Funnel Reboot

We all want to know how to improve the number of conversions we get on our websites. A lot of the time, we try to do that by rearranging the layout or switch up page elements. Then we go to our dashboards, see if the number went up or down. You’ve probably spotted the flaw in this. This is circular reasoning, a change in customer behavior can’t be proven by “looking back at data, trying to decide whether or not it was some sort of change that we made” As conversion expert, Matt Gershoff puts it.  What’s the right way to do this? It’s simple, reverse the order of events and start off with your hunch about what you should change, run an experiment on your customers, proving or disproving if the thing you believe causes their behaviour actually has that effect. 

This discipline is called CRO, which stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. There’s someone who’s superbly qualified to talk about this and I’m lucky to have known her for the past few years. 

Deborah unknowingly ran her first optimization study in school at the age of 8, when she put her classmates through a science experiment where they looked at pieces of construction paper tacked on a bristol board. Little Deborah grew up to earn a master’s of science degree, specializing in eye tracking technology. Today, Deborah applies her specialized skillset to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). She founded a well known resource website where she has published hundreds of client A/B test case studies. She also has a certificate in graphic design, giving her the blend of left and right-brain thinking that’s just right for working in CRO. 

Some things to listen for:

• Marketers who run paid search & paid social will want to listen to what she has to say about mixing traffic from various channels together. 
• She explains what minimum traffic constraints we’re under for A/B tests, and why with small volumes we’re better to put 2-pages into a test where only 1 thing has changed, versus testing multiple pages or multiple variables at the same time 
• She has some tips on how we can maintain objectivity as we run our tests and as we present the results to our leadership.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Deborah’s Five Step Process:

1. Practice Know Your Audience (KYA) and research the performance of pages via site analytics and heatmaps like CrazyEgg and HotJar. 

2. Form a SMART experiment hypothesis. Here is a single-sentence version:  “Because I observed and received feedback on [what is causing users to convert at X rate], I believe that [the change to be tested]  For [targeted segment or all users] will result in [specific lift in conversion rate].”

Ensure you have sufficient traffic / time for the experiment, using one of these calculators:

• Evan’s Awesome A/B Tools
• CXL
• Shinyapps

3. Pick a Tool to run the experiment. Here are some common ones:

• Google Optimize
• VWO
• Optimizely
• Adobe Target

4. Run the experiment. Here’s a screenshot from one run using Google’s free tool 

5. Implement the winning page and monitor for expected results. 

How A/B pages are commonly named: “A” is your Control (original version) and “B’ is your Variant (includes change you’re testing). Here is a more in-depth Conversion Rate Optimization glossary

Note the different frameworks that tools use:  Frequentist vs Bayesian frameworks. Depending on the statistical framework used, the timeframe needed to give results will change.

Connect with Deborah on LinkedIn and Twitter

Deborah’s websites include GuessTheTest.com and Convert Experts

Episode Reboot

Run an A/A Test, here is Deborah’s article on why you should and what to consider.

Before 2020, most interactions between sellers and buyers were done in-person, at industry conferences. To attract and retain customers, companies held their own seminars or user group events. Of course, none of us have been driving or jetting around for the past year and a half (I’m recording in late 2021)  and as of now  here in Canada and elsewhere, we have filled the void with virtual events.

These are more than just webinars, If you have attended one, it’s likely been a paid affair, though cheaper than it’s IRL counterpart. These  virtual events enable you to interact with others, you can either take part in breakout sessions, ask speakers questions & take their polls, or sit at virtual tables to chat and network.   

So while it’s unclear whether we will keep using virtual events as much once face-to-face meetings return, there’s no denying their powerful advantages. 

I’m speaking to someone who knows more about virtual events than almost anyone. Jarrod Goldsmith has tons of experience running physical events and hosting exciting virtual events for others. He is better described as a Canadian small business community builder and is the embodiment of the small business spirit. He founded Sax Appeal (Canada’s Premier Saxophone Ensemble), Jarrod also shares his passion for entrepreneurship through the eSAX Podcast series and the Pivoted Success Podcast which he co-hosts. You can also follow Jarrod on social media; he’s easy to spot, he’ll be wearing his ever-present Fedora. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Show Flow Diagram sample:

Horizon Workrooms: Facebook’s Metaverse Starts With Virtual Reality Meetings

Event registration tools: 

• Events.com
• Eventbrite

Event recording tools for hosts:

• Loom
• Zencastr
• W. Brett Wilson

About Jarrod:

• Jarrod’s site  &  email details 
• Jarrod’s Twitter profile @eSAXnetworking and instagram profile, @esaxnetworking.
• Jarrod’s Youtube Channel
• Jarrod on Linkedin

Episode Reboot.

When attending an event, add your social links to your main profile, it gives people chances to connect with you down the road, whether or not they engage with you during the event. 

The element of marketing that occupies the largest chunk of our time and energy is the collection of software tools that we use. We usually termed it as our technology stack. Some people have seen enough things done with tech stacks, they can spot the do’s and don’ts that marketers should follow. I brought somebody on who I think is really good at this. 

Dave Hicks is a front end digital marketing strategist, photographer and designer whose tools of choice are Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.  He’s also a backend developer who knows JavaScript,  Jquery, Node.JS, Ruby and PHP. But what he’s especially good at is making sure that the tech stack a company uses conforms to the marketing objective that the strategy calls for. 

I met Dave through some of his community minded pursuits including his organization of live meet ups for social media and marketing folks in Ottawa. I also enjoy gawking at the creations he makes out of Arduinos and Raspberry Pi’s as a hobby. After doing a lot of moving around in his youth, he settled in Ottawa, where he lives and works on cool projects as a freelance marketer.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Single point of failure
• COTS vs Custom-coded software: Here’s one view and here’s another.
• Development vs Staging vs Production sites
• Corel
• K.I.S.S. Principle
• Dave’s twitter account, which has over 200K tweets
• Dave can be reached via email

Episode Reboot. You can’t automate everything.

Our guest, Morgan Friedman, loved math as a kid, so it may not surprise you to know that his life as a marketing professional centred around pay-per-click, most recently as the CEO of a few digital agencies.  

That’s interesting in its own right, but when we step back to Morgan in his 20’s, he was already doing different things than what I did at that age: 

• He Cofounded “Overheard in New York.com,”  dubbed one of the coolest blogs by Time Magazine, it still exists 17 years later, with bazillions of pageviews. 
• He published my two Amazon bestseller humour books.
• He ran an experiment to gauge human communication. He bet that good actors could convey story lines solely through body language, and he tested this by watching an entire season of the sitcom Friends without sound. 
• He obtained a bachelor’s degree from UPenn, with studies in English & History. Not just history, but Classics in particular

This last activity brings us to why he’s here today. Classical philosophy influenced Morgan heavily, and he feels that philosophy can teach us much about marketing. As someone who’s overseen a lot of client relations, he believes practicing thoughtfulness is a key ingredient to good agency-client collaboration. 

As a mini pandemic project last year, Morgan put out some posts illustrating how various philosophers would adapt their approach to Pay-per-click marketing. Of course his posts were tongue-in-cheek, but they paved the way for today’s conversation. 

Listen to why philosophically inquiring about what we know helps us frame problems. Hear him tell how communicating with empathy impacts how well others understand us. I’m sure you’ll catch these and other deep ponderings that have very practical application in our day-to-day digital marketing jobs

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Philosophers: 

• Nietzsche 
• Heraclitus
• Hegel
• Plato/Socrates
• Aristotle
• Seneca, Epictetus & the Stoics
• Popper

About Morgan:

• Morgan’s personal website , also Display Ads blog site, PPC Certification site and The Marketing Scientist site
• Morgan’s book focused on the topic of Empathy. 
• Morgan’s book “Beloved by Clients” and companion online resources.
• Morgan’s podcast, Client Horror Stories
• You can connect with Morgan on Linkedin, marketers who work on PPC can request access to his slack group, PPC Club83 

Episode Reboot

Please don’t ever utter a sentence in conversation starting with “Obviously….”