Fine Tuning Your Conversion Rates With A CRO Expert with Kanika Misra

00:00 Andy Splichal Welcome to the Make Each Click Count Podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. We're happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is fine-tuning your conversion rates with a conversion rate optimization expert. Today's guest works as manager and director at BedaBeda, where they build high-performance landing pages and A-B tests using conversion-focused psychology, data, and copyrighting. A big welcome to Kanika Misra. Hi, Kanika.

00:31 Kanika Misra Hey there. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat with you today.

Andy Splichal Great. Well, thanks for joining us. Now, before we get into how you guys are helping customers, let me ask, what are some of the biggest and most common mistakes you see websites making with their landing pages that can negatively affect their conversion?

Kanika Misra That is not using them at all. That's probably the biggest one. I would say, it's still something that depending on the space that I'm speaking with, the space I'm looking at, whether it's e-commerce or whether it's SaaS, it's not something that everyone is leveraging. And I would say the biggest mistake I see is people just not going in and leaning in on conversion optimization and landing pages. Beyond that, I was just having this conversation this week, a few things that are easy but difficult in practice at times is making all the content about the product or the solution. They're saying, hey, my solution or my service, this is what it does. But they're not going as far to say, hey, my product or solution, this is what it does for you. This is how it benefits your life. So hey, we do all these great things. We minimize data and we quicken up your… Or actually, that's a good example. We make things really fast for you. That's a good example. But hey, we compress data. That's a bad example. Because if you're compressing data, if somebody just sees that, they say, okay, that sounds nice. But if you say, hey, we compress data to make your site speed 10 times faster. Oh, that's how it's benefiting me. Or even better, we compress your data to make your site speed 10 times faster so that you get conversions. Oh, okay. I get it. So instead of just going benefit driven, I guess, is what a lot of people say these days is, hey, make sure you're communicating your benefits. Go a step further and communicate your outcomes. That is a basic that I see pretty frequently, just not happening.

02:33 Andy Splichal And that's a great point. So when you go in, is that what you're first looking for? Is a client that comes to you, are they fully describing the benefits and the outcomes? Is that the first place you look when you're looking to make changes?

02:51 Kanika Misra We take a really big step back when we're looking at changes. So first, we want to understand where are these users coming from? What is the context that they're getting before they hit? So let's focus specifically on landing pages. So what's the context they're getting in the ads before they hit the page? Whether they're running Google ads or whether they're running Facebook ads on Google, are there specific keywords that people are searching for before they get here? What are you targeting if that's the case? If not, if it's Facebook, what is the ad creative that people are seeing before they get here? So what is the mindset they're coming in with and what did you do to hook them in first? So that's kind of step one. Step two is saying, okay, what do they expect? So now that you've hooked them, what do they expect in the next phase of this customer journey? What are the questions that you need to answer? What are the hesitations that they probably have? What are their biggest objections? What is going to make them stop and say, hmm, I don't really know. I think I should take some more time. I think I should explore some other options. What are those big, heavy questions? And to answer that, we have a big process where we're going to go and do review mining, testimonial mining. So we're going to go in and see, okay, what are the common themes that are coming up again and again, both on the positive end of the spectrum and the negative end of the spectrum as people are reviewing your product or your service? All right, great. Let's do some more research externally. We live in the internet and everyone talks on the internet. So we have great resources like Reddit, other sort of kind of very specific forums, Quora. So can we find what people are talking about out in the wild? Okay, great. Now we know what they're talking about. Are we answering these things on the landing page? Are we actually addressing them? In most cases, no, because especially when an in-house team is working on landing pages and in the site and communications, it's really hard. One of my favorite things that somebody said to me years ago is you can't read the label from inside the jar. That's very true. So they get very focused on, here's what I think that people care about and here's what I want people to learn about us. But when you go and you see, okay, this is what people are actually writing about out in the wild and here's what they're concerned about. Here's what they're asking each other. And you can take all that information and say, perfect. Let's make sure that on the landing page, we are addressing those concerns, giving them that information and doing it in kind of a priority order that makes sense.

05:29 Andy Splichal And it's kind of psychologically moving them through. Well, let me say, you gave us a lot of stuff there. But first of all, I love that term out in the wild. I think I'm going to use that. But I mean, it sounds like a ton of work. It's a ton of research. How large are organizations usually when they start to consider whether they need a company like yours, a conversion optimization company?

05:57 Kanika Misra Yeah. Honestly, they don't need to be too big. Typically, about the million dollar mark is where I would say you should start looking at optimizing your conversions and kind of all these acquisition channels and activities you're doing. Because the reality of it is that every single day, advertising is getting more expensive. And if we don't make those processes more efficient, it's going to keep hurting and hurting and getting harder and harder. So once you reach that one million dollar mark where you kind of have a little bit of breathing room, until you get there, it's a lot of scrappiness. And frankly, if you have time, if you have built a team that's agile, or even if you are a solo founder, and you're really agile, and you have the time to kind of look at and analyze these behaviors and these funnels, do it. It's never really too early to get started. But where you're going to see the biggest impact is when you're in that one million plus, typically like really great impact, the bigger you are, the smaller changes make a larger result at the end of the day. But million plus is kind of where we say, hey, you should really, really focus on this.

07:04 Andy Splichal Do you ever suggest, I guess, what I'm trying to get at, is there a reason to re-platform with conversion rate optimization? Is there certain, especially for e-commerce, whether you're switching like a Magento or a Shaba, I mean, is there a particular platform that you recommend and even that you would say advise customers to re-platform to?

07:30 Kanika Misra Yeah, I would say that you don't need to re-platform for conversion rate optimization. It's definitely a bigger picture question. How does it simplify operations? How does it simplify agility of executing, things like that. But Magento is difficult. It does make it hard to actually execute on any test that you run that do win. You can't run quite as complex tests without a lot of heavy development needed. So Shopify is definitely our preferred platform for e-commerce clients. WooCommerce is okay and it does add a lot of customization options for folks, but frankly, the bang is typically not worth the buck. And it's not as user-friendly typically. It's harder for people who don't have a development background to really jump in and help with. So as your team expands WordPress, WooCom, it gets harder and harder to use. Whereas Shopify, it's user-friendly, running tests is pretty darn simple and you have a lot of abilities in there to not quickly necessarily, but to very effectively and efficiently run tests and create your conversion and just have kind of a very flexible outcome and flexible future of your store.

08:49 Andy Splichal So customer acquisition always seems to get all the everybody's attention. How can I acquire more traffic? How can I acquire more customers? How can I do it more profitably? I mean, all that rolled into customer acquisition, but how much resources do you think that an established store, let's say doing over a million dollars, should be spending on increasing their conversion versus customer acquisition?

09:25 Kanika Misra It's one in their hand in hand. So it's kind of not an either or situation. If you are spending money on advertising, then you should also be spending resources on optimizing those efforts. Because if you're advertising- But how much? How much? I mean, should you be spending the same amount? I mean, how should you be split that? Okay. So when you're starting off, if you're close to that million dollar range, you're going to be spending more money on the ad size of things. So I guess on the performance acquisition side of things, conversion optimization is kind of like however much you can give there is going to make sense. But frankly, to do CRO well, it is a resource pull. So a lot of people trying to do it in-house, they're going to struggle. And frankly, if you're going to try to get an agency, it's not going to be worth the money. So it is that odd point when you're in that one to three million dollar range that's like, okay, how do I split my resources? Typically, if you're in that range, you probably have a freelancer. Maybe you do have an agency running your ads. So I would say, one million dollars, you're going to put 70%, 30%. 70% acquisition. Yeah, 30% CRO. As you get bigger, you're going to want to focus on leveling that out. So at some point, it might be 50-50. I don't think that there's ever a day where you say, okay, I'm going to just turn off my ads and let's run, right? Because CRO is very dependent on ads and dependent on traffic. So let me take that back, not necessarily ads, but CRO is dependent on traffic. So if you turn off the faucet of traffic, you can't run tests. So you need to make sure that you're maintaining that at all times.

10:57 Andy Splichal Now, profitability ROI is pretty easy to calculate with running ads, running paid traffic, especially. How do you calculate ROI when it comes to conversion rate optimization?

11:19 Kanika Misra Yeah, I love that question. So the best way that we like to do it is what we call revenue per session. And revenue per session is the multiplication or it's the combination of conversion rate times average order value. So especially for e-commerce, if you're in SaaS, then you're going to have a certain value per user, right? So same thing. I'm going to use e-commerce for the simplicity of this. Conversion rate times AOV times average order value equals your revenue per session. And why that's important is because sometimes you'll run a test and your conversion rate will skyrocket, but your average order value will decrease by a bunch. So the net win, there isn't any, or vice versa. Your conversion rate plummets, your average order value skyrockets, but the net gain, there isn't one. So our goal is always, we want to increase conversion rate while also either maintaining AOV or also increasing AOV. That is going to give you your revenue per session. So when we're looking at tasks, when we're running tests, at the end of the day, everyone's goal is we want to make more revenue, right? So revenue per session is kind of that North Star KPI.

Andy Splichal When a client signs up with you, do you see improved games consistently or does it ever flatline at a point?

Kanika Misra There's a point with CRO that is definitely, you know that, hey, we've kind of done what we can do, right? That being said, with CRO, that timeline is often in the one to two year mark. It's a very long term thing. And if you're doing CRO well, it's going to be closer to that two year mark. And that doesn't even mean that you've exhausted CRO as an option. It just means that, hey, maybe it's time to move to a different team, frankly. And it doesn't really make me sad to say that, but just the same thing I was saying to you earlier, when you get too close to a company, it's hard to see what you're missing. You're just too far in there. So there does come a point where, hey, we've run all these tests for the last five months and we haven't seen a win yet. At that point, if you had been seeing pretty consistent wins every few months until then, then you kind of know, okay, hey, you know, what are we missing here? Have we kind of reached the point of diminishing returns? Is it time to move on to another team? You know, what do you think? When you're working with a good team, they'll be honest about it. But they probably won't bring that up for you. Probably won't bring it up for you. But you know, I think when you're working there, and they do exist, right? The agency world is a weird, very weird world. But there are agencies that exist that say, hey, you know what, we like to earn our ROI. We want to make sure that you're getting ROI on working with us. And good agencies track that. And if they get to a point where it's like, wow, we are under a one ROI for how much you've spent on us and how much you've made, good agencies will know that. And there'll be a conversation that says, hey, we haven't won in this many months. We at this point, I've been working together for 15 months. And we're not sure if, you know, we've exhausted these options. We've done all these user interviews. We've done, you know, all these rounds. And here are the steps that we took. What do you guys think? Sometimes, you know, as a company, you say, you're right. But do you guys see a path forward? And that agency will say, yeah, we do. And here's here are the steps that we want to take. But we want to hear what you think. Right. And at that point, that agency might have already covered their fees by the other wins they've made up until then, it could be worth exploring. Sometimes it's a mutual agreement. And you say, hey, it's time.

Andy Splichal So I'm curious, when you are running a test for a client, how much traffic is needed before a test, an A-B test is statistically relevant?

Kanika Misra Very good question. And I think that this can be pretty confused because there's a lot of stuff out there that say, hey, you can't run tests if you don't have 100,000 people to your site, or you can't run tests if you don't have at least 50,000 people to your site. The reality and kind of the missing variable there is that you can run a test with just a few thousand visitors, really. But the biggest variable that you can't control and that you can't really predict is what is that delta in performance. So even if you only have 3000 people coming through to a test, and so it's 1500 per variant, if one is performing at a 3% conversion rate, but the other one is so different, you've improved it so much that it's converting at a 8% conversion rate, I'm just using extremes right now. Well, that 3000 number of sessions, that's probably going to be good enough. And you only have to run that for four weeks at that point if it's going to be 3000 sessions. But that's the variable that's hard to control for. The number that we say you want an absolute minimum for, and this is more for landing page testing than site-wide, for landing page testing, we say 5K. You want that 5K number. If you're going to do site-wide testing, you want at least about 10 to 20. 10K, you still want it, right? 10K is going to be, okay, we might have to run this test a little bit longer, and you want to make sure that people are getting in there. Again, is it possible? Can you run a test and you only have 5000 site visitors per month, and one just crushes the

17:00 Andy Splichal other one? Right. I mean, that's really where I thought you were going to go was it kind of depend on how much the discrepancy was. 60-40 is at 70-30, 80-20, then it doesn't take as much.

17:13 Kanika Misra Yeah. I mean, it's hard to predict for. That's why it's hard to answer that question in a very structured way. If you don't make big changes, you're not going to really see big differences in the results. And so that's why the golden rule and the things that everyone says is like, yeah, you need 40, 50, 100,000 people to your site every month in order for it to work, is because most people are changing pretty small elements at a time. That's how CRO traditionally has always been done. If that's how you're approaching CRO, which is good and fine, the small changes, yeah, 5000 people isn't going to cut it because they're going to perform so similarly. You're never going to get an answer that's just significantly significant.

So what are you using to test? What software?

Yeah, right now we're using Google Optimize. That is, I'm holding out hope, but that is Sunsetting. That's what is going to be my next question is, what are you going to do after that? So we are testing a few different platforms. Convert is one of our front runners right now. VWO used to be one that we liked a lot in the past. We did transparently experience a bunch of bugs with it towards the end of 2021. So we moved off the platform, but since then we've spoken to others who have said they've made improvements and they do have a new free tier that has come out that is comparable to Google Optimize. So that is another option in there. ABtasty is another one that's in there. What was that? ABtasty? ABtasty. Like when you taste something. Oh, tasty. Okay. Yep. And then, you know, there's a few other options that are kind of bigger. They're a little bit more expensive. So, optimizely is great as an enterprise solution. It is a pretty penny, for sure. And then there's things like dynamic yield, which are also, you know, pretty pennies, but they're great solutions if budget allows for.

So for small businesses, are there any that are free?

Yeah. So VWO has come out with that free tier. It's very recent. I think they only came out with it a couple of months ago, basically to prepare for the sun setting of Google Optimize.

19:25 Andy Splichal So that is the best free option that I have seen so far. And you're a lot more, you know, you're a lot closer than I am. Why was Google Optimizer being retired?

19:38 Kanika Misra I think, you know, it's the same reasons that Google Analytics, Universal Analytics is being sunset. No one really knows the exact reason, but kind of the grumblings in the communities have been that privacy concerns and they might be looking at some lawsuits. So they have to kind of change the way that they display information and make it accessible for people to use it. That being said, we've been using Google Optimize with clients that are only on GA4. So that's why I'm holding out a little bit of hope that Google Optimize actually might have some sort of comeback or resurgence, because to me, it's really silly and very unlike Google to say, wow, we have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of users using this platform of ours, and we're just going to say, poof, see you, bye bye. Right. So I'm holding out a little bit of hope, but we'll see.

20:28 Andy Splichal So for companies that are under a million, where it probably doesn't make sense to hire an agency like yours, what are some quick wins? What could they be doing to improve their, optimize their conversion I guess?

20:40 Kanika Misra The first thing I would always recommend is if you haven't before, check your site speed. And there's a fantastic site. It's web web dev page insights. You can just Google it, you'll get the actual website from there and put in the different pages of your store, your company, your website. And it's going to basically give you an itemized list of all the improvements you can make to speed up your site. If you have a developer that you trust, or if you have a developer on your team, just give them that list and they're going to have literally one by one. Here's what you need to do. Here's how much it's going to save you in page load. So that's the first thing I would do. It's a simple thing. You don't need to go super deep into the weeds for that. Run the analysis, hand it off, get that done. From there, if you haven't yet, start running different surveys. The best thing that I say is download video recording and heat mapping software. That way you can see what people are doing on your site and how they're engaging with it.

Who do you recommend? Like a hot jar?

Hot jar is okay. They're UI. It's very easy to use. My favorite one is Mouthflow actually, because they just give you more information, more data. And if you want a free solution, it doesn't give you everything. It doesn't have all the fancy bells and whistles, but Microsoft Clarity, MS Clarity is also a solution that's completely free.

One of my favorite questions is always about reading and business books. In your career, have there been any books out there that you could attribute to your journey as an entrepreneur?

I think my favorite book, and I've read it so many times, the first time I got through it, it took me months because there's just so much knowledge in it. And it's Presuasion by Robert Cialdini. And my background is very much in direct response and conversion, copywriting, and just in acquisition. And in order to communicate and acquire customers, you really need to understand the psychology behind what makes them tick. And that book goes too deep into different experiments that have been run, the reasons why people engage and react to things the way they do, how you can kind of pull those levers. It is just chock full of knowledge. So that is one of the best books I can recommend to anyone getting into both conversionary optimization or just user acquisition in general.

Andy Splichal Interesting. I haven't read that. I saw that he was the guest keynote speaker at the Warren Buffett conference a couple of weeks ago.

Oh, man. I did not know that. Did you go? No. Ah, that would have been seeing him speak. I mean, that's my favorite book of his. He has different books. He has a lot of material. But Robert Cialdini in general is somebody that I would recommend everyone puts on their radar and just tries to learn from.

So let's get into BedaBeda. What services do you offer clients to help them increase conversion? Yep. So we do full service landing page testing and site-wide testing. So our team handles all the strategies, design, development, copy, as well as just test, execution, analysis so that we can say, OK, what's our hypothesis? What's going to help people convert more by higher value things or download your app, whatever it may be? And then how are we going to implement it? What is the copy? What is the user psychology that we're going to implement that makes them do what we want them to do? How do we complement that with design? All right, great. Let's go ahead and code this up so we can run the split test 50-50. And then how do we analyze these results? How do we watch these video recordings and take the notes from there and compile them into something meaningful? Same thing with heat maps, same thing with actual data segmentation. Great. We have this report. Here's how we're going to do it next. Here's what worked. Here's what didn't work. Here's how we're going to continue to increase your conversion and ultimately improve your revenue. And do you work with companies, I assume, that are just going to their own website, you don't work with Amazon stores or anything like that? Unfortunately, for Amazon, they do have a beta mode and I think a few select stores do have access to it. They do have an internal conversion rate optimization tool that is kind of being tested and rolled out. However, it's very limited. So they allow you to test the image carousel. They allow you to test some of the images within the description and a couple other small things. But I would do it. If I was an Amazon store owner and I had that ability, definitely try it and play with it and test different things. It's not worth hiring an agency to do because they frankly can't test enough or it's going to be worth paying them. So do you have a favorite success story of a client you could share? I have so many success stories, but I think my favorite one recently has been it's for a beauty kind of cleaning product, I suppose. And they had seen good success. I think they do about eight figures a year. That's an e-commerce store. And they had just been struggling to say, okay, we've tried all these different positionings and we've tried all these different ways to communicate and we just can't get past this level. And we said, all right, let us go through and let us go and read your reviews and let us go read all the comments that people have left and let us try it ourselves and talk to people in our networks and say, what's holding you back? And also, what do you actually love about it? And so our team actually got our hands on the product and we went and did all this review mining and all this analysis that I told you about and spoke to our family and friends as well as some customers that they gave us access to. And we were able to identify the sense, the way that these products were there, the way that they smelled was just the main, main, main driver for everyone. They cared less about the direction they had been going with. It's so eco-friendly and you're saving the environment and things like that, which are important. But what was the most important to people? How the product smelled. So we created this user journey and this landing page experience that surrounded the smells. And we use really strong… How did you cut a user journey based on smell? Oh, the whole thing was based… So the first hero section, when you first hit the page, the headline, everything was talking about immersing yourself in these scents and having the spa-like experience. Then as you continue moving through it, you're seeing the images of the different products with the different scents. And then we use really powerful image driving or image invoking copy to say, okay, imagine yourself in the field of flowers and on a right after a spring rain, that type of thing. And so people were really able to say, oh, wow, that sounds like my scent. And there was seven of them. So we went through that experience and just gave them the different pieces of information to say, oh, this feels like I am in a store as close as you can get online. That's really the goal. And what did that do for conversion? So they increased their conversion rate by about 44%. And their average order value by another 37%. So it was a really nice big driver for them. I think their revenue per session ultimately ended up being about a 39% increase from just that one test. And we've continued on stacking wins from that initial learning. And it's actually gotten bigger and better from there.

Are there any challenges that you ever struggle with in getting results for clients? There's a lot of challenges, right? I think the most frustrating challenge is always when you start working with a client and they just have what you think is a horrible user experience. It's ugly. It doesn't make sense. It's kind of clunky. And you approach it and you say, this is going to be easy. This is a no-brainer. And I will tell you this, Andy, it's the most frustrating thing because most times those stores, those companies are the ones that are the hardest ones to crack because their audience has grown accustomed, right? Or they have this very, very niche audience that actually likes sort of this, what we think is a confusing user experience or this ugly quote unquote experience. And so we use our background and we use what we think is best. We do this research, but sometimes it's really difficult to understand and pinpoint those small nuances that actually are very core components of the-

29:28 Andy Splichal Yeah. No, I've seen that before in my own experience too, where I've had people fix up website and then it doesn't convert like I would have thought it would have. What do you do then?

29:39 Kanika Misra You go back, if you run tests a few times and you say, what the heck, right? Like all these things in theory, in practice from what research we did, it should work. So when we get to that step and it hasn't, then we typically start doing customer interviews, right? So we don't necessarily say, hey, why didn't this work? Why didn't you convert on this new thing? But we say, hey, what's most important to you? What issues have you had in the past with our site? What did you really like about it? What don't you like about it? And are you reaching out on the phone or are you doing this online survey or- Phone or video calls. So that's typically the best way to do it if you have the opportunity to do so. Surveys are a great second way to do it. But the thing about surveys is people will tell you one thing and they'll do another thing. And it's much easier to do it behind a keyboard than doing it live. Can it happen live too? Like maybe I'll tell you, wow, I really love this part of the site, but like internally, I actually hate it. And I'm scared to tell you that it's possible. It's harder for people to do that when they're speaking to you live. So that's why we really like those customer interviews. The best source of truth, honestly, is those video recordings. And that's why I recommend no matter how small you are or how big you are, install that video recording software. On a Saturday, you're bored, you have some free time, plug your computer into your TV, play those video recordings and see what people are doing on your site. And if you're doing it for long enough, if you make a bunch of changes, you'll be able to say, okay, let me watch an hour of the new site. Let me go back and watch an hour of the old site. What were people doing that was successful on the old site? What are people doing that's not so successful on a new site? And that's the process of elimination. So who makes the perfect client for your agency? Perfect client is typically Ecom or SaaS, typically customer facing, who are doing between three to 10 million a year. People who are frustrated and wanting to improve their revenue to decrease their ad costs, people who want to just be more efficient about their acquisition in general, and definitely people who have a very testing and learning forward mindset. And how can they contact you to learn more? You can contact us on our site at bettabettagrowth.com, B-E-D-A-B-E-D-A growth.com, or you can reach out to me on Twitter. It is kanika_misra on Twitter, and I will reach out and respond as quickly as I possibly can. Well, this has been great, Kanikaa. Is there anything else you would like to add before we wrap it up today? Not really. I think, you know, if you haven't yet, start testing, you know, start learning, start trying to figure out how can I make the best possible user experience for my customers. And if you do that, you're going to be on the

32:33 Andy Splichal right path. Great. Well, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much. For listeners. Remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding BedaBeda or connecting with Kanika, you will find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our all new podcast resource center available at podcast.makeeach click count.com. We have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and include each of their contact information in case you would like more information on any of the services I've discussed during previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.