Drive and Convert

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

Ryan:
Well, hello, Jon. Excited to connect today because we're going to talk about something that I would consider bigger than CRO or maybe it's a topic that encapsulates CRO, but it's a broader topic that I don't think I've ever heard about before. So if I've not heard about it, chances are a lot of other people haven't either.

Jon:
Okay. Well, that's great. I'm excited to talk about it then.

Ryan:
Yeah. So we do have probably, to a degree, an unproductive emphasis on conversion rates in our day-to-day within e-commerce. I think we oversimplify it when I'm talking about math equations on traffic, conversions, retention, profit. It's yeah, just increase your conversion rate. It's really simple, right? It's important and do it, but it's easy to do, and I am raising my hand as somebody that's been guilty of this, but getting focused too closely on just certain metrics and getting too deep inside the jar that I can't read the label correctly, to put it in one of your metaphors, but it likely leaves money on the table.
Back in the day, it was people looking at bounce rates, like, "Ah, bounce rate is the end all be all. If they can't stay on your site, they can't transact." Okay, well, we've hopefully gone beyond that and we don't focus as much on bounce rates, but you've been talking a lot about this term digital experience optimization, and not as much as I would say, at least reading some of your content recently and your LinkedIn posts, not as much about conversion rate optimization, but you're a CRO company. So why are we taking it into more a digital, what are we calling it, a DXO?

Jon:
DXO, yeah. Look, I've been saying this for the past few months that CRO is out and DXO is in. The reality is we have been a conversion optimization firm for over a decade, and that's typically the industry you would know, but I promise that websites and apps won't reach their full potential under the current industry expectations and the implementations of conversion rate optimization. So I'm here today, and I've been on the soapbox for a little bit, but you're right, we haven't really talked about it. I'm here to propose a better solution, and that's DXO or digital experience optimization.
This evolved approach is really just bringing together all the diverse disciplines and the tactics that are needed to build a better digital journey, not just focus on conversions, but really re-centering the focus on what matters most, and that is the customer.

Ryan:
I like it. So we're not going to focus as much just on the actual site itself and conversion rates for conversion rates' sake, but we're going to say, what are they trying to accomplish? Who's the person or people that we need this site to serve?

Jon:
Yes.

Ryan:
I like it.

Jon:
And you may have noticed the trend leading up to this with Behind The Click, my last book, which is all about the why you're doing different tactics and the psychology behind these folks who are visiting your site or using your app. The reason that I wrote that book was a lead in to this. I had noticed in the industry that everybody's now focusing on conversion. It's the hot topic of the past year, year and a half, ever since COVID, right? Reality, e-commerce had a boom in COVID, everybody wanted to focus on conversion, and then when numbers started dipping post-COVID, they were like, "Oh, we better focus on conversion." They doubled down on it, and ad costs and customer acquisition costs are so high. Everybody's focused on conversion right now, and I really think a lot of folks are missing the point.
Now, it also really is creating a whole bunch of issues for brands who shouldn't be focused just on conversion. Now, I agree, everybody wants conversion on their site, but there are brands who, they're not a good candidate for conversion optimization. They don't have enough traffic. They don't have enough conversions happening already. They don't have the resources, the budget to put into conversion optimization.
So as I started looking at all of this, I realized that that singular focus on conversion is really hurting a lot of brands more than it's helping, and they need to be focusing on that entire digital experience and optimizing that. So CRO was just a subset of that focusing on conversion, but there's way more to the picture.

Ryan:
Yeah, because we look at the market of e-comm brands, the vast majority of them are not at a size that are going to pay for true CRO. They don't have the data. It doesn't make sense to say, "Yeah, let's go do a bunch of user testing and do all these A-B tests." When you have, let's say, 1,000 visitors a month, that's just not there. So you're saying that DXO can be a solution that can work for every company, no matter your size and where you're at, you can still leverage DXO and improve the experience of the consumer. So what's the differences we're seeing? If we're seeing that CRO is kind of a subset, transparently, what am I going to be able to explain to somebody like, "Oh, you need DXO"?

Jon:
So DXO is really the process of making meaningful changes to your website or app that meet the needs or meet the needs better of your users and your business, and this is achieved through stuff that you might have heard me talk a lot about here, but data analysis, research, strategy. Experimentation is part of that, right? But DXO is really a foundational approach that involves looking at a digital journey as a whole, and not just how customers engage with you, but why they make different decisions. Again, going back to the book, Behind The Click, and talking about the why, it analyzes behaviors from the moment they enter your app all the way through post-conversion.
So my point of view on this is conversion optimization is just too small of a lens. DXO is bigger than, I don't know, tweaking colors. Maybe it's just a little bit of copy, some images on your website or app. Now, look, digital experience optimization does improve the look and feel of your digital product or site, but it can also change how you think about and address your customers, improve your culture of experimentation in your business, skyrocket buy-in from stakeholders, and using data to make more informed decisions.
So I think to summarize that, put it more simply, digital experience optimization, it crafts comprehensive user-centered journeys. It address the needs of the consumer at every single stage that they would take of that journey.

Ryan:
Yeah. So when you're talking about journeys, I visualize this crazy roadmap almost of like, "Hey, all these places, they enter the site and then they go here," and I visualize a thing that used to be awesome in Google Analytics, the universal one, and then figure out, "Oh, is that the digital journey we're mapping or is this more about finding personas and understanding people?" How can I visualize this better, I guess, in my head when you're talking journeys to what you mean about the consumers on the site?

Jon:
Well, and that's how I broke it down in the book to have four different parts of that. So there's four specific areas that consumers are looking at, and I think it's really interesting because the first is that discovery phase. This is where consumers are understanding they have a problem, they're doing some research. Maybe they see your ad or they find you on Google or get a referral. Then that second phase is information gathering. This is where consumers are really going to jump in and say, "Can you as a brand solve my specific pain or need?" They might have 100 tabs open with your competitors and products-

Ryan:
Or you're Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
Or you're just, "Let's use the first thing that comes along." Only after they've done all of that do they start making a decision and start to actually think about conversion and buying. Then there's the whole post-purchase phase. What happens after somebody purchases? Are they going to regret that purchase? Are they going to tell other people? The challenge with all of this is that conversion rate optimization is defined as singularly that process that increases percentage of users who performed a desired action or buy off of your website.
So out of those four, you're really only getting a subset of one of those four steps that people are going through. You're not even getting one-fourth. You're actually getting less than that because that step has multiple things that they're going through. They're information gathering, they're starting to really make a decision, and then they convert. So it's one action out of this entire journey.
I think that that's really the challenge is because most people when they hear conversion optimization, they immediately go to, "This is A-B testing." They immediately go to, "Oh, well, I'm going to find ways to alter my site through A-B testing that are going to tell me how to get people to convert at a higher rate," and that's all they focus on. You often hear something like conversion rate optimization program and a testing program used interchangeably, and that's why because it is only testing is the reality. We've always done more than that at The Good, but we've never really talked about all these other things that we do because the clients that came to us always wanted testing. That was what they knew. So we're trying to educate folks on what the entire journey looks like.
So when compared to DXO, CRO is actually very narrow and very limiting, and I think we need to get away from that. In fact, I think this might get me in some hot water. I know you love your hot takes, but I think the reality is I'm tempted to go as far as to advocate that conversion rate optimization, as it's currently defined and understood by the industry, should not exist anymore. We should simply remove it from our vocabulary, and I say this as the founder of one of the industry's first conversion rate optimization firms. So if I'm moving on from this and leaving a decade of history plus behind, it's not for nothing. This is something that we need to be doing as an industry.

Ryan:
Damn. I'd say that's a pretty big comment coming from the CRO brain that I would say dominates quite a bit. So I mean-

Jon:
The DXO brain.

Ryan:
Yes, the DXO brain. Now, if I take a step back personally though and start thinking about my digital journeys now, I would say that the DXO would go even beyond the website, and I would think that your social channels where you're higher up the funnel, you've got to be probably considering the experience there in addition to the website because, I mean, the reality is my decision to buy often happens before I even get to the website, and at that point, the website can only screw it up by not having a normal checkout process. If you just put me on a Volusion site maybe that's 20 years old, you might not get me, but other than that, I saw this thing on social, my friend said it to me, said I had to have it, I'm like, "All right. Yeah, I definitely need to have that." My wife buys things for our new pool this summer that I don't know how she got to that site, but it's like, "Yeah, you're buying." "Okay. Great," but that is, I mean, I don't know if CRO, I mean, as a CRO founder, have you ever talked about social profiles and the actual CRO process? I mean, is that something completely out of left field and I'm crazy?

Jon:
You're not crazy, first of all, which I'm sure you appreciate hearing, but I think-

Ryan:
I got one. I'm going to take ... I mean, you're going to meet my wife later today.

Jon:
Love it. The reality is that happens in that discovery phase. That is the first phase. Now, I'm not suggesting that The Good is going to become a social ad company, but I will say that the research that we do and the customer understanding should filter back up to what is driving the traffic because there needs to be a connection between what promises are made in that traffic generation technique, whether it be social or ads or whatever it might, videos, whatever it is that somebody saw, and when they get to your site, there needs to be a thread there. If that thread's not there, they're probably going to be confused and leave because, again, they're doing that discovery of, "Well, what is the pain point I really have and are there solutions for this out there?" And then they come across the search results that it may have 10 different options, and then they start going into information gathering mode.

Ryan:
Got it. Okay.

Jon:
So you do have to have the social or ads or video marketing, whatever you're doing needs to have a thread through it to the site and what you talk about. Now, DXO can focus on the site. In fact, it does improve the look and feel of your website. It goes beyond these superficial changes, but it incorporates user feedback and behavioral data to drive decisions. So that's where a site might look good, but also work well, and that's something that ... I like to think of this as it's a great way to build those hard-to-measure qualities like trustworthiness, reliability, and maybe safety that your customers really need and the things that they're looking for each of those steps in the journey, but off of the site, it also helps you to prioritize your ideas and improvements you want to make.
So you probably have hundreds of ideas you want to try, but each of those change comes with a cost and resourcing, workforce, time, money. So how do you choose which ones you should do? What's worth exploring? So DXO is really meant to help you kind of zero in on those ideas that are more likely to move the needle. So that might not be just on site. Same thing. It will help you form a deeper understanding of your customers. It's going to give you that more profound comprehension of your customer's beliefs, their preferences, what their needs are, and of course, all of that's going to help you convert better, but it also is going to help you to have more relevant ads in the end.
It can also help you create a culture of user-centered and data-driven decision making. It's no secret that, I don't know, data-backed decisions are better than gut feelings, and some may argue that, but as a computer science and just general science believer, I think probably data is the way to go, but a strong DXO program is going to use real-world data from your ideal audience to guide that decision making, and that's not something you just would use on your website, although this all does get applied. I mean, where The Good comes in is we are experts at taking all this information and applying it to your website or app.
Lastly, you really can save time and resources by validating your design decisions before you do them. So it enables you to validate or maybe even invalidate data and understand what you should implement before you do it. What are customers going to want and how do they react? So you're not wasting money digging a hole that you have to fill right back up. Unfortunately, CRO likes to say they validate decisions, but really, what they're validating is, will this make somebody take an action? And that's all that CRO does. This is much more holistic than that.

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

Ryan:
So as somebody that has lots of ideas that get shot down by my significant other before they get off the ground, walk me through how DXO could actually practically help me prioritize an idea. How would that realistically work? Like, "I think we should do this." "Well, DXO says that's a bad idea, but you should try this version." How does that play out?

Jon:
Yeah, maybe that's the next book, How DXO Can Save Your Marriage. I think the reality there is, look, if you're going to measure the performance of your digital experience, it's a tall task, especially compared to just focusing on conversion rate and that singular metric, but DXO is going to set you off for more success as a whole. So there are five areas that we generally want to look at at The Good to understand if we're being effective.
So the first is data foundations. Do you have these clear goals? Do you have ownership and maybe good data to form the backbone of any decisions that you're making? So first of all, is there data? Do you have the data that you need? So this immediately eliminates those SMB's e-comm sites, which is a huge problem with CRO. Those folks shouldn't be doing CRO to begin with. This immediately upfront just eliminates them because they don't have the right data.
The second is user-centered approach. So does your company have a comprehensive roadmap of what should be optimized based on what consumers are looking for? Not just what your CEO thinks you should do, right? It's really based on that data and that research. And then third is resourcing. Are you giving optimization the resources, the support, the adequate capabilities? Are you moving along at a decent pace? These are all questions you need to ask yourself if you're going to be successful.
Fourth is toolkit. Do you have the necessary tools for planning, for measurement, analytics, et cetera, and even running tests. It's true you do need tools to run tests, not just A-B tests. You could do user tests, et cetera. You need all the right tools to do that. And then the last is the biggest, I think, because once you get this, you've kind of unlocked the ability to level up everything I just mentioned even more.
So I put this last on the list because if you've knocked out the other four, at least enough to prove it out, you'll get the fifth one, which is impact and buy-in. So you'll increase the relevance of data-backed decisions, and you'll have stakeholders utilizing that data and championing it throughout the company, which will then feed back in to let you collect more data, to take in more user-centered approaches, to have more resources to do all of this, to get the right toolkits. You can see how this all kind of feeds itself over time, and it's not something that a small e-comm site can do.

Ryan:
So are you saying that small e-comm sites can't do DXO or they have to use DXO because they can't do CRO?

Jon:
Well, I'm saying that the reality is they often don't have the resources to be able to optimize the entire digital journey, and that's why they think CRO is going to solve their problems like, "Let's just focus on the conversion." The problem is they try to do that, but then they don't have the right data. So it's kind of this weird catch 22. What I recommend they do, and this is something you've heard me say for years now, Ryan, is talk to your consumers. That's what you need to do. That's the first step. Don't worry about converting them yet. Talk to them and then alter your site based on what you learn. If you just do that, you probably won't need conversion optimization for quite some time.

Ryan:
So you would be throwing that in the bucket of DXO like, "Hey, you're actually just going to talk to your customers because you're going to get better data from them than you would measuring the conversion rate of 200 visitors." Got it. That makes a lot more sense.

Jon:
Right, and you're now starting to take a user-centered approach. You're going to go out and use that data to help you get more resources. Then eventually, you'll be able to get the toolkits and you'll have that buy-in from your team.

Ryan:
I love it. I think that makes a lot of sense because you don't have to be small to talk to your customers either. I mean, big companies can and should be doing it. It's like they're paying your bills and they're keeping your site going and keeping your employees employed. Just talk to them. They're not scary.

Jon:
They are the real boss.

Ryan:
They are. I think this is really cool. I'm excited to see how this plays out in the market too when there's a new term, DXO. Did you trademark it? Is that why we're changing?

Jon:
Well, we had our conversion growth program before. We now have the DXO program, which is something we've been working on for almost two years to revise our service offering, to broaden it a little bit to where it incorporates all of these things that need to be part of it, and that is really proving beneficial. The clients that we've been doing this with for the past four to six months are really finding that there's a lot of value here for them that's not just in measuring that singular metric, and that makes me happy because, again, as a mission of removing all the bad online experiences until only the good remain, well, I think if we just focus on the conversion, we're missing that point.

Ryan:
No, I love it. As an advocate for small brands growing and getting the opportunities that big brands do, like, hey, I love working with big brands. We have a lot of really big cool ones that it's fun to work with, but I also like, as the entrepreneur in me, I want all business owners that are small to have a shot at getting big. I think this idea of your DXO process for all size businesses is awesome. Excited for this.

Jon:
Thank you.

Ryan:
So anybody can do DXO, you just got to take the steps. Listen to Jon. I assume you have more content on the website about DXO if somebody wants to dig in a little deeper.

Jon:
Yeah. I mean, I think that there's a couple of ways to do that. First is my last book, Opting Into Optimization is a great lead into this because writing that book is kind of what helped me realize there needed to be a shift here, and then reading Behind the Click, of course, will help you to take that a step further, but even just following what we're doing at The Good, signing up for our insight emails. We call them The Good Question now. Each week, we're answering a question that somebody submits and diving really deep on it. So all helpful content. We don't sell through that content. It's never a sales pitch. It's more of a how can we help you with this, and so that's a great educational tool. We have that encyclopedia of DXO, if you will, up on our site, 15 years worth of thinking. Go check it all out.

Ryan:
That's awesome. Thank you, Jon. Appreciate it, and yeah, go check out Jon's site If you haven't signed up for his newsletter and you're on episode, what is it, 110, you've skipped a few things. You got to get in there and catch back up. So subscribe to Jon's email list. It's great.

Jon:
Love it. All right, Ryan. Thank you. Appreciate it.

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