£10M+ E-commerce CRO Tactics with Dylan Ander

0:00If you're the type of brand where statics are usually like just images, like statics are working really well for you, sounds crazy. Literally take your top performing static and make that your hero image.

0:17Dylan, how you doing?

0:20Olly:Can't complain, brother. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, welcome back to DC Diaries, everybody. Just the two of us today, Lucas. Lucas dropped so much sauce on his last episode of storytelling. that he's decided to take a week off and left me to it. But really excited to have Dylan Ander on today from Heatmaps, exited CRO agency founder, turned rapidly growing SaaS entrepreneur, which we're going to get into that journey a bit later on. But I kind of wanted to dive straight into the value and the meat of the episode. We've spent the last six to eight weeks either interviewing founders or talking pretty exclusively around creative and everything pre-click, how to stop attention, how to make great ads, how to get people to cite.

1:08Olly:And we've probably given not enough attention to the other end of the equation or anything beyond that point. So excited to have you on today. Thank you for joining us and excited to dive into some of the meat of the maybe less sexy post-click equation. Hey, man, look, everyone underestimates it. It's the 80-20. I know all these ads people love talking about driving traffic, but if they don't click that buy now button, there's no ROAS. So underrated. CRO has been my competitive differentiator for years, not just the fact of the agency and building heat map, but I actually, less people know that I exited two e-com brands, one in the eight-figure range, one in the mid-sevens, before I even started my CRO agency.

1:56and CRO is always my secret sauce. Like even on dropshipping stores, you make a better lander, you make something else. Everyone's competing for the same ad space. If your lander converts better, you get fed more, you get more signal back to Meta, you get more signal back to Google. Like, you know, everyone's sleeping on it and hopefully I'm glad they're listening and we'll just give nothing but value, no shill today. And, you know, make sure they got their head on straight.

2:21Olly:Love it. Yeah, arguably a bigger swing, right? Those offers, offers obviously the biggest, but even those swings in RPS that you can unlock, and we'll get onto that further on, especially in a world of rising CPM, right? It can change the game for a brand overnight. I kind of wanted to start with a dive into, like, what are the best doing that the rest aren't as a starting point? Obviously, you've got access to a ton of site data, you've got a ton of context. And I always think it's interesting to discuss, like, what are the top 1 % of brands doing that is driving that exponential growth, month-on-month exponential growth that the rest aren't?

3:03Olly:And how can people sort of learn from that? So, yeah, it'd be good to hear about your thoughts on the other side. So there's quite a few. I put out a post about it. It went kind of marketing viral. It was pretty cool. One big trend, and I'm curious if you're doing it with your agency, is the entry page, meaning the landing page. In CRO, we define a landing page not by your long form list, gladvertorial. Your landing page is whatever your entry page is, meaning where you're likely pushing your ads to or your SEO traffic goes, your email traffic goes. Those are your landing pages per channel. The most successful landing page I'm seeing right now is homepage.

3:46These brands that are in that top 1 % are ripping ads to their homepage. That is one that most people don't know about. I always give the analogy of like, you're in a store, right? So you're in a physical store. I don't know if you guys got Walmart across the pond, but if you're walking into a giant Walmart, it's a big box retailer. Even if it's like a small local store and you got like 20, 30 SKUs on both of them, are you going to force someone to enter on a certain area and say, no, you can't go over to these other areas? I understand you're just trying to get that first purchase. You can get them again and again later.

4:25But when they go to the homepage, it's like you're allowing them. It's like someone greeting them saying, hey, what would you like to shop for? I can bring you to that aisle in the physical store. So if you run it to the homepage, they can hit the nav, they can look at certain things they want to look at. If you're pushing them to a certain PDP or collections page, you're assuming that that's what they want. But what happens is I've noticed that as time goes on, and with Heatmap, we have trillions of data points, the pages per session is increasing across the board. So it used to be in the 2016 days when I started, 2014 even, it was like the less clicks, the higher the conversion rate and performance.

5:09Let's fuck conversion rate, but performance. So now people love having the liberty of clicking anywhere they want. They're in charge. They're smart, savvy shoppers that the number of pages they're touching is higher. And those are also higher converting sessions.

5:28Olly:Interesting. I guess you said that in terms of savvy shoppers, that sophistication of buyer online, right? I guess that makes sense. We actually aren't seeing that a huge amount across our client base. We're very UK heavy. I don't know if that's maybe a differentiation. Give it a whirl. Every ads agency I tell this to, they usually message me a month later like, damn, you were right. It's also way higher AOV if you push to the homepage. And that's what I believe it's coming from. Makes a lot of sense. So you asked for the top one percenters. So that's number one. Number two, utilizing landing pages, not just having one landing page that's your winner or your hero landing page and ripping to it, but the people that dupe those, it can all be the same and just change your headline and your hero image.

6:16It's the topic of personalization. There's crazy personalization softwares out there that are dynamic down to the single user. But what I've noticed is just controlled personalization, even just to the smallest degree, is what's happening. So a lot of clients I see too, especially fashion, apparel, not as much accessories, but a lot of things like if you have men and women, that it's both demographics.

6:44Olly:Yeah. Having ads with males and just in your hero image, having a male and maybe changing a word or two, and then having your female one, which is identical with the exception of a female image and maybe a slightly different headline. And if you do those, you'll get crazy results because I don't know about you, but for me, my perspective is that your creative is your ad targeting. But even more, I would say you're just as much. That's only 30 % of your ad targeting. the 70 % of your ad targeting is your landing page that you're sending it to it's the website yeah yeah i think that's that's a huge thing we're seeing right now is that that continuity between pre-click and post-click and even you mentioned on a gender level but even on a persona problem level i think exactly it can be age yeah it can be interests there's so many yeah pain point and then even yeah even age being a big one even like text sizes aligning carousel images to the persona aligning reviews to the pain point that you've mentioned in the creative i think that's like a just a huge unlock if you can replicate that find a winning ad recreate the landing page align it even even like those small tiny changes can unlock a massive improvement in revenue possession and a massive efficiency gain which makes it makes a lot of sense.

8:08And can I, one thing I got to correct you on, sorry, this is that New York love. Never again in your entire professional life, never let anyone in your agency ever say a small or tiny change on the website. I have a database of 4 ,000 split tests we ran at my agency. At least half of those, at least the upper quartile of biggest tests, or just changing a headline or changing an image. So my clients, they were paying 10, 15, 25K a month. And that's a lot. And they're like, what the heck? You're just changing our headline and our hero image? And I'm like, yeah, let's take a look at these results in two weeks.

8:51And boom, an extra million dollars a year. And I'm like, now can you relax? You didn't do this before. So you brought us on and we're getting you the results. So there's no such thing as a small change. So take that out of your vocabulary, brother.

9:06Olly:Maybe low impact, low effort, high impact. Maybe that's a better way to say. That was perfect. Do that again. Yeah, exactly. I've seen you and I've seen you kind of waxing lyrical about that product carousel being one of an example of things that just people don't appreciate, especially with heat maps, when you can look at, I think that's one of the most useful parts of your tool and software is that revenue view of interaction across the site and how much that carousel can drive in terms of gains in efficiency on PostClick is crazy. And I think that's, again, under-leveraged massively across client-based.

9:49Olly:I'd say we're not most of our... So that was your second. What's your third in terms of that top 1 %? So do you know what Wayback Machine is? is that look that's looking back at previous sites from say looking at the first uber right and going like you can go all the way back in in terms of internet history right yep whenever you make a change it creates a new one yeah the like the brands that are you know really crushing it have like a thousand next ones where they're just updating their website so often um that's a really big one and another little sleeper that i've noticed just when i talk to customers uh dpa and catalog ads seem to be ripping that also comes from my buddy uh dan at marpipe like they like allow you to change everything i'm sure you probably use marpipe but like people using you know catalog ads seem to be rushing it just like way underutilized i know that's off-site.

10:52And fun fact, I don't know if you knew, I've run almost like 50 to 100 million in meta ads with my hands. I don't talk about it a lot. I let people just be the CRO guy, but I've done SEO, done tons of ads, like Google ads. I'm actually a killer on. So I come from the ad perspective too. So yeah, catalog ads, ripping right now.

11:14Olly:Love it. That kind of books the trend of homepage, right? You're going catalog, you're going direct to point of conversion. It's kind of like a little bit the opposite of that. I assume it is working for the right businesses, the ones with deep catalogs, broad product offerings. It's interesting to see how that kind of catalog customer journey is going to play out with AI as well, how that's starting to serve a lot of those catalogs into AI, LLMs, and how that's going to change that path to conversion and probably make the website, that whole website journey, as it will continue to make that as important as ever in terms of optimization in terms of those key areas that you've mentioned like who are some of the brands that are that you'd say are gold standard in terms of process uh that people could look at as like a reference point and keep up to date with wish i could share uh you know um there's there's some public ones like i can go into like certain landers and stuff that's like public but you know uh not in your data the heat map gang a little bit yeah yeah maybe not in your data pool but i mean like broadly if you're looking at a brand that maybe you don't work with that you look at as like a real good inspiration um so like one other thing that i'll say like does include that one percent listicles and advertorials man like if you're in health and wellness and you're not if you're health wellness consumable if you have true USPs and you're not running a listicle, mission critical failure.

12:45Any company in the world can run an advertorial. To be honest, like Barry Haad of Make Ugly Ads, honestly, I've been seeing some ugly landing pages and they are killing it. They are ripping it all over the place. Those brands are like, I have to keep a little more subtle. But in terms of landing pages, um javi you know javi coffee they have a very famous you know uh bundle builder exactly they've like you know they changed the game on bundle builders and like their aov versus like base product there's a metric that people actually don't track which is your price like of a unit like let's say your supplement brand and for someone to buy one bottle is twenty dollars but your standard AOV is like$70.

13:39That's pretty much three and a half times your base unit. So looking at your AOV in terms of, you know, there's a big spread, like there's a median, there's your mode, there's your average, like average order value. But looking at the graph of, there's actually specific graphs, we're gonna be adding it onto heat map because people don't do it, which is like your base product to your actual AOV. It's a very important metric. Some ads perform better in that, some don't. Some landers perform better in that area, some don't. But it also depends on your goals as a company. Are you going for pure EBITDA, going for pure top line?

14:19Are you going for getting as many new customers, even if it's not as profitable in the first one because you know your 90-day LTV type thing? So it all depends on what your goals are. But your landing page, there's ones that attract large AOVs. There's ones that attract higher conversion rates on that page. There's ones that attract is generally higher revenue per session. And it's all based on your goals. So just like anything else in your business, make sure it matches the objectives of your company.

14:49Olly:Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. A couple of things I want to touch on the AOV one being one, but yeah, that listicle pre-sell, we call it pre-sell page, but just extending the funnel for a product that has like education to be done or very clear common objections or and a lot of that you can uncover in some of the processes we talk about on this podcast a lot like deep customer surveying deep exit intent surveys or um ai review mining and you can literally just at this point just extract from that structure for for five reasons or seven reasons why and i think so many supplement brands or so many brands with that educational element to the product should be testing those and they often perform so much better than direct to convert direct to pdp it's such an untapped area customer feedback surveys are the most underutilized tool in all of marketing so a really fun fact i i am an engineer like i like i do code and maybe a six out of ten like can do the basic stuff but nothing too crazy like my devs like you know in sas but I was using chat like open AI's, you know, like chat GPT 2.0.

16:05When you were in the 1.5 and the 2.0 range, there was no interface. It was just an API. And what I would do is I made this like ugly single page that I could upload a CSV and it would summarize everything for me. So in my agency days, like really early on, I was able to do that because like it required some code to be able to do, but I was able to do that. And then you make an RSS feed anytime someone mentions you. Granted, now you can just upload it to chat and it's like a piece of cake. But I've been doing that for probably like, I don't know, six years before there was even an interface for it.

16:42So it's one of the most underutilized things. You can literally just take a landing page, upload all your reviews and just say, hey, where's the copywriting off? doesn't do a half bad job. Whether you use Claude or you use ChatGPT, make a custom GPT or custom Claude project and upload every single thing you can. All your winning ads, your best landing pages, just give a PNG, your ICP training data, your metrics in a spreadsheet that you could show them, your target, emails that are high converting, absolutely everything. This is another thing that really advanced brands are using. It's just like put all of it together and then you can talk with it.

17:29And for any type of creative production, maybe you're not ripping the ads from there, but it'll tell you directionally like what's going on and update it. The memory keeps updated. And like, it's something wickedly useful. We do it for heat map where we have heat map GPT. It knows our financials. It knows how much people are getting paid. It knows like, you know, what our CAC is per channel. I update it all the time that we have a heat map GPT that like it's I feel like it's the second CEO of the company it's wild so cannot recommend it enough yeah 100 % and then we've and then building custom GPT below that that is con that specialize

18:04Olly:towards a certain area I think is the next the next level below that as well to get to say building one for headlines on landing pages but I think that whole customer speaking to your customers as a concept is still just under under underutilized like surveys being one method but even direct phone calls we've been doing some of those as a part of our creative strategy process and like so you can extract so much information from being on the phone with someone for 30 minutes and it can drastically change your understanding of your own products the understanding of the angle the reason why someone bought maybe some of the hesitations they had at the time of purchase and that can provide such massive unlocks and it's it's that availability of data is one of the big like benefits of d2c i guess in some ways and it's like for customer data that is all the privacy has had a bit of an impact on that compared to say retail but i just think brands still just massively underutilized or sass or sass yeah dude it's so different i've been an e-com guy my whole life i still am but in sass you don't have as many at bats in e-com you have an unlimited number of at bats yeah exactly if you were if you were say a looking to launch it say you say you're on that kind of fast growth journey you found some winning angles you've really been doubling down on creative is that real first key part of getting true scale product market fit month-on-month growth and you're looking at like first round of tests and looking at sort of building out that optimization process for post click like where would you be looking at as a starting point, quickest wins, highest possible impacts?

19:47Olly:Just say you've found a winning angle, you've really found, you've got that creative process working, but you've not really touched site optimization. Like from your experience, where are you starting in terms of, in terms of quickest wins, highest possible chance of success and impact? I guess that's difficult probably to generalize. No, no, for sure. I got you. So I know a lot of people that listen to this are definitely ad heavy, right? Just because your background. So I'm actually going to try and tie more of this versus just pure CRO to really tying it to ads. So if you're the type of brand where statics are usually just images, like statics are working really well for you, sounds crazy.

20:32Literally take your top performing static and make that your hero image i've seen that time and time again just absolutely rip just header image one of the home page just straight in yeah literally just like your text over here and your image over here like because if you think about it like people all talk about like continuity from the ad to the landing page but what more continuity is there when they click on something and then they see it and it feels familiar because they were just on Instagram or meta or wherever and they clicked on it and like it takes a little time to load that it's got three seconds of familiarity that then they're going to sit there and read another five six seconds like yeah crazy continuity and that's kind of what I meant by like duping those landing pages and just putting in your ads as the images so like the other thing too is uh in your product uh you know galleries like on your product pages take your winning ads if they're focused and make that image number two or three that's another place where they feel that familiarity because they saw the ad they've surfed the website a little bit they don't remember what the heck they clicked on people don't buy because they remember an ad you know like because the site and what they're reading so it will feel familiar and like welcoming to them if they see an image maybe 15 20 seconds later than when they first saw an image that made them click.

22:00So those are two really low effort, high impact. And then the other one is copywriting. A big one right now, if you guys remember the Hemingway app that showed how advanced your stuff was, on your top highest traffic pages, definitely your homepage, your product page stuff, there's a magic number of an eighth grade reading level. If you put things on an eighth grade reading level, your conversion rates will improve immediately. Your revenue per session will improve immediately. Your AOV will go up immediately. And it's just this magical thing where people have to spend less effort thinking about what they're consuming.

22:40So you have beautiful images and you have eighth grade reading level copy. Even if you're selling like rocket science work, you can get it on an eighth grade reading level, which is the best. If you have above ninth grade or you even go to 10th grade, that's the max. 10th grade is like white papers, you know, like really advanced stuff. So if you do that as well. And then another one is like, if you have any font on your website that is less than 14 point font, immediately change it. So if you guys want a revolutionary change for the highest ROI of listening to a podcast, literally just number one, go and take all your 12 point font, put it up to 14.

23:19Headlines are supposed to be a minimum of 18 or 24 so like just increase the size of your text number two put it on an eighth grade reading level and number three thanks thank ollie for having me on and that will

23:30Olly:be your biggest improvement that you've had i love it i think it's often those fundamentals right i think when you're close to a product or you're in a brand you can sort of default to complexity and trying to like over to make things sound higher value and like and you forget that that just confuses a buyer it doesn't make it more desirable um in a world of very short attention spans and and huge levels of consumption so and i've done the off the back of some of your feedback previously i've implemented the pixel size change and it's it's crazy the impact that can have um especially again if you're in the older demographic if you're if you're selling to people over the age of 40 just just making things bigger making things more legible not making buttons really hard to click like things like that just simple stuff that really moves the needle um yeah that's exciting what question what else have you tested that you've seen i think like just persona and angle alignment with ad at scale so finding a winning persona and angle combination and then aligning the images aligning any reviews up the page to be directly associated with that persona and pain point or objection and just kind of replicating that across top ad angles at scale.

24:51Olly:I think generally, I think embedding more UGC videos across sites is something we've seen work pretty well over the last 12 months, although it doesn't work on every occasion. I think it depends on the execution sometimes. And then pre-step pages, which we've got pre-sell pages or listicles or five reasons why or advertorials, publisher pages, like those sort of things prior to the PDP have been three of probably the most common wins we're seeing right now. I think that whole publisher page, third-party page is really interesting with the rise of like publisher ads, third-party ads on Meta are such a buzz right now.

25:31Olly:So they're almost being pushed more by the platform. I think that opens the door for a lot more interesting customer journeys as a whole before you get to the product. And that's something we're really doubling down on with our clients right now. Love it. One, so two things on UGC and like testimonial, social proof, that whole category. Number one, let's say you have three USPs, like, you know, your supplement brand, it helps like hair, skin and nails. let's say like skin you find is the number one usp from your customer feedback surveys maybe winning angles things like that you're able to change the testimonials that show on your site your testimonials should be aligned with that angle just because someone gives a positive review they should be giving a positive review about what the customers care about so that's a really subtle one that if you make that ugc or your just giant list of tests of like you know, reviews, or if you've like static testimonials, like, you know, quotes, make those all geared towards the USP.

26:38That's a huge one as well. And then the other one, guess what is so like if you're whitelisting or third party pages, that type of thing, let's say you're whitelisting with, let's say I'm whitelisting on your account, I would put a text testimonial of you on that first landing page because again familiarity a lot of people talk about congruency to the landing page but i would call it more so like that feeling of familiarity and comfort and trust because they don't trust you when they're on instagram and they randomly click an ad they're like this is probably bullshit but let me go check it out and then like they go and check it out and they maybe know your face as a follower you put a testimonial of you it's like okay it came from ollie's account But actually, Ali is supporting this here.

27:25So even at Heatmap, where we're ripping ads right now, a lot of people think that in SaaS, just running quality ads doesn't scale. That's bullcrap. We're getting amazing results across meta. Reddit is a sleeper right now. On Google, just make really good ads. And it works. So what we do is we do whitelist a couple of amazing marketing professionals on our ads. And all we do is just dupe the homepage. and with the UTM, just have their name as, you know, we have our hero section, how it works, and then a testimonial kind of thing of them. So that's ripping for us as well. So making sure that, you know, it feels familiar and trusted once it goes across.

28:06Cool.

28:07Olly:So I want to switch topics now directly to sort of measurement of a lot of what we've talked about. And I know you're an advocate of, what's your favorite saying in the conversion rate world? Well, conversion rate, baby. Yeah, I want to hear a bit more about why this is your guiding principle, I guess. And hopefully this segues us into a few other bits from there. But yeah. Totally. If not conversion rate, what's your approach to measurement? So the main thing is you should care. So first off, why you shouldn't trust, keyword is global conversion rate. The only time I use conversion rate is maybe on a specific page because there might be a higher converting page versus others.

28:52But that is apples to apples. There's no apples to anything when you're looking at your global conversion rate. There's seasonality. You could be running identical ads to identical everything. If you're in season or off season, it'll look different. It might take more, you know, a higher frequency of visits to like get someone to buy. Then your conversion rate looks lower. You can be out of stock of something. Your conversion rate's going to go down. You can be running more top of funnel. Your conversion rate is going to go down. Your competitor can start be ripping tons more ads. Conversion rate will go down.