Conversion Gold

I’ve been experimenting with retargeting lists for search ads (RLSAs). If you’re not familiar, RLSAs are a type of retargeting that enables you to establish an audience and then show them Google Ads. What makes them different is that you can show an ad for a generic keyword to a specific audience. If you sell prescription sunglasses, you would probably find it difficult to bid on a generic keyword like [sunglasses] with a decent ROAS (return on ad spend), since only a particular sliver of that audience would be a good fit for your product....

If you’re looking for ways to build leverage, you should think about persistent problems. What are the obstacles that you’ll encounter on the journey between the first step and the finish line? Not all problems are worth investing in, but if we consider that persistent problems need to be solved repeatedly, we’re already off to a good start. That means that our solution accrues a little value each time we repeat the process....

There’s a major paradigm shift that takes place in the marketers I’ve seen grow from good to great: they begin to think about marketing in terms of campaigns, not as a big, continuous thing that they do. It may appear to be a subtle distinction, but my experience suggests that it’s anything but. In reality, a mature marketing program is a collection of specific programs that have been built, tested, iterated upon, and can be counted on to produce consistent results....

Certain products aren’t the obvious choice for most people, but for the ones that get it, they’re the only choice. These are lumpy products. Lumpy products have something different about them. They stand out. If they exist in a commoditized market, they aren’t the product that most people buy. They’re more expensive, more specialized, or harder to find. They’re never Amazon’s Choice, but for the people that get it, there isn’t any substitute....

Typical subscription businesses exist to give you more of what you’ve already received. They can’t easily alter the deal. This is because they’ve only got transactional opt-in. The buyers and sellers came to an agreement with pre-defined terms – for this amount of money you’ll send me this thing at these intervals. That’s pretty much the definition of doing things the way they’ve always been done. I’m seeing the outlines of a new model emerge, and I couldn’t be more excited....

The primary goal I have with Conversion Gold is to give you the mental models and concepts that I’ve collected over the years, in hopes that you can apply them to enrich your interests. I don’t often write about the one easy trick, or provide copy and paste swipe files of killer headlines. I want to talk about the concepts. I want to understand why these things work. I’m more interested in discussing principles and strategies than I am in discussing tactics....

If you’re SEO savvy, you probably also noticed the switch Google made several months ago, to a mobile-first indexing scheme. This means that as Googlebot crawls the internet, they’re scoring your pages based on how they render and appear to a mobile user agent. Do me a favor. Go into your analytics tool of choice and take a look at your desktop conversion rate. Now take a look at your mobile conversion rate....

Being visual creatures, humans are reliant on sight as a facilitator for decision making. Entire industries are built on providing visually appealing products, sometimes at the expense of utility. We all have a friend with an eccentric furniture collection, who favors form over function. This is one of the reasons that product images are at odds with the rest of the conversion optimization mindset. For pretty much everything else, we worry about function over form....

As I’ve said before, websites should be built for the user, not the business that created them. This issue of Conversion Gold is going to talk about how you can do that. We’re going to dive into the best way to understand what users think about your website. It’s difficult to build a great website in a vacuum — which is exactly what an overwhelmingly large amount of companies do. Learning from (and collaborating wherever possible) with your customers should enable you to build a site that meets all of their requirements in a way that creates value for the business behind it....

In a typical browsing session I’ll see a lot of pages that have multiple goals. It’s a lot to ask of a single page to complete one goal, much less two or three. Four? Fuhggedaboutit. The next few issues of Conversion Gold will be about specific page types. We’ll evaluate the distinct roles that they play on the site, and the distinct goals and outcomes they attempt to serve. I’m going to start with the homepage — it’s the most iconic of all pages, and the central “beating heart” of your website....