Tanner Larsson
Hey, and welcome back to the optimized e commerce podcast. I’m Tanner Larsson, my business partner Matthew Stafford, we are the owners of the Bill Grow Scale the ecom optimization company as well as your host of the podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about why an ecommerce store redesign may not be in your best interest, despite the fact that it’s one of the most touted things out there in terms of ways to improve your store. And we’re also going to kind of go through our process and what we talked about and what we believe as to why that’s not such a good thing and what you should do instead. So, Matt, when people come to us to work with us on site designs, what they think we do, right, yeah, yeah, the first the very first question I have for them as I asked them if other data is tagged, and they’re collecting data correctly, which we’ve never had.
Matthew Stafford
Any one that is, and definitely not at the level that we do. And so part of the reason why I asked that is because you spend a lot of time and money to redo everything and take it over to a new site or a new platform, or because a lot of times we have people that won’t come from a different platform combined with Shopify. And I’m like, if you’re not looking at your data, how do you know which part to bring over that’s working, and what parts not working? And they’re always like, Oh, we don’t know. I think so why build a whole bunch of stuff on the new platform. That doesn’t work if you don’t have your data. So typically, we say, don’t do that site redesign, get all your data collecting correctly, optimize what you have. And then if you’re going to do a platform switch, you move over what’s working well and then start your split tests over there, but nine times actually 10 out of 10 times they’re not collecting the data enough.
Matthew Stafford
To know, what’s working and what’s not working
Tanner Larsson
On every aspect of the site.
Matthew Stafford
yeah, yeah.
Tanner Larsson
And guys, this is a common thing because what Build Grow Scale does through our Amplified Partnership Program is we become the optimization back end of the stores we partner with. So we provide a turnkey plug and play service where our team goes in there, React re tags and optimizes the store based on data, starts running split tests, and does all of that. Okay. It’s an ongoing full time thing. When people kind of come to us initially, they’re in their head, they’re thinking that we’re going to design them a new site, which sometimes we do, but they usually come to us and say, Oh, we’ve gotten quotes on site redesigns from someone else or other people. What’s your quote? And they were like, hang on, what are you in your business doing $2 million a month, your conversion rates 2%, whatever. Why would you want to have a complete site redesign? Because that’s not going to get you to 3% or 4% conversion more than likely
Matthew Stafford
Sometimes it’s worse.
Tanner Larsson
Yeah.
Matthew Stafford
Because other repeat customers are no longer used to their site. And typically this the stores that are doing a decent volume, they have a 30% 25% return customer rate. So now a third of their business comes to their site. And they’re like, Oh, this is the right place. Yeah, they really aren’t familiar with that at all. And we’ve actually seen with the new site redesigns where we’ll see that return customer rate drop drastically, and it takes months for it to build back up again. And so we’ve always gotten much better results by optimizing what they have getting that dialed in. And then when they transfer platforms, it doesn’t look like a totally new site. And there’s really no drop off from that point. Or if there is, it’s very minimal.
Tanner Larsson
And even if you know, Matt just said transfer platforms, you may think, Oh, I’m not translating, so it doesn’t apply to me. Same thing. Yeah. If you’re on Shopify, or you’re on Google
Tanner Larsson
You’re on big commerce, you’re on Magento, the store that you have. Now, assuming you’re running a business, and you’ve already, you know, established things, it’s working, you’re selling your mate, you’re making sales, you have a conversion rate, you have traffic, all those things, you’re going to be much better served in every single case, to do what Matt said, which is optimize what you’ve got. Okay? And then only then would you even think about potentially redesigning an element of the site, or maybe we’re going to update the framework or something like that, but only after you’ve looked at the data, and you know what you’re transitioning. So when Matt’s talking about data, I’m gonna make him elaborate a little bit on this, Matt, you said, making sure everything’s tact and reporting the data. What do you mean?
Matthew Stafford
Well, I’m gonna, I’m gonna say something. Or else I’ll forget, and then I’ll talk about the data. About 95% of the time a site is redesigned. All it’s done for is to make the owner feel new and fresh about their site.
Matthew Stafford
It doesn’t mean it’s not working. Typically, their sites are working very well. They’re making a lot of sales. They’re feeling this extra Mojo. Now they want to like in their head, take it to the next level, refresh, rebrand, I think that comes with a rebrand or something more professional. The truth of the matter is, it makes the owner feel good. The site owner or the site visitors, nine times out of 10, they don’t know what you were before. They don’t know that’s any different than what you are now. Like, all they care about is their user experience and a site brand, almost never incorporate elements that will make the journey easier. It’s typically how it looks, how it’s skinned. All things that really don’t have a lot to do with, other than maybe it’ll make the site more trustworthy or not trustworthy. But if you’re already selling Wow, then typically that’s not the issue with the theme.
Matthew Stafford
So then you said talk about data. So we use like, when we say tagging, there’s most people’s level of tagging. And then there’s our level. Yeah, so we tag every single thing on the site. So any, any link that can be clicked, any image, any video, how long it’s played, and then what the conversion rate is at every drop off point. If they click the main navigation, what their conversions are compared to if they click the, you know, an on the mobile menu, so we track, mobile and desktop completely different and we treat them as two different experiences. Because people don’t shop on their desktop the way they do on their phone. In fact, we know that typically, your conversion on your desktop is double what it is on your mobile, and then your tablet should be the same as your desktop otherwise sounds broken. So we have lots of metrics to know.
Matthew Stafford
And people literally just do whatever the default in Google Analytics is, and they think that’s tagging their site, we actually use tag.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah. And it’s better than nothing for sure it works, that we started that way, years and years ago. But now, if you think about it, Google Analytics is just a hub for your data. So if you don’t have it set up to collect the data properly, garbage in garbage out, it’s going to give you you’re going to think that you have good data and you’re going to be making decisions off of bad information. And that’s typically not going to work well. So what we do is encourage people to learn how to use a Tag Manager, get all the scripts and everything else off your theme, so that it runs fast, and it’s only fired when it’s necessary. And then all that data then gets imported into Google Analytics properly.
Tanner Larsson
That allows you to make this right decisions for a site redesign if you so choose to go that route because that way
Tanner Larsson
You’re able to look at all the data, look at every single aspect of your site, from images, to colors, to buttons to links to everything, navigation menus, drop downs, everything and see how all of this performs, and only migrate what is working into that new theme, new design. And if they have an element that they want to add, you can compare it to what you’re currently getting and if you don’t have that element, you can at least have a baseline of this that has to perform better than this to be worth happy. Now the problem is, most of these, actually, I would say, if we go with the 8020 rule of life, right 80% of these site design services out there that are going to go in and read, rebrand, and optimize this new theme or new new store, they’re going to design for you. They don’t even log into your Google Analytics. They don’t even ask for your Google Analytics. So how could they actually produce something that’s going to convert better than what you have without looking at your data?
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, they believe in form over function. And we struggle with it too. We want this app to look nice and feel good and to all those things. But the form should never take the place of function. Because people would rather use a site that works very well that has so much stuff on it that makes it all cutey that it’s confusing on what to click and where to click and what what a certain button means.
Matthew Stafford
We always were very strong with things that are prototypical and split tests. And then when we do a split test, we’ll usually do bigger changes at one element at a time. Because if you change three or four things and your conversion rate drops, how do you know what did it or if your conversion rate goes up? How do you know what to do more of and not to do? any of the other so you really have to do things per page one at a time. Otherwise, like you literally have no idea
Matthew Stafford
what worked and what didn’t work? reminds me of the old advertising. They go, yeah, 50% of our advertising works. We just don’t know which 50% Yep. So they can’t cut it out.
Tanner Larsson
They don’t know how to eliminate the waste. And like what Matt was talking about, think about this. He’s talking about how you make wins, and you figure out how to do more and less based on doing a test at a time, one change at a time. Okay, what’s a site design? It’s everything at once. Now, you may have some common elements. But let’s say if they’re going to do a complete redesign, you’re looking at 80 to 90% new stuff, okay? All at once you go live, and then you wonder what’s working, what’s not working? Why did my conversion rate go down, my Add To Cart went up, you have no way of mining this out and figuring this out. You can’t use your Google Analytics data because Google Analytics is only forward processing and forward thinking. It collects data from the day it’s installed. So you’re starting over at square one. We much prefer and much more. Highly recommend much more highly recommend that you go with a consistent optimization strategy of making sure you’re first and foremost, your data set up correctly, which, like Matt said, and any time we’ve ever gotten into someone’s Google Analytics, it’s never wants even when they tell us Oh, we got our data perfect. It’s never once been actually set up the way it needs to be. We’ve always had to fix stuff. Now some of them are good or better than others, but it’s still not.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, and we do the site stores that we do. We do it at a level that requires, you know, NASA, probably, yeah, probably not everyone. Not every single store needs to do it the way we do. I do believe that if they did, they would win much longer. And overtime. Yeah. But like this isn’t to say like every single person needs to know all of that before they can be effective. But like, for one, they should be following someone that is collecting data like that. So that when they test stuff, it’s based off of something that’s similar otherwise it’s just a shot in the dark.
Tanner Larsson
So if you’re thinking about a site redesign or your conversions are stagnant and you’ve been like, man, maybe we should redesign our site, maybe we should start over, maybe we should do whatever. Think twice, please. And if but if you’re really committed to a site redesign or a store redesign, at the very least, that your designer or the company is going to do this and see what they’re using from that’s actually coming from your existing data, because no matter what that company tells you, they don’t know your customer, or what’s going on in your site better than the data that you’re already collecting. And if they’re not digging into that, and they’re not coming back to you and saying, we’re going to change, make this change on your store, or make this new element based on this data, then they’re just designing to be pretty but you’re not actually doing anything based on conversion data.
Matthew Stafford
And like I said, 95% of the time, an entire site overhaul is because the owners are tired of the way the site looks and they want it to be fresh and all these other things when the site visitor, they don’t know you from Adam. So if they’ve seen your site a few times, it’s actually better if it still looks the same, not changes 100% different.
Tanner Larsson
Again, from the BGS methodology. Yes, we have redesigned sites that we just when we took them over, were they broken or that bad. But we still don’t do it without first leveraging the data and collecting the data and making sure we know that what we’re changing is for the best based on what we’re collecting, okay. But in most cases you don’t like Matt said, it’s usually for the owners whim. But you don’t need a site redesign. All you need to do is continue to optimize the site you’re on, keep improving that buyer’s journey from the time they land on that site, whatever page it is, just keep optimizing that process. And you know, the thing that Matt talks about is, well, that basically the more things you can cut away, things you can get rid of, the better it is right?
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, we always thought in the beginning all of our major wins are actually removing things not adding new elements to making the site very simple and very easy to do whatever they want to do.
Tanner Larsson
Store owners, entrepreneurs, marketers have a tendency to want to add everything in the kitchen saying oh, well more persuasion more copy more imagery. Oh, this gift is cool. And oh, I need this Gridley button and all this stuff. We start piling on all this until we wind up wondering why it’s no longer working. And Matt Knight can attest to doing that ourselves on more than one occasion.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, back in the years when we got started. We literally had a site that before we realized all the stuff was during the app years ago. I say it was 13 seconds, a load that wasn’t above the fold, but still, I mean, you know to look back and see what we were doing every time we thought, Oh, well, this is working really good. Let me add this and all me add this. And we never split tested it against other things.
Tanner Larsson
And then when we did, that’s when it actually started working way, way, way better. I mean, not to say that it didn’t work before. But it’s really hard to scale a brand that has a 13 and a half second page load time, when you’re really trying to put a lot of visitors on it. So anyway, guys, in summary, think twice about a site redesign or a store redesign. You more than likely don’t need it, make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. Like Matt said, don’t be the owner who just wants a fresh look to make it pretty. If it’s making money, just let it keep making money that makes you happier than a site that’s pretty that doesn’t make money and make sure your data is collecting correctly if you do decide to do a site redesign and use the data to influence what actually gets changed. Yeah, so with that, guys, we’re gonna wrap this up, please click below to subscribe to the podcast. We also do this over on YouTube. If you need the direct links. It is at BuildGrowScale.com/podcast and subscribe if you liked this episode. If you like listening to Matt and I ramble, then leave a comment below or a review and let us know what you think. And if you have ideas for future episodes, we’re always looking for more stuff. And we’re happy to, you know, act on the comment or their feedback that you give us. So with that, guys, we’ll see you later on the next episode. See ya.
