In today's podcast I got a real good treat for you. Conversion rate optimization is one of the most important parts to succeed with e-commerce and I've interviewed one of the absolute top people in the world in terms of how you can optimize your website to get a higher conversion rate. That means that you get more value for each ad dollar that you spend.
So without further ado, check out Sean from Audit and my talk to him about how e-commerce stores can improve their conversion rates and then earn more, get more loyal customers and build better businesses. Sean, how are you doing? I'm doing good, man.
We got a little bit of a sprinkling of summer for like two weeks and we had no snow and now I'm looking out the window right now and it's just absolutely dumping. I was like, oh, spring might be here. It's not here.
We have the same situation in Norway and it always happens every year. Then everyone starts thinking, yeah, the spring is coming. Everything's good.
And then just snow and cold hits you and you're stuck for a few more months of that. Yeah, exactly. I've been a really big fan of Audit since I discovered you, I would say maybe two or three years ago.
I think it's really cool what you guys are doing in terms of at least simplifying the complexity of conversion rates and making things look prettier and smarter and give higher results. You've done a few of these Audit reports now. You say 10,000 plus happy brands worldwide have tried the reports.
Our audience is small e-commerce owners. They are very limited on resources. They're maybe limited in terms of tech and time.
What are the classical mistakes you see most of the people who want an Audit report have made or things you point out in those reports? Yeah. I think there's two camps of brands we work with.
One is the brands who they're just on a template. They built it themselves and they're trying to find the best way to optimize conversion within that ecosystem. They don't want to go hire a developer to customize it and do all this fancy crap that if we were to redesign it, there might be some stuff that won't fit in the theme.
And then there's the other side of it where brands are just like, we want it to look the best. We don't care if it's a custom theme. We just want it to be a certain aesthetic and that's our goal.
So we have to approach those a little bit differently. I think the most common things we see are with, I mean, it's across both of those camps, but a lot of it has to do with content organization. So the hierarchy of information, a lot of brands, they approach pages for some reason, whenever brands are designing a landing page, the flow is very strategic.
On their website, they almost look at it as a catch-all. They're like, okay, well, it doesn't matter where we say this, we said it. So it doesn't matter.
They're going through our website. They're going to look at everything. It's not on our product page, but we set it on our homepage.
And the information hierarchy is just not really well considered. They kind of just slap things around. And it's not, I'm not saying they do that intentionally, but there's not a ton of thought put into if someone clicks on an ad and or organically either way, but mostly it's ad traffic with e-commerce.
Their attention span is like, you've got them for milliseconds. And if that hierarchy of information isn't right. And when I say hierarchy of information, I'm saying, if you sit in a room with your team and you are identifying what makes us unique, why do our customers keep coming back to us?
What are our repeat customers saying? What's the most common thing said in reviews? All of those things, you list them out and then you just made a checklist, right?
Like what's most common, what's the most important, all of these things, prioritize them. That should reflect the sections on pages in your site and content on your site, because the top of the page is the only part every user sees, then it's 95% see it, then 90, then 80, then 70. Then by the time they're at the bottom where you're pushing some offer, it's one of 10 years users see it, right?
So that hierarchy of information is really critical and you can't just spit out whatever the template flow that you bought is, right? And a lot of them, that's what happens, is Shopify, free template, $100 template, whatever. It has their reference placeholders and people just kind of put in their info based on that flow.
They don't really consider what's better for my brand or my story. And so that's one of the biggest pitfalls we see is they just kind of put in their content into a template and they're just like, well, Shopify is huge. They know what they're doing.
This must be right. And then they just, they go. And in some cases that'll work, but in a lot of cases it doesn't.
And so a lot of what we're doing is just helping them reorganize things, simple stuff like their subheading should be their heading, right? Or little things like that, or a section that's at the bottom should be at the top. It's a lot of organization of content and fine tuning of content.
It's not always design changes. And for those brands that are just on templates, you almost want to avoid design changes because those are going to cost them more money, right? I want to recommend and talk to them about as many changes they can make without spending money on someone other than me, right?
They're already probably paying me to make recommendations. I don't want to hand them a file and be like, okay, here you go. Then they got to go spend 10 grand to get it implemented.
I would rather they, if I know that they have small budgets, then we're going to focus on stuff that's easier to implement internally for them. So that's kind of one of the main things. The other thing that we see, and this is for all brands, unless we're dealing with a really big brand, like we have a few clients that are more like household names and they always get it, but that's through a ton of money and through a ton of time usually is consistency.
A lot of conversion rate optimization is being consistent and that comes down to everything, right? I've been seeing the whatever, something get pushed to me on Twitter or X lately where it's always talking about the corner radius of an iPhone and the corner radius of their AirPods and the corner radius of their laptops and the corner radius, it's the same.
To the tiniest degree, it's the same across every product they've ever made. Even as a designer, I never noticed that and no customer notices that, but the consistency of holding their products and them feeling consistent and feeling like part of a system, it builds trust, right? Obviously it's a great, useful product.
There's a ton of other layers to that, but those little consistencies are what give them the perception of like, oh yeah, this is worth 900 instead of the 400 I was going to spend on that piece of shit, Google, whatever. And so there's a lot of things like that that websites need to take from physical product design and they need to take from even retail design.
When I come into a lot of our customer sites, the homepage is just kind of a mishmash of like every offer, every product, every review, that design aesthetic doesn't translate to the collection page, doesn't translate to the product page. And taking that corner radius thing as an example, I don't want to see seven button styles on a site, right?
Maybe they tested the homepage and red worked, and then they tested the collection page and black worked, and they tested the product page and blue worked. And in those individual silos, that might make sense from a traditional conversion optimization standpoint, right? Maybe they had a team testing it and they're like, oh no, we got to use blue here.
It works better on this page. But long-term, if you're building a brand that's not just an Amazon reseller, right? You're not just like, and we deal with a lot of brands like that.
They found a product, they get made cheap in China, they resell it, they slap a Fiverr logo on it, and they're running ads for a year until it dies. And that's fine. You make your money and leave.
I mean, I can't argue with that. But if you're a brand that's trying to build an actual brand, an actual following, something that's going to last, something that you're going to sell, not just the product, but sell the company, those consistencies are everything for building brand trust. And it's like if you imagine walking into like, I don't know what the equivalent would be in Nordic countries, but you walk into a retail store, a grocery store, Ikea, that's an example.
Just imagine every time you went to one of the openings to the next section and the sign was a different layout, different font, different color, you're signaling to them different things. And the innate reaction in people is that, oh, this is actually a different, maybe it's a different area of the store because there's a different color.
When really it's just bad design if they did that. And retail stores do a really good job of every price label is the same format. The font hierarchy and the sizing is the same format.
Anything that's used for wayfinding is the same format. Anything that's on a door is the same format. Anything that's an exit is lit and in the same format.
And all of these things are taken for granted in a retail setting, right? It's just assumed that's how it's done. But when it comes to e-commerce and digital design, if you don't have a designer involved, a lot of that stuff can start to slip away.
And brands don't seem to care that much because they just see it as, okay, well, whatever works for conversion, that's what we're going to do. But long-term, all of those consistencies in your aesthetic, that's what drives trust, right? If I walk into Ikea and all the shelves are a mess and I'm looking at the couches and the cushions are flipped off and it starts to feel like a lived-in house without a cleaner, I'm not buying anything, right?
If it's organized and it feels like, oh man, my house is going to look like this and it's organized, I want to spend money. It's the same with your store. If I come in and it feels unorganized, if your website feels unorganized and not consistent, I'm less inclined to spend money.
And I'm not saying that a user clicks on an ad and they come to the site and they're like, oh, this feels messy, I don't want to shop. It's just that feeling you get, right? Where you walk into a room or you go to a website where you click on an email and you're like, oh, this kind of feels scammy or this doesn't make you feel good.
And that's a really hard thing to capture and explain to customers of just trying to get the website to make people feel good. Every brand is a little different on how you do that, but it does have an effect on purchase behavior and it does have an effect on conversion rate and how long people are willing to spend on the site and make purchase and spend more money and come back.
Sorry, that was a very long-winded response. No, no. I think that's great.
So you touched on the hierarchy of content and you touched on consistency as two things that is often overlooked and maybe easier to actually resolve and fix yourself as a small shop versus redesigning everything. And I have a few follow-up questions regarding that. So first of all, if we think about the hierarchy of content that you talked about, what are some quick wins that you see people should do more often in terms of what they should lift up, what they should focus on, that kind of thing.
So if you were just touching on the hierarchy part of it. A lot of it depends on where traffic's coming from, what they already know, and where they're landing. So what I mean by that is if they're coming from an ad and the ad says better gut health, it's telling them what they're trying to solve, but doesn't tell them what the product is.
When they land on that page, I want to be super direct. Here's exactly what we make and here's how it helps gut health. If they're clicking on an ad that just shows the product and doesn't necessarily dive deep into all the benefits, then I'm going to lead with the benefits.
And so it very much depends on where they're coming from and what you've already told them. But in general, we like to take the stance of your website is where you should be extremely direct. So one of the major pitfalls that a lot of brands fall into is every section, let's say has a heading and a subheading, whether that's paragraphs of content or just a secondary sentence.
And a lot of times what happens is they use the main heading as where they get kind of cheeky or creative and it's more vague. It doesn't tell them a ton. It kind of tries to draw them in and that can work well.
But if someone's landing from an ad and they have very little, you know, they've got, they've been scrolling Facebook, they have no attention span, you've got seconds of their time. They're not reading heading, subheading, heading, subheading, heading, subheading, or heading, paragraph, heading, paragraph.
They're scanning. And if all of the primary headings are really creative, you know, trying to be cheeky content, instead of just being direct, like, here's what we make, here's what it solves, here's how it does it, here's where you buy it. If you're not doing that, and instead you're drawing them in with the headlines and then making them read a bunch more, it can have a drastic effect on click throughs to, you know, the rest of the site.
And then same thing on product pages, right? Amazon is a very extreme example of it, but like, there's a reason that product titles are super descriptive. And why they recommend that on Amazon.
Yeah, it's great for searchability, but it's also just because most people, that's the one piece of info they're reading, is the product title. Like, they're not reading every detail. They're not reading every accordion.
I'm not saying use Amazon titles in your site because some of them are way overkill, but it's just an example. Like, that's why they do that, is to be more direct. You never see a marketing title or like, you know, an abstract title on Amazon.
They literally, they won't, they'll probably allow it, but you won't make any money because you'll be buried at the bottom of the page for that search, for like, for searching for that product. So I think that's one of those things where you really have to be as direct as possible. And it's a balance with what I talked about in the beginning, right?
We deal with a lot of big brands where there's so much trust already in the brand, they can kind of say whatever they want. They get to break all the rules, right? Big household name brands, they don't need to communicate as clearly.
They can be cheeky. They can focus on really creative marketing copy and less direct, but that's because they've earned it. They're doing 500 million a year in revenue.
They're a household name. Their friend told
about it. That's all they need to know.
They don't even give a shit what's in it. New brands or small brands, you don't have any of that. You can't just be creative, like, you know, it's, it's a spectrum, but you have to earn that right as a brand, to use that type of copy and sell users.
As a small brand, you have to be just direct. Here's what we make. Here's why it's great.
Here's where to buy it. And if you stick to that, that kind of flow and being really clear to users, it just works better for small brands. And honestly, as a business owner myself, I want to fail fast.
So like, I don't want to copy the big guys and a lot of small brands do that they copy what their competitor or the biggest in space is doing and it never works for them because they're a small brand and they haven't earned that ability to talk or use the same tactics. And if you use those, you're going to fail fast because it's not going to work.
But I think I want to know if people want my product for the exact reasons that I made it right. And by speaking directly and stating that, here's why we made it, here's how we made it, here's what makes it great. You're going to learn real quick, whether you have something unique or not.
Because people will tell you by just not hitting add to cart. Yeah, voting with the wallets. Yeah, exactly.
How I get the feeling that you're a creative design loving guy. How important is copywriting versus design? I mean, if you can only do one of them, what would you lean into?
What would you focus on? Probably copy, unfortunately, when it comes to ecommerce. Yeah, this is for ecommerce.
Small businesses, limited resources. Probably copy. I think, and the reason I say that is because Shopify and other ecommerce platforms have provided such an insane ecosystem of good design.
There's not really a great ecosystem of how to write better headlines for your Shopify site in that ecosystem. But the actual templates of how they look, you can spend 300-400 bucks and get a pretty amazing website. As long as you write good copy and get good photos.
A lot of the design is just based on how good are your photos? Because all of those templates look like crap. If you just have a bunch of iPhone photos.
It depends. But the setup for good design is much simpler for brands. Copy, I think, is way more important in terms of all those little details, headlines, product titles, description of the product, how you're positioning it, reviews, all that stuff.
Yeah. One of the things that amazes me when I look at your case studies, and the first time I was made aware of you is Ugmonk, Jeff, I have all of the things. I think you did a great job with the audit report on them, or the case you're showing.
But usually, it's more like reorganizing or restructuring, as you're saying, the content that's already there and finding logical ways to make that fit within the small screen more than reinventing the wheel, which I find fascinating. Do you have any cases, case studies, stats you can share in terms of the effect a small change or just a reorg of things might have for a site?
Yeah, I mean, it's because we're such a design heavy company, when I what I mean by that is we very rarely are we actually building out everything. And so without that ongoing relationship, it's always hard to get the results back unless we personally reach out to them. Yeah, we get a lot of brands reach out and be like, hey, just wanted to let you know, like, this is crazy how much it helped us, whatever.
But it's it's rare, right? brands are busy. They're not interested in like, Oh, yeah, I got to remember to email that guy that did that design for me and tell of course.
Yeah. I was just talking to a customer yesterday. And there, we did a one page audit report.
So it was Oh, man, it was 1700 bucks. And brand was called lumen works dot com. And it's essentially just these kind of lit up religious or Christian images, and they spent $1,700 and their conversion doubled after the audit.
So Oh, wow. You know, it in, I don't know the exact numbers. And I probably shouldn't say any of their exact numbers on the call.
So I won't. But no, it was a substantial, you know, like payback the audit and hours kind of thing. Yeah.
And then they reach out to us and said, you know, our conversion doubled, like amazing. But our AOV dropped, you know, 10%. So now we get now we have a follow up task.
Okay, let's try and figure out. Here's all the changes we made. What did we do here?
That's helping, you know, drop that. Okay, we know what that is. Okay.
Now let's let's figure out how do we make AOV back, you know, increase again, what can we do to get more money in the cart? Yeah. Now that case isn't the same everywhere.
But that particular project was a simple was like a simple reorganization of their product landing page and product page, and how content is is organized and flows and how it's communicated. And just like I was saying, it was a lot of really hard marketing copy they were using, and we just flipped it to be really direct.
It's like, here's exactly what you're getting. You know, being more direct about the actual offering and the variance within the product, buy box and stuff like that. Now, as I said, that's a very, that's a, you know, a huge win.
That's like, we'd love every customer to get that on average, it's probably, you know, 10% increase. That would that's a good increase for us. But I would say a 10% increase in conversion rate means a lot of extra revenue, right?
That's, that's, that's the amazing part about it. It's that it's so impactful, just to have a small increase is is huge for the business. Yeah.
And I think honestly, one of the tertiary benefits that that and why people keep coming to audit, and why like we've never spent my ad dollars, it's all word of mouth. The reason we get recommended so often is not necessarily because it's like, like you said, you don't look at the designs we do. And we're like, Oh, man, I've never seen that before.
This is crazy. That's never we've never done that. It's never like, award worthy design type stuff, right?
It's, it's common sense design. And that's, you know, your Ugmonk example is a perfect one. Jeff's probably a better designer than all of us.
But you get too close to your product, every brand owner does. And you just start to miss the simple, common sense stuff. And that's what we're known for.
It's the most common feedback I get from an audit report being sent out is, Oh, man, that's so simple. How did I not think of that? It's never Holy shit, I've never seen this before.
It's always, how did we not think of this? This is so obvious, which, you know, proves the point of just getting a third party perspective sometimes is all that's needed, right? And that's a lot of my customers that can't afford us, even though I don't find us to be crazy expensive from an agency or service standpoint, there's still tons of small brands that can't afford us.
And my recommendation is always just go on user testing.com. Pick a task, right? Get three people to go from the homepage and purchase XYZ product, whichever one you want from the purchase, or send them to the page you're driving traffic to from an ad, show them the ad and get them to purchase.
And just watch them watch three random people. I don't care what sex they are. I don't care what age they are.
I don't care what experience they have. I don't care if they buy your product. Normally, I want complete strangers.
And just see where they get stuck. See where they pause. See where read the notes afterwards.
What were they confused by? That's all we're doing. There's no one on our team that's like, you know, crazy world class product.
No, we're we're reading we're going through websites and saying, where the hell does this break? Where do we get stuck? Where is it confusing?
And honestly, you do not need to be a designer. You don't have to be working at all. You don't need none of that background.
You just need someone with a complete blank canvas or view on your brand to get that perspective. And that's why we approach it the way we do. That's why we don't do long winded onboarding.
We don't do deep dive nothing you purchase on our site. And you wait for the report back because I don't want I don't want any bullshit from the customer being like, well, this is why this is here. And this and no, I don't want to matter.
No, I want to go in cold and see where this is all fucked up. And you know, it was a big gamble to begin with to do it that way. But you know, it's paid off.
And it's the most consistent feedback we get is that that's what they like about it is it's just like, we're finding stuff they never thought of because it's so common sense. You just have to listen to an you know, a cold user really. Yeah, that makes sense.
Cool. Okay, so last question. And Sean, I think this has been great.
And this is this is something you probably wouldn't ask a lot of times the last year at least and that's regarding AI and and kind of where do you see copywriting, design, like, product pages, all that going when it's easier and easier to generate something and to kind of get some feedback and some perspective.
But what are your thoughts regarding AI in the ecom space when it comes to conversion rate optimization, testing, designing, etc? I think it's definitely not at the point where I would just use it to write all my copy, I, we would use it, like we use it at audit, but it's as a, okay, we wrote a headline, right for more variations of the same headline.
And let's see if we can find one that's better structured or better written. Or Yeah, but it's never the it's never the baseline, like, shit, I don't know what our product does. Can you figure it out?
Like, you never want to use it as a creative resource, I guess, from my perspective, you want to use it as a supplementary resource to help you get through roadblocks or creative roadblocks, or just help come up with other ways to position something. And it's great for testing, right? I've got a headline here, here's our key value props, right, me three other headlines that focus on the other two or the other three, and test those.
So from a copy standpoint, it can be awesome for just seeing what connects with people, and not having to spend a ton of time with copywriters doing that. I think the design side of it, you know, UI UX wise, ignoring imagery. It's probably a few years away from fully, you know, taking over, but, you know, it's, it's in my, it's, it's in my radar of like, yeah, it's probably gonna start devouring design agencies.
Whether it's through a Shopify product, or through just people can just design whatever site they want with a click of a button and optimize it. I think where I've seen it used the poorest so far, and it needs a lot of work is in imagery, product images, lifestyle images, site images, you know, traditionally, or let's say this last 15 years, stock imagery, kind of was how people got the images for their site.
And then once they had enough money or sales, then they got hired a photographer, beautiful photo shoot all this, but it was a lot of stock outside of their product photos, it was a lot of stock photos, or renders, right, they just buy a render template, slap their design on 100 times. And I think AI imagery currently is similar to stock photography, where if I was to put a real photo of a person wearing the product and a stock photo, nine times out of 10, a user can be like, okay, well, that's the stock photo one, right?
It just it just feels it's like watching a seal it, you know, a C list movie, you just know it's a bad actor, right? Like you get it. He's like seconds in the music, the way it's triggered, everything about it, you can just feel it's a low budget movie, and it's a bad actor, or just a bad everything.
And it's the same as stock photo, you can just it just gives you a bad feeling. And it goes back to that what I was saying at the start, bad AI and stock photography like that. They build a distrust, they give you that bad feeling, they don't make you feel good, when you're on the website.
And I don't think AI from a photo standpoint, at least a lot of the brands I've seen, I found one that does it really well, that I can send you, but for the most part, they're just using it in a way where it still feels fake, it looks fake, it looks generated. Yeah, and it's just not helping. And so I think we're probably a little bit away from it being perfect.
But we're going to see more and more agencies popping up that are they're not, you know, their entire service offering is helping you leverage AI to create all of these different things in your business, not here's a tool that does x service or tool that does its agencies. And we're already seeing them that are just, you're just paying them a fee to help you solve those problems with your team doesn't need to go troubleshoot 100 different tools that are launching every day.
Yeah, that makes sense. Makes perfect sense. Cool.
Okay, do you guys still offer your discovery calls? Is that the best way to kind of get into the audit world? Or?
Yeah, so we do, we have a free audit offer where you just put in your website, and your email, our team reviews the page, whatever URL you submit. And we redesigned one section to be conversion optimized. Usually within two days.
Yeah, there's no, you know, there's no credit card, I think it's just your email, your domain, and that's it. So that's one way to just try it out. And then yeah, on our site, you can book a discovery call.
It's, it's very rarely like a sales call. Usually we go through your site together. Pick, you know, pick through some things, figure out where the trouble is happening and, and chat through how we could help if that makes sense.
But yeah, that's definitely the best way to connect. And worst case scenario, you get some free advice out of it that you can go implement. Cool.
And great, I think that that covers everything from my side. And I just want to thank you guys for, for normalizing and talking about conversion rates, copywriting design, I think it's, it's super important. And it's, it's, I think we need more people who can share good advice and, and help people focus on these things.
Ads keep getting more expensive, marketing keeps getting harder, having a, having a conversion, good converting site and a brand people care about, I think is super important going forward. And you guys are doing good work in that space. So thank you.
Awesome, man. I appreciate that. Thank you for having me on.
Perfect.
