329: E-Commerce Traffic and Conversion Using Heatmaps and User Testing with Jon MacDonald

[00:00:00] Robert Plank: Robert Plank show, episode three to nine, e commerce traffic and conversion using heat maps and user testing with John McDonald. [00:00:12] Robert Plank: Hey everyone and welcome back to the show. We're talking right now with Jon McDonald and he's the founder and president of the good, which, and they're conversion rate optimization experts and they turn browsers into buyers. So John and the team at The Good have made a practice of advising brands on how to see e commerce sales double or more within 12 to 24 months. [00:00:34] Robert Plank: Brands that have utilized their conversion growth program have seen an average revenue increase in revenue of over 100%. And you can learn more about that at thegood. com. So John, welcome. Thank you. [00:00:47] Jon MacDonald: Thanks for having me today, Robert. [00:00:48] Robert Plank: I am glad that you're here. And so it sounds like you guys help people with conversion rates. [00:00:53] Robert Plank: So can you tell us in your own words? What it is that you do and what makes you stand out? [00:00:58] Jon MacDonald: Of course. So at The Good, we are conversion rate experts. And what I mean by that is that we help convert traffic that is on your website and to buyers, ideally we work mainly with e commerce companies. [00:01:13] Jon MacDonald: So what we're looking to do is remove all of the barriers that are on your website. And help consumers do one of the only two things they're on your site to do. And, we've been in business about nine years, so we've only seen these two things, and two reasons why consumers are on our website. The first is that they have a pain or a need that they want to get resolved. [00:01:35] Jon MacDonald: And they're on your site because they think that your product or service is able to help them do that. And the second is once they determine they've completed their research, they determine that your product or service is a good fit for them is to convert. They want to buy that product or service as quickly and easily as possible. [00:01:52] Jon MacDonald: So what we help brands do is to facilitate doing those two tasks on their website and basically getting out of the way of the consumer, letting them do those two tasks. [00:02:04] Robert Plank: And do you see that most people who have these e commerce sites, is that like the big problem that they just can't get out of the way of that consumer, like they're either they have that pain and they just want to make sure that there's a solution or they want the solution and the checkout process or whatever it is too difficult. [00:02:21] Robert Plank: Are you seeing that just like that the site is there, but maybe things are configured incorrectly? [00:02:27] Jon MacDonald: I think that's a great explanation. I think, my perspective really is that most brands don't believe that when a consumer reaches their website, that their marketing has won. So marketing is really only to get people to the website, but once it's there, the marketing is done. [00:02:44] Jon MacDonald: It's tasks has completed what it was set to do. So now it's really about serving the needs of the consumer once they're on your website and giving them the information that they need in order to make an informed decision. And by having the right content strategy, by understanding what consumers are looking for, as opposed to what messaging the brand wants to push can really help to increase convergence. [00:03:08] Robert Plank: Great. And am I hearing you correctly in that when a client comes to you and your agency, their website is already set up but it just sounds like maybe it's set up but like you said it's more set up from like the brand perspective, or it's more set up from what they think as opposed to what visitors want. [00:03:24] Jon MacDonald: Exactly. If you think about it, marketing teams have always done websites, right? So websites have, from the early days of when the internet started, for some reason, marketers ruin everything, right? And what happens is that marketing teams get a hold of websites as a marketing engine. And as opposed to A sales team getting a hold of a website and treating it like a sales tool. [00:03:48] Jon MacDonald: Over the years it's been a websites have become a repository for marketing campaigns, right? So if you think about it, you go to most brand websites big and small, and if they ran an ad somewhere they want that on their homepage of their website. So you'll get a lot of, scrolling carousels of a whole bunch of different marketing messages that are going on and all the different campaigns they're running. [00:04:11] Jon MacDonald: The challenge with that is, is that, when we get to a website at the good, we often see that there's cluttered messaging. There's trying to, the marketing team is trying to get the consumer who's visiting the site to follow along with all of these campaigns that are doing when really, the consumer may have reached the site because they Googled a particular pain point that they had, and this brand site came up. [00:04:35] Jon MacDonald: But there's a huge disconnect between what the person was looking for and when they got to the website, they're not seeing any alignment between the, the channel that drove them to the website and the messaging that's on that website. So we pay a lot of attention to that. And where if, in the past, if a sales person had gotten ahold of a website, it would be much more of a sales tool. [00:04:57] Jon MacDonald: It'd be, okay, great. I want to facilitate helping you do your research, find the right product. And I want to help you to purchase that product because that's what salespeople do. It's help make decisions and then get them facilitate getting the product to them. And we believe that a website should be very similar to that. [00:05:14] Jon MacDonald: Should fulfill a sales role, not a marketing role. [00:05:17] Robert Plank: And so how does someone clean up a site? In order to do that sales role, not the marketing role, because it's it sounds like what you're describing, I can imagine these companies running their advertising campaigns and loading up a webpage and maybe thinking that like more is better and then ending up with a huge cluttered mess. [00:05:33] Robert Plank: And the place that I get stuck a lot of times, if I'm changing up a website or trying to figure out like, how to make it look better for some of that cold traffic, I'm thinking I want to have all this good stuff on the page so that way they know what they're, why they're there, they know what's there, but then I feel like I get stuck in between loading it up with just tons of stuff and then if I remove a lot of stuff, like some of these web pages look super slick and have very little words, but then I feel like if I remove like too much at a certain point, it won't say enough and I'm not always really sure like where that point is where it's like too much is removed or too much is added. [00:06:07] Robert Plank: Does that make sense? [00:06:08] Jon MacDonald: It does. So the first thing I would suggest is to do two things. First is to make sure that you're tracking data on your website and that you're making data backed decisions about what content resonates. So be looking at things like heatmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps. Those data points are extremely reasonable to, to achieve. [00:06:29] Jon MacDonald: They're very easy to set up and, there's tools like Crazy Egg. They're, Which is extremely inexpensive. There's also one called Hotjar. H O T J A R. And I think, I believe it's 9 a month. And they even have a free plan you can use for a while. Those, bits of data in conjunction with looking at, if you're using like Google Analytics or something of that sort will help you understand what content is resonating. [00:06:54] Jon MacDonald: So you really want to use data to make those decisions. The second thing is that you also want to be collecting qualitative data and not just quantitative. What I mean by that is, talk to consumers. Do user testing. There's a great tool, it's called Peek, P E K, peek. usertesting. com. It allows you to go on and get a free user test of your website. [00:07:17] Jon MacDonald: I think you can actually run up to three a month. You can do different pages, things of that sort if you want, and it will get an actual consumer on your website, and you'll be able to see their screen while they're clicking around, and it records their audio, and it asks them to complete a few tasks and give their initial opinions of your site. [00:07:39] Jon MacDonald: Now you can do more deep user testing if you want in the end, but Peek is a great way to get in and get an initial pass of what consumers think about your site and what that will help you do is really optimize the content. It will, it really opens a lot of eyes. One of the things we do for brands we work with is our strategy team runs pretty extensive user testing as part of our initial auditing. [00:08:03] Jon MacDonald: And when we put that end user testing video clips together, we go through and we take all of the relevant clips out of this testing, and we typically do two to three hours of testing in the end, and we put together maybe a 15 20 minute clip of all of the different clips together. [00:08:21] Jon MacDonald: Interesting points we found and what's what's really helpful is that we find that marketing teams and high level executives will resonate because they're, the message that's coming through in that video is of one of their consumers who's struggling to find the information that they're looking for and they keep seeing the story play out over and over in these video clips and then they realize, I see, the consumer is actually looking for content X and all we're giving them is content Y. [00:08:49] Jon MacDonald: There's no wonder why we're only getting less than 1 percent of people to convert on our site. [00:08:54] Robert Plank: That's some really great advice, and I think that both of those Tools combine as you mentioned it sounds pretty crazy because I've heard of heat mapping before and that's one of those things We're like I did it a few years ago and play it around and and forgot about it But I've seen heat mapping as far as this thing where you know Someone goes to a site and it shows where their mouse move what they clicked on where they scroll what pages they went on but the, and then what's really great about kind of the sort of detour you took with us is that usually when people say things about, website data or you have to collect data, I'm always thinking like, in terms of either like you said, a Google analytics or a heat map, right? [00:09:29] Robert Plank: Just like , oh what are the numbers? Or what are the paths, or what's the percentages? But then this this site peak. usertesting. com. I pulled it up as you were explaining it. And this is a super amazing service or a tool here where if I'm understanding this right, you can say, here's my website, here's this web page, and then and then this service will send a five minute video of a real life person, like not even a robot, but like a real human being going to your site clicking on your site. [00:09:58] Robert Plank: And and it sounds like by combining these two things. We can get like a really good like a really good sort of report of what's happening. And it sounds like a near the end there, what you were describing is when you cut that video together, it's like when it comes time to show the decision maker or the owner or whoever, what changes to be made what changes are to be made, you can say here's the heat map and that's good. [00:10:20] Robert Plank: But then based on the heat map here is that actually shown in the sort of user testing. So am I hearing all of that correctly? [00:10:27] Jon MacDonald: That's exactly correct. Yes. [00:10:29] Robert Plank: Cool, and you get the the heat map figured out, and you get the user testing figured out, and can you walk us through maybe like a case study or one of your clients where maybe someone came to you and they were unhappy with the website and you ran some of these tools and worked some of your magic and changed things up for them? [00:10:46] Jon MacDonald: Sure. There's a pretty good example of a a floral company out of the East Coast. They were called Diane James Home, and they sell faux floral arrangements. When we first started working with them, the conversion rate was pretty low. And they came to us because they didn't understand why people weren't buying off of their website, but they were getting a lot of traffic and the conversion rate was just super low. [00:11:12] Jon MacDonald: So we did our auditing and looked at all of the content and also the user testing, the things we just spoke about. And the heatmaps and scrollmaps and everything showed that people were actually looking at all the content. And one of the things to when you're doing heat mapping is specifically when it shows you where people's mouse cursor has been hovering on your website. [00:11:36] Jon MacDonald: And one of the tricks out of heat mapping is that most people don't realize they do this, but as they're reading a website, they're actually reading. reading with their cursor and their cursor is tracking as they read and view on a page. So what we can see is that the more red or the more engaged a certain area is on a heat map means that people are looking in at that content more. [00:11:58] Jon MacDonald: And so what we found was a lot of people were looking at the products but then they're hovering over the price. And we thought man that's interesting faux floral arrangements that are meant to last forever are all handmade in the U. S. run a higher price point. An average product for this company is about 500 for a floral arrangement. [00:12:18] Jon MacDonald: But if you think about it in terms of the value, Those floor arrangements are actually relatively inexpensive. They last a lifetime as opposed to going out every week and spending 50 buying a bouquet of flowers. Whenever you want fresh flowers in your house. And they look very real. So what we found was that the data on the heat map showed us that people were engaging with the price. [00:12:41] Jon MacDonald: That's an indicator to us that they're having a problem with the price or they're trying to understand the price. So when we did user testing. What we actually found was that everybody's first initial reaction is they'd look through and say, wow, these are really beautiful. These look like great floral arrangements. [00:12:58] Jon MacDonald: And they'd get to the price of, whoa, 500 for a bouquet of flowers. I can go get them at my store for less than 50 bucks. What people weren't connecting the dots was that these were faux floral arrangements. And these weren't live flowers, so everybody was coming to the site seeing the beautiful pictures that looked really nice and full, beautiful live flower arrangements, but they were initially getting price anchoring effect, which meant that they were seeing this 500 price and saying, Oh, wow, this is too expensive. [00:13:29] Jon MacDonald: And then they'd leave. Because they didn't understand that the value that was being provided. And we found that out through user testing. So what we did is as we went through the site, we made it more prevalent that there was that these were faux flower arrangements. And what we did is took that and ran with it and did a bunch of AB or multivariate testing with different language and putting it in different places on the page, on the homepage, also in category and product detail pages, all the way down to even doing a test of doing a time lapse photography of a live floral arrangement that was made to look exactly like one of the faux floral arrangements and put them side by side into a 30 second video clip where you would see over a week the live floral arrangement died with the Faux flower arrangements still looked beautiful. [00:14:21] Jon MacDonald: And immediately they saw about a 35 percent gain in their conversion rates and their revenues went up over 50%. [00:14:29] Robert Plank: Pretty dang crazy. And and so that's super cool how you look at the heat map and just based on the fact that it seemed like people were getting almost all the way there and getting stuck on the price and you change those things up and emphasize that these were faux flowers and emphasize. [00:14:44] Robert Plank: The value in it and that, buying this one time is the equivalent of, like you said, buying like a lifetime of the same flowers. And so when you looked at those heat map results and you saw a lot of sort of that hovering over the price, how did you come to that conclusion? If someone's hovering over the price, how did you know to emphasize the faux flower stuff and not play around with like extra text or like a discount or anything, any other alternatives? [00:15:10] Jon MacDonald: Yeah discounting is always the final approach, right? It's really easy to get more conversions by lowering your price or offering a discount. So that's usually something that we won't do unless everything else fails. In fact, I don't, I think our, my team would say that we've never suggested discounts because that means we failed at our job. [00:15:30] Jon MacDonald: So we always want to figure out what's the barrier for the consumer. And what we found was through that user testing, we our strategy team put together tasks for consumers to do on the site. And one of the tasks was to find a floral arrangement that they liked and explain why they liked it, and then add it to their cart and give us their first reaction. [00:15:54] Jon MacDonald: And the first reaction was always, Whoa, this is 500. 500. And so it was the user testing that showed us and proved out that the price was an initial challenge. And usually when price is a challenge, that means value is a challenge. It's not being articulated correctly. And in this case, that's what we were able to do was to understand the value was not being articulated. [00:16:18] Jon MacDonald: And then we tested out different messaging to help convey that value. [00:16:22] Robert Plank: Cool. So as far as that testing out of the messaging, was the, this time lapse thing your first attempt or were there other sort of things that you tested before arriving at that conclusion? [00:16:34] Jon MacDonald: So that was something that requires a little more Of an effort, right? [00:16:40] Jon MacDonald: You have to set up the cameras, there's some cost involved. So we wanted to start with a few smaller items first. And so what we did first is we tested out different types of language that all meant faux or fake, right? We didn't want to say fake because fake is a low value word, meaning that most people see fake and they think cheap price, right? [00:17:02] Jon MacDonald: And these are really a 500 price point. They're very well put together beautiful materials. And so we wanted to find other words that might resonate. So then we did a multivariate test, which means we tried out, I think it was four or five different terms. And we saw which terms used throughout the site would convert the highest and the clear hands down winner based on statistically significant results. [00:17:28] Jon MacDonald: was faux. And so that's how we ended up settling on that. And once we knew that that messaging was leading to higher conversion rates, that's when we went back and said, okay, now how can we drive this point home more? And once we had the data to back up that this truly was the barrier, now it made sense to make a little bit more of an investment in the time lapse photography and things of that sort. [00:17:55] Robert Plank: That's pretty cool that it's just like you're just testing out these little micro problems or micro decisions to arrive at the decision you were going to make as opposed to just thinking of some stuff or just, redesigning something you're actually looking at the data, which I think is pretty interesting. [00:18:10] Robert Plank: And you've been mentioning that your clients involve are like e commerce people. And so because you do a lot of This sort of testing and data driven stuff. Am I right to assume that you only work with clients who have a lot of traffic to their e commerce sites, or do you work with any e commerce sites that are new? [00:18:28] Jon MacDonald: We typically work with more established brands. However there is, you can do ABR multivariate testing on a smaller traffic site. So the cutoff for us typically is about 15, 000 visitors a month. As a minimum, however, if you're have below that there are different types of testing you could be doing on your site. [00:18:51] Jon MacDonald: And some of those tests we typically would recommend doing larger tests. So that way you have less traffic, but you're testing out larger initiatives. So you could be doing just a split test. The split test is where you drive half your traffic to one page and half your traffic to another. And they could be completely different redesigns of that page. [00:19:13] Jon MacDonald: to see which performs better. And that's going to be, a full redesign of a page and combine testing two different variations of that same page is a pretty big test. If you're looking to do like a multivariate test or typically what people would think about as AB testing in that sense, you're testing out maybe different headlines, adding a small piece of content, removing content, changing photography, or, buttons, things of that sort. [00:19:41] Jon MacDonald: Or maybe even just changing up the navigation a little bit. But if you have low traffic, it would take you a very long time to get a statistically significant winner of those tests. And you would be stuck in testing for a very long time to get any results that would make a meaningful difference. [00:19:58] Jon MacDonald: What we often recommend if you're, if you have lower traffic is to focus on large ideas, large tests. Because those are going to prove out for you a lot sooner than if you try to do a whole bunch of small tests. [00:20:13] Robert Plank: That's super great advice. So if the traffic is less than 15 visitors a month then just do those like an A to B split test testing like a different headline or some big crazy idea that way you can see for sure if one is a clear winner, that makes perfect sense to me. [00:20:28] Robert Plank: And so when when you work with your clients, do you, are you limited to clients on certain platforms? Do you require that someone coming to you is hosted with WooCommerce or Shopify or something like that? Or do you work with anybody? [00:20:41] Jon MacDonald: Our methodology works with any platform. [00:20:44] Jon MacDonald: We're very platform agnostic. And actually, our tool set, we put a small snippet of JavaScript on our client's sites, and the end consumer has no idea they're being opted into these tests. And they just see a normal website with the alternate content as we're testing it out. And they don't know whether they're getting grouped into, test A, B, C, D, etc. [00:21:08] Jon MacDonald: We can do this on any platform, and we can make changes to, through our code, we can make changes to any site regardless of what platform it's on. [00:21:18] Robert Plank: Super great. And along those lines of someone people who are like listening to this, if they're coming your way if they want to be sure that they are an ideal fit for you, can you tell us about what budget or what sort of timeframe or what sort of project scope people are dealing with when they come to you? [00:21:35] Robert Plank: Is it usually like a few weeks or what sort of that process and timeframe and budget like? [00:21:40] Jon MacDonald: Yeah, great question. So the majority of our customers are on what we call our conversion growth program. The conversion growth program is ongoing month to month testing solution. [00:21:52] Jon MacDonald: And what I mean by that is that, conversion rate optimization is not a one, there's not one thing you're going to do to your site and it's just going to double your conversions overnight. Really you have to think about it like. I don't know interest in a savings account, right? It's gonna compound over time and continue to grow. [00:22:15] Jon MacDonald: So the idea really here is that you should be making small changes to your site at all time based on data that are compounding, they're continually growing your conversions. And once you have a winning test, You can move on and try something else. And so you just keep testing different areas of your site, different content, until you just continue to grow your conversion rate over time. [00:22:40] Jon MacDonald: I like to set the expectation that with our clients, they should be thinking that they need about at least six months on our conversion growth program before they're going to see really significant results. And the reasoning behind that is, is that if we're truly doing multivariate testing correctly we're going to be testing different areas of the site and each month we're learning something new and we're incorporating that change into the site and we're moving on to another area and continually improving the site. [00:23:11] Jon MacDonald: And it takes about six months of doing that cycle before you see significant results on your site. Our clients are typically with us on that conversion growth program, 12 to 18 months on average. And they generally we see on average about a 9 to 1 return on their spend with us. So for every dollar a client 9 back in additional sales. [00:23:32] Jon MacDonald: through conversions. So, our average client on the conversion growth program is about, spends about 10, 000 to 15, 000 a month with us. Now those scores, that's for large brands. We also do have other opportunities and services for smaller brands as well, where we can just set up A B or multivariate testing plan. [00:23:54] Jon MacDonald: We can just do an assessment of the site in different areas, or we can even do a full audit of a site conversion audit that would show collect, help you collect all the data. Analyze all that data, pull the insights out of that data and tell you what's wrong with the site and how we think you should fix it and put together a multivariate testing roadmap and plan for what should be done over the following 6 to 12 months. [00:24:20] Jon MacDonald: Now, we do have clients who take that audit and information and go run the testing plans themselves. And that's great for smaller brands who want to know, have some direction and know what to do and pull on our expertise to get started. And and that's where that fits in for brands who are, doing maybe 5 million a year in e commerce sales. [00:24:42] Jon MacDonald: That's where they typically will start coming to us and have us do everything for them. [00:24:47] Robert Plank: Super great. So it sounds like people can either get their toe in the water and get that assessment, get that audit, and then either see where the problem is and then either take that to their own team or then have you handle that. [00:24:59] Robert Plank: And I really liked that your whole concept of the monthly conversion program, the conversion growth program, sorry because that way people can just see month to month how things are going. And it's really great because it's, I don't know, like when I when I heard about your agency and this whole idea of, doing all the testing and seeing the before and the after what at first popped into my mind was like, Oh like they're going to take, 50 grand or a hundred grand one time and come back in a week or two when things are changed. [00:25:25] Robert Plank: But this is really great how it's this monthly ongoing process and like you said, they're like either you can like work on the front page or work on other areas of the site, or, if they're an e commerce brand, they're always. Bringing in new inventory and all kinds of things. [00:25:39] Robert Plank: It makes perfect sense that you had your tests from before and you have certain assumptions, but if they're piling in, new content and new items in that inventory, it makes sense how you'd want to split test that as well. So really a great idea had really great solutions as far as. [00:25:55] Robert Plank: That sort of ongoing testing and tracking and all that fun stuff. And I think that, this is a really amazing thing because you hear about like SEO agencies and they'll set up a website for you and that's okay. But then this whole idea of, split testing and multivariate testing and looking at all the data, it's very geeky, right? [00:26:11] Robert Plank: And I think that a lot of people who are even geeky enough to do web design or do web programming or even the e commerce stuff. Some of them don't want to go as far into the numbers as the, like the testing and the heat maps and the user's testing and all that sort of stuff. And so I really like how there's a sort of this very important and needed and custom solution for that area of things as far as like the testing and the improvement and all that stuff. [00:26:35] Robert Plank: And I don't want to keep you too long here, Mr. John, but if people are listening to our conversation here and they like these things you've thrown out about How your thought process as far as seeing where the problem is and seeing what things could be done and they want to reach out and they want to see what kind of things that you and your team can do for them. [00:26:54] Robert Plank: Where should they go? Is, should it be just the front page of the good. com or is there a specific place on the good where you want them to click and reach out to you? [00:27:01] Jon MacDonald: Yeah, so thegood. com is going to be the best place to learn a lot more about the company, see some case studies and video testimonials from our clients, learn more about exactly what we do. [00:27:13] Jon MacDonald: In addition to that at the top right of every single page on the site is a button that says score your site. We do offer a free, what we call, stuck score. It's a evaluation that takes you about 15 minutes to go through and address the questions that are posed. Once you answer those questions, if you do there's a complimentary score that is given to your site. [00:27:37] Jon MacDonald: And also, you can schedule some time to review scorecards and a report based on a review of Your answers and your site. And that's something we offer complimentary for qualified brands. So if a brand is interested anybody can go and get their score, but then we'll schedule a half hour, 45 minutes to review that information and provide some insights off of it for qualified brands as well. [00:28:04] Robert Plank: Super great. So everyone should go there right now. That's the good. com. That's T H E G O D. com. And when you go there on every page at the top there's that score your site button. So fill it out figure out your stuck score. And then once you do that, you'll be able to schedule time with John and his team to improve those things. [00:28:24] Robert Plank: And so if you have an e commerce site and you're just always wondering Could it be converting better? Am I losing too many visitors? Is the navigation confusing? Is there too much on the page? Not enough? Guessing is going to drive you crazy and guessing is just a shot in the dark. [00:28:39] Robert Plank: It makes a lot more sense for John and his team at the good to do some of that tracking, some of that crazy egg or hot jar heat. mapping and a click mapping and then also that user testing and also the multivariate testing so that way they can just look at what everyone coming to your site does and feels and where they get stuck and all those important things and then you can make logical decisions from there as opposed to just throwing it all out and recreating it every couple of months that I imagine some struggling brands do. [00:29:10] Robert Plank: So don't be a struggling brand. Instead do things, Make those decisions in a smart way based on the data. And so you should go right now to the good. com and click on score your site and tell that team at the good all about your e commerce site so that you can get things corrected. And you can have a lot of fun by making a lot more money and scaling your business. [00:29:31] Robert Plank: So I want to So much, Mr. John, for stopping by the show today and telling us about your agency, telling us about what it is that you guys do very well and giving us just a ton of really great takeaways for us to maybe whet our appetite or to try out some of these tools on our own. And then once we see that we can make a little change. [00:29:50] Robert Plank: From our own efforts, then maybe we can once if a little bit on our own makes a big deal, we can hand it over to a team that really knows what they're doing over at the good, and they can really give us some really amazing results. So I want to thank you for stopping by and sharing all that stuff today. [00:30:04] Jon MacDonald: Thank you so much for having me, Robert. I really appreciate it. [00:30:07] Robert Plank: Please take a second to rate and subscribe to the Robert Plank Show in the iTunes store. It's free. Robert plank.com/itunes.