The Most Overlooked Growth Lever in E-commerce (And It’s Not Your Ads)

0:00We like to kind of take that down to what we call the interest high funnel. So the four key steps that lead to a conversion and then segment those steps down individually by device category, by landing page, by channel. Most neglected part of the funnel is always the on-site experience. There's a considerable amount of investment into your ad spend, into driving traffic, into your creative. But when it comes to the outside experience, like the amount of like data driven action that's being taken there is like super minimal. Welcome to the DTC Insider Podcast, where online business owners come to find actionable tips and tactics to grow their businesses.

0:41Now, here's your host, Brian Roizenthal.

0:51Hey, welcome to another episode of the ABC Insider Podcast. I'm Brian Grayson, your host. And today I'm joined by a friend of the house by now. I think it's the second time that we are doing an episode with him, but we've been in touch since, I don't know, forever, probably many years now. His name is Anthony Morgan. He's the co-founder and CEO of eNavy. Hey, Anthony, welcome back. Hey, good to see you, Brian. Good to see you too. Could you please tell me all this more about you and about the company? What do you guys do? Yeah, so I am Anthony, the founder of Enavi. I started off in-house at an apparel brand.

1:29Brian actually did some media buying for that brand back in the day, which is crazy. And now I run an agency called Enavi and we're focused on CRO. That's our core service. We work predominantly with Shopify stores, typically eight and nine figure Shopify brands. And so a little bit of background about myself and the history with Brian, it's quite crazy. I don't know, it's probably getting close to 10 years ago that you were initially doing some media buying with me. A lot of experience in this space. I got to my second camera now. I don't know, it's news. I have to return to my original camera in a minute.

2:06But basically what I wanted to ask you is, what do you see that, when you speak with these eight and nine figure brands, what are they struggling with? How would you define their 2025 and beginning of 2026? Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think obviously there's a lot of different struggles that brands have gone through over the years. I think when we look at 2025, there was a mix of things. You had the tariffs at the beginning of the year and having to respond and react to that. But when we're looking at on-site experience, on-site performance, really the two most common issues that we see is for like an eight-figure brand, their catalog has scaled.

2:47And so they've maybe added more collections, more products. And as a result, typically what happens is product discovery is on the decline. And what I mean by product discovery is the percentage of users that land on your site that actually view a product. So you've got a segment of users that are landing on the homepage. You've got a segment of users that are landing on collection pages, and they're not advancing to view products. You're not guiding them well enough. And it's oftentimes an afterthought. Sometimes it's thought through what the brand thinks the customer would care about instead of how the customer is actually thinking about finding the right product.

3:19And that's a massive issue that we see with brands. And then the other issue would be paid social. Oftentimes it's driving to a PDP, or even if it's going to a landing page, like a custom landing page, oftentimes it's not performing as well as it could. And so like product view to add to cart rate, product view to purchase isn't where it would be for this particular segment, especially when you segment it down to like new audience versus existing customers. That new audience typically is converting like a third or a fourth of the existing customers. And sometimes it can get masked over in terms of performance because you're getting a lot of repeat customers from meta instead of new.

3:55Yeah. So on the pay that side, which is our wheelhouse, it's been definitely tough because of probably a couple of things, you know, some socioeconomic reasons, of course. It's been a tough few years. Election year, the tariffs, you know, both programs and population inflation recession, you name it. But then, of course, the privacy, the privacy, you know, issues, lack of tracking that started with iOS 14 in 2021. and we can see these days that it's tougher. Something you said, you know, it's interesting that you said that most paid ads go to the PDPs. You think that's a good thing? It should be used probably in certain cases.

4:37Where should the ad go or how can we best test that? Yeah, I mean, that's a question that we get a lot. The reality is if we're just focusing in on like paid social, let's say Meta, which is where most brands are spending the vast majority of their ad spend, it really depends on what you're selling. like if you're an apparel brand and you're not selling like performance apparel or some like really technical apparel there's no reason for you to probably whip up a custom landing page like you're probably not going to get any value out of that exercise you probably also have a larger catalog where instead of like you've got like a clear top you know five or six products you might have like a dozen products that perform really well and it's not going to make sense to have a bunch of landing pages for them so it definitely depends on what you're selling like oftentimes what happens is brands think, oh, we need to set up a custom landing page because that's going to help performance.

5:27And they do that as like a band-aid fix, but really their product page experience is less than ideal. Oftentimes it's best to like really try to nail your product page experience, make sure that it orients well. So when a user does land there, they're able to navigate through, understand the product, understand the brand, and then ultimately take the next action that we're looking to take. And then if you're like really serious and spending quite a bit on paid social and for a product standpoint it makes sense then you can invest in like custom landing pages um but it it's it just depends like there's sometimes it makes more sense to go to the home page or collection pages depends on how big your catalog is it depends on the brand the product um i hate saying it depends but that's kind of the the reality but i like it we can we can go deeper if you want on that when do you think that makes most sense to does you Now it's the era of information.

6:20You know, I'm not the first one to say this. We are all consuming a lot of information these days, probably way more than we need. And there's a lot of misinformation as well. And many people telling you, like, including ourselves, you know, we are content creators as well. And we try to educate the audience. So we add to that noise as well, even though we believe it's signal, of course, but people are consuming all kinds of stuff. Anthony says one thing, Brian says another thing, the greater number. a thousand says another thing. So some people say, just create how to do X great or in a great way in 2026.

6:55Realistical advertorials, they make these generic statements that don't go anywhere. So let's give people some education information here. When do you think that it's a good or some good scenarios in which they can leverage landing pages and which type of landing pages will work? Yeah. When it comes to landing pages, Our indicator for whether your paid social performance is not performing well currently by on-site performance standards. You might not be feeling this yet. Your ads might be scaling okay. But at some point in time, CPMs are going to go up. You're going to hit some kind of drag. And then this performance indicator is going to be something you need to solve.

7:37It's going to become a problem. Right now, it's just slowly sabotaging your growth, but not at the point where it's stalling it. if you know what I mean. And this is pride for you to add to cart rate looking at paid social. So like if we're narrowing in like meta, that segment, what percentage of those users that land on your product page are adding to cart? Anytime we see that below 5%, it's a big indicator that we need to fix the landing page experience here. Whether that's addressing the product page or that's creating a custom landing page, that's the initial indicator that there needs to be some serious effort towards this.

8:11When it comes to when it makes sense to do a landing page, I'll give a few examples. We work with a brand that sells gym equipment, accessories, and they have individual products. In those situations, I would say it doesn't make sense to probably have a landing page. The price point of some of those products is less than$50. Some of them are kind of commoditized but we move into their like kits or bundles or some of their more expensive products there is like clear differentiators on why you should select them and why you should select this bundle of products and so you can create what we call like a hero landing page that's talking through ultimately the benefits and the outcomes of using their strength kit versus a competitor's right.

9:01And so that's an example where you're still going to be using landing pages in certain situations, like your catalog ads are going to drive to landing pages, the PDP, I mean. And then you're going to be creating for this like hero product, you're pushing quite a bit of spend to custom landing page and testing that out versus the PDP. Would that be a bottom of funnel landing page where it'd be more of a top of funnel landing page in that case? In this situation, I would consider it like it's it's going to be direct response so it's for really like bottom of the funnel more than it is top of the funnel it's not like a listicle or an advertorial it's not like a five reasons why you should select our product yeah and i'm curious in those in those situations you know how could you approach that like some you know some some brands we work with sometimes they say you know we would love to have you know more education so we know that you know at least our way of doing things on meta let's say we don't like we don't like creating campaigns that are not conversion oriented because meta gives you a segment that is like traffic campaigns awareness campaigns you name it is like it won't give you the end customers but on the flip side if you run conversions campaigns against a top of a funnel landing page that will be tough too so how would you solve that situation because let's say you from your um you suggest a brand you know let's educate the audience.

10:22Let's create these advertorials, listicles, whatever format to educate people with the top of a funnel, middle of a funnel landing pages. These days, in this era of paid advertising, where would the traffic to those landing pages come from? When you're referring to landing pages, are you referring to like a top of funnel landing page in this situation? This case, yes. Let's say, as you said, top five reasons why you need these, whatever, or five reasons why you should be consuming supplements or whatever after workout. So you're not mentioning the product from the get go, but you get there through the article.

11:01Yeah. I mean, when we decide to use those types of landing pages is based off of like the market awareness of the customer. And, you know, a brand could have like their, their core customer, their market awareness is here, or they could have a particular product that their market awareness is here for this particular product. And so in that situation, there's really like two stages that we would use that for. Typically, we don't like touch unaware very often, but like problem aware, they know there's a problem, but they don't know a solution exists. Those can be a great option there because you can really press on the problem through education and then present the product as a solution.

11:42Or you have the next stage where people are solution aware you can talk through like the different ways to solve the problem and they know that there's a solution there's probably a chance that they already are uh you know subscribed or have purchased a solution and they would need to change and shift over to this new one and so then you're you're taking it from that angle instead of these people know there's a problem but they don't know how to solve it these people know there's a problem they think they're kind of solving it or maybe they're unsure if they're solving it with their current option and you're presenting then your option as the solution to the problem.

12:19Those are like the two stages where we'd use some of those like top of funnel type plays for landing pages. And it can work well for your, like TikTok is very top of funnel. These can be a nice way to keep that TikTok traffic intrigued and engaged, though you're not going to see the same conversion rates from that segment as you would like a meta audience. Everybody knows that. If you've done TikTok ads, they're going to convert very low. But these can be a nice play instead of just sending them to a PDP and you have like a 99 % bounce rate. Yeah. So you mentioned, you keep mentioning PDP, you know, the product page.

12:55And that product page, when the traffic is sent there, of course, should be optimized. So, of course, we won't be able to do a full CRO course on how to optimize a PDP here. What would be the 101 PDP optimization like tips that you would keep brands listening to this? Why? Because to, let's say, everyone, you know, watching this or listening to this, probably they are in this space. They are either brand owners, marketers. It's not that they don't know what a product page is or look like. Let's face it, most product pages look alike. They all use more or less the same template. You have a few images at the left.

13:35You have the title, maybe some review icons, and then the price up to cart, UPP icons, whatever description. So what are some things that probably most of these brands are missing that they should be doing to make the most out of it? When we think about a product page, the most important elements are pretty much everything near or above the add to cart button. If we look at heat maps or scroll maps, the vast majority of your users are probably not scrolling below that. Does that mean the rest of this information, the rest of the information below that is not valuable? No, it's just less valuable, especially when we're talking about like paid social, where those users have a higher bounce rate.

14:19And if you just segmented to that, there's even less that are scrolling past the add to cart button. And so really nailing the add to cart button and above is important. And when you look at most product pages, there's not really a clear sales pitch. The user lands on the page. There's an image gallery or a slider with images. In some cases, like very generic images, studio shots that aren't really pitching the product. Like I believe the first place that you have an opportunity to weave in a sales pitch is in the image gallery. A sales pitch doesn't always have to be copy. It can be imagery. Like for apparel, you are in many cases selling a lifestyle or something aspirational.

15:00And so how can you present that and communicate that in your imagery? Your product imagery, image gallery is a massive opportunity for that. And then some brands just, they've got a bunch of studio shots that just aren't really doing the job. And then you scroll down past that, you usually get into a buy box. You have your product title, review stars, maybe a buy now, pay later, the price. And then you've got your variant selection, maybe size, color. Maybe there's a size chart and then your add to cart button. That's usually the typical experience that we see. And so really the only sales pitch there is the image gallery.

15:33And so what are the ways within that upper part of the product page, the near the add to cart button and above or near the fold and above that you can weave in a sales pitch? Like what actually matters to your customers? What's the benefits that drive them to ultimately purchase? What are the outcomes that drive them to purchase? And that's the first lever, right? That's the motivation side. You have two levers in CRO. Motivation, we want to increase that. And then friction, we want to reduce that. And so then with friction, there's a whole slew of other things you have to think about. If you're selling apparel, size and fit is huge.

16:12And it's not as simple as, let's just put a size chart on. There are so many questions that the customer is actually asking about, how does this product fit? How does this product look on me? is there a model that is my size or looks like me? So I can see what that could look like. There are so many different ways that you can address that problem. And there's so many different problems that kind of stem out of size and fit, for instance. And so that's what I would say is like really focus in on the add to cart button and above. Think about how can we increase motivation, reduce friction from what we know about our customer, not what we're assuming about our customer.

16:46Like what does our customer actually say? What are the questions that they ask? What are the positive things that they're saying in reviews? Where do you gather that? Where do you get that information from? So, I mean, the first, like a great spot for understanding the benefits that customers are highlighting and the outcomes is in reviews. So if you've got a good amount of review data, you can mine that, pull out the themes and leverage that to communicate outcomes that your customers care about, the benefits that they care about. instead of just highlighting features and specs, lead with the benefit first.

17:20And then when it comes to friction, oftentimes this is found in your customer support ticket logs. What are they asking customer support? Are we answering that well on the product page? And not just answering it well in the FAQ that's on the bottom of the product page, but how are we answering it in the spot where the majority of users are actually viewing a page? So because we would advise our clients to, or we do it ourselves as well, to analyze you know customer reviews post-purchase surveys but uh i actually never thought about the customer support tickets and that's a great way of finding the bad things usually typically they don't they don't reach out to compliment you right so yeah we'll find the bad things but yeah it's it's crazy how people are obsessed over some things like i don't know obsessed with um attribution and find the perfect, like what comes from where.

18:14And again, it's good to track things. But to a certain degree, we all know that there's no single touch point and the attribution tools are not perfect either. Even if you use servers like tracking, I want to, of course, get your thoughts about it, but they are not as focused on getting zero-party data, data that people leave in post-purchase surveys and reviews on social media, CX tickets, you know, that gives you valuable information to improve your marketing offers and everything else. Yeah, no, that's so true. Surveying is a massive part of what we do. Like review mining and customer support ticket logs are two places that you already have data, most likely.

18:55Not everybody's doing surveys. At least they're not asking good questions in the surveys. Not that asking attribution related questions are bad. It's just that's not going to help you solve these problems. And so you can get really pointed with your post-purchase surveys. You can even do on-site polling where you're actually pulling users in the buying process and understanding where they're at with a simple like pointed question that's trying to uncover a particular data point about your customer. I wanted to get your thoughts about that and some other, let's say, myths or not. And you just mentioned that one of them.

19:29So what do you think about that? You mentioned before they need to increase motivation and decrease friction. And sometimes there's a gray area for those of us that are not CRO experts, right? And it's like, will it add friction or will it be helpful? Of course, at the end of the day, probably we can test it. But doing a, I don't know if calling it pre-purchase surveys, little quiz, or just a question in a pop-up about what are you looking for today? What do you think typically, or what have you seen typically? Does it help or add friction? Adding the surveying during the buying process. Yeah, like a pop-up you're looking for and they can say, kind of like click on one category so you can point them in the right direction or what you mentioned as well, gathering data while they're browsing on the website.

20:18It depends on how it's done. There's so many pop-ups on an e-commerce site nowadays. You've got an email opt-in pop-up. You've got a cookie consent pop-up. you've got oftentimes like a loyalty pop-up you've got then you said no to the email opt-in so now it's over here on the side and then you've got this customer support little chat bubble it's literally like a russian nesting doll that you're just like trying to get through all the pop-ups to get to where you're wanting or to where you're wanting to ultimately you know the actions that you're ultimately wanting to take and so it has to be done well it has to be done really like tastefully and it depends on what you're trying to do like if you're um you know in the case of like an on-site poll or survey in many cases we're trying to understand and get clarity on a particular problem or diagnose the problems that um users are experiencing in a particular part of the shopping experience you know and so that's something that has to be done tastefully you want to send that to users that are actually engaged you're not going to send that in the first five seconds or even 10 seconds.

21:26It's something that's probably going to come on, you know, halfway through the average amount of time sent on a page or spent on a page. And so we're talking like 30, 45 seconds, it's then going to pop up and it's not going to be full screen and, you know, invade their whole entire little iPhone screen. And so, you know, that's one instance. Then you have like email opt-ins where you can ask a question to collect some zero-party data on what they're interested in. This works really well if you have a larger catalog. I'm sure you know the benefits on the email side of how you can then segment that, but we like that data too on the CRO side because then we can leverage it to understand what our user is saying based off of where they land, based off of where they're coming from, what are the trends that we're seeing in what they're interested in and how can we then use that to make sure they're landing in the right place, make sure they're being directed to the right place.

22:17There's a lot of ways that that data can be used in the process. And so it's all about how you do it. Like, think about it if you were the user, would you want to have to go through all of these pop-ups or have these pop-ups like invading at the worst times? Yeah, that's, that's the thing. Each of us are different. And when we, that's again, those who are not professional in this space, that's why of course need to hire a professional, a professional like, like you in the space. But even if we think about logically like it's like in some cases if there are many options and i feel like i'm overwhelmed because i don't know where to start it might i might use a hand and try to say you know we're looking for this or for that um i don't know if you are not selling multiple products that are giftable you know are looking for birthday gift link gifts or you can like if you're looking for I don't know, plants, you know, like indoor plants, outdoor plants, an arrangement for, I don't know, a flower arrangement for, again, a wedding or event.

23:17So what type of event, right? So sometimes it could be a guide, but again, that's just me. Some other people might say, I don't want it. I got it, right? Depending on the education of that user about that brand or the products. So yeah, that's why I was asking about some data from some common themes across brands. Yeah. I mean, common themes across brands, it's hard because brands are so different. Like you have brands that have very small catalog, right? Or they've got less than 10 products and they've scaled to$25,$30 million. And you're going to treat that differently through how you guide them or how you survey them versus a brand that's got, you know, men's and women's apparel and they've got 500 products in their catalog.

24:10So that's the hard thing. Like, there is no, like, this is the right way to do it. I think the biggest thing with anything that we do is we're trying to diagnose and understand a problem or solve a problem with what we're implementing. Too often, the tactics are just like, you should do this because X brand is doing it. Instead of like, no, we should do this because our customers have a problem finding products, finding X products. Or we should do this because our customers shop in this way. They discover products in this way. And it's actually backed by data instead of like an assumption. Because usually what happens is when it's backed by an assumption, it oftentimes doesn't win and isn't valuable.

24:53It doesn't matter to the customer in the end. Yeah. My understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, is that CRO or good CRO, let's say, is not only focused on conversion optimization, but also on maximizing revenue, right? Yeah. So what are the things that you see right now that, because I always read things in these lines, right? Like on LinkedIn and everywhere else, but mainly on LinkedIn, you know, it's everything is getting more expensive. CACs, like everyone freaking out about, you know, increasing CACs, all stuff. And everyone is focused on decreasing costs. That's not bad. That's something necessary many times.

25:32But the other lever is how to make more money on the back end to be able to afford those increasing CACs, right? And on the website itself, of course, after the website, after they buy, we have more. But on the website itself, we have some levers to pull to maximize revenue. and not many brands are benefiting from those. However, there are some that probably are more noise than signals and some others are not. Do you have any examples of what levers are working these days? It could be for some clients, some examples, some use cases. And what are probably more noise? It could be upsells, cross-sells, bundles, whatever.

26:10Yeah, no, that is a good question because I think what we have commonly seen and we've seen the same trend for the last long while, but especially as there's been pretty big shifts in meta in the way that meta even targets and the value of creative. Most neglected part of the funnel is always the onsite experience. There's a considerable amount of investment into your ad spend, into driving traffic, into your creative. But when it comes to the onsite experience, the amount of data-driven action that's being taken there is super minimal. And that's like a core part of your growth lever. And it's a core part of your funnel.

26:51And so when we think about some of the like common like tactics, we could say that work for brands is I'm going to go back to one of the first two problems that I spoke to at the beginning. And it's product discovery. Oftentimes what we see is a brand will over index too far down in trying to improve their funnel. So there'll be like a few steps too far down where the biggest bottleneck is actually further up the funnel, but they don't have visibility on it. And so product discovery is one of those where based off of our internal data set and from our experience doing hundreds of audits, 94 % of stores struggle with product discovery.

27:31Either their homepage or their collection pages aren't driving users to product pages at the ideal kind of target rate that we set. And the homepage in particular is like a pretty big issue. And so we have an example from a brand called Carnivore Snacks, where early on, like some background on the brand, they gained a lot of traction through YouTube. They partnered with Joe Rogan. And so they had quite a bit of traffic that was coming from YouTube organic landing on the homepage. They were even initially driving quite a bit of traffic to their homepage from paid social. And it was landing on a homepage.