Michelle Bourke – Foresight Digital – Smashing your eCommerse ROI right now

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the #CriticalFewActions™ to improve your business podcast. I’m John Downes and I’m here to help you cut through the overwhelm and prioritize what matters most to improve your business. Let’s get started and discover the #CriticalFewActions™ that have the biggest impact. I’d like to introduce you to Michelle Bourke of Foresight Digital and what we’re going to do today is talk about smashing your Ecommerce return on investment.

I met Michelle through our 2021 CEO Masterclass, and I was really impressed by the depth of understanding and analysis behind, the numbers of SEO, around marketing performance and a focus on online marketing and spend ROI. We’ve had many nerdy conversations about web marketing, and I’m delighted to share some of the brilliance today focused on

retail e commerce, performance. So if you’ve got a web store, particularly a consumer focused web store, this interview is for you, Michelle, welcome.

Thank you. Excited to be here. Appreciate the time.

So Michelle, tell me a bit about your journey.

I started in a client side marketing. So I started at big, bad old Telstra. and then. I really came to the conclusion that a lot of the agencies that we were working with didn’t deeply understand our customer. Now being on the agency side, I understand why that happened that, you know, often client side, that’s all that we think about.

all day, whereas for an agency, they’re working with many clients, but I felt that there was a missing piece there in terms of a deeper understanding of the customer and those really core kind of marketing and psychological understandings that underpin the four P’s of marketing, which is fair because a lot of agencies very much specialize in kind of technical areas and so they’re not always thinking about that bigger picture.

So, so that was really where the concept behind, what ended up becoming Foresight. that’s where it started, in 2017, we won the Telstra New Business, award for Victoria. and we specialized across that sort of, you know, 5 to 6 year period, 7 year period on large and small businesses and really across a range of even through to B2B tech companies.

And then in the last 3 years, we’ve really honed our focus into e commerce, retail e commerce, as well as direct to consumer DTC e commerce, in particular, with a lot of experience around Shopify as well. So. I guess that’s been the journey to date and I think retail and e commerce is a really interesting one right now because, you know, it was easy to win in this space before COVID.

And in fact, especially during COVID, if you had the right system set up, and I think a lot of, brands, including platform brands behind, e commerce like Shopify thought this was going to go on forever, they thought. that there was going to be this continued, increase that they saw in COVID.

And of course, e commerce absolutely is still continuing, you know, I mean, we’re talking trillions, by 2026, but it’s not at the rate that they expected. It went back to the same growth levels as pre COVID. And so I think that struck people, in a difficult position, especially brands who, had sort of been looking year on year and going, oh, great.

Well, this is what I was doing, you know, for those two years. Hang on. Why have things changed? And I think we’re starting to get out of that now. You know what I mean? We’re two years leased out of COVID. But nevertheless, given the cost of living crisis that we now have here in Australia, that brings a whole added pressure, especially to the mid market and the smaller e commerce brands, you know?

So I think it puts. all e commerce brands in a really interesting position whereby, you know, they don’t have some of the tools that they used to have three, four years ago. privacy, updates in terms of Apple’s browsing privacy updates, all of these have actually impacted tracking. And if you think about it, it’s not just tracking that’s been impacted.

It’s the ability for the algorithms themselves. If you’re doing paid advertising, the algorithms themselves to be able to know who to target as your customers, because you know, that was a big part of what often allowed. Meta or other platforms Facebook at the time, To showcase their value and then for people to go and reinvest, but it wasn’t just about them showcasing that value.

It was also about their algorithms actually knowing and being able to go after more of that type of consumer. So we see less of that now and it is harder and so I think in this environment, this is really the time that an e commerce brand needs to understand the nuances, because it is not as easy to get the kind of results that they were getting COVID and pre COVID in this current environment.

And so, just to give that some context. So this, what it sounds like is we’ve actually had a blip. So pre COVID was going on in a predictable sort of trajectory. COVID, because of all of the constraints changes in, Working from home behaviors and so on has caused a revenue blip and everybody assumed that it was just going to continue on at the next level.

But actually, it’s dropped back. How much did it sort of bump up and bump down

Significant. I mean, for a smaller brand, you’d be looking at 3x what they might be doing.

times? Wow.

Yep. and for large brands, larger brands, it might be in the order of 25 percent more.

Yeah, which

So if there are 10 million, 30 million, 300 million brand, that’s the kind of lift that they would have seen,dropped back by how much, roughly?

back to where they were pre COVID basically.

Yeah, which, which, you know, obviously is a bit disappointing if you think that, you know, that Nirvana was going to continue, but, even more disappointing if you scaled up your infrastructure, your capacity, your buying purchases, possibly even 12 months in advance from wherever, all of a sudden that becomes a major crisis.

Yeah. And look, I think most e commerce brands will have like more of a 90 day turnaround. I guess it depends, you know, if you’re talking about furniture versus clothing, like, obviously they have different turnarounds, but I think, Nevertheless, there’s the expectation and that’s really, it’s a really hard thing to realign on, because then you don’t know what your new baseline is, especially for companies where the majority of their growth started with COVID.

So maybe. Maybe, for instance, they set up shop in 2019 or in 2018. And so COVID, they were still very much a young business. They might have been able to scale to a few million. And then at that point, they’re coming back down. And they just, they don’t actually know what their point of normal is. And this leads them to Feeling like the grass must be greener somewhere else, you know, Oh, maybe this person can help me.

Maybe this expert can solve all of my problems. But sometimes it really does come back down to the fact that, and of course, if they don’t have that historical data, they have no, they don’t have that extra context, you know, a large brand can kind of look back and go, Oh, well, I can see that blip. It’s quite clear, you know, but not all brands have that luxury if they are newer.

Yeah. So that does lead them to needing to kind of create this new baseline, but not necessarily knowing that’s what they need.

Yeah, and so we met, during 2021 CEO Masterclass, and at that stage, you’d already moved into the intense analysis, of the, Retail E Comp. so it’s been a particularly interesting journey, I’m sure, to sort of actually go through and experience with your clients. And try to actually demystify how that blips occurred and also how to respond to it.

Yeah, it’s, interesting is a lovely way of putting it. Sean, yeah, that’s very polite of you.

So, so on that basis then, so what would you see now as being the three high impact strategies to help maximise digital ROI,

The way that I like to break it down for people is to understand, first of all, Where the core of your traffic is actually coming from to your site. Now, I think e commerce founders in particular tend to be a visual bunch. So they tend to gravitate toward spending a lot of time on social media. And I’m certainly not saying that is, that organic social is not a critical for brand growth.

But I think when it comes to sales, they tend to underestimate channels like organic search, mainly because it’s not visual. It’s slower and it’s more boring, but it really does contain some of the biggest opportunities for growth. And I hear a lot of people saying to me now, like, Oh, but what about AI?

And you know, what about marketplaces? Of course, marketplaces, right? Where it’s the right fit for a brand, certainly marketplaces and syndicating those marketplaces. So let’s say, you know, there’s stuff that we can get straight on to target in the U.

S. as an example, or onto eBay or onto Etsy, any of those marketplaces are useful. That’s a whole other sort of channel that we’re talking about there, where people are actually buying on those third party sites. And that’s the first place that they look. But otherwise, we still have. You know, 70 percent of consumers when they first search for something, when they want to buy something, one of the first places they look is organic search.

So when it then comes to where the ideal mix and where the general mix that we see the best performing e commerce brands sitting at, they’re usually at 50 percent or above organic search. of their traffic is actually coming from organic search. So, so it is by far the largest source of traffic and therefore for the vast majority of very successful e commerce brands, it is the largest source of income.

Right.

So if that’s, if you’re sort of looking at your own traffic as an e com brand and you’re kind of going, gee, wow, like or I’m super reliant on paid advertising at the moment. 50 percent of my income does not come from organic search, that tells you right away that there’s an opportunity there.

So they really should be expecting 50 percent to be

that’s the, yeah, that’s the benchmark that we like to set for people, and for them to set for themselves, yes.

Well, in that case, we better, better talk about SEO because it’s absolutely crucial.

So, yeah, so I guess that’s one and then the other really again comes down to where these other channels, channel mixes are coming from. So paid search and social ads, I would say are the next most, especially because one, they’re fast and easy. They’re definitely more expensive and they’re harder to make work in a profitable way, but they are usually the quickest fix if there’s a problem.

But they’re the dopamine.

That’s right. A little dopamine hit. That’s exactly right. and then last of all is, I think, it’s not a channel, but it is ACT and ROI. focus that I think can impact any incoming source of traffic and that is your conversion rate optimization. I mean, this is a very simplistic way of looking at it, but there are two ways if you’re already doing paid advertising, let’s say you’re spending 20, 000 a month.

There’s two ways that you could, in theory, double your revenue. One could be that you could double that ad spend. And hope that it drives double the traffic and that traffic converts at the same rate. That it did when you were spending 20, 000 as to when you were spending 40, 000, or you can take that 1 percent conversion rate that has been the average on your site.

And you can improve it to 2%, which then means that you’re not just getting the extra conversions from paid digital, but it’s impacting every single source of traffic that’s coming to your site.

And so instead of, you know, Making whatever return you may just off pay digital, you get the added return across all of those channels.

Now, the reality is. One, it’s not that simple to just go and double your conversion rate. Otherwise, everyone would be doing it. And number two, it’s not that simple to just go and double your spend, on Facebook or on Google ads and expect that you’re going to get the same conversion rate. Usually what happens is you double your spend and then your conversion rate halves, which means.

You basically might as well have just kept spending what you were and getting the same amount of money. So, so, so these are things, these are reasons why, like, of course, you know, business owner would normally go, all right, well, I’m happy to do either of those two things, whichever one’s going to get me the better return.

and the reality is that it’s a combination. it’s not going to be a quick fix and it’s not going to be, something you can’t just scale your ad spend overnight unless you’re talking about,time of the year, like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, where everyone is primed to buy. Otherwise, it tends to be a far more steady increase process.

And then similarly for conversion, you’re not going to double that overnight. That might be a six to 12 month process as well. these are the three key areas that you can just you can go and start working on tomorrow and start seeing impacts within, you know, I’m going to say one to four weeks.

And so those I think are the three key areas or organic search, paid search and social and conversion rate optimization that I think are the key areas. Now you might wonder why I’m not saying email because there are absolutely some sites where. They’re making like 30%, 40 percent of their revenue off of email.

So you might ask me, well, then Michelle, why would we not be talking about email? and the answer is, where does email come from? Does email just come from like someone who randomly wakes up in the morning and happens to know that your site exists and go to it? Or does an email come from one of these other sources of traffic?

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Yeah. That’s how you build your list.

That’s right. So what we tend to find is when people start focusing on email and stop focusing on their top of funnel, which is what got them the emails in the first place, they don’t see a drop straight away. They won’t see it, they might not see it in a month, they might not even see it in two months.

The problem is by the time they get to the third month, it’s too late, and they’re now 90 days behind where they should have been had they kept, these other channels going. And this is a really hard thing to see this idea of this funnel that comes into your business. I remember actually listening to a podcast about someone who was like a very well known skincare brand.

And she’d say, Oh, we’ve turned off all of our ads and like, we’re just like, we’re just doing email now. And I’m thinking, good luck. Okay. To be fair, a skincare brand is going to take longer than any other kind of brand, or most other types of retail brands to actually feel the effect of that because skincare is that repurchase.

And if you’ve got the loyalty from those customers, you can see up to a 70 percent repurchase rate. for someone in skincare, you know, cause you got a refill, right?

Yeah. yeah. Yeah.

of stuff. You’ve got your products that you like using. You want to go back and repurchase. So they will feel the effects over a longer period of time, but they will feel the effects no matter what every type of brand will feel the effect.

So EDM email is really harvesting a lot of the value that take and the trust and the awareness that social, SEO. paid ads are sowing as a crop.

That’s a beautiful analogy, John.

Okay. and, you know, massive generalizations, but if we were looking at, social, web SEO, EDM, As the core of, our, the origins of our revenue, what should we be thinking about as sort of rough percentages?

organic search should still be making up a significant portion. I would say that like email will tend to make up, if you’re doing it well, will tend to make up 20%. I think that the brands where email is making up like 30 or 40 percent from my perspective, that’s because that brand is not doing what they should be.

on these other channels. Do you know what I mean? Like,

money on the table.

yeah, if email has taken over so much of your revenue, you are not spending enough time on organic search andpaid search and social. that’s my perspective.

Okay, cool. All right. So how do we drive SEO?

And what does that really mean?

search engine optimization is really about helping consumers find your content, and making sure that you are referring to your content. in the way that consumers are searching for it. Now, this is a particular problem for e commerce brands where they’ve maybe come up with some sort of innovation and they feel like they want to call their product something else.

there was this brand that I came across the other day who does like fridge bags. and branded name for it. And. that branded name is simply not how people search for fridge bags or reusable produce bags.

Yeah.

And so

the reality

reality is, even though Google can get the gist of what your site is talking about with all of the other words that you use, if you’re not actually referring to how consumers refer to your product, you have a problem.

hmm, And so that’s the first place to start is to actually understand how consumers are trying to find your product. And if you are in the position where you think that you have a new product to market, it can’t possibly be so new that A consumer wouldn’t have an alternative thing that they’re doing right now, an alternative, you know, so let’s say that your bag is made out of this particular sort of microfabric, whatever.

Okay, but surely right now they’re just using mesh bags or they’re using like some other kind of normal fridge bag, like.example, yeah, or Tupperware. Exactly. So it’s about understanding what the consumer is actually using at the moment as an alternative to your brand, even if they don’t understand what your brand is.

Cause that is a very hard position to be in. And I don’t really want to spend that much time talking about that because it is, it’s unique, you know, generally speaking, e commerce brands are doing things that consumers already have demand for and it’s just about understanding how those consumers search.

The first thing that we do when we want to understand that is, we use third party tools, tools like, Ahrefs, that’s spelled A H R E F S dot com. And we use those tools to really type in examples of what we think consumers, we start with what we think. And then usually these tools will also give us back other ideas based on synonyms, and other keywords that competitor landing pages might be, ranking for.

You can also take the URL of a competitor page, You can pop that in and then see what that page is ranking for. See what keywords it is ranking for. So these kinds of things start to give us an idea of the type of keywords that we care most about. And then it comes down to things like. Okay, well, how competitive is this keyword?

Like, how hard is it going to be for me to rank in the top 10 in the top 10 search results? Now, why do we care about that? We care about that because, you know, 80 to 90 percent of consumers will not go past the first 10 results. Basically, and in fact, it’s kind of like a straight line down to the bottom, you know, that and of course this is different for every single search.

it’s slightly different, but you know, just as a general rule that the first result, the first organic result will get like a 33 percent of the traffic volume for that keyword. And then as you go down, it’ll be like 14%, 7%. 5%, 2 percent and so on. So I think by the end of page one, you’re probably sitting at about 2 percent

Yeah. I was smiling because, You know, I had an interview with Sue Elson just, just a couple of weeks ago one of famous, quotes or re quotes was, where do you hide a dead body, on

on the second page of

because no one will ever see it.

Yeah, I mean, you know, like, obviously the exceptions to that are, of course, very high volume keywords, you know, so where there’s very high volume, of course, that there’s that trickle down effect. So yes, you might only have 0. 5 percent on the next page, but if it’s 0. 5 percent of a keyword that people are searching, you know, 100, 000 searches.

For that keyword each month. Well, clearly the second page is still going to get some love in terms of actual numbers, you know, but yeah,

target is to be on, in the top 10,

that is correct you can be on page one.

And, and so when we talk about competition, what we’re, what we are actually talking about there is how hard it is. And these third party tools usually give us an indication of that.

And part of that indication is how many backlinks, how many links from other sites to our site.this keyword would need in order for you to be ranked in that top 10 position. Right

The backlinks are that important.

they are, they still are absolutely. And in fact, when we talk about sort of two key things that impact rankings, especially on the first page or the first 10 results, because obviously pages don’t exist now, you don’t have to paginate through, just keep scrolling.

one is keyword relevance. And that’s about how relevant the content that you write is to the intent behind the person who’s searching for the keyword that you want to rank for. And then the second thing is I actually create this overarching term called credibility. to me, credibility consists of a few things for, our friends in e commerce.

one is a concept called domain authority. And domain authority is basically wrapped up in this whole number and value of links from other sites to us. It’s saying, you know, likeif someone suggested some random new album to you, and let’s say you were a big fan of Coldplay, right? And. Someone on the street said, oh, hey, I’ve got this new band that I’d love you to listen to. here you go, check it out. You don’t know this person. They don’t know your music style. Like, are you going to? Probably not. There’s not a very crediblereferral, I should say, or reference. Whereas let’s say that you met Chris Martin and Chris Martin says, Hey, you’re a Coldplay fan. Love that. So am I.what about these guys? They’re actually quite similar to us. And I think you might love their music. This is the difference between a high value or high authority domain linking to you versus a low authority domain linking to you.

You’re going this site. Let’s say that you get a backlink from Apple. It’s very rare that would happen. Apple has a domain authority of something like 98 out of 100.

Right.

Okay, so the domain authority score goes between 0 and 100. These third parties determine the score and so it is a little different to each other.

So if you go into one it’ll look a little different to the other but effectively they’re relative and the higher the score the harder it is to move between numbers. So it’s logarithmic. So you know, it’s pretty easy. It might be pretty easy to get to 20. I’d say most e commerce brands sit between like 20 and. 45, there are a few e commerce brands that will get to 60 or 70 and we’re talking like Under Armour type brands. And then there are the news organizations and only those will ever get to like Wikipedia and Apple and Pinterest and Facebook. Those are the kind of brands that are in the 90s.

And what websites actually show those rankings?

so how would I know what my, my rating

your domain authority is. Like, for free, you can use a tool called Moz, M O Z dot com. they have like a little, Chrome plugin. And so when you go to a site, you can actually see that information about the site. You can see the domain authority, its domain authority overall.and then you can also see the authority of the page in particular that you’re sitting on.

but basically,

and universities are fairly high, I take it?

generally speaking, you will find that dot gov domains and.edu domains will be provided more credibility than just a.com domain. Also, the top level domain, like, you know, dot com or.com au or.co uk. number of links from those top level domains will also help Google to kind of triangulate how relevant you are for a specific country’s results.

So, you know, if you have more backlinks to your site from com. au domains, then you’re going to do better in Australian rankings, even if you have a com domain.

Sure,

So it will determine it based on that. The other thing that you need to think about is not just credibility, but the relevance of the backlink.

So if I get a,let’s say I, I sell rings and I get a backlink from, I’m just trying to think like the motorways association. That’s great, but it’s not really in any way relevant to Rings.

yeah.

And so while things like news articles, that’s super, super helpful. Like if you get a, you know, if you’re doing good PR work and you’re getting links from The Guardian and from The Age and, you know, You know, from Sydney Morning Herald, from wherever those are still super, super helpful, but they’re not giving you link relevance.

So you need to have a mix. You need to have sites that are linking back to you, that are high credibility and high authority, like those kind of news based sites, but that are more general regardless of the topic. But then you do also need, ideally, some more niche based sites where the domain authority might be lower, but they might be highly focused. So if it’s the Jewelers Association of Australia, and that’s going to cost you, you know, 1, 000 to be a member a year, but one of the benefits is that you get a backlink from their site, then that might actually be something that’s worthwhile doing. So,

orgs also rate higher than, say, coms or only relevant ones?

that’s a good question. I don’t have any specific research on like org versus com, certainly edu and gov. but usually they would be at least on par with one another.

Okay soo relevance and domain authority.

That’s right. and think about backlinks as linking domains. So, you don’t really care whether the age links back to you a thousand times. You really only care that it links back to you once. You’re not getting a whole heap of extra value for all of those extra links. So what you really care about is the total number of unique websites that link back to you and generally speaking their domain authority.

that’s one piece. The other piece for e commerce, which I think is not very well known, is that Google does, especially in between the positions of 10 to position one, it looks at, reviews that are present on the collection pages, although the category product category pages, or if it’s a product page that’s being ranked on the product page itself.

So the more and the better the star rating, the more likely if you’re already in the pack of top 10, that you will be capable of moving upward.

Sorry, what do you mean by collection pages?

So a collection page, or a category page is like a, you know, if we’re saying, I’m on Harvey Norman’s site and I need to find a juicer. So the category page is all of the juicers all together, you know, where you can see like three in a row and all the way down and it’s got the different prices, the different brands, or if you’re on a t shirt site.

And you want to see blue t shirts, and you just want to see all of the blue t shirts together. So in Shopify, that’s called a collection page. In any other type of e commerce site, it’s called a category page. It means the same thing, but it’s basically the collection of products that sit within a particular category.

gotcha.

And Google loves category pages. So, because if you think about it, why would it go and list all of these individual products? That’s kind of a waste of its space, you know? So it would rather list more brands, give people more choice, and therefore it will always, if it can, it will try and prioritize collection pages over product pages. for most e commerce brands, the best place for them to start optimizing is a collection page is a category page.

To create those or feature in them.

That’s right.

Cool. Okay. So what that’s going to do is, I take it there are some, there are obviously a lot of things that you can do, but the simple things that you can do to actually get yourself up into that sort of top 10 or top 20 are really around your domain authority, the backlinks.

collection pages will be known to be part of a theme, which makes it easy effectively to, to Google actually refer to you based on trusted insight.

Yeah. So normally the pathway that we would recommend for most e com brands, even if they have super low domain authority in Australia, and I specify this as only for Australia because the U S and the UK are quite different markets. They’re very, they’re much more competitive in the e commerce space, But in Australia, for the most part, a very small brand with very low domain authority can actually still rank in the top 10.

Really?

And so we tend to actually say, start by focusing just on optimizing for the relevance for your relevance to that keyword, to whatever the keywords are that we want to focus on. And obviously the keyword focus should be based on, you know, what the customer is searching for. which is

kind a true.

exactly.

And you, we will usually choose a primary keyword to start with and then a whole heap of synonyms of that keyword as secondary keywords.

And what do they do to achieve that then?

so we would start by using A tool like Surfer SEO. and with a tool like that, we can populate in our primary keyword. So we’re sort of telling it, what it basically does is it pulls in all of the results from other competitor landing pages that are in the top 10 for that most important keyword.

And then it will give you a content score. It will say, well, in terms of keyword relevance and content relevance, These competitors sitting in the top 10, you know, this one is at on average, or the highest score is sitting at 70 and you’re sitting right now based on the content on this page, you’re sitting at 20.

So obviously we want to get to 80 or 90 if we can. And so this tool allows. It allows people to very quickly optimize the content on that category page, such that the content score is higher than the highest ranking competitor in that top 10, pack of

Does that sort of mean like a total rewrite of all the content or is it a matter of?

Well, see, the thing is on most e commerce site pages, there is no content on a collection page or a category page.

Okay, so that should be an easy win,

It’s literally like just the products, some people will have maybe a small little, you know, piece of content right up the top. Some people who have been doing SEO will have, you know, a fair amount of content at the bottom.

So, like, after the products have been listed, there’ll be content at the bottom. Either one of those is fine. If you’re going to put all of the content up the top, you want to have like a read more. So you’re not hiding it, but you basically got it in a bit of a toggle so that consumers aren’t having to come to the page and like scroll through a bunch of content because clearly that is not ideal for their purchasing

top few centimetres is the most precious real estate. Is that

Exactly. Yeah. So, you do still want to, maintain that focus on the products because that’s, that is, people are very visual when they are buying e commerce.they want to go straight to the product from the perspective of helping those who do want to know more and For,educating Google as to what exactly makes you unique in this page, unique and why consumers need to care about it.

Well, that needs to go somewhere like, otherwise, what are you doing? It’s just your product titles and you’re hoping that Google figures it out. So, so that’s the first step is basically like a lot of people. I think they go, Oh, SEO, I’m going to go and do a blog. You know, I’ve already sorted, yeah, I’ve already, I’m sorted with SEO.

I’ve done everything on my content pages. I’ve done my meta titles. I’ve done my meta descriptions. you know, those are the things that show up in, in Google search. So you don’t really see them on the product page, but you can see them on Google search. It’s a nice little summary, but I’m not talking about that.

I’m talking about the actual content on a category page. Most people move on way, way sooner than they should. From focusing on that, because once, once you’ve done that. Usually, if you do it with one of these tools, you will rank, and then you go and submit the new content to Google Search Console, and you let Google know, hey, I’ve got some new content, please come and read for this page, please come and have a look at this page, rescan it, Google will start ranking you for anywhere between 10 and 50 new keywords within a week.

Wow.

Now, I’m not saying that you’re suddenly going to be on page one, but suddenly you have broadened your horizons on that page. and you’ve focused your energy into the primary keyword area that you care about the most. Once you’ve done that, let’s say that after a month, you’re sitting at the bottom of page one.

Okay. That’s the point at which you go back and you go, how many backlinks do I need to this page to get it shooting up? And am I okay with all of the other, like, enough reviews on the collection page,to, to impact my rankings. Because if the answer to either, either of those questions is no, then you’ve still got headroom.

You’ve got more that you can do, and you don’t need, like, I’m not saying that you need to go and get a specific domain authority. I think that’s very ephemeral for most people. It’s hard, you know, you can’t really control it, but you can control going out and maybe, I don’t know, if you were an alumni of some university and maybe the business that you’ve built now is rather impressive, maybe they’ll do a piece on you.

Maybe you’ll get a dot edu link. Maybe you can put that dot edu link to that specific page.

Yeah. Hmm. Okay.

of value, but low hanging fruit is Local directories, you know, or other product review sites or social media sites that allow you to link back. I mean, Google knows the difference between the value of some of these sites that make it super easy to add your own link versus one that you really earn, but it’s,it’s better than nothing.

And you absolutely can get value by, by linking back to that page that you really want to focus on and push up in the results. Most people just go, even after the metas it’s, I’m done. Then we come back and we say,no, it’s not about the metas. It’s about all of the content on the page. So let’s deal with that.

Okay, cool. Now I’m done. No, you’re not done. You’re not done with that page. You shouldn’t be focusing on top of funnel blogs.That all they’re going to do is dilute your conversion rate, right? Like I see heaps of people like, Oh yeah, I’m great at SEO. I’ve done all these blogs and I’m driving all this traffic to us.

Like the problem is, our conversion rate has tanked. Wonder why that is. Well, it’s because you’re getting a whole bunch of traffic. That’s not ready to convert. And you’re doing that before you’ve ever dealt with the most important thing, which is the stuff that you sell. So that’s what we would recommend in terms of a process of going about it.

So every time you move another place up that, organic search is an extra two, three, four, five, 10, 15%. Of,views

That’s right, of impressions

their way down. Yeah,

and it means that like, you know, if you’re sitting at the bottom ofof page one, the literal page one or metaphoric page one, I should say, that, you know, if that’s where you’re sitting, if the keyword is worth, you know, 10, 000, Visits a month and you know that moving up another couple of places could get you an extra 300 people You know that your site converts a 5 percent Whatever the AOV is and you know that off the back of that Just doing that could get you an extra 10 grand revenue a month just from that one keyword.

This is what I mean. It’s like, I think a lot of people just get sidetracked because I’m not really sure, actually, probably because they don’t know how to track the performance of what’s good in SEO. And they also don’t know, like, well, hang on, once I’ve done this first step, what next? You know, most people just get caught up in the idea that optimization is like one time we do this and then we move on.

But when has that ever been the case in business

well, it has to be a constant moving face because everyone in your competitor is actually trying to achieve the same thing.

That’s right.

It’s a competitive and a very dynamic, fluid, landscape. So it’s not, it’s something that you just cannot rest on.

Correct.

but I think also,I think also a lot of, businesses.

Yes, they’re looking for the one and done and I think great. I’m going to rank on from an SEO perspective, but they don’t draw and they might not have the data or they might not understand the data. which allows them to correlate. Okay. 60, 000 views per month or X thousand views per month correlates to with this conversion rate equals this amount of revenue.

And what are the revenue implications of, a one or a half a percent change in conversion rates versus a, a one or a 10 percent increase in views that actually then feed that process.

Yeah, and I think that is the questions, like if people understand how to track both of these things, like whether it be conversion rate, like a lift in conversion rate versus a lift in traffic from SEO that already does convert generally pretty highly, as long as we’re talking about traffic from keywords that matter, keywords that are buying and commercial intent, then those are the questions that ;Founders or e commerce marketing managers do need to be asking themselves because, you know, we do only have so much time in the day.

So if the answer to that question is actually right now, I’m going to get better bang for my buck by going and doing some conversion rate testing and shifting the conversion rate up just by, you know, quarter of a percent, less than a quarter of a percent. very much. Then that may still be a more worthwhile exercise in that moment than, you know, optimizing one, you know, one core page.

The other problem is that usually that’s a lot harder job. One core page, I can tell you from start to finish, if you’ve done it before and you know, broadly what you’re doing, shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. So it’s a low touch. You know, low time, and high impact, activity that you can get done quickly.

I think the hardest thing about it is that most people don’t know all of the steps to. Get to that point, and then they don’t know how to evaluate it. But the first thing that I would say is that if anyone is already using Google Analytics, which most Ecom brands are, they already have it installed. That is where you go to get your baseline data on what the conversion rate for search engine, organic search channels are.

and how much revenue that channel is bringing you. So if you go straight to Google Analytics or GA4, there are reports in there that will break that down. And Google’s pretty accurate as it relates to that, already. So that’s what will bring together the idea of your rankings all the way through to your actual sales.

Cool.

Oh, sorry. The only other caveat that I will say there is that usually what you want to do is go into Google search console and you want to get an understanding of what percentage of your traffic comes from branded search for your brand versus non brand. Because, like, If 90 percent of your organic search traffic comes from people searching for your brand name, everyone’s searching Nike versus then,the only way to increase that is to increase people’s awareness about you.

You

Yes.

know what I mean? So you clearly haven’t done any work to increase, your focus on people who are simply just searching for shoes, women’s shoes, men’s shoes. that is something that you do definitely need to know because people who are searching for your brand are lower in the funnel and usually they will have many times the conversion rate.

Yeah.

Then another keyword. So a non brand keyword,

looking for you means that they’re ready to buy.

yeah, exactly. The non brand keyword of just, you know, women’s shoes will have like a, I’m just giving examples here, but, a conversion rate of, one to 3%. Now, if I’m searching for Nike women’s shoes, we might be talking about a conversion rate of 20%.

Massive difference.

So you really do needto know what the mix is for your brand. And it very much differs for brands, but you can expect that if you’re a new brand, probably most of your organic search is not coming from brand. And you can expect if you’re an established brand, usually at least 25 percent is actually coming from brand.

okay. So, I know that, you know, my, my viewing of Google Analytics is, has actually left me largely more perplexed than when I actually started the process. Perhaps I can add into the show notes a couple of URLs that you might recommend on how to actually look at Google Analytics and understand what the hell it’s really about and how it’s actually providing some insight for me.

Definitely.

one is like the user acquisition or the traffic acquisition report, because normally if tracking has been set up properly, when you go to that link, and that report within Google Analytics, you will see the entire sort of, you’ll see down the left hand side, all of the different channels, and then you’ll actually see the flow all the way through to checkout and then, final sale and the total revenue from that channel.

So that really is like the, I’m going to call it like the baseline, the easiest report to access. and the one that probably gives, you know, for the way in which we’re talking about most founders or e com brands using this, in the context of this session, probably the most useful for them. So, so

I’ve got, I’ve either gone down the organic, optimization path or I’ve said, Oh, it’s too hard. and, I’m addicted to dopamine. So why don’t I just throw an extra 20, 000 a month at, paid ads. So tell us a bit around the whole scenario around paid ads, the why, the how, and what’s going to help me.

So I’d say that when most people think about paid ads, they probably think about two main channels. And that is, Google ads meta ads. meta ads is the broad term for ads that run on Facebook as well as Instagram. Generally speaking, when you’re actually managing it in the channel, by default, they will run across both unless you go and select specific placements.

And generally speaking, you will find for most brands, it’s, you’re not better off selecting a specific placement. You Facebook choose which channel it should go on. And then what happens is certain types of brands, The campaign will mainly do well on, on Instagram. Like, if you do sort of a breakdown report, you’ll see, like, for instance, we did some work with the, baby carrier brand.

The vast majority of all of their sales came from Instagram, but we didn’t specify that it should go to Instagram. It’s just that most of them came from there. And the algorithm optimized toward those placements, but we still would get good sales with a good cost per acquisition from the normal Facebook feed as well.

So it made no sense to just remove that for the sake of it.

So, so for the skeptics. you know, there’d be a question, I guess, is, well, why would I trust Meta to figure out,where I’m going to get, best return from a back? and why wouldn’t they put me into a light performing channel?

you shouldn’t ever trust anything that Meta or Google says.

There’s a quotable quote. Yeah.

these companies do not have, I’m going to say even more broadly, humanities interests at heart. And that’s hard for me as a marketer to say, we could go into a whole philosophical conversation about that, but I think to keep it on track, what I would say is that the reason why I can say this with confidence as a marketer is because frankly, I don’t trust either of them.

And so we’ve tried it the other way and. Their way is still better as a very simple response to that. Now, if there are certain founders that feel like they need to do their own tests. Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s nothing wrong with doing that. it’s usually a pretty low cost exercise.

You can actually set up a test, AB split test campaign within, and within Google ads to do those kinds of things, if you’re, if you want to see whether you can beat the system.

Yeah.

And in fact, you know, I mean, across this month, Facebook is actually giving like 1, 000 credit for people to be able to run tests like that.

So they, they know that people don’t always trust, what they’re kind of suggesting. I think the thing that people do need to be aware of is that over the last 2 years, just as AI has proliferated, from a consumer perspective in terms of how we access it, like with ChatGPT, Meta and Google’s advertising algorithms.

have become far more sophisticated than where they were before. And so that’s why, in general, Meta’s approach and recommendation to advertisers is to stop using audiences, is to use the, just like you would in TV, right? I mean, yeah, sure, you might choose a specific time slot as to when you wanted the ad to run based on the other shows around it, but you weren’t able to target anyone in particular.

yeah What

No.

had to do was make sure that your message was right on point for your target audience. Now in the past, you could get away with choosing a very specific audience on Facebook know that it was accurate because of the kind of extra tracking that Facebook would do via someone’s browser, and therefore Facebook would find that person and show your ad to them regardless of the fact that your ad maybe wasn’t the best at attracting them in the first place. Whereas now, you can’t rely on those interest categories, you can’t rely, certainly if you’re trying to scale spend, if you’re trying to spend more,the best approach is what’s called broad targeting. And broad targeting basically means country and potentially gender. Although personally, we would normally, like, let, again, good example is the baby carrier.

or even, you know, maternity products, you don’t have to, you don’t have to turn the gender specifically to the main buyer because Facebook will do that anyway. And what you tend to then find is that there will be some males that will make purchases and they are actually your cheapest purchases.

And I guess, it sort of makes sense if you look at it from a self interest perspective on behalf of the big,players, Google and Meta.the reality is if we correlate,Return to dopamine hits, it’s actually in Meta’s AI best interest to actually find you the channels, the audiences, the people who are going to buy the most, because if they do that, then you’ll come back and want to double your advertising spend anyway, because it worked right.

that’s usually the idea. That’s right. And of course they have been hamstrung by these privacy laws and by the privacy settings within browsers and devices. So they are still running behind that. Like that, I think they would love to claim more than what they currently can.but this is the reality as it exists today.

And so the way that they’ve tried to catch up and I guess meet the market where they’re at is to make more sophisticated algorithms that are better at finding, the right person, especially if you’re able to, load up and spend money on ad creative, that really speaks to your target audience.

Yep.

So you’re using the creative itself to actually determine. to qualify. So you probably noticed that in some video ads and Facebook, the first thing that someone will say is. Hey, blah, blah, blah. If you’re a new mother with, you know, a newborn, if you’re a, if you’re a father that needs a new tool for whatever, I mean, basically this idea of getting directly to the target audience, sometimes even just by being as brazen as naming them.this is really what people are doing in ads to basically have the ad creative do the targeting for them. That’s what I mean by that.

And is it working?

It does work. Yeah,

Oh, good. Okay. So, so on that, so paid advertising, Meta versus Google and YouTube and, so on,in a simplistic sense, would I spend my money on Meta or on Google in the first instance?

if we were in a, the thing is that most of the time, 99 percent of the time, we will come into a, e commerce client’s business and they are already spending on all channels or on, certainly always on Google Ads and Meta. And so it’s hard at that point to really dissect which channel is contributing what.

the reason for that is, the attribution windows. so that is like how a sale is attributed back to the channel.is number one, bias to Google, because Google does that tracking via, Google Analytics, which it owns, and it owns the browsers, and it owns all of the things. And by the way, I’m not making a case for Meta, because I think they’re both as bad as one another, but I’m just saying that, you can’t always trust

those results to kind of tell you that the bigger picture. So, you know, in an ideal world, you would probably start with one channel. And that one channel would be dependent on the type of product that you have.

of course.

So if you sell, something that.has a very established market in the shopping space.

So in Google shopping, which is, I mean, most campaigns in Google ads, shopping campaigns have turned into what’s called P max campaigns or performance max campaigns. And it’s basically an all in one campaign that Google had forced all e commerce brands onto. and it includes a combo of Putting ads on search on, you know, like when you search for something like, yeah, new shoes, new men’s shoes, what will come up, and I’m just going to do it now, new men’s shoes.

So depending on whether you’re desktop or, whatever, or mobile, The first thing that will come up is like the sponsored results. That is, all of that is being fed out of a Google Ads shopping campaign.

Yeah.

And either someone has set it up to run out of PMAX or out of a old school shopping campaign. You don’t know, you can’t know from looking at the ad.

but I’d say that 95 percent of e commerce brands would be running it out of the PMAX structure. but I’d say that 95 percent of e commerce brands would be running it out of the PMAX structure. And the reason for that is because there’s certain things you can do in PMAX to force the algorithm to care about how much return you want.

So you might say, I want to be able to spend a dollar and make 2. 50 back. I don’t want you to bid on this keyword and show my ad unless, you think I can get a 2. 5x return.

Rosh. Well, I think we got it.

yeah, so, so. Those are the sponsored results. That’s the shopping and that, that take, usually that is the majority of what is successful for an e commerce brand.

and usually you can spend a relatively small amount and get a pretty good return.there are nuances to that. I won’t go into them now, but I’ll just say that, You know, you want to try and make sure that it’s not, Focusing too much on brand because what Pmax can do because you don’t get to control these types of things is it can start going, Oh, look, I’m going to get all these conversions for people that have searched for Nike shoes. So I’m going to show your ads and I’m going to claim all of these conversions when maybe 70 percent of those conversions anyway, via organic search. But anyways, so, so I would say that you would start with the channel that was usually the lowest to the bottom of funnel, and generally that will be Google Ads.

But I will say that most people find that Meta is easier to set up than Google and easier to understand. So on that basis, sometimes people might have only just gone to MetaFirst. And I don’t think, I actually don’t think there’s necessarily a wrong answer, except for very specific niche products. as an example, a product that doesn’t have an audience, like where there’s not a lot of search volume on Google, That’s a type of product that you need to go to Meta with, because you need to, people will understand the product if you put the image in front of them and you show them how it works in a video.

But you can’t do that on Google. You’ve got to rely on someone actually searching for what you’re selling.

We’re a bit of text.

So that would be a good example of where someone should start on Meta instead of Google. And then the question is, well, I mean, should we limit ourselves to Meta and Google? And the answer is no, if.

If, I don’t think we should be putting all of our eggs in those baskets and this then comes down to, again, the type of brand that you are. So I’ll give you a few examples.there’s a Rings brand that we work with, sort of jewelry, manly kind of jewelry, and they do, in terms of outside of Meta and Google, TikTok is a great channel for them, and a little bit of Pinterest for the baby wear brand.

Pinterest is a great one outside of Google and Meta. For other brands, it’s programmatic, which means buying on other sites that aren’t owned within Google’s display network. So like, Again, coming back to that PMAX campaign, you can have ads showing here on, on search, like when someone’s searching, but what will also happen is Google has a whole network of like millions of sites that have its advertising code on their site and will show you ads.

So if you’ve ever gone and like read a blog somewhere and you know, those display ads come up. That’s, that could be Google’s network. It could also be another brand’s network. So a lot of the big, media agencies, they do deals with, with large, sometimes Google, but sometimes other brands that go and buy media space.

And then we, the advertisers, go and buy the media from these big brands. So that’s,that’s kind of what programmatic advertising looks at. We’ve, I’ve got, we’ve got another brand that we work with that does like flight simulators. That audience is all coming from Reddit and YouTube. And I can tell you, if we tried to advertise anything else on, you know, like the baby carrier on Reddit and YouTube, it probably wouldn’t work.

so, these other channels that are less ubiquitous, that often have like special niches that tend to do better, those are the ones that you then kind of need to start to understand the individual cust who your customer is, and where they are hanging out. there are tools that can help with this,they’re also expensive.

So I don’t think they’re useful really to talk about. I think really you will know this. One of the ways you can actually do this, it’s far cheaper than that is simply to go to your own Google analytics results. Look at the referral websites. So all of the websites that refer traffic to you and just see if there’s any kind of patterns.

The other thing that you can do is you can add a survey to a post purchase survey. So after someone’s purchased. And then you can ask them, where did you first find out about us?and then if you don’t know to start with, then you might not have those options in. You just give them their own options.

And then once you start kind of getting a sense of where people are finding you, then you can add those as options that people can pre select from. So, so I think, it comes down to, for most brands, they will still have the majority of their spend on meta and Google ads. And Google ads can only be scaled until you hit the maximum of the number of people searching.

So meta is a far. By a far more scalable channel than Google, if you think about it, because there’s only so many people searching in this moment for shoes,

Yes.

right? but on Meta where people aren’t yet searching for shoes, they’re not yet in that mindset, but ultimately we can bring them down the funnel toward the point where they might search for shoes.

And we can do that on, that we can do that on platforms like Meta, like YouTube, like Programmatic. so, I would say that Meta is the most scalable channel, and then after Meta, depending on the kind of brand that you were, you would look at either TikTok, Programmatic, or Pinterest.

Oh, or YouTube, I should say. I shouldn’t leave YouTube out. It’s just that you run YouTube campaigns out of Google Ads, and PMAX already runs YouTube campaigns on behalf of, e commerce.

and is YouTube a crucial or an important channel?

I’d say it’s still brand dependent, you know, like for brands where people go to YouTube, especially like, I’m going to say higher in, longer timeline and higher technicality type brands benefit quite well from YouTube, because usually what the, what you’ve got is this like education period where someone’s going to YouTube and trying to learn from people.

Maybe they’re also looking at YouTube reviews. Someone. You know, working on the product, working through it and something that’s a bit more in depth than you would get on TikTok or on, Instagram. So it is product dependent, but basically what I would say is if someone has a more technically, it’s still a consumer product, but it’s more technically involved, And I’m not just talking like a juicer.

Yeah.

but something that’s a bit more technically involved, that would be something that, that benefits from YouTube. That’s not to say that YouTube, I mean, if we take Nike, for example, they would be spending millions and millions on YouTube, but they’re doing it for a different purpose. They’re doing it for brand awareness.

They’re not expecting a huge return. So when I’m talking about like what channels to focus on, I guess I am saying if we’re talking about shorter term ROI, Versus longer term brand growth, that’s why I’m sort of talking about these channels and the order in the way that I’m talking about them.

Sure. Okay. So, so we’ve sorted out our organic, we’ve spent a truckload on ads, and we now have just a plethora of people who cannot wait to throw money at us. How do we get our conversion up from Pumpteenth to a lot more?

that would be nice and I think that’s what everyone wants to achieve. My experience with e commerce brands is that, they can go in one of two directions. They’re the kind of founder that was always the customer was at the heart of what they did from the very beginning. And what I mean by that is not just that it was a problem that they wanted to solve for themselves, because often that is where a founder starts, but that, you know, that they were going to markets.

They were speaking to their customers. They were selling physically to their customers and they were having conversations with their customers, maybe calls. Then there’s another kind of e commerce founder. And they’re like the shy e commerce founder. they’re the introvert. They kind of came up with a product idea.

They somehow managed to hit the nail on the head. They, um, so they’ve got still a good audience. But. They don’t really speak to them. They’re often still speaking to them in the context of like direct messenger, customer service, that sort of thing.

But if we, our team was to say to them, Hey guys, In our post purchase survey, we’ve asked people who are open to a direct interview with you to, for you to give them a call and to actually ask them about your brand and do an interview and ask them what they like about you and go into detail so that you can really understand what made them purchase.

Because if you think about it, if you sell at a market, people tell you, because you’re having this human interaction, people will tell you why they purchased. People will tell you all of the. Oh, yeah. Well, it was this thing. And then so and so’s birthday was the other day. And then I needed to do this before this.

And then you start going, Oh, wow. So that’s the trigger for purchase for my product. But if you don’t have those conversations, how do you ever know? You don’t. My point is that sometimes we’ll ask founders to do this and there are certain type of founders like they just can’t, like they cannot even bring themselves to have this conversation, which I find quite funny.

But also it’s it does not work in their favor, you know, because you need to have the customer at the center of your understanding. And so, the first thing that you need to think about when you’re talking about conversion optimization is yeah, like, sure, you can go to a blog. There’s like, there’s a, there’s like the Econ Messiah.

I think he’s a pretty good guy to, to follow because he’s a European fellow. he has a lot of followers that are probably more in the agency realm, but he releases a lot of information. Like, you know, how he took UDI from this to this. You know, conversion rate X and this other brand from nothing to 12 million in a year.

And I think they’re very impressive results to learn from. You’ve got to understand that these brands were also highly motivated in themselves and, you know, had all of the right stuff for him to be able to do what he did.but, you know, he has a lot of great best practice stuff. I don’t know whether he’s moved off X yet, but you know, they, these, he does do a lot of stuff just popping out on X and he also has a free school on school, S K O O L.

so I think learning from people like that is great because you can use some of their best practices. At the end of the day, you also have to understand what’s right for your consumer and the product that you’re selling, and you can’t possibly know that unless you really know your customer. And so the first place that you want to start is that, is understanding your customer, if you don’t have a good enough understanding of them yet. and I think that if you have not, are not doing the things that I’m going to be talking about next, then you don’t have a good enough understanding yet. So that is the way that someone can determine whether they do or do not.

One is that you should absolutely have a post purchase survey. You should have had at least three or four direct conversations with customers about what they like about your brand and in depth stuff in the last month. Whether that’s at a market, if you’re selling, still selling there, or, you know, whether it’s via something a bit more formal, if you’re a bigger brand.

Obviously the bigger brands, they have a whole market research departments that can do this, but it’s all of these mid level brands that don’t have that yet, but they still need the insight.so that’s the second thing. And then the third thing, which is really relatively easy to install is a free tool called Clarity, which is by Microsoft.

and that you can install on your website and it will start tracking, every single move that anyone makes on your website. So it’ll show you videos. That you can then look at and run through and see what is happening when people are trying to purchase your product on

How cool is that? Because I installed that on my website two days ago. I don’t know why. I think actually because you told me to. And it’s amazing.

Yeah. It’s fantastic. Like, it’s so easy then to sort of see the. The things, and of course you can’t read their minds and this is where obviously the qualitative research comes into play, but it takes you a long way. I’ll give you an example of a, there was one brand that we worked with for conversion rate optimization where they sell, lunchboxes, kids lunchboxes. And. They have like, they had this list of tags, like as long as a toilet roll of all of the different variants of the colors and the patterns. So once someone got to the page, like all the colors and the patterns. Now, the first thing that we did, is we just did best practice. So we basically created these little icons that had, you know, a slash in the middle and it had like the color on one side and add the pattern on the other.

So people could immediately get a visual sense of what they were doing.

Like swatches. Yeah.

But what we realized When we then put this live and it actually performed worse than the current situation was when we started testing it, we saw what people were doing, they were like still going down and picking an up and then they were actually using the gallery itself as a way of sort of determining.

the variants that they wanted, and it’s almost like they needed just like a little checkbox from there that said, now I just want this color, rather than having to go down and find where it was. So we could see that they were going back and forth. they were using the gallery itself, the product gallery itself to kind of determine what they wanted. Now no other sites that we could look at to say that do this, but we could see what this consumer needed based on the way that this product was being sold.

and so once that was in place, Then we saw consumers actually doing what we wanted them to do. As long as we made it easy, as long as it was super, super clear, they were able to do something that doesn’t exist on other e commerce sites. and I think this is the danger between just going, you know, let’s apply best practice.

Versus let’s understand who the customer is and how they interact with their product. Now, in that particular example, there was kind of no way of knowing until we did the first test, unless, you know, some customer sort of brought it up, but it’s a bit, it’s one of those ones that’s a bit hard to tell, but having that video evidence, that made it super, super clear to us.

So even if it’s not something that you can get to in a qualitative fashion, you should at least, even when you’re testing, be able to go back and review the videos of what’s happening now that you’ve released this new kind of design. So I would say that, you know, as it relates to testing websites, I would always start with surveys, qualitative, quantitative, post, purchase.

I would then install Clarity. I would. break down what videos I’m looking at into sections. So I’d look at all of the, I’d focus on anything that was a product page and I’d maybe spend an hour just going through the videos, watching at 2x speed. It doesn’t take too much time, but just to get a sense. Then I would do the same with category pages or collection pages.

And then I, and then once it had been running for a week, like a long enough that I could see more about people who had checked out, then I would also look at. Just people who were checking out so that I could get a sense of, you know, what’s happening with the cart ad the cart draw. If you have a cart draw that’s coming out to the side when someone’s clicking, add to cart. those, and then lastly, I would look at the homepage, and I would look at the way that people are using the menu structure. And then through that asking myself a few sort of questions. I’m asking, you know,are there any things that I could create a better experience for the customer here?

And I think that the changes would sort of fit into three categories. So one is clarity, helping, is there anything here I can do to help potential buyers recognize, experience, or understand something better? Like, is there something that they’re struggling with to based on what I can see in their behavior?

speed. Is there anything that I can see is stopping them from getting somewhere slower than what they need to. So an example would be like, we work with this,bags company. And, there are these users that were like, they, each bag has a pattern, but they have different bags.

So there’s, you know, you can buy a shopping bag in this Rosella pattern. You can also buy The, cooler bag in the same pattern and the wine cooler in the same pattern and a wet bag in the same pattern. Now, what some users are doing, not everyone, but what some users were doing is they’d add the first one to their cart, and then they’d realize that maybe there was some other products that had the same pattern and they wanted to have it matching.

So they would search painstakingly for. the name of the pattern and try and find all these other products to match the pattern and add to their cart. And so that’s an example of where we created a section called matchy that automatically did that. So behind the scenes, we could go and select.

This stuff, and this, these are things that frankly, people just go, but can’t I just add like one of those AI tools that just like suggests products to people when they get to cars like, yeah, you’re not really, I mean, an AI can only work with the data that it’s got,

Yeah.

and AI is only good with the data that it’s got.

And so if consumers aren’t doing, or there’s an opportunity that they’re not seeing, and you haven’t seen, why do you think AI is going to figure it out? Like, especially if it’s only for 1 or 2 percent of people, but if you made it available to everyone, then suddenly 5, 10 percent of people are using this thing.

And suddenly your average order value has gone from 60 to 100.

Absolutely.

So, so that’s that. And then nudging, which is, the other bucket is, what are the things that we could do to apply that gentle pressure? Urgency offers, you know, Anything that helps to encourage the actions that you think they should be taking on that particular page, which, you know, from an e commerce point of view, if you’re on the product page, you expect people to be adding to cart.

If they’re on the add to cart, you expect them to be clicking checkout. If they’re on the homepage, you expect them to be going to a category page to start, like, you know, getting a sense of the products that you sell.

nudging’s not just about,they’ve gone to the checkout, they’ve committed to buying it, and then all of a sudden they get hit with this torrent of, would you like this, that, and something else as well.

No, it can be at any stage of the funnel, and really based on, you know, what is the key action that you want to take, want them to take next. So I guess once you’ve done that, you then have a couple of choices. There’s going to be things that you can fix really easily, and maybe you just want to go and do that.

and there’s no problem with that, you know, maybe it’s, Oh my goodness. Oh, whoops. I can see actually that this whole piece of text is completely wrong. I have to update that no matter what, I’m not going to go test that. Then there’s things that really can impact. Like I’d say anything above the fold, it has quite a significant impact on conversion rate.

And my perspective is you want to break down to the U if you can. And this really depends on, you know, how many sales you’re making a day and how many visitors you get to your site each month as to how useful doing testing will be. But I think if you have 50, 000 visits to your site each month, this becomes a more viable option because then you can sort of go, I want to just change this on product pages.

But of course, not all of the visitors to your site ever get to a product page, right? Like, it’s a subsection. So, and maybe if you’re only doing it on one category of products, that then, you know, is a smaller funnel again. So, Let’s just make a general rule and say this is most useful if you’re getting about 50 000 visits to your site a month, and you’re assuming also that you’re making hundreds of sales a month is the ideal.

Okay, if you’re only making 50 000 a month, This is not going to help you. Like if you’re selling a 3, 000 thing and you’re still making, you know, good money, you might as well not test, you might as well just ask your customers for feedback on the design. but talking to this sort of standard of 50 K visits to the site a month, that’s where you would use.

If you’re using Shopify, I love the tool shoplift because it makes it really easy to just select. The new design and basically you would need a developer, generally speaking, and a designer to make these changes. And if they’re really small, that makes your job easier, you know, it’s got okay, cool. Well, you know, we know that, at the moment we’re not offering after pay.

Our hypothesis is that doing so will help nudge people toward Add to Cart. so we’re going to test the page with Afterpay. and that little information just below, like the buy in. I’m giving a very easy one because most e commerce brands already have this, right? But, yeah, buy in for payments of just for payments of 20 bucks or whatever.

the difference would literally be, I’ve got all of the, my product templates that are the standard, and then I’m just selecting the new template where all the change is just this one thing. And then the tool itself will tell you how long you need to run the test for, before it’s statistically significant.

And, you know, if it makes a big difference, usually the time to statistical significance is shorter. And of course, the closer that the two are to one another, the longer the time to statistical significance.and then there’s other ones that are not for Shopify sites, like VWO, Visual Website Optimizer.

they’re more expensive. I love the Shopify one, but I realize not everyone’s on Shopify. So, VWO is a good one outside of that. so those are the things that you want to be doing. And then basically, as you do each one, it’s additive, right? So, okay. If you can add, you know, 0.1% from that one thing, can you add 0.5 from the next one and another 0.1 from the next one.

That’s all gonna add up across, you know, 10.1 percentage points to a whole new percentage conversion rate.

Yeah.

and this is not something that happens overnight. Cause if you think about it, you can absolutely get quick wins because the quick win is being able to get that first test live and actually benefiting from it within seven days.

But in terms of the time to actually double a conversion rate, well, each test might need two weeks to run before you then go and switch it over. So then that means you can only, you might only run a total of 20, you know, 26 tests a year or whatever. So you are limited therefore in terms of how much you can do.

And ultimately what you’re limited by is your site traffic at any point in time, because if you don’t have the site traffic to support the test, like, you know, a massive brand could run a test within 24 hours and know, eBay can run a CRO test probably within a couple of hours and know,

Yeah. yeah. Absolutely.

or Amazon is probably a better example.

so this is really helpful because,we’ve attacked it from three dimensions. One is how do we get more organic traffic? how do we buy more effective traffic? And then when we’ve got the traffic, how do we actually get more conversion rates that ultimately gives it our return on investment?

does, AI help us or hinder us in all of the above,

what I’m seeing on social media is that, and I am an extensive user of AI for my own research purposes.but what I’m saying on social media is that AI is going to be, is Nirvana. anybody can create 365 days of content for a content calendar in under four seconds.

Use two, maybe even only one neuron as part of that process, and, and, world hunger, and global warming will be solved instantaneously.

Yep, at the

I suspect it’s probably not that easy.

There is so much that I love about AI. there’s also so much that I don’t love. There’s actually a really good blog,it’s done by The Guardian. It’s called The Black Box. And they do, they’ve done a series of seven episodes all on AI and it’s such a fascinating listen.

so yeah, I just, understanding like the basis of the technology and, you know, all of its highs and lows. I think it’s a really important starting point for most people. In terms of how we use it every day though, as people and consumers,I’ll talk about a few different things.

So one is the concept that the companies that we use to help manage our marketing. So like Meta, like Google, this is not new to them and their algorithms are already taking advantage of, artificial intelligence, right? Like they’ve already got this, all of the tools that we use are already kind of building this in.

So I think we need to separate out the concept of tools, leveraging AI as the basis for how they work. And maybe provide insights to you and then that’s sort of less visible, you know, because like from your perspective, back, you know, 2 years ago, that could have just been some simple dev rules that showed you a particular insight.

Now you get AI insights, but like, I’m just saying there’s not that much. difference to us as the consumer of the tool other than, okay, maybe that is more insightful than what I would have gotten if it’s a simple dev rule. then there’s actually using AI in the process of creating marketing materials themselves.

And that process generally will involve ChatGPT at some point. Point or a tool that leverages ChatGPT’s open AI platform, you know, for the build of their own AI tool. And I think that’s the area where just like working and briefing a human, you cannot expect that what gets spat out is, is going to be useful.

I think the first thing to understand is that AI is, Much better at taking step by step briefing instructions than it is at being given a brief as a whole. And, The human still has to be a part of kind of curating that throughout. Good example, yesterday, writing ads for, a client of ours, jewelry client, and, the start of that process was going to be some UGC ads.

And usually like, sometimes ChatGPT will come up with some good stuff. So

this was about basically scripting ads that look like user generated content, that look like someone just sort of saying, Oh wow, I got this ring yesterday and it’s so amazing and whatever.

I chucked that into ChatGPT and gave it the basic brief. And what came back was to the naked eye, a very good simulacrum of a UGC script. Problem was, it was like, I don’t ever use this word, but it was naff. Like it was not really, it didn’t have the brand tone. even when I fed it the brand tone.

and so that was never, ever going to be something that we would use. But after that point, you might have a starting point. You might go, okay, I see what you’ve done there. That’s not really what I want. This is what I want. See a lot of humans. Most humans, in fact, are not very good at saying what they want or what they really need up front.

Totally.

There’s,

process.

yeah, it all, it often is. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a boss or whatever in the past that’s like, you know, we have,we have two types of clients, like client that knows it when they see it and a client that knows how to brief and the client that knows it when they see it can be quite a dangerous type of client, you know, because They don’t know what they don’t know and they don’t know what good looks like until they see it.

Whereas a good client usually has, okay, well, these are our brand guidelines. these are the things that we’re thinking. Here’s some inspiration, you know, all of those kinds of things. And a good agency helps to pull those things together for a client if they don’t, if they don’t have it. but I think even if you are feeding some of those things, some of those baseline things to ChatGPT, if you’re doing it all at once, you’re still not going to get there. Actually need to go, brief by brief, often, not necessarily paragraph by paragraph, but if we take the example of a script, you would need to do a script for a single video, you would usually need to work on that script, update it to the brand, then go back to ChatGPT, feed it in again and say, okay, what do you think of this?

Sometimes it’ll come back with some suggestions, you go, okay, look, I’ll use that sentence, the rest of it is no good. a reason why it’s called conversational AI

Yeah,

you know, I strongly believe that if you actually have a conversation with it, you actually get a far superior

that’s right. You just, you treat it

the brief.

correct. You treat it as you would if you were collaborating directly with someone who was sitting next to you. because I think if you try anything else, there’s always going to be a step missed. and so, so I think that’s one of the ways that you can get the best out of AI.

The other thing I would say is, you do have to think about what the environmental impact is. I mean, you know, depending on how much you’re using it, it’s like, it uses up, I don’t know, some ridiculous amount of extra energy feel like it’s in the order of seven times, just doing a simple search on Google.

If you can’t get to the answer in six searches on Google, maybe you’re better use doing a single question to chat GPT. Right. But, the point is that I think we do also need to think about the environmental impact that, that AI has in terms of the way that we, operate with it. And I appreciate that’s like a personal philosophical.

Consideration, not necessarily a business consideration, but I suppose we all want our businesses to still be here, on this earth and be able to do business with the most amount of people. So, hopefully, we are not going to be in climate crisis, at that point. So I think anything that we do have to still consider all of those things.

The other thing that I wanted to say is. we’re then talking about from the consumer point of view as to how they actually. Use AI to get and find the products that they need. I would say that’s still kind of in its infancy in terms of usefulness. And there’s probably a couple of reasons for this.

I tested out a few tools like search tools. ChatGPT is probably going to become the biggest competitor, I think, to, to Google if it releases free search. I mean, at the moment now, search has been integrated into its own platform. So, you know, you can now do a ChatGPT search. I’m not sure whether it’s out of beta yet, but I can access it in our ChatGPT version.

So,

And it’s already now a Chrome extension, which actually replaces Google’s search.

yeah, well, there is the Chrome extension, but that Chrome extension is not actually the new chat GPT search. So it doesn’t really help it. All it really does is if you’ve got the free version of chat GPT, it’s like, it’s giving you the same answer that chat GPT would give you. But the new version of ChatGPT that is SearchGPT specifically, I know they have the same name as the Chrome plugin, but it’s actually not the same thing.

The SearchGPT, part of ChatGPT, which they are building, we’re talking about the ideal scenario. Because what’s the ideal scenario? Ideal scenario from an e commerce founders point of view would be, Look, I don’t know, I’m looking for some shorts for my husband for his birthday and like, kind of want those ones that are, you know, the mid length ones.

He doesn’t want shorty shorts and he doesn’t want super long ones below the knee. Can you maybe suggest, like, what I should go for? Now, I did that example and I put it into,you know, a few different, like I put it into Gemini, I put it into ChatGPT, but one of the other big sort of AI, new AI search platforms.

And there were a number of different problems with each one. So for Google, didn’t give me any links, for the AI platform, of which name I cannot recall now, but it was useless to me, so I didn’t keep using it. They did not location specify me, but they were probably the most specific. so I would then have to go, but I’m not in America, like, give me Australian results, you know, Gemini obviously knew that I was in Australia because it’s a Google platform.

And so it gave me relevant results, but it gave me no links. Why? Because why would Google want to, I mean, Google has to think

Decimated Advertising

Yeah, very hard about how it manages this transition process. And I think what’s going to end up happening is yeah, something like ChatGPT. Because they have nothing to lose on that front, they can do whatever they want, you know, in, in similar ways to being, although being still has a whole advertising platform in terms of how it earns its money.

So. Even then, they’ve obviously been, you know, I’ve looked just in the last sort of two or so months as to the, lift in Bing search

versus, versus Google, Google search. It’s not been huge. I mean, Australia’s barely moved, even though Bing AI was such a big part of like their new sort of, you know, pitch for using Microsoft Edge as a browser and having, having that incorporated.

I certainly have Bing search on my phone now, but I feel like I’m the kind of person that goes and downloads apps like that’s, you know, I don’t think

not everyone does that. And you can see in terms of total population, People are not really doing that. You know, it’s still only like 5 percent market share here in Australia.

It’s like 10 percent market share in the US hasn’t, it’s maybe moved a few percentage points, which is more than it has done in many a year. But I’m just saying, it’s certainly not taking over the world yet. So, so yeah, so same thing with being AI. It did not Find my location. It gave me a little bit of information, but the point is that right now, this like intersection of generative conversational AI and,You know, and the human need to search and find something.

It’s not there. I think it could be there so soon. I just don’t know who’s going to get there first, but my feeling is that Google could have done this a year ago. They’re not doing it because they have a commercial reason not to. Bing has a semi commercial reason not to. Therefore, I think what we can expect is it’s going to be a new player that does this best first.

There’ll be followers. And most likely search GPT.

suppose I wanted to sort of give those three angles, the kind of the integration of AI within the tools that we already use, the actual use of AI in our daily jobs. and then the use of AI from a consumer’s perspective as it relates to how they search for products. The other thing I would say on the middle one, the how we use AI for marketing,we, one of the things that, one of the tools that I really do love is,the new, artificial generated voiceover tools.

We use those a lot for ads. So we use a tool called PLAY.HT.

All right. Is that a bit like notebook LM?

I don’t know what notebookLM is, but basically what PLAY.HT does is you can choose from any, like a number of different accents, Australian, UK, whatever, you pop in the script for the ad. And then a voice, comes back. You can also do voice cloning. So if you get like three hours worth of recording from a client’s voice, you know, a brand founder who’s happy to have their voice cloned, that’s a whole other story.

But if they are, you can basically create a clone of their voice and then you can use their voice in ads as well.

Wow.

Yeah. So that it really removes the need for like any voiceover artist. I mean, the reality is that. If it weren’t there, we probably just wouldn’t go and pay for a voiceover artist. So I don’t know how much business it’s taking away from voiceover artists.

I mean, obviously, I’ve come from a creative background, so I feel kind of bad. And I always need to look at the ethics of what some of this stuff means. But I’d say at least in the way that we use it for our clients. this sort of fast paced production, like we’re not talking high value production for a TV commercial or for a, you know, massive brand in those cases, there wouldn’t have been the budget for a voiceover artist anyway.

Not in that volume anyway.

yeah, but those are the kinds of things that I think now. Are supporting,ad creative and thinking about ad creative. There’s even things that you can do to AI generate music.that definitely is something that affects artists. In our case, we don’t do that. we use, we use a site called Musicbed, and so if any client has. Less than 50,employees, then basically it’s covered under sort of a group license, music license, but that way, at least, you know, anything that’s being used, the money’s going back directly to the artists.

Absolutely. Fantastic. This has been a torrent of information, which is exactly what I was hoping that we would do because I love to nerd out on this stuff with you. So. Now that we’ve looked at those four dimensions,as expected, there’s probably at least 50, if not more ideas that, any business could go and pursue now. and as you know, I’m obsessed with something that’s digestible and manageable. So, what would you suggest would be those #CriticalFewActions™ that if they did nothing else would help them Get towards their vision of driving increased revenue with better return on investment, out of our discussion.

I’m going to give like sort of a timeframe to these, but I would say, these are the most time boxed ones. Thank you.

Yeah. Ruthless prioritization.

list your top selling products, top selling product categories and basically do, optimization on those top 10 starting one per week for the next 10 weeks.so

them all up into page one

That’s right. the next one would be, install Clarity and run your first test. Just do that. If you can just do one, you’ll be able to do another. I think a lot of this comes down to if people aren’t doing it already. They don’t have that process of, oh, okay, now I know how it works. I’m just going to rinse and repeat.

And with both of those activities, they are kind of rinse and repeat. All you have to do is keep talking to customers, come up with another test idea, test it, and then release it.

and see what

you’re not, if you’re not doing it, you’re not getting a benefit. So, so though that would be the second, and then I guess the third, I’m trying to, I guess, bring this back to the three core channels that we’ve talked about today.

So that’s SEO and CRO. And then in terms of paid digital, this is very dependent on the brand, so I would say.if they’re already doing Google and Meta, I would be considering is there another channel that could meet your needs and to look into programmatic as another option as a starting point. using a company like StackAdapt, which doesn’t really have any baseline spend requirements that a lot of the big programmatic companies require spend of like 300 to 500, 000 minimum a year.

so StackAdapt do have a bit of a minimum, something like 5, 000 a month, but they don’t really hold you to it. So I think that would be a good starting point, to then kind of support Google and Facebook and kind of get off the, addictive substance that is those two channels.

Yes, indeed.

or certainly spread your risks.

Spread your risk is a better way of putting that.

Fantastic. absolutely brilliant, Michelle. I really appreciate, what you’ve shared today. and it certainly has. demystified so much of this in a way that I, had hoped for. So thank you so much for that. Very pleased to hear that.

on a slightly different topic, you were one of the first people to go through the CEO masterclass And a couple of years down the track,it intrigues me as you’ve just recommended good idea to speak to the customers. It intrigues me to ask, what did you get out of the masterclass?

I think, I mean, #CriticalFewActions™ is a great one. I think that, you have the masterclass had a really good, strategic structure, but I think for most businesses, the hardest thing. is that prioritization process is condensing it down to the most important actions. And what’s interesting, John, is that, you may recall that I was childless at the time that I went through that masterclass.

And,and so I was on the verge of creating a family. And one of the things that you know, is definitely not true, is that women can have it all. they cannot possibly balance all of the things in such a way that would satisfy them that they’re doing their jobs excellently as a parent and as a business owner, in my case. And so, Before I got pregnant, before I had a child, I thought to myself, how could I possibly ever, I’m just not that person. You probably can see the way that we speak and converse. I’m the kind of person that like, I’ll find a problem and then I’m down that rabbit hole. I’m following where that rabbit hole goes.

I’m not a critical few person by nature. I’m just not. and I will happily admit that. but. But parenthood has absolutely and completely forced me into that, the need for that mindset. and the need to continue to carry it out. even when I fail at it, you know, even when I’m like, Oh gosh, you know, I’ve just gone and rabbit holes. Bring myself back on track. What are the critical few? You know, and I think a lot of founders, especially entrepreneurs in particular, they have this mindset This challenge because they have the, I don’t know, it’s like the chicken challenge. Oh, chicken. Oh, what’s this bright, shiny thing over here? BSO, the bright shiny object.

and I’d say that it’s even not just founders. I think most humans are like that. And unfortunately, As AI has become better, social media, I think, the metas, and TikTok’s ability to actually take our attention and to reduce our attention is, has been made worse as well. So if you’re in any way like a regular social media user, you would probably say to yourself that you are more addicted to social media.

Then you’ve ever been.

Yes. And your attention span is now split seconds as opposed to minutes.

so all of these things drive us to this, you know, I suppose for me on a personal level, back to this concept of the most important things. For a business and the good thing about that is you can create layers of that. Like there’s the critical few at the strategic layer of a business, but as we’ve just talked about today, there is the critical few at the marketing operations or marketing strategy layer of a business.

And you could say that across all of the different kind of areas of the business, and then the people that are responsible for those. So,for me, that was certainly the biggest. initially, nudged change from you, followed by forced change, following childbirth.​

Are you looking to pinpoint the areas that will make the biggest impact on your business? Check out the Organization Performance and Value Diagnostic. This powerful tool lets you evaluate your business on multiple facets and provides email reminders to keep you on track. Head over to @CriticalFewActions.com.Au and get started now.

So how is your business different as a result of you going through the masterclass?

Well, I think one of the things that you mentioned earlier, right at the start of this session was that when we did the masterclass, we had only just started this decision around starting to focus. on e commerce as a core business offering. you know, I mean, when a business is bringing in, let’s say at that point, it would have been 80 to 90 percent of our monthly revenue came from non e commerce. well, that is not an overnight job to shift to that. So, so now we can say that the majority of our revenue now comes from e commerce.and we still have legacy clients. We still have, businesses that we work with that are lead generation and that sort of thing. and I actually think from a risk management point of view, that is something that I want to keep going with because we can see in COVID, we can see with the cost of living crisis that It’s important just as I am counseling to have people put more eggs in more than one basket.

I’ve seen agencies who are purely e commerce go under. and so I think you do have to be careful about like attaching yourself to a very specific industry. And in fact, there’s lots of benefits of having other,other types of businesses, because you can kind of use some of that thinking. We can use our lead generation thinking for lead generation in e commerce and we do.

you know, to gather emails as an example, instead of like a lead gen through to a sale. So, yeah, so that I guess is really the biggest shift has been this complete focus, and building of our expertise. In this space such that, you know, the conversation that you and I had today, I could have a conversation like this for two days and three days and five days and still not actually get out all of the things that are important to e commerce.

Yeah.

So I think we’ve really built a very significant, you know, knowledge IP over the last, sort of three years, three, four years.and that has been significant in our ability to be working with the types of international, e commerce brands that we’re working with today.

So choosing my words carefully here, Michelle,I don’t know of anyone in Australia who the depth of analytical knowledge, understanding, and. a sense of curiosity and inquiry that you and your team have got when it comes to e commerce. that’s probably the only thing that people come away from listening to our fireside chat, then I suspect one or two of them might be thinking, how would I work with And Michelle, what does that look like?

Usually

where do they start? Or, and who’s the right person to work with you?

Yeah. So.

You know, if I’ve got an empty store and I’m selling, you know, five, crocheted,fridge bags a year, maybe you are probably not the right person. Or maybe you are, I dunno,

how would I self-regulate and, and

do need to be at a baseline level of revenue to benefit from the type of work that our team does. I would say, like, if you’re not funded, I would say in the order of 200k plus revenue a month.you know, so, so in the order of over a million dollar business, you know, 2 million business plus a year. and then we do our best work, I would say, where the business is still in its nimble phase. You know, we obviously we have worked with very large brands, Yeti, Under Armour as some examples, but. and Adairs. but these are businesses that have lots of different marketing departments. They have lots of different layers.

and we work very well with those layers. But I would say that, you know, in terms of end-to-end marketing management and outcomes, it’s those middle few, you know, through, up to let’s say 50, sometimes even a hundred million depending on where. Where a business is at, you know, from that lower point, of the 2 mil through to that higher point of the 100 mil, that our best work is done.

In terms of working with us, anyone can reach out on our contact page that meets that criteria. we especially like to hear from Shopify brands. Mainly because we have that deepest level of experience at a CMS level on Shopify. I mean, there’s no requirement really for a marketing agency to necessarily have that, but there’s a whole bunch of benefits that do come with it when the team is familiar with the CMS, content management system, that is.

and then. Then when there’s, if you head to our website at foresightdigital. com. au you can head to the contact or book a call. And that’s a call with me and in that there’s a form to fill out which just asks a bunch of questions. You find a time that suits you. and then we have an initial chat. We go through an understanding of your challenges, the goals, what the brand wants to achieve.

and then, from there we set up, some access points. So usually for businesses over a certain amount of revenue, we’ll do a complimentary performance review. Of their existing marketing channels, and what really comes out the back of that is, I guess, a level of confidence that we understand the business, but it’s also for us, right, to make sure that the business is at a point where, you know, marketing is never going to fix the world, just like AI isn’t either. and so the business still needs to be in a strong position. And this gives both parties, both of us a good opportunity to kind of check that out. so usually we sign an NDA, we’ll take a look directly at their performance,their financials, if they’re on Shopify, and have an understanding of whether we think we can scaleand.

Then the normal, I’m going to say, sort of starting point for most brands tends to be, a combination of paid digital, SEO and CRO together,as an ideal scenario. if someone only wants to come up with one service, then it tends to be paid digital as a starting point, just again, because you’re building a new relationship. And you need to be able to see results quickly to kind of solidify that relationship and feel like you can trust, trust our team,as an agency and as a marketing partner. So that’s as simple as it gets. And then basically after that review is done, which is usually within a week, we set up another session.

I take them through it. and we go through the pricing at that point, and then usually folks will kind of sign within the next seven days and we get set up usually in the next closest month, whatever that looks like.

fantastic. Terrific. Michelle, this has been an exhaustive discussion. Not exhausting, I’m inspired by it. but it’s been an exhausting, exhaustive discussion and, and I know for well that you’re not under studying it in that we could have gone another four and a half days. But, um,but this has been really fantastic and it’s really helped with my knowledge and understanding and my level of,capacity to know how much I don’t know, which is an important part of this process so that,you know, knowing enough to be dangerous and knowing enough to know when you would be dangerous is a really important thing.

But there are some really great tips throughout that and some great websites that I’m going to go and investigate further. and, I’m also looking forward to watching some clarity, videos of my own website because, I’m finding it, intensely curious.

Yeah, it’s, that’s another rabbit hole. So you definitely to time box yourself on that one, John. You got to time box yourself.

Fantastic. Michelle, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. it’s been a pleasure.

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