Welcome to the latest episode of “Osom To Know”! In this session, our host Maciej Nowak, is joined by the David Sinton, co-founder of Quiet Owls, a digital growth agency specializing in the direct-to-consumer space.

➡️ As a co-founder of Quiet Owl Marketing, he helps businesses demystify their digital marketing channels and build a growth engine that they understand and control. With over 20 years of experience in the online marketing industry, he has developed and implemented sustainable growth strategies for clients across various sectors and niches, including financial research, e-commerce, B2B SaaS, and education.

Together, they dive into the impact of AI on ecommerce marketing to the pitfalls of solely focusing on remarketing campaigns. The conversation sheds light on the critical need for brands to broaden their keyword strategies and craft educational landing pages to attract and retain customers.
We explore the surprising results of testing free shipping thresholds, the drawbacks of AI-generated content, and the strategy of lengthening the buyer’s journey to inspire and educate potential buyers. With engaging examples and keen insights, this compelling discussion promises to leave you with a fresh perspective on marketing and ecommerce.

Maciej Nowak [00:00:00]:
Hello, everyone. My name is Maciej Nowak, and welcome to the “Osom to Know” podcast where we discuss all things purpose. My today’s guest is David Sinton, co-founder of Quiet Owls, a digital growth agency specializing in the direct-to-consumer space. I have a feeling that there’s a lot of actionable knowledge in this episode for you to test on your ecommerce platforms. In this episode, we talk about some concepts that are not your typical first choice when thinking about optimizing conversion rates. For example, making the buyer journey longer, not shorter. Crazy. Right? And interesting too.

Maciej Nowak [00:00:32]:
We also couldn’t avoid AI topic and the impact it has on content creation. If you don’t want to miss new episodes and keep learning about WordPress, please subscribe to our newsletter at osmostudio.com/newsletter. This is osmostudio.com/newsletter. If you watch this on YouTube, give us a thumb and subscribe to the channel. This means a word to us. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with David Sinton.

Lector [00:01:08]:
Hey, everyone. It’s good to have you here. We’re glad you decided to tune in for this episode of the Osom to Know podcast.

Maciej Nowak [00:01:16]:
It will be a little bit different than other episodes I have recorded with people from WordPress space and so on, because I reached out to you to discuss some of the aspects that are related to, for example, having a WooCommerce store, if you are running a WooCommerce store. I wanted to, ask you some questions regarding how I can have my life maybe easier, or how can I make my revenue higher, or how can I be more successful at running my ecommerce platform? So, yeah, that’s that’s that’s the thing for today. A question I would like to ask us, like, in introduction would be what are, some unconventional strategies, or approaches for marketing and working with e commerce platforms? Something off the beaten track, like, you know, more performance, better performance, better checkout process. You know, it’s it’s very popular. But what is something less popular as a strategy for, working with e commerce in terms of marketing that you can think of?

David Sinton [00:02:25]:
Yeah. It’s a really great question because I feel like everyone’s talking about optimizing that path to purchase. How can they make it as efficient as possible? How can they reduce the number of clicks? How can they get to the product faster, get to checkout faster, purchase faster. And our agency has taken a very different approach with this, because what we’ve seen is the gap that comes from that is people forget to introduce the value of their brand. They’re in such a hurry to push a purchase through that they forget that non brand visitors to the site, people that are not yet familiar with the company that’s selling the products. Those people, they need some education, they need some inspiration on why they should care about that brand. And if everything has been optimized around brand visitors who already know the product, already know the company and are coming back to purchase, If you’ve done such a good job optimizing that path to purchase, that it’s so fast and so quick, you often forget to warm up those non brand customers. And what you end up with is a a growth engine that’s focused on converting people that already know about you, that you end up spending money on people that we’re going to purchase from you anyway, and optimizing your website around people that we’re going to purchase anyway to make it easy for them.

David Sinton [00:04:04]:
And your marketing is not attracting new eyeballs. It’s not attracting new customers, and it’s not performing the way you want it to. So our agencies, you know, been experimenting, running tests on how can we slow it down? How can we go in the opposite direction? Take more time to inspire, educate, nurture, make buying a longer journey, a longer process, and measure that properly, and then validate that that’s actually bringing new people into the brand.

Maciej Nowak [00:04:33]:
It sounds really counterintuitive. Can you give for our listeners, can you give some example or of, like, how to grasp that such well optimized funnel for going straight to purchase? What are the factors that are obvious when you are seeing this, as, you know, as an example of a shop that is constructed construed in in such a way?

David Sinton [00:04:58]:
You know, it actually starts even outside the website. So when we audit, Facebook accounts for prospects, we often see a huge portion of their spend is being spent on product focused ads. So just an image of a product, here’s the price, buy now. It it’s often includes what we call dynamic remarketing, where it’s actually just ads based on your product feed, where it’s just showing an image of the product, the price, and a link to buy it. And you follow that link, it takes you straight to the product page where the streamline checkout, very little information why you would want this product or the brand that’s carrying this product or the history behind it. It’s focused on price, add to cart, buy it now, get it now, one click checkout.

Maciej Nowak [00:05:54]:
I’m think when I’m hearing this, I’m thinking about, for example, a a a shop which sells a product that is, you know, it’s not like a brand shop, but rather a shop that is selling product that is, you know, available in multiple platforms. And the focus is just to push that product. And, you know, no matter what because we don’t have any brand, there is that product of some, you know, other, you know, known brand. And these guys did all of the education around the brand, and we are just pushing the product. So do I get this right?

David Sinton [00:06:24]:
You got that right, except that to assume that the brand is doing the education is also a missed opportunity. In cases like that, you know, we have a client that sells scuba gear and he’s carries scuba diving gear across multiple brands. And the opportunity there is not to try and compete on price and efficiency, it’s to compete on education. So why would you pick this scuba mask over a different scuba mask? Why would you pick these fins over those those fins? Why would you pick this dive computer over that dive computer? What are the benefits? Who is it for? Which conditions does it perform the best in? All that education for the consumer is once gonna have them trust that company and be like, I wanna buy from them. It’s not just about price. It’s not just about how fast checkout is. It’s the education that comes along with it can be what differentiates you from competitors.

Maciej Nowak [00:07:28]:
Alright. Alright. Makes sense. Thank you. And so we can now get back into, you know, making that path longer, not rushing to the checkout. So I have a feeling that, you know, it’s a piece of advice. I’d here shorten the path, you know, remove that stuff. Right? So in what situation would that work, and how would that work?

David Sinton [00:07:47]:
That’s a great question. So I think starting with the easiest way to to look at it is with paid social. So if you look at your your Facebook ads account, and most of your ad spend is going towards dynamic remarketing, product focused marketing, try linking to a category page, try having video and other content rather than linking to an individual product linked to a category page. You’re moving up one level and run that as a test. If you’re already doing that and you’re linking to category pages and letting people peruse various products within that category after educating them on Facebook, why they should care about the product. One of the tests we actually ran that really surprised us when we ran it as a split test was directing, and this applied to paid social and, paid search traffic. So if you’ve got keyword traffic, give me, give me a product category, give me an example and I’ll I’ll

Maciej Nowak [00:08:53]:
Running shoes.

David Sinton [00:08:54]:
Perfect. So you’re searching online for running shoes rather than taking people to a category page, which is just 20 different brands of running shoes, different colors, different styles, different prices, with sort and filter on the left, maybe by price or size or or style. You might consider running a split test where half the traffic you send it to a educational lifestyle page of, like, how to buy running shoes, how to pick your next pair of running shoes That really breaks that out into, you know, are you caring most about or how are you running? Are you a trail runner? Are you a road runner? Do you need waterproof? How important is it to be crazy light? How advanced of a runner are you? How much ankle support do you need? These are all the topics that could be educational that lead people into the shopping experience more gently with beautiful photography, storytelling, etcetera, that warm that audience up, feel like they’re gaining value even before they start shopping. We’ve run tests like that for ecommerce brands, and maybe running shoes is not the best example because maybe people are already educated and everyone’s doing that. Other categories, this same philosophy might work even better for, and that’s why I’d encourage it to be a split test. But what we’ve seen with a lot of clients is that longer journey where you’re not just dropping them into products and pricing, but why they should care about the brand. You know, telling more of the story, providing more education actually led to higher dollar per visitor outcomes, that it was more efficient.

Maciej Nowak [00:10:56]:
So would you say that that education won the client over for that particular brand or, like, spark that, you know, urge to buy. Let’s say it’s my theory. So there were 2 scenarios. This person wasn’t 100%, willing to purchase, and that education spark that purchase, like, triggered that purchase. That this was that missing element, or the brand won over that client against other brands. Let’s say that was let’s say competing for the same within the same product, category.

David Sinton [00:11:38]:
So I think what I’m hearing you the distinction you’re you’re helping me make is the difference between a brand and how they would use this versus a reseller. And I and I think each case would have to be evaluated differently. I think in most cases we’re dealing with brands, not resellers. Most of our clients are brands, not resellers, and we’re helping them provide that inspiration and education for why you should care about this brand over another brand. So that’s the use case I’m most familiar with, But we do have clients that are also resellers. And I think the difference is with a reseller, it’s more about educating the client on why they should pick which brand over another brand, or why they should pick this type of product over another type of product. It’s like, it’s more education that you’re adding value in the buying journey by giving them knowledge. I think with, with a brand, it’s more inspiration.

David Sinton [00:12:48]:
It’s less about technical education. It’s more why you should care about this brand over any other brand. And that might be more of the storytelling behind what went into the product design, why it’s different from other product designs, its competitive advantage, things like that, where it’s less technical education about that field that they’re in and more why this brand or this product is superior.

Maciej Nowak [00:13:19]:
You know, in your example, it all starts with the marketing, like, ads, for for example. So you can direct ads at the product, then fast checkout, or you can direct the ads as Splitt. So, obviously, to check, you know, if there’s a good idea, on the education pages. We we brought up that, reseller. And if you have big enough brand which has resellers, this has to be partly beneficial for for for the whole channel. Right? Because the brand is doing the education for the mass market from which the resellers will benefit because the education was done by the central, like, headquarters, let’s say. Right?

David Sinton [00:14:02]:
Well, I mean, you you triggered a thought for me is it’s not that all traffic needs to be funneled through this long buying journey or educational landing page or inspirational landing page. There’s a place there’s a time and place for both. So if you’re running, for example, shopping ads on Google and you have a product feed, you’re going straight to product pages and it’s how can you optimize a product page and you’re running tests on your product page. Where we’ve seen value with the long form educational pages, lifestyle pages, etcetera, is opening up search keywords. So we see this again and again when we audit accounts. The bulk of the money is being spent on shopping campaigns where they don’t really control keywords. It’s just a product feed and you’re putting money behind that product feed and it’s optimizing around products that are converting, but you don’t have as much control, and it’s all bottom of the funnel focused. People love that, the metrics look good, that’s why they lean into it, but they often neglect search advertising.

David Sinton [00:15:17]:
And search advertising it’s it’s typically broader keywords. So for example, if you search for Nike men’s size 12 running shoes, it’s more likely to pick a shopping ad at the top of your experience. You’re more likely to click one of those. You already know you want Nike. You already know what size. You already know what you’re looking for. You’re gonna come to a product page and you’re gonna check out. But if you’re just searching for best men’s running shoes, that’s the type of keyword where you’re more likely to click on a search ad, and you’re looking for that education.

David Sinton [00:15:55]:
You’re looking for that inspiration. You’re looking for the reviews. You’re looking for something that’s gonna help educate you on which brand you should pick and why. Yeah.

Maciej Nowak [00:16:03]:
You are indicating that you are much earlier in the journey because you don’t know what you want to buy.

David Sinton [00:16:08]:
Exactly. And it’s in those cases where if you try pointing keywords like men’s running shoes to a category page that just lists pictures of running shoes with prices, and they don’t know what to pick and why versus taking them to a page that’s gonna educate them on the best running shoes. Typically the page that’s gonna educate them on the best running shoes will outperform just a shopping category page for the tests and brands that we’ve run. I mean, it obviously varies brand to brand and it’s something you need to test, but that has been one of the things we’ve unlocked with a longer, more deliberate buying journey.

Maciej Nowak [00:16:48]:
Based on the very broad query intended for education of the user, you’re you’re directing that person into a category page. This seems like a clear mistake on on the shop side.

David Sinton [00:17:02]:
It and it’s easy to call it a mistake and point the finger. The reality is it’s a lot of work to create these long form education. It requires content. It requires thought. It and it requires testing to validate that it works versus, hey. I have the category page for men’s running shoes. They’re searching for men’s running shoes. It’s WooCommerce.

David Sinton [00:17:23]:
Right? You’ve got these category pages, drop them there and see what happens. It’s very easy and quick to test that. It’s very hard to create the content landing page and lead people into the shopping experience. It requires a lot of thought and and testing.

Maciej Nowak [00:17:41]:
Since we started talking about content, there are platforms or tools that let you, for example, generate 800 blog posts on given keywords, for example. So there is more and more, ways to massively saturate your website with extremely cheap content. So how then you will be, you know, like, managing that quality of content to make this still relevant for the customer?

David Sinton [00:18:11]:
It’s such a good question, and everyone’s talking about it right now. And I’ve it’s very polarized. Right? You have people who swear it’s it’s the future, it’s changing everything. And if you’re not on that train, you’re falling behind. And then on the opposite side, you have people questioning the quality of it. Personally, I’m on the the side that’s questioning the quality of it. I feel like it is producing content to sound like everyone else. I mean, it’s basing its writing on everything else to sound like everything else.

David Sinton [00:18:49]:
So if if you want your brand to fit in, to pass the sniff test, to look like everyone else, because you feel you’re a you’re just getting started. You have nothing. You’re starting from nowhere, and nobody’s heard about you, and you want to look credible, you want to look like all the other big brands in your space. Maybe it’s an exciting way to get started. Maybe it’s a way to get content when you don’t have the resources to produce content. The reason I don’t like it is the brands that do well are the ones that have a vision, that are unique, that have a way to connect to humans in a unique way that people will care about. I mean, that’s what building a brand is, is making people care about your vision of your company, your products, and how it can help people. If you’re just spitting out content to sound like everyone else, you’re gonna look like everyone else, and there’s gonna be no reason to really care about why you should buy from this company or brand.

David Sinton [00:19:57]:
So I I think it it’s a poison pill. It’s sugar coated. It looks really appealing. It’s a quick way to get content. It’s a quick way to get something when you have nothing. I think it’s okay for research, but I think in terms of actually using it to generate content, yeah, I think it’s very, very dangerous.

Maciej Nowak [00:20:17]:
Mhmm. I will play the devil’s advocate for for for a second. But, you know, when you are eating a lot of sugar, you’re exploding as well. Right? But, you know, maybe this is worth the effort and worth the risk if you are producing massively, like, you know, wonderful results. I’m not saying it’s the case, but, you know, just for the sake of discussion.

David Sinton [00:20:41]:
I I’ve seen accounts where they’ve used this for SEO and the marketing department is incredibly confident that they’re crushing it using AI to generate content. And when I went to audit those accounts, what I found was a lot of traffic coming from Google that they the AI had followed through on its promise. It was generating pages and pages of content that was ranking well on Google. And it inflated all of their traffic metrics that if you were analyzing this company’s performance from a traffic perspective, they’d hit a home run with this. Unfortunately, none of it was converting. That this was traffic. It came, it looked, it skimmed, it bounced. And now they were desperately trying to figure out, well, what could they do to those landing pages to have them still rank well, but have them convert? And so now they were having to put attention on

Maciej Nowak [00:21:45]:
that. Building on what you said, have you already developed that mental filter when you are seeing when you are browsing or reading some blog posts, you see the blog post cover they meet, or you scroll through Google. Sorry. Not Google. YouTube. I have a 7 month old baby. So when I’m scrolling for baby music, for sleeping, or whatever, I see those covers. I immediately feel this is super fake even though, you know, I know how this was generated.

David Sinton [00:22:20]:
I think it even applies to music too. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but so much of this music that’s being put out made with AI, made with computers, etcetera, it follows formulas. And it might sound appealing at first because it’s programmed to sound appealing. But if you listen to that that music for any length of time, it can just feel like it’s eating at your brain. I mean, there’s no variety. It’s almost the the inherent flaws with human creativity and how we produce stuff is what makes it enjoyable and beneficial in the long term. And I I feel like the same is true for written content. It’s that honest, authentic human content with its flaws built in, with its spelling mistakes built in, is going to become more and more desirable.

David Sinton [00:23:22]:
Because we’re gonna get so sick of the perfect formula based written content that’s designed to sound appealing, but lacks anything original.

Maciej Nowak [00:23:34]:
Do you have a feeling that people are getting, like fed up with this, kind of generated content?

David Sinton [00:23:42]:
See, I think it’s annoying, but I also think it’s absolutely perfect that it’s happening now. Because even before we had AI content, there was this focus on quantity of content over quality of content. And people were just putting out content that was not very well thought out. And I think now that we have a way to have as much garbage content as you could possibly hope for, People are gonna start prioritizing quality over quantity. And I think it’s gonna have the opposite effect that everyone thought it would, is I think people are gonna get sick of it and they’re gonna start craving quality over everything else. And I think that’s gonna change the Internet for the better. That yes, you’ll always have all this noise. You’ll always have all this garbage content out there, But as humans, we’re gonna increasingly prioritize quality.

David Sinton [00:24:43]:
Now that we have unlimited quantity of high calorie, low nutrition content.

Maciej Nowak [00:24:52]:
Let’s get back to that lengthening the the buyer journey. So we touched on the content a little bit. So, again, speaking of content, you know, how, you know, how how this content can manifest? You know, you mentioned videos. You mentioned blog posts. How can you, like, think of a strategy for that content that will be intentionally created for, you know, helping make that buyer journey a little bit longer when where necessary, let’s say.

David Sinton [00:25:30]:
Let’s start with the brand. So there’s 2 sides to examine. There’s the paid social side, and then there’s the the paid search side for those are the 2 biggest levers for pulling people into your website directly. I would say start with the paid search side because it’ll it’ll get you started the easiest because it will give you topics to start with. So typically if it was a brand I would be looking at, okay, what are the product categories they serve? What industry are they in? And how does those connect with keywords? And so I would be looking at at their keywords. I’d be looking at competitor keywords, and I’d be looking for not the hyper specific low volume long tail keywords, but the short tail broad keywords. The keywords that seemed too big, too broad to spend real money on because we never were able to see performance from them in the past. And I would be looking for those categories and be thinking, okay.

Maciej Nowak [00:26:45]:
Why? May I ask, you know, sorry for interrupting, but why more traffic to to to to to Estelle?

David Sinton [00:26:53]:
Why would I start with, the broader high volume keywords? Because there’s a number of reasons. 1, you’re probably already converting well with your product detail pages on the long tail hyper specific. They already know exactly what they’re looking for. But also the volume on those is gonna be small. So if you’re gonna go to this trouble of validating a longer buying journey, setting up a landing page, writing the content, this is a big project. And I think you wanna do it on something that has has significant volume behind it so that it becomes a very real growth lever for your business. So again, if you’re you’re selling if you’re if you’re a brand selling men’s running shoes, look for those keywords like men’s running shoes that are gonna have 100 of thousands of search queries a a month versus the hyper specific men’s size 12 waterproof trail running shoes. Probably your product page can compete on something like that.

David Sinton [00:28:03]:
But if you’re wanting to compete on the broader men’s running shoes, likely just dropping them to a category page is not going to work, and you’re gonna find that those search queries have not been profitable for you in the past because they were too broad, and you didn’t have a way to connect them to your brand.

Maciej Nowak [00:28:24]:
Alright. So we are we are thinking about, keywords that are too broad to be well converting just directed on a category page. Exactly. Unsuitable for that category page.

David Sinton [00:28:37]:
Exactly. And then you’re thinking, okay, well, if I can unlock this keyword and I can make this keyword profitable for my business, this is a significant growth lever for you because it has real volume behind it. And it’s converting people that weren’t familiar with your brand. And then the biggest trap brands fall into with marketing is they end up spending their the bulk of their budget protecting their brand, advertising on their brand terms. So what that means is most of their budget on social is going towards remarketing. Most of their budget on search is going towards smart shopping campaigns that are optimized around people that already were shopping for that brand or brand keywords that they’re already searching for that brand by name. And so if you have a $100,000 a month ad budget and $80,000 of it is going towards your own brand and your own customers, you’re only spending 20,000 trying to grow your brand and bringing new eyeballs in. That’s not a good growth engine.

David Sinton [00:29:38]:
That’s not a healthy growth engine. It might look amazing in your Google Analytics. You know, your return on ad spend looks so incredible, but in terms of what it’s actually doing for the company, very little. And that’s what we’re trying to move away from with this longer buying journey is, okay. How can we bring new eyeballs into the brand?

Maciej Nowak [00:29:57]:
Because, that’s traffic as for that brand you mentioned, for the AI, it’s all vanity metrics that there is a huge traffic, very little money, like, dropping from that traffic.

David Sinton [00:30:11]:
So this this longer, broader keyword terms, if you can unlock these, these are gonna be new eyeballs. They’re not gonna be they’re gonna be new to brand customers. It’s gonna be incremental revenue for the company. But it’s also gonna require you to get your story, your pitch, your content super dialed in, which is gonna help the rest of your business as well. And so this is where kind of this was the founding principle of how our agency was founded around this, was using marketing to learn about your customer and how to align your brand with your customers. This becomes a test and learn. What do customers actually care about? You take a broad term like men’s running shoes. You can start testing on your landing page.

David Sinton [00:31:06]:
What is actually gonna influence people to care about your brand? Is it technical information about your running shoes and why they’re different from other running shoes? Is it inspirational stuff? Is it, you know, beautiful lifestyle pictures and and having people fantasize about that lifestyle and breaking into it that’s gonna have the difference? Is it the style of the running shoes and beautiful images and close-up, you know, design features? You can start to use this landing page to test and to learn. Well, what is it that’s gonna make the difference? Once you take that learning and you’ve you’ve discovered that it’s it’s the photography and the design features over the education or technical features. You can take that learning and you can apply it to paid social. You can apply it to your homepage. You can apply it to the rest of your brand. But it it becomes this learning tool where, okay, we have a new audience. We know they’re interested in men’s running shoes. How can we position ourselves in the best way to convert those people into brand loyal customers? So then I would look, you know, what are other brands doing? What, you know, I try and get a runner, or a number of runners do run user tests on what they care about, how they shop for shoes, Those platforms that we use, user testing is one you may have heard of, where you actually can recruit your target customer and define who is your target customer that you’re going after.

David Sinton [00:32:50]:
They will recruit those users for you and have them participate in a 30 minute recorded test of your website, of your landing page, of your competitors landing pages. And you’ll actually get to watch a video of, like, them sharing their thoughts about messaging, product images, you know, ease of navigation, you know, what they care about when they’re buying a pair of running shoes. Like, you can run these tests to get ideas for what your landing page needs to be, what the points it needs to address. And then wireframe design, write the copy for those those problems, and then run it as a test. You know, you you send half of the traffic to one experience and half to another and start to learn which one is is driving the engagement that you’re hoping for.

Maciej Nowak [00:33:44]:
Always there is the question of how much traffic do you need to have any kind of, you know, significant results and just not, you know, random results because of whatever there is. Yeah. So this is, you know, from like, statistics perspective, this is very, you know to have, like, very proper results, you would have to have this done super, super, you know, with super big numbers and a very sophisticated, you know, math. So we don’t have that stuff, you know, when running tests and, how to deal with that.

David Sinton [00:34:20]:
That that also ties into taking a long view as opposed to being shortsighted. I think it’s very common when people do split testing to jump to a conclusion very quickly. Oh, this one’s winning, it’s leaning in the right direction, end the test, it’s working. And I think you want you want at least 95% statistical significance. So we use a statistical significance calculator, and you can plug in your your metrics for, you know, how many people you drove to the site, how many conversions you’ve got for each experience, and it will tell you with what degree of certainty one is a winner over the other. And I think you want 95% confidence, but you also want to run the test for a minimum of 2 weeks. We’ve gotten excited. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve run AV tests, gotten crazy excited about the results in the 1st week.

David Sinton [00:35:17]:
It’s winning with even 98% confidence, but it’s 12 conversions to 3 conversions. And the test is absolutely certain the one with 12 conversions is winning. And then we’re like, no. No. Wait. Be patient. Let it run. And by the time you get up to a 100, 200 conversions, they’re much closer or the one that was losing is now the one that’s winning.

David Sinton [00:35:42]:
And don’t make that novice mistake of ending tests early because you’re excited about the results and you wanna push the one that you like live as quickly as possible.

Maciej Nowak [00:35:53]:
Yeah. Exactly. Because this sounds super exciting, and it’s totally insignificant because you are too early in the test to tell, to tell because you know that the number of, results will be in 100 instead of 1,000, and this changes everything. Alright? This is this is super interesting. I thought that this would be less interesting when you mentioned the extending the, the path, and we, jumped into AI and and and talked about content.

David Sinton [00:36:25]:
There’s one other way extending the path that we haven’t covered. We’ve been we’ve been talking landing pages primarily. What we’re running now for a number of clients is outperforming anything we’ve done on landing pages. And it actually ties in with some of the challenges people have with measurement right now with 3rd party cookies not having the lifespan that they used to have, tracking not working the way it used to, attribution getting far more murky. One of the solutions we’ve come to use to get around that is to use email addresses as the link to attribution. And what I mean by that is, you know, someone clicks an ad on Facebook to your website, they follow that link, the cookie drops, They spend time on the website. They look at the brand. They read educational content.

David Sinton [00:37:24]:
They watch the videos, and then they leave and they they come back a couple of days later, or they leave looking for a coupon. They come back from a Google ad. Maybe they may end up making the purchase 2 to 3 days later because they’re looking for a deal. Your cookie based tracking, your cookie based attribution is gonna fall apart in those scenarios. You know, there’s people looking to do there’s people doing, like triple whale is making all of that first party cookie. It helps some, but it’s still not perfect. And so our way around this for a lot of brands has been, let’s use email as the stitch. So rather than relying on cookies, let’s capture an email as soon as we can in the buying journey, and then make sure we track where that email came from, which campaign it came from.

David Sinton [00:38:21]:
And in a lot of cases, we’re even able to capture emails directly on social platforms. And so this goes with that longer buying journey. If you’re a brand and there’s room for education, so we have a mountain bike parts brand. I’m gonna use that as a, as the hypothetical example. They produced a beautiful guide on how to upgrade your mountain bike. They sell upgraded parts for mountain bikes, and they put together this just incredible guide of not only how to upgrade your mountain bike, but it had riding tips, really a a gem of a piece. And then they have this video promoting that. Those ads are working phenomenally well at generating growth in their email list, but we’re also able to validate that that growth turns into revenue because we’re able to track it all the way through, and we have that data coming out of the email nurture program.

David Sinton [00:39:24]:
And so again, that’s the longer buying journey where it doesn’t even require a landing page, but it requires something of value that someone would give their email address for.

Maciej Nowak [00:39:37]:
I love it. I love it. So the path is the user the user downloads the guide, leaving the email, and this is starting the cookie. And then

David Sinton [00:39:50]:
Not even the cookie. The the email address when it comes in shows that it came in from a certain Facebook campaign. And then But

Maciej Nowak [00:40:02]:
may I prod you on this? Because I’m wondering, you know, how that email is transferred from, you know, where it start, which is, you know, landing or back end of the of the store when the user has downloaded the

David Sinton [00:40:16]:
it’s right on Facebook. So there’s there’s a Facebook ad format where you have a video, it’s promoting buying this, downloading this guide. You click on the ad and without leaving Facebook, it takes you to a form that’s prefilled out for you with your email address and name. You click submit. Yes. I want the guide. That email goes straight from Facebook into Klaviyo, Mailchimp, whatever you’re using with a tag that says where it came from.

Maciej Nowak [00:40:45]:
Okay. Okay. Makes sense. Makes sense. So no I like this example very much.

David Sinton [00:40:50]:
No cookies needed. No cookies needed.

Maciej Nowak [00:40:53]:
I guess this is a little bit easier on the GDPR, I guess, at least. But on the other hand, you have to store the you have to store the email. So, not so much, maybe. Not so much. But I love the idea. This is, I have a feeling this gives you like, a huge confidence in the attribution of the, of the at the end of the day, the purchase.

David Sinton [00:41:14]:
Exactly. And we we’ve tested this across 6 brands now that we’re doing this. And and seen a range from 40¢ an email up to $2 an email in advertising costs to acquire an email with the expectation that the email quality was not gonna be great. I mean, a lot of people think, oh, the the emails you collect on Facebook are terrible. They’re not gonna perform. We actually saw the opposite. Now if you’re doing a giveaway or you’re doing a discount or a coupon, expect your emails are gonna not perform as well because everyone and anyone will sign up for that. But if you’re giving away an educational piece, a course, a content, a guide, a book, and it’s it’s promoted correctly, those people we’ve seen actually engage incredibly well in the email list and and do end up converting.

Maciej Nowak [00:42:17]:
Mhmm. And I have a feeling this would work very well for the consumer consumer brands. And for b to b to b, Facebook wouldn’t be the, like, medium of or the first choice. Right? I’m thinking, is there any other tactic that you would like to point something counterintuitive, maybe?

David Sinton [00:42:38]:
Yeah. Should we talk ship Should? Should we talk shipping?

Maciej Nowak [00:42:43]:
That’s perfect.

David Sinton [00:42:46]:
So if if this has come about from ongoing discussions with brands on how much they should be charging for shipping. That they don’t wanna be losing money on shipping. You know, we’re often saying, oh, but conversion rates will be so much better if you lower your shipping costs. And it can become as an agency, I can say it can become a time suck having these ongoing discussions. And one of the solutions we found to that is to actually start testing different free shipping thresholds or shipping prices, right on the website. And it So

Maciej Nowak [00:43:33]:
not only testing landing pages, testing, you know, button colors, also testing the prices of

David Sinton [00:43:40]:
of

Maciej Nowak [00:43:40]:
shipping of thresholds for the free shipping. Okay.

David Sinton [00:43:43]:
Yeah. And there’s some really great tools for this. I haven’t used any for WooCommerce yet, but on Shopify, there’s a there’s an AB testing tool that we’ve used called ShipScout. And it it’s a a tool that allows you to to run a split test on free shipping thresholds. You know, do you wanna spend in the US $50, I guess, where you are €50 and get free shipping, or do you wanna make people spend at least a 100 to get free shipping? Running a test like that, you know, our our first pathway into doing this type of testing was, oh, let’s just have a banner on the site and offer that, or let’s have a pop up on the site like, hey, would you like a free shipping offer? Spend $50 give us your email address, sign up for this and we’ll give you the coupon for it. We found that that was not very effective at properly testing that. That if you want to really understand how shipping costs are impacting conversion rates, you need to run it as a purely random split test, not just a banner promotion, not just a highlight on the product detail page, but actual logic in the checkout. That for some people they’ll see it one way and the other people they’ll see it another.

David Sinton [00:45:13]:
And, you know, we expected free shipping to be the winner and it it the results have varied client to client, brand to brand. That for some brands, particularly if they have a very brand loyal audience, Free shipping was much less of a factor that they were loyal. They were gonna buy it anyway, and actually collecting a little bit of money for shipping was more profitable for them, that they should be charging money for shipping. For brands that maybe don’t have as much of a loyal audience and they’re driving more new eyeballs to the brand, a higher percentage of the traffic is new to brand visitors. Free shipping is almost a must in order to get the conversion. The conversion rates were were substantially better. So it it’s starting to test and understand and learn about your consumer and your visitor, has been really eye opening for our agency. And a great way to kind of end that debate of how much should we be charging for shipping, because it can just turn into an emotional debate very quickly.

Maciej Nowak [00:46:24]:
Yeah. And then you, you know, after those AB tests, you can produce results and say, this is this is our way.

David Sinton [00:46:29]:
Yeah. This is how much money you’re making or losing based on your shipping rules.

Maciej Nowak [00:46:34]:
I have never heard about such a strategy that, you know, you can you can you can test those thresholds. And I I I think that, those small amounts for or maybe not not small at all, but those small amounts, for shipping can be for some businesses, can be the size of the whole margin on the whole basket sometimes. You know? If if this is not, not very, you know, expensive item or if if the margin are razor thin. So that shipping cost can be, you know, making that business break even or not. Was there anything that surprised you during those shipping tests that you would say this is this is totally not what I expected, for example?

David Sinton [00:47:22]:
I think there was the case with the brand that had a lot of brand loyal visitors. That actually lowering the free shipping threshold didn’t actually make them that much more money or improve conversion rates that much. And that the the AB test more or less concluded that they should be they should be charging something for shipping. And that, you know, we we’ve seen in the past, it’s mostly the opposite that, you know, you give people a choice between a percent off or free shipping, and it’s quite often as a as a as a split test, it’s free shipping that improves conversion rates more. It’s like and this could be different in Europe too. I you know, it’s probably it varies place to place. It varies brand to brand. But most of the tests I’ve done previously were indications that the consumers really didn’t like having to pay for shipping.

David Sinton [00:48:34]:
And then if you removed that shipping cost, conversion rates went up. But the thing that was counterintuitive to us is, if it’s a brand that someone knows they’re going to buy anyway, that you can that charging for shipping, in that case, actually made the brand more money.

Maciej Nowak [00:48:57]:
We talked a little bit about AI and generative stuff. So I’m thinking about these ideas that are happening and, are, for example, are emerging as a new trend in, ecommerce marketing, for example? Anything that you’d point to?

David Sinton [00:49:14]:
A thought provoking question. So what we’re seeing more and more is the shift to using AI, not just for content generation, but for campaign optimization. And what that looks like for Google is the smart campaigns, p max campaigns is the latest evolution of this, where you you don’t even pick keywords. You enter in your website. Google will create the campaign. You set the budget, you enter in your website. Google will pick the keywords, it will write the ad copy, maybe you upload some videos that you wanna use as ads, and you don’t even choose whether you want it to be shopping, whether you want it to be search, whether you want it to be display. It’s fully automated on autopilot.

David Sinton [00:50:07]:
Google controls everything for you, and they’re using their AI to optimize it.

Maciej Nowak [00:50:12]:
Scary. Especially scary. Or And and yet Let’s turn it

David Sinton [00:50:17]:
Yeah. And yet it’s showing incredible results in platform. So it’s very appealing to to brands because all of a sudden, they don’t need their agency anymore.

Maciej Nowak [00:50:30]:
This is number 1 scary that I wanted to turn into a question.

David Sinton [00:50:34]:
I’m actually looking at it not from the perspective again, it’s kind of like it’s gonna backfire the same way that AI for content is gonna backfire, in my opinion. In the same way people are getting sick of garbage content with this AI produced content, and they’re looking for something more authentic, more real, and it’s increasing the value of the real content. I think the same thing is happening with with Google’s play to push people into Pmax campaigns, that it’s gonna actually make people care about their agency even more. Because the people that take that poison pill and a lot of people have, they realize they’ve handed over their keys to Google and Google does not have their best interest at heart. Google cares about one thing only, and that is Google making more money. And so they’ve discovered that if they can make their performance max campaigns look better, then companies will spend more money. So they found very good ways of calculating attribution, of targeting people that were going to buy anyway to make their dashboards look better. And so it worked.

David Sinton [00:51:52]:
In the short term, it worked. Companies swallowed the poison pill. They spent more and more money with Google. They got really excited about how well Performance Max was doing. And then at a certain point, CFOs start looking at, okay, you’re saying these campaigns are working really well, that we don’t need our agency anymore, that Google can run everything on autopilot, but our business isn’t doing well. Our bottom line doesn’t reflect all the things you’re saying Google is showing in their dashboard because it it’s an illusion. It’s not real. And I think that’s the that’s happening everywhere.

David Sinton [00:52:37]:
It’s not just with Google. It’s happening with Facebook. It’s happening across all the platforms. And the thing to be aware of is when control is being taken away, you need to start questioning why. And it’s often being taken away with bait. It’s here’s something that we can do for you that you don’t have to do anymore. We can make this look better than it ever looked better in the past. We can promise performance that you never could unlock in the past.

David Sinton [00:53:10]:
We can do all the creative for you that you never had to do. Every time you’re taking the easy path, the path of least resistance, the path of least work, but sacrificing control, I think it’s potentially a mistake. And I think it’s the thing I would encourage brands to be most alert about, most aware of with this evolution of AI is not to lose track of not to lose control over the direction of your brand and where it’s going and how you’re marketing it. Not to just turn over to comfort and ease and simplicity of letting AI do it for you.

Maciej Nowak [00:53:55]:
This is this is very interesting insight, one I wasn’t expecting and, you know, this is very interesting, because of it. I can make a comment that the whole Google ecosystem is an ecosystem that you have to trust, produces correct results. You have no way of very no way or very little no way of verifying, you know, what happens behind the scenes, you know, because behind the scenes is not for you. And you only rely on results that are presented to you that you have little knowledge about the traffic that is coming, to your website because you generated the the that paid traffic, you have very little knowledge. And unless you really tie that, for example, with that idea for tying the campaign via email address, You know, this is something that is a trail that you are leaving, to, like, those bread crumbs until they were they’ve been eaten. So but there

David Sinton [00:55:02]:
You can validate, but not with the direction Google’s going. And so if you decline Google’s recommendations, and they actually penalize us as an agency for doing this, it’s like, we get rewarded as an agency by convincing clients to shift to Performance Max. You know, they will give us all these reward points and gifts and agency like, the one thing to look for is if an agency has this stamp of being a, top tier agency in Google’s eyes, it’s more than likely to win that that stamp of approval from Google. You have to be recommending that all your customers be on performance max. But you can decline that. You can take control back and you can validate the Google traffic. You there is still enough tracking today. And if you set up measurement properly, you can validate the power of Google.

David Sinton [00:56:06]:
It’s not completely a black box. But to be aware and to fight back, because I think if all brands just continue to to roll with the performance max campaigns, what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna actually just remove your ability to have manual campaigns in the future. If if enough people comply with the direction they want of having complete control.

Maciej Nowak [00:56:31]:
With a critical mass gained.

David Sinton [00:56:33]:
Yeah. And and so I think it it it’s really important for brands to to fight back and to say, no, we’re not doing that. We’re gonna continue to run manual campaigns. We’re not gonna swap it over to Google autopilot. We’re not gonna turn on, that’s the other sneaky thing Google does. There’s a setting that will just turn on sometimes even by itself for auto apply their recommendations. You have to be very deliberate and fight back and turn these off and say, no, you can’t just make changes in our ad account without

Maciej Nowak [00:57:05]:
It’s just a glitch. It’s it’s a glitch.

David Sinton [00:57:10]:
Yeah.

Maciej Nowak [00:57:12]:
Wow. Yeah. This sounds deliberate, you know? Like, you know, all of those, conspiracy theories are coming to my mind. You know, this is one of those, like, those conspiracy theory theories manifest themselves themselves in this way. That there is that little switch.

David Sinton [00:57:35]:
Yeah. Maybe I put a conspiracy nut, but I’ve been watching what’s happening on Google too long. And

Maciej Nowak [00:57:41]:
No. I mean I mean but, you know, if you look long enough, my you know, it it’s easier to see stuff going. But, you know, this is super interesting. Alright. Thank you. Thank you, David, for the conversation. It was, very interesting conversation with unexpected turns, like, for the AI and and the, ominous, ending about Google. It was it was a pleasure for me to, to chat about it.

Maciej Nowak [00:58:10]:
And thank you. And maybe we will have another episode, you know, about other aspects of marketing.

David Sinton [00:58:17]:
Whenever you tell me.

Lector [00:58:18]:
If you like what you’ve just heard, don’t forget to subscribe for more episodes. On the other hand, if you’ve got a question we haven’t answered yet, feel free to reach out to us directly. Just go to osomstudio.com/contact. Thanks for listening, and see you in the next episode of the Osom to Know podcast.