 So I found this incredible technology that did analytics and predictive analytics for your store It was you know midnight. I'm at my computer. I'm doing searching. I'm asking questions If you've ever used Google analytics and your store, you know that everyone tells you you know connected up to analytics And then you do and then later you're like I still don't know what to do with this, right? There's a whole bunch of data, but nothing no information no insight and so I was looking for tools and I found one And I found one that looked really incredible on the first visit of a person on your store just Navigating your store. They could analyze the behavior on your site compare it to the behavior of other people on your site and then Predict the lifetime value of that customer before they bought a single thing and I was like oh My god, I need this so it was really cool because they had a whole sign up, you know no no credit card needed and You would you'd have to give them some integration, right? You'd give them your API for stripe You'd give them your API for Mailchimp. They would look over all the emails you were sending out They would look over all the orders that had come in and then they would and they said you know This could take as we as we mine over all your data This could take a day or two before we get back to you, right? So I said it Did all the connections and about 1 a.m. I went to bed I was like I can't wait to wake up tomorrow morning because now people just gonna browse my site And I can see over their heads in virtual dollar signs how much they're worth to me. This is gonna be awesome so I wake up and I have an email from the CEO of this company And I'm like, oh So I read it and it says Chris Thank you so much for your interest in our technology We've poured over the purchases from your site and Unfortunately There's not enough data for us to make any predictions We work with companies like Target under armor JC pennies and Best Buy to analyze their flow You're doing a thousand dollars a month in revenue we suggest you circle back when you're doing a million That was the most polite way to say piss off that I've ever read Right But I tell you that story to tell you that in reality when we talk about e-commerce and conversions Everybody starts somewhere right everybody starts with a store when I when I was running one of my earlier stores years ago Someone said oh you wrote ebooks. Yes. Yeah, and and how are those selling and I'm like Yeah, you know, they're good. I mean like I guess it all depends like compared to zero $200 a month feels like a lot of money, but it's not like I'm gonna quit my day job, right? Everybody starts somewhere and so today what we're gonna do is talk about kind of that journey of how do you improve your store? Right for conversions so that you actually make more money so that you have more traffic Converting and if you're a store owner, this is great for you But if you're a person who helps store owners right if you design themes for your store or if you code and assemble Stores, hopefully this will be applicable to you as well. Does that make sense? Awesome. All right, so the first thing we have to do is be really really honest And that is to say that e-commerce is really hard right and that there is no magic bullet There is no this do this and you make a million dollars a month, right? There are a whole bunch of things that you try you test you iterate through and hopefully get to a point where you're like This is working. I'm gonna keep doing it. This isn't working so much. I'm gonna turn it off. Does that make sense? Okay, so Let's get into it single biggest factor In terms of conversions the single biggest factor without question so far beyond everything else That is the only thing you should start with and that's the speed and performance of your site the speed and performance of your site If you I work a lot with WooCommerce, which is an online platform if you go to WooCommerce comm slash showcase You will see 562 stores Over all the little clicks next next night you have five hundred and sixty two stores of the five hundred and sixty because 562 of those five hundred sixty two a handful of those sixty of them No longer use WooCommerce, right? So they they have after they put their name up for the showcase eventually they moved on to do something else What have you there's five hundred and two stores in the showcase that still Use WooCommerce. Okay, great So we took all those domain names and we threw them at GT metrics Which is a solution that analyzes the performance of every one of those stores now to do that We had to first go back and look at every store and figure out where their shop page was so that we are comparing apples to apples 460 out of five hundred and two Load up in more than three seconds with an average of about seven or eight seconds Google tells us that when they direct traffic The magic number for them in terms of their ability to think about whether or not you care about your customers, right? It's two point seven seconds 460 of the five hundred and two already outside their age But there's other studies right that will say oh, hey if you're not below two point seven, right? You're gonna see less conversions We'll talk about that but fundamentally, it's really simple to understand like this to say hey If people aren't on your site, they can't convert and people don't stay on a site that doesn't load And so the first thing you have to do is make sure that you have a chance at converting someone Is it you have to make sure they're there and that means you have to load quickly. Is that make sense? All right, so here are some stats, right? Maybe the most important stat on this page is the fact that if you have a two-second delay, right? This was a Akamai right last year and Akamai was looking at this and they By looking at a whole bunch of stores and pull it together They saw that when you had a two-second delay moving from one page to another that it shortened the session length by 51% Now if you're Amazon and that means average person staying on Amazon is about eight minutes in the human day Eight minutes to four minutes not so bad, right? But how many of you run Amazon? All right. Yeah, no, they're not here. They didn't show it to a work camp. I'm a cookie. That's weird So if you're not Amazon you may have already a session length of two minutes Right cutting it in half is one minute. That may mean you go from four pages, right to two page views Man, you got to do a lot of work to convince someone in that short of time Right, so you want to make sure that you're loading quickly. The other thing to note is Bounce rates, right? If you don't know what a bounce rate is It's the notion that someone comes from say a Google search lands on a particular page, right? They were typing T-shirts for people who sweat a lot, right? None of you obviously, but there are other people that do that in Google and so They type people who you know t-shirts of people who sweat a lot and they get routed to a particular store Right and when they get to that store, they're reading that page and I mean that page they go It's way too expensive for a t-shirt and then they just leave if you land on the page and leave from the same page That's a bounce Right and the lowest bounce rates, right were for stores that loaded pages that loaded in 1.2 seconds Right now imagine if your store is running at seven seconds on a page load 1.2 is a really far far cry from that It's a lot of work to get down there So of course what makes this harder is that everybody shops at Amazon and because everybody shops at Amazon, right? Fundamentally, they're resetting the bar for every single experience Everything you do as a store owner is being compared to Amazon Everything that you build as a developer is being compared to Amazon and every store owner who asks you to build if you're building for them Says I want it like Amazon Every time I get that question and I get it a lot, right? Hey, what can we do to make our store? You know what I saw this on Amazon. I saw this on Amazon I would like a store to work like Amazon and like awesome super cool and you have budget authority over this project Yes, I do great and you have Amazon's budget Wait what? So if you have the authority right so I was hanging out with the chief science officer for Amazon a couple years ago three years ago And he said that on their thank you page Right, that's after you purchase They were running 27 tests 27 AB tests on the thank you page After you have made the purchase I'm like dear god, what are you testing? Like you already done you already took the money like what is it? He goes well, you know that thing when you hit when you hit, you know When you buy and this is thank you and then at the top it says Share this purchase with your friends and there's a social set of buttons. I said yeah He goes well, that's one of seven different versions. Some sometimes it's a command share this with your friends, right? And other times it's a question. Would you like to share this purchase with your friends? Sometimes it's a specific question. Would you like to share this norelco razor purchase with your friends? And he goes we have seven different versions of those and we test those and I'm like, oh my god He goes that's just one of the 25 tests on that page Now the thing you know about testing if you know anything about testing is you need a certain amount of data To create what's called? Statistical significance right the notion that you didn't just get a fluke right like people who barely start AB testing Right they're like I put up the blue logo I put up the tall logo and I put up the wide logo and I had seven visits and four people like this one So we're gonna go with that you're like nothing You just said it makes any sense right stop talking and stop testing and find a professional but It's because you need more people right you need a certain amount of traffic for that Significance to be useful to you and I said thank you. I was asking a super smart question I said the data scientist Yeah, but you got 27 tests how long before you get all the information back