Focus on Revenue Optimisation Not Conversion Rate | Matthew Stafford

Matt Edmundson [0:00 - 2:32]: Welcome to the Ecommerce podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmundson. This is a show all about helping you deliver ecommerce. Wow. And to help us do just that, I am chatting with my very special guest, Matt Stafford from Build Grow Scale about how to get your website to rocket in growth. Now, it's no exaggeration to say that this episode has probably been the longest episode in terms of getting in the calendar. So you know it's going to be worth it. You're going to want to grab your notebooks, you are going to want to grab your pens or whatever, your note taking devices because there's going to be some great stuff to help you grow your ecommerce business and to be honest with you, to help me grow mine as well. If you don't know if you're new with us, then yes, I am. Like you, I'm an ecommerce entrepreneur. I love ecommerce. I love the fact that whenever I wake up in the morning, somebody in the world has bought something from one of my websites. It's a beautiful thing. So I do this show just so I can connect with amazing people and learn about ecommerce and hopefully give you guys some value as well. So if it's your first time with us, a very warm welcome to you. And of course, if you're a regular, thanks for coming back. Really appreciate you being with us on this part of our journey. If you haven't done so already, make sure you subscribe to the newsletter because every week we send out the newsletter, it's actually changing. Actually. The new one coming out is called the ecommercer. It's getting developed, it's getting upgraded, we've moved it to Beehive. We're throwing in some extra stuff as well as all the usual show notes and links and all that sort of stuff from the guest. We throw in more tips, more strategies, more helpful stuff. It's all in there. So you're going to want to find out more about it. You can do that at ecommercepodcast.net now let's talk about Mr. Matthew Stafford. It's always good to talk to a fellow Matt. Yes, it is. He is CEO and mastermind behind Build Grow Scale's revenue optimisation system. With 27 years of business experience, he's a pro at spotting hidden opportunities and optimising the customer journey. Known as one of the top Shopify optimisation experts, he's analyzed nearly a billion dollars in data to perfect his approach. That's a lot of data, Matt, I'm not going to lie. How did that work out well, it's.

Matthew Stafford [2:32 - 3:10]: Been cumulative over the last several years. I think we stopped counting just going through our own shopping carts around 400 million several years ago. Because if you think about it, it's someone that's running their store, whether it's 10 million, 400 million or a billion dollars, like, it's really hard to even fathom that amount. And so the only reason the bigger numbers is maybe just to stroke our ego a little bit. But I think realistically, we have enough data that we have a set of best practices that we know will help anyone.

Matt Edmundson [3:11 - 3:24]: Fantastic. Well, it sounds great. That sounds absolutely wonderful. So I'm curious, how did it all start for you? I mean, it obviously didn't start. One day you woke up and thought, I know what I'm doing. I'm gonna go through a billion dollars worth of data. No, no, no, no. Hopefully there's something a bit more interesting.

Matthew Stafford [3:24 - 3:56]: Yeah. Well, I actually started out in the brick and mortar businesses. So I had commercial concrete and a couple of brick and mortar salons. And in that process, I realized when I opened up the brick and mortar stores, I had to get traffic. It wasn't quite like the service business that we had with concrete. And so I learned how to do some online, you know, website or not. Actually, back then, it wasn't. Website optimisation is really like how to get the people to the website.

Matt Edmundson [3:56 - 3:57]: Yeah.

Matthew Stafford [3:57 - 3:59]: And that's about all you had to do back then.

Matt Edmundson [4:00 - 4:04]: Yeah. And I remember those days well very fondly, too.

Matthew Stafford [4:05 - 4:25]: Once that happened, I realized, like, oh, this is kind of fun. Like, it's my job or my livelihood's not dependent on the weather. And so it made me want to look into that a lot more. And I went to a Tony Robbins event, and he was selling a DVD series called Money Masters.

Matt Edmundson [4:25 - 4:26]: Yeah.

Matthew Stafford [4:26 - 6:12]: And it was all about online marketing. And I thought, wow, in five years, I'm going to be 100% online and get rid of this other stuff that I have. And it was almost five years to the month that that became true for me. And I was like, wow, maybe I should have said three years or two years. But in that process, what I had done is I learned how to run Facebook ads to marketing pages and sell things and was pretty good at it through that process. Eventually, Shopify was pretty new at the time. I opened a Shopify site, and we started selling kitchen products and did really well right off the bat. And I thought, oh, wow, this is going to be really easy. And I started adding all kinds of apps and different things to my Shopify site. And what happened in about a six month period is we went from selling three or four hundred sales a day down to three or four hundred sales a week. And it was a lot harder to make money. And I was just super frustrated. And so I paid a guy, I saw a guy online, was advertising for a thousand dollars. He would give you six calls and teach you Google Analytics. I thought, okay, I'll do that. So I paid him the thousand dollars. And after the first week I was like, oh my goodness, there's so much data in here to figure out how to make my website work better that I'm gonna do that. And every time I made changes, my ads worked better. And so within, within the end of that six weeks, we were back to the 3, 400 sales a day, very profitable, and started scaling it up from there.

Matt Edmundson [6:13 - 6:15]: That says worth a thousand dollars then.

Matthew Stafford [6:15 - 6:17]: Oh man, it's crazy.

Matt Edmundson [6:17 - 6:22]: He took a better return on investment. That sounds like that was one of the best things I'd spent a grand on.

Matthew Stafford [6:23 - 6:33]: Yeah, there was the, the scarier part of that story is because of the first three or four months, we had done really good. We had been out, got a loan and.

Matt Edmundson [6:33 - 6:34]: Right.

Matthew Stafford [6:35 - 7:08]: Borrowed a bunch of money and private labeled the stuff from China. So we had about 400 grand worth of kitchen supplies sitting in a warehouse. And it kept getting worse and worse and worse. And we had more coming on the, on the boat. And so I was, you know, we were not in a good position and I was like, I have to. It was almost. I had to figure it out or I was going to be hurting. And yeah, so, yeah, it was, it was literally that thousand dollars saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

Matt Edmundson [7:08 - 7:56]: Wow. Wow. Well, what a fascinating story. It's interesting. It started with Tony Robbins. I, I have another podcast called Push to Me More where we. It's a leadership podcast, talk to business leaders. And I picked that brain about how to run a business. Great podcast. Really enjoy. It's really good fun. One of the questions I asked them at the start of the interview is if you could interview anybody know, in your own podcast. Pastor presence had a big influence on your life. Who would it be and why? And by far one of the most popular answers, I mean, you've got your, you know, most popular answers that have come through are my dad, Jesus and Tony Robbins. And it's quite fascinating how, how many people mention Tony Robbins, especially from, you know, your side of the pond. He seems to be quite an influential character.

Matthew Stafford [7:56 - 9:47]: Yeah, for sure. I, I would say, yeah. So interesting. You Bring that up. I didn't think we were going to go there with this, but I. I'd love to for a second. I dealt with a lot of trauma growing up, and going through his programs helped me realize that a lot of it has, you know, we can reframe a lot of that and to be supportive. And the more that I've talked about that part of my journey with other entrepreneurs, the more I realized that it's pretty common. And so I started studying that similar to how I studied a website and thought like, wow, why is it so common amongst entrepreneurs that, you know, they have this in their background? And the definition of trauma is just a feeling of loss of control. And so I thought, like, well, in business, how often do you feel like you're really in control? You're constantly doing things. And so it made sense to me that the majority of us that are entrepreneurs have dealt with that feeling of loss of control. And we have a coping mechanism to handle. It doesn't mean it's healthy, but we have a coping mechanism that allows us to be in an environment that is constant chaos and for us to be able to make order from that and then move forward. Because the normal employees look at what we do and they're like, no way. I don't want anything to do with that. And so I think that has a lot to do with, you know, why people resonate with him or why, you know, entrepreneurs in general really get a lot from talking to each other because, like, we. We have a unique set of circumstances that we went through growing up that give us the ability to do that.

Matt Edmundson [9:47 - 11:06]: Wow, that's powerful insight, man. It's one of those where. And again, I totally agree, every. Everyone that comes on the show, it's an interesting definition of the word trauma you use, you know, the loss of control. And I. And there's always some event, there's always some catalyst which starts. And I find it really interesting listening to them talk about that, you know, because I think as entrepreneurs, even in the digital space, whether, you know, there is something about entrepreneurs that I find quite captivating, that I have a, you know, I have questions and I really enjoy getting to chat with people like yourself and sort of dig into it a little bit. So anyway, before we get off into the whole push to be more podcast channel, so you started to dig in the weeds, you started to get into Google Analytics. One of the things that I find about Google Analytics and mat maybe you've got some thoughts on this is there is so much. I mean, you had to pay a guy grant to teach you what to look at and to understand. Seems to me like with tools like Analytics, Google Analytics, there's paralysis. Analysis isn't. There is. There's so much data, you don't know where to begin. So you don't know what to look at.

Matthew Stafford [11:07 - 12:24]: Yeah, 100%. If you think about it, the problem with Google Analytics is they have a set of preset filters that don't necessarily work for ecommerce. There is, like, optimised. There's the optimised ecommerce tab that you can go to that has a bunch of stuff, but that's not necessarily everything that you need. And so what we found is the more that we work on it over time, we use the tag manager, which is basically a set of filters that then puts the data into Google Analytics in a way that you can analyze it. And without using the tag manager to set all that up, it makes it a lot harder and much, you know, a lot more difficult to go through. But it's still, I guess it reminds me of, like in advertising, they say 50% of the advertising is working. You just don't know which 50%. And so the nice thing about Google Analytics is you can use that to figure out which part is working, stop the rest, and double down on what's working. And that alone will radically shift your business.

Matt Edmundson [12:24 - 12:37]: Yeah, yeah. So what are some of the things then that you found to look at? I mean, you know, analytics is a big pool. You've got your tag manager set up. But if, if I come to you as a new client, what's sort of one of the first things that you look at in that data?

Matthew Stafford [12:38 - 13:57]: Well, we always start at the back of the store, which is the cart and the checkout, because if we can optimise that, anything else that we do on the site generates more revenue. If your cart and your checkout aren't optimised, if I fix your homepage and make it work way better now, you get a bunch of people to a collection page that hasn't necessarily made you more money if the cart is still broken. And so we start at the back, optimise the cart and the checkout, and then move forward or then move from there to the next. So we could then go to, you know, the product pages, then the collection pages, then the homepage, which seems counterintuitive because everybody thinks like, oh, I want my homepage to look nice to all this other stuff. I want you to make more money right from the very beginning. And that's why we call it revenue optimisation, not conversion rate optimisation because your conversion rate can go up and you can not make more money. I can just put your products on sale. Your conversion rate's going to go up. But that doesn't necessarily get you what we're looking for. That's a temporary fix. And so it's obviously an important metric, but it's a little bit of a vanity metric. If your entire store works better, you're going to make more net revenue, not just a higher top line.

Matt Edmundson [13:57 - 14:01]: I love that. Revenue optimisation. Is that a phrase that you've coined?

Matthew Stafford [14:01 - 14:05]: Yeah, yeah. We've actually even trademarked it because other people started using it, so.

Matt Edmundson [14:05 - 14:52]: But yeah, yeah, love that. It's like, I own this space now, boys and girls. Yeah, yeah, Revenue optimisation. It's interesting. You start at the back, and to me it makes total sense. I get the logic. I understand the flow, I guess I'm curious. There's a lot of people listening to the show who will use sites like Shopify. We mentioned that at the start, I think. Although I keep. I keep getting Shopify and Spotify mixed up when I'm talking to people. It's just. It's so annoying. They're so similar. But people use sites like Shopify. Shoplines coming up. You know, you've got a few of these now where the checkout processes, it seems fixed. How would you sort of encourage or speak to those guys?

Matthew Stafford [14:52 - 15:14]: Yeah, there's. There is things that you can do. So we have a lot of our clients are on the plus version, which gives us the ability to do that. But there's some very subtle changes that will make a huge difference. And I'll give them to your audience for free today. I. I guarantee you that if they do this, they'll see a bump in their conversions.

Matt Edmundson [15:14 - 15:14]: Okay.

Matthew Stafford [15:14 - 15:16]: And so everyone's listening now.

Matt Edmundson [15:16 - 15:18]: They've all got their pens ready.

Matthew Stafford [15:18 - 15:23]: Yeah. It comes from a book called Persuasion by Robert Cialdini.

Matt Edmundson [15:23 - 15:24]: Great book.

Matthew Stafford [15:24 - 16:36]: Great. He talked about how people don't mind giving you information if you give them a reason why. And he uses an example of someone cutting in line and they say, hey, do you mind if I cut in line? 80% of people said, no, you can't cut in line. But then they said literally the exact same same thing, except for they gave a reason. Hey, do you mind if I cut in line? My kids are late for school. And 80% of people said yes. So they don't mind giving you, you know, a yes if you give them a reason. And so what we did is we tested when we Were tracking form field errors in the checkout which make a huge difference because that's where your conversions drop. We noticed the email and phone number is where we got the most form field errors. And so we thought like why don't we give them a reason why instead of just say email phone. And so under the email one we put email required for order notification or order confirmation. Sorry.

Matt Edmundson [16:36 - 16:37]: Yeah.

Matthew Stafford [16:37 - 16:58]: And we know that the order confirmation email is opened. It's the most opened email that you'll ever send. It's about a 80 open rate. And so we thought okay, if we use that, we know that they already are going to 80% of people are going to open it. We'll get better information. And we reduced our form field errors by over 200%.

Matt Edmundson [16:58 - 16:58]: Wow.

Matthew Stafford [16:59 - 17:26]: It was crazy different. And then. And we've tried all different texts in there. We kept thinking like oh this is a big deal, let's try to, to figure this out. And we've never been able to beat that. Required for order confirmation. Then under the phone you put phone required for shipping notification. And we tried like we'll never call our phone for shipping notification will never call you. That like tanked conversions.

Matt Edmundson [17:27 - 17:27]: Okay.

Matthew Stafford [17:27 - 17:31]: And we're like, oh, okay. We introduced a problem that they weren't thinking about.

Matt Edmundson [17:31 - 17:31]: Yeah.

Matthew Stafford [17:31 - 17:35]: We didn't assume we were going to call them but now that we said that they're afraid we are.

Matt Edmundson [17:35 - 17:35]: Yeah.

Matthew Stafford [17:36 - 17:58]: And so just phone required for shipping notification. You do those two things. We've had as much as a 17% lift just in the chat alone from doing that. And one was on a digital product and they do about 60 million a year. So just that change 17 is really.

Matt Edmundson [17:58 - 17:59]: Handy on 60 million.

Matthew Stafford [17:59 - 18:13]: Yeah, it was crazy. So that alone spend phenomenal for the different checkouts. And you don't need Shopify plus to do it. You just go to the language settings and you can change the form field. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson [18:13 - 18:38]: That's fantastic. Well, I love that. Definitely be instigating those with the team. But I'm curious with the. Is the reason you start at the back and move forward because the back is where the low hanging fruit is. Is it easier for example, with these tweaks that you talked about in the checkout? I guess by the time somebody's already got to this part of the process, they're pretty keen and ready to buy. Whereas if you start on the homepage.

Matthew Stafford [18:39 - 18:41]: Fewer steps before the money transfers hands.

Matt Edmundson [18:41 - 18:42]: Right.

Matthew Stafford [18:42 - 19:27]: I really, I really didn't think about it as like that it's an easier place to do it. I just thought about it as really simply, if I get a, if I get an increase right there, that means more revenue. And for me, if the very first things that we do for a client or a customer is help them get more revenue, they're much happier than me making them feel good because their homepage looks awesome. But, you know, the first three weeks that we worked on everything, they're not making more money. If I can get them more money from day one or the first week, that gives us a little bit longer, you know, journey with them in order to actually create enough change that it's a great relationship.

Matt Edmundson [19:27 - 19:47]: Yeah, yeah, no, fair enough. It's a, it's a really interesting idea and I, I, I, I, I love it because it's. Well, I like, I'm a big fan of your revenue optimisation trademarked name. I think it's quite clever. What else then do you see? What are some of the common mistakes you see businesses make?

Matthew Stafford [19:49 - 21:41]: Well, another principle that we use a lot is called the hierarchy of focus. And what that means is when somebody lands on a page, we want it to be obvious what the next most important step is. And so if we use your product page as an example, the next most important step on a product page would be to add to cart. And what we notice is a lot of people make everything on their theme match colors. And so everybody's like, oh, well, what matters? What's the best color? What's the best xyz? And what we found is it means, it means way less what the color is that, you know, it doesn't matter if it's red, green, blue. We try not to use red because red means error on a website. And so pretty much any color that stands out from the page. And what we found is, so if your theme is black and yellow, using a black or yellow button doesn't make that button stand out totally different than anything else. But if it's a green button on a black and yellow theme, then all of a sudden, like, it's really obvious. And people don't think that that would make that big of a difference because it's the logical thing, but people just aren't logical. And we look at a website totally different than our customers do, because we're looking at it all day, every day. And we have probably for years. Before COVID online sales was only about 10% of sales made During COVID it went up to like 30% of sales were made online. And then it dropped back down to like 23, 24% afterwards. So there's still a lot of People that are just learning how to shop online.

Matt Edmundson [21:41 - 21:42]: Yeah.

Matthew Stafford [21:42 - 21:49]: And we take for granted because we've been doing it for, you know, last eight, 10 years, that everyone knows what we know and they just don't.

Matt Edmundson [21:49 - 22:17]: Yeah. Yeah. That's fair play. And is it the. I've had lots of conversations about the color of the Buy now button, and I'm glad to hear you say it doesn't really matter too much. I mean, there is some impact, but it doesn't really matter too much what the color is. It just matters that it's unique and that it stands out. Is it a case then that actually you just use that color on the Buy now button and that's the only place that you use it, or do you use it anywhere else?

Matthew Stafford [22:17 - 22:49]: No, we would use it on every button all the way through the page, through the site. So on the, the home page, whatever, the button. I will tell you this, the text on the button does matter what it says, and we've proven that over and over and over. So people that have, like Buy now always converts way less than depending on where it's at. If it's on the. If it's on the product page, it should be add to cart.

Matt Edmundson [22:49 - 22:50]: Yep.

Matthew Stafford [22:50 - 24:20]: And then when you get in the cart, it should be proceed to checkout and then to shipping and then to payment, and then to complete your order. You want them. People don't want to click on something if they don't know where it's going to take them. And a lot of times what we found is people are not ready to Buy now when they add something to their cart. Because, you know, we've watched thousands and thousands of videos. People will put 8, 10 items in their cart, and then they'll actually go to their cart and shop from there, remove things, and then check out. And so the Buy now button, that text is terrible for them because they're like, oh, I'm not ready to buy yet. I'm still browsing. And so by going through those micro commitments in the text, we've essentially found a way to make it much easier for them to do that. So like, like homepage we use, like learn more or more options, see more stuff like that, so that they're like, oh, okay, there's other things that I can go look at that takes me to a collection page that has like multiple options, and then it's like, you know, more choices or things like that. And then add to cart, then proceed to check out, etc. So that matters more than the color. But the color needs to Be something that stands out so that they see what the next most important step is.

Matt Edmundson [24:20 - 25:03]: Which is, I mean, going back to the color. It makes sense. It's what I see on a lot of websites where the main call to action button is a specific coloring. You only ever see that color on call to action buttons. I'm curious, Matt, if you've played around with. With the. What's the word I'm looking for? I read a report and I'm desperately trying to think in my head where this. Where I saw this data from. Changing the text from add to cart to add to my cart. Have you tested that by throwing the word my in there? Because one of the reports I read was actually if you use the word my or some sort of ownership, it results in like a 37% uplift.

Matthew Stafford [25:03 - 25:14]: We will be testing. We will test that right away because I have it that I know of, maybe some of our team has, but. Yeah, that makes sense to me. I would love to try that. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson [25:15 - 25:27]: Well, let me know the results of the. Because this is something that I've been wondering whether we should play with. We've played around with it a little bit on some of our websites, but I haven't done it directly on the add to cart button. And as I said, I do know.

Matthew Stafford [25:27 - 25:46]: That you put like a little lock symbol or a cart that. That actually does increase the add to cart. So for us, like basically we put a little lock and it says add to cart or it says add to cart and we put a cart on there and that those little symbols actually do increase.

Matt Edmundson [25:46 - 26:05]: They did, yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Use a locked icon as a. I mean, I've seen it obviously with. With the basket or the. The shopping cart icon. Yeah, I've seen the lock icon on secure checkout securely or whatever it is. I've not seen it on the add to cart button.

Matthew Stafford [26:05 - 26:38]: Yeah. So another thing that we use is we'll put the number of items and the price in the button. That's helped a lot because if people don't realize that they've actually clicked it twice, it will show, you know, or what the quantity is. And what we found is there was way less cart abandonment by having that there. And the reason, you know, the assumption that we made is, okay, they're not getting into the cart and then seeing a different price and thinking like, oh, this is more expensive than I thought it was when really all they had done is click two of them.

Matt Edmundson [26:38 - 26:47]: That's really good. I'm gonna try that one as well. Yeah, I Don't know if we've ever done that. It's wrecking my brain.

Matthew Stafford [26:48 - 26:52]: The number of the quantity and the price in the button itself.

Matt Edmundson [26:53 - 26:56]: So it will say add to T shirts to.

Matthew Stafford [26:56 - 26:59]: Well say add to cart and it one and the price.

Matt Edmundson [26:59 - 27:43]: Yeah, yeah, okay. Like it. Oh, I'm getting lots of tips here, Matt. This is great. And I going to be going to be experimenting and testing. Where do you. These sort of micro adjustments. I was, I remember I've had lots of these sort of conversations whereby you can put sort of three or four of them together and this might have half a percentage impact over here, but when you add sort of four or five of them actually the numbers start to add up, you know. Yeah. And it starts to make a big difference. Is that what we're finding more these days? That actually it's more about the micro adjustments as opposed to finding the killer that's going to give me a 30% uplift kind of thing or are they still out there?

Matthew Stafford [27:43 - 30:38]: Yeah, no, we're still looking for, we're still looking for that. And I think websites are contextual so a lot of times where people make the mistake is they go, oh well this site sells a lot. I'm gonna do what they're doing. Well, they don't realize like, well, their demographic might be a 40 year old male. And you know, the website that they're comparing it to is, you know, Kylie Jenner because she's a billionaire and sells all this makeup. Wow. It's a huge difference because they own their traffic and their site can be really crappy and they'll still sell a lot. And people will a lot of times mimic really crappy sites because they're doing really well because they own their traffic rather than they got to buy their traffic. And so I would say it's really a combination of both. Like you can get the big wins but for us we have like a set of best practices that we go through first that have a lot of the principles that we know win every time. I always say clarity trumps persuasion. So a lot of times people are trying to be very fancy and use flowery words and like a brand, you know, language, etc. But it's really confusing to the customer that doesn't understand it because they're not the ones that created it. And so what we, we want to do is keep things as prototypical as possible, which means similar to other sites that people use because in doing that they don't have to. It reduces the cognitive load. They don't have to think through what they're doing in order to buy from you. So all of those things that people are trying to be fancy actually end up hurting their sales. I always say traffic's not your problem. You know, most ecommerce sites convert around 2%, maybe a little above, a little below. It kind of goes back and forth and everybody thinks like, oh, I need more traffic, I need more traffic. I'm like, no, you had a hundred people come to your site, 2 people bought, 98 people left and you're trying to get another hundred people there. My theory is if I make my website work better, I'm going to get two more of those 98 people that left and I'm going to double my business on the same amount of ad spend. And the moment we did that and we learned how to do that, we've been able to create, I think over 117, 117 or 120 some sites that do over a million dollars a year. We have like 20 of them now that are over $10 million a year. In our students, it's replicatable and you know, over the last 10 years we had about a thousand students, we have more than 20. If you think about it, more than 20% of them have hit that million dollar mark. If you look at Shopify statistics, it's less than 1% ever even make a sale of people that open the stores.

Matt Edmundson [30:38 - 30:39]: Yeah.

Matthew Stafford [30:39 - 30:47]: So to have 25% of them turn into, or 20% of them turn into million dollar businesses out of a thousand, what we do works.

Matt Edmundson [30:47 - 31:58]: Yeah, that's really powerful. Yeah, I love that. There's always. There was something quite galling to me whenever I remember a chap called me and said, listen, our website does. I think it was three quarters of a million they were doing in sales. And he was like, I think we need to double our ad spend on the website. Can you help us? And I'm like, well one, I don't manage ad spend, but I'm, I'm probably fairly sure your issue is not your ad spend. And so we, we had a look at his competitor's website and, and it was very apparent that his website, his competitor was doing seven times conversion. So they were converting seven customers for every one he was converting. I'm like, there's your problem right there. It's not a traffic thing, it's a conversion thing. I mean, you could argue were they getting better traffic, but fundamentally it's the exact same principle. Look at the traffic first and figure out how you can convert it better and optimse that before you start going spending way more money on advertising. Because I think we get stuck in this place where it's like, my website's got 2% conversion. That's kind of where it has to stay.

Matthew Stafford [31:58 - 31:59]: Right, Right.

Matt Edmundson [31:59 - 32:01]: Do you know what I mean? And so the easy leader to put.

Matthew Stafford [32:01 - 32:22]: Is, is we have customers now that have been with us seven, eight years. They're around six, 7%. It's crazy. You know, we would have never thought that that was possible, but just over time, it just keeps getting better and better. It just works better. The other thing. Oh, man, I lost my train of thought. Well, I lost my chain of thought.

Matt Edmundson [32:22 - 32:24]: So it'll come back. It always does.

Matthew Stafford [32:24 - 32:45]: Okay. Yeah, I remember now. So another thing you have to remember is the difference between mobile and desktop. You know, we started 10 years ago. The majority was on desktop, and mobile was not even close. It was probably 80, 20, 80% desktop, 20% mobile. Now it's. It's 80 to 90% mobile.

Matt Edmundson [32:45 - 32:45]: Yeah.

Matthew Stafford [32:45 - 33:02]: You know, 20% desktop. And so you can use your Google Analytics to see if you have issues there too. With all of the data that we've, that we've captured and looked at, we know that desktop should convert twice as high as mobile.

Matt Edmundson [33:02 - 33:03]: Okay.

Matthew Stafford [33:03 - 34:14]: So if you're converting at 2% mobile, your desktop should convert 4%. Otherwise, something's broken. But they should be two different experiences. And so you get away with a lot more on desktop because you have a lot more real estate to work with on mobile. You have to be very, very specific. And if you think about, if you have a lot of products and you're forcing people to scroll through a lot of products, you wonder why, like, you have five or six of your 20 products that sell, you know, five times as much. It's because people either look at those first few and leave, or those other ones never even get seen. And so what we found is on your category pages, to have a really good set of filters matters a lot. We've seen as much as a 3 to 500% increase, especially on, like, clothing sites and things like that that have a lot of options when they can pare it down to find what they're looking for much easier. The conversion rate goes way up. So filters and search traffic, like the search bar, those are your two most valuable forms of website visitors. Like, if you can get them to use the filters or the search bar.

Matt Edmundson [34:14 - 34:14]: Yeah.

Matthew Stafford [34:14 - 34:16]: You'll double your conversion.

Matt Edmundson [34:16 - 34:37]: Yeah. We found the same thing, actually. The customers who typed any, and it didn't matter what it was, they just really Typed anything in the search bar. It didn't, didn't have to be a product. It could have been an ingredient or it could have been something, you know, sort of a how to type thing. Anybody that typed anything in that search bar became a much more valuable customer.

Matthew Stafford [34:37 - 35:08]: Double, double the value and double the conversion. I'll give you a little, a little story that, you know, we've learned a lot of lessons. This is kind of a damaging mission. We used to say, well, if you don't have more than four or five products, you don't need Search Bar. Like they're going to find all your products. And what we realized is people will type in their problem and then a lot of times if you don't have the solution, but it's what's being typed in, a lot of times that tells you what your next product can be.

Matt Edmundson [35:08 - 35:13]: Yeah, sorry, let me just get rid of. I thought I had my phone on. Do not disturb. Sorry.

Matthew Stafford [35:13 - 35:48]: That's okay. And so we had a site called Cubco. And what we realized is, you know, it was basically, it was like a hoodie for little kids that they could take it off and it would fold into itself and become a stuffed animal. Well, the number one and number two search terms were unicorn and unicorn spelled wrong. And over like a four year period and we're like, wow, we don't have a unicorn. So they came out with a unicorn and they launched it on Amazon prime day and they did a little over half a million dollars in 48 hours.

Matt Edmundson [35:49 - 35:50]: Holy moly.

Matthew Stafford [35:50 - 36:00]: So it literally there is gold in that information. If you, if you're tracking it, looking at it and learning from it.

Matt Edmundson [36:00 - 36:07]: That's a really good point. Actually. I'm going to. One of the questions I have for the team tomorrow is are we tracking that search bar data? I'm sure we are.

Matthew Stafford [36:07 - 36:09]: Yeah. So just what are they typing in there?

Matt Edmundson [36:09 - 36:12]: Yeah, and just looking at that, I think will be quite fascinating.

Matthew Stafford [36:12 - 36:50]: Yeah, you can use. It is gold. You can use it to describe how to solve problems, et cetera. There's a whole, We've used that for all kinds of things. I'll give you one more really, really good tip that all your users can use. And they can use like Hot Jar, Lucky Orange or whatever to install it. What we do, and this is the very first thing we do on every client site that we start is we put a pop up on the thank you page that pops up and it asks this question. What was the one thing that almost made you not buy?

Matt Edmundson [36:50 - 36:51]: Okay.

Matthew Stafford [36:52 - 36:57]: And so those people that just spent money with you will tell you what was difficult, what they didn't understand.

Matt Edmundson [36:58 - 36:58]: Yeah.

Matthew Stafford [36:58 - 37:16]: What almost prevented. Prevented them from buying. And you take that information, go back, and you fix it on the website. I can tell you that probably six of our top 10 winners of all time came from that question on the thank you page from the customer telling us what was difficult for them.

Matt Edmundson [37:16 - 37:53]: Wow. Wow, love that. That's a really. Yeah, we don't do that. That I do know, Matt, so thank you for that. Listen, Magnitude, there's been a lot of value that you've delivered here. And before we get. Before we go further, I really need to just be aware of time and to say that. What's your question for me? This is where we break the conversation slightly. This is where I ask my guest for a question. If you're new to the show, I ask my guest for a question. I take that question and answer it on social media. So, Matt, what's your question for me?

Matthew Stafford [37:55 - 38:01]: Hmm. If you were writing a book about your life, what chapter would you be in right now?

Matt Edmundson [38:03 - 38:29]: That's a great question. That's a lovely question. And I will be answering that on social media. If you don't follow me, come find me on Instagram or LinkedIn. MattEdmundson. That's all you need to know. You'll find me there. But, Matt, listen, thank you for the question and thank you for all the value that you've bought today. If people want to know more about you, if they want to connect with you, maybe even get you to look over their website, I don't know what your process is or how you kickstart that whole thing. Maybe you could just let us know.

Matthew Stafford [38:30 - 39:00]: Yeah. So our website is buildgrowthscale.com and then on there they can fill out forms to get us to do that or even to schedule a call or my email is matt buildgrowthscale.com and I answer all my own emails and take care of that. So super. I love what I do. I enjoy it, have a lot of fun helping people. It's very fulfilling. So, yeah, feel free to reach out or go to our website and look at the different things that we do and ways that we can help you.

Matt Edmundson [39:00 - 39:25]: That'd be great. And you've obviously got a big passion for it, which is nice, actually. It's lovely to hear when people have a passion for their topic. So thank you so much for coming on, brother. I really appreciate it. And as always, I've got lots of notes. You've given me some really interesting ideas to think about. So we're definitely going to go away and test a few things and let's stay in touch over this because I'm really curious to see where it goes.

Matthew Stafford [39:25 - 39:27]: Okay, Sounds good. Thanks, Matt.

Matt Edmundson [39:27 - 40:40]: Wonderful. Well, what a great conversation. Let me do the. The usual. Hang on. Here we go. Let's do this. There we go. Yes. This is what happens when you buy the new Rode sound desk. You get all these little sound pads and thanks, Matt. Really appreciate it. Now, be sure to follow the Ecommerce podcast wherever you get your podcast from, because we've got some more great conversations lined up and I of course, do not want you to miss any of them. And in case no one has told you yet today, let me be the first. You are awesome. Yes, you are created awesome. It's just a burden you've got to bear. Matt's got to bear it. I've got to bear it. You've got to bury it as well. Now, the Ecommerce podcast is produced by Podjunction. You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app. The theme music was by Josh Edmundson. And as I mentioned, if you'd like to read the transcript, the show notes and all that sort of good stuff, head over to the website ecommercepodcast.net which is where you can also sign up for the very good newsletter that I mentioned earlier. But do go check it out. But that's it from me. That's it from Matt. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.