D&C Episode 54 – Listener Q&A (April 2022) – WORDPRESS

Drive and Convert (Ep. 054): Listener Q&A (Traffic Generation Post-iOS, Mobile vs. Desktop Optimization, and more)

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk field a few questions from Drive & Convert listeners, covering topics ranging from how to generate traffic in a post-iOS world to how to allocated your budget for paid acquisition.

Listen to this episode:

About This Episode:

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

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

  1. How to drive traffic in a world where privacy provisions are ever-increasing
  2. Whether you should focus your optimization on your desktop or mobile site
  3. How to reach that coveted “1,000 customers” milestone for a new brand
  4. How to allocated your paid acquisition budget across multiple channels

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, hit us up on Twitter. We’re @jonmacdonald and @ryangarrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better eCommerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
Ryan, you and I have spent the majority of our days answering questions for the eCommerce community partly because it’s our jobs, right?

Ryan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jon:
And partly because we also love what we do and we love the community. And that’s partly why we do this podcast. So, with that in mind, you had the brilliant idea of doing a Q&A episode where folks submit their questions and then we answer them live on recording. So, here we are.
Today, we’ve got 10 questions or so lined up that came from the community. We put out a Google form, ask whatever you want to ask, and we’ll answer it for you. So, we’re going to try to answer them all. But if not today, perhaps we’ll do a part two because I’m pretty sure as I’m looking at these briefly, each of these questions could be an entire episode and I’m not getting my hopes up that we’re going to do all 10 in one sitting.

Ryan:
We tend to go long winded on certain things, too. So, hopefully we [crosstalk 00:01:08] that for the few episodes.

Jon:
I was just going to say we are not the briefest. I will also say, Ryan, that I’m not sure you’ve seen any of these questions yet.

Ryan:
No. You had access to the forum, I didn’t. So, these are all going to be fresh to me.

Jon:
Awesome. And also partly because we had a scheduling snafu where I scheduled it on my calendar but not yours. So, we scrambled to get this recording going but all in good fun because I can’t wait to put you on the spot with these type of questions.

Ryan:
That’s kind of like Twitter AMA without being on Twitter.

Jon:
There we go. I love it. I guess we’ll start off. I’ll just ask you the first question. So, if you’re looking at the dock is I’m looking at these questions, Ryan. The name before them is who the question was better suited to answer. So, first one says Ryan so this is for you. The listener says, “I was researching ways to drive traffic posts iOS 14, 15 and the cookie phase out. But most of the top results are speculative pieces from last year. What are you seeing work with your clients these days?”

Ryan:
Man, this has really been a big topic. And so, I’m not surprised this came up because I addressed this probably most weeks. With the loss of cookies, really what you’re losing is attribution. And on a lot of Facebook things which has had the biggest impact in the last year, a lot of Facebook was belief anyway. I mean, Facebook was claiming a lot of credit for sales and you look at analytics and it wasn’t even close.
And so, I believe that a lot of companies are going to continue doing some of the same stuff. Even Facebook is generally speaking top of funnel. And so, it’s if you’ve reversed time 30 years where people were buying billboards and TV ads just in faith knowing they’re putting their brand out there, that’s a lot of what is happening on Facebook right now anyway. And so, I believe that Google is actually adopting some of the same strategies as Apple.
And so, a lot of people freaked out last week when that came out. It was kind of like, “Let’s kick Facebook when they’re down.” And Google wants to get rid of their biggest ad competitor. Facebook’s going to figure this out. And I heard, I was listening to another podcast about my … I think it’s called My First Million and they were doing a thing around one of my favorite episodes they do is kind of the what don’t you like about a certain business or certain business owners or the billionaires we think we don’t like?
They talked about Facebook in this scenario actually. And it was Zuckerberg is pretty ruthless and arguably one of the more ruthless CEOs in the Silicon Valley. And to grow, they can’t buy TikTok.

Jon:
Of course, the antitrust, there is no way they’re going to do anything. Yeah.

Ryan:
So, they have to figure out how to grow this engine. It’s got a phenomenal margin forum. And then they have Oculus and some other things in the metaspace. So, not betting against Facebook but they were surprised that $400 billion came off their market cap in the last month. So, from a Facebook perspective, I would say I’m not tremendously worried about it. I think they’ll figure it out.
But I also think that in the meantime, smaller brands are going to struggle a little more because they don’t necessarily have the cash to operate in faith that this is filling the top of the funnel that we can capture in other channels. And so, from a Facebook social ads perspective, we’re really looking at influencer marketing and dark posting which I think we’ve mentioned on maybe a previous couple. But if we haven’t, dark posting at a high level is you as the brand being able to link your ad manager to an influencer. When they post about you, you can then boost that post to their followers. It’s Facebook’s algorithm. You might get 5% or 10% of the followers of that influencer to see it.
And for smaller brands, it’s difficult to find quality influencers. I’ve wasted a lot of my own money thinking I found quality influencers and I didn’t.

Jon:
The best part about this show, Ryan, is all the ways you’ve lost a lot of money and we all learn from it so thank you.

Ryan:
Yeah. And actually, I’m going to be the guinea pig again in some of these programs at Logical Position. It’s like, “Yeah, I can move fast and break things if it’s my money so let’s go do it.” My partners have a lot of grace in our testing. And so, it’s starting to figure that out from a small brand perspective is who are your good influencers that you’ve seen quality from and how do you connect with them to say, “Hey, I’d like to be able to boost the posts that you’re posting about me. Still pay you the affiliate revenue but I’d like it to be in front of more people.” And there’s not many influencers that would say no to that.
Another spin on that for smaller brands is emailing your current customers and saying, “Hey, we’ve got this new program.” And we’re looking at impact and hashtag page. There are two companies that could handle this where, “Hey, if you’d like to get money from the brand to post about us, join one of these programs. And every time you post about it, we can actually boost that post and just see what the uptake is.”
Some followers of you or some customers of you might just want to do it because they like your company which should be great. Trying to cultivate those microinfluencers because you as a brand may not even know that you already have large influencers using your products. I have a massive company but even I haven’t gone through my email database to say, “Hey, is Ashton Kutcher in my email database? Does he want to post about me?” I don’t know.
But I think one of the biggest impacts is going to be outside of Facebook. And this is where I think a lot of brands are going to struggle in the iOS 15 update, email loss a lot of their tracking on Apple devices. And so, that hugely profitable channel you have as a brand now doesn’t have that attribution available to say, “Hey, email went out. I clicked on an Apple device and they went and purchased.” You’re still going to get the revenue, you just won’t have the exact same, “Hey, Klaviyo sent this email. They clicked it. They bought it.” And that’s probably going to go away on Apple as well.
And so, that whole argument I have around use Google Bing to acquire new customers and to build lifetime value through loyalty and email, that future profit isn’t going to be as obviously attributed to that channel. You’ll have to make some inferences like sent the email on Monday at 10:00 a.m., saw the traffic spike and the conversion spike. We can generally attribute that over. So we’ve, in the name of privacy, taken some steps back in what we can attribute revenue to and so we have to do things just do we know are working and historically have done well within that space.

Jon:
It’s an interesting cycle in marketing where started out not knowing where your money was being effective, right? What’s the quote? Wanamaker I think is his name, right?

Ryan:
50% of your money.

Jon:
Yup. “I don’t know where 50% of my marketing money is working for me.” But I think we’re going to come back to that, right? It’s just going to be, “Hey, are my revenues, is my company performance up in the right? Then, okay, I’m going to keep doing some of these things.” But you’re not going to be able to move as quickly and know as quickly which is interesting.

Ryan:
Yeah. And I think it’s going to be and I predicted this I think last year where it’s going to be a scenario of the rich get richer in online marketing, unfortunately. They get bigger brands with a lot of first-party data already in their systems are going to have some massive advantages over small companies that don’t have that much first-party data. And they are also probably going to be able to have more money as a larger brand to operate in faith knowing, “Hey, I can’t see the data but I know what’s working,” or, “I’ve seen it in the past and I have no reason to believe that that is going to not work anymore.”
Whereas smaller brands that are much more targeted generally on specific metrics are going to be pulling money back out of the market and it’s going to stunt their growth. And it’s going to be really difficult to launch an online brand in the next few years. I mean, it’s like, “Go now and go fast because if you’re not big in a year, it’s going to be difficult to get big.”

Jon:
Yeah. I can definitely understand that. It’s going to be an interesting next 18 months or so in digital marketing. We’ll see what happens.

Ryan:
For sure. I mean, it’s fun but it’s also a little scary. But hey, the change keeps me in a job. If it was easy, I wouldn’t be needed.

Jon:
There you go. All right, well, should we go to the next question?

Ryan:
Yeah. It looks like it’s you. So, Jon, obviously, we’re in a multi-device environment. And this question is about, “How do you balance the efforts between desktop and mobile optimization? Should we be focusing on one device type at a time and creating customer tests for that platform or working primarily on desktop and hoping that most of the impact trickles down to mobile users?” Some dangerous statements in there.

Jon:
Yeah. Well, look, I think that this is a question I get all the time so I’m glad somebody asked it. The first thing I’d say is where is the majority of your revenue coming from? Okay. So, you just mentioned a lot about first-party data. So, onsite optimization is all dealing with first-party data. So, thinking about that, where do you have the most data? And if you’re looking to impact revenue then where is the most revenue coming from so that you have the largest data pool to work with?
A lot of folks are misconstrued because when they start optimizing for eCommerce, they immediately go to mobile because they say that’s for the vast majority of their traffic is. Well, true, because you’re advertising on these social platforms that people are accessing on their phones. So then they click through and ends up there. But if you look at the vast majority of your conversions, for most products, not all, but for most parties, that still happens on desktop and thus the revenue is higher.
And the higher your AOV, the more likely it is that people are buying from desktop because they’re going to do more research. They want to compare. They want to make sure, “Hey, I’m spending $1000 bucks on this product. I better make sure it’s what I want.” How many people do you know are ordering a brand new MacBook tuned to their liking off their phone? Very few. I just did this this morning for a new employee. And I tried to get it off my phone. I really want to make sure I get the best setup for this person. And I’d better go to my desktop and do that.
And so, it’s something where if I’m spending a couple grand, yeah, I’m going to do it on my desktop so I can be sure I’m doing what I want. We’re just not 100% there yet. Now, maybe that’s a generational thing and I’m just freaking old at this point. And that might be the case where I didn’t grow up with a phone in my hand. Close to it but I didn’t fully grow up that way. So, I’m still more comfortable buying stuff on a desktop. Okay. My parents, my dad, I guarantee you my dad is not buying anything on his phone at all. He’s going straight to his computer.

Ryan:
He’s probably pinging, too.

Jon:
Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, he’s in that demographic for sure. But I have a five-year-old, I bet that he … He knows how to use the iPad perfectly. And I bet by the point that he’s buying things, he’s a teenager and he’s buying things, he’s going to 100% be comfortable doing that on a tablet and mobile. But I think for today, I digress. For today, you really need to focus on desktop most likely if that’s where the majority of your conversions are happening. Because if you do that, then you can trickle that down as the question as to mobile.
And most sites these days should be responsive or are responsive. If you’re on a Shopify especially, almost every theme is responsive. So, that means if you make a copy change, it will be applicable to both desktop and mobile. So, my point of view on this, go to where the conversions are and optimize there. And then trickle it down to the other platforms that you’re on.

Ryan:
But that probably goes against what a lot of business owners looking at their analytics are going to default to. If I look at my analytics, I’ve got, I’m making numbers up, 50,000 visitors on desktop, 200,000 on mobile. And the conversion rate is 0.3 on mobile. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, if I get that mobile up to even just half a percent conversion rate, the amount of money I’ll be printing will be astronomical.” But that’s probably not the best step. You’re pending a lot of the subpoints you left up there.

Jon:
The question is, are those folks doing more research on their phones? Probably not. They’re doing awareness, right? They’re doing top of funnel activities that are like, “Hey, I’m looking at fertilizers. Oh, this is a good brand, I should look at this.” And then what they do is they then send it to themselves, flag it, bookmark it, whatever, to go and open up the six tabs next to each other in a browser. And if we do user testing on a most shopping journeys, that’s what we see.
So, yes, I think it’s counterintuitive. Most brands that come to us say, “Hey, we want to optimize mobile, that’s where all our traffic is.” Well, yeah but I don’t know. It’s just not something that I think is going to be really productive.

Ryan:
And they might be better off optimizing their traffic driving on mobile and where they’re spending money. Come talk to me and let’s fix that market. That would improve your conversion rate if you just stop setting crappy traffic.

Jon:
All right, Ryan, next question unless you have anything else you wanted me to add about that one?

Ryan:
No, I think people have to use a logic test a lot more. And most of them look for easy buttons. And I think look then they start talking to us like, “Oh, that actually is logical, I should have thought of that.” And I’m like, “You should have,” but I’ll be your easy button.

Jon:
Hey, that’s what we’re here for.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on eCommerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with eCommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the 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.

Jon:
All right, Ryan, what advice do you have for early stage brands that are trying to attract their first 1,000 customers to reach critical mass? Back in the day, you could just throw money at Facebook ads until you found a profitable angle and then open the floodgates. That’s obviously not the case anymore. Yeah. I mean, we just talked about this a little bit. But how do you think brands should focus on getting that first 1,000 customers? What’s your strategy now since you can’t … They’re right, you can’t just go to Facebook and throw a few grand at it and validate.

Ryan:
Yeah, I think we as an online society have evolved very quickly. And that trying a business on dropshipping to become a viable business is not probably going to happen or it’s going to be very difficult. That dream that probably worked 10 years ago, not that likely. Being a pure play online retailer as a startup right now, it’s not likely there’s. There’s too much ahead of you unless you can find a very specific niche that you are an expert that you know how to merchandise very specifically to take on large existing online merchants in the space. I just don’t think there’s a need for it right now. It’s too easy to find a product already and compare pricing on Amazon or Google.
And so, I think people have to be thinking more about their brand before they even go to market. Think about, “Okay, who am I going to be marketing against? What’s my goal in the business?” If your goal is to create a business and sell it, your strategy may be a lot different than it would be if your goal is just to build something up that your kids can take over and wants to be a cash cow for a family. And your marketing goals will be different. Customer acquisition will be different.
Right now, you can go to Amazon. And if you have access to products at a price point everybody else does and you’re willing to give up all your margin in the name of growth on Amazon, you can build up an Amazon business pretty quick and there’s a bunch of companies out there looking to gobble up Amazon businesses thinking that that’s going to be the next greatest thing is like the savings you get from having one single marketing team that handles all these brands and potentially opportunities to cross-pollinate. I don’t really believe in that model long term. I think they’re riddled with debt.
And yeah, I think there’s one that has a $10 billion valuation right now that I did it like three or four years. And there’s so many … I mean, I get emails every day about some company that wants to buy my Amazon brands. It would be easy to sell right now but I just don’t think it’d be worth it yet. So, back to that, I think it’s really being thoughtful about your brand, what products you have. I wouldn’t be very excited about creating a brand online around somebody else’s products that anybody else can sell.
I would want an exclusive distributor relationship in the country like the United States where I am the brand and I’m responsible for it. Or creating my own brand where I’m creating the product that can’t be easily duplicated on Amazon, like if you’re going to sell T-shirts, Amazon’s going to beat you at the end of the day. There’s so much risk there that if they create it and it’s their marketplace, you’re an algorithm jump away or an Amazon basics product away from losing a dramatic amount of money.
And so, it means that company or the company I heard of like a lot of people talking about how it’d be better to buy the Shopify brands because they’re direct consumer and they’re working better there, there’s some more value there.

Jon:
That’s interesting. This is something where I look at this and I keep thinking that the riches are in the niches.

Ryan:
That’s a great saying.

Jon:
And if you think about it, as an early stage brand, you’re not going to compete with a global entity as you said or somebody who has a ton of first-party data because you’re going to start being screwed over pretty quickly because you just can’t get the same return on ad spend, they can. But you could go really, really deep in a niche and own that niche from a brand perspective and people who are looking to solve that problem, you own.
So, I have a feeling what we’re going to see is a whole bunch. And we’re starting to see this with DTC brands, a whole bunch of DTC brands that are going really, really, really focused on one specific pain point. And they only have a couple of products, right? They have a main product. And then they have some maybe accessory products around it, stuff like that. And they’re owning that market before they expand anything else.
I mean, that really started back in the day with that’s how … What’s that razor company that Unilever ended up buying? Dollar Shave Club.

Ryan:
Oh, yeah.

Jon:
That’s what they did. They went really, really deep and just said, “We’re going to have a razor and it’s going to be super cheap but good. And we’re going to go direct to consumer and we’ll just deliver it to your door.” And at the time, that was a pretty novel thing but you’d be shocked how many brands still aren’t doing that. Today, they try to compete with big corporations.
And their whole point was, “Yeah, we’re not going to compete against Beck, etcetera.” But you have to go to a store to get that. They’re not really selling direct to consumer in the same manner. You have to go to Target or whatever to get it. But they did a really great job of just owning that direct channel. And then, they were able to cash out for quite a large sum of money.

Ryan:
Oh, yeah. I think they had a B in it.

Jon:
Yeah, I think I was just going to say that, too. I didn’t want to misspeak but yeah …

Ryan:
I might be wrong but I think it did. But there was a lot of thought that went into that brand. It wasn’t just … I mean, we look at and be like, “Oh my gosh, they went viral.” And it was such an overnight sensation. I’ve read the story. And they were all comedians that got together to create this thing that could go viral because if it’s not funny, the chances of it going viral are almost zero. And they had months of creating a script before they went and shot in one day and made it to look like it was very like, “Oh, yeah, we kind of did this on the back of a napkin and haha we’re kind of cool in breaking this corporate thing.” But they were intentional.
And that’s where I think … Man, so many brands I don’t think have thought through why am I doing what I’m doing? And who is going to be going to … Who’s going to buy from me? And what’s the next step in the evolution? There’s a lot of planning that goes into that. I don’t know if the first 1,000 customers is critical mass. In some industries, that might be. If you’re selling $15 product like I am $1,000 bucks like, “Great, you’ve made $5,000 in profit.” That doesn’t feel like critical mass to me.
And then, what’s the lifetime value? If you’re selling one thing one time, if you’re selling somebody a winter coat, that’s not something people buy that often probably. And so, if you sell them one coat this year, you might not have another buy for another two years, three years if they like it and if you’re a business at that point. And I think in that process, if you’re going to be a brand, do not forget about brick and mortar. I think so often, eCommerce companies think I’m just going to sell online direct to consumer, it’s going to be great. I think that’s dumb.
If you are the brand and you’ve got a product, retailers are phenomenal marketing channels. You get paid as the brand to have people putting your product in other people’s hands. I take less margin but that store in Georgia is they’re selling plants and they’re selling Joyful Dirt alongside that. There are new customers getting my brand that probably wouldn’t have gotten it.

Jon:
Yeah, that’s the awareness.

Ryan:
Yeah. I think that is the best marketing a brand can have I think is being able to go to brick and mortar stores.

Jon:
I mean, I even … Didn’t I text you? Well, it was a couple months ago now but I think I texted you a photo of your product. I was at a plant store and they had it laid out. And I was like, “I know this guy.” And she started laughing. She’s like, “People love the product.” I was like, “Awesome. Good for Ryan for being in retail.” And it was a fun experience to run into it in a retail location.

Ryan:
Yeah. So, it’s a very roundabout way to answer this directly of how to get to critical mass, but I think it’s not a simple answer. And it may have been more simple 10 years ago where we could put that out there. And I’ve talked to some brands that did phenomenal growth on Facebook because they had a very visual solution they were presenting on Facebook. And that was key I think to Facebook blasting ads like they were a dog shampoo and cream that fix specific skin issues on dogs.
And that’s a very visual thing. You see a dog and you’re like, “Oh, my dog got that.” As a pet parent, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t want my dog to be itching or scraping and having these skin issues. I’m going to try that.” And it was like a $15 shampoo. Easy-to-purchase impulse.

Jon:
But that’s also a niche.

Ryan:
It is. It’s very specific.

Jon:
That’s a very specific …

Ryan:
You solved a cool problem that nobody else was out there solving. And so, stop trying to dropship to build a business around. Don’t duplicate what DICK’S Sporting Goods is doing on their side. They are going to be … Generally speaking, unless you figure out, “Hey, I’m going to be the merchant for the cross-people that love wearing purple and live in this area.” Great. Okay. Maybe that’s not being served well by DICK’S. And you can build that very specific niche around those people.
And expand from there because you’ve duplicated. You see the model, “Hey, I was really successful here, what else could I do using that success and intelligence I’ve built up because of that success in the niche that I can go do this, this and this in another city or a different vertical or industry?” Challenging, for sure.

Jon:
Yeah. Okay. Cool. Well, I think we have time for maybe one more.

Ryan:
All right. And it looks like you’re up. So Jon, does it ever make sense to condense content into accordions or similar interactive containers? Okay. I don’t even know what that is because I don’t play the accordion. But why don’t you explain what accordion should be to somebody that’s looking at a website?

Jon:
I love this. Okay. Very tactical question. Somebody obviously has a specific need here. Or they’ve heard me on my soapbox about this before because … Okay, let’s talk about what an accordion is for people who don’t understand like yourself. Okay. So, first of all, accordion is when you have in-page navigation where you have a whole bunch of content.
And then, what you want to do is have the headline and you click on the headline and it expands out and there’s a whole bunch of text that shows. So, it might be a list of headlines and then you click on one and it expands out. And then the other headlines around it, you click on another one and then that content expands out and all the others shrink down to just the headline.

Ryan:
There’s Google index in all of the content on that page even though it’s not visible to the eyeball?

Jon:
Bingo, you hit on my number one point here which is people always think I need to put all this content on my page. And I don’t want it to be overwhelming. So, I put it into an accordion. Well, it creates two problems. The number one problem, you just said. Because it’s not visible on page load, Google does not index it. Or if it does recognize the text is there, it gives it a much lower weight towards the index meaning it doesn’t trust that content as much.
This is because back in a day for SEO purposes, people used to hide content on the page. They used to just stuff keywords into a page and hide it behind their [crosstalk 00:25:34].

Ryan:
Background folder and like Britney Spears, boobs or whatever.

Jon:
Yeah, we’d like to get match the background color, right? This is to try to get people there. And so, it was a huge issue. So, Google obviously said, “Hey, we’re not going to index content that’s not showing when you first click on it.” And that is what it is. But the second thing is that people don’t click on it either, right? So, we do eye tracking and mouse click tracking and all that kind of stuff. People ignore these and the content doesn’t get seen by anyone then. It’s not going to get picked up in a search engine.
Now, even if it does, how frustrating is that to a consumer who searches for a term? It lands on your page and they don’t see that term anywhere. Now all of a sudden, they’re like, “Why am I here?” And that’s the number one reason as well why Google discredits that content because they don’t want people bouncing right back to Google. They want people to find the right result in their first click on Google and trust Google so that they continue to go back to Google.
And if Google serves up content that people don’t think is aligned with the results, then they start to say, “Google’s not doing as good of a job at searching. So, I’m going to go someplace else.” Google loses that ad revenue. So, this all comes back to, “No, it doesn’t make sense to condense content in accordion or similar interactive containers.”
Has there ever been a use case where it has made sense? The vast majority of the time, I see this make sense is when you have a highly technical product that you’re showing the product with like callouts over that product. And maybe it has a little plus with like a circle with a plus or something. You can click on that and get information on that specific feature or specific button if you’re diagramming something like a product and you want to show people the interface on it or all the different functionality or something of that sort.
Then I think it can be helpful but you have to understand that that content needs to be in two places on that page, not just within that diagram. But if you’re just trying to stuff a bunch of content on to a product detail page and put it all within an accordion nav, at that point, you’ve just lost consumers. Don’t worry about scrolling. People will scroll. So, you don’t have to worry about it. Yeah, you don’t have to worry about having too much content on a page. Now, is that possible? Yes. But at the same time, I would go for more content than less.

Ryan:
And I would argue that all that content on a product page is not going to be even valuable for an SEO perspective anyway. Google doesn’t genuinely rank product pages very high for high-volume terms. That’s all going to be category pages. And so, maybe that’s stuff bunch of content there. Maybe you need a few pages because it’s probably better to be more targeted on that page and rank for multiple terms by spreading that content out and just doing SEO for those specific pages for specific searches.

Jon:
Yeah. I think again going back to the fact that we could do a whole episode on all of these, I mean we could do a whole episode on what type of user interactions make sense and don’t make sense on a page. And this is definitely one of them where it just doesn’t make sense in my point of view. So, whoever asked this question has to go back and look … They obviously have heard me before. And usually when I’m doing teardowns, live teardowns, etcetera, I make this point. And I think most people don’t understand why. So, here we are.

Ryan:
Yeah. So, I would say almost if you’re tempted to use an accordion, you probably aren’t explaining it very well or simplify it or it’s not simple enough for the consumer if you even need that.

Jon:
Yeah, that’s a great point. And if it’s content that you really need on a page, why do you want to hide it? Don’t hide it if it’s necessary for people to make a decision. Just have it on the page.

Ryan:
Yeah, if you’re doing really complex machine purchases that have all of these data points is I’m trying to compare like does this fit this and this fit here? Like, “Okay, yeah, put it on there.”

Jon:
Well, Ryan, I think we got through four questions today, two for each of us. I predicted we wouldn’t get through 10 but I thought we might do more than four. And here we are over 30 minutes and we’re four in. So, you called it. We talk a lot and that’s why podcast is great for us. But I think for not seeing the questions before, you did a wonderful job.

Ryan:
Yeah. Now, I have them so we’re going to be really prepared next time.

Jon:
Okay. Next time, it won’t be as impromptu for you. I didn’t have time to take any notes on these either. But yeah, hopefully, folks find this helpful. We can do a part two next time and get that episode out and try to get through six of these, the remaining six questions that we have here so that, I want this to be a little more speedy next time. And hopefully next time, I’ll actually invite you on the calendar invites so it’s not a surprise.

Ryan:
Yeah. I mean, thankfully I was able to lose the thing so we’re good.

Jon:
Yeah. All right. Well, thank you. This is fun.

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James Sowers

About the Author

James Sowers

James Sowers is the former Director of The Good Ventures. He has more than a decade of experience helping software and ecommerce companies accelerate their growth and improve their customer experience.