For most SaaS companies, a high feature adoption rate is linked to increased upgrades, retention, and loyalty. When users fully adopt a product, they integrate it into their daily workflow and continually find value.

But alarmingly, a reasonable feature adoption rate in SaaS is between 20% and 30%, and similarly, only 20% of launched features are used. We can all understand that some features won’t hit the mark, but should we really accept that up to 80% of the features we build will go unused?

I don’t think so.

By refining the prioritization process, we can make sure you’re working on the right features that will drive value for users and improve feature adoption rates. And it starts with understanding your user.

Reasons for low feature adoption

As product teams focus on developing innovative capabilities and addressing technical debt, the gap between feature development and feature adoption widens.

Underperforming features are a drain on your company’s time and resources. But what causes low adoption rates in the first place?

• Lack of awareness: The new feature isn’t presented/marketed to users in a compelling way
• Wrong messaging: The marketing message doesn’t resonate with users, and they’re unaware of the benefits
• Bad feature: The feature doesn’t actually address a user’s need or pain point

While these are the three most commonly cited reasons for low feature adoption, we’ve found that these symptoms often stem from underlying issues with how features are prioritized for development and release. Teams let internal assumptions, stakeholder requests, or competitive pressures (rather than genuine user insights) drive priorities. In turn, the wrong features are released, spurring feature bloat, low adoption rates, and more.

Think of that ‘AI-powered suggestion’ feature that no one uses. Was it truly solving a user need, or just a cool tech demo?

We’ve seen firsthand with clients how prioritization directly impacts performance. When companies prioritize effectively, they stay focused on what is proven to deliver results. And when they don’t, the opposite happens.

What is user-centered prioritization?

There are plenty of ways to address low feature adoption, but user-centered prioritization might be the Trojan horse you didn’t see coming.

User-centered prioritization is an approach that places the user at the heart of every decision regarding feature development and enhancement.

It’s a systematic way to ensure that the features you build truly solve your users’ problems, meet their needs, and provide the most value. This contrasts with traditional prioritization methods that might heavily weigh internal opinions, market trends, or ease of development.

With user-centered prioritization, you leverage user research, behavior analytics, and feedback loops to make data-driven development decisions. By understanding not just what users say they want, but how they actually behave, product teams can make more strategic choices about which features to build, when to release them, and how to position them for maximum adoption.

User-centered prioritization is the first step to higher feature adoption rates

We’ll get to some specific strategies in a minute, but for now, I want to provide some additional context on why user-centered prioritization is the first step to higher feature adoption.

It’s more than just a method; it’s a mindset. The core idea is to build products and services that truly solve user problems and provide a positive experience.

When faced with a long list of potential features or improvements, user-centered prioritization helps teams decide what matters most. It can:

• Identify pain points and focus on features that directly address user frustrations or obstacles.
• Hone in on the most frequent and important tasks users want to accomplish, then prioritize content and features that support these tasks.
• Visualize the user journey and break it down into actionable user stories, prioritizing those with the highest potential impact on user satisfaction and business goals.
• Classify and prioritize usability problems based on their impact on user task completion, frequency, and ease of fix.

To make any of this happen, you need a deep understanding of users. Prioritization begins with thorough user research. Use various methods such as interviews, surveys, observational studies, usability testing, and analyzing user data to gather insights. Try to build an understanding of how and where users will interact with the feature.

In essence, user-centered prioritization ensures that product development efforts are aligned with what users truly need and value, leading to ethical and successful products.

Strategies for improving feature adoption rates with user-centered prioritization in the customer journey

So, what does it look like in action when a user-centered approach dictates feature development and deployment? Here are eight strategies.

1. Build the right features

The foundation is to build the right features, and to ensure you don’t do it in a vacuum. As we have covered, you need user research to understand the problems you are trying to solve.

Before moving to development, test concepts and prototypes with real users to ensure the feature addresses a need and has a clear value proposition.

Prioritize features that will deliver the most significant value to users, not just those that are “nice to have” or technically interesting.

2. Be clear about the value proposition of your feature

Users need to understand why a feature is beneficial for them and how it solves a problem, not just what it does. Articulate this clearly in all communications.

Each feature should address a distinct user pain point or enable a new, valuable capability. Ideally, use language that has been tested and proven to clearly convey the value of the feature.

3. Make onboarding frictionless

Segment users (by role, industry, goals, etc.) and tailor onboarding experiences. A marketing professional might need a different introduction than a developer.

Guide users to the core value of the product and its key features as quickly as possible. This is the moment they realize “this product is for me.”

Instead of static tours, interactively prompt users to take the desired action so that you’re teaching them while they accomplish tasks.

4. Create context in the app experience

Use subtle, in-context cues to highlight new features or explain specific UI elements when a user is in a relevant area.

For more significant feature announcements, use in-experience banners or modals that appear at relevant moments. Behavioral triggers can also deliver guidance based on what a user is currently doing or has done.

When a feature’s area is empty, use this space to explain the feature’s purpose and guide the user on how to get started. Make it easy to find the features your user is looking for.

5. Educate and clearly communicate with users

As mentioned above, prioritize in-app methods for immediate context, but be sure to supplement with marketing materials like:

• Targeted emails that announce new features, explain their benefits, and link directly to the feature in the product. Segment these emails to ensure relevance.
• Blogs that add in-depth explanations, use cases, and technical details for those who want them.
• For complex or high-impact features, host live or recorded webinars to demo features and answer questions.
• Social media, including short, engaging content (videos, graphics) to announce features and drive interest.

6. Personalize the feature

Not all features are for every user. To be sure the right features are being shown to the target user, you can hide or highlight features based on a user’s role or permissions.

Allow users to tailor their experience, making the most relevant features easily accessible, and use machine learning to suggest features or workflows based on a user’s past behavior or similar user segments.

7. Gather data and feedback

Instead of relying on just feature adoption rates, gather supplemental data and feedback to understand why users are or aren’t adopting the feature. Use micro-surveys (e.g., after a user interacts with a new feature) to get immediate feedback on usability and value. Monitor overall satisfaction with NPS & CSAT surveys, conduct regular user interviews, and look for recurring issues in support tickets.

Make sure to analyze all this information across different user segments to identify differences and tailor strategies.

8. Iterate on the feature

Don’t just launch and leave a feature; you can continue iterating on the experience and messaging post-launch until you figure out what works. Test different onboarding flows, in-app messages, or feature designs to see what drives higher adoption.

Feature adoption is an ongoing process. Regularly review data, implement changes, and measure their impact. Don’t stop promoting after the announcement.

By adopting these strategies, SaaS companies can move beyond simply launching features to truly integrating them into their users’ workflows, maximizing the value delivered, and ultimately driving sustainable growth.

A good feature adoption rate is always improving

We’ve often touted the uselessness of benchmarks. And while they are meaningless for setting goals, they can help to paint a picture of industry averages and to set expectations. In the case of feature adoption rates, if you’re below that 20% mark, you should strongly consider building a more user-centered prioritization process.

Incorporating user feedback early and often can significantly reduce development time and costs. Instead of building features based on incorrect assumptions, you’ll focus resources where they’ll have the most impact, leading to higher ROI.

The direct link between user-centered prioritization and feature adoption is clear.

The days of simply building features and hoping for the best are over. If you’re ready to take a different approach, our team is available to support.

The post How User-Centered Prioritization Helps Improve Feature Adoption Rates appeared first on The Good.

Despite this being a proven economic model, companies are rarely focusing their effort on that 20%.

It’s not because they don’t want to; it’s because it is easy to get wrapped up in not losing a single sale, to the point that you are spreading yourself too thin.

If you focus your energy and product improvements on the highest-value user segment, you will see greater returns for less work.

In this article, we’re sharing the study we recently ran for a client that helped us identify their most valuable user segments and prioritize improvements to meet their needs.

What are user segments?

User segments are groups within a customer base who share similar characteristics, behaviors, or values.

They are created with user segmentation, which researches those commonalities and divides your audience into distinct groups. You can then tailor experiences, personalize messaging, and focus optimization efforts on their specific needs.

Common types of user segments

User segments can be divided based on different traits. The type of segmentation you use will vary based on your use case and goals. Here is a quick overview of common user segments.

Why companies optimize for the wrong segments

When we run prioritization exercises, one of the most common mistakes we see is companies focused on segments of users based on volume. If the segment has more users, they automatically believe it deserves more attention.

This reflects one of the three common prioritization mistakes:

1. Volume bias: Prioritizing segments with the most users rather than the most value
2. Squeaky wheel focus: Optimizing for the users who complain the loudest
3. Recency fallacy: Focusing on the latest acquisition channel or user cohort without evaluating their actual value

The uncomfortable truth is that your most valuable segments may not be your largest, your loudest, or your newest.

Conducting a segmentation study step by step

At The Good, we’ve developed a systematic approach to identify and prioritize your most valuable user segments. Here’s how it works.

Step 1: Set your goals

Before you start analyzing data, segmenting users, and prioritizing, you need a clear understanding of your project goals. In most cases, they will look something like this:

• Identify and quantify subsets of user segments based on use cases
• Understand the potential value of known segments
• Identify features and benefits that are most important on a per-segment basis
• Find opportunities to improve the engagement of high-value users

These goals can be turned into the key research questions of your study.

Step 2: Identify valuable behaviors beyond revenue

Your most valuable user segments, of course, need to drive revenue, but there are other indicators to consider when prioritizing who you are building/optimizing for.

Current value metrics, future value indicators, influence value, and cost-to-serve factors will all influence the overall value of a user segment.

• Current value metrics: Revenue generated, subscription tier, feature usage, team size
• Future value indicators: Growth trajectory, expansion potential
• Influence value: Referral behavior, advocacy impact
• Cost-to-serve factors: Support requirements, implementation complexity, churn risk, acquisition cost

Identifying and tracking these metrics and scoring segments based on this information will help paint a more holistic picture of value. Some segments might not be your biggest revenue drivers today, but they represent significant future opportunities, so you may choose to optimize for them instead of your current biggest spenders.

Step 3: Collect qualitative and quantitative data

Once you’re clear on goals and value metrics, you’re ready to start collecting data for your segmentation analysis. Gathering a multidimensional data set will help you better understand users as the complex humans they are. Types of data that will help your analysis will include:

• Usage patterns: Frequency, features used, time spent in the product
• Transactional data: Revenue contribution, plan type, upgrade/downgrade history
• Behavioral signals: Engagement with key activation points, referral behavior
• Acquisition source: Channel origin, customer acquisition cost, time to convert
• Demographic/firmographic data: Company size, industry, role

Most of this data will be sourced from your main quantitative collection tool, such as Google Analytics or your product analytics. But for a truly effective study, you need to supplement all this information with qualitative context. Surveys, session recordings, or user tests can help you better understand why your users are doing what they do.

Step 4: Conduct factor analysis to identify value drivers

Group your data together into a reduced number of independent factors that represent the underlying themes within the dataset. This will help identify value drivers that differentiate your user segments.

For example, in a recent segmentation project, we discovered distinct value factors that formed natural segment groupings:

• Efficiency seekers: Primarily valued time savings and streamlined workflows
• Integration power users: Heavily utilized connections to other tools in their stack
• Data-driven optimizers: Focused on analytics and performance insights
• Scale-focused operators: Needed enterprise features and team collaboration

Understanding these value drivers helps you move beyond simple demographic segmentation to truly understand what motivates different user groups.

Step 5: Apply cluster analysis to form actionable segments

Once you’ve identified the key value drivers, use cluster analysis to group users with similar characteristics. Usually, 3-7 distinct segments emerge from the exercise.

These segments often cross traditional demographic lines, revealing unexpected patterns. For example, power users might not be enterprise customers as you assumed, but mid-market companies with specific workflow needs.

This is also the time to start looking for natural clusters of behavior that indicate high-value segments. Considering this, when you’re analyzing user clusters, look for key differentiators like:

1. Usage frequency: Daily users vs. weekly vs. monthly
2. Feature utilization: Which user flows are most common for each segment
3. Value perception: What features each segment values most highly
4. Growth potential: Which segments show increasing usage over time

Step 6: Quantify segment value and opportunity size

The inputs from your data, factor, and cluster analyses will produce outputs of your high-value segments.

Here’s an example of that workflow so far. The data (survey themes collected) on habits, values, and use cases were the inputs for the factor and cluster analyses. That resulted in segments around the frequency of product use, customer values, and reason for use.

For each potential high-value segment, revisit the value metrics you established in step 2 of the process. Calculate the relevant metrics to ensure you’re not just following hunches but making data-backed decisions about where to focus.

The most valuable segments often show strength across multiple metrics, not just in current revenue. For example, a segment with moderate current revenue but excellent retention and high referral rates may be more valuable than a high-revenue segment with poor retention.

You’ll also start to see how your most valuable segments differ from your hypotheses. Maybe it’s not defined by company size but by a specific usage pattern. As a specific example, imagine users who perform at least 3 exports per week AND invite 2+ team members within the first 30 days are 4.5x more likely to upgrade to the enterprise tier within 6 months.

This kind of insight could transform your priorities, focusing on making these specific actions easier and more intuitive, rather than spending time/money on creating new features for other segments.

Step 7: Map segments to specific opportunities

The final step is to leverage your knowledge about high-value users to focus optimization efforts. Now, you can connect your segment analysis to concrete optimization opportunities. A few thought starters for this process:

1. What actions correlate with long-term success for this segment?
2. Where do users in this segment typically struggle?
3. What capabilities does this segment need but doesn’t have?
4. What value propositions connect most strongly to this segment?

You’ll end up with a list of optimization opportunities. To prioritize those efforts and start building a roadmap, we recommend scoring them across these dimensions on a 1-10 scale, then calculating a weighted score that reflects your company’s specific situation and constraints.

1. Potential revenue impact: How much additional revenue could optimizing for this segment generate?
2. Implementation effort: How difficult would it be to implement changes for this segment?
3. Time to results: How quickly can you expect to see meaningful outcomes?
4. Strategic alignment: How well does focusing on this segment align with your long-term business strategy?

For example, if you’re under pressure to show quick wins, you might weigh “time to results” more heavily. If you’re planning for long-term growth, strategic alignment might carry more weight.

This will be the start of your roadmap for optimization efforts, ensuring that you focus resources on the right opportunities for your most valuable segments.

Focus on your highest-value segments first, then gradually expand your optimization efforts to secondary segments once you’ve captured the initial value. Always consider potential cross-segment impacts when making changes.

Drive growth with user segmentation and prioritization

As your product and market evolve, so will your user segments. What constitutes a high-value segment today may shift as you introduce new features or enter new markets.

We recommend evaluating your user segments quarterly, with a more comprehensive review annually or whenever you experience significant business changes.

Remember, the path to scaling your SaaS business isn’t through trying to please everyone with generic optimizations. It’s through deeply understanding which user segments create the most value and deliberately focusing your limited resources on enhancing their experience.

Ready to identify and prioritize your most valuable user segments? The Good’s Digital Experience Optimization Program can help you discover untapped growth opportunities through expert research, strategic insight, and data-driven experimentation. Contact us to learn more about how our team can help your SaaS business scale faster.

The post How to Identify Your Most Valuable User Segments and Prioritize Accordingly appeared first on The Good.

But this episodic style is falling out of favor with forward-thinking teams. The best product organizations are embracing continuous research, an always-on approach to gathering insights that allows for more user-centered, effective products.

In one study, 83% of designers, product managers, and researchers agreed that research should be conducted at every stage of the product development life cycle. But, only 36% of them are conducting research studies after launch.

How can they bridge the gap? With continuous research.

What is continuous research?

Continuous research is an “always-on” style of research, where product teams put practices and systems in place to habitually learn from users. Rather than conducting isolated research studies or sprints, it focuses on integrating regular research activities into the product development cycle.

Why continuous research?

The benefits of continuous research are plentiful. Gathering insights regularly means quickly responding to user needs/wants, making more data-driven decisions, and reducing spend on changes that don’t work.

According to research by McKinsey, there is a direct correlation between financial success and de-risking development by continually listening, testing, and iterating with end-users. Continuous research methods are proven to positively impact the bottom line, and you can feel good knowing that they also make your customers’ lives better.

However, the under-touted benefit of continuous research is that it makes everyone’s job at your company easier. Product teams get their questions answered faster. Developers don’t have to waste time on unfriendly user features. Sales can more easily connect with customers.

No one has to wait to get on a roadmap, because there is a constant cycle of feedback and user connection that is otherwise unattainable.

Continuous research methods

So, what specifically counts as continuous research? Plenty of methods would fall under this umbrella. Here are a few of our favorites to paint a picture of what continuous research looks like in action.

Regular user interviews

Open a time on your calendar to consistently fill with customer interviews. This consistent, lightweight user research can gather immediate feedback on new features or designs.

Regular usability testing

Find time to observe users interacting with your product. Do this often, and you will uncover patterns to improve your UX.

Ongoing collection of CSAT or NPS scores

Keep a record of customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) or Net Promoter Scores (NPS) to understand over time whether users are happy with your product. This consistent record will help you determine if product optimizations have helped or hurt your experience.

Cohort comparison through onboarding surveys

Conduct onboarding surveys and then compare cohorts over time to identify trends that may not be apparent in individual feedback sessions.

Lightweight prototype testing

Get feedback on designs from initial prototype to mid-fidelity to fully mocked up. Use the consistent feedback to iterate quickly and make immediate changes as you go.

Continuous research implementation strategies

With the benefits and methods clear, you might be ready to shift your culture towards continuous research. If so, here are a few implementation strategies to set you off on the right foot.

Start small and build up consistency

Begin with a single recurring research touchpoint, such as weekly user interviews or bi-weekly prototype testing sessions. You don’t need a comprehensive, always-on strategy when you’re just starting out. Starting small will get you into the habit, and then you can find ways to expand your efforts.

Put research on the calendar

Blocking time on the calendar for research will get you into the continuous research habit. Consider something like a Friday afternoon standing meeting that you can fill with customer interviews.

Teresa Torres, a well-respected expert and author of Continuous Discovery Habits, suggests you talk to customers every week. “Continuous discovery means weekly touchpoints with customers by the team building the product, where they conduct small research activities in pursuit of a desired outcome.”

The emphasis is on taking research from something you pause to do, into something you always do. Putting it on the calendar in a consistent cadence will help you stick to it.

Get the whole team involved

One of the best parts of continuous research is that it benefits the whole team… and the whole team can be involved! While continuous research may be led by a researcher, it can also be effectively led by product managers who incorporate it into their regular schedule.

Even if other teams don’t lead the process, get them involved by:

• Asking salespeople to ask one specific research question in each call
• Having designers build prototype testing into their workflows
• Sharing research findings across the organization

We have lots of expert insights on how to make B2B research work harder and get your team involved in the process, here.

Complement ongoing feedback with strategic research

Another great recommendation from Teresa Torres is to complement ongoing feedback with occasional deeper discovery work. When you have a higher-risk change or question, take the necessary time to do a deep dive into the data, testing, and analysis.

An always-on research strategy should ensure you’re solving the right problems and that you’re doing it effectively. A combination of lighter, continuous, and deep-dive research will make sure that happens.

Build your toolkit

Tools and technologies that enable continuous feedback will be a lifesaver during busy weeks when it would be easy to let research fall to the wayside. Set up automations and find the tools that make it easier for you to keep users scheduling, data collecting, and insights surfacing.

In the end, the value of continuous research comes from rapidly applying insights. These implementation strategies will create explicit pathways for research findings to influence product decisions within days, not months.

Who should leverage continuous research?

A shift to continuous research represents a cultural shift in product development. It’s not just a changing methodology; it’s a truly user-centered approach where customer feedback continuously shapes product direction. Most product teams would benefit from implementing an always-on research strategy, but it’s particularly valuable in a few circumstances.

Teams with limited resources

It might seem counterintuitive, but it is particularly valuable for teams that don’t have a big research budget. Even without the dollars to fund big studies, teams can leverage continuous research to uncover customer insights that guide development.

Growth-stage startups

It’s ideal for startups that are moving quickly to build and make decisions. They’re mostly throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, but continuous research can act as the safety net or gut check for those ideas. Run it by a customer and get some quick feedback instead of waiting to make mistakes in-market.

Products in rapidly evolving markets

If you’re in a market that is changing quickly, like AI, it’s a good idea to implement continuous research. It helps you adapt to evolving consumer needs more efficiently and to keep up with rapidly developing technological advancements. When you have an always-on research schedule, you can get your questions answered more quickly and implement changes shortly after.

Why “always-on” should be your new normal

Studies show that the compartmentalization of design, development, and research stages of product development “increases the risk of losing the voice of the consumer or of relying too heavily on one iteration of that voice.” Don’t let your organization fall into this trap.

User insights help teams innovate faster and build better products. The best teams today are those that learn from their customers as they build, putting the user experience at the center of product development and optimization. Consistent feedback loops allow them to deliver constant value and effectively respond to market changes.

As competition intensifies in SaaS, continuous research could be the difference between products that thrive and those that die.

If your team sees the value of continuous research but doesn’t have the resources to manage it in-house, The Good can help.

Our team of experts will be an on-demand research (and design and strategy) team that helps you get things done faster. No more waiting months to get your ideas on the roadmap.

The post Continuous Research: The Secret Weapon For Effective Product Teams appeared first on The Good.

What is going wrong? The most common assumption is a poor product experience, but something else could be the culprit: SaaS products take too long to deliver value.

If users don’t quickly experience how software makes their life better, they will delete the app or simply abandon their account.

If you find your users in this position, accelerating time-to-value should be at the top of your priority list. Reducing the time it takes a customer to find value in your product can increase customer satisfaction by 10% to 30%, which will have a direct impact on retention.

In this article, we’ll share how strategies like optimizing onboarding, personalizing the user experience, and implementing quick wins can help you improve time-to-value and reduce churn.

What is time-to-value (TTV)?

Time-to-value is the duration of time it takes a user to experience the value of your SaaS product. It measures the time lapsed from when a user starts engaging with your tool to when they have an ‘Aha!’ moment about the positive impact on their life.

Types of time-to-value:

• Time-to-basic value: A metric measuring the time it takes a customer to see any value from your product.
• Time-to-exceed value: A metric measuring the time it takes to exceed a user’s expectations about your product’s value.
• Long time-to-value SaaS: A product or service that takes a longer duration of time to realize value (sometimes weeks or months). Usually, for SaaS, this is true when it takes time to integrate systems or data. In this case, it’s important to demonstrate incremental value during the journey to full value.
• Short time-to-value SaaS: A product or service that meets an immediate need, such as a transactional software product with a one-time use.
• Immediate time-to-value SaaS: A product or service with an instant reward for customer actions, such as a picture resizing or link shortening software.

How to calculate time-to-value

The simple time-to-value formula is:
TTV = Time that value is realized – Time user starts engaging with your product

But while the concept of time to value is pretty straightforward, how you calculate it will vary.

Your unique product, user, and definition of value will help guide the inputs of your TTV formula. Here is a quick overview of how to calculate time to value for your business:

1. Define value: What does finding value mean in the context of your product? Usually, it is how long it takes a user to complete a specific task that showcases the core function of your product.
2. Define the start time: When do you start measuring the users’ path to value? What is the starting point of their journey? Usually, it’s during the registration or onboarding process.
3. Define the end time: What is the moment a customer realizes value for your product? You’ll likely need to conduct research to pinpoint the ‘Aha!’ moment (more on that later). Typically, it takes the form of achieving a specific outcome, uncovering a benefit, or reaching a milestone.
4. Calculate the duration: Measure the time between the start and end points. This is your time to value.

Source

Some examples of how actual SaaS companies measure time-to-value include: how long it takes for a user to upgrade from free to paid, how quickly users start a new project after onboarding, or how long it takes to get the first ROI from the tool.

Why is time-to-value important?

Time-to-value directly impacts product success. It is an early indicator of retention and churn, and can help uncover areas for optimization.

The metric is especially important for companies with freemium or free trial pricing models. When your monetization happens during the product experience, you need to show your value explicitly and efficiently. Time-to-value is a way to measure if you are doing so successfully.

How to improve time-to-value

Demonstrating your value early on takes your SaaS product from ‘nice-to-have’ to ‘can’t live without.’ Here are a few strategies to help you do it.

Identify your product’s ‘Aha!’ moments

To get to the ‘Aha!’ moments faster, you first need to understand what those eye-opening experiences are. What turns casual users into lifelong customers? What is the first product experience that clearly shows your product’s potential impact on a user’s life?

To identify those ‘Aha!’ moments (or the end time in your formula), there is nothing more effective than talking to and studying the users themselves.

With user research methods like session recordings, usability tests, interviews, and surveys, you can uncover the intrinsic motivations of your users and take stock of their goals. What you find in your UX research process will help identify which product experiences will be most valuable to them and help prioritize which to show off early.

For example, if a new user of your project management tool wants to gain transparency across their team, the product should show them how to do that before it does anything else.

It will be tempting to bombard new users with all the amazing features of your tool, but to provide the quickest route to value for each user, you have to understand their objectives and why they are exploring your tool in the first place.

Personalize the user experience

The meaning of value will vary across your user base and their unique needs. For example, a 10-strong team signing up for an analytics tool may find different early value than a one-person team looking to monitor their small business. Or someone who has less tech know-how might need more hand-holding, while someone already comfortable with complex systems might want to see more intricate aspects upfront.

That’s why it’s important to personalize the user experience to accelerate time-to-value.

It doesn’t have to be 1:1 personalization, though. There’s a good chance there will be groups of users who have similar goals. Gain insight into your users, identify patterns, and create experiences for those groups. Start with a few segments and then continue to add on personalization if you see it’s working.

Optimize the registration and onboarding experiences

One significant lever for accelerating time to value is improving early product experiences.

The ROPES framework, designed to help product-first leaders think about, optimize, and improve the end-to-end customer experience, shows how the R (registration) and O (onboarding) experiences might help or hinder TTV.

While the other elements of the customer journey can play a part, the biggest drivers for reducing TTV lie in those first stages of the product experience.

While there is no exact blueprint for optimization, there are some commonalities you can bear in mind for improving registration and onboarding:

• Take it slowly: The last thing you want to do is dump everything onto new signups. Avoid overwhelming by trickling out information and allowing users to go at their own pace.
• Put the user first: The best experiences focus on the needs of each individual user and what they need to know to get started.
• Leverage novel UI mechanisms: Make use of novel mechanisms like tooltips or a modal window to gently guide users through the registration onboarding process.
• Give clear step-by-step instructions: Clearly guide users through your registration and onboarding step-by-step. Make it straightforward to complete, and be sure to highlight your product’s use cases during the process.
• Follow good form design principles: Show clear progress, give feedback as they go, and group common information to make it easily digestible.
• Collect feedback: Track and measure how successful your process is by asking new signups for their feedback.

Your product experience should be fluid. The needs of your user base will change over time, and you must listen to user feedback if you want to continue to improve the experience and showcase your value more efficiently.

Implement quick wins for users

Quick wins are a great tactic for improving time to value. Get your new users to complete small actions quickly so they start to feel comfortable using your tool ASAP.

Quick wins create initial momentum for users, playing into the psychology that when you feel accomplished or successful, you’re inclined to continue succeeding. This is similar to basketball players who gain confidence as they continue scoring points (hot streak) or that feeling when you have a task list of chores to do and you begin crossing them off one by one. Momentum is something that is built and will carry users forward.

As you build their confidence with your tool, you can use those quick wins to show the valuable features or functionality that is relevant to them.

Measure and iterate

No product experience gets it exactly right the first time, and there are always ways to continue improving your time to value.

Just like your users are learning how to use your product, you’re also learning how they use it. The more clarity you get on challenges, use cases, and goals, the easier it’ll be to create a valuable experience early on.

Continuously test different journeys, tweak steps based on user feedback, and don’t forget to track everything you do to see what works and what doesn’t.

Signs your time-to-value is too slow

It’s true that there is always room for TTV improvement, but how do you know you have a big problem?

Here are some red flags to look out for:

• High churn or low retention rates: Customers are leaving your service early in their subscription cycle, usually the first 30, 60, or 90 days.
• Low upgrade rate: Users don’t upgrade on their own, and/or sales teams get resistance to any account expansion or new offering pitches. This means customers are either seeing too much or too little value on their current account level.
• Low engagement with core features: Infrequent logins or low engagement with your core product functions/features means users don’t see the value of your product.
• Poor NPS: The feedback you receive is largely neutral or even negative.
• High customer acquisition costs: When users abandon, and you have to replace lost users, your cost of acquiring new customers will increase.
• Customer success or sales complaints: Your customer success team spends almost all their time resolving issues, or the sales team can’t clearly show the ROI of your product.

If you see one or many of these red flags, it’s time to start a new UX research cycle and dig into where there is room to optimize and show your value earlier on.

To get an expert’s POV on the situation, reach out to The Good. We can help uncover where and why your users are dropping off, and help you fix it.

The post Accelerating Time-to-Value: How SaaS Products Get Users to ‘Aha!’ Moments Faster appeared first on The Good.

If you’re spearheading the shift from an intuition-driven to a data-driven practice, it can be an uphill battle and a lonely one at that. We spoke with Hanna Grevelius, CPO at Golf Gamebook & Advisor, and Maggie Paveza, Digital Strategist at The Good, about how they’ve navigated data-imperfect conditions throughout their careers and successfully advocated for data-first principles.

Whether you’re working with limited data or as your company’s first A/B testing specialist, their stories make one thing clear: doing it alone doesn’t have to be so daunting.

Keep reading to hear about:

• How they learned to work with data
• How to leverage data to build prioritization intuition
• When guessing is appropriate
• How to be an advocate for data-first practices

1. It’s OK to learn on the job

For those with only a passable knowledge of statistics, it can seem intimidating to dive headfirst into data-driven decision making. But it doesn’t take a data science degree to be able to act on good data. In fact, few teams employ full-time analysts at early stages of growth. Most teams get by early on with the skills of a few generalists, who, it turns out, often learn on the job.

“Quantitative methods are something that I’ve learned in my career,” says Maggie Paveza, Senior Digital Strategist at The Good. Having previously worked as a UX Researcher at Usertesting.com, Maggie started with a strong foundation in qualitative research before adding quantitative methods to her toolkit, which she says helps her tell a fuller story. “The qualitative research forms the why; the quantitative research forms the what.”

For Hanna Gervelius, CPO at GolfGamebook, her relationship data started from close collaboration with Product Managers.

“My role when I started was in support, answering customer support emails. In trying to understand the scalability of issues, I got to work and talk a lot to product managers who really helped me understand we need to look at the data to know: is it one person who experienced the bug? Is it from a specific version of the app? Is it related to the device or operating system they were on?”

Hanna says learning how to dig for data helped her contextualize customer pain. And through that practice, she built the skills necessary to transition into Product Management. “It was through support that I started to understand that we should look into the data, then eventually I moved over to work on Product Management.”

When she added A/B testing to her toolkit, that took her passion for data to a whole new level.

“It’s so clear when you A/B test that even a small change can have a big impact. When you start seeing the difference, that really sparks an interest.”

2. Use data to define your focus

Once Hanna could confidently dive into the data, she started to use it in her practice, evaluating where traffic hits the app most frequently and focusing on those high-value, high-traffic areas first. This exercise in opportunity sizing taught her that it’s ok to shift focus in light of new data.

Maggie takes a similar approach to prioritization. She uses traffic data to understand what areas of a site or app are highly trafficked, and before proposing a test, she always verifies that an A/B test would see significance within an acceptable amount of time.

“We rely on prioritization methodologies to understand if running a test in an area would have a significant revenue impact and if an A/B test would help us gauge in a number of weeks or longer.”

If you’re just starting out with a new property, Maggie and Hanna both suggest building a foundational understanding of traffic patterns and to regularly refine your strategy. Priorities often shift as a result.

3. In the absence of data, start with a guess

One valuable skill that came later in their careers was understanding the value of a lead. Boosting form fills can feel invigorating, but without an understanding of what portion of that audience might become a deal later, it’s hard to know if your work is making a difference. Assigning a dollar amount to a lead is a powerful tool to evaluate your performance.

But if you’re joining an organization without mature data practices, leads often have no value assigned. And without institutional knowledge, it can be intimidating to make a guesstimate. But to Hanna, it’s worth starting with a guess to set initial priorities.

Hanna advises using a rough calculation to estimate the value of a metric (with things like average deal value and percent of pipeline that converts), which can help you get an early read.

“Over time, you can start adjusting it higher or lower. But trying to put a value on it and making decisions based on that is the best way to still work in a data-driven way even when you don’t have all the answers.”

Hanna warns that an estimate is just that, and that staying above board about where the data comes from is key to retaining trust.

“What’s really important in that estimation reporting is that you’re always super clear that you’re estimating—that it could be a lot higher and a lot lower, because if you start making critical budget decisions on it, you can end up in a dangerous situation.”

4. Be the change you want to see

For those who know the clarity that data can bring to the decision-making process, working within a data-poor organization can be challenging. But Hanna says it’s fairly easy to lead others to data advocacy, even if you’re not in a C-suite. “Most people nowadays want to be data-driven,” Hanna says. In her opinion, it doesn’t take a fancy title to turn others into advocates.

“If you are working in an org where you are the only person who is responsible for testing, the best thing you can do is try to spread that knowledge. Get them involved and feel a sense of ownership. Try to make it so that you’re not the only one who cares about A/B testing and being data-driven.”

In order to build stewardship throughout the organization, Hanna’s advice is to walk through your thinking, specifically by walking colleagues through the potential upside to testing, and the risks of not. “That can help people who are not so interested in testing to be a bit more curious and to want to understand.”

In Hanna’s experience, your passion can be quite contagious. “Data and testing, it opens up a world that is so fun.”

As for how she does it, Hanna shares her excitement by showing rather than telling. “As soon as you have the test going, share a bit of the data early on,” she says. Rather than being cagey about how inaccurate early test data is, she uses it as a teaching moment.

“All of us who work in the testing space know that data from one day or three days is probably going to be completely wrong, and you can say that also. But show it to that person. Show that ‘this is super early, we have no idea if this is going to be correct or not, and stat sig, but after one day this is what it looks like’”

And of course, once you run successful tests down the line, Maggie’s experience tells her that there is nothing more powerful than sharing a win with your team.

Artfully navigating the shift

Advocating for data-driven decision-making in intuition-led companies isn’t always easy, but it’s a challenge worth taking on.

As Maggie and Hanna’s experiences show, starting small, whether by learning on the job, prioritizing based on data, making informed estimates, or sharing early insights, can lead to big shifts in mindset.

By fostering curiosity and collaboration, you can help transform your organization’s approach to decision-making, making data a natural and valued part of the process.

The post How to Make the Move From Intuition-led to Data-driven appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

2024 was the year social ads made a serious comeback, and the focus on social selling will continue into 2025. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss how YouTube is poised to impact the marketing stack in 2025.

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. Why YouTube’s roster of influencers and the YouTube Shopping program are attracting media spend.
2. The four unique ways YouTube can track attribution.
3. How brands should get started with YouTube in 2025.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon MacDonald: Ryan, clients are starting to plan for 2025. We’re seeing it across our client base. I’m sure you guys are as well. 24 seemed like a big focus in social selling. TikTok shop is something I continuously hear about now. And I know there’s others that kind of have blown up for selling online this past year.

A lot of that’s been happening for a handful of years, but it really seemed to take off this year. So I know you want to talk about this. I’d love to get your thoughts on it. So it seemed like a good topic for today. What do you think?

Ryan Garrow: I agree. It’s, I have mixed feelings on TikTok. I’m not on there because I’m, I just don’t have time.

I’m maybe too old to get new tricks going. All of our clients, it does feel like everybody had to have some insights or [00:01:00] questions around TikTok. Do I do it now? When do I do it? I have to be involved. What does it look like? Then on the other side, I hear a lot of people burned out from TikTok shop and influencers doing nothing but peddling products and pushing it.

TikTok may have gone too far. They’re really in tight with Amazon. And there’s a lot of stuff on there from trying to sell products and which is fine. Influencers have to make some money, but we saw a big decrease in social ads through the pandemic because of the Apple iOS issues in 21 and changing tracking for all of us.

Which was painful for somebody that’s been doing the same thing for a long time. For me, it feels there’s even ancillary data around that, but social ads really did make a comeback in 24 meta stock price alone would be proof that social ads are doing fairly well. It’s gone bonkers.

And so I think that everybody here’s aware of social, I don’t have to talk about, why you need to be involved in social ads or Just a presence on social media. What I think is missing [00:02:00] is a good discussion around that other social platform out there called YouTube.

Jon MacDonald: Oh, the other, huh? I would have said the main one was the first.

Not the first, but it is a big dog for sure.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Google had their little foray into what’s called, what was it? Google plus, or that they tried to have, what did they call that? Yeah.

Jon MacDonald: Was a mess. Yeah, that

Ryan Garrow: was, I was one of the, I had one of the first ones and I thought it was going to be great.

And then they, it was terrible. But historically YouTube is not really fit into the Bucket of social marketing. I’ll say that it wasn’t necessarily social. People have comments on it, but it’s not like there’s a lot of two way interaction. At least that I see, it’s like you’re posting to be seen, but not get feedback really.

Or yeah, it’s not like LinkedIn

Jon MacDonald: where it’s a conversation every post.

Ryan Garrow: There’s a conversation or I follow my friends on YouTube so I can remember people from high school or my family. Wait, that used to be

Jon MacDonald: Facebook. Wasn’t that what Facebook was for?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And so it’s [00:03:00] now it’s I don’t know what Facebook’s for now.

My mom’s on it and there’s a lot of politics essentially, which is why I don’t get on there anymore. Yep. Yep. But YouTube wasn’t really doing that. It was like you would go there, I think, to be entertained or follow somebody who created content that you liked. And so I think Tik TOK had an impact on that to a degree, but there weren’t people going there to maybe get influenced to purchase.

It was, my dad uses YouTube a lot to fix stuff and I do as well. If I need to solve a problem in my house, cause I’m not a fix it person. I’m like, I don’t know. How do I change? Every time, man, this is funny. I just did this last week. My wife’s expedition. She’s the back windshield wiper needs to be replaced.

I’m like, okay, great. I think I’ll figure out and get the wiper. And I’m like, I get back in the truck. I’m like, I gotta, you gotta Google the same video. I think every single time. Replace the windshield wiper on the back of the expedition. That’s what I use YouTube for having worked with Google for 15 years now.

I’ve seen them try so many different ways of selling my clients on. They need to get on spending on YouTube. Like it’s [00:04:00] every year. It seems to be like, this is the year, Gerald, you’ve got YouTube. They’re missing out and for 15 years, they’ve not spent on YouTube and they’ve not missed out with a few exceptions like our team does really good stuff on YouTube.

We’ve won awards two years in a row for our work on YouTube, so there is some really good things happening there, but it just hasn’t felt like it got critical mass to really be like everybody needs to be on YouTube and everybody’s knows it and they’re asking us questions about it and just saying, Hey, what do I need to do?

How do I scale YouTube? I think 25 is going to be that year. I just

Jon MacDonald: so this is the year Google got to you

Ryan Garrow: if I’m making a prediction now in 24. Yeah, this is the year that I’m going to listen to Google. And I’m going to be like, Yes, we are doing it is we are going to get people spending on YouTube because it’s going to have an impact.

Jon MacDonald: Okay, so you’re saying that my teams are going to actually be looking at landing pages this next year, and we’re going to have to optimize them for YouTube traffic. That’s what I’m hearing.

Ryan Garrow: I’ll say this. I’m not going to stand on a battleship and say [00:05:00] the battles one and everything. YouTube is success.

But what I am saying is I finally believe YouTube has a compelling reason to be looked at much deeper. And I’m betting some of my own time and money on the fact that it’s going to work. It’s rare that I would do that with a Google property that I haven’t seen a lot of traction at scale. There’s, Blenjet did some amazing things with our team and grew their brand really well there.

There have been wins, but I think it’s going to be a lot of wins in 2025.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. I’ve always looked at YouTube as the second largest search engine. So under that kind of line of thinking, it would make a lot of sense to be there. So why is this time different? What’s different for you?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. So I think that I agree, second largest search engine, if you looked at it that way, which is always how they put set it, but it’s like Google has, you What 95 percent of the search volume in the US and being has 30 percent so like beating being wasn’t exactly this great amazing thing, but YouTube as a search [00:06:00] engine is interesting because yes, I search YouTube, but I’m searching for a video to explain something or to entertain me, not like I’m going to say what’s the best.

Headphones. Maybe there is a YouTube video, but that’s going to happen on Google. And then they’re going to drive me to YouTube to watch a video if I don’t want to read it. And for my personality, I like reading rather than watching or listening because I can do it quicker

Jon MacDonald: but unless you’re changing a wiper.

Ryan Garrow: Unless I’m changing a wiper, then I already know I’ve got to have somebody show me how to do it or even change you. It’s always cars for me cause I’m not a car guy. I enjoy cars, but I don’t work on them. And so even changing the battery in my remote, I’m like, I forget how to change it again.

And I’ve got to figure out how to get into it.

Jon MacDonald: I had to do that for my Audi remote. And I will tell you, it was a pain in the butt to get the battery out. And I’m glad I had a video show me how let’s do that. I would have broke the key 100 percent

Ryan Garrow: me too. Like every time and I’m like, at some point, I probably should be like, it’s worth 300 for a new remote.

We’re going to trash it. The battery’s dead. It’s not worth it. Historically on YouTube. [00:07:00] We’ve really had one way to measure. And that was through a brand list study. And if you can only get that if you spent seven grand a month or more. And so most of the scale on YouTube was large brands that could say, Hey, you, Google’s going to do this cool study for us.

And we’re going to be able to use that and say it worked and obviously not perfect, but functional, but it’s also. Like going to the IRS and saying, Hey, did I do my taxes? They’re like how much did you pay us? Oh, you paid us enough. Therefore you did it. And so it’s always been a struggle when it comes to YouTube, because you had to do it outside of what we normally looked at as a source of truth, where I can’t just go To analytics and see what it is now meta has a different side of that where there’s been They are able to tell us whatever they want And it’s always different than google analytics or what we’ve seen in the past as our social truth for some reason As advertisers, we’re always like that’s all right Okay So I think they broke the that glass ceiling to a degree for youtube to say It’s okay if we’re showing numbers that are different as long as it’s true We’re seeing the growth.

It can’t be like [00:08:00] meta is saying they drove a million dollars in sales last month when the site only did 20, 000. Okay that’s obviously not working.

Jon MacDonald: I think I hear about that all the time. And as marketers, we have a hundred percent been conditioned, if you will, to the fact that data is never going to be the same across platforms and you’ve got to have that single source of truth.

And I think that’s why we’re just okay with. Like each platform being wrong because you don’t know which one’s right. So you just assume, you know what? They’re all biased and they’re all wrong. We will find what that, what go in the corner and do your numbers. I’ll do what I need to do and we’ll just work with it.

That’s pretty much the attitude, unfortunately.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And the problem YouTube had in that world is it’s being run in a Google ads account with like next to a campaign where you’re trusting. That data in Google ads and Google analytics matching up and Oh, I get it. Yep. Here’s what they’re saying then you’ve got this YouTube campaign.

That’s like what the heck is this? It doesn’t not even close to matching up or making sense based on what we’re looking at from a Shopping or text [00:09:00] ad standpoint because the intense a little different on those and so lots of issues from tracking My wife even brought this up to me. She’s think about YouTube like our kids have our YouTube login like yeah You Why not?

She’s I have yet to give our 11 year old my Instagram login. Oh good point when it’s on Instagram or meta, they know exactly whose eyeballs they’re looking at. Yeah. When it comes to YouTube, we have YouTube TV. We have YouTube like for video game solving problems. Like my son needs to figure out how to build something on Minecraft.

Guess where he goes? I can’t answer the questions. I’m like, I don’t know. I’ll just YouTube that and figure out somebody else has done it. Change is coming, which I’m excited about. They’re bringing in shopping feeds, which is exciting because it’s putting it more into the flow of okay TikTok has shopping feeds.

Meta has shopping feeds. Everybody has shopping feeds of YouTube. Hasn’t really leaned as much into the shopping feed and now they’ve got some cool stuff coming up with that. And so I think that we’re really going to start seeing the e com brands lean in a lot more because of it’s going to feel and work a lot more similarly to [00:10:00] what they’re used to on meta and tick tock.

Jon MacDonald: Are you saying that Google had to come up with its own YouTube specific tracking?

Ryan Garrow: Pretty much Google’s realized that I think in 24 that. All right we can’t beat them, join them, let’s understand how we get meta advertisers because that’s the same place they want to play in from a social standpoint

Jon MacDonald: okay

Ryan Garrow: see YouTube in the same way.

So if so, we’ve got to learn how to track it the same, but also in Google’s, we got to be different because we’ve got to somehow be able to show we’re better and get that. So YouTube now has four different things, I say for tracking, which. Again, makes it somewhat complex, but we’re getting a lot of really cool points that tell a story.

I say you’ve got to use multiple different data points and our team’s going to talk about, you’re going to need to have some to help measure the impact and say, Hey, when we do this, what else happens and using all four of these things together, it should create a much cooler picture than just saying.

[00:11:00] Spend a million on meta and they 3 million and analytics says half a million. We’re going to meet somewhere in the middle. Two of the YouTube more things that are currently in process are in closed beta. So I can’t get into the super details on that from

Jon MacDonald: okay

Ryan Garrow: summary standpoint. They’re going to give you the geographic impact of ads and just think a way to scale blackout tests without having to do it manually.

Interesting. And it’s show ads in Seattle, but not in San Francisco and then see what happens as far as sales to the site. And then they have three different lifts that they do. Conversion lift, brand lift, search lift. And generally speaking right now, those are for larger advertisers because you need volume of conversions to really see it.

You can’t be doing, 50 conversions on the site. Okay. Go spend on YouTube and see the impact through their measurement. I think there’s going to be ways that we take a lot of those enterprise strategies in 25 and boil them down to somebody that only wants to spend or can only spend a thousand or 1500 on YouTube to be able to say, great, we’ll black out, or we’ll only run it in one market to see, what’s going [00:12:00] on.

What is that having an impact on and then we can run some of these tests individually in each account to make it work for that merchant.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. So with all this stuff, YouTube’s coming out with, you’re able to prove the ROI a little better. It sounds do some testing with the data. Do you think that’s going to pull money and budget away from meta and tick tock?

Ryan Garrow: I doubt it. I think those platforms have done a good job in 2324 of showing what they can do. And they’re probably going to get more spend this year. If anything, my guess is it’s going to pull more from television buys and display buys from large advertisers. So if you’ve got a, 2 million a month display budget, it’s probably going to make sense to lower that half a million to a million and throw that on YouTube if you haven’t been there yet.

And I think if you’re a smaller advertiser, I’ll say six figures or under a hundred thousand or less. I see. You’re probably going to be seeing YouTube as the logical flow up the funnel. Like you’re covered a lot of your Google search and shopping. [00:13:00] Now it’s going to make sense. How do we get to that next layer?

That mid funnel, that’s going to have an impact and that’s going to be some in meta, but it’s probably going to be some in YouTube as well.

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

Ryan Garrow: What I found interesting, we had this big event in Boston. It’s one of their Google office by MIT. We had some of the top YouTube talent inside of Google come and talk to us. Some of the numbers are fascinating in explaining how under invested in YouTube it is. [00:14:00] Facebook had, I want to say 130, 31 million or so advertising revenue in 23.

YouTube, I think, had 30, 32, somewhere in that space. So roughly 25 percent or just under 25 percent of Meta’s ads was YouTube and YouTube actually had just a super small fraction less time on the platform than Facebook did include Instagram and WhatsApp in there too, but it shows the Delta in investment in YouTube from an ad standpoint.

Is dramatically less as a percentage of available inventory than meta has, and so it should be cheaper and have more scale.

Jon MacDonald: Do you think that’s, to me, the way that was, I’m hearing this and correct me if I’m wrong, though, is that is Google cannibalizing their own ad spending. Cause you had mentioned like people pulling from display and maybe even search into YouTube, that would be mostly Google just moving their budget over to YouTube, which as an end user, it seems like it [00:15:00] makes sense to me because they’re rolling out the AI answers is not a lot of clicks happening on ads.

Inside Google these days, at least for me, I haven’t, I don’t remember last time I got past the AI answers because they’re actually getting pretty good. None of them have told me to eat something that’s going to make me sick or anything like that, which was like the early answers we’re doing.

I remember some of those examples, but I do think there’s good opportunity for them to move that budget. People were already spending with Google to other channels and I can’t help but wonder if that’s part of the play here.

Ryan Garrow: Google’s hoping, I’m sure, that they keep search and shopping there, and then YouTube would be the next layer up, that mid funnel that would help feed some of that down the funnel.

So it’s like when I talk to a meta advertiser yes, you should be spending some money on meta, but if you haven’t covered the searches on Google at the bottom of the funnel, you’re likely investing some money in meta to your competitors. And so make sure the [00:16:00] bottom is solid, that you know you’ve got it covered, then move up a layer.

I think too often, especially smaller CPG brands, I see this a lot, where they really just want to be like I heard this brand did really well. Like Nick Sharma had a brand that spends 2 million a month on social, so I should do that. I’m like, what? Probably, but maybe let’s take some steps to get there and build something.

Cause they don’t hear about some of that kind of nitty gritty yeah, you do have to cover it. And the best social brands really do have a solid bottom of funnel. If you search their brand on Google, you’re going to see a almost monopoly on the shopping ads. You’re going to see a well built text ad, usually taking up real estate to keep the competitors off of that space.

Cause they will be there and they should.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. Yeah. So that’s fair. You’re not going to. As a brand, you’re not going to move on from it. You might just not iterate as much or invest as heavily, but that definitely makes sense. You don’t want to give up ground. So to date, when we’re recording this episode, there’s a big boxing match coming up.

I believe that’s tonight or very soon with [00:17:00] Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, which is going to be amazing to watch. I can’t wait to see it. Yeah,

Ryan Garrow: I, me too. I’m excited. I’ve been excited about a boxing match for probably 15 years, maybe 20 years.

Jon MacDonald: we could probably do a whole episode just on this because I really only see this going one of two ways and a older gentleman is going to get the legacy knocked out of him or a young person is going to get seriously hurt. It’s going to be one of the two. Yeah. There’s this not and that’s why this is going to be entertaining. It’s not for the boxing itself. I’m not worried about the skill here. This is just a rough match, but

Ryan Garrow: no,

Jon MacDonald: I am thinking about how Jake Paul got here. And I’m thinking about how there’s been so many influencers, especially in YouTube.

And not that much on products. So I’m wondering what the play is for YouTube with products.

Ryan Garrow: It’s true. YouTube, the biggest influencers in the world are generally [00:18:00] got their start on YouTube. If we look at Mr. Beast, like the billionaire influencer started by posting YouTube videos over a decade ago.

Same thing with Jake Paul. Like it was pranks and stuff and about, getting information on YouTube and people following there, that’s where they made their money and their impact and those same influencers. I think there was a crazy stat when Tik TOK released their creator fund in, I want to say 21, 22, Mr. Beast was massive in 21, 22, just like he is now, I think in 10 months, he made something like. 14, 000 despite having yeah, almost a billion views. And then while YouTube is paying him disgusting millions of dollars from an influencer standpoint, just creating good content. YouTube has generally been way ahead of the game.

When it came to we’re going to get people to watch and be entertained and have eyeballs here. But what they haven’t necessarily done is say, how do we bring products into that? Whereas TikTok and Meta, it was really simple. Yeah, there’s a feed. And [00:19:00] so you’re going to ship this influence or a product and they’re going to talk about it on TikTok and people are going to buy. Like it was pretty stupidly simple, actually. And TikTok and Meta didn’t have to pay their influencers really. Whereas YouTube didn’t have that. So it was always like, Hey, we got to pay for this content. Looking at it almost like Netflix buying movies or having their own creative thing.

If they’re going to pay for that, it costs them money and then people pay to be there. YouTube’s advertising funneled it. And so all that to say YouTube. Adding product feeds for creators to tag products and enter more into that, what we expect to see on social now, like I, it doesn’t bug me when I’m scrolling through a feed now to see somebody talking about a product or being pitched a product. And so I think in YouTube shorts now, their competitor to reels and TikTok.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah,

Ryan Garrow: I think people are going to be just used to seeing products. And if the targeting is done right, which if you’ve got a good advertising agency, hello, come talk to me. It should drive some decent traffic and [00:20:00] conversions because it’s now set up to handle that.

Yeah. It’s cool. Cause it’s cool in beta. So there’s not a lot of details I can share publicly, but there’s ways now for brands to go in and from an affiliate standpoint, incentivize these creators to talk about you. And there’s a discovery thing in there. For both creators and brands. I think this is going to be big.

I do. And brands can bring the creators in. So if you’ve got a decent amount of creators on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, you should be able to move a lot of those in to the YouTube environment. And there’s going to be some incentive for those creators to come make sure they’re creating content for YouTube.

And so we’ve got some larger brands are going to be hopefully moving their creators into the system that we’ll be able to hopefully maybe towards the end of Q1, I’ll have some really cool data to share that’ll be like, Hey, I’m Here’s the actual numbers that I talked about, at the end of 24 that are now going to be real and tangible.

Jon MacDonald: Okay. I’m convinced our listeners are convinced. How should they get started with YouTube in 25? Because that sounds to me like that’s going to change. Based on what they have been [00:21:00] doing.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, I think that kind of scrap what you used to think about YouTube. I think it started Hey, if pretend it’s a brand new social platform, then you’re like, all right, everybody’s moving there.

Let’s get excited. Let’s participate. You, every brand will be different. I’ll say that you’re going to have to establish it what makes sense for your brand because it’s probably going to be different than your next door neighbor’s brand, but you have to have a YouTube channel. You have to have, that’s just base practice.

If you don’t have it already, go get your YouTube channel claimed, get it designed, right? Have a plan for creating content. It’s what I talked about in Tik Tok, I don’t know, a couple of years ago, when we saw some really good success from some of our brands, you had to have a voice on there to participate.

You couldn’t just run ads on TikTok without actually putting some of your own content out there and being a part of the community. It was, it created a feeling of inauthenticity. Like you were just weren’t, you were there just with your money, not. to participate. I don’t think that’s as important on YouTube because of how ads run and it’s because you can run pre roll on your competitor’s sites if they haven’t [00:22:00] blocked or your competitor pages if they haven’t blocked it.

I just want to have a landing page that people can research you and make sure that you’re a legitimate brand more than anything else. So you don’t have to probably regularly create content. I think it’s a benefit if you do, but just at least have a presence there controlled. That’s you. And then for most advertisers, I’m going to say, you’re probably going to create a separate Google account for YouTube.

Not all the time, but for most of you out there, separate accounts going to make sense. Cause it keeps your tracking cleaner. Cause what happens is if you have YouTube as a separate campaign and where you’re running shopping and search and all the other various things you can run in Google, you will have, we’ll call credit stealing, where they’re going to have multiple touch points.

And Google’s data driven algorithm is going to say that hit shopping there and it hit a text ad here. And then YouTube was here. So it’s going to get 10 percent of the credit. It’s going to be more difficult to see the full impact. So the similar, the way you would have your meta account is separate from Google.

They’re both claiming credit for some of the same sales. And you realize that as an [00:23:00] advertiser, look at YouTube as a social channel, be able to be comfortable with it, measuring the full impact and then deleting credit where you see fit. But you’re going to be able to see a better holistic picture of.

What is it actually doing? All of our larger advertisers have separate accounts. When you’re doing some of the cool studies with Google, it’s helpful to have a separate account. Again, when you come to shopping feeds, I get this question. So I’ll address it now that you can have two Google ads accounts targeting the same website, one with YouTube, one with all the shopping and also connected to one merchant center.

Jon MacDonald: Okay.

Ryan Garrow: So you got one merchant center running all of your product feeds. And you can have that going to two, two separate Google ads accounts.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. Yeah. I would have thought that wasn’t possible, but what do I know? Yeah. Interesting.

Ryan Garrow: And then I’ll say you’re going to have to go out and have a goal for it.

That makes sense. What is it? What is, what do I need YouTube to do? Look at some of the data and then make adjustments to either how you’re looking at it, if it’s not performing that way, not to say you have to justify it, but say, Hey, we expected it to do this, but in reality it’s doing. [00:24:00] This down here and maybe we just need to accept that and say hey, how is that benefiting the brand?

Let’s still continue to scale it But know that it’s accomplishing a goal slightly different than what we wanted it to be and keep testing You know, you’re gonna have the audiences can be again super creepy and awesome from a marketing standpoint like meta I would say you can’t give up on it that’s been one of the things you have to have a really hard head because It’s not gonna for most of you listening.

It’s not out of the gate going to be boom We spent 50 grand on youtube and our business grew half a million dollars that month. That was amazing Hopefully that happens but understand that it’s not and it’s going to be a commitment to making it work Just like for most of you meta wasn’t perfect out of the gate and it was a commitment to saying, okay I have to make this work, the eyeballs are there, I want to get first mover advantage over my competitors.

So we are going to make this work. Let’s keep trying, keep iterating, test the content, test the landing pages, test the algorithm, test all the things that can go into making the system work just like [00:25:00] you would if you were iterating on Meta.

Jon MacDonald: Awesome. So 2025 is the year of YouTube, I’m hearing. And.

Ryan Garrow: It’s as of now,

Jon MacDonald: as of now, Ryan is convinced subject to change on what actually happens

Ryan Garrow: always

Jon MacDonald: what he finds, but I think it’s really interesting. I would not have guessed that you would have come here today and say that. So

Ryan Garrow: two months ago, I probably wouldn’t have thought that either.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, I do think there is a lot of opportunities still out there and all this stuff goes in cycles. I remember years ago, they’re talking about adding clickable shoppable moments into YouTube videos with overlays, et cetera, to highlight products and be able to clip one click to a page to buy it.

And that never really came to fruition. Now they’re like, you know what, we need to do this because everyone else is doing it and it’s coming back around. But at the same time, e commerce especially has been really hurting this past year for some time now. And I think they’re all looking for this new place to shift their marketing [00:26:00] dollars to some degree that’s going to get them back to where they were.

And for no other reason, I think there’ll be some more investment in YouTube just to try something else, right? And see if they can be the first mover to take advantage of it and ride that wave. So this is really interesting. I appreciate you sharing that today.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Thanks for the time, Jon. Let me stand on my soapbox.

Jon MacDonald: All right. Thank you, Ryan.

Ryan Garrow: Thank you.

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

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 123): New Year, New Marketing appeared first on The Good.

The most buzzy way to get that validation is via A/B testing. But many don’t have the budget, appetite, time, or team to even get started.

Enter: Rapid testing.

Like A/B testing, rapid testing helps you understand if your solutions are actually working.

Unlike A/B testing, rapid tests are fast, done with small sample sizes, and offer a level of qualitative insight not afforded via experimentation alone.

Rapid testing is no substitute for A/B testing, but it has a ton of applications:

• Get a gut check when true A/B testing is not a viable option
• Understand where new features might be confusing or unclear
• Evaluate time-to-success and pass/fail rates of task flows
• Narrow down your options from many to few when deciding what messages to test in the market

Think of it as your canary in the coal mine. A utility to mitigate the risk of feature flop.

In this article, we’ll explore what rapid experimentation is, its benefits, the types of rapid tests you can run, and when to use each. If you’re looking to de-risk your decisions and innovate faster, keep reading for a framework to get you started.

What is rapid experimentation?

Rapid experimentation or rapid testing refers to a collection of tactics we use to get quick feedback for operational decisions. This type of testing helps teams make agile decisions around design, copy, and other site elements.

Rapid experimentation is a lean approach to validating ideas, designs, or features in a quick, iterative manner. It focuses on qualitative insights and directional data.

Instead of waiting weeks for results, you can gather actionable insights in days or even hours. This method enables teams to:

• Understand whether users grasp a new concept
• Identify potential usability issues
• Test multiple variations of an idea before committing to development

In short, rapid experimentation helps you answer the question: “Am I moving in the right direction?”

Why do teams use rapid experimentation?

Rapid experimentation delivers value in multiple ways, particularly for SaaS teams that need to move fast and make data-informed decisions.

While rapid testing uses less qualified participants and smaller sample sizes than traditional A/B testing, the tradeoff is exponentially faster results. Rapid testing delivers value by:

• Speeding up results: Unlike A/B testing, which can take weeks to produce reliable results, rapid tests can be designed, executed, and analyzed in days. This speed allows teams to iterate quickly.
• Limiting politics of A/B testing: Which A/B tests get run is informed by rapid test data instead of executive opinions.
• Narrowing down many ideas: When you need to identify the best few ideas out of many, rapid testing is an efficient way to do so.
• Lowering costs: Because rapid tests require smaller sample sizes and fewer resources, they’re accessible to teams with limited budgets.
• Identifying problems early: Rapid experimentation helps uncover potential usability issues or misunderstandings before they’re baked into a feature or product. This can save significant rework down the line.
• Increasing qualitative depth: Where A/B testing provides numbers, rapid tests provide context. Understanding the “why” behind user behavior can inform better solutions.
• De-risking decisions: By testing ideas early and often, teams can reduce the risk of releasing features or products that fail to meet user needs.

What are the types of rapid tests?

Rapid experimentation is not a one-size-fits-all process. Different scenarios call for different types of tests.

Here are some common methods:

Task Completion Analysis

Task completion analysis allows us to quickly test new ideas to understand time-on-task and success rates.

Typically, users are asked to complete a specific task, such as signing up for a trial or finding a key feature. Teams observe where users struggle and measure success rates, time-to-completion, and drop-off points.

First-Click Tests

First-click tests evaluate whether users can intuitively find the primary action or information on a page. Participants are given a task and asked to click where they think they should start. This is ideal for evaluating navigation or CTA placement.

Tree Test

Tree testing is a usability technique that helps you understand how users navigate through your website or app’s structure. It focuses on how well people can find information within a system.

By stripping away visual elements and focusing solely on the structure (the “tree”), you can identify whether the content organization makes sense or if users are getting lost.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis lets us preview how users might respond and react to a treatment. It allows us to evaluate user emotions and opinions about a product or experience. Typically, feedback is collected through surveys, reviews, or user interviews, and responses are analyzed to identify positive, neutral, or negative sentiments. Teams use this data to uncover pain points, gauge satisfaction, and prioritize improvements.

5-Second Tests

5-second tests assess a user’s immediate impression of a design or message. They show participants an interface or design for five seconds and then ask them what they remember or understand. This is great for defining the value propositions or headlines that are most memorable.

Design Surveys

Design surveys collect qualitative feedback on wireframes or mockups. They can help validate designs before investing in development to implement them on your site.

Preference Tests

This test involves showing users two or more design variations and asking which they prefer and why. It’s perfect for narrowing down visual or messaging options before launching a formal test.

Card Sorting

Card sorting is a research technique used to understand how users organize and categorize information. You present participants with a set of cards, each representing a piece of content or functionality, and ask them to group these cards in a way that makes sense to them.

This process reveals how people naturally think about and structure information. It lets you uncover insights into how users might intuitively organize menu items, product categories, or any other structured content on your site. Ultimately, this helps you design a website or app that aligns with their expectations.

These are just six of the many types of rapid experimentation.

How to choose the right method for your scenario

With so many options, it can be challenging to know which rapid testing method to use in a given situation. Each method has strengths and weaknesses, and choosing the wrong one can result in wasted effort or inconclusive results.

If you’re interested in getting started with rapid testing but aren’t sure which method is right for your scenario, we devised a simple way to narrow down the options.

In this decision tree, you can ask questions to help understand which rapid testing method best suits your needs.

A few caveats:

• There are more methods than are covered here; this is just a sample
• Test types can be used in combination in some instances, and
• There are always exceptions to the rule

There’s no substitute for experience, but if you’re just getting started with this kind of research, I hope this gives you a head start.

Using this framework ensures you select the method best suited to your goals, saving time and effort while delivering more meaningful results.

The Telegraph used rapid testing to increase registrations

So, what might rapid testing look like in action?

During a Digital Experience Optimization Program, we worked with The Telegraph to improve their paywall experience as a part of their goal to reach a million subscribers.

The first part of any DXO Program, our team conducted a thorough audit of the end-to-end customer experience to uncover the biggest barriers and opportunities for conversions. Once we had the research plan and were armed with a strategic roadmap, it was on to the next phase of the program. We took hypothesized improvements and tested them with The Telegraph’s ideal audience to confirm they would move the needle before investing in implementation.

Thanks to rapid testing, we were able to design, test, and decide on the first phase of implementations in a matter of days.

One rapid test we ran for The Telegraph assessed site banner color and layout. When shown two banner variants, visitors had a clear preference — 78% of participants found content easier to read against a yellow background. Recall tests also showed visitors were more likely to remember key details in this variant as well, further supporting it as the preferable option.

We ran over 20 similar tests to assess cookie notification placement and design, desktop and mobile paywall presentation, brand headlines, offer messaging, and more. Each test leveraged the method relevant to the hypothesis we hoped to validate with experimentation. We chose the testing methodology using a similar thought process to the rapid testing decision tree framework shared earlier.

And the best part? We did this in just a few weeks, something that would have been impossible to accomplish via A/B testing due to resource constraints. David Humber, Head of Conversion at The Telegraph, also credits the efficiency and effectiveness of the rapid tests to having a team of external experts come in. “You do less spinning of the wheels because you’re having somebody come in that’s got this additional expertise as their bread and butter.”

Overall, identifying small wins in numerous places added up to a significant impact for The Telegraph in both improved metrics and an understanding of the customer.

Upskill your team with external support

While rapid experimentation is a powerful tool, getting started can feel overwhelming. How do you design effective tests? What metrics should you measure? And how do you ensure your insights lead to meaningful improvements?

This is where The Good can help. Our team specializes in UX research and digital experience optimization for SaaS companies. From designing and executing rapid tests to implementing insights, we’re here to guide you every step of the way. With our proven frameworks and expertise, you can:

• Validate ideas faster and more effectively
• Reduce the risk of feature flop
• Build a culture of experimentation within your team

Ready to get started? Contact us to learn how we can help you make better decisions faster.

The post Which Rapid Testing Method Should I Use? appeared first on The Good.

I have no doubt that your SaaS product has countless things that make it great. But do users intuitively understand those benefits and unique selling points across your digital experience? Are you making sure they know exactly what sets you apart no matter where they are in their journey? 

If your answer is anything less than an enthusiastic “yes,” this article is for you. We’re sharing how you can identify and address the gaps in your benefits and unique selling points.

What is the benefits & unique selling points heuristic?

Benefits and unique selling points differentiate products/services by highlighting unique value promises. They show users why they should choose to purchase from you instead of elsewhere. 

Without clear benefits and unique selling points, you leave the user uncertain whether it is right for them. 

Digital experiences that adhere to this heuristic may apply a tactic like breaking down a differentiating feature in a demo video or building an interactive comparison chart that helps users clearly see the advantage of their service/product.

Benefits and unique selling points is one of the six Heuristics of Digital Experience Optimization developed by our team at The Good. The full list includes:

1. Priming & Expectation Setting
2. Trust & Authority
3. Ease
4. Benefits & Unique Selling Points
5. Directional Guidance
6. Incentives

These heuristics theme common optimization issues and opportunities. Optimizing your digital experience through the lens of heuristics keeps the user at the center of analyses. When done correctly, it will ensure your strategy creates journeys that feel familiar, do what they say, and function intuitively.

Knowing this heuristic is the first step. Now, let’s look at how to spot areas where you may be falling short.

Use research to understand where benefits & USPs are unclear 

It’s important to understand where and when users are missing the value promise of your product. 

A great way to deepen your understanding of the current experience is with user research. 

Research methods like session recordings, heatmap analysis, and user testing may indicate you are in violation of the benefits and unique selling points heuristic. Watch for these common signs that your benefits and USPs may not be coming across clearly:

Low Directness

• Research methodology: Session recordings
• How it manifests: Users can be seen scrolling through the site looking for specific content and struggling to find items of interest, possibly hesitating on the site, suggesting uncertainty.
• What it means: If you’re noticing patterns of users hesitating to click when looking at the menu or visiting several pages before finally lingering on a page, they may need support in wayfinding. 
• What to do about it: Take low directness as a sign that users need a little directional guidance and use it as a jumping-off point to further evaluate your navigation, labels, and page nesting. If you have a flagship use case that regular customers swear by, try to get users to see it (and its value) earlier, and don’t make them dig for it. 

Attentive/Intentional Reading

• Research methodology: Session recordings
• How it manifests: When a user slowly scrolls over content on a desktop, their mouse hovers over text, and when they are intensely reading, you might even see them go line-by-line.
• What it means: When users demonstrate a detailed reading of the fine print, it may indicate that they are looking for something they simply can’t find or trying to determine if the product fits their use case.  
• What to do about it: Keep an eye out for sessions that include intense reading and try to determine what content the user was looking for (and not finding) so you can serve that up more prominently in the user experience. For consumable products, that might mean clearer nutritional benefits. For a digital product, it might mean showcasing compatibility or use cases. 

Positive Sentiment or Negative Sentiment

• Research methodology: User testing
• How it manifests: User expresses positive or negative emotions towards the site/brand or an element of the site/brand.
• What it means: If, in early testing, users aren’t connecting to your product, you might hear subtle hints like “I would want to go back and make sure to evaluate the alternatives.” When users don’t clearly understand your unique value proposition, they’ll fail to connect and indicate they’re not sold. 
• What to do about it: Use those blasé moments to fine-tune your messaging until it starts to click. Make sure you’re articulating who your product is best for in the language of your users. 

5 Examples of SaaS companies that leverage the benefits and unique selling points heuristic 

Once you’ve identified the areas in your site or app that are in violation of the benefits and unique selling points heuristic, you can address them. 

The goal is to help users make their decisions faster and with ease. As a starting point for inspiration, here are five SaaS companies that showcase the effective use of benefits and USPs, each helping users make confident decisions more easily.

Give a holistic breakdown by value theme like DocuSign

DocuSign breaks down the security benefits holistically, reassuring security-conscious users about important benefits and unique selling points.

List features in a comparison chart like Indicative

Indicative adds CTA buttons to their comparison chart so that as they highlight core capabilities, users have quick-access entry points to get the offer.

Leverage guided tours like Outreach

Sales platform Outreach has use case-specific interactive demos on the website so prospects can see why the tool could be a good fit for them. 

Lead with core benefits like PandaDoc’s feature announcement pop-up

PandaDoc‘s pop-up for a feature rollout announcement leads with the benefit to the user, which makes users more likely to engage with the overlay. 

Animate your pricing page like QuickBooks

QuickBooks’ pricing chart has a visual cue for each feature that pops out with details, benefits, and a pitch video. This increases user confidence.

How to identify your benefits and unique selling points

It can be tough to find the right benefits and unique selling points to highlight across the digital experience, even if you can see where customers are getting stuck.  

Here are some tips to get you started: 

• Write a list: jot down all of the things that make your business, products, or services unique from your competitors – get specific, like your pricing model, customer service accessibility, and features.
• Research the competition: you won’t know what makes you different if you don’t know what you’re up against. Dig into their benefits and unique selling points so you can be sure to stand out.
• Identify your customers’ needs: research your customers using data and surveys to discover their most pressing needs and determine how your tooling is meeting those needs so you can more prominently feature it across the experience.
• Combine needs and differentiators: cross-reference the list of things that make your successful business different and your list of customer needs to pinpoint any that overlap. 
• Consider how you will implement: these points should be woven throughout the digital experience so that users are presented with benefits and unique selling points relevant to where they are in the customer journey.
• Test and validate: With your improvement ideas in hand, it’s time to test the optimizations. There’s no point going all-in on implementation if the language or functions don’t resonate. Consider a second round of user testing, some rapid testing, or A/B testing where it makes sense. 

For more inspiration, check out our article on 14 unique selling proposition examples. 

Heuristics build the foundation of an excellent digital experience

Most SaaS teams have a million things on their plate, juggling KPIs, internal politics, and all the day-to-day tasks to keep the product moving forward. However, nothing is as important as the foundational user experience and how your audience perceives your product.

This is where heuristics come in. You can uncover pain points that can be solved with tactics to address them. It may sound simple, but it can be a lot to accomplish without an external, user-centered POV. If you’d like support in your efforts, contact us.

The post Is Your Value Promise Falling Short? Here’s How to Identify and Upgrade Tired USPs appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

While analytics, interviews, and surveys offer valuable insights, nothing compares to watching how users actually engage with your site. That is where heatmaps come in. However, not every heatmap software is created equally.

This week on Drive & Convert, Jon talks all things heat maps! From their various uses to which heatmap tool is truly the best, join us for an episode that is a researcher’s dream. 

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. The value of using heat mapping tools
2. How Hotjar stands out from its competitors
3. Other tools you can use to see what your site visitors are doing

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon Macdonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

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: Well, hello, Jon. Good to connect again. I am. Excited about what we’re talking about today. Cause it actually came up last week between us and it happened to coincide with our schedules. This is fun. When real life mirrors podcast life, you put on here that we, you wanted to discuss heat mapping and the software out there and, and what’s the best one for people that want to really dig into research and we’ve always at logical position, like historically, I’ll say eight years ago.

We, in the SMB side of the business, we had some clients that were really into data and bogged down our team with lots of questions. And one of their solutions was, well, you’d like data, you need to go look at heat mapping. Because what we found out is once they got a heat map, they became silent. And then all they did was watch their screen and watch people on the site.

And they just were so

Jon: fascinated with it. And hopefully they would learn some stuff in the meantime. Right? So, I mean, it sounds like a win win.

Ryan: That would be the hope. I don’t honestly know if these clients actually came away with anything, but they were super distracted and let us do our work. But it was out of that, we actually learned a lot of the value of heat mapping because it’s like, wow, there’s a lot of things you can solve by just understanding where people are getting lost.

So it’s like dipping your toe into conversion rate optimization or DxO. It just comes with understanding of what are people doing on the site. Right. And so I’m excited to actually learn the actual reasons behind heat mapping, not just kind of distracting clients and getting some of that data, but it was, it was fascinating last week to hear some of your answers to our team’s questions around heat mapping and understanding some of the traffic patterns and interactions on the site and how you can learn a lot from your, about your customers through it.

So yeah, now that transparently there are probably close to a hundred heat mapping. Systems out there or claim to be like Shopify alone probably has quote unquote, I’m using air quotes here free heat mapping softwares that are like, you know, I don’t, I don’t even want to get into it probably, but they’re, they all say the same thing, but you know, why are we having to talk about the best?

Is it only because there’s like over a hundred of them that say they do the same thing?

Jon: Well, look, that’s, that’s a great observation because there are tons out there. So, we really do need to talk about this in part because there are so many options. They’re not all the same. You’ll have to trust me on that, but they’re not all the same.

But I can see how it looks that way based on someone who doesn’t live in these tools on a daily basis. Right? And it’s also partly a topic of conversation today because we get asked this question at The Good so often. Much all the time. Like you said, it came up last week. I guarantee you it came up at least last week for our team as well.

So here’s the deal. A researcher is only as good as their tools, right? So if you want to make the best decisions, you need to arm yourself with the best information, analytics, data, user interviews, surveys, they’re all helpful in their own ways, right? But there is a Powerful insight in observing people using your site or your app, and that’s what heat maps are all about, but you need to have quality data that you can trust, and when you have that, this gives you a clear, a really comprehensive and ideally unbiased view of the visitor’s experience on your site.

Ryan: All right, so, I mean, conceptually, I understand heat mapping, but I guess, is there a primary value of that other than just seeing where a cursor moves on a site?

Jon: Oh, for sure. I think that’s where, if you’re just looking to distract somebody, perhaps, right? Then yeah, there’s value in just seeing that, right?

And living in that data, I think. is extremely valuable, you know, learning by observing that stuff is great, but there are dozens of little variables that affect how and when your visitors decide to take action, right? For instance, a visitor might read some content, explore some images, the page before finally taking that next step, these footprints, let’s call them, right, can provide key insight to help you optimize the experience and drive more convergence and opportunities.

communities. Unfortunately, You can’t get that type of data out of the box in things like Google Analytics. That isn’t just a bad tool. What can you get

Ryan: out of GA4? Well, I mean. Okay, maybe that is a

Jon: slight ding on GA. I think GA4, step back. We’ve had a whole show about that. It is a challenge, right? But. Yeah.

Regardless, even when GA was amazing, it wasn’t going to provide you everything that you needed. So if you have customer tracking set up, it tells a fuller picture, a fuller story. All you can do is tell what’s happening. It won’t actually show you what’s happening through that tracking. Right? Therefore, you need some more specialty tools, right?

You gotta have the right tool for the job. You gotta see exactly what visitors are doing on your site. And those tools really come down to heat maps, scroll maps, click maps, and session recordings.

Ryan: I got it. So it’s these tools don’t just track a cursor. They actually, I didn’t even know this, they do a lot more than these things.

They do a lot more. What else do these things do that I don’t even know about?

Jon: Well, okay, so you talked tracking cursors. That’s mainly session recordings, okay? So, session recordings are better known as where the user has moved their cursor. Okay, so you’re going to see a composite of the user’s path that the cursors are taking, and that can tell you a ton of information about how complicated your user interface is for the visitor.

For example, does the visitor move their mouse all over the page looking for that next step or do they go directly to it, right? So that’s where it can be really, really helpful. But there’s other things that these do high level. We’ll start with heat maps, right? This is where people pay attention. So there’s a really famous Nielsen eye tracking study that made pretty big waves when it proved.

Really what we all suspected anyways, but people don’t read on the web. We actually scan, right? How often, if you look at an eye tracking heat map, which is another whole tool set in and of itself, you will see a very predictable F shaped pattern. We start at the far left hand side, scan to the right, and then drop down and to the left, and we repeat.

Now, when we scan to the right, often we’re not reading to the end of the line. We get what the first few words said, like, I’m not interested, or get to the first few words. I get the idea of moving on. Now, again, this is in Western cultures. There’s other directions in other cultures, but they all have the same underlying concern.

Okay. If you’re reading right to left, you still don’t read the entire way. You follow reverse F pattern. It’s very similar. The result is that some spots on the page get the majority of our attention. That’s just naturally what happens here. Other spots get ignored, right? And I really think what we can do is use this to learn whether design elements are effective.

And how to optimize the page. And I think that’s key. It’s a data point. You know, typically this data is shown in areas that receive a lot of attention as warmer colors. This is where heat comes in, right? Heat map. It’s typically red, orange areas that receive little attention or cooler, like green and blue.

So that’s where the term heat map comes in. Most folks know that, but it’s important to call that out because almost every tool is going to show you those same type of colors, but the accuracy of that is going to, is debatable, let’s just say.

Ryan: So, like, but I’m, I know that when I’m on a site, it’s not accessing my camera and actually watching my eyes.

Right. So they can’t, like, zap me and figure that out. So the technology is, Well, it’s,

Jon: there are different types, heat maps that we’re talking about today. You’re correct. It does not use a camera. It uses your mouse movement. Now the key to understand out of all of this is you can get pretty darn close to eye tracking with mouse cursor tracking.

The reason we’re able to do that is because whether you know it or not, your eyes are following your cursor around your screen. And so I got to go try that later today. You don’t pay attention to it yourself, but yeah, you got to look where your cursor is going to click or where it’s pointing. Right. So your eyes are going to naturally go there.

Now, when you’re reading, Typically, unless you’re, you’re my mom, you’re not following the cursor along with every word that you read, right? Most of us, you know, give that up when we’re seven or eight years old, we start, stop reading with our finger, right? Same thing on a computer, you’re not following the cursor while you’re reading.

Now, as we get older, that tends to happen again, but I digress. The majority of the population on your site, that’s not happening to that’s where I tracking can really come in and it requires different tooling than what we’re talking about today, but the output could look like a heat map. Okay. So, okay.

There’s another data point that’s really good out of these tools, and that’s called scroll mappings. And scroll map is whether people consume your content or not. That is what you want to understand here. How do you understand that? Well, let’s just say you design long, beautiful pages. But you want to know, does anybody read them?

Do they actually make the experience better for your users? Well, scroll maps can help us understand where people scroll on a page and how long they spend at each section of that page. Okay, so these maps use the same hot cold color grading as heat maps. It’s probably why they’re always lumped together, but it’s a different view on that data and provides a different data point.

If users spend a lot of time in one area, the map is going to show it as red or orange. Okay, if they never scrolled that page at all, it’s going to go home. Cold like blue. So scroll maps are really powerful tools to help you optimize your pages because like heat maps, they tell you what users care about and offer insight into improving the, those pages.

Ryan: So yeah, it gives you insight on where to put the more important information too. It’s parts of the page. You don’t want, if you do a thing in F shapes, don’t put really important stuff on the right side. There, there’s a reason there’s a right, right, right. They never get there.

Jon: Exactly. You’re hiding information down where people aren’t going to scroll.

So maybe you need to change the order of that information so that your most important point is made right up top. Are you sure people are going to see it? There are ways to influence getting people to scroll further down the page, but this can help you to understand where they’re not consuming the content.

Let’s just say. Now, okay, the last tool that these provide is what’s called click maps. And this is whether people are close to converting. That’s really what you’re looking for here. Okay. The click is one of our most valuable signals because it represents engagement with the content. Some cases, a click indicates that prized conversion, right?

Add to cart. Check out whatever that might be. But if people are clicking your call to action, it’s a sign that your page is at least decently optimized. If they click elsewhere, well, it might mean that they find something else more valuable or maybe they just need more information, right? So click maps show where somebody clicks on your page and they reveal whether your users are interested in what they’re looking at.

That making sense so far?

Ryan: Yeah, I guess so. Click map. You could also in the well because they can click on things that they don’t do anything. And I think that’s an important delineation because you could put analytics events on every link on a page and technically see where they do that. But I think I’ve seen you audit a site In real time, where it was like people tried to click on a mirror in a picture, like they weren’t selling the mirror.

They were selling a couch. And so those clicks were important because it’s like they wanted that. So I was like, you should sell mirrors instead of couches because you have a good mirror.

Jon: I mean, that, that was, I remember that talk. I think it was the talk I gave at an LPX event at Google’s headquarters, right?

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, a digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization.

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: Yeah, in New York, that was like one of my favorite

Jon: ones too. That was a great talk and it was a great event. I remember that gentleman ended up working with us in the end, but it was, it was interesting because he went home and he emailed me. Within 12 hours, he’s like, Jon, I’ve changed the image. Can you run that heat map again?

It was pretty funny. I was like, sure, let’s have people focus on the product you’re selling. It makes a lot of sense. But you would have never known that if you just relied on a heat map, click map, you know, if you, if you had not. Um, excuse me, if you had only relied on a heat map, not a click map, right? So it’s the combination of these tools that’s really important.

So there’s also a bonus one that a lot of these tools provide, and that is onsite surveying. Now it’s not a heat mapping, but some of these tools also provide onsite surveying. So that can be helpful when you pop up out of the corner of the screen and ask, you know, a couple of really pointed questions, you might get some responses to that.

If I’m saying that right of those is debatable, but it is something that we’ve used at the good quite a bit as well.

Ryan: And this isn’t a pop up for like get 10 percent off for giving me your email pop up. This is a, did you like this image or did you find the information you needed? Like what kind of things would I need to ask in this system?

Jon: Yeah. Oh, I think that’s exactly it. You’re asking very pointed questions or are you missing any information? here. Yes or no. And if somebody says yes, then you can have a question. Okay. What questions do you have? That’s a great way to collect that information. It’s a very poor way to offer customer support.

I will caution you that the vast majority of people who are going to answer these surveys are people who are really looking for or need customer support. So that’s why I say they’re effective when done correctly. The majority of blank brands Ploy these don’t do it effectively.

Ryan: Got it. Okay. So, you know, we don’t, we are talking about the best, so I assume there is a best of all of these that come together.

Like, are they in one tool or are they like.

Jon: Yeah. Yeah. I guess kind of burying the lead here a little bit. I could have let off with this, but I mean, you know, we generally recommend Hotjar and sometimes new clients ask us to use their preferred tools, but I’ll be honest, our team almost always resists and that’s how confident we are in Hotjar and providing value there.

But Right now, hands down, it’s the best heat mapping software on the market for professional researchers. Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t free options out there that, as you said earlier, might distract. The data is not always amazing and not always accurate. And it might be a representative sample that is very, very low quantity.

So take that all for what it is. The investment, if you’re going to really actually use this data to use hot jar is super minimal. So it’s well worth it. If you’re, if you’re going to be looking at the data to get the tool, it does it. Right.

Ryan: And I will say we don’t take sponsorships here. So hot jar, if you’re listening, yeah, Jon got a high five because we’re not being paid to do this.

So it actually is a true opinion of what the best product out there is. And that’s pretty telling now, you know, they do all these things, but so do competitors. Is there something that makes them stand out more? Like as like the specifics of each one,

Jon: right? Yeah, definitely. As I was saying, there’s, there’s deeper reasons to use hot jar, right?

Cause there are competitors out there that are free. Here are some of the features I really like out of hot jar. First of all, it gives you separate instances for each map. So I talked about all those different types of heat maps. Right? Click maps, scroll maps, heat maps, generally following the cursor, et cetera.

But having access to all these different types of data is great, but a lot of tools pump them all into that same report. And this really just ends up painting a really muddy picture and makes accurate analysis really difficult to see. Their point of view is, well, when you overlay this data, you can gain more insights, but The reality is it muddies the data in our opinion.

If I want to overlap it, let me overlap it. Don’t do it for me. So hot, hot jar will separate all these different types of maps and data, and it helps our team focus on the information we’re looking for. So there’s really no misunderstandings there.

Ryan: Got it. So if I have a session of scroll map from, let’s say, Bob over there, I can also see, Oh, I’d rather, I’d really love to see like the heat map on in addition to that scroll map from that person and overlay them if I want to.

Jon: Well, not down necessarily to a person level, right? None of these will do personally identifiable information. Oh yeah, PII,

Ryan: can’t do that.

Jon: Right. So this will do it in aggregate. Get it. Okay, so it will do all of your viewers between a certain timeframe, right? Now you also do have to have enough traffic to your site to write.

So if you only have 10 visitors coming to your site, it’s probably going to withhold that data because it doesn’t want you to see what only 10 people can do. It’s kind of like Facebook and ads where they won’t let you run an ad to a group that is too small because you’re clearly targeting one or two people and you might get 10 in there.

But. They don’t want you to be able to identify individuals. I get

Ryan: that. Okay, that is an important note then. So even these free tools, like if I’ve just started and I have three people to come to my site a day, can I get free heatmaps and some of these things?

Jon: You can install the snippet. The data most likely won’t be there.

But let’s be honest, if you don’t have enough traffic to do, to get heatmap data, You’ve got bigger issues on your hands. You should probably give Ryan a call and just get traffic going.

Ryan: There’s a decent amount of you living. Yeah. Heat maps are valuable, but what would be your horrible ballpark back of napkin?

If you don’t have this much traffic, heat maps are worthless or, or these tools.

Jon: If you don’t have 5, 000 visitors a month sessions, not just visitor sessions. So if you can get 5, 000, then. Okay, it might make sense to start looking at your heat maps, but in all honesty, you really want 000 before this data is really going to be something you’re going to have the resources to even act on unless you’re independently funded.

Maybe you’re wealthy. I don’t know, but most brands I talked to, that’s not the case.

Ryan: Okay,

Jon: good to know.

Ryan: Even the free ones like. There’s very little value, less than 5, 000.

Jon: Yeah, I would say that’s accurate.

Ryan: Okay,

Jon: so Hotjar also does filters for session recordings. So not only can you see session recordings individually, meaning as its own data set, right?

Not individual users, just to be clear again. But session recordings can take a while to sort through, especially if you have many of them, you can watch them at speeds faster than real time, which is great, but they still take a while to watch. All right, this means we end up spending a lot of time at the good watching dozens of irrelevant recordings for each page, often without learning anything valuable.

It’s a major time suck. So highly recommend filtering. What this means is Hotjar, fortunately, well, it lets us filter our recordings to reduce the number of sessions that we end up having to watch. We can quickly drill down to the sessions that have the most impact on whatever we’re trying to learn. So again, if you have enough data, you have enough sessions, now we can slice that data to just get close to what we want to see, as opposed to having to watch everything.

Ryan: Okay, we want this certain page and the people that spent at least 30 seconds on this page with activity, not like they went to the page for two minutes and didn’t do anything. Exactly.

Jon: Exactly. Okay, also keyboard shortcuts are available within Hotjar. So this provides quick navigation. Now, maybe you’re just a nerd like me, or maybe you love keyboard navigation.

I’m the guy who’s in Gmail all day using the keyboard. If I can not touch my mouse, I would love to. The idea here is when you’re watching these session recordings, Hotjar really enables you to stop and play and go forward and backwards using keyboard. Now, this is just a huge time saver, letting you bounce around a quickly between recordings and find the information that you need.

However, some competitors allow for these kinds of actions, but you have to click their buttons, which takes huge attention away from the video. Because now, instead of watching the video, what happens? You have to look over, find the button and then click it and go back. Just takes forever, right? When you really get into the research and you’re watching a lot of these.

Yeah, you want keyboard navigation. Let’s be honest. You’re you’re, if you’re going to be a pro, you’re not using your mouse for this. It’s just unfortunate, right? Have you ever seen a really good CPA use Excel? They never touch the mouse, right? It’s a similar type of thing. So as far as we know, I think that

Ryan: I don’t have to watch my CPA.

That would for sure

Jon: put me to sleep. See, it would be the same thing here. But I’m promising you that eventually that payoff is here. If you start watching enough of these, right? But they’re the only tool that provides this. Which is shocking to me. Right. So there’s a free tip for all the hotjar competitors out there.

Go put keyboard shortcuts in there and at least maybe you might have some, you know, maybe some crossover at that point. The last thing I really like about hotjar, and now you mentioned this with the mirror and the couch, right? And this was a company that sold interior furnishings and they were selling a couch that was an image on a product detail page for a sofa and they had a mirror.

It was basically just the sofa in the mirror in the background and I don’t know why they put the mirror there, but for some reason they did. And people were just rage clicking on the mirror cause they’re like, give me this mirror. Give me this mirror. Right? So they just kept clicking and they were getting frustrated.

Hot door allows you to identify these moments of rage, right? Where users can become so frustrated. The way they click repeatedly. thinking, well, this will make the site work. I don’t ask me, I don’t get it, but I’ve definitely been in that rage before. So it, this often really can get confused by slow page speed or broken elements or confusion around what’s clickable, what’s not.

Okay, so often we’ll see rage clicking when a page isn’t done loading, even though someone’s clicking on a button, right? Where a slow page load and the button’s not active yet, but it’s displaying, people start clicking on it because they know what they want to do. That’s a great telltale sign. There’s an error there.

And I would classify page speed as being an error at that point.

Ryan: So for sure, rage clicked.

Jon: Well, that doesn’t surprise me, right? These are really serious moments of frustration. I think they were a must avoid. So hot jars, click map, show you where users rage click and helps focus on that frustration point.

Ryan: Dang. Okay. So insightful. Like, I think if you have more than 5, 000 sessions a month, you, you know, likely should be paying attention to these things. Like it makes sense if you’re going to take the next step in the brand and continue to grow. If you’re less than 5, 000, it’s focused on traffic. Don’t get distracted.

There’s better things to be doing with your time than really analyzing. You know, a few hundred sessions a month, it just doesn’t make any sense at that point to understand, especially, I think, you know, a lot of these tools came out pre like Shopify taking off to like Shopify from a conversion standpoint.

And like, just simply like the templates, if you don’t mess them up, they’re going to function well enough to get you to that 5, 000. Yeah. You really don’t probably have to worry about this yet. And so those, those free versions. Who cares? I mean, you’ve said it multiple times and I have to like, you get what you pay for.

If you want something free, guess what? You are the product or their, their products inferior at the free level. And it’s just not going to make any sense.

Jon: If you don’t trust me, just go sign up for a free trial of, of hot jar and give it a shot for a little bit and see what happens. Right. There’s nothing to lose in doing that.

Ryan: And if you’ve got lots of sessions and you’re trying to figure out how to use these keyboard keys to try to navigate stuff, you probably should just be talking to Jon and let him push the buttons for you. Like, like I do with my CPA. Like, I don’t want to know how my CPA navigates Excel because that’s just really boring to me.

So get an expert.

Jon: I need to get, you know, what makes that interesting is a little offshoot here. There’s some great Instagram accounts. of people doing Excel hacks that I think will blow your mind. You

Ryan: would, I won’t watch my CPA do Excel, but we have, we have real Excel nerds at our company that I constantly have to ping, like, okay, I need to figure out how to do this V lookup or I’m trying to put these two things together.

Like, Gero, how long have you been in digital marketing and you don’t know how to do Excel things? Like, it’s, it’s surprising how much digital marketing is Excel. Like it, it’s crazy. Crunching data, right? Yeah, it hasn’t updated in what, 20 years, really? And it’s still one of the most valuable business tools in existence.

Jon: I would agree with that. That is, is a big reason that Microsoft is where they are.

Ryan: Yeah, I love Excel. Like if they had no other product, I would be a Microsoft customer.

Jon: Well, next time one of those digital marketers on your team give you help for saying, asking them a question, say, well, that’s why you’re part of the team, right?

You got all this great experience that I don’t have.

Ryan: You know how to do Excel and I don’t. I mean, I know it’s dangerous, but not that some of the levels of complexity with Excel. Our formulas is and astounds me. Yeah. But Jon, thanks for the education. We now know which company is best for heat mapping and all of the things that fall under the large broad stroke statement of heat mapping.

Jon: There are more than most people think. So thanks for interviewing me on this today. I appreciate it.

Ryan: Yeah. Thanks for the information and we’ll continue to keep. Pushing people over to Hot Chart to grow their business.

Jon: Love it.

Ryan: Thanks Ryan. Thank you.

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@driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 114): What is the Best Heatmap Software for Researchers? appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

After walking 100 miles across a wall in Europe (for vacation!?), Ryan is back and wondering what walls brands can build that will net them better traffic.

In this week’s episode, Ryan tells Jon all about what he learned from reading a recent study on zero-click searches. They discuss the amount of clicks that go to organic listings vs. Google-owned properties and ways to pivot focus to optimize your marketing budget.

Listen to the full episode to learn:

• How to find a middle ground between SEO and other marketing strategies
• What has been the impact of AI in Google search results on click-through rates
• How focusing on smaller areas can help you drive traffic
• Why Ryan would walk 100 miles while on vacation

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:

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

Jon:

Ryan, welcome home. I am told you recently went on a 100-mile hike in Northern England along Hadrian’s Wall. Since we’re talking, I assume you made it home, which is good.

Ryan:

Yes, we made it home safe. My body may not agree that it’s all fine and good, but it was a great trip.

Jon:

I have to ask, what would cause one to go for almost a 100-mile hike in ancient ruins?

Ryan:

Your dad is turning 70 and he decides that’s what he wants to do for his 70th birthday.

Jon:

I hope when I turn 70, I want to walk 100 miles too.

Ryan:

Yeah. I think part of it may have been he knew my mom wasn’t going to do it, so he’d have a chance with his kids just to himself. Me and my siblings took him off on the Wall and hiked for… We were off there in England for 10 days, hiking for six. It was good.

Jon:

All right. Well, that sounds fun. Well, to bring that back home to why we’re here today, with all that thinking, did you develop any new traffic driving strategies, anything on that drive portion of the Drive and Convert? Heck, maybe you figured out conversion optimization as well.

Ryan:

I wish. It was actually pretty good to be over in England, and I learned this about myself. If I go enough time zones away and I have everything turned off, I can’t work if I wanted to because nobody else is working at that time, and so that was actually really good for me. It was a good mental break, fully unplugged, which rarely happens because I’ll go away for a long weekend with the family and that’s never fully unplugged unfortunately.

Jon:

I hear that.

Ryan:

Yeah, it didn’t solve any of the world’s problems unfortunately when it comes to driving in a CRO. Good luck. But it was interesting because you’re hiking this wall that it’s 100 miles long and so somehow the Romans figured out the narrowest point on this island of Britain and built a wall across it. It took them six years to build it and I’m sure a tremendous amount of resources. I mean, it would take a lot of resources now, but I mean, you’re talking thousands of men in six years and you’re thinking, “Okay. Why keep the Scots out? What was the purpose behind this? Why not just go up? You have the Roman Empire behind you, just go up and destroy them.”

When you read the history, it came down to the complexity of conquering Scotland because it wasn’t like a single country. It’s a bunch of little fiefdoms and a bunch of little tribes essentially 2,000 years ago, and there weren’t enough resources up there to justify it. You weren’t going to get anything by taking it over really, and there weren’t enough resources because weren’t concentrated enough. You couldn’t support an army up there. You’d have to constantly be bringing supplies and everything up in there because you couldn’t go take over town and take all their food. You had to be like bring it all with you.

So Hadrian’s like, “All right. Fine. We’re just going to build a wall, keep the Scots there, and that’s the edge of the Roman Empire. Done, set, move on.” So fascinating, but it also got me really thinking along around where do I need to do that personally? Where in business do we need to be doing that? Because it’s most of us in business and in life don’t have unlimited resources and have to make determinations of what makes sense now versus later or just never. You’re talking the Roman Empire, arguably one of the most dominant empires the planet’s ever seen, decided that this little area of Britannia at the time, Scotland now, wasn’t even worth deploying enough of their army to go take it over and just be done with it.

Jon:

Obviously, Scotch had not been invented yet.

Ryan:

Good point. Yeah. If Scotch had been there, it would’ve made more sense probably.

Jon:

Well, okay, so you didn’t solve the world’s problems, but I actually thought that conversation was going to go a different way. I assumed you were going to say that Google is the Roman Empire because they own everything and wall off whatever they want. So that’s not the case. It sounds-

Ryan:

It’s true. Yeah. So coming back and processing all of this, I started to do some research on all of this around how can I advise some of our clients to be putting up walls when it makes sense in their business? I came across this cool study that had some very interesting patterns on what Google’s doing and how are they directing traffic once the search happens because it’s ever-evolving that Google’s… We know it’s constantly testing service and traffic is going many different places and there’s a lot going on constantly. So I was like, “Okay.” Well, just fascinating seeing what the data is telling us at the end of the day because all we do is look at numbers and data and make decisions based on that.

Jon:

Well, to start with, what report are we talking about then?

Ryan:

With many of you listening… I mean, I’m making assumptions here. So there’s a gentleman named Rand Fishkin.

Jon:

Oh, yes.

Ryan:

If you haven’t heard of this gentleman, you probably should. You should see what else he’s done. He was the founder and CEO of Moz, which there’s always debate, but I would say one of the top SEO tools created. Years ago, it was the best, and it’s still easily one of the best. Every couple of years he does this study about where the clicks on Google go and analyzes the trends and offers some of his insights on how that’s changed and where it needs to go and what you as a branch should just be aware of.

Jon:

What stood out to you that you felt like it was worth talking about today?

Ryan:

Well, there’s a couple of things. Probably the most fascinating to me was as he analyzed the data, just was it last month, I think, AI did not have the impact I thought it would. So I thought that AI was going to be like, “Okay. That’s going to answer so many questions that there’s going to be less clicks going to paid search and AI is going to kind of take over all of this. So Google controls everything.”

Jon:

I foresee a end of year where we were wrong episode again going straight here because I do recall you saying AI is taking over search and it’s going to keep all the results on the page there.

Ryan:

Yes. It wasn’t even that long ago that I said that, and I guess I probably should have gone and polled Rand more or sooner to find out what he thought because he’s done more of the research. But AI, there’s many different numbers around studies around how many searches AI is showing on. It’s anywhere from 15 to I think somebody said 50%, and I’m like, I still haven’t seen close to 50%, but it also has to do with certain searches. You can see there’s voice searches that are being done that they can’t analyze in Rand’s model. So there’s a lot of things they just don’t know or they don’t have transparency in.

Jon:

So what did you think the AI results were going to do?

Ryan:

I thought that AI results were going to trump a lot of organic clicks because if you’re getting the answer right there on Google, I don’t need to go anywhere else. Like I said before when we talked about AI, I’m one of the paranoid people that needs to know where they’re pulling their answer from. So I’m going to click on that result to understand, okay, do I trust this site or is this some clickbait site that’s designed to get me to click and waste time chasing… Medium, for example, great clickbait site, questionable articles, but again, that’s where I went with it.

On the AI side in particular, what they’re seeing is that it probably hurt Google more than it helped them. So important metrics to Google are searches per searcher and clicks per search because the more clicks that happen and the more searches that happen, the more chances Google has to make money because if nobody clicks, Google makes no money. If you look at separating mobile and desktop out, on mobile devices, when AI is being the changing differentiating factor, the searchers per searcher dropped dramatically with the rollout of this AI.

So there’s no real reason given yet because we’re still analyzing data, but the hypothesis moving forward is it’s causing people to stop searches and not have to search again because they found the answer they needed and then they’re done and they move on. In fact, for a while it’s been about 60% of searches done on Google don’t end up in a click. So we have something like 8 billion, 8.5 billion searches a month done on Google, and 60% of them don’t even end up in a click, which is fascinating to me that Google would not be trying to figure out, “How do I take that 60% and move that to 58%?”

Jon:

Yeah. Yeah. It seems like a lot of money left on the table with ads. But also, I mean, how many times have you used Google to just verify a word is spelled correctly? You know what I mean?

Ryan:

More often than I’d like to admit.

Jon:

Right. So I think I look at that and I’m like, “Man, that might make up at least 20% of my searches on Google.” So with that in mind, I’m skewing that average already.

Ryan:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. When I’ve got kids that they all have a Google Home in their rooms, they get to ask Google stupid questions and they get to hear dad jokes on Google if I’m not around and then play music.

Jon:

Yeah, the worst is my wife’s car has Google in it and my son continually asks it to tell jokes, and the jokes are dad jokes, but they’re funny like, “Yay, whatever.” But yeah, after a while it’s like, “Oh, I’m sorry. My wife’s Google search is going to… History is just totally jacked up.”

Ryan:

Yeah. I pay for my family Kindle Unlimited for all the kids so they can all read books because they do love reading. I would say at least 25% of my four kids and the hundreds of books read per month by them, 25% are joke books.

Jon:

Okay. Fair enough. I bet. Hey, sounds funny. Nothing else. I bet it’s entertaining.

Ryan:

Hey, we laugh a lot, but not bad.

Announcer:

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

Jon:

So, do companies need to be Hadrian and start building walls around AI here? What do you recommending?

Ryan:

Transparently, I’m not even sure if AI would stay in the wall.

Jon:

Fair enough.

Ryan:

That may be a problem there, but I do think some brands need to be thinking about beyond this AI thing, putting walls up around certain areas that they’ve been investing in for a while on Google based on where these trends are going. Specifically, I think SEO was going to be the one that gets impacted the most. It’s not because of the AI taking all the clicks, which is where my hypothesis would’ve been two months ago. It’s really around Google directing those organic clicks to other areas.

Jon:

Are you saying don’t do SEO? I mean, coming from a traffic person, that seems like really weird and odd advice.

Ryan:

Which I would agree with if I’m actually saying… I can’t say that, that not do SEO. The second most interesting point I found in this article, interesting for me is being proven wrong, and so that’s why the AI one comes in there, but from a practical standpoint for clients I work with and companies listening to this, it’s the sheer amount of traffic. Google is driving to Google properties instead of organic results. So we’ve seen this for a while, but I guess I just hadn’t seen the numbers around what volume of these. So the numbers that Rand came up with in this study, almost 30% of all clicks on Google go to a Google property, and so that’s YouTube, Google Maps, Google Hotels, Google Flights, Google App Store. I mean, I’m guilty of that, flight checking for business trips and personal trips. I get Google alerts on flights and I’m there. I’m in the Google Flights because it’s so much easier than going into Delta and then going into Alaska separately.

So the share of clicks being given to organic or going to go, I wouldn’t say given, I guess Google can’t technically just give them, but they impact it a lot, is at an all time low, and so only… It’s around 70% of the clicks that happen go to organic now, and that’s decreasing in the US pretty aggressively. It caused me to start thinking about how you might be investing in this. So if you know that the share of clicks to organic listings is decreasing and you’ve got some significant competitors already ranking above you and that would be like Amazon, Walmart, target, GNC, if you’re in the supplement world, if you’re behind them on important non-brand searches, is it going to make sense to be pushing into that to try to rank higher and outrank somebody that’s so far ahead from an SEO standpoint? That’s where I think maybe we need to start digging a little deeper into the minutiae and decide what does or does not make sense around that.

So, don’t hear this to say don’t invest in SEO anymore. That can’t be what’s heard. So if you’re cutting me up to blast me on LinkedIn, I’m going to get you because I’m recording the full thing here. But I think there could be potential for a lot of brands on focusing on Google properties and where Google is wanting to push traffic. So I’ve said this many times and I think most people understand, it’s Google’s world. We’re living in it, and you’ve got to make your brand fit Google’s world not make Google fit your brand because that’s an uphill battle you’re going to lose every time.

In fact, in that study, Rand quotes a guy, won’t remember who it is, but a few years ago he put a tweet out that said, “Google has the most phenomenal SEO team in the world. They have never been hit by at a Google update ever and lost SEO traffic.” Good point. I mean, even though the EU antitrust thing came out recently and penalized Google and cost them I don’t know how many hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, they are still going this direction within the US and knowing full well they’ll probably get something similar to what happened in the U, but it’s far enough down the road in the legal world that there are still billions upon billions of dollars to make in the meantime.

Jon:

Well, and data to collect in the meantime, which will only help fuel them moving forward. You have to think about eventually. I believe I saw this report when it came out too or overview it. One of the major ways they’ve collected data has been Chrome. I thought that was really, really interesting. Everybody knows it, but it came out and I guess there was some leak around the algorithm for Google. It came out a while back.

Ryan:

That was an interesting one. If you haven’t looked at the Google leak docs or a summary of it, you can find a good one on search engine land.

Jon:

I’ll have to check that out. I think I saw something around an overview of that for the short one, and it wasn’t surprising to me, but it’s like, oh yeah, Google’s watching everything you do at every single step. There are a lot of places across the world now where they’re being slapped on the wrist for doing that, but the US hasn’t so far not been one of them.

Ryan:

It’s hard you have… When you look at Chrome… I use Chrome and I like it because it syncs everything across all my devices. It makes it easy to store my passwords. It makes it easy to autofill. I mean, they’ve created a phenomenal ecosystem that it’s painful for me to find. If somebody forced me and says, “You have to migrate and use Firefox,” I’d be like, “I put my whole life on all my devices is on Chrome. Now I got to redo things.” So yes, all that, it’s Google’s world Live in that and understand that and start placing some bets, I would say, in the Google realm and where they want clicks to be going.

So still, yes, SEO. Most companies out there don’t need to wall off SEO entirely and throw it over into Scotland and say, “No, we’ll do that later.” It’s probably putting a wall down the middle of SEO in reality and separating that and saying, “Okay. There are different pieces to SEO. If I can, I’d like to be able to potentially split that budget and split the focus of my team from SEO and say the things that I know work well long-term are going to be backlinks, quality content linking back to me to increase my domain authority.” That hasn’t really changed in the last 20 years. Put some good content out there, but the line would be keep doing that.

Instead of focusing a lot of on-site content, I might say, “Let’s get that content team maybe to start doing some things on YouTube.” Maybe put some question and answer things that I would’ve maybe written in a blog, but instead of that, maybe put it on YouTube. But if you’re writing it from doing everything on YouTube, it may not be that hard to have a transcription put on your website. I mean, you are king of reusing a single piece of content in multiple areas. I mean, if you want a case study and doing something once and using it 20 times, Jon MacDonald is the guy for that, for sure.

Jon:

I will say two things on that. One is I would defer to Ross Simmonds. He runs a great training or has in the past called DREAM: Distribution Rules Everything Around Me. Yes, he’s a Wu-Tang rap fan, the song CREAM: Cash Rules Everything Around Me. But he was saying here so many businesses have a glutton of content, but they don’t use it, right? They get it out there and then they let it die. So I learned a lot from him. I would redirect people to go check that out. But also my team at The Good, they’ve done an amazing job of helping reuse content. So I can’t take all the credit for that, but I do appreciate it. We do put out a ton of content. I have so many lists of things I’ve yet to promote that I’m supposed to get out there, so I’m the backlog when it comes to that.

Ryan:

Yeah. I mean, if you see the content your team’s put out, I would guess if I didn’t know already, I would’ve said, “Man, you have a large team, five, six, seven people helping you put content out.” In fact, you have a very lean team that does a phenomenal job of hitting out of their weight class based on [inaudible 00:19:05] they have.

Jon:

Thank you. I’ll pass that along.

Ryan:

Yeah, great job there. So take a cue from Jon and his team as you’re looking at your investment in SEO. SEO and helping things onsite can help your paid search. So you’ve got to do some to get your paid search to work better, get the now traffic. Start doing some analysis on YouTube at your competitors. Do some searches on YouTube that say, “All right. If somebody’s trying to solve this problem on YouTube, what does it look like?” There’s a lot of YouTube, Pinterest DIY things. I go there to figure out how to fix a home project before I go to Home Depot to figure out what I got to buy to make things work. If you’re in that space, answering those questions can be of benefit and can rank higher where Google wants to send that traffic and then come back. Just found out today that Google is really excited about feeds going into YouTube. So they want to make YouTube more of a shopping destination.

Jon:

Interesting. Okay.

Ryan:

It’s been a challenging integration in shopping into YouTube. They’ve done some shoppable videos that have just never gotten anywhere.

Jon:

Well, and are those still available? Because I remember when those came out a decade ago and people were super excited about that.

Ryan:

They were excited because Google told us we were supposed to be excited about it and nobody did anything. I don’t know if there was one purchase that it was done through those. There’s probably was. I don’t know how many we tracked, but it probably wasn’t nearly what we expected. Google is going to test and measure enough things that they’re going to get people to shop because they’re using YouTube more and more. The TikToks, the vertical videos are being a big thing we talk about. Instagram, that type of interaction where you’re scrolling a feed, they’re really trying to get YouTube to operate that way. People that are scrolling it, therefore you’ll see a lot more easy ways shop and convert inside the ecosystem. Similar to Facebook or Instagram Shop is what I expect to have come out fairly soon, maybe holiday.

Jon:

Oh, okay.

Ryan:

Be prepared, but they’re hot and excited about feeds going into YouTube. So knowing that’s Google’s goal and where they’re going, if you don’t have content there, it’s going to be much more difficult for you to just pop up your product in an unrelated video because you’re remarketing to them. But if you have native videos that are yours and you have a page on there, much easier to fit that in there. I would assume influencers are going to be heavily incentivized as they talk about products to have those shoppable. It’ll be easy to track the conversion. Again, there’s so many things Google can do to incentivize influential people and brands to start participating, and I’m seeing that happen. There’s a lot of cash flying around from Google to make that happen.

I would be focusing more on YouTube and leverage that as somewhat of an SEO standpoint and understanding those clicks are going to come organically. But again, it’s difficult to bucket that under SEO if I’m a CFO because that’s not an owned click of yours. They still have to come to the site for that to be considered, I guess, SEO optimizing for search engines. So YouTube, if they can convert there and send sales, it’s going to be much easier to see it as a channel, more of a social channel, but be there and be aware of it.

I think that’s also going to play into some of this AI consideration and how you’re looking at AI. So if we take this back to AI and SEO, AI is not taking SEO clicks as we can see. But a good example would be a client of ours, Dynojet. Think about this, if somebody is searching for, “Does fuel tuning make my motorcycle go faster?” If I just bought a motorcycle and I want to go faster, I need to know how to do that and I’m like, “Okay. I heard about fuel tuning.” If you ask that question, you’ll get an AI answer. Dynojet who we did the SEO for actually shows an article answering that question that they reference. It took time. Their domain authority is high enough. I don’t have to click as a searcher on that, I already know fuel tuning does do that.

Okay. So I need a fuel tuner. I just got the bike. I’m not going to do that now. Maybe a month down the road I save money and decide I need to see how much a fuel tuner costs. I go search Yamaha R7 fuel tuner. Oh, great, I’ve got… Here it is. Oh yeah, Dynojet, I remember that name from the search I did and the AI popped it up. I may not remember it was AI. I may not remember how it showed, but Dynojet resonates. Think of it as a branding play, high up the funnel. So that part is SEO. That may be something you need to focus on more. If you can’t build the backlinks to overtake your competitors, maybe you get really good at designing blog content that’s schema markups so that AI picks it up.

Jon:

Yeah. Or answering very specific questions like that.

Ryan:

Yes. Another company I invest in has done a great job of that scaling article creation to answer very specific questions because you can figure out the search volume if you go to… Semrush is great resource for that because they have an API access into the Google keyword planners. They know the search volume. You can say, “Okay. I know there’s this many searches for how to make the best cookies.” Great. I sell flour for baking and I know that there’s 300 searches for that a month, great, I might be able to use AI by writing this article and get the answer to 200 of them. They’re not going to click, so you can’t see the click traffic, but if 200 people out of 300 don’t click anywhere, which is about the average on Google and they just see your answer, well, they need to go buy flour next time, maybe they see that and remember the name. “Oh yeah, that name sticks in my head for some reason. I don’t know why, but since I remember it, they must be a good product.”

Jon:

Interesting. So what’s your overall punch line here?

Ryan:

So I guess the punch line is going to be… Unfortunately, it’s like most of my answers, it’s going to be an, it depends answer for the vast majority of you out there. There’s not one answer for everyone, but each brand needs to start re-looking at how they’re investing and their time and money and be willing to put up a wall to focus on something more effectively, more strategically. As I look at the rest of this year, we’re doing our holiday planning now for a lot of our clients and gearing up to our holiday event in a couple of weeks, in a down economy, there’s going to be a smaller pie, less searches happening for that particular product, less people are going to buy it. The more you focus on something that is working, the further you’re going to be ahead of your competitors in that specific area, and I think that’s going to give you the ability to win more often in a smaller arena because you have more expertise in this particular area.

So whether that’s going to be paid search and you really want to focus on the shopping campaigns or performance max and you’re really going to get into the feed and make that work really well and test to measure what your feed is talking about or how you’re talking about images and all of that, great, do that. If you’re going to focus on SEO, maybe you put a wall around all of your social content. You’re not going to invest in social content very aggressively right now because you’re going to invest everything in SEO because that’s where you think you have the best opportunity to win based on where you can see your competitors investing. Or maybe you’re going to the opposite of that. You’re going to throw SEO over into Scotland and it’s going to be social content, social ads, and you’re going to go all in with influencers and affiliates and make that work first.

I think a lot of small brands get bogged down with all of the things you can be doing across the internet to market your brand and drive traffic to get it to your site. You could do a little bit in 10 different areas and you’re going to get nowhere. I see that probably more often like, “Oh, I’m going to spend $100 in paid search. I’m going to spend $100 in paid social. I’m going to do one article a month on SEO and I’m going to record one video every two months.” No, that’s a terrible idea. You’d be better off putting all of the resources into one area that you think you can win best at right now and make that your core. Once you win that, it’s going to make it much easier to like, “Okay. I’ve got enough resources to expand. I’m going to land and expand one other area.” Maybe it’s paid search first and you’re going to go into paid social and then you’re going to go into SEO.

Jon:

I love that approach. I just had a conversation this morning with somebody where I was talking about how NBA players have one solid move they’re known for, right? You could be a really great three-point shooter and nobody talks about anything else that you do or a great-

Ryan:

Play horrible defense.

Jon:

Exactly. Or you’re just a defensive specialist, or you really only have to succeed in sports and/or business. You have to have one thing that you know gets the job done. If you have that one lead gen source that works for you, stop messing around in 20 different things. Take most of that budget, 80% of that budget and put it under that one item that works and run with it and watch it grow. But you really only need that one thing and you have to figure out what that one thing is that works for you. For us at The Good, it’s been content for all these years, sharing our expertise as you talked about. So I love your approach here. Wall everything else off and throw it over to Scotland and handle what you’re good at. That’s great advice.

Ryan:

Yeah, looking forward to seeing it work for a lot of you.

Jon:

Well, I appreciate you sharing. I’m glad you came back in one piece and with 100 extra miles on your feet if nothing else, but time to come home and sleep.

Ryan:

Lots of that. Well, I wish more. Four kids have decided that that’s not what’s happening. It’s summertime. They need to play.

Jon:

There you go. All right, Ryan. Well, I’ll let you go. Enjoy and thank you for sharing.

Ryan:

Thanks, Jon.

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

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 113): Where Did Organic Click Share Go? appeared first on The Good.