w/ Logan Grasby, Conversion Pages
Creating Shopify landing pages is essential to success as an online store.
In this episode, you'll learn how to create pages that look great and help you boost your return on advertising spend (ROAS).
You can only tweak ad creative in Business Manager for so long before you're rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.
Landing pages are key - today we've got someone who's built 300 of them and he's going to talk us through it all.
Logan Grasby is The Director of Product at Appstle and the Co-founder of Conversion Pages. Logan has deep ecommerce experience from building a Shopify brand from the ground up, to scaling a Shopify Plus brand to 8 figures as the Ecommerce Lead at Inspired Go. In 2022 he founded Conversion Pages which has built over 300 landing pages for ecommerce brands to date.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
2/28/2023
Kurt Elster: How are your ads doing, my friends? What’s your ROAS? You think about it daily, don’t you? I know you do. So, what do you do about it? How do you improve that ROAS? How do you pull the right lever and bump up your revenue? You can only tweak ad creative so long. That’s the problem. You can only screw around in Business Manager for so long before you’re rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. But what about the landing page? Where do you send the traffic to? You build landing pages, right? You’ve heard that’s the trick, I’m sure. Plenty of… If you drink from the firehose of eCommerce educational content that’s out there like myself… Yeah, I’m a contributor to the firehose. You know the importance of landing pages.
But I bet you’re probably not bothering, or if you are, not at the scale you could. And so, today we’ve got someone who’s built over 300 landing pages and he’s gonna talk us through it. I got Logan Grasby here. He’s the Director of Product at Appstle and the co-founder of Conversion Pages. That’s the thing we’re interested in, because Logan’s got deep eCommerce experience from building a Shopify brand from the ground up, to scaling a Shopify Plus brand to eight figures as their eCommerce lead, and now he’s Director of Product and Growth at Appstle, an app developer building Subscriptions app, which is Shopify’s top reviewed subscription app. I didn’t know that. That’s cool.
In 2022, he founded Conversion Pages, which has built over 300 landing pages. That’s the thing we’re into here. This is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Sound Board: Tech Nasty.
Kurt Elster: And today we’re talking landing pages. Logan, welcome.
Logan Grasby: Thanks for having me, Kurt.
Kurt Elster: My pleasure. How you doing, man?
Logan Grasby: I’m doing really good. Yeah. I’m up here in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It’s nice and cold.
Kurt Elster: So, I’m gonna ask you the question, my favorite opener. Are you ready? Why should I listen to you?
Logan Grasby: Good question. Good question. Yeah. Well, I’ll start off with some of the things that you mentioned already, where I’ve built a brand from the ground up, so that was actually right out of university, first thing that I did. We were selling modular home climbing walls for kids. Long story there. Wish I knew what I know now. And so, really got that experience to see what that’s like. Went on from there to help build Inspired Go, which is one of Canada’s largest meal delivery companies now. At the time, it wasn’t, and so we really scaled that brand from a startup to being in the upper eight figures in revenue.
And the thing that was really neat about that experience was we actually didn’t work with agencies at all. So, all of our marketing capabilities were internal. We were scaling on Facebook. And so, I got to learn about a lot of things, like building email flows, actually executing and being in the weeds on all these things, to actually learning how to code, and implementing customizations to our website, and then what we’re most interested in is actually running ads and building landing pages for those ads, and so the thing that really piqued my interest was they were realizing like, “Hey, this makes a huge difference.” We just kind of independently discovered the tremendous benefits from going from sending traffic to a collection or product page to sending it to a landing page.
And so, upon seeing that I realized, “Hey, I should go and help other brands do this.” Started Conversion Pages. We didn’t necessarily realize at the time just how in demand this would be and really it’s been the spike in interest is really from the iOS changes and people looking for new levers to pull to be able to scale their ad accounts. And one interesting fact is that we actually host 90% of our landing pages for our customers, and so we can see ad traffic or just page view traffic, essentially, across all of the pages collectively. And so, we’ve just been able to accumulate this massive amount of diverse experience building different types of landing pages for different types of brands. We’ve even done SaaS and agency landing pages, and so it’s been really fun, but really been able to really dial in about what makes a landing page convert.
Kurt Elster: I think what’s interesting about landing pages is people seem resistant to them, right? Have you noticed this?
Logan Grasby: Yes. I’d say absolutely. I mean, when people reach out to us, obviously they’ve made the decision to build a landing page, but I would say that a lot of brands maybe don’t think that it’s worth the investment. It’s not worth just spending this extra time on. They already have a website, so they already have a website that converts. They put a lot of time into their Shopify homepage, they put a lot of time into their collection page, to their product page, and those would work, right? I mean, you could send your ad traffic directly there. They see their ads convert.
And so, yeah, there certainly is resistance.
Kurt Elster: Why do you think it is?
Logan Grasby: Well, I think it really just comes down to the fact that it may not be clear right away what the benefit of the landing page actually is, because again, you have that product page. It’s already there. You have that homepage. It’s already there. It already has your messaging. You already know what your customer wants to hear from you. And so, it might just… I think a lot of brands don’t necessarily think about what those benefits of the landing page actually might be.
Kurt Elster: What are they?
Logan Grasby: Really, what it comes down to is your funnel. When you’re building out an ad and you’re running a campaign, and you build out a specific officer, and then you send your customer to a page that doesn’t have that same messaging, it doesn’t have that same offer, it doesn’t communicate to them in the same way as the campaign that you’re running on Facebook or whatever platform. And so, what ends up happening is simply that you are not communicating to that customer in the way that they expect.
They see something, they see this dialed ad campaign. They see this incredible copy that’s communicating something very specific. And there is kind of this… It’s a bit disjointed once they hit your product page or collection page. They don’t see that same messaging. And so, now the alternative with landing page is that you know exactly the customer that is going to be hitting that page. And you know where they’re coming from. You can even, if you wanted to, you could separate out a landing page for each channel that you’re spending on. And you can communicate your offer directly on that landing page and kind of tackle all of those questions your customer might have. You can tackle all of those points of resistance that you know a new customer might have.
And what happens is that because now your messaging is tailored, you know that this is, for example, a customer who’s never seen your brand before. They’ve never shopped with you before. And so, you can communicate to them in a way that is different than a customer who’s already shopped with you, and you know that they care about different things. And then you also need them to clearly understand the offer, so when you go from an ad to your landing page, you can expand on your offer. You can expand on your value proposition specific to that offer, and you can create urgency around that offer.
And all of these things add up to an improved conversion rate. The last thing is page speed. So, with landing pages in particular, page speed can matter quite a bit. And in fact, Facebook will measure your page speed of where your ads are being sent, and so-
Kurt Elster: Oh, those rascals. I got another one measuring page speed on me?
Logan Grasby: That is another point, too, that your landing page is not connected to your Shopify store. It doesn’t load those 47 apps that you have installed. And so, you don’t see all that JavaScript running. You don’t have all that extra code that is gonna slow down your site. And so, that’s another point, as well, that makes them really valuable.
Kurt Elster: So, hold on, where’s my landing page hosted? Is it like a subdomain? My Shopify store is ACME.com, but then I’ve got LP.ACME.com is actually… That goes to a landing page service as opposed to Shopify. That’s my guess here.
Logan Grasby: Yeah. Hopefully it’s hosted by Conversion Pages, but so typically what you do is you-
Kurt Elster: So, would it be like ConversionPages.com?
Logan Grasby: No, no. So, we have our own hosting, but what you’re kind of alluding to there is how do you set this up on your domain, so one option is that you can use a subdomain, so you can set up for example like try.mystore.com.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I like try. That’s a good use for a subdomain.
Logan Grasby: Yeah. We use try a lot. Try, shop, whatever you’d like, really. You just set this up in your DNS and then you have a hosting platform. But there are options where you can actually have it instead of being a subdomain, it can actually be a page on your Shopify store, so those are kind of your two options there, though.
Kurt Elster: Okay. That makes sense. So, it’s a separate service. We’re running it in parallel with our store. Done correctly, no one’s gonna know the difference or care, and the idea’s like I now get fast pages, fast to create pages, so performant, fast to load, and easier, faster to build, and then I’m not… I don’t have to think about my apps and all this other stuff that may be on my store.
Because these things really… We’ve siloed them very separately and there’s advantage in that.
Logan Grasby: Yeah. Exactly. I mean, the page speed killer is JavaScript.
Kurt Elster: Oh, yeah.
Logan Grasby: Yeah, I mean it’s-
Kurt Elster: And it’s apps.
Logan Grasby: Yeah. It’s apps. So, we at Appstle, we dealt with this all the time. We get lots of UI that we add to stores, and so we would try to optimize that as much as we can, but you’re working within Shopify’s rules, right? They have a system. You can’t… There’s a limit to what you can do, for sure. But on a landing page that you have completely separated from your Shopify store, now the world’s your oyster and you can do anything you want. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Have we defined what a landing page is? I’ve got a homepage, a product page, collection page. I can send people to any of these three pages and I bet I can get some of them to buy. And so, it’s like, “Well, you gotta get this separate system, and we’re gonna have a page on that, you’re gonna send the traffic to that, and then something, something, something, more profit.” Okay, what the heck? What’s different about the landing page besides that like, all right, it loads faster, and I get that I’m trying to hyper focus here. I want to laser focus. My homepage is for whoever has Googled my brand name. And so, they’re probably already familiar. The landing page is specific to people clicking on ads, and because I can build the landing pages somewhat easily, then I’ve got… The headline in the ad is going to be exactly the same as the landing page. I get that.
Is there more to it? What makes it a landing page versus my homepage and product page? Well, that’s not a landing page. I don’t get it.
Logan Grasby: Yeah. Well, let’s dive into what specifically makes a landing page work. I think that… So, what I would say is that there is an 80-20 rule here, where 80%, or 20% of the work is gonna get you 80% of the results, and then the remainder is certainly good to optimize, but it isn’t going to be what is really driving the needle. So, if you’re gonna… There’s four things that I think I would focus on.
So, if you go onto any brand’s… I’d say well-optimized landing page, you’ll notice it’s not short. It’s actually there’s quite a few sections, a lot of information. You probably think like, “Do people really ever go… Do I really need it to be this long? No one’s gonna scroll down. I just want them to click. Why don’t I just make the button as big as possible so that it’s really enticing to click?” But actually, you want that page there to educate your customer, and you want them to read it. You want it to be engaging and to kind of solve in their head all of their objections that they’ve kind of-
Kurt Elster: Wait. Hold on. We have a listener question coming in. But people don’t read. What do we say to that?
Logan Grasby: So, that’s a great point, so you keep it short is what you do. Let’s go into the specifics. So, of the 20% that are gonna get you there, one, it’s gonna be your above the fold optimization. So, effectively what that means is the first part of your landing page that people see when it loads. Now, what you need to do here is to effectively, in the simplest terms, you need to answer the question of why is this product gonna solve your problem. People need… call it like some five to 10 word bullet points that say these are the benefits and maybe answer an objection. So, this is why this product is exceptional. This is why it’s gonna solve your problem. Really hyper focus on the problem in this section.
Another thing to list separately… You can do this, for example. You have a CTA that’s actually what you want people to click. A good thing to do is below that put some points on your brand. So, what are the benefits from buying from your brand specifically? And so, that’s not necessarily to do with your product. It might be to do with something to do with your values. It could be something to do with your guarantee. Do you have a 30-day money back guarantee, for example? So, you’ve optimized this page to really clearly address the problem your customer has.
Then, you need to make sure that your page has social proof. So, you have to… A really great thing to do is to display photos of your customer with your product, photos of your customer, reviews by your customer.
Kurt Elster: So, it sounds like we want a lot of user generated content, UGC?
Logan Grasby: Yeah. If your brand has been showcased in different articles, in different maybe news outlets, you can use that to build authority, as well.
The next thing that I would say is it’s really important to focus in on your offer. So, you have created an offer for your ad, very likely. Now you’re communicating more specifically on your landing page what that offer is going to be. But you need to make sure that your customer understands that there’s an offer and as part of this, include scarcity. So, this offer isn’t around forever. This offer… You want to do this in a way that doesn’t seem inauthentic. You don’t want your customer to think like, “This is obviously fake.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No one wants to get hustled, so it can’t look spammy, and the easiest way to do that is you gotta be real. So, how do we make it real?
Logan Grasby: Well, you can simply communicate something that’s true, that for example the offer ends a specific date. And it’s not in 10 minutes, it’s whenever the date the offer actually… You can do things like that. And so, yeah, it’s important to make sure that you’re building trust, and you do that through that scarcity communication, as well as through social proof. The rest, you can really mix and match how you communicate the benefits of your product.
One thing that we really like to do is add .GIFs or videos. I haven’t seen this as common with other landing pages, but we find that it works very, very well.
Kurt Elster: Because I know like video generally boosts conversion. Not always, but video can be a big plus.
Logan Grasby: Yeah. Totally.
Kurt Elster: And I think part of what’s going on is like some people prefer video, some people prefer text, and so it’s not that someone’s doing both. It’s that you’re appealing to both audiences here.
Logan Grasby: A great example that I know is for Matcha brands. They have like a powdered Matcha, and very simple thing you can do, show your customer making the product in a quick .GIF or a quick video. What you’re doing there is you answer in a few seconds something that would actually take quite a bit to explain with text, which is like, “How do you make this product?” I’ve never seen a powdered Matcha before. I’ve never seen a powdered drink before, let’s say. How does this actually work? And then you can show somebody scooping into a cup, they got their whisker that comes with it, you can show them taking it out of the package. Okay, you’ve just answered probably a lot of your customer’s first questions just in a few seconds.
Kurt Elster: The people who are visiting this page, or my site, from an ad, are the most skeptical, most resistant audience. They’re like, “Look, I was minding my own business scrolling through Facebook endlessly, starting into the void, questioning my existence, and then I saw your ad and it stopped my thumb, and then I clicked on it, and I’m taking a shot here before I go straight back to scrolling.” So, it’s like, “All right, it’s gotta keep my attention,” so it’s gotta load quickly, and then from there it really can’t be a surprise. It’s gotta match what that ad said. And it’s gotta be really clear and concise, so there’s not a lot of garbage here above the fold. And if it grabs my attention in that time, okay, now I’ve got an offer. I’ve got social proof. I’m gonna use user generated content for that, like show my customers. I’ve gotta explain this thing. I am not worried about length. We’re going long here because that’s… We’re gonna separate the wheat from the chaff. The people who scroll through it, who pay attention, are the ones who are gonna make the purchase.
And that scarcity on the offer will help keep their interest, but if it looks lame and spammy, they’re out. All right, I get that. And if we have convinced them, then they buy, and we send them back to Shopify? What else goes in this page that I might be missing?
Logan Grasby: Yeah, totally. So, you initially want to be answering questions about your product. You essentially start at the top. You can think of it like this. You start at the top with the benefits. You start at the top answering the question why does this solve your problem. And that’s your optimize above the fold. That’s also where your offer lives. And you are communicating really the basics.
You know, on mobile, we see that 60% of people that hit landing pages, they don’t ever actually scroll down. And so, you need to make sure that at a minimum, those things are clear. But for the customers that are… You know, you do want them to be educated on your brand, on your product, on that page, and so as you scroll down, you kind of go from educating on your product, so you can include sections that talk about the more specifics on each benefit. So, you’ve kind of listed three to four benefits on your above the fold, and now let’s dig into those. What actually does that translate to?
And for those customers who want to get educated, they can go down and they can actually… You can have some short paragraphs associated specific to that benefit. And eventually, as you scroll down, you’re going to get into who are you. So, now we’ve communicated the product, we’ve communicated the offer, and we’ve communicated the benefits, but who are you as a brand? So, if you have a guarantee, include that in your landing page. Make sure that your customers understand like, “Hey, we have this 30-day guarantee, so it’s like there’s no risk in making your purchase.”
And then you can move into your actual brand value, so this is going to be closer to the bottom of your page, but customers that may get all the way down there, they’ve shown some particular interest. They want to be educated on who you are. And so, actually communicate these are my brand values, these are why we exist. And you can do things even like if your brand is closely associated to you as a founder, then you can even write about this is our story. This is my personal story. You could put a picture of yourself on there. That doesn’t make sense for all brands, but if it does for you, customers want to know that. And then for the customers that do make it to that section, now you’ve really had the opportunity to build some serious trust with them.
The last thing that I would add is at the bottom of your page, no matter what, always include an FAQ. Because if somebody’s made it all the way down there, there’s a good chance they still have questions. They have been intrigued enough to continue reading through all of these. The other thing is that in some cases, you can include your offer right at the bottom. And so, what you can do, which is a bit of a sneaky trick, is if you have multiple offers, so let’s say you have three tiers of offers, but if you make that the CTA on your above the fold section, if you click it and you make them scroll, it like literally scrolls for them to the bottom of your page, they are one, going to scroll past your whole page, and they may see something that’s intriguing to them. They’ll want to learn more. You’ll have those three, or whatever, however many offers you’d like to have, or you just have one.
And so, that’s a structure we like to use because it really does force your customer to at least preview what is in your entire landing page. Yeah, so those are some more structural points.
Kurt Elster: All right, take that structure, and I want you to put it together for me. Give me the bullet point outline of what this… The page you’ve described to me in the last 20 minutes, top to bottom, what’s it look like?
Logan Grasby: We’re gonna go element by element here. You have header, this is gonna be a thin bar. You’re going to just include something, for example, like a callout like free shipping on all orders, for example. All orders over $60, for example. Then you have your optimized above the fold section. Here, you’re going to… You have either a photo that’s showcasing your product, the most important copy of your page that’s clearly articulating the customer’s problem or your solution to the customer’s problem and the benefits of purchasing your product. It's not about the features.
And you’re gonna have a call to action, and you’re gonna have perhaps in that section… You’re gonna have some benefits of your brand. So, you have your guarantee. You’re gonna have some other benefits. Next really great option is to put any social proof you have about your brand, so build authority. Put things like other companies that have referred to you. Maybe you’ve been on the news, so you can put these companies that have… could build authority about your brand. Then you can go into… Usually we mix it up here, but you can have a social proof section right away for your customer, as well, so you kind of go into this brand social proof and then your product social proof, where they can see perhaps a callout of here’s what your customer loves about your product, and you could see a picture of one of your customers using it, and something that they really see that like, “Oh, real people use this thing.”
And now you are digging into probably a few elements here, a few sections. You’re digging into the specific benefits that you’ve listed in your above the fold. Next, this is where you’d usually include your videos, so now your customer has kind of gone through these benefits and they understand them in more detail. Now, here’s how it works. Here’s the specific video showing that matcha stirring, for example. That section moves around a lot, but how it works, don’t ever think I’d say for any brand that your customer doesn’t need to know at all how it works. Even very simple products, we find that this makes a difference.
We sometimes like to reiterate social proof here around the middle of the page, but you can jump back into your brand benefits. So, you donate to charity. I’m just making things up here, but you can articulate in more detail what that is. Maybe you’re gonna articulate there something about your guarantee if you do offer a guarantee but make it specific to your brand. So, you’re going through each of those sections.
From there, you can jump into your offer, so again, using the strategy where your CTA actually takes them down to the offer, and here you’re going to now just hyperfocus on this is why you should buy now. So, we’ve talked about why you should buy. This is why you should buy today, because we have this offer. You’re gonna create scarcity in different ways that are authentic but depending on your brand, you’re gonna have one offer, and then you’re just going to articulate this is why you should take advantage of this offer now. You’re also likely gonna restate a lot of the things that were in your above the fold section because you want your customer to just be reminded of that, this is why I should shop.
The important thing is you want them to realize like, “This is why I should buy today.” The other point about that is that you may want to create tiered offers if it makes sense for your brand. So, you can do things like create bundles where the bundle in the middle might be what you actually want to sell them. That’s going to be just like… Software does this all the time, where it’s kind of the mid-tier product is what they actually want to sell you, and then they frame it with a more expensive option and then a cheaper option. So, you can take advantage of that to build a really clear offer there.
And then below that, your FAQ section, go through just your five, eight points about these are the things that we see that our customers ask all the time, especially our first-time customers. They have the opportunity to go through those. Usually, I like to do it as a dropdown, so they see the question, they click on it, and it opens up the actual answer. So, that is… Yeah, landing page structure 101.
Kurt Elster: I’m with you. I love it. I love the idea of essentially you bookend it with if it’s got offer top, bottom, and we use… I think it’s called an anchor link where you click a link that just takes you elsewhere on the page. And this thing’s like as old as the internet that you could do this. And so, I click it and then it scrolls this otherwise non-scrolling person to the bottom of the page to my offer, and then they’ll see… Maybe something catches their eye along the way or we’ve got our FAQ, our objection-busting info at the bottom.
Once I launch this page, I’m sure it’ll perform, but how do I determine its efficacy and where do I go from there? How do I optimize it? I want to get the juice out of it. The squeeze must be squoze. How do I get more juice out of this thing once I see some success with it?
Logan Grasby: Yeah. And so, that’s actually a really important point that you’re certainly not done once you have your landing page up. It’s gonna be very unlikely-
Kurt Elster: It’s always something with you.
Logan Grasby: Yeah. No, but there’s always gonna be more to do. There’s always gonna be opportunities to improve your conversion rate. And so, this is a service we offer. We offer conversion rate optimization. And so, some of our customers, after they launch the landing page, we will test different options of essentially how can we get… We’ve already improved their conversion rate by launching this page, but we don’t want to stop there. We want to figure out what’s the specific unlock for this brand in particular, because every brand is different, that is going to really get that last 20, 30% out of this page.
And that is just the beginning because you also have an entire website that you’re likely gonna be sending this customer from, either from your landing page to a collection page, to a product page, or you’re gonna send them directly to checkout.
Kurt Elster: Hold on, let’s back up here. Because I’ve got this landing page and at the end of it, it’s a link to my Shopify site, because this thing, it’s not on Shopify. We’re gonna say it’s Shopify adjacent, like I have built it on my domain name but not running as part of Shopify. And so, I gotta just provide it a link to where they could purchase, and my three options here, I could send them to the product page, I could send them to the cart page with the items already loaded in it. That’s called a cart permalink. Or I could send them to the checkout with the stuff already loaded in it. And it’s in the Shopify documentation, it’s like you stick in the product or variant ID. I guess it would have to be variant ID. So, it’s like your site’s URL and then it ends with the item’s IDs and then like : and then the quantity you want in there.
Logan Grasby: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And you could do it for multiple items. So, you can have it just send them to the checkout with like they’ve got three, and it’s a bundle, so they’ve got two of this item, one of this item, and so of those options, what’s your preference?
Logan Grasby: So, of course I’m gonna say it depends, but no, I would say what we see, what I love is sending the customer directly to checkout. And obviously if you are able to educate your customer well enough from the landing page and you can get them to make that purchase, you don’t want to put extra steps in your funnel. And so, if you can just remove all that, send them directly to checkout, that is amazing. One of the things that we do which enables that is that we actually have a custom feature for making your landing page shoppable, so you can actually create bundles on your landing page and then send them directly to checkout with the bundle. And so, we really tried to make it as easy as possible for brands to be able to do that.
That being said, there are times when that doesn’t make sense, and it’s especially if you know that there’s more… You know that you need to continue to educate that customer, especially those that don’t scroll at all, and so you want to be able to… Maybe you’re gonna send them to your product page, or maybe you need to send them to your collection page because you’re a meal delivery company, for example. That was the case for Inspired Go, where it didn’t make sense to send them to a product page. They really had to go to a collection page because we have to be able to see all the different various items, and there’s stuff to do with delivery conditions that most stores don’t have to deal with, and so you might have to do that.
In those cases, then you’re going to want to be doing conversion rate optimization on your Shopify store, as well, because that really is the next opportunity. Anything down your funnel from your ad ultimately improves what’s in your ad account. Your results in your ad account directly correlate with the optimization of the rest of your funnel, the rest of your store.
Kurt Elster: I’m with you on all of this. We’re coming to the end of our time together. I want to hear about your tools. Oh, I love tools. We all do. I know we’re using Webflow. We love our CDN. We’re edge deploying things. Microsoft Clarity, maybe? Talk me through some tools here.
Logan Grasby: Yeah, so the first one you mentioned, Webflow, is really… we love, and I’d say if you are not ready to get help with your landing page and you’re just looking to work on this, I’d say Webflow is a great option and gives you a lot of flexibility. That’s what we use. And all of our hosting stuff are things that we’ve custom built ourselves, but other tools that we use is… yeah, you mentioned Clarity. Clarity, for those who don’t know, it’s similar to projects like Hotjar, LogRocket, where they screen record your users and they allow you to do things like create heatmaps, but it’s free. It’s a tool made by Microsoft.
Kurt Elster: Microsoft is getting into this space, and it’s… I was all in on Hotjar. I know a lot of listeners use LuckyOrange. If you’re using LuckyOrange, Hotjar, take a look at Microsoft Clarity. It’s free and it’s really powerful. I don’t know. I’ve got five client stores running it now and I’m very happy with it.
Logan Grasby: Yeah. I love it.
Kurt Elster: Free plug for Microsoft in case they needed any assistance.
Logan Grasby: Yeah, they really need it. Yeah, especially these days. But yeah, so we use that specifically more for conversion rate optimization, because it really helps you narrow down where are the opportunities. Where are customers getting confused? Where are they stopping? Where are they not stopping to read?
Kurt Elster: Where are they rage clicking? That’s another thing it will track.
Logan Grasby: Yeah. Exactly. Rage clicking.
Kurt Elster: Dead clicks, where it’s like they’re clicking on stuff that does nothing, it will call out for you like, “Hey, maybe take a look at this.”
Logan Grasby: And an interesting thing that we found with Clarity is that it’s actually better at crossing subdomains, so some tools aren’t able to do that, which is weird. It also is better at… Some tools, for some reason, have trouble with Shopify’s checkout. They’ll just end the recording once someone goes to checkout. And Clarity is better at… Maybe it has something to do with just your settings. There’s all kinds of things that you can change in Shopify’s checkout settings that you might want to see that are creating an issue.
So, overall, I actually think it’s not only a free tool, but it’s actually the best tool for that. Yeah, that’s something we use all the time.
And honestly, it’s not a huge tech stack. Really, it’s just you need something to be able to build the page, you need to be able to host the page, and then once we get to conversion rate optimization, sadly, we just learned recently that Google Optimize is going away, but we use that for conversion rate optimization and love it, so I’m sad about that and hopefully we’re gonna see a good alternative coming up here in GA4. But so far, not sure what that’s gonna look like.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. When I read that news, when I first saw it…
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: I was pretty bummed about it. I loved Optimize. It was free. It worked. It was easy because it integrated so well with Google Analytics. Honestly, I’m really hoping Microsoft Clarity adds split testing. I think that solves all my issues. But that’s a pipe dream. Until then, I don’t know. I’m looking for a new solution, man.
Logan Grasby: Yeah. I would say that it is everybody’s best bet to wait and see what happens with GA4, because they’re going to relaunch a split testing tool in GA4. But to be honest, given how the GA4 transition has been going, I know lots of brands are frustrated.
Kurt Elster: Not feeling real confident. No one is. That’s funny that you said that, because that’s everybody’s sentiment.
Logan Grasby: Yeah. I would say I’m in your camp. I want to see Microsoft take the lead on this and if I could run everything through Clarity, I would be happier. Clarity has great analytics, by the way, as well. So, you know, they’re getting pretty close to even replacing Google Analytics. But anyway.
Kurt Elster: Don’t get me excited, all right? Now, here’s some faint praise. Google Analytics is fine. It’s fine. Ripe for disruption, though, I think, the analytics space. But all right, we’ve been at this a while. I’m feeling inspired. I want to know, I’m feeling inspired, but I just don’t want to mess with this myself. I feel about this like I feel about patching holes in drywall. It’s not for me. I don’t want to do it. How can I hire you to do it? Can you just do this for me, please?
Logan Grasby: Yeah. We can do it for you and we have the experience to make sure that it goes well very fast, and so that’s really what it comes down to, is we get top converting landing pages done in three business days and you just… You go in the same week, you’re able to launch better ads, and we even have an offer for you.
Kurt Elster: All right, give me the offer.
Logan Grasby: Yeah, so if you just let us know that you heard about us from the podcast, you’ll get $500 off your first landing page.
Kurt Elster: So, you gotta tell them that Tech Nasty sent you?
Logan Grasby: Exactly. Yeah, that’s all you need.
Kurt Elster: And you have to say it in that voice, otherwise you don’t get… It’s a $400 discount instead of $500. Is that U.S. or Canadian?
Logan Grasby: U.S.
Kurt Elster: Okay. All right. Good. Because I heard you’re in Calgary.
Logan Grasby: Yeah. I’m in Canada, but yeah, that’s U.S.
Kurt Elster: All right. Excellent. Well, I think we’ll end it there, but where can I learn more about you, sir?
Logan Grasby: So, you can check out our website, conversionpages.com. You can also follow me on Twitter @LoganGrasby and yeah, those are probably good places to start.
Kurt Elster: All right, and I will include that stuff in the show notes. Logan, thank you so much for sharing your experience and wisdom with us. I appreciate it.
Logan Grasby: Thank you. It was a lot of fun.