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 McDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan:
All right, Jon, here we sit at the beginning of 2023, recording a podcast where, in theory, anything is possible. The year looks like rainbows and unicorns to everybody. Our goals are all possible. Nothing has happened globally to ruin all of our plans, so it's great. I love this time of year. My goals all look really smart. All the things I say publicly sound like they're a great thing, it's going to happen. And guarantee, in March-

Jon:
I'm holding you to that.

Ryan:
... in March, all my predictions are a mess. So this year I'm not going to predict anything, it's just going to be, it is going to happen when it's going to happen. And maybe our year turns out normal, quote, unquote, "normal," whatever that is anymore.

Jon:
Mm-hmm. We'll find out.

Ryan:
But in that vein, you've come up with a really cool topic to talk about today that I'm excited for because you're going to give us all the answers that you no longer have to do CRO. It's awesome. You've got this wonderful list you've come up with about improving our converge rate and customer experience, and there's five things you can do. And then, we're done. I mean, we'll probably end the podcast after this.

Jon:
Yeah, hey, perfect. It only took us 70 shows to get there, but you know what? We're there and I appreciate it.

Ryan:
Yeah, it's awesome.

Jon:
Yeah, no, I love the sarcasm-

Ryan:
Yeah. So in reality, we are talking about five tests that Jon has seen over his experience. He's been doing this longer than most of you listening to this have probably been in e-commerce. And he's refined this down to get smaller sites that really can't do official CRO... I mean, if you're under the threshold of 50,000 visitors a month, you got to make different types of tests. So we've got five tests that you've outlined. How did you come up with these particular tests? I mean, you do hundreds. In fact, I was interviewing somebody yesterday that is a client of both of ours, and he said the first 20 tests your team came up with, 19 of them were successful and they implemented the changes.

Jon:
That's what I like to hear. I like those ones.

Ryan:
So I was like, okay, that was the first little bit of testing with this one client and you boiled all of your brain down to five tests. So I'm excited about this one. Tell me about how you came up with these ones or landed on these, I guess.

Jon:
Yeah. Well, look, I think that most e-commerce brands will tell you that it's a challenge to come up with the right areas for optimization. Whether you have 50,000 visitors a month or not, it's still a challenge. But after, as you said, I feel old, I've been doing this forever, but after, wow, 15 years now, I think, of doing this, we've identified patterns across a lot of our clients at the good. And so, I really think there are specific areas of e-commerce that when optimized, they consistently deliver results. And that's what we've seen. And so, I think there's a few tests that we run that have always had success just time and again.
And so, looking back at that, we really just analyzed our vault of optimization patterns and pulled five out that are our favorite data backtests and I wanted to share those because I think they help gather the right insights and increase conversions, and it works extremely well. So it's worth sharing. And these are five that we've seen work almost every time.

Ryan:
Got it. And to be clear, these are not change button colors, do this, it's actual, test this because we think it'll work, but you have to actually get some data?

Jon:
Well, always. And let's be clear as we dive into this, these are patterns we've seen work across lots of brands, but you should always test these ideas instead of just straight up implementing them. And that goes for anything I say, right? Whatever I say, it's not the gospel, it's not just automatically true. The reality here is what I'm sharing today is data-backed. We've run this across dozens of clients and these tests have worked. And that means that, in general, it is a very good chance it's going to work for you too.
But would I just outright implement these? Probably not. Right. I would want you to test. Now, if you don't have enough traffic to run true A/B testing, there are other ways you can test these ideas. Just launch one for a month, see how it works, and then compare month over month. All right?
And really, what you should be doing here is implementing these ideas and setting up annotations in Google Analytics because if you can annotate when you've done this and implemented a test, you're able then to look back and compare between date ranges. So I know annotations are a favorite of yours.

Ryan:
Oh yeah.

Jon:
Always where we start with new clients. Right. It's like you need to be annotating if you're not already because you're going to thank yourself in six months, 12 months. I mean, I was just saying earlier today before we started the recording that I'm like a goldfish, I can't remember what happened 10 minutes ago a lot of times. Right. I can't imagine a brand trying to figure out what campaign they sent, what change they made to their site a year from now, it's just unlikely to happen.

Ryan:
Yeah. And if you've never put an annotation in Analytics, pause the podcast right now, open your analytics. Right under the graph in the middle, as you look at the left on Acquisition, click on Acquisition. See the graph in the middle. There's a little dropdown arrow, it's small, click it and it'll open up the little annotation window. Put anything in, said, "Hey, listen to Jon and Ryan today," doesn't matter because it's just information for you in the future to look back to that.
I say it probably almost every day, that future self will thank present self for putting an annotation in. And when you're starting, you can't over annotate. I mean, as you start seeing it, you'll start to feel it come back and be like, "Okay, I probably didn't really need to see that it was sunny at two o'clock if I already put that it was sunny at eight o'clock." Probably. But Analytics allows it. Just put whatever you want in there you might want to remember.

Jon:
I mean, it depends what you're selling. If you're selling sunglasses and you want to know if it was sunny that day where you were selling them-

Ryan:
Oh yeah. I mean, it's-

Jon:
... you put that in there.

Ryan:
... awesome data. We're in a time period right now where there is a lot of turnover in our space, especially my space in the partner world where if your team may look different in a year, you need your next team to see what's happening now and what's important to the team now because if they're gone, that may go out the door with them. So gosh, if you get nothing out of this, you annotate, but there's probably better points coming from Jon. We know we have to-

Jon:
Well, that was test [inaudible 00:06:50] number zero-

Ryan:
Number zero-

Jon:
... which is-

Ryan:
Not annotating.

Jon:
... test annotating.

Ryan:
Now are these going to go in order from the most obvious, best one to do to, yeah, this one's the next one even more advanced, or is it like you're saving the punchline till the end, so everybody has to listen to the very end?

Jon:
Yeah, no, that would probably have been smart to do, but they're just five tests that I pulled out, not in any particular order.

Ryan:
Okay, great. Let's just kick it off then. Let's jump in. So what's the first one you're going to tell us about?

Jon:
Well, I call it quality tiles. All right. So the idea behind this test is that you want to replace your product tiles on the category page with quality tiles that really are just a word for featuring different brand messaging. So the idea behind this is, really, testing product tiles with different key messages in them.
So you have a grid on your category page and you might have five different pairs of shoes on that grid. Take one of those tiles, and now you have six tiles, so you're adding a new tile. And it talks about, maybe, your brand values or that you offer free shipping or you're teaching what the customers care about. And so, perhaps they're worried about the quality or the materials or where your products are made, sustainability, any of these brand qualities that you want to get across need to be communicated on a category page. Category page gets forgotten about so much. So it's a really good opportunity here.
And what I've done for each of these test ideas is talk about the test idea, why I love it, an example, and then why it works. So we'll do all four of those for each of these. So here's an example of quality tiles. So we've worked with a shoe brand called Beckett Simonon. Beckett Simonon relied really heavily on product images to decide whether people were going to purchase. And the reason behind that was because they have a quality shoe that they make. Every shoe's handmade, handstitched. And it became very difficult to communicate that they were more expensive because they were handmade, but consumers just didn't understand what the differentiation was, why it was so much more valuable to be able to pay more.
So our team hypothesized that focusing on the company's messaging through key... We did image-driven moments because these are images, they may have text in them, but that was the idea. We wanted to help users to understand the product's unique values. And one of the big ones for them is ethical responsibility. So they pay fair wages, they use sustainable materials, et cetera. So what we did is we A/B test different messaging on the category page. So for like variant one, we focused on their ethical responsibility practices. For Variant two, we focused on the company's enduring product quality.
And what we found was that the ethical responsibility test produced 5% higher conversion rate than a control which was doing nothing. So we could have done anything, any of these messages and seen a 5% higher, ethical responsibility showed the best. But the reality here was having quality tiles gave them a 5% higher conversion rate.

Ryan:
Interesting.

Jon:
That gave them a return on investment of 237% from running those tests.

Ryan:
So a couple questions on that then. So I guess, the ROI or the return on investment of 237, what is that an investment on? Is it on the CRO team that they paid? Like we're paying you X.

Jon:
On paying us.

Ryan:
Okay.

Jon:
Mm-hmm.

Ryan:
And then, just because that one change we did that one month, you're making this much. Okay, that's good. And then, you say A/B, but it's almost A/B/C because you're doing it against the no tile on there, right?

Jon:
Right. The control. That's typically called the control.

Ryan:
Okay.

Jon:
Right. So you have variance and then control.

Ryan:
Did both A and B increase-

Jon:
So control is generally doing nothing.

Ryan:
... the conversion rate?

Jon:
Yes.

Ryan:
Okay.

Jon:
Both variants increased the conversion rate. The ethical responsibility test did better, but they both increased the conversion rate.

Ryan:
Now, does it matter where it is on that category page? Does it need to be in the top row? Does it need to be on the right rail most often and that's kind of immaterial?

Jon:
It does not matter. What we actually did was have them randomly placed throughout because we did not want to have that be part of the test, so the best way to do that is insert randomization. So we had it up here, everything except for the first or last. So we took the number of tiles and we said, you can't be one or you can't be the last.

Ryan:
Got it. Interesting.

Jon:
Right.

Ryan:
Okay. Now, how easy is it, because I've had Shopify sites, I've worked with BigCommerce a lot, how easy is it to sub out a product on a category page or collection page and say, "I don't want a product there, I want this image that's not clickable there.

Jon:
In theme, it's actually pretty easy to do.

Ryan:
Okay.

Jon:
Now, this test was run on Shopify, so I can't speak to BigCommerce for Beckett Simonon, but I will say, we have run it on BigCommerce before and Woo Commerce and several others as well. But yes, it's fairly easy to-

Ryan:
So average Shopify site not plus can probably do this without investing a tremendous amount of money in a developer.

Jon:
Exactly. Yep.

Ryan:
Okay. That's good to know.

Jon:
And most of these tests are that way, right, because I would think that the idea behind any of these tests are you should be able to get a return on investment out of them. If it requires so much effort to build it, then you're not going to get a return because you'd have to invest so much, not only to just test it, but also to implement it.

Ryan:
That's sweet. Okay. So when you're doing the research, why did that one work? I can kind of understand conceptually. What did the data tell you?

Jon:
Well, I mean, from a conceptual standpoint, emphasizing the sustainability aligned with the Beckett Simonon values and connected the shoppers to the brand. So I know we just did an episode recently about brand versus not brand. What does that mean? How do you optimize? Why is brand first an issue? This is a good way to incorporate brand throughout the buying journey. So this is a good one to be thinking about with that.
Now, the reality is we found that other companies are going to offer high quality boots and handmade shoes, but those, they're not promoting that their suppliers care about the environment. So this was an edge that we found that a lot of their competition wasn't talking about. So what the test did is it taught the brand that consumers care about and to give consumers extra confidence to make a purchase. So really giving that confidence and kind of saying, "Hey, this is something that's going to be worth it from more than just a monetary standpoint for you."
So the reality is, consumers are going to linger on these category pages, and this is a way to get them to better understand. How many times have you looked at a category page as just a grid of products and you're looking through the products, you're going to cross paths with one of these tiles. So it's almost like you're guaranteeing this message is going to get seen. So there were things you can test out, your brand values, maybe your unique selling proposition, or even some type of special offers that you're doing, not discounts, offers.

Ryan:
Yeah. Just think about, instead of in the header or even in addition to that like, "Hey, I always have free shipping on orders," at the top, instead, maybe we have free shipping and free returns or 30-day returns, whatever that looks like. It seems pretty easy kind of on that point because I've seen that type of quality tile taken to a different level on Amazon. And obviously, I never advocate for people looking at competitors and thinking that it's right because competitors... Amazon is kind of a unique one in that we know they have a massive CRO team. So if Amazon is doing some tests and then you start to see that more and more and more, chances are that probably worked well, I'm starting to see a lot more, instead of product images on Amazon, I'm seeing quality tiles in the image carousel. So I'm looking at a product page, which is category, we're talking here, but on a product page, main product image here, hero image, then it goes into a quality tile, then another regular image, and then even another quality tile sometimes.

Jon:
Yeah, because that's the easiest place on Amazon for brands to incorporate this, right? And they know that messaging is going to get seen as people click through the photos. So in theory, it's the same principle. We have also run tests around putting quality tiles on product detail pages in the middle of those images. And we've had good results with that as well. I don't talk about that today. It's not one of my top five favorites, if you will, but I will say that it does work and works well.

Ryan:
Yeah, I think just categories get more traffic often.

Jon:
Well, and they're often overlooked, right? Where PDPs get a lot of love just because everyone thinks that's where the conversion is going to happen. But there's a big drop-off at the category page that should be addressed.

Announcer:
You're listening to Drive and Convert a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon McDonald, 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 paper 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:
Yep. Love it. Okay, so test two, what's that one?

Jon:
Categories in your navigation. So really, what we're suggesting here is to add popular product categories as items in your navigation.

Ryan:
So not dropdowns or dropdowns as well?

Jon:
Just as the top navigation items.

Ryan:
Oh, really?

Jon:
Mm-hmm. So there's almost always a way to test something in navigation and optimize it for better experience. I think that navigation is often one of those things that's overlooked. Can't tell you the number of times I see up-and-coming brands that have Home in the navigation. I think that's a huge issue. I just spoke to a brand today-

Ryan:
Wait, let me check my sites real quick.

Jon:
... doing over 2 million a year already, and they had Home, Men, Women, Shop and Clearance was their navigation. And I said, "So do I go to Men, Women, or Shop?" And they were like, "Well, you could do any of them. If you're a man, you can click on Shop or on Men." And I was like, "This is really confusing. Tell me where to go. So can I not buy if I click on Men? This tells me I can't buy, so why would I ever click on men? I'm just going to go to Shop and then you're making me choose Men or Women."
So the reality is navigation is just a huge opportunity in my opinion because so many brands are so close to their site, they just do what makes sense to them, not to a new [inaudible 00:18:17] customer. An easy way to think about this is to put categories front and center. This is going to reduce the friction and get people deeper into that sales funnel right off the bat.
So an example from this is that a client came to us with a menu listing items instead of categories. So they had similar to what I talked about, said like Shop, Connect, Discover, Rewards, all these things that aren't really shopping items, they're just... Only thing in there that seems shoppable is Shop. Right. And then, on top of that, the Shop dropdown lists product categories with labels like Collections and Themes. Again, not helpful. Right. So I'm going to Shop and then, I'm going to shop a collection or shop a theme? No, just drop me into those. So it really wasn't very clear to new visitors. And so, we had the opportunity to raise the awareness, the product catalog and surface those. So this is what we wanted to do.
So we tested adding top product categories into that top menu, top level menu. And the variant of this, so the control was their current nav, and then, we brought those categories up. It resulted in over $100,000 of revenue gains in that test alone, just in the time we were testing it. So there is money to be made by altering your navigation.

Ryan:
Mm-hmm. And you work with some big brands, but I mean 100,000 is still going to matter to even some big brands.

Jon:
Hey, that's a salary, right? I mean, for as big as some brands are, nobody should sneeze at 100,000, especially when, I guarantee you, they didn't pay us close to a hundred grand to run that test, so the return on that is massive.
Let's talk for a second about why that one works. It's really clear categorization that helps visitors easily find the product they want. And that's the key, to shorten that path from landing page to purchase decision. Nobody's upset about that. The brand wants that and the customer wants it, so why do we not do it more often?
And then, really, just test your original navigation as the control against the categories. And if you're unsure what categories to feature, just look at your Google Analytics, find your top categories in most visited pages and put those in the main navigation. I think, overall, and then I'll get off my soapbox about navigation, but I think overall, making an easy to navigate website is just reducing friction, and only thing you need to do on your site to increase sales is reduce friction. If you just do that, you can double your sales, so this is a big one for doing that.

Ryan:
Mm-hmm. And it's not about... I mean, because you also talk about simplifying navigation for a lot of brands too. There's some brands that go opposite and like, "We have 15 little links up there at the top," and that is not what you're advocating, just making all your categories at the top.

Jon:
So let's talk about that for a second. If you're going to do your top categories five to seven, that's what you want, five to seven.

Ryan:
That's all you should have on your top nav, right?

Jon:
Yes.

Ryan:
Five to seven.

Jon:
And it should only be shoppable items.

Ryan:
Yeah, people don't need the contact info at the top nav.

Jon:
No, too many things are in the navigation, this is an epidemic across the entire e-com world, that are not shoppable. And it's things that brands want to communicate. Consumers aren't asking for that information, they don't care about that information, brands want to push it in front of consumers. That's where it's a problem. You need to ask yourself for your main navigation as a brand, "Do my consumers want this or do I want to tell them about this?" And if you're trying to tell them about something, rewards is a good one.
Like a site I was talking to this morning, they had rewards in their navigation, I'm like, "Who's looking for rewards? I just want to find the right product for me. And you're already trying to tell me that I can get rewards. I'm not interested in rewards, I don't even know if you can solve my problem. Once I've bought from you, maybe that's the time to pitch rewards because it can help get me to come back." That is a customer lifetime value play, not an initial conversion play. And a customer, in order to increase customer lifetime value, you've got to get them to come back. Well, that means you have to also get them to convert once. So let's focus on getting that first conversion first.

Ryan:
When I think about where people land on the site based on who they are. Like if they're landing on the homepage, chances are they know about you already or they've been to your site before, now they're coming back to purchase something. So your homepage generally is not going to rank high for non-brand terms, generally speaking. And so, if they're going to go to the homepage, they're going to instantly try to navigate to where they want, and that navigation helps there.
The other high trafficked one for potential non-brand where they're trying to find you the first time is going to be a category where you've got that tile, but you've got breadcrumbs, potentially, from product pages that that nav is going to be so easy that it just says, "Hey, I landed on because I searched for purple widget." And then, I get to the category page of all the purple widgets and I'm like, "Oh, you've got a link right there that says pink ones." And I'm like, "I didn't know you had pink ones," but it's the top category, top seller for you. Let's go to pink.

Jon:
And this is also a great SEO play because if it's in your navigation, your main site navigation, you're telling Google, it's of higher importance. So it will help you get your category pages listed higher as well.

Ryan:
Dang, such easy ones so far. So, I'm guessing you're going to-

Jon:
None of these are hard. I will tell you, none of these are hard. And that's the beauty of them.

Ryan:
Yeah, it's like you're inside, "Look at the label on the wrong side, Jon. You got to get outside. Listen to this podcast. Make some easy changes."

Jon:
That's right.

Ryan:
All right.

Jon:
That's right.

Ryan:
Change three, you have called the Etsy test. So what does an Etsy test look like?

Jon:
Well, this could be as easily called the Amazon test, but in reality, we did some research on this, Etsy did this first and best before Amazon. So that's what we call it the Etsy test not the Amazon test. But the idea here is to feature similar products or "other customers have also viewed" items to inspire onsite comparison and decrease abandonment. Offering your customers alternatives keeps them interacting and engaging with your site instead of going to a competitor or back to Google to comparison shop. That's the goal here, how do you increase the stickiness of your site?
So many brands do this pretty horribly in the sense that they just let Shopify or BigCommerce algorithm choose the products, which it's really horrible at, by the way, there's no real logic behind it, it just randomly chooses products. So you want them to be relevant and there's some plugins that can help you with that.We can get into that in a minute.
But the reality here is Etsy, if you go to Etsy, you'll see that they display similar products above the fold, and that's a key too. Amazon usually has them below as well, but this encourages shoppers to stay on site, even if what they clicked on was not the product they needed or wanted. And that's the key here. Usually that's the biggest reason people abandon. They clicked on something from an ad, they got to the landing page and it wasn't what they wanted, so they immediately clicked that back arrow.
What they also did at Etsy is they add the product prices below the image. So if customers want to shop for better deals on similar products, maybe the one they're looking at, it's not within their budget, but a similar product might be, they're enticed to go down and click on that and keep their journey going on Etsy.
We looked at some stats around Etsy, they have an amazing time on site because you can just get lost in Etsy. It's all handmade goods-

Ryan:
Guilty-

Jon:
... it's all interesting stuff. Right. Yeah. You just end up getting lost on there shopping. That's fine turned, that's why you're doing it. It's not by chance, it's because Etsy wants you to stick around.

Ryan:
No, I mean, I advocate for this constantly without even knowing that you'd had some test data around it because we've seen ancillary data that backs this up without even trying to do CRO. But I know that all shopping traffic across the board, they're planning on a product page from Google Shopping or Bing Shopping. I don't care how many SKUs you have on your site, well, unless you have just one, over 50% of the time, they're not even going to buy the product they click on. Doesn't matter what else you're doing on the site. Higher SKU count, higher potential that that's not even in the cart. We did an analysis of 80,000 SKUs, spent a hundred grand a month on ads on shopping, 72% of their purchases from Google Shopping didn't even have the product they click on. It wasn't like a different size, it was school supplies and math, STEM stuff, unbelievable numbers. And it just gets more, the further more complex your product catalog gets.

Jon:
To play on that, this is really excellent for brands that are running a lot of Google Shopping ads. So that's where it really can fit in.

Ryan:
Well, we've seen, because we had a mutual partner years ago, Wendy, if you ever listen to this, your original company, you did a lot in the product suggestion space. And so, we did some tests by tagging analytics to see does their product bubble up better product results? Yes, it did. But even the standard, doesn't matter really what's in that little widget that shows like products or recommended products. So if you don't even have that, just put that on there and it'll help.

Jon:
You got to start somewhere.

Ryan:
Conversion rates increase three times once you get those widgets on there. Once they click it, they are shopping your site. So it's like the whole goal, get people to the site cheap with Google Shopping if you can, but get them to click on a recommended product and it's over, they're shopping your site, they're deep enough that they can't click back to Google and go shop Google again because the back button, they don't know how many times to click it, so they just keep shopping your site.

Jon:
Yep. There you go. Let them walk around the mall that is your site. Right?

Ryan:
Yep.

Jon:
So key things out of this that I love and why it works, really, need to make sure that they're relevant, in our opinion. Yes, having them at all is great, but relevant, it will take a big leap forward even.

Ryan:
For sure.

Jon:
In addition to that, show them above the fold. Too many brands put it at the very bottom of their PDP, it's the last thing, like a last ditch effort. I would say above the fold, if you want people to stay on and not abandon, that's where you're going to want it.

Ryan:
Mm-hmm. We even had a client, actually, I'm just pulling up their site on the side to see if they're still doing it on shopping traffic. They changed, but they went through a lot of... Oh, they don't even have products. Oh, they changed platforms it looks like. But there was a client in the gifting space, gift basket space. By the way, don't ever start one of those, it's the worst, they beat each other up, you lose lots of money to hopefully make it later.

Jon:
Seems like a logistical problem too.

Ryan:
Yeah. But what they did is they took product suggestions and put them at the very top. So it was like top nav, product suggestions, product on a product landing page so that we know you're buying something different than what you clicked on from Google Shopping, we want you to just find it right away. So it was all category related. So in their space, I think wine gift baskets were big. Or if you clicked on a sympathy gift basket, price points very dramatically, so it's very easy to say, "Hey, this one you clicked on was a hundred, here's one for 50, one for 75, one for 200." Worked amazing.

Jon:
That's great. Awesome. All right. Should we move on to number four?

Ryan:
Yeah. Number four. What we got?

Jon:
Instructional search. So this is really a pretty simple test idea. It's just testing a friendly instructional search prompt. And so, I love this because instructional search encourages intentional browsing, improves the user experience, and it does boost conversions. People who use search convert at the highest rate of all visitors on your site. You want to encourage people to use search. They are intentional buyers at that point. They know what they want, they're on your site looking for it, make it easy for them to do that.
Now, the goal behind this is less about the results of search, which also matter, but even just getting people to use it, that's the goal is how do we make it friendly and easy to use search by giving them some type of prompt?
So during research for one client, what we did was ran a bunch of user tests and session recordings like we usually do. But we found that customers were primarily navigating through that search bar. Great. That meant that there were a whole bunch of people there who were looking for particular, specific items. Right. But we also found that customers would only engage with select menu categories. So it was interesting. It was like, okay, so people primarily used a search bar, but when they don't, they're only clicking on one or two menu in categories. So that means the rest of the nav was getting ignored.
And it was really interesting because we hypothesized that adding microcopy and enhancing that search bar visibility would encourage everyone to use the search. And instead of people having to kind of hunt through the navigation to find the one or two categories that mattered, they'd be able to just go in and search instead.
So we put it to the test and we visually emphasized the search bar with a white background instead of a dark background. And we added language to the box that said, "Try search term." And what I mean by try search term was just pretty simple, try searching, enter a search term here. Right. It delivered over $3 million in revenue gains, $3 million just to encourage people to search more.

Ryan:
Are you just starting to take a share of revenue now? I mean, maybe that's a good business model for you based on the returns you're talking.

Jon:
If people would, I'd be all for it. As soon as that gets to the CFO's desk, it's like, "Nope, sorry. Moving on." The reality here though is that 59% of web visitors will use a search navigation and 15% would rather use the search than any other type of menu navigation.

Ryan:
Wow.

Jon:
So 59% will frequently use an internal search, and I think that that's really helpful. I mean, they know what they want. They're interested in a particular product, they want to know if you have it. So I think that the goal here, this is where a lot of brands say, "I want to increase my time on site." And I always say, "That should never be your goal. Your goal should be to convert people as quickly and easily as possible. And if that takes them two minutes, it takes them two minutes, that's great." But if you see someone on your site for 30 minutes and you're just like, "Oh, that's great. My time on site's really long." It's like, no, it's not. That's not a good goal. That means people are lost, they're confused, they're getting upset, they're opening another window and searching, you've made it complicated to do what they want to do.
So if you run this on your site, you could try just adding friendly microcopy to your search bar, maybe include a key product or category for inspiration. You could expose the search bar on mobile. That's always a big one. So many brands have a little magnifying glass and you have to click it to open search on mobile, and it just doesn't work well. I would also recommend trying a white or a light background on the search bar to make it pop off the page.

Ryan:
So different than the general background of the page already.

Jon:
Exactly. Exactly.

Ryan:
So all you're trying to do is draw eyeballs to it so they use it. Now, have you noticed much difference? Because I probably have five partners that all do site search. My point for most of my clients is just do something. But I know the default search on BigCommerce or Shopify's often not the best, but at least getting them to use it will help prove that, hey, it does something, now you can invest in a search tool maybe.

Jon:
Yes. And we could do a whole episode, and maybe we should, on improving your site search. At a high level, you want to look at your Google Analytics and see what are the most search terms, go search those yourself and see what the results are. Hopefully, you won't punch your screen, but a lot of brands probably do because the results are not great because they have not taken the time to tune those. And really, the best thing that Shopify can do is look at your product descriptions, so make sure that what the search terms are are in your product descriptions or your product titles, and that will really help them to get surfaced up appropriately. Now there's a whole bunch of plug-ins around site search, things of that sort of product search that can be helpful. Really, all of those plug-ins are helping you do is add metadata that can be searched. So you still have that manual work to do either way, but it can be helpful to have a tool kind of guide you through that.

Ryan:
All right, enhance people using site search. All right. Your final, the pinnacle of all of Jon's idea of... We might have already hit the pinnacle actually, but this is the last one in the podcast.

Jon:
It's going to be hard to top a $3 million gain.

Ryan:
It's going to be, but we can try. So this one, you've titled the buy box, which sounds super cool.

Jon:
Yeah.

Ryan:
So how do we test the buy box when we're not on Amazon?

Jon:
Well, every product detail page has a buy box. This is where you first come to a product detail page, it's typically the top right of that page. Really, what we're suggesting here is you dig into the content of that buy box area on a PDP to find areas for optimization. So you can test the buy box's layout, product descriptions, adding reviews. And I love this just because when you optimize that buy box, you improve how quickly and easily customers understand your product and make a purchase. As I just said earlier, you want to facilitate that process of purchase as quickly and easily as possible, and that's what this is going to help you do.
So let's get into more specifics about this, because that's a big area to test, there's a lot you could do here, but what we did is, for one client, we saw heat maps and session recordings show us that people were interacting in a interesting way on mobile product pages with this buy box. So what they were doing was they were struggling to see product images, which really just led to a lot of lack of engagement because they get frustrated with the images and then, they would just bounce from there because they wanted more details.
So we tested a new layout. Instead of placing the product images first, we prioritized the product name and description and put the images a little bit further down. So what that meant was before people would start getting frustrated scrolling through the images, we would give them more context, give them a title and a little description, and then show them the images. And restacking the content in that way by just clearly decluttering and reorganizing that resulted in a 26% increase in conversions. So we got another quarter of users to actually purchase off the site because of this.
So it's a huge opportunity area here, and it can be as simple as just reorganizing the content. It doesn't have to be anything more than that. Just reorder it into a way that makes more sense. So moving content around just helps understand where and what the customer needs to make a purchase decision. And you can test those, put that key product information above the fold, especially on mobile and stop creating guesswork for the consumer, that's really what you're doing by just showing images.

Ryan:
Yeah, it's so easy to add on things that you've heard about that will clutter up everything around the add to cart checkout button. I've seen people stuff review stars in there, they've stuffed like the five different payment types in addition to multi-pay. And it's like, "I'm guessing if you've got a site, you'll have a way for me to check out. I don't need to know that you take Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Visa. I mean, who cares?"

Jon:
I tell people this all the time, but when was the last time you were on a e-commerce site that did not take at least one form of payment that you had available to you? Right.

Ryan:
Slightly been very long.

Jon:
Right. Look, I guarantee you it'll take at least one form of your money. So you don't need to tell people that until they're in checkout.

Ryan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think there's a tremendous opportunity to remove friction that... And I mean, even from no fault of the owner, just a lot of these plugins will automatically hijack that once you put it on your site like, "Oh yeah, I do want to go with Affirm or Afterpay or Klarna," and then it's all over your buy button for their branding purposes, not necessarily yours.

Jon:
Yep. Yep. It's a challenge. So I guess, the key here is just to remember, less is more. Don't be shy about cutting. Get that knife out and just cut out the things that aren't working well on that page or reorder it. Right.
One thing I always like to do, and is really helpful here, take a screenshot of your product detail page, especially that above the fold area, cut out the individual elements. So print it out, sorry, cut out the individual elements and then rearrange them a little bit on your table and then that will give you a lot of options for how you can do that. There's a lot of other ways to do it, but I like taking it to paper right away for things like this because if you work on a computer and do it in Canva or Figma or whatever tool you want, you really don't think about it as much because it's so easy to move those pixels around. But when you print it out and have it there, you start thinking more about why people would engage with that. So I like getting off the computer for something like that, that helps out with a lot.

Ryan:
That's awesome. All right, we've gotten five points from you. Obviously, you don't run five tests at a time, I'm guessing. That would be-

Jon:
No, I would do one of these at a time. Or the reality is, test one thing on your PDP, test one thing on your category page, test one thing on your homepage. So that was part of why I chose five that were in different areas of your site.

Ryan:
Okay. Well, if you're getting this podcast at the very beginning of the year in '23, so you've just finished holiday, anybody should be able to get through all of these tests before the next holiday season kicks in.

Jon:
Oh, I would hope so.

Ryan:
And you should have a better performing site without a doubt if you're able to execute these.

Jon:
Well, let's look at this way, even if it takes you two months to test each of these, you've done five high impact areas and you still are done before Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

Ryan:
If you're listening to this and you haven't done these yet, you're dumb not to do them. You have to do them.

Jon:
Get started now.

Ryan:
I'll go on record on that one. There's my '23 prediction, if you don't do Jon's five tests, you're going to be disappointed in yourself at the end of the year.

Jon:
I love it. All right.

Ryan:
All right. Anything else we got to finish up with, Jon? Any last parting nuggets?

Jon:
I would say give them a shot, go from there and make sure you're testing them and taking these as high level ideas and implementing what's best for your site and going from there. But the key is just always be testing.

Ryan:
Yeah, I thought it was, always be closing, but Jon's going change that to always test-

Jon:
Testing leads to closing as you saw, $3 million, a quarter percent more conversions.

Ryan:
Three million, 25% increase. Yeah, the numbers make sense, they don't lie.

Jon:
There you go.

Ryan:
Thank you, Jon.

Jon:
Thank you, Ryan.

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