Pop-ups, Landing Pages and Public Speaking with Oli Gardner - Inbound After Hours - Ep. 24

In this week's episode, we are joined by Oli Gardner, who is one of six Co-Founders at Unbounce.

Oli has seen a lot of landing pages in his time and is set on identifying and reversing bad marketing practices. Oli is also a prolific international speaker. 

This podcast provides a really insightful look at public speaking, landing pages and pop-ups, while providing hints and tips for you to learn from. Learning from other people's experience is crucial, so take the opportunity to learn from Oli.

Unbounce are hosting Marketing Optimisation Week, which is taking place from 20th to 23rd February 2018. Click here to find out more about Marketing Optimisation Week. 

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Thanks so much for joining us this week.

Have some feedback you’d like to share? Do it in the comments below! 

Full transcript:

- Welcome to Inbound After Hours, everybody. Today we've got a very special guest. We've got co-founder of Unbounce, Oli Gardener. Hey, Oli.

- [Oli] Hey, how's it going?

- Yeah, fantastic. Firstly, I heard you got married recently. Congratulations on that.

- Thank you. I did, yeah. It was actually in August, but we kept it quiet for awhile.

- [Rikki] Ah, sorry.

- We eloped and then we were gonna do something else. But we didn't, so I announced it onstage at a gig in December. I pulled her up on the stage.

- Awesome, yeah, it was December I saw it. Well, congrats for that. Did you manage to get some time off work?

- [Oli] I just had a really crazy month of content in January.

- I saw that, yeah.

- Insane. So I accomplished the final 7000-word roundup post. Yeah, I had them on a Thursday. Friday morning we went to Mexico for a week, just to chill out.

- It sounds like a good idea to me. We did a similar thing about a year ago. Obviously not writing them all ourselves. We shared it across the team and we did 30 blogs in 30 days. Between about five of us did it, so it was a little bit less stressful, but still it was stressful. I can imagine if you tried to do the bulk of that work on your own, then that's a huge challenge. So well done, for that. How did you find it? You said that it'd been, I read on that blog you were talking about that it had been awhile since you'd sat down and wrote for the Unbounce blog. How did you find getting back into that?

- It was two years, yeah. And it was amazing, doing it. But I needed the challenge. If I hadn't said to myself, "You gotta do 30 in 30," I would've maybe tried to do three and I would've done none. I needed the ridiculousness of it to kind of inspire me. And it ended up being 20 because I stopped doing weekends so that I didn't get divorced.

- Yes, so soon after the marriage and on the blog every weekend. That's not a good start. So we just jumped straight in there. Forgot to ask you the obvious question. For the people who don't know, could you just tell us a bit about what you do now and how you ended up doing it?

- Yeah, for sure. I am one of six co-founders here at Unbounce. We started back in 2009, based in Vancouver in Canada. And when we began I was the sole marketer. And now you have a marketing team of 30 people or something. I spend half of my time, roughly, as a public speaker. Maybe a little bit less, this year. And other than that, I just try to create content, new content. Usually because as a speaker I create a lot of new ideas and new stuff for that which turns into the content I then put out for the rest of the year.

- Awesome. I guess a lot of our listeners will be the sole in-house marketer. And you've gone from that role through to building a team, now through to being the contributor to that team and the front person for the company. How have you found that transition and what have you learned along the way?

- I started speaking, maybe three, two and a half years ago, I think. And after originally being guilted into it, I quickly learned to love it. I don't really have any fear of it anymore. I still get the tingles, but when I'm onstage I just absolutely love it. It's the best thing I've ever done, in terms of personal growth, meeting new people. It's great, whenever I go on the road, I'm gonna hang out with some of my best friends. So it's really cool.

- Definitely. I've seen you speak. I can't remember if it was inbound last year or the year before.

- [Oli] The year before.

- Yeah, year before. So I know firsthand you're a good speaker. And on a lot of your stuff I've been reading through in prep for this, you talk about speaking a lot and the sort of ratings you get. A lot of people are scared of speaking, want to do it for the first time. What tips have you got for people who are getting into speaking, and also why should they?

- Wow, let's do that part first. Why should you? Because it changes you, in terms of like, building a personal brand is important. The respect you get, just the capability to present who you are and what you know, there's no other way of doing it that has the same kind of impact. For me, I'm an introvert, except when I'm onstage. It helps you grow in that way as well. You become more confident. I think looking at me now versus three years ago, it's night and day.

- Did you go through any coaching, or have you just learned it all yourself? What approach have you taken?

- I'm kind of obsessive, so I just dug in when I was starting. If people want to get how I did it, there's a Medium post called It's Okay to Puke.

- Okay, is that a good insight into how this went?

- It's okay to puke as a public speaker. It's a pretty funny post about how it all began. That's a good starting point, 'cause I give a lot of explanations as to how I did it. My commute on the bus then, I don't live there anymore so I drive, but it was exactly 18 minutes. So I watched a TED Talk on my phone on the way to work every day. So when I get to work I'm pumped up and kind of "change the world!" It was just a good way. 'Cause you'd find some of them that are like, "I need to do what that person just did." The something they did was so special. So I'd bring some of those in. I read a bunch of books about speaking. But other than that, just self-taught.

- Awesome. I think what I remember from the talks I've seen, obviously I've watched a few on YouTube since as well, is just data. You bring that to the table better than anyone I've seen. And you go to a lot of marketing conferences and there's a lot of big-theory topics discussed. And sometimes you're left thinking, "Yeah, that's a great idea, but what do I do with that? "And is it gonna work?"

- Yeah, being actionable is really our MO here, with our Call to Action Conference and just the fact, the concept of lining pages. They have one thing to do, it's an actionable concept. So I try to follow that when I'm speaking, too. Also, I've seen so many talks like that as well. And if I can't educate, entertain, and inspire, I'm not doing my job right. Those three things are what I look for. And the entertain part is the one I like the most. But I know that if I get people to laugh in the places where I want them to laugh, then I'm in control and they are getting the benefit that I'm hoping they will.

- Yeah, it really works. 'Cause like I said, I go to a lot of conferences and things. And you look around the room, there's people staring at their phones, doing email, and they're in the room but they're not. And I think if you get them hooked with a bit of something out of the box or like you say, something funny, and get their heads up from the screen to listen to you, then that's job done. And I think humour is a good way to go about doing that.

- Yeah, then the worst thing is, I've never seen it happen with one of my talks. I hope it hasn't, but I've been in some boring talks. And you look around and there's people asleep. And that usually gets on Twitter. Someone sees it and they'll reference it. "This isn't fun."

- That's the bottom bar of where you're going with speaking, if there's someone asleep in the room. That's funny. I think one of the things I've also noticed about Unbounce is you do a lot of co-branded stuff like days or events and stuff. I think we took part in last year's Digital Agency Day with Hubspot. And that was when I first noticed you guys getting involved. I think you've got something going on this week in a similar sort of vein as well.

- Yeah, Marketing Optimization Week starts this week. Four days of tonnes of free content.

- How did you guys get into co-branded and why? Is it a good marketing opportunity that a lot of people don't do?

- Yeah, we used to do it a lot for webinars. We'd partner with people. Usually with them ourselves and we'd have a guest. And it was their thing, we just hosted them. And I did the same with a lot of other people's ones. So there was co-marketing there. Usually it was a lead share or some things to promote it, and you'd swap leads. But then these ones, these bigger ones. So we did International Conversion Optimization Day. That was the year prior, that was massive. Then we did another one, then Digital Agency Day. We did PPC week recently and now we're doing Marketing Optimization Week. So it's a good way of strengthening our partnerships, which is important. And everybody does their part to share and try to make it a big event. So it's kind of cool.

- It's obviously working if you're doubling down and doing more each year, then it works for you. Obviously you guys don't fall into this category these days, but if you're in a smaller company, it's good to align yourself with brands that have got affinity with the ones you're going after. Like these brands I've seen up in Good Light were up there. And for the names alongside them, there's some sort of benefit from that as well.

- Yeah, and the good thing about the model, this lead-share, most of the leads are done by us, either because of our type of marketing or just we're setting it up, so we push a bit harder. I've seen the leads come from others. And some are tiny, some are not bad. But you can be a small brand who has a similar approach. "Hey, we want to partner with you." They're not gonna get that many leads from it, but they get to participate. So that's a great way of getting exposure if you are a new company and you can make that kind of thing happen, regardless of how many leads you might get, just the exposure. 'Cause usually each of those sponsors will have a speaker in there. That's also how we choose them too. It's not sponsored speaker week kind of thing. It's we choose brands who are relevant to our audience, but also we know they have someone who can actually deliver.

- Yeah, and that's really important, isn't it? How did you, obviously when you go now and it's you and it's Unbounce, and you go to someone about one of these events, it's probably quite an easy buy for most of the companies you go to. Thinking back to the days when you were the solo marketer and Unbounce wasn't on the map, how did you find getting other people to help you and leverage? Even if it was something as simple as guest posting or something like that, even if it wasn't an event, how did you find approaching companies and actually getting them to take you up on any offer that you had?

- Back then it was a lot of guest posts. And a lot of places, you need a resume of content before you approach someone to do a guest post. Some are really rigorous and it takes forever to get in. It can be hard. But I started on the MOS blog because they have their open You MOS blog where you put in a thing on there and it gets promoted to the main blog. I think, did I hear that they actually shut that down?

- They did, yeah, sadly. I was actually in the middle of writing one. Yeah, I'd got one back a few years ago. I was writing one and it came through saying it shut down. I was like, "Damn you." I guess I can use it on my own site. But yeah, it's a shame.

- It is a big shame. They're going through some transition time, so I get it. But that was massive, 'cause back then the MOS community was just huge. And you'd get something working on there, it was great exposure, which is a smart move. Because we had a tiny blog at the time. If I put the types of giant content I built for them on our blog, it would've been a waste.

- I've found it surprisingly easy to get people on this show. So when we started this last year, it's been about a year to the day since we started. We had ourselves on a podcast and then we started outreaching to people. What I found is, most people say yes. You've just got to ask. I've not had a negative response. Obviously some people ignore you. But the vast majority of people are pretty open to doing it. And I think a lot of marketers are scared of going out there, 'cause it's a big name or it's somebody everyone in the industry knows. But I found people pretty receptive. I don't know if that's just the marketing industry and if I worked in manufacturing or engineering, whether I'd find the same. But I've found it okay, just going and saying, "Hey, we do this show. It's to help marketers. "Do you want to be part of it?"

- It's so true, 'cause it's easier. It depends what it is. Sometimes, I'm better now, but I used to be a bit nervous about it. It's that whole imposter syndrome. You're afraid of being asked a question that you're like, "Uh." And also, I like to be prepared. 'Cause I know some questions are very referential to the past or something, so I like to dig into my memory or ask other ones of the founders or whatever, "What happened then?" But I've got over that for the large part, where I don't usually ask the questions anymore. But I used to all the time. 'Cause when you're getting started in this kind of thing, you want to appear smart. Some prep does help.

- [Rikki] It definitely does.

- But in terms of effort, other than being crazy and writing thousands of words of notes, it's a low amount of effort. And it's usually really, really fun. 'Cause you're having a conversation.

- Yeah, it's quite easy. I think I've stopped writing on the blog since we started doing these. This is kind of my replacement for that. And I think a lot of guys have done the same, which is sad in some ways. But like you say, the effort of, "Okay, I've got to set the camera up "for ten minutes and come and talk." But then we use this as a video, so we use it on our own blog, we use it on YouTube, we post it on social, it goes out on five or six podcast channels, we transcribe it and we put it on the blog. It's funny, if you do one of these, there are about 8000 words. So it's pretty reusable. From this half an hour slot of having a chat, you get a hell of a lot of content from it.

- Yeah, and it's smart too, because it is the up-and-coming medium. Everybody has a podcast now, which also is the problem. Because yet again, it's a content marketing medium. We are all battling someone else. I've actually been thinking about maybe rebooting our podcast in a different format. But we'll see.

- We found it a good medium for us. I wish we'd gone and set goals back at the start. And that sounds like a bad thing for marketers to say. But we just said, "Let's see what happens." And we took the approach, it's a bit like how a blog, we know this'll take a year before we see anything out of it. And actually, it hasn't. It's done well. I think we get about 750 to 1000 listeners a month. Most of them are from the US, so I don't have a clue what they think about our Northern English accent.

- [Oli] Where are you?

- So we're based in a town called Clitheroe, which is north of Manchester. Pretty much middle of nowhere, so we've got some pretty broad accents here. And we had Rand on a few weeks ago and I'm pretty sure he didn't understand a word we said.

- Yeah, I'm a Geordie.

- Oh really? Wow. So I'm from Durham, so not too far away from there.

- [Oli] Durham, Durham, Durham.

- How did you end up all the way over there, then from?

- So I was there 'til I was 10, then moved to Scotland, grew up there. And then I came to Canada for a year after uni in '95. Bumped into a grizzly bear on a trip in the US, fell in love with the idea of geography. Moved back to the UK, worked on my current resident application, then moved in 2000. So this is home now. All my family's still in Scotland. But luckily, I don't think I'm getting back this year, but for the last three years I've been speaking at Turing Fest in Edinburgh, which is awesome. Getting flown home to see your family's kind of cool.

- Yeah, definitely. How have you found the approach to marketing over there, compared to back in Scotland or England, when you lived here? Have you found the attitudes are different?

- I don't really know because I've never worked over there in this realm. I was programmer for a financial futures and options derivative trading platform in London.

- Rolls off the tongue.

- I do see differences when I go speak there, which hasn't been very often. There's Scotland and I've spoken in London once. Things in some regards are a little bit behind North America. Not as much as, say, Eastern Europe or South America. That's quite different. But yeah, I don't know. I find, especially in Scotland, they're very, very grateful. Wonderful audiences, because there are no decent marketing conferences in Scotland, really. Turing Fest is one of the only ones that's that actual world-class quality.

- I've found we, of course we have a partner agency so we spend a bit of time in Boston, and whenever I speak to their marketing team and our customers in the US, they're a lot more risk-acceptable. It's probably the other way around. We're more risk-averse. So a lot of people over here feel that if you lose 100 pounds, it's a bit bothered. Whereas in the US, I think I was speaking to Matt Barbey from Hobbs-Barton, and he was saying, "Look, 75% of our marketage fails. "And if it didn't, we're not pushing the boundaries enough." And I don't think that attitude reached here yet. But I think we're getting there and I think we'll catch up.

- Actually, I've spoken in Dublin a couple of times as well. And yeah, I find similar types of experience level to Scotland. It's interesting. They're definitely accelerating, I think.

- I think so, I think there's a lot of exciting startups in the marketing space here. And I think over the next couple of years, I think we'll get there. Maybe not quite where North America is, but we should get very close behind, which would be cool.

- Yeah, and it's interesting. You'd think, 'cause of the internet, everybody on this level playing field. But it's strange, it's not quite like that. It is some of those approaches where yeah, I don't know. I'd love to know what the ratio, for example, of percentage of tech companies in the UK who have a public speaker, like a public face as a speaker, compared to other countries. That'd be really interesting.

- I bet it's really low, compared to North America. Whenever I speak to someone from Hobbs-Barton, they're just like, "How are you so photogenic "and ready for video off the bat?" I said, "When you come in, does everybody go through "a public speaking training course or something?" They're like, "No, no, it's just the way we are." We tried to get a lot of our clients onto video, obviously. Like you said, it's the medium that's moving forward with some pace at the moment. And the number-one objection is, "Who's gonna do it? 'Cause I'm not."

- Right, that's a common fear. But seriously, I've got to get some better lighting in here. This is terrible. This is campfire light. There's one overhead here.

- Yeah, it's very strongly lit up. Like what you've got in the background there, most of the companies that we speak to, we have a room where we do video and stuff. And that'll be cool, when we catch up over here. 'Cause it is a huge medium and huge opportunity. And no matter what you Google, you get a video result back. And most of those results are American. I think it'd be good to have some friendly faces and accents on our answers to our questions.

- Definitely, yeah. And it's important, having that local expertise. 'Cause especially when you consider it's probably there, but it's not exposed often enough. 'Cause we have an office in Berlin and we do a lot of translation. We have a blog in German, Spanish, and Portuguese. And a site, so it's like a mini-version. And that does really well. If you look at the conversion rate of foreign language, those three specifically, coming to our English site, the conversion rate's like 0.4%. When they go to their own language, it's like 10 times that, which is crazy. Just because you're respecting someone by delivering it in their language. 'Cause if you look at the number of marketing experts, obviously it's heavily weighted to North America. They don't speak German or whatever. So the more we can help push some of this content in other places, I think it'll accelerate things even more.

- And less competition as well, if there's less people putting it out in Spanish and French then the market's there for the taking, isn't it? That's a huge one. So obviously, given what you guys do at Unbounce, it'd be wrong to not speak about a couple of things. First one, popups. I've seen some pretty heated debates, probably you involved from time to time, on Twitter and suchlike about popups. And obviously, you guys have launched a product in it. So how have you found that? 'Cause out of the box, marketers hate popups. They think they hate popups, anyway. But are we just too precious about it because we know what it is, and should we focus just on the results they get? How have you gone about marketing something that's a very difficult subject?

- It's not easy. No, we are a lining page, we're a conversion platform for marketers now. Lining pages was our bread and butter, now we've launched popups and sticky bars. And yeah, it is a challenge. Not so much because of the what they are, but because of the stigma that's been created by people misusing them. I've said often. The technology's not the problem, we are. It's the marketers who don't care enough to respect their visitors who are breaking the experience. And as long as you're adding value and putting it in the right place. Like some notes are what I said about the conversion rates of different languages. If we had a customer who put popups on their home page and then on their blog. They have both, I think for the same thing, subscribe to blah blah blah, our content, whatever. That's incongruent with your website. It's not anything to do with what you do, and that converted at 0.02 or some horrible number. The same thing on the blog converted at 14% because it's relevant, it's useful. You don't do things like that. You gotta use the right targeting and triggers. We have some pretty advanced stuff in our products for that, to make sure you're giving it to the right people. You can do geolocation, you can do cookie targeting, you can do URL referral targeting, all that kind of stuff, and set the right frequencies and triggers. And you can create a great experience, as long as you're providing value. Like our events, like Marketing Optimization Week, we convert between 15 and 30% on exit, saying, "If you can't attend 'cause it's an event, "we'll give you the videos for free when it's happened." And people love that, 'cause that's extremely valuable that it's free. 'Cause a lot of places charge you for that type of content. So it's just about how you use them. And if we just think of them as a simple interaction device, as something that's available. I have to write a post today, actually, about the new Chrome adblocker. Because there's a lot of fear that it's gonna block popups. But it's not, unless you're doing it wrong. They have an organisation of ad standards or something, Better Ads, and they're outlining the characteristics of ones that will be paid attention to by Google and potentially, you get warned, I think. But I've got to go through all that today and explain that it won't actually impact 99% of what you're doing. Here's a couple of things you should not be doing. It's when you have an interstitial. So when you arrive, it's right there, full screen. And there's a countdown on it, not like that. It's kind of like Forbes. I want to know what happens with Forbes, 'cause they have that five-second delay.

- Yeah, that huge full-page thing. I'd given up clicking on Forbes, I'll be honest, awhile ago. But they have an amazing ability to rank a lot of stuff.

- And it's annoying because all they're doing there is giving some bullshit inspirational quote. How does that increase brand affinity? I like you less because you're making me read that. I don't even know if they have anything that's financially beneficial for the money I make. Just annoying.

- It does. You'd think they must be aware that people are annoyed by this, 'cause I've been on Twitter more than once and vented my spleen, so I'm sure other people have as well. Yeah, you do wonder how they get away with ranking so highly for stuff with that there as well. It's super counterintuitive.

- So that will be interesting, to see if they get dinged. 'Cause that and a few other things. Like on mobile, I'll say mobile 'cause that's how you guys say it. And that's how I used to say it and I still try to. But then down in the states they say "mo-bill." So I keep hearing that. There's an E on the end.

- [Rikki] Yeah, say it.

- Flashback to Eddie Izzard, "Because there's a effing H in it." Herb. I don't even know what I was talking about then. Anyway, oh yeah. Like say on mobiles, you have a sticky bar. So they're the built ones. If you make that more than 30% of the screen size, I think that's one of the criteria that also might get you in trouble. So we actually just built something into our app. So when you're building a sticky bar, if you try and make it bigger, make it really big, we recommend 100 pixels, don't go above that. So we're actually building this recommendation engine inside the app to try and educate people. The more we can do that to increase the percentage of people creating nice behaviour, the more, hopefully, from our perspective, we see some of this negativity go down. 'Cause the customers we have who use this stuff properly, have amazing results.

- I bet. I've read loads of studies about popups and stuff of that nature. The results, like you say, when used correctly, are exponential. I think a lot of it comes down to doing good marketing. And it sounds really basic, but having your screen covered is not a good experience for anybody. Having no way out of it is not a good experience for anybody. If you're kind of fair and decent with it, you've got no problems with most things in marketing, have you? It just comes back to that.

- Yeah, I wrote for this product awareness month we did in January, those 20 posts I did. One of them was 11 Surprisingly Delightful Popups Scored by the Delight Equation. So I created this mathematical, I reverse-engineered a really good popup into an equation that you can then measure yours by. It includes things like the interaction mechanism. So in terms of closing, it should be the top-right corner close. There should be the link or whatever to say no. You need to be able to, this is for ideal points, you have both of those. If you hit Escape it goes away, or you click outside it. Those four things, you do all of those, you hit 100% on the interaction thing. And then there's the psychology of the good cop, bad cop. Like "Yes, I want this," "No, I hate making money." Nonsense, so it scores it based on you not doing these things. So some really great, simple mechanisms to know if you're doing it right.

- I love that. And like you say, all the education work you guys are doing on that, hopefully it will just drag the knowledge in the industry up and stop annoying people, which gave it the bad name in the first place. I think that's--

- Yeah, well when we launched it, lesson learned here, but we were calling them overlays at that point. Because I was trying, it wasn't my name, but what I was trying to do, communication-wise, was draw a line in the sand. Like if you talk about bad experience, that's a popup. Talk about a good one, that's an overlay. So kind of a historical, it changed now. But we find out that it's complicated to market that. It's lower search volume. And trying to put it in your marketing when you just want to say popup. But when you talk about it, you say overlay and then explain what an overlay is. And then people just go, "Isn't it just a popup?" And you're like, "Yeah, it is."

- We'll just call it that then.

- Yeah, so we went back to that. But that's helped.

- Like you say, I think the number-one place I've seen people go wrong with that is just not realising what point in the buyer's journey the person's at. So I think you gave a good example of, you go at your homepage, pops up, "Subscribe to our newsletter." Which is probably not why they're on the homepage. More appropriate to when they're on the blog. I think if you have a good think about your personas, where they are in the buyer's journey, you should have your pages mapped against those stages. And then you can show a popup which is relevant to where they should be.

- Yeah, and think about behaviour. If someone goes to your pricing page, your SAS, and they leave, they could be going to look at the competition. They could be going to ask permission. They could just not be ready. But I wouldn't stick something in their way at that time. I would have the frequency of, on their second visit if they exit the pricing page, I would ask a question or say, "Hey, you get a discount," or "What's stopping you buying," or da-da-da-da-da. So that kind of thing, but not on the first one, because that's just a bit too aggressive. I think the best way of looking at it is that gut check where you think about it and go, "If that was me, would that be annoying "or would it be helpful?" And just ask those questions before you do it. It's just like we have some emails going out as a bit of content, as a part of our crew that's trying to get more adoption of the product for our customers. And in one of these emails that they've created, they come from me, and I'm probably gonna go talk about it. We have a testimonial from a customer. And a bit of the copy next to it is, it's supposed to be playful, it's like, blah blah blah, "What a handsome devil he is!" So I changed that to handsome chap, 'cause I thought it was a little bit. But then I was thinking yesterday, I was walking around and I thought, "Okay, well what's gut-check here? "If we reverse that and had a woman's photo there, "would we say, 'Oh, isn't she beautiful or pretty?' "No, you can't do that. "So why is it okay to say it about the guy?" And if you think about it in both of those ways, you're like, "Oh, actually then I shouldn't do that." And I'm probably gonna email them and say, "Hey, let's change that "because it's not the way it should be."

- That's a good approach, isn't it? I think one of the best pieces of business advice I was given on is, "Common sense isn't that common." But in a lot of ways, common sense just rules a lot of things. And marketing's no different to that. And I think, like you say, you can just ask yourself those questions. You're going to be right 90% of the time. I think that's awesome advice. So getting on to Landon Pages, for anyone that knows you, they've probably seen long video rants of you ripping down Landon Pages, left, right, and centre. I'd probably say, from knowing where our audience is, most of them probably have Landon Pages in some variety, but they're probably quite templated. Forms on the right, image descriptions on the left. They've probably never tested them. Someone in that situation, what should be the first thing they go and test?

- Never run a test ever, in your life, until you've done some research. Because you need to find and observe pain before you try and solve that problem. If you just go, "I'm gonna change my headline, "I'm gonna change the button colour," You're not thinking like an optimizer. So for that, I'd look at scroll map, click map. Something I've really been getting into last year changed the way I work. What I call micrometrics. So your conversion rate's not enough. 'Cause let's say you, actually I'll get into that in a second. Let's say, 'cause everyone thinks you have to put something above the fold, like your call to action. Yes, sometimes, but we've found a lot in our experimentation. We put it at the bottom of the page. 'Cause if you look at the scroll map when it's at the top, you might see they only get 30% of the way down or 50. We put the CTA right at the bottom of the page, it means they get to have a less distracted reading experience at the top, but they also have to hunt for the CTA. So they scroll further, see more of your content, may become more of an ideal customer if they then convert. 'Cause they saw some of the features that when you're in the app, if you didn't see that, you might go, "Oh, I wish it did this." And it probably does do that, but you might not be able to find it, based on the UX of the platform. So things like that, you have to experiment with that. Do that and then look at the scroll map. Is it increasing engagement? But then micrometrics, for me, 'cause let's say 90% of AB tests you run don't win or lose. They just flatline, cause you're not talking to the psyche of motivation, so you can't influence it. And you think, "Oh, they both convert at 10%. "Well then I'm just gonna pick "this one, 'cause it's new, "or I'm gonna stick with this one "'cause this one didn't beat it." But if you don't look deeper at the micrometrics, that might be it. I did an amazingly interesting test experiment where I used a conversational form, which is a script from an agency in Denmark called Space10. It'll change your form into a chat-like thing. And it looks like a chat environment. It's really cool, kind of humanising it. But I tested that, converted at 8.3%, as did the one with the regular form. I'm like, "Ugh." So I dug deeper and I looked at some click maps. And 12% of the people were clicking on the first question. The bubble, which is the first question, which is "What is your first name?" They were clicking on that, 'cause it's a new interaction model. They don't understand that's not clickable. You have to click below it into the typing area, which is only one. So there's no longer four fields or whatever. So that was a micrometric. 12% were clicking the wrong thing. Then number of spam email addresses. I was worried, 'cause it might look like a chatbot, that people would be scared to put an email address in. Sure enough, something like 55% increase in spam and fake email addresses. And a 72% reduction in branded professional email addresses, which are name@companyname.com as opposed to joe@gmail.com. We're going for the first one, because when you do your email marketing, it's going to their business account while they're at work. That's what you need, is better email marketing. So there, three measurements of, in this instance, this page failed massively. If you only look at conversion rate, you're doing it wrong. And if you published that, your business is gonna be tanking because of all those three broken things. So knowing that, you can. It's a collaborative design process. I have data metrics for this process. That's my talk actually, in Marketing Optimization Week. I encourage people to watch that, because it's a collaborative optimization process for your team, to get your marketing team to work better together. 'Cause a lot of frustration, I think marketing teams are dysfunctional. So this can help you fix that. When you have these micrometrics, you can then, that's the design challenge. And then the designers and everybody, you can work on designing, sketching solutions to those three things. Trying to change on-page behaviour, basically, by doing this. And if you can design little experiences that change on-page behaviour, you're becoming an optimizer. And that's an amazing thing and you did it in the right way. So I really encourage everybody to watch that video, because you'll learn a lot.

- That sounds awesome. There's so many marketers and agencies and people out there these days who say they're data-driven. And when you get to the bottom of it, they aren't. I think it seems to be the phrase people like to say they are at the moment. I think anything like what you're doing, in terms of building a structure around it, having a process to follow, is awesome because a lot of people get lost in where to look. And they get data paralysis, "I've got all these things. "How should I know what to do "and what to test first and why?"

- This is exactly what this process is about. It begins with, to be clear, I prefer the term data-informed over data-driven. It should be data-informed, customer-driven. Talia Bull said that. I love that phrasing. I chose data-driven because it's three D's, and I like it.

- Of course.

- And just the first part of that is the 3D playbook. So it's a big interactive sheet where you choose the page element you're interested in optimising, and it will filter it and say, "You should look at these six types of data," instead of the 150 that you're imagining, which is overwhelming so you're not even gonna bother. It gives you a starting point. And it tells you all the sample sizes you need and it creates worksheets for you for data collection, observation, and micrometrics. It's a really functioning team tool that I've built. It's cool.

- That sounds really good. Respectful of your time, I know we've overrun a little bit here. Just to finish this off, we always ask what your tip would be for marketers out there. So if you're an in-house marketer, what would be the one thing you'd be focusing your attention on?

- I guess we just talked about it.

- [Rikki] We did.

- Especially in-house, 'cause in-house you're working with a copywriter, designer, marketer. That's a big part of your team structure, most likely. The framework I built will make your team work better together. I share a lot of data at the beginning of it about how frustrated, particularly marketers and designers are. There's a lot of this, often under the surface that's not talked about. This helps remove some of that frustration and builds empathy, not only for your customers that you're watching do things through the data, your visitors, but also builds empathy for your team, knowing, "Wow, I'd never seen you "work like that before, copywriter. "That little sketch you did "to solve this problem is amazing. "I never would've thought." And showing them where to get the data and what it looks like, so you're all aware. It's not just like this black box that the marketer sits in the corner and looks at data and then spews out what they think. It goes together. So when's this going out, do you know?

- This will probably go out next week, I guess.

- I'm putting my talk on Friday, Thursday or Friday. But it's gonna be recorded. I've already recorded it, actually. It's in the past.

- I'll jump you up the queue, don't worry. I think most of these are pretty evergreen, so if there's a time you need, we'll jump it up the queue and give our listeners a hand. So we'll post the links to those below and see if we can get some people on that, 'cause I think it's great thing.

- Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate that. And this is a selfless kind of thing. My mission and my goal when I speak is to educate people so they can do a better job as a marketer. And that's pure that. This is not a pitch here or anything like that. Just become a better marketer.

- No, I love that and that's the exact aim of the podcast as well. So let's get those two things aligned and let's get that on there. That's awesome. So really appreciative of your time today. I know you're a busy man, so thanks for coming on the show. Loads of value for the listeners and viewers as well. So thanks for your time.

- Yeah, my pleasure.

- I could chat this all day. Gotta cut it short before I do. So thanks very much for your time, Oli, and hope to speak to you again soon. Thank you.