Episode #95 – Jakub Linowski On How To Transform Your Business Into A Sales Machine Through The Power Of Conversions (start testing.. or test BETTER)

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Hey, it’s John McIntryre here, the auto responder guy, and it’s time for episode 95 of the McMethod- you know- marketing podcast where you’ll discover just plain old simple marketing fundamentals which is all about email marketing but ultimately- you know- let’s make some more sales, let’s make some more money, let’s get rich. Wealthy, maybe. Even a little bit famous, and let’s do it while automating the whole thing so we can chill out on a beach, we can go to the park with our kids, we can get on a nice date with our partner, drink some wine, look at the sunset, walking on the beach. Point is we wanna live life on our own terms so today, I’ll be talking to Jacob Linowski. Now Jacob, Jacob like a number of my other guests and he’s a web optimization, basically a conversion optimization expert. He has a sick looking website which we’ll hear about in a second. And he’s got some great skills in terms of how to increase your conversion rates and I’ve mentioned this before but something you’ll learn in- you know- when you get to test and when you get to track everything that you’re doing in your business, you’ll realize that being successful at having that massive business or maybe just that massive cash flow depending on what your business is mostly just a matter of testing, tweaking, testing, tweaking, testing, tweaking forever, right? This is the mindset that you gotta have and this is how I think every successful person lives their life. Here’s what people like to say, failure doesn’t exist. The only thing that exists is feedback. So you set a goal, “I’m gonna go make a million dollars”, and you start off and a week later you went into- you have a challenge like, “oh man, the bank won’t loan you some money”, something like that. And some people will be like, “ah you failed”. Maybe you even started a business and six months later, you went bankrupt. And maybe you’re like, “well it failed”. Well, you could look at it like that or you could say, “Hey I just ran a split test. I just did a test in my life didn’t work so let’s run it again”. Let’s run that test again. Run that scenario again. Let’s start another business. Do it slightly differently. Tweak a variable and see if we go bankrupt a second time because if we change something, if we change what we’re doing, what went wrong, then we get- we’re not gonna get bankrupt the second time. Okay, so this is the a- it’s one of the tracking conversions that is so fundamental to building a business and also, I recommend, it’s just fundamental to building a life; growing your life. And that there’s always gonna be mistakes, always challenges, always things going wrong and people that get pissed off at you and don’t like you. That’s always gonna happen. The point is what do you do about it? Do you run back into your little you know your little hideout in the jungle somewhere and and cry yourself to sleep? Or do you get up; you dust yourself off and differently this time to make it work? because that’s the that’s the but to bring back us back to building your website and building your business and building your sales, try sales funnel. You can write some emails and be like, “oh man, I’m terrible at writing emails”, but hey try it again. See if you can change a few things. Maybe hire a different writer. Maybe just hire a better copywriter. Try it again. See if you get better results. Track the results. Do it again and again and again. And if you improve 10 percent each time after a year, after 10 times you don’t have a hundred percent increase. You’ve got, I think, a hundred and eleven- a hundred and twelve. It’s a compounding increase- (0:02:56) it’s a compounding interest is the most powerful force in the universe. So that’s what we’re talking about today. Compound interest, the most powerful force in the universe, with Jacob Linowski on which is really conversion optimization. How to run some tests and how to boost it.  and just get more sales for this episode of the email marketing podcast, go to the mcmethod.com/95. Now this week’s McMaster with this week’s topic is go and sign up to a service like Mixpanel. Now, Mixpanel is I think it’s meant to be used for apps. For software apps, you can check which pages people go on and where they are- you know- going throughout the site and things like that. But what I’ve been using Mixpanel for is they have a feature called funnels where you can set up which say here’s page one here’s page 2, page 3, page 4, page 5. And it will then breakdown. It will show you the conversion rate from step to step to step to step. And then you can set up a second funnel and test that. And then you can see which one performs best. Scrap the one- scrap the loser. Keep the winner. My favorite part about Mixpanel. You can do this with a lot of tracking things so this is not- this is not just uhm just for Mixpanel but this is what I use Mixpanel for. Youre gonna add these variables in the URLs. You can say- you know- my site.com forward slash question mark ID equals Facebook. Right? and you use that link on your Facebook add and anyone who clicks that link and ends up on that funnel, it’s gonna show up in Mixpanel. You have one visitor from your funnel variable. Okay? From ID equals funnel. And you can get as many variables as you want and it will show up in Mixpanel. So i was going on Facebook and this is where I was going- was doing and say a campaign targeting to- you know- 30-55 year olds. Right? So I could put that in the URL, track it, look at how 30-55 year olds respond in the funnel. Then I could do the same thing for 55-65 year olds. Then I can do the same thing for people targeting say and see which one of those guys are more likely to buy stuff and on and on and on and on. And when you can track things down to  like this, you can find out exactly who the hell is buying your stuff, exactly who isn’t. Get rid of the people who aren’t, and just spend way more money on advertising to the people who buy your stuff. And then you grow your business. Boom! So that’s McMasters inside . McMasters is a- it’s a private community to have. There’s a forum. There’s a bunch of training products all about about email marketing but it’s also stuff  how to write a great sales page, how to write stories that sell, how to do- how I built Facebook campaign that I ran recently. The one that I just mentioned. Basically, a bunch of stuff in there some webinars there’s a form that I make every day and you can learn more about that at the McMethod.com at the top menu bar there is a link to- just click that you can learn more about it there and we’ll see you on the inside. Now last thing  is reviews. If you wanna make my day, out a smile on my face, make the sun shine and the rain go away, leave me a review. Leave me a review. So head over to iTunes, search for the McMethod email marketing podcast and leave me a review. how many stars you think it’s worth. Tell me what you think about the show and I will read it out and I will even buy you a beer when I run into you eventually in the US, in Thailand, in China, who knows where? And now enough of that, let’s get into this interview with Mr. Jacob Linowski.

It’s John McIntyre here, the auto responder guy. I’m here with Jacob Linowski. Now ah Jacob email a while back to talk about the podcast. He’s a- he’s an active listener and he’s been enjoying it and he mentioned that some of the stuff that he was working on, which was a user interface design with conversion optimization, and it’s some great insights to share so that’s why I got him on the podcast and make a podcast. So he’s got a site called goodUI. That’s goodUI.org. It’s a content piece of how much ideas around how to critique a good user interface, and then he’s also with Linowski.ca. That’s L I N O W S K I dot C A where they do conversion optimization. They got a whole bunch of cool stuff there. So today, we’re gonna talk about how to run your first optimization test, and it’s also gonna be good for people who are already been testing because I think you’re gonna get some good ideas about what to test even if youve been doing it for a while. So we’ll get into that in just a minute. Jacob, how are you doing man?

Jacob Linowski: Thanks John. Hey, how’s it going? Good.

John McIntyre: Pretty good man thanks for coming on the show.

Jacob Linowski: Thanks for having me.

John McIntyre: Okay. So before we get into- I guess- the content or the details, can you give the listener just a little bit of- more of a background on who you are and what you do?

Jacob Linowski: Sure. So we’re running a conversion optimization company and we’ve been testing, running test, learning while we test as of last year and before that doing a bunch of UI design concepting, and there was a time where probably a year and a half ago where we decided to basically focus mostly on measurable results that can drive decisions- design decisions. So, hence, conversion optimization.

John McIntyre: Right. The cool thing here is that this podcast has traditionally been an email marketing podcast but [00:07:50.16] been listening to this for a while. I know- its- we talk about traffic and sales funnels and split testing. A whole bunch of different stuff and what I like to do actually is, like in this case when it comes to email marketing, obviously it pays to test things but this is just business and [00:08:04.16] marketing 101 that you have to test and anyone who’s been doing this for any amount of time knows that testing is really where the magic happens. You don’t get things right the first time. You’ll do if you’re lucky but even the best guys in the world, they test. You know some of the biggest companies direct response [00:08:20.01] 6 to 7 hundred million dollars a year, they’re testing everything. So they’re always trying to optimize. So before we get into the- I guess- the nitty gritty, tell my why it’s important? Why is running optimization tests- why is optimizing for conversion important in your words?

Jacob Linowski: So I think there’s a time when you are designing a UI, a landing page, a lead page, any kind of front end (0:08:47) sometimes there’s a point where you’d come uncertain. And you hit that- this phase where you’re feeling like, “oh it could be like this way or it could be something else”, and I think those are golden moments where you can like you just have to capture those and just make a note. And you don’t have to be sure, you don’t have to be- make a decision based on that. You just cannot set that apart and I think those are great candidates to explore using data. Of course there’s other moments where you know you might be just – there’s some design elements that are just missing that are obvious such as, maybe there’s like no benefit or no headline or no button or something like that, so I mean those things, those moments, I think, it’s good to separate the high confidence stuff from those uncertainties.

John McIntyre: Right. I mean one thing that took me a while to get; I think that it’s recently. When earlier this year, I ran a campaign on Facebook advertising and I guess I learned by experience that you really gotta track everything and optimize for conversions. Well, you start off with whatever your rate is to begin with, you start with that and then you optimize. You run a split test on each step on that sales funnel and you say you [00:09:55.13] you know each step by 10 percent and you’ve got 4 steps where your increase isn’t 40%, it’s really, I think, that’d be 44 or 45% so that you’ve got the compound interest. And that’s where it gets really powerful. This to me is why I get so excited about it because you know I’m a really like a- I’m kinda like fly by the seat of my pants kind of guy like I get on here, I don’t plan these podcasts too much because I like to kinda just- generally personality-wise I just like to wing it. So I’m not really- I’m not usually a numbers guy but when I get to see the numbers and how by running these simple tests which don’t even have to take that long to set up. Just changing a few words or changing a button or changing slightly tweaking an offer different stuff like that or just the price, you can totally change the results or the ROI on a sales firm. So that’s what gets me so pumped about it.

Jacob Linowski: So I think, so you’re touching upon an interesting point here like of course there’s some tests which could be done very quickly, you can wing it and you can have it come up with little changes potentially changes that have a big effect let’s say headlines but then there’s other (0:10:56) like larger variations. We can completely, like we think a whole page and maybe have multiple sections which have to be readjusted and so forth. So I think there’s a balance between how large your variations are and how far away are they from the control.

John McIntyre: Right. ‘Cause one thing I’ve noticed is one of the first things in my experience we’re testing is the offer and the price. With the offer you don’t have to tweak the actual product and that could take a bit of time but the press side of things, all you have to do is you know drop it on your Paypal and they can change the text of the page that says the price. So there’s tests like that that are really fast but then like what you’re talking about is maybe you wanna test an entire new user interface and see how that impacts conversions.

Jacob Linowski: So I think that touches upon the effects. So typically I think we found that the smaller changes of course like the single variable changes I think they’re great and awesome for identifying the cause and effect of course then I mean if you change the headline and you know that it’s the headline that caused the 5 10 20% left. Alright so that’s amazing you can then reuse that on maybe on other pages and maybe on other material, maybe in emails but sometimes we find that not every side has the traffic. Right? To reach significance coz that’s an important element as well like I mean if you’re basing your decision on you know 5 out of a hundred conversions versus i don’t know 12 or 8 out of a hundred conversions on another variation, that’s really significant so there’s a danger there, right? So that’s for first timers  maybe one piece of advice like you really need to get your significance levels in check and I think there’s tools out there that can help people with that but that’s important.

John McIntyre: This is a cool thing. So what you’ve brought up here is that is there’s a statistical significance which is where you can run a test and if you wanna get 5- you know you might get if you’re on a split test with any sort of split testing software and you’ve got a whole bunch of traffic through [00:12:51.07] split test the headline and maybe you get 4 conversions and one other one and 7 conversions on the other one you think like whoa my- one of the variations almost doubles the conversions and it’s like whoa hold on hold on you don’t have enough data yet. If you’ve only got 7 conversions, you don’t know anything. Coz that can still swing. [00:13:06.21] a random variation you don’t know that quick. So I know there are pretty complex formulas- well there is a complex formula that allows you to kinda figure out what statistically significant is but if you’re using- I’ve used visual website optimizer, VWO, I think [00:13:19.15] I’m sure the other ones do it as well but they’re like to tell you if it’s statistically significant or not.

Jacob Linowski: Yeah, I mean we use W- Sorry, V- I always get this screwed up here

John McIntyre: VWO

Jacob Linowski: VWO. We also use that as a primary tool. Something to know about those tools. Sometimes they do sugarcoat the results a little bit but there’s other tools out there that also can- I think it’s like- I think it’s a good start to use in the beginning. There is also a bit more conservative tools out there but a- that’s one thing to keep in mind.

John McIntyre: Tell me about like if I would say a- I’ve got a website- I’ve got a basic sales funnel set up, I might have even a auto responder I don’t know basically I’ve got some traffic, I’ve got a couple different pages that require conversions and I wanna run my first test. So let’s say I go sign up to Visual Website Optimizer VWO.com its where it is now let’s say I sign up to that and I’m ready to run my first test. What do you suggest?

Jacob Linowski: So typically one thing we do upfront, especially when we’re doing with a new project and a new client- applies to any kind of new page as well, try to gauge the current traffic and the current conversion rate. If you’re getting a hundred unique visits every month, then that’s a sign, that’s basically a bit of planning like if you have- that starts giving you a bit of an idea on how long you need to test for as well as how many variations you can have so typically on using VWO, we’d use we’d run even on [00:14:50.05] just to get that launched if we don’t have any proper metrics upfront so we almost set up a tracker just to understand how much traffic there is and all the current conversion is. And then with that, we start planning. If it’s a little traffic site, we focus mostly on- we try to have one variation so a traditional A/B test, typically we avoid those smaller tests in those cases. So we tried- we focus more on the bigger changes such as maybe there’s like a better sales copy, maybe there’s a better headline, maybe there’s some social proof, maybe anchoring and so on. They’d be more visible call to action if it’s a long page maybe repeated calls to action and so forth, right?

John McIntyre: Right. So since we’re talking about like you could test variable like i think there’s one basically we’re talking about variables that scream and variables that whisper. So some things, you’re gonna test the price, you test the offer, you test the headline, you test the opening couple sentences or you test the major user interface shift. [00:15:49.05] big changes then you’re gonna run the test and you’re probably gonna see a big difference. You might see like you know 20 30 50 a hundred percent change in conversions [00:15:57.03] say the color of the button, that’s not always gonna make that big of a difference so when you have a low traffic [00:16:02.29], you don’t really have the flexibility to test a whole bunch of stuff just because every test costs time. So you’ve gotta really optimize for the biggest wins.

Jacob Linowski: I think so, yeah. We’re gonna result in if you’re doing a single change and its going to be- let’s say 10% increase, that test may require  on a low traffic site maybe 6 months a year or so. If however, you’re doing let’s say you’re getting to a 30 40% left, that might cut your duration, required duration to let’s say a month or two. Again, just using some sample numbers here.

John McIntyre: Right. One thing I mean like if you run into a client and they have low traffic, do you ever suggest that before they go maybe set up a conversion test because that’s what’s gonna take too long and you figure out [00:16:48.26] a variable that screams go and test it or set the test up cause once you set it up, its running. You just let the data on and you go do your thing. Now after that, obviously the more traffic you can get, the faster you’re gonna improve. And this is where paid traffic gets really exciting is because if you’re not tracking anything, if you’re not testing anything, well you’re not really gonna be at it. You know you spend money of Facebook ads or [00:17:07.21], you’re not gonna know whether you’re making money number one or even if you were, like maybe you might be losing money but we’d only require a few simple tests then you would be making money. So its kinda like you get in this position wherein once you set the test up, go and buy some traffic. Right? Because if you buy more traffic, you’d get more leads through. Maybe you can run a test every month instead of every six months. That means you get a compound interest on it every month for 6 months instead of once every 6 months. so and that might not sound like much because your business might not change much in that 6 months whichever way you do it, but over a few years, these small tweaks, these small changes in timelines make a massive difference in the way that business is gonna grow.

Jacob Linowski: Exactly. So throwing traffic at a test is definitely a good way to reach significance faster. If, of course, that traffic matches your other traffic that’s kinda more natural, more organic or beyond the duration of the test right?

John McIntyre: Right. Give me like- what- if I was a client and I wanted to test something in my website right now, I don’t know you can go the McMethod.com well you’d say I’m curious to see what you’d say here coz this would give us a couple of interesting ideas. Go to the mcmethod.com and if you give me 3 things just off the top of your head, what would you- I’ve tested a whole bunch of stuff on this site. What would you test?

Jacob Linowski: Oh man you caught me off guard here. [00:18:20.12].

John McIntyre: It’s good making [00:18:22.17] when you make something concrete like this, you get some interesting insights out of it so

Jacob Linowski: So I think this a- ill try to come up with something- but i think this raises an interesting point it’s like sure there’s some things that we can pull out of the bucket. Let’s say have a bunch of 50 plus tips on goodui.org that we can pull and sometimes use and those are kind of the you know the generic rules of [00:18:45.15] so to say right? But you could also dig deeper. you can also supplement that with proper user research and listening to customers and filling their [00:18:54.28] and so John I might ask you like okay so where do people what are the first one or two questions they ask you when they speak to you about like doing consulting with you? What are they worried about? And that’s another of course good way to figure out what’s wrong with this page. Right? If there’s anything wrong with it right? So it’s a balance of taking stuff from the past experience as well as

John McIntyre: I like that idea. So it’s not just- you can’t just look at a page really and go alright Ill test this. you really have to go back to i mean this is- when I teach people inside the McMasters how to write an auto responder, how to write a sales letter, yeah you can give then you can just come off the bat and say you should do this you should use this formula and you should write bullets like this and use this headline template but you’ve really gotta go back to square one and think well hang on go and talk to your customers, go and talk to your prospects get them on the phone and find out what do they really wanna know about before they purchase. Coz that’s where you’re gonna get the insights [00:19:52.05] drive the conversions in the long run.

Jacob Linowski: Exactly. So if you’re asking about ideas on top of my head, I’m assuming. Is that what you’re?

John McIntyre: Oh yeah, I’m curious. What ideas at the top of your head would you come up with?

Jacob Linowski: Okay. so maybe some social proof around the email sign up list maybe how many people have signed up maybe that’s worthy of a little experiment. I’m not sure how much effect that will be maybe I’ll guess if anything 5% plus or minus. Maybe very close to the user sign-up. Maybe something about lowering commitments just like the more- basically can unsubscribe anytime if you choose to leave [00:20:35.05] every time you set an email headlines warning this website will show you to- well that’s interesting. So using a pretty direct way of getting someone’s attention you have to top maybe gradual engagement as well let’s say there’s daily emails. Daily email tips. maybe there’s a way to pick and choose out of 2 or 3 email types. Maybe there’s like email types that people could segment themselves all over into I don’t know tips on email marketing, tips on conversion optimization tips on copywriting or something like that. Sometimes [00:21:11.15] this is kind of a gradual engagement helps people to make that first decision that kinda flow into the- to the next action which is the email of course sign up and that’s something we found as well. Benefits. I wonder- I mean- I haven’t really got a chance to read and analyze this whole page so you’re going into benefits. I think that’s great [00:21:33.22]. Is this what you’re looking for?

John McIntyre: Yeah. This is no- it’s interesting because what I’m really looking for is an insight into how you think right? so it’s not the specific stuff and I’m getting some ideas here that are- you know- I’ll go and test this stuff but more importantly for the listener. It’s interesting what I find- you know- what I get most out of doing this podcast when I meet people at conferences and things is always fascinating to look inside someone’s brain and see how they think. So that’s really what I’m interested in. I think the main thing when I look at- you know we talked about you know when I’m listening to you talk about how to find- you know- pick stuff to optimize, it’s things like it all comes back to the [00:22:07.21] you’re thinking what’s stopping someone from signing up? So it’s like someone’s gonna go it’s clear its fairly straightforward you know its a one column layer coz I noticed you mentioned that on your sites so it’s fairly easy to figure out what’s going on- on the site but obviously you’re right. There is no- so- one reason that some people might not be signing up is where they could put their email address in. There’s nothing in there about how many people have signed up to that list. So maybe that’s the reason why some people are not signing up. And then you know I like that idea of thinking well instead of thinking what can we test or [00:22:37.20] ask the question of why aren’t people buying, or why aren’t people signing up, or why aren’t people moving to the next step. And then make a list or you can even ask them. Why haven’t you signed up yet? You know I’ve noticed- one thing I’ve noticed with the McMasters the community that I have, you pay a monthly fee for access to training in a form and things like that and one thing I’ve noticed is some people really don’t like the idea of paying a monthly subscription. And I think the challenge with that is funny because you can cancel anytime. But maybe I haven’t been actually- maybe I haven’t been properly clear about that on the sales page and on the check out page. So what’s happening is someone’s going in there and go, “oh it’s a monthly fee and oh I’m probably gonna sign up for like 6 months or something”, and you know they’re gonna be locked in some contract. So then it’s like all I have to do is- all I have to do is add cancel anytime somewhere near the Buy Out button and also on the checkout page, and the conversions are gonna go up. And the point here isn’t that some that are listening to this can go walk away and go, “oh I’m gonna add that same thing to my sales page my [00:23:31.07] cancel anytime”. The challenge is you think you would know that’s not the secret. The secret is really getting inside your prospects. Getting inside your visitors head and really asking yourself why aren’t they taking the next step.

Jacob Linowski: Right and when you’re on a product or you have a service or info product in our case I mean we’re running into the same issue we’re selling some of our insights in a form of A/B test that we run ourselves so we [00:23:55.10] part of goodUI/datastores, here’s a little plug. We’re running through the same issue. I mean you listen I mean when you deal with customers you hear their emails their frustrations, their questions so overtime I mean opening up your ears to those things. I think those are great candidates for whether for tests or for just [00:24:19.01]. And we have the exact same thing. There’s a subscription model and we hear people saying just wanna I’m not sure about the subscription and that’s kinda too committal. So maybe one option for that would be to test something like purchased one month at this one fixed fee or something like that.

John McIntyre: Yeah, okay. So we also talked about- you mentioned what pages should people be testing? If they’re looking at the sign and wanna set up, they don’t wanna set up 5 tests, they just wanna set up one test. Where’s the best place for them to run a test to begin?

Jacob Linowski: So I think the page idea corresponds very much [00:24:56.10] primary question upfront is [00:24:56.25] metric. What’s the key metric? I mean, here right now, you gave me this page and pretty much assume very, very quickly that it’s the newsletter sign out that matters to you. But I think it’s of any test of any business, I think it’s important to identify that key primary goal. Right? So let’s say its purchases or McMaster I don’t know of the mastermind. With that, I think you identify the goal like how do you track that it’s a page visit let’s say to a post purchase page. That’s actually a purchase after the check out page. So working backwards, I think from that, you start identifying where are the pinpoints, where are the problem areas. and sometimes it’s not just one page [00:25:44.15] a funnel and one other reason why we kind of set up an initial kind of tracker upfront we might like say track a way from the homepage to your lead page to the checkout page finally to the post purchase page and then just like looking at some of the kind of data you can get a bit of a sense of where those problem areas might originate. So that’s one way to identify. another way to identify is just by looking at traffic. Like what are your top visited pages.

John McIntyre: I like it, man. You have this very like deep analytical way of diving into this and you know I’m more of a let’s just pick something and go for it but it’s always interesting and I’ve got a friend here in Thailand, I’m kinda like a sledgehammer. I just like to get in and get dirty but there’s also like the alternate or the other side of the spectrum and somebody comes in and goes really like a scalpel. Like a surgeon’s knife and kinda really isolate the biggest wins. It sounds like that’s sort of where your head’s at. You like to really dive in and understand what’s going on here.

Jacob Linowski: Well, we’re actually- well John- we’re learning I mean as I mentioned, it’s just been a year so some of our tests are actually like sledgehammers. And you know we actually have this testing strategy. We call it the shotgun approach or we go [00:26:58.02] okay throw it against the wall and hope it’s fixed approach where we again typically on lower traffic sites. We’ll just come up with 3 as diverse variations as possible and just try stuff out and then look at what happens and see if which one performs better and then work again grouping so many changes to a particular variations one would necessarily give us a concrete insight as to why it’s performing better but at least, it will set a new baseline for let’s say a plus 40% lift. And then we can work our way from that with a series of smaller tests. Alright.

John McIntyre: Okay. And then what sort of- I mean- you mentioned metrics a minute ago and when I think about testing, I’m just gonna be measuring the conversion rate. what’s- is there more to it than that? Is there more metrics that I should be looking at than conversions?

Jacob Linowski: Definitely. Definitely. so I mentioned this idea or primary metric and that alleviates the pain of later on when you let’s say you’re tracking clicks, let’s say you tracking- what’s this called- submits form submits maybe you’re tracking another page visit in your funnel like on a- between the landing page and the checkout and then post checkout and maybe the homepage. Let’s say all of a sudden you have like 5 metrics in your test and then you’re thinking, “okay what’s the most important one”, and so to avoid making that decision during the test, so the first thing was like to choose what’s really important upfront and then in terms of multiple metrics. I think it’s always good to have those metrics tracking across the funnel because then they all- take again- they can give you a bit of a sense of let’s say you have a lead page or a landing page which warms up the traffic and you have click there so that’s like your first interaction. Maybe people are- maybe lots people are clicking on the clicks, but maybe there’s some sort of form validation that’s prohibiting them from going forward. maybe they’re getting stuck there maybe the don’t know what to enter into a field and let’s say that plus 30 lift is not carrying over to the next page which only is showing plus 5% lift. And then you know then you’ll start seeing oh if there’s a high conversion rate here upfront but not necessarily carries over further down the road then you know you have something to work with.

John McIntyre: Yeah, so we’re talking about breaking it down into as granular as possible so you could say oh its someone viewed the page then someone clicked the link then someone- you know you can even track down to the events based on what forms someone filled out. You know forms maybe they get stuck on. maybe you can move that credit card number down to the end of the form and that increases over all conversions cause then people don’t get stuck halfway down going and fishing away for their credit card but if they fill out the entire form first, then they committed then they’re like oh [00:29:46.20] thinking about and by that point, they filled out the entire form so they might as well get their credit cards and fill out the rest. Whereas you’ve got the credit card at the top, they might have a different feeling. So we’re trying to looking at things in a really granular way.

Jacob Linowski: Yep, breaking down the funnel.

John McIntyre: Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Jacob Linowski: So that’s another good practice, i think. Tracking page visits, I think, is also good as opposed to just clicks again for that same very reason. Anything [00:30:08.20] is also good.

John McIntyre: Okay. And you mentioned some best practices. What are the best practices have you got? Have you got like 5 best practices or a list?

Jacob Linowski: So best practice for optimization or for testing?

John McIntyre: For testing.

Jacob Linowski: Sure. So I started like mentioning a little bit [00:30:28.22] like having primary goals, having braking down the funnel, estimating upfront i think is also good, I kinda mentioned that early on. so getting a bit of a sense of what you’re traffic is like coz again that helps you determine to plan the test, tracking page visits another best practice would be typically again typically you can reach faster more significant results when you have less variations so focusing on more traditional A/B tests that basically gives you a faster results so yeah i think those are kind of the key.

John McIntyre: So you got a whole list of these at goodUI.org/betterdata, right?

Jacob Linowski: You found it, yes. So, yes. So on goodUI.org/betterdata we explore some kind of our learnings as well and yeah that’s all free content there for A/B testing. Best practices and yeah, I mentioned some of those. Some of those get a little bit technical and some are more high level.

John McIntyre: Okay. Well, let’s wrap it up. We’re right on time here so where are these places? You mentioned goodUI.org/betterdata, you’ve got goodUI.org/datastores which is looks like it’s a subscription newsletter with ideas on what tests to run?

Jacob Linowski: Yeah, so if goodUI.org is like this periodic element table of just things to try, we purposely use the word try and then X idea because these are like kind of hypothesis. It’s like almost a checklist for things to do to raise conversions. And goodUI.org/datastores pretty much we take those ideas and we group them into variations and we test them out. we try to figure out which ones work which ones don’t so when we run tests basically once a month, we share our best test results in that publication.

John McIntyre: Okay. And you’ve also got linowski.ca.

Jacob Linowski: That’s the official company name and that’s where we do our consulting.

John McIntyre: So if someone wants to talk to you more of you know get in touch maybe even hire you to do some conversion optimization, the best place for them to  go would be linowski.ca right?

Jacob Linowski: That sound like a good start.

John McIntyre: Okay. Great. All right, Jake, mate, this has been really good. Really appreciate you coming on the show man.

Jacob Linowski: Thanks, John. Thanks for having me!