that just kind of functioned. It was a rebranding of some other app thing. So I can’t necessarily fault them because they had to move somewhat quick, but it doesn’t feel like they’re investing in that platform.
And so I think most brands need to find an external tool, and I think right now, Triple Whale at scale for small and big brands is phenomenal, and I think you need to be looking at that and making sure that that is tracking, especially on social because it’s allowing you to see attribution better. No commerce is going to be important to seeing post-purchase survey stuff. Really powerful on TikTok, especially when you’ve got … and when people don’t buy on TikTok shop, you’re going to see three, four-week attribution windows that is just crazy long for me in my mind of a $50 product that they saw a month ago and then go to the website to buy.

Jon:
You’re more of an impulse buyer.

Ryan:
I’m an impulse buyer, but it’s probably largely because my brain can’t think back that far. So if I saw something a month ago and I didn’t buy it, you as a brand have probably lost me forever. You’ve got to buy my eyeballs again because I-

Jon:
Or it’s stuck in your subconscious and then you see it on TikTok again and you’re like, “Oh, yeah.”

Ryan:
Yeah. Social is going to be doing very well moving forward still. But I think you, as a brand, you need to make sure that you’ve got additional insights into that social channel to be able to push it appropriately. And so if you’ve seen your social spend drop because you can’t see the ROAS in the pixel, you’d better be focused more on creative. I think in that one, I said very granular campaign builds on social channels. Now because of the AI, back to my previous one, the automation built into the Meta in particular, you can get more general ad groups targeting larger audiences and then test creative.
And so I think social, instead of focusing really on bid management and getting really nuanced into the data, it’s becoming more general and it’s more of a creative focus, honestly. And so you’ve got to have good creative you’re testing. You can put a good amount of creative in an ad group, find the winners, test more, get rid of the losers in the creative side and keep leaning into an audience to try to find better and better creative and keeping it fresh. If you have stale creative, which I’ve seen a lot of brands like, well, this worked really well in 2021. It should still work for cat lovers in 2024 because people still love cats. Yes, I do love cats, but there’s still going to be a lot of better creative that you need to be looking at for it.
And I think you need to be dark posting. So if you don’t have a plan right now on social, in this post-iOS arena, influencers are key and you need to have ones you can dark post on and leverage the trust that they have to find new users at a good cost. It’s not going to end the game for you if you don’t have influencers, but it’s going to make your life a lot easier. And so have a plan of acquiring influencers steadily. And it’s not fun, by the way, because there’s not a real, solid, inexpensive system that lets you go out and scale influencer acquisition. It is a time intensive thing that your social media manager probably needs to be spending time daily doing, nurturing and finding new influencers.
And that mid to upper funnel post-iOS, Facebook was doing really well mid and driving people into the lower funnel for acquisition. It’s just their creepy data was phenomenal. They’re still in the mid funnel. I don’t envision them getting really deep into the lower funnel anytime soon. But there are other channels you can look at. YouTube from a social perspective, I still am not a fan of. Probably four years ago, I probably mentioned it as an opportunity because I did like it pre-COVID, and then COVID messed up a lot of their data it seems, and it’s just not great.
It’s very top of funnel where now you’ve got some video platforms like MNTN, for example, that is designed for e-com brands to get a ROAS on connected tv, which four years ago I could not have envisioned. It’s like the democratization of television ads now where you might not be able to go linear TV, which is I’m going to go buy a Superbowl ad because the budgets are too big. But you can do connected TV because everybody’s got smart TVs and everybody is streaming everything now that there are ads available with us down to a thousand dollar a month spend. So you can do connected TV inexpensively, as long as you’ve got a reasonable way to get creative and test it.

Jon:
That’s great.

Ryan:
Yeah, excited about post-iOS. We may not have some of that creepy data again, but the market has come back with really good data that we can optimize off of.

Jon:
That’s great to hear because I remember everyone being so freaked out about this iOS update. And look, I like the privacy, but man, that’s going to hurt my business. And so I’m glad to see that we all got through that. Typical Apple fashion, when they kill something, usually it ends up being really painful to start and then in the long term, it works out.

Ryan:
Except GA good for nothing. That may have been an output of that.

Jon:
Well, that’s a Google issue. Yes. Yeah, that’s true. Fair, fair. All right. So my next one is a phrase that I have said a lot on this show and that is test everything. It’s interesting. I just want to set the record straight on this because I’ve said it so much, I feel like I need to, kind of, I don’t know about walk it back, but I will say that this is an area that the team and I at The Good have definitely changed our thinking around. And I think that the word instead of test should be validate. Brands should be validating everything, not necessarily AB testing everything. And that’s really the key shift here. It was episode 47 where I introduced what we call rapid testing as the next evolution of CRO.
That’s really where rapid testing comes from, is how do we augment these heavier lifts to just be able to do something and improve it out. Now, in most cases, you’re right. I’m going to say, “Hey, you really need to be doing full AB testing or you really need to be thinking about doing a more iterative approach. This isn’t just a quick win.” And I think the goal here is going in with your eyes wide open.
So wow, that was two years ago now that I was thinking about that. And I talked a little bit about how it’s changed how we thought about AB testing at the time. And I think we even over that last 18 months or so, we’ve really refined more to call it rapid validation, and specifically using the term validation instead of testing because we’re doing a lot less AB testing these days and a lot more of rapid validation strategies.
So what is this doing? Well, this is really allowing us to move much more quickly, but still be data backed. That’s the benefit of AB testing, is to be data backed, but here, we’re researching a lot of optimizations on that digital journey and then we’re quickly being able to validate those opportunities as opposed to having to do AB testing, which can take a month, two months depending on traffic. Or we could run a small test on a high traffic page and get an answer in a week, but it’s probably not going to move the needle because it’s going to be such a small test.
So really, the idea behind this is that it’s a cornerstone of risk avoidance, and it’s really a way for teams to save money before investing in optimizations or design changes. So that’s really something AB testing can’t do. So also, I would say as CRO has become a commodity, the leader of that has been AB testing. AB testing has become a commodity. Every pop-up tool, every Shopify app, all of those, all have some type of AB testing built in. Heck, I was even approached by an SMS company a couple of weeks ago who wanted to do a call because they were like, “Hey, I really want to know more. We want to build in AB testing in our platform. Can we discuss that a little bit?” And I thought that was really interesting because now everybody, every tool has an option to AB test, whatever you’re doing in that tool. So it really has become a commodity.
And I think that because of that, it’s become watered down, and the only way to really move quickly is to really do what we’re calling validation, rapid validation, which is other research methods that are not AB testing. So that’s where I’ve changed my thinking. I don’t think you should test everything. I think you should validate everything.

Ryan:
Now, what I hear when you say that is, oh, you can now move much quicker and maybe CRO is less expensive. Now, is that true or does that mean I can get to a higher conversion rate much quicker because I don’t have to go through the extensive AB testing and I can go like that, “Hey, that change was great. Go, go, go, go, go.” Because that’s what I would love to do.

Jon:
Yes. Well, that’s part of the goal, is to move quicker with optimization. So that was one of the goals. And one of the things we consistently over 15 years of doing this have heard from our clients is, “Hey, we want to move quicker. We want to move quicker.” And we’re like, “Well, the data can only move as quickly as the data can move. That’s not a limitation we’re putting on it. It’s not a limitation you’re necessarily putting on it, but there’s just not enough traffic to move that much quicker.” And it’s also why we’ve always had a minimum traffic level for working with brands, because otherwise, we couldn’t possibly AB test.
So this solves both those problems and it allows us to move a lot more quickly. Now, does it cost less? I would say the value is the same, if not more. So in terms of a budget, I would say the investment levels needs to still be there, and I think the return on that investment is definitely there, if not more than it was with just AB testing. So in that sense, in terms of the budget, yeah, I bet you could start finding people eventually. Just like AB testing became commoditized, this type of thinking will become commoditized a handful of years down the road, and in which case, the price will come down. Right now, it’s not a cost benefit necessarily but it is a speed benefit.

Ryan:
Somewhat related but I guess a side note, do you envision platforms themselves doing CRO at scale? If you think about Amazon, they’re doing the CRO for the company selling on there, essentially. They know it’s their platform. They’re making money on it. Shopify, in a similar fashion, they make money on every transaction because they’re the merchant processor for most of those brands on there. In theory, it could make sense for Shopify to be like, “We’re just going to help everybody do better by doing the CRO on all of our templates and everything.”

Jon:
Yeah, it’s interesting. Maybe I’ll just answer that by jumping into my last point here that I’m going to change my mind on, which is the future of CRO. We’re going way back to episode 14, which is when you’re making predictions on the future, it makes it pretty easy to look back now and say, “Oh, shoot, we had an episode about this.”
It’s so true today that people are used to Amazon checkout. They’re used to the Shopify checkout. They’re used to these platforms that have grown to be the monsters in the space. And if you really deviate from those best practices, then you are potentially creating a barrier.
I started looking through all these episodes and I was like, “Oh, shoot. I actually did have a whole episode where I made predictions, and I wonder how those have held up.” But one of those was that Amazon is going to impact the way we view checkout and conversion process in general. The prediction was I agreed that most platforms would move to a checkout that resembled Amazon’s just because consumers get used to conventions and makes it easier for them to follow those conventions. And the reality on that is that instead, Amazon has really focused on two initiatives that have had way more impact, and that’s buy with Prime and Amazon Pay. And in fact, the standardized third-party checkouts like Bolt have pretty much gone under. I don’t know anyone who’s using Bolt anymore-

Ryan:
Or if they are-

Jon:
But all of those type of …

Ryan:
We have a shared client that’s like, “They’re expensive and it doesn’t seem to be showing the value anymore.” I’m like, “I would agree with the data on that.”

Jon:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I think that unfortunately, I was wrong on that. I did think that Amazon checkout would really become the standard. I think now Shopify has done, as you mentioned, has done a good job with their checkout, but they even came out with the ability over the past year maybe, the ability to alter the checkout for almost everybody. Nobody is really altering the checkout. Everybody you go to, it still looks like the Shopify checkout. So if folks aren’t doing it, it’s really not having much of an impact right now.

Ryan:
That future of CRO episode you had, let’s just keep going on that. All the Google updates going through that, it just changes so fast. We could make a prediction that’s exactly opposite of what we believe, and it could have actually be right two years from now. That’s how fast we change now. So what were you seeing back then?

Jon:
Yeah. At the time, Google was just rolling out the updates to include site experience into their organic algorithm where they were saying, “Hey, you need to have a good site experience or we’re going to start ranking you lower.” So the prediction at the time was that if you haven’t optimized your site’s consumer experience, it was going to impact your rankings and your organic traffic was just going to go way down.
The reality on that is, it’s true, they did put a lot more emphasis on user experience, but it’s also false in that it didn’t really force brands to make as many changes as I would have liked to have seen. I thought it would have a way bigger impact, but also that’s a good thing because, for The Good, because there still is a lot of needed help from these brands, and I think Google did not do a good job of giving them a checklist. Did not say these are the specific things we’re ranking you on. They instead came out with site speed tools and they have a couple of webmaster tools and things that really give you some idea of, “Hey, your buttons are too small or the text is too small or things are too close together on screen.” Those are really, really weird high-level tips. And how do you know, oh, I need to make that button bigger? Okay. That’s not true optimization.
So I think the list of what they’re ranking you on and those type of user experience aspects is pretty poor, quite honestly. So I don’t think it made the brands do as many changes as I would have predicted.

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Ryan:
Google and tying conversion rates to organic results just still seems so foreign to what the reality is because maybe a conversion to one brand is not what they’re tracking because some people, some brands I can look at are tracking the conversion or an event in analytics as a page view. How does Google know, just looking at high-level data what that conversion is and is that really valuable to the user? It could be yes or no, but it would require Google to have almost a second analytics behind the scene that says, “Oh, we are tracking our version of conversions, not letting the brands decide what their value is. We’re going to try to decide what that success on that page looks like.”

Jon:
Makes me wonder if they’re actually doing that. It’s possible, but again, privacy changes, privacy laws as of recent, highly unlikely, but it’s possible.

Ryan:
It’s possible. I think too. They have to focus just on content, I think, and what’s on that page and the basic metrics of a website,

Jon:
Yeah, which dumbs it down enough that is less useful.

Ryan:
This is great. Where else were you wrong, Jon?

Jon:
Let’s see. What else did I say? Oh, I have other places I was wrong. That’s for sure. All right. So I said that CRO would become more accessible to brands of all sizes, especially those smaller brands. So my point was that AB testing tools had gone from $10,000 a month to free in terms of Google Optimize at the time, RIP, and that happened over a span of just a few years. Because it became more popular, everybody wanted to do it, but most brands couldn’t afford the toolset alone to do it.
So I predicted we were going to see a democratization of CRO and that would continue to happen. The reality is that 100% that happened, I know this is one I got right, but the challenge with this is really that it has watered down the effectiveness of CRO as a whole, as an industry. Like SEO had gone through this a while back where if you knew SEO and it was held closely by a handful of people who did it right for the most part, but there were a few bad actors in there who did some black hat stuff and really then they had to combat it, and it just became more democratized over time and more people would try more black hat stuff, and you would end up chasing a Google algorithm at that point.
Well, I think now, what has happened is it’s so easy to go on Twitter or X and find an influencer who, and I’ll put it in air quotes, “does CRO.” And for a thousand dollars a month, they’ll say, “Hey, we’ll run some AB tests on your site.” But again, your site shouldn’t even be running AB tests because you don’t have enough traffic and you’re not going to get the needle move that much. So yes, it is now accessible, but should brands be doing it? I don’t think so. That’s the challenge.
I think there’s the misalignment of how it’s happening and who is using it. So I was right in the sense that it technically is accessible to more brands now, even small ones. You can go get it, pay a lot less. The tools are darn near free. There’s no more free tools out there, unfortunately. But I do think that it’s good to see more awareness out there. I disagree with how it’s being enacted. Yeah. Let’s see.
One other one was, I think the question you posed in that episode for me was, what do we all currently expect on an e-commerce site that will not be part of an e-commerce site in two or three years? Well, here we are three years later, and I said that putting your credit card in a website is going to go away completely. I said, “You know what? There’s too many easy ways to pay.” At the time, Bolt was really coming up. You had all these other one-click checkout things. I was like, “There’s no way you’re even going to have to have a credit card or know your credit card anymore.”
The reality is it has not gone away a hundred percent. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay have all made it super easy and it’s definitely out there and it’s prevalent at almost every site. I think if anything, what has happened is PayPal has gotten slaughtered more than anything else. PayPal is very rarely an option on sites to pay anymore because you have to go to this third-party site, still got to log in, still got to do all these. It’s not one click. And yeah, it used to be the closest thing to that, but now with Apple, Google and Amazon having one-click checkouts and payment options, it really has made it super easy.
But credit card, still an option. And credit cards, I still use it. Yeah, I have everything stored in 1Password, so it’s still close to one click for me. It’s not exactly one click, but it’s close. But I still use that a lot more than I use any of the other branded one-click pay options. So I was wrong on that. It has not gone away completely.

Ryan:
Well, and I think part of the reason is because Google and Apple have made it so easy to just have your credit card stored on Safari or Chrome and it’s like a face ID, it automatically fills it in, or I put my CID for my credit card in on Chrome, and it’s not a big deal. It’s easier for me to do that than go, “Go authorize Amazon Pay.” Just even Shop Pay annoys me with their texting. I’m like, “Just no. Let me just put my credit card in and I don’t need to be in anybody else’s list to keep that going.”
And I think that’s part of the problem too, is I think, at least me, I feel like just the unsubscribe process just becomes just stupid and it annoys me enough that I’m like, “Yeah, I’ll do this, but then I have to go back and unsubscribe, and if I forget, I just keep getting emails and it annoys me that I just prefer not to do it.” And I’m probably in the minority in that I hate texting or brands texting me. I’m not a fan of SMS nurturing, even though I have to advocate for it because some people like it and respond well, but a lot of these pay things …

Jon:
Well, hey, you do read it. It does get to you. Right?

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
And I think that’s their selling point right now, is email, you have no idea if it’s going to actually get there. SMS, very likely someone has seen it. And that’s really the, I don’t know if we can call it arbitrage at this point, is that you know that people are going to see it. I think that will eventually fade.
Our power was out for eight days here in Portland at our house, and I ended up spending it with some family who has two high school boys, and their phones had 200 unread text messages. And I’m like, “How do you do it?” They’re like, “Well, I saw the notification. I just didn’t mark it as read or I decided not to engage.” Or they were like, “Yeah. It’s like every brand I’ve ever ordered from has texted me and I don’t want them.” And I’m like, “You don’t just reply stop?” They’re like, “Oh, I can do that? Just reply stop and it shuts them off?” I’m like, “Yeah.” But they’re, I don’t know, lazy or just don’t care. They just don’t do it.

Ryan:
Once you fall back far enough-

Jon:
It’s not important to them.

Ryan:
There’s not a way yet to mass unsubscribe. I want to select these 50 messages and I want to push stop in all of them. Hopefully, Apple, if you’re listening, do that. That would be great for those types of people. I just want to stop all of these from these 50 ones I just clicked. We’ll get there, I assume, and once there is a simpler mass opt out or something like that, yeah, I’ll give you my text information for that and I’m going to immediately push stop because I got my 25% off or whatever.
All right. So to finish it out, I’ve got my last one that I think back in episode 46, I talked about balancing traffic.
I would say minimize profit. We’re going to eat beans for a while because we have to get big enough to be able to insulate us with our own data and our own customers so that we don’t have to rely on continuing to push against a Google algorithm that is determining who wins and who loses. I don’t want somebody else telling me I’m a winner or a loser. I want to determine that myself. And I think that the writing on the wall right now says that’s where we’re going to be in a couple of years.
As I was talking through this at the time, we were still in the wonderful world of Universal Analytics, and I wanted brands to be focused on balancing your channel traffic so that you’re not dependent on a channel because things can change quickly. So if all of your traffic was coming from Facebook before the iOS update, you were in big trouble. And the whole point really was how do you avoid that as a brand so that you’re diversified? Like an investment portfolio, you want to be diversified, so if bonds go down, stocks go up and vice versa. So you could be fluid.
So I do still think that is relatively decent advice, but my thinking has evolved around channel diversity to more about looking at it from a funnel diversity. You don’t want to be just down at the bottom of the funnel. You want to be mid funnel and upper funnel. And generally speaking, your bottom of the funnel hasn’t changed much in the last few years. There’s demand capture on Google at the bottom as people search for your product be there. You’ve got email and remarketing all at the bottom where it’s more I want to capture the transaction.
I think it’s really where you look at the mid funnel. Where are you moving people from awareness to consideration? That area is more about, “Hey, I need multiple opportunities in the middle of the funnel in case one goes away, and I still need to be at top of funnel.” And so making sure that in those areas, you’ve got multiple areas that are being covered and that you’re still pushing people through the process.
And I think in that one as well, I thought TikTok was more of the impulse buy. We had a brand that was at the time doing really well at a 39.99 price point, and we saw them growing on TikTok. They advertised on it and it was like these people just see it and then they buy it, and that’s where TikTok is going to live. If you can’t get somebody to buy a hundred dollar product where there’s more consideration, very wrong obviously now that we’re in a different world of TikTok and attribution and we can now look back with better tools like, for example, nopCommerce and Triple Whale, which I’ve already mentioned, allow you on TikTok to see that it’s about a four-week consideration process on TikTok. It’s not the impulse buy that I originally thought, but if you don’t have that funnel diversity to keep them in the conversation and through the consideration process, you’re likely not going to be able to see that.
It’s not going to be, yeah, I advertise on TikTok and then four weeks later somewhere, they’re going to come back to my site and they’re going to buy something. No, it actually takes some work and you have to be able to say, “All right. I’m going to hit you with this ad and then you’re going to be on this ad and I’m going to remarket to you through various channels, maybe through Google remarketing, through social channel remarketing on Facebook.” It’s not a one and done, and you have to be very considerate and aware of those different channels and how they’re going to be moving through that.
And then we now have influencers and Spark Ads on TikTok that are able to do some quick things, so they are sometimes down further at the bottom of the funnel, and so you have to be aware that social, while generally it’s going to be on awareness top of funnel, but also mid funnel pushing them through, if you have an influencer with aggressive promotions with you or a special version that’s just for their followers. For example, I’ve got a company that we’re partnered with that’s going to be working with Mr. Beast. At this exact moment, it doesn’t get bigger than Mr. Beast on social if he’s advocating for you. There’s not a brand out here that would say, “Don’t work with Mr. Beast.” I would give Mr. Beast part of my company and a special product for his followers only. It would be dumb not to.
And so being aware of doing that and saying that there is some opportunity at the bottom of the funnel with social, but again, diversifying that, knowing that we’re a month away from a dramatic change that we weren’t expecting. And you have to be able to see that and pivot and move your money appropriately.
And even, look, we had a brand yesterday that somebody hacked into their Meta account and put them on, at least Facebook and Meta are investigating this, but they hacked into their account and put them on an invoice program, brand didn’t know. Now they’re three months late on their invoice program. Meta is like, “Hey, you didn’t pay your invoice. You’re off.” They got cold. “Done. You’re turned off.” And they were investing heavily in Meta and had moved Google budget up to that to capture more awareness than they had in ’23. Had to pivot yesterday. We’re like, “Hey, thankfully we have all these campaigns that were mid funnel on Google that we can now boost back up.” But those things happen. We are in a hacker-centric world online now that something-

Jon:
Got to use that two-factor authentication, right?

Ryan:
Yeah. And still, it’s just started so we have no idea. I’ll probably have to revisit this on this podcast in a couple of months when we find the solution like, “Okay, this can’t happen. Brands, protect yourself against this.” But at this point, we didn’t even know somebody could get into the finance section of Meta, apply for an invoice, put them on it, and then somehow that you got to pay it. We don’t know where. So just be ready to pivot quickly and have that channel diversity, ready to move money as things dictate when you start looking at the data.

Jon:
Well, Ryan, thank you for being a great co-host for a hundred episodes. I look forward to the next hundred. I was shocked after a hundred episodes, we still haven’t ran out of things to talk about, so I think we should keep going.

Ryan:
Yeah. Things keep changing. We’ll keep talking.

Jon:
All right. Well, thanks for your time today, Ryan, and congrats on a hundred and we’ll see you for 101.

Ryan:
Thank you. You as well. Thanks, Jon.

Speaker 1:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.