AdBuyer Tips

Here's 5 solid tips anyone can implement that increased our overall conversion rate from ~2% to ~5%+ on a daily basis. These tips are all things you can do - TODAY!

There are a number of apps out there from Lucky Orange, Crazyegg, etc. that offer heat map services. I can bet without a doubt more than a few of you have installed these. I can also bet that more than 95% of people who did install it haven't ever actually used the program correctly.

Most people will now and then browse what their visitors are doing and that results in you seeing where they're focusing / spending the "majority" of their time on the site.

What people are screwing up is they're not looking for problems. They're just watching to watch. Admidttely I find these services don't really do a good job at "teaching" you what to look for because they think the people installing their app are tech-oriented.

Example:

Two weeks ago we had a conversion rate of 0.8% and the day before we had a solid 5.6%. There was no 'real' explanation as to why this had occured as I hadn't made any changes nor uploaded anything new. I went digging only to find out that in the background an app we had changed one TINY line of CSS and it essentially caused a meltdown. This tiny line forced people to not only "check" a box saying they wanted to use their billing info as shipping, but they had to do it twice. Check, uncheck, recheck, and finally checkout (hint why we barely had any checkouts). Had it not been for Lucky Orange I wouldn't have been able to view the successful checkouts and compare it to the abandoners to find out that the people who successfully checked out did so because they were frustrated and spammed the button.

Watch what your customers do, but compare it to the customers who completed a checkout/goal so you can see where the problem lies.

This one is obvious but so, so many people screw this up. Go open up GTMetrix AND Pingdom and check your scores on both. Once you've got that number, compare it to Google's Pagespeed tests.

For every second your page takes to load, you're losing up to 10% of your customers.

Example:

We recently were trying to figure out why one of the products we were testing was going so slow and taking an eternity to load. Turns out we uploaded an image that was 2800x2400px big and roughly 6mb in size. Without GTMetrix this would have taken far longer to "find" and cost me a lot more money.

Some things are going to be out of your control. If you're selling on Shopify, you're kinda screwed when it comes to some of their files but their CDN isn't too bad so it makes up for it.

We analyze our site 3x a week and have reports sent directly to a slack channel. If page load speed is over 2s or our requests get too high, either I or someone on my team is spending the day finding out why. We're also testing multiple pages on our site, not our homepage. Always, always, always test your product pages and focus there. When's the last time you ran an ad to your homepage?

As a developer, I hate mobile. As a customer, I love mobile. Mobile has made things annoying for people like me, but it's great because more people than ever are buying online and are buying ALL the time.

I bet most of you have probably looked at your site on mobile before, but have you looked at your site on multiple phones? Have you built in specific mobile-only blocks so that things look GREAT on a mobile device and not just "responsive"? Answer is probably no because so many people are telling you to only focus on ads. Ads is half the battle. If your site sucks, doesn't matter how much traffic or how great of a product you have. You won't make money.

Example:

I swapped out images, headlines, and three buttons on our site so that they would load specifically on mobile only. I even made 2 "mobile" variations for small/large phones. See that 11.8% conversion rate? That's what we were averaging on mobile devices for a high priced product, all because I put the time and effort into making sure it looked GORGEOUS. Prior to making the changes our load speed was 1.9 seconds (the changes made it 1.2 seconds) and the conversion rate averaged around 3.2%.

If I had 1000 visitors I just increased my overall bottom line by 86 sales a day. Think you could be a LOT more profitable if you got 4x as many sales?

Most people use Shopify and they'll track their visitors, ATC, & PURC percentages. Sadly in today's market that's not going to be good enough to truly "scale" your business. The guys that are making $100,000+ a month are doing it by tracking everything they possibly can and then some.

Google Analytics is a great place to start, because you can use the enhanced ecom feature in Google Analytics to build out funnels and even track split tests to see what changes resulted in what increase/decrease. We're split testing things daily and even doing tests seasonly to find out what works best during a certain time of the year.

Do NOT rely on just Shopify/whatever shopping cart you use's analytics program. It will let you down and you'll leave massive amount of money on the table.

Example:

Installed GA, looked at a 'winner' we were beginning to scale only to find out that the traffic was only converting during a certain time of the day. Of course FB showed similar data, but we hadn't dug that deep yet into our breakdowns. Using GA I was able to pinpoint a "winning" audience and for the first time got to actually use "day-parted" ads (please don't ask me about this, I honestly don't know much we're still testing it and it's hit or miss on products). Long story short, we went from a cost per purchase of $14 to $6.50. Once I get time to throw into the mix some conversion tricks we use we'll essentially have tripled our profits all thanks to proper tracking.

This is one you may or may not have heard about, but is arguably is the most important in this list.

If you have ever gone to a fortune 100 website, you're seeing one of thousands of variations their data analytics team has produced. You're being tested, constantly. Amazon wants you to complete a checkout, Netflix wants you to sign-up for their subscription, Best Buy wants you to build a home theater bundle...

The point is that if you're just throwing an offer in front of your customer, you're losing. This is why everyone rages about ClickFunnels and single-product funnels. When you put a product in front of someone and FORCE them to go step-by-step through a website, your conversions are going to improve. When you put a product in front of someone and CONVINCE them to go step-by-step through your website, exactly where you want them to go, your conversions skyrocket.

Example:

I tested putting very specific call to action buttons on my site and removing any distractions that would draw from a user. I did this by checking my Lucky Orange recordings, seeing where the heatmap had most clicks and removed anything that wasn't specifically getting a customer to the checkout. This included taking away a few "also bought X" tabs, a couple navigation buttons, and a few other misc. things. The result ended up in 65% of customers going from the product page to the "add to cart" button and then on the cart page I removed anything that drew the customer back to the site itself. The ONLY thing I wanted a customer to do was click "Checkout".

After getting rid of the navigation entirely on mobile, "hiding" the continue shopping buttons, and putting more emphasis on the checkout button I got the result I wanted. Nearly 85% of people that "Added to Cart" were hitting the checkout page. Beforehand only about 45-55% depending on the day/product were getting there.

This meant a massive increase in the people I was going to be able to retarget and also people I would be able to go after with abandon cart emails, etc.

Overall it led to a flat increase on our conversion rate that took us from around 4% to averaging a daily conversion rate of roughly 6%.

Anyways that's the top 5 things I'd recommend starting out with and implementing ASAP! The last one is a bit more 'technical' and might take more than a day to implement, but it's well worth the time and effort.