 You can get lucky. You could be like, oh, I looked at my analytics one day and it told me that I'm getting a lot of traffic from ads So I spent more money on ads and I got more conversions. That's getting lucky. That's not actually improving things And that happens But to actually improve it for the long term to see that 110-year trend and actually see an increase and not just a blip It takes a lot of work over a long period of time The other thing I want to make super clear is that check out and this is one thing a lot of folks will focus on the checkout And say oh well you need to move this field here or you need to take out these things here And I'll talk about some of that stuff for sure today because that is significant and important But the results that I've seen Start at visitor acquisition Where you get your traffic from? Impacts the effectiveness of your checkout more than anything you can do on your checkout physics I mean unless your checkouts broken But as long as the checkout is working the biggest impact that you'll see is where you get your traffic from That's the that's where check out optimization actually starts not all traffic is equal You can run ads you can do email campaigns. You could do a lot on social you can put Links in lots of places that are outside of your website whether it's on with partners do content marketing with partners If you are a product developer like I am the Plug-in itself or the theme itself is the highest quality traffic you can get period I literally have not met a single product developer who says something other than that The traffic that you get from inside of your plug-in is the most highly qualified traffic that you can get So all of us myself included who are super bothered by our WordPress admin that's covered in Notifications and whatnot That is problematic. I don't like that experience myself But what is the reason it's often because folks are trying to get the most qualified traffic that they can possibly get Which is in the plug-in itself? Those notification banners and whatnot. That's not the best method of it Honestly, and that's not what we do. That's not where we get most of our traffic either but The traffic I see coming from within the plug-in is the traffic that does the best at the checkout without question by like a magnitude of 10 So that's why I say that what I'm saying and then making physical changes to your checkout Whether you're using WooCommerce or you're using Easy digital downloads or you're using Shopify which changes to the checkout there are almost impossible Like significant changes are almost impossible And other platforms Making changes to those checkout processes is challenging. It's totally possible with WordPress options But it's risky you don't know for sure if those changes are going to be beneficial or not And it's hard to roll them back sometimes And you risk Introducing change that actually might introduce breakage to one form or another so While it's important to do physical changes to your checkout in order to get the best results It's also the riskiest place. So that's why whenever I talk about E-commerce checkout stuff. I start with everything that's not the checkout first Again, I it's almost like my title is a little bit clickbaity Let's talk about not check out in order to fix the checkout But that it's really what I have seen in terms of the the best results overall So what do we analyze actually when we're using analytics to understand things What do we analyze the first thing that like I said is the source? Where is your traffic actually coming from? Where are you attracting your visitors from generic blog articles can drive a lot of traffic for sure But not a ton of conversions so in order to actually start driving conversions with content marketing from your blog you're going to have to do a lot of traffic and That's a risk you have to take or an investment you have to consider is if that's going to be one of my primary ways of driving more Conversions I'm going to have to blog a lot and regularly and I'm going to have to spend a lot of time on that content I like content marketing a lot It's definitely one of the things that has driven a lot of conversions for give WP in particular But it is not free. It costs a lot of time a lot of effort And you have to be strategic about that as well Targeted advertising is another really good one. I actually like targeted advertising now Before I did target advertising. I didn't like advertising in general It's also fraught with privacy concerns and things like that Where do they get all this data to know that I want a blue shirt and not a pink shoe like well It's because they are watching me in different ways But I can say I like getting ads about blue shirts instead of pink shoes so there's pros and cons there again American living in Europe privacy concerns is something that I think about a lot but The targeted advertising does have the opportunity to actually take like instead of organic search Which can is a net that's really huge Targeted advertising can say like I just want to try to get these people because I know that these people are interested in what I'm trying to sell And so ideally if you're spending time there That traffic even if it's a lot less traffic than your organic traffic that traffic should have a higher conversion rate Absolutely, and if it's not you're doing something wrong with your advertising. I'm trying not to look at the camera. I'm trying to look good If you're a plug-in author like I like like I mentioned before the links inside of your plug-in are absolutely the most valuable option you have Or if you're a theme author But how you present them is really important I don't have a visualization for this But if you think about the WordPress admin and give WP has a Menu on the side that says donations and in that menu one of the sub menu items says add-ons and In my mind what that does is it highlights to the person? Using our plug-in that there's more that they can do they can add additional stuff on and so Not a lot of people are going to click on that thing because they're like I just need to build a form and move on I got other stuff to do. I'm in my WordPress admin. I'm doing blog posts. I'm Managing my users. I'm doing all this other stuff. I don't need to click on your advertising But the ones who do click on that that's where everything changes and You might be surprised but a lot of people do click on that They click on that and then they see a screen that says here's all the ways in which you can do more Once they click on those buttons. I have utm's on all of those things personally I don't ship any links outside of my control like if it's outside of my website if it's somewhere else in the world It always has a utm that does not collect private information there are folks who use utm's for malicious purposes and that's why that's also a sensitive issue, but I Want to just get the source did this traffic come from my plug-in? Yes, or no if it did come from my plug-in what screen did it come from I can get that as well If it did come from this screen, which button did it come from I can get that as well with utm's So every single link has a utm on it And I know with certainty which button in the plug-in drives the most traffic and drives the most conversion That's what you use the analytics for Is so that you can say with authority is this even working? Does anybody even care about this screen? I know a certainty that it does and I know which ones are are are the best That is by far the most valuable traffic that you get You can get really really good at advertising online advertising and that traffic can start to rival this type of traffic But I have never talked with a plug-in author and I have not yet experienced that paid advertising actually Exceeds the revenue and conversions that you get from inside the product itself next How actually this is actually on the next slide the entry pages when you now I've got traffic I got their attention one way or another. I got some organic traffic. I got some paid traffic I got some traffic from inside the plug-in Now they're on my site Now what am I doing on that page that they landed on? Sometimes what I see in the WordPress ecosystem often is that folks are driving to a blog post Which might be informative when which might be educational, but it doesn't actually do anything to drive conversions And it's not that it has to be busy and pushy and salesy But it does have to be educational and it does have to highlight the way in which you can purchase Those are the biggest things that I try to always say is if you're going to gain traffic and your business is e-commerce Then when they land on your site, you have to do a couple important things is your value proposition obvious When they land on your site, are you informing them educating them on why your site matters to them? In one way or another once you have their attention Are you able to keep it and that's where your value proposition does and then while they're there Are you educating them on the problem that you can solve for them? Again, this sounds weird to be talking about checkouts, but when you do these things You can have a relatively bad checkout experience and it will still perform relatively good Because you did all the right things before they got to the checkout. That's that's the key message I'm trying to drive and then when they're on that page entry pages are your call-to-actions CTAs are your call-to-actions? Explicit don't get cute with call-to-actions. Don't be like let's get started That could mean anything If you're wanting them to buy something say buy my thing and they click on the button that says buy my thing Because the worst thing is you say let's get started and then they end up in a checkout and they're like That's not what I wanted to do. That's not at all what I thought was going to happen That means your checkouts going to have a lot higher abandon rate Because you've got them there, but they're not going to stay there because they didn't want to be there in the first place So don't get cute with the buttons buy now purchase Open your wallet Anything that you want to say that makes it obvious that when they click on the button They're going to be in your cart or your checkout I am going to have lots of time for questions. I love questions. I would actually prefer for these types of things to be conversations so keep them in mind and Be ready for it and then the last thing I'll say before I get into some nitty-gritty details when it comes to the checkout itself Yes, checkout fields are important be minimalist with your checkout fields Don't ask for their nephew's name and their social security and all these things like don't ask for a ton of information Really try to be minimalist when it comes to checkout fields the fewer the better one of them evolutions of Stripe the payment gateway that I have loved is the way in which they're able to have a one field payment area essentially That that's been a big game changer for a lot of folks Do you need billing fields? Sometimes you really do and Billy billing fields can be helpful to prevent against fraud and things like that So but you don't always need them Do you really need their phone number? You got to think through that or not We actually do ask for a phone number, but it's not required It's because we actually do physically call people after they make their purchase And that's an interesting conversation. That's another presentation Is the checkout the best place for them to opt into your marketing? That's a hard question that a lot of people say well, they're there and I need them And so I want them to opt into my marketing, but is that the best place to ask them? They're not that's not their intent. That's not what they're trying to do at that time They want to buy from you. They don't want to get spammed by you You really need to ask the hard questions of whether or not that's the best place to do because all that does is like make them think About something that's not purchase related and if you're making them think about something not purchase related in your checkout You're increasing the chance that they're going to take off And then when it comes to payment options do the opposite be a maximalist And this is something I'm trying to work on on our checkout right now right now We basically have credit card and PayPal Which covers a huge portion of buyers, but more and more there's so many options I just went to go fill my tank at the gas station the other day I could pay in 25 different ways at the gas station. It was overwhelming. It was a bit much honestly I bet I was like G pay should I do that? Should I just take my phone out and tap? I don't know should I put in a card? I have five different cards Which one should I do that can be a little overwhelming? But the reason why you do more of the options at the checkout is because you don't want people to not buy because they don't have their preferred payment method the art between adding a lot of payment method options without being overwhelming is a whole Subject matter by itself as well And often it depends on your payment gateway and the way that they provide it again I feel like stripe is leading the way on that front There might be other opinions about that but the ability to do Apple pay and Google pay and All the credit card options to do to check out lots of German pay payment options as well all within one Simple area with stripe is pretty amazing So you don't want people to take off because they want to pay with Google pay and you don't allow them to do that All right, so show me the checkouts. I have some checkout examples and a little bit of what I walked through how much time do I have? At 10, okay, we're gonna go fast. So The give checkouts over the course of about three years. I'm actually going to flip over here to Figma And walk through it a bit Oh One thing I didn't do is figure out how to zoom in when I don't have my mouse There we go. Cool. So this was our checkout a couple years ago Which is almost like the stock easy digital downloads checkout. It has everything you need And it's boring as hell But being boring on your checkout is not a big problem, honestly Sometimes being boring is helpful because it is minimalist But we really felt like there's a lot that we can do here and just as a spoiler alert It's kind of confusing because you see a lot of down arrows here, but the this one right here is the result 64.65% Decrease in drop-offs these are the analytics So you want to pay attention to attention to on your checkout is add to carts is what it's called when you get it with somebody Actually physically add something to their cart and then how many checkouts did you actually get? How many transactions did you actually get with give WP? We don't have a cart at all. We go straight to checkout because we're basically always only selling one product at a time Not everybody has that so checking add to carts cart to Check out and check out to transaction in the case of give WP It's straight to check out so we got straight to check out and then we got transactions We increased that that differential by 65% because of these changes. I'm about to show you This was our first attempt. We we first went at it with a design. I we were like Let's make it more clear and the most the biggest motivation here was the a key part of the checkout That I feel like is really important is that when they hit buy sometimes what happens is That you go straight to a checkout that's like, all right, give me all your payment info now But literally sometimes they're like, but what am I buying even though they just click buy on your product page? They're at your checkout and they're not totally sure what they're buying. So on the checkout or in the cart Or both ideally there should be a way in which they have an overview of exactly what they're opting into So we wanted to lead with make sure that what they're buying is front and center I don't remember who made the decision to put my face on the checkout, but That happened to which is weird but That section there is about making sure that they understand you can buy and you can decide you don't want it anymore And that's going to be fine. You're going to be fine. That's a really important assurance We wanted to make that front and center as well And then the payment fields are isolated really clear and obvious And then you could see hopefully you're already spotting a problem with this one because I just said a little bit ago Don't get too cute. I got we got cute, right? Get started with give that's a purchase button That's like they're going to finalize their their purchase and it says get started lesson learned. Don't get cute This is a next iteration what we didn't like here is how everything felt Kind of too isolated and like you have to scroll a lot to Did to actually see everything and get down to payment information? So we've tightened it up quite a bit. We tried to make it feel a little more cohesive Still all all basically the same information But but it's a bit more cohesive here and and definitely More tightened up and the other thing here what we didn't like over here You can see that the purchase button is actually physically outside of the area And that felt like a problem for sure So we got that inside of the whole area instead and again Like I mentioned a long time ago doing these Customizations took a ton of effort and each of these are things that we shipped physically and then analyzed is this working And again, so like I said, this isn't results that we did over the course of a couple months This is what we did over the course of three years We did not necessarily not at the same time not a not a this check out and then this check out a B testing requires a ton of traffic to get actionable results and Give WP is a niche it would have taken us probably six months to get the amount of traffic that we wanted So instead we did more of just looking at the analytics before and after But over a period of time as well And we knew that we were going to be iterating over a long period of time So seeing the analytics changed throughout the whole process was the attempt I would love to be able to have enough traffic to a B test to check out over the course of a week That would be awesome. If you're in that position have at it. That's a whole nother presentation Okay, and then this is based almost exactly where we are today What we didn't like which you probably all intuitively understood to we didn't like that in order to get to the payment fields You really had to scroll down. We didn't like that But we also didn't like that after you scroll down you lose that summary of what you're buying it also We didn't like that either. So we're like, how can we have our cake and eat it too? And we ended up with this two-column layout for the check out which I was nervous about a two-column layout Also for mobile and things like that. It's super common nowadays. It happens everywhere but It's been working all right And this is literally a screenshot I took this morning of our check out now We have a an upgrade option at the top and a couple changes over here strong Testimonial right there. I got five minutes. So I'm going to do one more thing and jump into questions iconic WP is a great WooCommerce extension store. They've been using freemius for a long time And we just recently moved them over to WooCommerce and the checkout is actually powered by an iconic WP product called flux checkout And this is essentially the freemius checkout. So when you're on your marketing page, you can click buy now and this freemius Modal pops up and you can make the purchase right there And the great thing about that is you stay on the marketing page it's really just focusing on the Payment information. It's I it's supposed to be quick and generally speaking freemius does have serve a lot of Vendors and they have a lot of data on how their checkout works And so I know that the way that they build these out is intentional and data-driven as well I do want to say I like freemius overall But our business objectives really pushed us towards WooCommerce And this is now the checkout that we have at iconic and I don't have the data because we literally shipped this two weeks ago But a lot of the things that I talked about in terms of how we influenced our give WP checkout was used to Be applied to this checkout. You can see that it's you got the two columns What I like about the flux checkout product that we're using here in WooCommerce Is that you basically are getting a cart and a checkout all on the same page? So you can have multiple products being added here And you could see your cart you see it up here With a description of what this product is there can be multiple products here all at the same time And you can actually be changing that information Live right here and it updates automatically We have the 100% guarantee it doesn't have to have my face or anybody's face It could just be like you get your money back We have the trust pilot stuff all these things are helping to say like if you buy this you're gonna be good Well, we got your back And then when you click to the next You're still you're in the the checkout while you're still have the car overview Really simple fields up here. They're basically in line And then they even has an upsell here where you can add a second product at the same time And we the initial results that we've had within the first couple weeks is that this Upsell is getting already an 8% upsell conversion rate Which I was really surprised. That's very high. I'm expecting that to actually go down I'm thinking it's going to be like 2 to 3 percent in the long run, but initial results are really positive. So Last things before questions Show me the metrics do I have time? These are not our real numbers But this is what is now called looker. I think that's a terrible name, but he used to be called data studio All of this is populated by the weekly data that I pull out of analytics Every single week every single Monday And this is what I do over time. These are not our real numbers But it's an example of what they look like when everything is there I have it set up so that right now it's showing an annual view, but I can break this down to do only week five How was week five? And there's week five information or again I can just take all of it and see the annual and I see the graphs and charts And I'm checking to the website performance itself as a whole our ad performance organic performance email performance social performance affiliate performance I am living in this data. This is the The spreadsheet that populates that again, not our real numbers But this is what I'm looking at all the time, but I make this for everybody else to enjoy the numbers Most people don't enjoy this. I enjoy this I have fun looking at these numbers all the time But I make this a lot more tangible and nutshell oriented and when I say oh, we're seeing a dip here They go, well, what does that mean? Well, let me show you it looks like this That so that's been really helpful and effective for me That was so fast because I'm almost out of time and like I said, I love questions. So we'll jump into questions