Transcription
Can you hear my kids?
Yeah, a little bit, but it's fine. It's like not [laughter] It's not too bad. It's not like Yeah.
Well, that's until they start to Hold on. Let me do one more thing real >> like you're like you live next to a park. It's kind of what the Like it's like distant, but >> Is that any better?
No, your your voice is just a little now. Just put it back.
All right. I'm just going to try to throw on mute.
Hold on. Give me 1 second. This [ __ ] starts screaming instantly. All right.
And now, let's take a listen to the Scalability School podcast.
Welcome back to another episode of the Scalability School podcast. Andrew is not with us. Um that sounds really dark. He He's with us somewhere. He just [laughter] He's busy right now. Uh and so he he left us to do intros, and this is what happens when you leave uh me to do intros. But, uh we're excited to jump into some landing page stuff. I know I've been spending a lot of time talking about landing pages uh on this podcast, and basically if you've talked to me um about marketing in the last uh 60 days, it's something that I'm talking about way too much. Uh and today we're going to dig into a bunch of specific insights and just kind of have a back-and-forth yap session about things we're seeing working, um progression, how to test, what we'd like to see more of, how to do reporting, and a bunch of things in between. Um and so, yeah, it's going to be a little bit of a yap session. I did I will say I'm I'm about 30 minutes into your uh your Operators podcast, so you know, you're big you're big timing us, but uh no, it's good, dude.
Well, it gets worse. Like Don't listen Don't listen much longer. I um for those you know, the our our 10 you know, tens of singles of listeners that we have on Scalability School, they were asking like this uh like whatever they ask the same 10 questions at the end of every podcast. Like, what's one metric that's um What's one metric that's like uh overrated? And I said profit. And I immediately was I I gassed. It was like after like I had all day of calls. And I was like, "Yeah, it's because of cash flow." I was It was the worst [ __ ] answer I could have ever given, but you know what? Here Here we are. So, I like reached out to Aaron, "Can we take this out?" He's like, "It's already edited." I'm like, he's like, "We could." I'm like, "I'm not an [ __ ] Just put it through. It's fine." Everyone will think I I sound like decent and then they're like, "He doesn't want profit. What the [ __ ] is wrong with him?" So, anyways. Yeah, go listen to it.
There's a big crossover of people who listen to this and that, may you know, so there's a for sure like we we probably have all the people from that.
Probably already listened to that by the time they listen to this, so.
Anyways, uh yeah, and let's let's get into it. So, I think first first topic, we've talked about this a bit. I think I mentioned actually on that on that episode, but creative creative landing page congruency. Do you want to like kick this off and then I'll I'll add my my perspective?
Yeah, one of the one of the biggest like frustrations that I see still. I spend a lot of time looking at at accounts and libraries and I like watching an ad and it'll be like, "Help your dog sleep better at night." And then you click through to the page and it's like, "Okay, I land on the PDP." Which like might be fine, but there's literally nothing about sleep on the page. Like maybe a comparable for for like Hollow. Like cuz I know he always used Hollow as an example. It's like if you were talking about hiking to somebody and then you send them to like a page that like was using images of the like the compression socks has nothing to talk about with hunting. One more example. We're looking at a a is like a bedding bedding company and they like their top one of the top performing ads was talking about like how it makes bedtime easier and like kids making their bed was so much easier. And then like there's only pictures on the website are a bunch of old people making their bed. It's like, "Dude, [laughter] where are the kids at, brother?" So, anyways, point on landing page congruency is like you're you're telling you're starting to tell a story in the ad and then if you're not continuing that story on the landing page, I think there's just a pretty big missed opportunity and I think the recurring word of the year for us has been and and you said this a lot is like just intentionality and like being more thoughtful at every single step of the way. Um and so creative and landed congruency is like the way that we're seeing this. Um so today you guys are spending a lot of time thinking about that and it's like I think one of these last episodes you said it uh you didn't want to talk too much about it because it's it's one of the things that's been uh unlocking stuff but I think cat's out of the bag. Um so I don't know if you want to expand on things that you're seeing working and how you guys have been uh thinking about it.
Yeah, so we built a report just recently um and it's just just landing page reporting which I know we're going to talk about that here in a minute but the one of the things that I wanted to do is look at so I'll I'll talk about Mars for example on this one and Mars actively is running 33 landing pages which is quite a few and I think probably more than the average brand but I think what we're starting to do well is we're we're matching we are not going to launch an ad if it's going to talk about cortisol or if it's going to talk about, you know, uh strength or willpower, whatever, if we do not have a landing page that also talks about that. So that's like a new thesis in the company that we won't do it. We're like won't launch it and then the creative strategist basically say, "Hey, I don't feel like I have a landing page that's that's congruent enough. Go go make me one this week." So what's crazy about that is now I get to go look at all these ads that are running to these 33 different landing pages and actually see in my report that I built um it's just like a claw generator report with a drop down what are the top spending ads to that landing page and I can go figure out is there congruency happening or not cuz there's something that's happening that this ad is getting more spend which usually means okay it's something meta likes it or yes performance is probably there but like to your point about the sheets example like we're talking about cortisol in the ad and then we jump on a page and it's literally has nothing says doesn't even cortisol on it. Why are we running that that ad to that to that page? So, that's been like really really helpful. Uh I think that not a lot of people like people look at landing page performance and then look at ad creative performance. They don't usually look at them like combined. And I think the cool thing about looking at it from a landing page URL first and then the ad creative that actually goes to it, you're able to actually reverse kind of into is this is it doing what it's supposed to do first is just looking at top ads and then just like seeing it's just like it it's hard to kind of resonate is that matching the page or not. Uh I think it's easier to go the the other way around.
Yeah. And so you said 33 pages live and I'm sure we'll talk about maybe if we have enough time we'll talk about like how we actually test and how you think about testing. But those are like individually you're not it doesn't sound like you're using back-end split testing tool to split them. Like they're all active URLs listed inside of Meta. What That's not really my question. My question is really more like what is the limit to the quantity of pages and like how specific you know like cuz you can continue to go deeper and deeper and more narrow.
Yeah.
And so I guess like how are you thinking about the width of the pages?
So we break this down by pillar just like we would with an ad creative. So we start with pillars. So we've got like, you know, aging, cortisol, energy, you know, weight loss. GLP-1 is like a huge category, you know, uh TRT versus natural. Like these are all pillars. So you can start with the pillar. So like maybe we only have we have 33 pages but we maybe have like 10 10-ish pillars, right? to to choose from. And then obviously dependent on the pillar like if we see traction we'll have different pages. So like we might start with a listicle. Listicles are the easiest one to start with. We might start with 10 reasons why. If we see a 10 reasons why it's working really well for an aging pillar and performance is there and spend is there and we're like finding some concurrency of ads and like traction is there then we might go take a 10 reasons and punch it over to an advertorial. And then we'll maybe make a variant of the 10 reasons that is like, you know, maybe the images go from and the 10 reasons goes from images to then GIFs or like maybe we go from 10 down to five and then we add in a whole different comparison section creative to the page. That's kind of how we think about it is like we start always with a listicle. We start before the listicle even choosing that that template, we start with like the pillar of of the the page that we're going to try and match the pillar of the eye creatives.
Yeah, and then will you keep will you keep the advertorial Uh so so sorry. Okay, will you keep the listicle, the quiz, and the advertorial all live as long as they're still performing? So like same creative just different landing pages with the match messaging?
So the only way that we're doing the same actual ad creative to a different lander is to quiz. So if if a page is working on a 10 reasons why, we'll we'll we'll kind of like graduate it up to the quiz. But outside of that, it'll always be a net new piece of ad creative that we'll try. Yeah. So no, we don't have any of like the duplicate stuff. We used to do more of that. We started to see like performance take a hit. So again, based on what Meta is telling us, like they they see that as the same thing. So we we're trying to actually build it out as something different. Even though if the landing page is different, we're we're we're treating it as if it could be. The only funnel that we're okay with it being the same exact creative is is the quiz because it's such a different type of experience and funnel. So that's how we think about it.
Yeah, that's cool. I have uh there's an example that The reason I asked that um is because I have an example I I tweeted this recently, so I'm just pulling it up so I have the numbers in front of me, but we took um we had a client that was sending all their traffic to a PDP, but it was sending it all the traffic to the the to the PDP. So you can see that at the bottom there in this But it spent the the PDP um spent $41,000, and we duplicated that same piece of creative and sent it to a five reasons why page, and they ended up over that time period at least spending the same amount of money. Five reasons why, which has graduated to many other things since then, um like spent the same amount, but perform substantially more efficiently. And then everybody's obsessed with CPMR, so I kind of made a meme out of that and just saying like CPMR was also lower um for this. But like those are the same ads. And what was interesting about that as I found it I was looking at the delivery of the the different what what is the delivery difference between the two of these? Specifically the age breakdown. And if you look at the age breakdown for the PDP, it was like 45 and up pretty clearly. Um, and that was one of the insights that landed on the page. So, like the headline says X reasons why women 45 and up are blah blah blah blah blah. Um, I just was looking at the breakdown again for the five reasons why and how that changed. Really the only thing that changed is that all of a sudden 45 and up started to just rip even more. So, 45 and up was spending more, it was more efficient, but the 55 and up was still good it didn't get any more spend proportionally. Um, and 65 and up was also still really good just getting any didn't get any more spend proportionally, but it was the same ad. So, there's a couple points in there um that I'm just kind of like yapping through. The first is that we find that having multiple pages live has been interesting because it meets people at different points of where they're at. Like to your point, quizzes may be hey, I'm a little less aware of what's going on. Quizzes may be hey, I'm a little less aware of what's going on. Um, I'm not sure if you'd agree with that, but like it's a little more top of funnel in the way that people traditionally talk about it. Listicals may be somewhere in the middle depending on the positioning. And then PDP is like obviously is as close as you can probably get without sending people directly to check out, which I've seen some ad accounts try to do that. And then the other point is like okay, well, there's an interesting progression on that on that five reasons why page and those insights, which is okay, we've got this messaging on this page that says 45 and up. What what if we just duplicate the headline and go 55 and up and still leave the same ad live? How would that change things? A lot of philosophy around like how fragmented the ad account starts to get. Um, but the whole I said something on a call um recently that like seems to make it clear to people, but like Andromeda is reading the page, not just the ad. And that was that was that was interesting for me to see because now, yes, Meta thinks that the creative is the same, but it's very clearly different delivery. Um so, you're thinking about that whole funnel as as the ad, really. You said a couple things there that I think are super interesting that then personally I like take and and break down, which is like the age breakdown by landing page performance. That's something that I haven't thought about in a while. I look at it by creative, uh but I don't look at it by lander. So, that's that'll be fascinating to dig into and then I've never looked at CPM R by lander you're like destination URL. So, that just another one to be like, I wonder what that does and if some landing pages which I think would make sense inherently have a better CPM R. So, two good callouts there, for sure.
Yeah, and that that was that was the thing that was so interesting about that is I mean I mean, CPM R to me I'm still the cat cat uh the I don't I don't know if I've like fully come around to that as like a useful metric yet. I think it's interesting, um but like ROAS was substantially better and then we could spend more behind it. So, it's like I didn't need the CPM R signals to tell me that. Um and I'm sure we'll get into how we test things, um but like it was very clear that that just like consumed all the spend. So, um we still find success in sending the same creative to to um different landing pages cuz you actually do unlock uh a different audience as we saw in in that age uh breakdown.
Brad, I'm sure people who are listening to this probably know what CPM R is, but do you want to explain what that is cuz we've said it like five times, but
Yeah, yeah, so um generally people look at um CPM, so cost per 1,000 impressions. CPM R is basically just the reach version of that. So, impression impressions are non-unique. Reach is a unique impression. So, um it's just the amount that you spend to reach 1,000 unique people. The one of the reasons I don't like it is like inherently just goes down over time. Like it it the second you spend $1 on Meta, your next piece of reach like it just inherently goes down. There's only so many people you can reach in the world and if you narrow down to the US and then you narrow down to your target market, you just you just run out of people. And you you kind of alluded to this earlier, and it's one of the things you talked about in the in the operators episodes, which is like you think about starting a product that just has so many freaking angles that you can unlock, because that's how you can open up I mean, TAM is one way to think about this, but like specific angles is how you can say different things to different people. But yeah, CPM R is cost per 1,000 unique reached people. Sweet. Yeah, so you you kind of you were talking about the progression of landing pages and the types of landing pages. I don't know if you want to speak to you said you start with listicles and then go into some of those other things. Is there like a certain progression that you go to, certain reason why you start with listicles? Maybe you should talk about the formats or something.
Yeah, I mean, it's just ease, right? So, once you have a light a 10 reasons why template, for the most part, if you go look at any big nine-figure brands, like they all run pretty much the same template. So, the nice thing about it is it requires copy and it requires like static static image design for for for the graphics. So, I think just for you know, ease of speed, it's it's the best. And I think it's again, it's such a simple concept of like here's 10 reasons why, here's five reasons why. It's just it's inherently how people think about things. They just like lists. So, that that's usually where we start. From there then obviously getting advertorials to work. I used to be like a advertorials will never work. I think I've said this on this podcast. We've started to get them to work, and I think it just has to do with copywriting. Like it has to have the right ad creative that you know, usually is a bit more top of funnel and it then can do, you know, if if the creative then kind of answers the the it closes the loop of what the creative might might produce. You know, people talk about native ads, which is like you know, it looks like a a phone from your your photo from like your parents' phone. Like that that's the piece of creative. You know, like something sitting on a counter. It's like shitty lighting, interesting, and just kind of you like, "What is this?" That's the whole concept of like a proper native ad or native creative. And so, those images that just kind of prompts, you know, curiosity to then an advertorial style page where then it might be more of a story that you're telling. Uh I mean, can work well, but it's just harder to do. So, start with the 10 reasons, then go down that kind of rabbit hole of of advertorial, and then we might just do like kind of its own unique blend, which is like different sections. You know, there might be kind of like a mini 10 reasons why built within the page, then there might be a us versus them, and then there might be, you know, uh an FAQ section. There might be all sorts of like these kind of unique things, a longer story, maybe there's like a founder story section in it. That's kind of like the third one, and then the fourth, which is quiz, which I think, you know, there's a couple people on Twitter that talk about quizzes all the time. I mean, they are underrated, I think. Like, I think, you know, the problem is people seem like it's going to be like super hard to build, but they're not really hard to build. There's a there's a tool called Heyflow, which is what we used for the beginning of Marsman. We've now built the tool internally. Our head of e-com built it in Cloud, and then self-deployed it, which is sick. Um so, we can do a lot more kind of custom stuff with it, but Heyflow is great. Like, if you're wanting to try to build a quiz, like just go study again top brands. Most of them build them very similarly. This is another great entry point. So, it's kind of like listical, advertorial, dynamic page, and then quiz is kind of a whole other one. So, that's how we do it.
Got it. Yeah, and within the So, like going back to listicals for a second, um at some point I'm sure you started with a three reasons or a five reasons, and then a seven, and then a 10. Um so, there's like a progression that you've gone through where you started, hey, we started with a five, and then we went to 10, and it made a big difference. And then we added I mean, I've the amount of times I go into an ad library, I I click and the landing page and it's like, "Oh, this looks like Marsman's landing page." It's like [laughter] astounding. Um but like, there's comparison charts at the top or somewhere on the bottom. I know Primal Queen probably I think Primal Queen was one of the original people that had like the timeline to it. So it's like what are those what are the elements to a listicle that you've seen really make a difference?
Yeah, I mean the comparison chart is is a no-brainer. That one and then just like a super clear final CTA section and then usually like some type of social proof usually above that. So it goes like comparison chart, 10 reasons, either FAQ or social proof section of just like review style content or like a story from a customer and then there's like super clear this is the only CTA on the page to move you over to a PDP. That's usually it. And again like I think I might have mentioned this in the last on the last episode but like now we're testing like taking the PDP injecting it below. So not even like that CTA section. So I think we'll see more people inherently copy that if it's if it's you know I don't know if that was us really doing that for the most part.
But if you go look at our pages there's a lot of a lot of shoppable versions of PDPs below listicles and stuff like that now that we run. So Yeah, I mean I think I think that's mostly it. I you know candidly these ideas aren't aren't always us or mine like you know the OG goats of D2C and direct response were like Javi and Plissee. You know those are the two I got to meet the founders and get to become good friends with them and you know inherently ended up copying some of their ideas or talked to them about concepts but like the five reasons why originally was because Plissee was doing it and then they rolled out like six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 12, 15 reasons why and like they just kept adding more and kept seeing better performance and we didn't ratchet up to 15 or anything like that yet. But Yeah, Vajay and the team over at Plissee just absolute goats with with that and then I think the Javi team were the ones that were figuring out some of these unique elements to add into these pages just to add a little more sauce to them and maybe you would answer like a a more context which is usually what you're looking to do. It's just like, what is the missing context on this page that they would it would be great for the customer to know before they see the price. All right, friends, quick break. This episode is brought to you by Northbeam, the marketing attribution platform that we love over here at the pod. And if you're a marketer, you probably agree, incrementality testing is broken. Tests require a ton of labor, spreadsheets, statistical reference, designing tests is slow and error-prone. Once the tests are running, you have to monitor them daily in case anything happens. If you don't, a test could blow through thousands of dollars while being totally useless. And how are you supposed to know what the test is in the first place and when? There's a million factors that make incrementality testing really difficult. But good news, our friends at Northbeam have completely changed the game. They fixed incrementality. Only Northbeam incrementality automates your incrementality test design and monitoring while protecting you from the major mistakes that plague incrementality testing. Northbeam builds tests using your own MTA data, launches them directly in ad platforms, and automatically monitors them throughout. If something threatens validity, you're alerted before it ruins the result. With Northbeam, you can launch tests in platform with a single click inside Northbeam, saving you tons of time and reducing any chance of errors. And when the test concludes, results flow straight into your MTA, meaning you can easily see results alongside the rest of your data. This is automated and accurate testing, so you and your team can spend with confidence. Incrementality was broken, Northbeam fixed it.
For the customer to know before they see the price.
Yeah. There's That's like That's such an interesting like place that I think we have kind of talked about this really briefly where like that's where like you can probably innovate quite a bit is like, okay, I know what I'm trying to answer. Like I know what a comparison chart answers. It shows very quickly how you stack up against other things that people are considering. Um is there a different way you can communicate that other than a comparison chart? Um or like a um people want to know what the product is going to do for them. Like what does the transformation look like? A before and after is a way of showing that transformation, but that timeline um that I mentioned Primal Queen and I know a lot of other people have something like it, but like that timeline also kind of paints the picture of here's what you can expect and here's the transformation you can expect along these kind of timelines. Um I just it's such an interesting place cuz like that's where you can actually innovate, uh but that's also where it's very difficult cuz you have to figure out like what is the actual format and what is that section and how does it get delivered? Um I don't know if you've thought about like unique ways to deliver those those elements, but um that's something that that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about. So, I had I have two more two more follow questions to that. The first thing is um you kind of mentioned it in the notes on something you wish you had more insight into, which was like what elements that we just talked about like how they drive impact. How are you thinking about that? Like I think Heatmap might be a tool that kind of tries to map sections more specifically to revenue. I'm not sure exactly how they do it, but how are you thinking about that?
I think that's just AB testing pages. It's like the page with the element, the page without the element. I think that's really all you can do and the issue is like you just need the velocity to actually like do that and I think people you're probably better off most brands that are are you know are spending less than seven figures a month on ads is just like testing a whole new page versus like hey, I add one new section, is that going to get the lift? Like if you don't have enough velocity like the test is going to have to run for months to technically validate. So, you can obviously take the first couple days or hours of performance on IntelliGems however you want it and send it, which I've done in the past and things have generally worked out for us. So, sure, but that's how we that's how we do it. It's just like design the whole new section, usually test it against the highest spend or highest traffic volume lander and then run those side by side where it's just like we add one new section into the page, did it at any performance or not and then it's just a URL URL change. I do have I don't know this isn't tin hat theory. I do have a weird I there there's something in my brain that says that meta doesn't like AB test on the back end of URLs. I don't know what but I think it's I think it's the fact that it's you know in term of it's scraping the content of the page and it's seen a load happen or it's seen some Java script happen where it's like I don't like this as much. Who knows? Maybe it just gives you like a you know you have 100 points uh score and it takes one away of those 100 like maybe it's something but I just have a weird feeling that it has an issue. No proof of that but it just something I think about.
Yeah it's like is it confusing is it confusing signal for the reasons you just mentioned because of the way that it loads but also like if a different type of person is resonating with that page but it's technically the same ad creative. Like it's different if they were two different pieces of of like actually two different ads in the ad account but like it's actually delivering based on how that ad is responding so like is it sending confusing signal back because different types of people are you know responding to them in different ways. You know my tin foil hat is is with you on that so I get it. That that leads into something interesting so I'm skipping I'm skipping ahead a little bit with this one which is how you think about actually testing the pages like how do they get into the ad account and like you know are you when do you decide to actually use an IntelliGyms on the back end versus not?
Yeah usually it's just content swaps now for the most part like we're just we're we're we're adding a new element or we're adding potentially like a whole different like a 10 reasons why listical that pushes you to the PDP versus a 10 reasons why listical that that has the buy box or the whole PDP below it. That's when we're using IntelliGyms when we're taking kind of swings like that or we're launching things. I mean again with the creative volume you have with with the spend volume you have the ability to test more. So, I'm in a little bit of a unique scenario there or just because we just have to launch so much [ __ ] every week to keep up because just so many things burn out. So, we're launching like realistically probably three net new landing page funnels a week. I'd say around that number feels right. Uh For Mars, I'd say we're a bit a bit less than that for Hollow. Maybe one to two a week for Hollow net new landers. And yeah, we just launch them like we normally would. So, it's like depending on the products, it will go in a different campaign and then or or or depending on the funnel will go in a different campaign. If we we have them broken out by pillar not. Sometimes we do that, sometimes we don't. And then it will just go on its own ad set with its own budget just like you normally would with like a creative test.
Yeah, we've we've played around a lot with like with it when it's a net new page. So, like we like to build around like start with the ad as the insight. It's like, "Okay, what can we what can we build off of this?" How do we make a page based on this? And usually it's like, "Can you actually build it from one specific ad?" Now, you know, obviously if you can look at the entirety of your ad account and say to the the pillar point that you're making, if there's a bunch of different things I could benefit from a more specific page, great. Um we've we've when rolling out landing page tests, we'll start with like an ad, right? So, the one I referenced earlier in the tweet that I was talking about, that was built off of one founder ad that had some very specific insights about the delivery of that ad, what that specific ad was saying. We just duplicated it in within the same campaign, same ad set, and just let Meta dictate the spend between it. And that landing page literally literally the next day it was spending more than the PDP and continued to scale well in excess of it. Um we've also had other wins where like we've I winning to me with landing pages is not just it spends more or performs better or is more efficient than the other page. It's like, "Can you add net new spend volume to the ad account?" So, an example of this recently is um if we have we had if I'm using my hands to describe [laughter] this so it's like you have a if your spend volume is 100% your current funnel is set up to get you 100% of spend whatever you spend like maybe I should use a dollar amount. You're spending 5K a day on this funnel and you launch a lander you have you have a PDP spending 5K a day. You launch a lander and it adds 1K a day. As long as it goes up to 6K a day and spend and adds that new volume to me that's a win because you're you're again you're kind of meeting different people where they're at. Like that that's a win. It's not about just like getting getting an excess and that's why I like duplicating the existing ads and letting them letting meta dictate the spend between them because it shifts over time. Like I I was looking at an ad account the other day where it's like we launched a quiz it took over then it fell back then it's taking over again. Like it just keeps going in and in and out depending on the season. Now I don't know if there's like an actual seasonal reason for the change but the just like ads the landing pages and how they perform shifts over time. So as much as possible I try to like leave things on but I'm also the I'm also a little bit of a CBO leave things on maxi so um
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think you're right for the most part. I think we're just a little extra critical of because we have so much volume of creative going in it's like okay if we're if we're if we have to launch this to validate the creative we might as well try to match the page to it versus just like duping it again and trying it to to go to another one. That might not be as congruent. So I think generally you're right in thinking that way and the the whole idea of adding incremental spend is the goal at the end of the day. I mean like you add you make it a landing bit at a five reasons that outperforms your PDP. If you have a set multi budget that you can spend into because of inventory constraints or whatever sure great huge win to get incremental you know raw as left but the whole idea of this is building new funnels so you get more scale.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's how we
If you yeah if you're if you're going to try to launch you you make your you're looking at your your pillar and you're it's like okay we got one piece of creative now we need to launch it to the three different variants of landing pages that we have live. Like all of a sudden, you have you now you have to analyze performance on that that same piece of creative, those landing pages, and it's a I mean, it's a lot a lot of work on top of the fact like is there actually marginal benefit in that? And you know, debatable. Yeah. Debatable. Yeah. I'm going to sleep. Yeah.
How long are you letting things rip then? Like how what is what is your actual test and your patience for for those tests look like?
Yeah, it changes. It changes all the time. I feel like sometimes we we are more patient, sometimes we're not. I think I think at this threshold that Mars is at specifically, now things are just burning out so quickly that we we turn them off fairly quick. So like I mean, if we're not seeing the numbers that we want in like 48 hours, like we're usually killing that that ad. Um and when it comes to landing pages, it's like we if this is something that we've done, if the ad does work or doesn't work, we'll duplicate it over to a different funnel. For us, it might be quiz or PDP, and then we'll launch it in a what we like the graveyard concept, graveyard campaign, um with a cost control, and see if then that works. Cuz it's like was it actually the creative's problem or was the landing page problem that it was going to? So, we do that a lot. If if like the soft metrics on the creative looks good, but the performance was [ __ ] So, that is like the other way that we think about it. We're pretty hot to kill things, but it doesn't mean we're not going to do good and throw it in the cost control campaign and see if we can get some more steel out of it, um going to a different page.
Yeah. And then I'm Well, I think going this this rolls nicely into reporting, but before we do that, um Jordan and I Jordan is my business partner uh for those of you that don't know. Jordan and I have been like flirting with this idea of like the persona specific PDP, um because PDPs can still work really well, and I know um I've talked to a bunch of people in the space and like just expanding your PDP and giving more information that answers questions and customizing your product photos to um you know, I I know you you gave that insight, and then all of a sudden like like last year, and now everybody's product page their carousel has a bunch of images that are dialed in a certain way. Like have you have you flirted with the idea of just like making the product page a little bit more persona specific? Like okay, we just change the product title to match it's like I mean you you've the extreme version of what Hollow is like compression works so we made [ __ ] compression socks.
Yeah.
Compression socks.
Right.
Right. So you just do go the product route but
Right.
PDP customer this is exactly this is the next level of where we're at now for more. So it's like we've taken the add to landing page congruency. We've got that. Now we Now we move the PDP to the bottom of the page. Does that perform better than pushing the PDP? Let's say it does. Now it's much easier to edit that quote-unquote PDP section if it's all one long funnel and I think this is the one thing that was really interesting. I would I used to look at at brands like even Groom's a little bit but Primal Queen and like these pages are so long. How do how do that many customers get through this whole page? I think if if the content is right and it's relevant, I don't think the length of the page is actually going to hurt to a certain degree. It's not going to hurt general conversion rate if it's congruent. If you're talking about weight loss and then you go to a page and it's 10 reasons why this product is going to help with weight loss this season. Da da da da da 10 reasons great. And then you get into a product page section and it's like the weight the best weight loss products. Here's your discount. Da da da da right? I think and then all the carousel images match. Why would that not do better? So that's where we're at now where we are starting to to tinker with actual quote-unquote PDP because obviously we're single SKU which helps us do that much easier than if you're you know, 10,000 SKU apparel company.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean if you've got people that are like they want to solve a problem so badly, you've got them captivated. Like they're going to continue to read until you give them the solution. I think I think I told you guys separately I saw this insane ad from Dr. Gundry which I think is Golden Hippo as a Golden hippo brand if I'm not mistaken.
So.
Yeah, I think so.
Dude, like I clicked the ad on on Twitter cuz I was like this is going to be insane. And I clicked it and the only like it's a 5-minute VSL and you have to watch it. It's actually more than 5 minutes, I'm pretty sure. You have to watch the video. You can't do anything else on the page but watch the video. And at some point, I couldn't even wait that long. I literally tried to leave my phone. I was like, "I can't wait anymore." And so I abandoned the page. It's like you have to watch the whole thing and then get to the point. Now, I'm not trying to get sued by anybody by saying crazy things. But like they're promising some pretty insane things. And so like the person who's watching that is like desperate for a solution. Um and so like they're going to watch the whole thing. And like you know, people will talk about like levels of interest. Like there's people who sit down and watch a 3-hour podcast. And like it's cuz they're interested in it. Like they'll sit through the whole thing. And they'll stop when they don't want to read it anymore. Um that's the interesting thing about pages is you can just like yeah, progressively build build more and more as long as it's not like killing your page load speed. Um and all that good stuff. So, Yeah. Yeah, we've tried VSLs. Failed. I mean, we'll try it again. I mean, we'll try it again, but we um we didn't crack it the first go at it. So, it's something interesting. The my my my lessons from the VSL like going down the rabbit hole is you just you basically just push up an insane AOV. That's the whole enchilada. So, it's like you can get someone to watch 45 minutes of a video before you finally present the solution as this magical capsule. You need them because you've had so much drop-off throughout that. You need that customer to buy this insane AOV bundle, which is usually just like a bunch of crazy post-purchase upsells like stacked after another. So, and unless you can do that, like the full-blown VSL situation just doesn't make a ton of sense. Uh which is kind of why we killed it to some degree. Yeah, is there anything related to I know I still want to head in reporting. Is there anything related to like merchandising, offers, how it shows up in the product page, post-purchase that like you think is worth hammering through really quick?
I can't think of anything off the top of my head. We We did some questions post-purchase around Here Here's one that's interesting. In our quiz, we ask a really interesting question as like one of them. I won't say necessarily which one cuz I don't want everyone stealing [ __ ] but we ask an interesting question in the quiz. And that question has given me so many ideas for new pillars because we leave it like we kind of leave it open-ended. There's There's actual prompts, but like it's open-ended enough the way that we let them fill it out that I think it's it's been really interesting. So, I would say like if you feel like you're getting stuck with Hey, I don't know what pillars to go build for creative or even for landers, build a quiz and ask a question that like prompts these people that don't know much about your brand your product yet to like give you some feedback and you might come up with something really interesting. So, that's one that's been I'll just say is like a teaser of something that's been
generating interesting ideas for me and in coming up with new new concepts for for new pillars.
>> Yeah. Does your quiz builder, I know you use something else and you guys recently switched, does it tell you like are you guys paying attention to who ends up buying and how they answered the questions and then using that information? Cuz like you can get like you have the quiz answers in aggregate, but like the most useful ones are the people that end up buying, right? And obviously you can see where drop-off looks like and things like that, but have have you have you cuz like post purchase is it's also a very different experience. Like this person also bought, they self-selected, they're kind of they may be answering it different than pre-purchase. So, there's like there's almost value in understanding what the people who didn't buy said and then also, okay, the people who did buy, how did they answer these these questions and just filtering it by purchaser actually?
>> Don't have that data, but we're going to figure that out cuz that's super interesting. That's super interesting.
>> Yeah, I mostly look at like a little bit from both.
>> Yeah, I mean, right now I'm kind of going on the rabbit hole of like hacking the drop-off rate. I'm looking at like drop-off by question and I'm like, okay, what can I change this this slide or question to be so I can keep the progression progression happening. Um that's mostly where my time is spent right now in the quiz. It's just like thinking about those drop-off rates and figuring out what about that question or what about the answers that that they have as options to select or are slowing them down or making them bored and saying this is too many questions. So but yeah, that would be pretty that would be pretty important information to get. Yeah.
>> Yeah, I mean I've seen some insanely long quizzes and I'm always surprised by like I don't know this idea of friction. Like people people I feel like people are really coming around to thinking that like friction is not necessarily a bad thing. Um especially with quizzes cuz like quizzes are like starting to self-select. It maybe it's the open loop concept. I said that on a call today. It was super cringey. Um it's like the open loop of like okay, I want the answer. I have started this. I want to know what it's going to tell me. I want to know the answer is. I want this like miracle thing that I could take to solve all my problems. Um but yeah, uh well, you'll have to tell me how that goes cuz now I'm now I'm invested.
>> [laughter]
>> Uh that rolls really nicely into like landing page reporting and how you're thinking about um reporting. You kind of talked about the reports that you just built out that you you found really interesting. Um I'll just really quickly say a couple things that I pay attention to from a landing page reporting perspective and then I know there's a lot more that I would like to dig further into, but um because of the way that we launch tests in CBO spend velocity is like aggregate spend for that funnel uh or that product or that campaign is one thing. Spend velocity is another thing. And then once we start to see some validation, that's where I'm going in and I'm looking at the heat maps and I'm saying, okay, this is how far people are making down the page. Here's where people are clicking most often. And I'll give one specific tactical thing that came out like you should watch you should watch recordings. It's really helpful to watch recordings. We ran a quiz funnel one time and I was starting to watch recordings. I watched [ __ ] 20 in a row. Nobody took the quiz. I was like it's working and it was converting insanely well. Nobody was was the quiz. Literally nobody. We added a shop the product button What is that? Start the quiz or shop the product right below it. Uh that literally revenue per session went uh 20% by just adding that cuz like and if you don't want to take the quiz, cool. You can go to the product page and check it out. Um and then the people that want to take the quiz, great. Like that was So, um I watched the recordings and that's kind of like a recordings are tricky cuz um small samples and it's, you know, um easy to get distracted by that, but um total spend, spend velocity are kind of some core things that I pay attention to. Um what else are you looking at as you're evaluating landing page reporting?
>> Yeah, I mean, the biggest one is the creative that's going to that landing page. I kind of talked about it earlier. It's like start with the landing page URL, see how performance is, is it is it beating baseline versus the rest of the account? What is the spend volume versus the rest of the account, which then gives you some indication of like, okay, maybe there's some ability for the ROAS to be slightly lower on that if they're if they're getting more scale out of it. And then what are the actual ads that are performing for that lander? That is the main thing I'm paying attention to right now. Um I think like the content on the page, watching screen recordings, watching heat maps or like looking at heat maps or click maps. I think that's like the next level. Um but because we're launching so many new ones and we're trying to build this concurrency thing, I'm mostly just trying to figure out like what are the ads are actually working within this lander? Which are the ones that are not that are getting a bunch of spend that we that that are kind of like failing at that combination of concurrency. So, that's mostly it. I don't really have anything else super super special. We we built like this thing that kind of shows them on like a chart format so I can watch landers like uh scale or or fall off throughout periods of time. And then also this like scatter plot kind of version, which then breaks it out by like um spend and then ROAS. So, it's like you can kind of figure out like, okay, the ROAS kind of degrades, but then some of these like landers have a lot more scale to them. So, it's easier to kind of identify those winners. Again, nothing too crazy. Um mostly just like that that combo of what ad is actually not working for this very specific lander.
>> Uh yeah. It well feels like getting into like metrics like bounce rate and obviously like revenue procession, profit procession, conversion rate, those things are like helpful, but it's like you need a you need a success metric first, which is maybe total spend, spend velocity, actual efficiency. It's like that's going to be way more insightful than looking at a bounce rate. Well, it's like bounce rate might not actually tell you anything. Like you know, the when the test that I talked about earlier, um going from a PDP to a listicle, bounce rate dropped a lot, which was that's a helpful insight, but like it also just performed better. I didn't need bounce rate to tell me that. It's like, "Okay, people are spending more time reading the content on the page. Great." Um is but is bounce rate that like what is bounce rate going to tell me that um that spend velocity didn't um is uh is something that I've been thinking a lot about. Like if you if you're doing nothing, like you're you're you're listening to this and you're like, "I'm about it. Like yes, sign me up. I want to test landing pages. How do I do it?" Um I think it's kind of daunting. Um I know like AI is making it progressively less daunting to get pages rolled out, which is great. But is there any place that you would suggest people go to start? And the caveat to that is like why why do you think it takes most brands forever to build and test and deploy a landing page? Like are CRO agencies just like super slow? Um are they like what what's Yeah. Um how would you start? What's preventing people from just like launching pages? The answer is like it's not that hard anymore, but you do need to do you need to put all the pieces together correctly, which is the template has to be correct and it needs to be like a winning template. What would I do there? Go look at InMotion, in any other of your favorite tools, go look at the brands that are spending the most. Any Trend Track, any any of these tools that can like scrape things, go find the brands that are spending the most, they're pushing traffic. Most of them have the same looking templates for the most part, especially for listicles. Just copy that. Like start there, copy that template. So many people have copied ours already, right? Hollow, Mars men, it's whatever. It It is what it is. Template I don't really care about. Copy it away. Then, really what it comes down to is just copywriting and copywriting and then the images that that go with the pages. I think the copywriting's the hardest part. I think writing good copy is much harder than people make it out to be. Throwing it into Claude without a ton of pre-prompting is going to get you [ __ ] copy with a bunch of M dashes and like I think people see into that now. So, I think doing copy right is hard and I think that's probably like the biggest thing that slows things down. And then if if a brand is very brand forward, they want everything like designed to match brand standard. That's another thing that can slow [ __ ] down. So, I think the one thing that I always say is like your landing pages can definitely be uglier than your website and your ads can be even uglier than your landing pages. So, like be okay with a little bit of like, yeah, use your brand font, use your brand colors, use use those things, but like if it's not perfect, guys, get started. Like you it's you're just wasting time and and lack of efficiency from getting started. So, yeah, I mean there's there's great tools out there. I mean, you know, I think a lot of people use Replo, a lot of people, you know, we're friends with Ryan Donahue who owns Page Deck. It's a great tool for this. Like low price point, quickest way in. Page Deck is like an incredible solution. We use it for Homestead clients. Like it's a it's a great one. So, I'd say between that, Replo, and then just kind of using the resources of of the bigger the bigger guys like from a template perspective, that's what I would do. Copywriting, again, like that's what's going to take you some time. Um and I think spend some time on that. Don't just like rep it into Claude and say, "Hey, make this make Hollow's 10 reasons why for my, you know, gummy brand or some [ __ ] right?" So, I think that's that's the part that needs the time and attention and that also needs like a proper marketer and someone that understands direct response copywriting.
>> Yeah, it seems like the technical limitations that used to exist, I mean with things like PageFly and and Replo are like starting to go by the wayside, but even even further than that. Like they they're the each of them has their own AI features for like building these things and like those are progressively getting better. And so what matters the most is the content on the page. Um and if you're still like stuck like struggling with the the uh technical stuff, like maybe just DM one of us and we get maybe me, not you. You got way too much [ __ ] to do. Uh I'll [laughter] show you how to like come overcome some of those things. Because like technical limitations should not be the limit to testing this at this point. Um but yes, it does take time. You actually have to like Okay, watch your ads, figure out what they're saying. Why do you think people are like just like you do creative analysis, just extend that to what the page says. Um you could probably see a lot of success by doing that. Um cool. Is there anything anything else that you want to you want to add on or or say before we wrap things up? Any beefs? Uh Andrew's not here, so I'm going to do beefs in his honor. I don't know if I have any beefs.
>> Yeah, you just talk [ __ ] about Andrew. Yeah, there's nothing bad to say about that guy. So um no, let's wrap here. Uh I think it was a good episode.
>> Cool. All right, thanks y'all for listening. I don't know how we usually close this out, but uh maybe subscribe on YouTube. Leave a comment. Maybe ask us a question on there. I don't know if we asked that for for
>> Go follow go follow Brad uh on Twitter and and DM him with your with your landing page questions. That's the
>> Yeah, please. Please blow my DMs up.
>> [laughter]
>> Cool. Thanks for listening. Tune in. See you. Let me stop. There it is.
>> The only way that we grow this podcast is by you sharing it with your friends. Honestly, like reviews kind of don't really mean anything too much anymore. They're really meaningful, but they don't do a lot for the growth of the podcast. Um and so sharing YouTube links, sharing Spotify links, sharing Apple, whatever we call it under the podcast app now. Anything you can share, the better we're going to be. Um guys, anything else you want to say on this?
>> Yeah, please go check us out on YouTube. Rack up those views for us. We love to see it. And then subscribe. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube as well.
>> And I relentlessly refresh the YouTube comments because it dictates my mental health for the day. So, please say something nice about all of us.
>> Thank you, everyone.
>> Thanks, everyone.
>> listening, honestly.