Clicks to Conversions: The Science of eCom Growth - with Will Laurenson from Customers Who Click

In this talk, Will Lawrenson, founder of Customers Who Click, discusses the science of converting clicks into actual sales for e-commerce brands. He emphasizes that while driving traffic may be simple, the real challenge lies in converting that traffic into paying customers. Lawrenson presents a typical e-commerce funnel, highlighting crucial metrics such as product views and checkout completion. He introduces the UAM method, a formula for growth that considers usability, motivation, and anxiety. The speaker stresses the importance of understanding customer behavior and providing essential information to aid purchasing decisions. Finally, he critiques common mistakes in conversion rate optimization, advocating for a deeper focus on customer research and iterative testing to enhance both usability and sales.

Hello. Um, yeah. So, I'm going to talk about clicks to conversions, the science of e-commerce growth. Um, I'll skip through this really quickly because we're a bit short on time, but I'm Will Lawrenson, founder of Customers Who Click. Uh, I spent nine years inhouse, so managing six, seven figure budgets, so I've kind of, you know, I've done the ads, I've done the emails. Um, and where I

settled on was CRO. Um, I spent three years running my own fancy football business, which was traumatic. Um, especially, in fact, seeing the DraftKings logo as I came from the airport was not uh not a good memory. Um, five years of customers a click. Um, and our average clients get about $125,000 monthly revenue uplift, 12% AOV, 90% conversion rate. Um, we've generated about 30 million in incremental

revenue and yeah, 230 plus episodes and about 400,000 downloads on the podcast over the last 5 years. Uh, and just some of the brands that we have been working with recently. So, getting into it, um, clicks are easy. So, driving traffic to a website is is still pretty easy these days, even with Facebook doing what Facebook does. Um, but conversions are obviously where the money lies. So,

the problem we see at the moment is obviously most brands are leaking money. Um, good at driving traffic, you know, ads perform okay, getting good clickthrough rates still. Um, but the website is the thing that's only just keeping you going, right? If the website's not converting, you're not making money, not really making much money off your ads. So, what's the point? So, a common e-commerce funnel funnel

will look something like this. We'll see generally around 33 to 48% um of sessions to a website will view a product. 2 to 6% of that traffic will then add to cart. 37 41% will start checkout and about 50% will complete checkout from there. So basically, yeah, less than half the traffic that you pay to send to a website is actually viewing a product in the first

place. And if it doesn't view a product, you can't buy a product. So this is roughly where where where we view benchmarks. So we want to try and get brands to 65% uh product views, 12% ad to cart, 45 start checkout, 55 complete checkout. There's always going to be people who drop off at various stages for various reasons. They're window shopping, they clicked on the ad for

the wrong reason, you know, whatever. Um this is where people focus their time on the the checkout. It's always we've got people to check out. we need more people to buy. Yeah, it makes absolute sense, but you know, on the average brand, it's only a 9% uplift on start checkout and 4% uplift on complete checkout for them to actually be at benchmark. Whereas on the product views

and add to cart rate, that's where the big uplifts are. So, that's where the big opportunity is to just drive more traffic into that funnel. And if you're already getting 41% ch uh starting checkout, 50% completing checkout, then if you can get 35% more people viewing a product in the first place, you're going to make you're going to make loads more money just with that change. So

yeah, CR the science behind ecom growth. So we we have our methodology which was mentioned earlier, the UAM method which we kind of turned into a bit of a formula recently. Basically over the last well five years doing it as an agency plus in-house every test and change that we make to a website falls into three categories. And so that's where this formula has come from. So

we got growth equals usability times motivation minus anxiety. I'll just let people take a picture. Um, and just before I get into what those are, I think the real key thing to to talk about is the fact that CRO is not just changing button colors or the placement of a button or little UX UI changes like that which don't really move the needle. It's about unlocking growth

your brand has already paid for, right? CRO is not a marketing channel. It doesn't drive traffic. So, it's there to make sure that when you are paying for that traffic to come to a website, you are converting it and you are making So we start with usability which is can I do the thing. So for the most part we are talking about conversions. We want people to

buy products but really this is anything that the user or customer has come to your website to do can they do it? So if they want to reach out to customer service, if they want to return a product, if they want to view your store locations, whatever it is, can they do that as easily as possible? And then obviously we want to focus on PDPs, checking out

and things like that. Um, so here's a a kind of test that we've run a few times for furniture brands and it works really well for brands that have a lot of a lot of product options and a lot of variance in those options. So what we found is that uh on the left hand side is the the kind of before version where you've got everything laid

out on the page. Everything is clickable. You can see all the options there and there's just loads going on in the page. And what we found is that by turning these into drop downs instead, not only do we condense the page, you get more information on the page. There's more above the fold in the first place, but it kind of becomes this step-by-step process for people instead.

So instead of just, you know, a wall of information, we're actually now guiding them through a process of configur configuring their product and helping them buy it. Then we've got anxiety, which is what do I need to know about the thing? So these are generally the questions and concerns that people have about your products and about your business. So product wise it would be what's it made

of? You know what's the material? What are the ingredients? If it's edible, um what size is it? Dimensions, weight, all that sort of thing. If it's shoes, it's generally shoe size. Um and then there's questions about the business as well. If people have never buyed from you, buy if people have never bought from you, who are you? Why should I trust you? Who else trusts you? um

what does that person need to know in order to make that purchase from you? So this is kind of more more feature-led functional. It's just the information people want to know. And so this is a test we ran for the ocean bottle. Um and basically we just wanted to you know we found out through customer research that people had questions about the bottle. There was no information

on the page really about how much water it held, how long it would retain the temperature, whether it was hot or cold, uh dimensions of it. Uh people wanted to know the weight, which is actually something I hadn't really considered. And then we also had some information about, you know, leak proof seal, double opening. There's also uh one of the ones below is um dishwasher safe and

things like that. So people just wanted this functional information and they wanted to make it really easy to find which I haven't done very well with this screenshot but if you look on the very your right hand side where it says ei view details so we just added a call to action quite high up the page which just allowed people to find this information really easily and

then finally we've got motivation which really is is the most important part in this is why should I do the thing so if people have um they found your products So, if they're looking for I always use the example of a standing desk um because I was buying one when I thought all this through. Um what do you want to know about the standing? So, you've got

to find it on the website. So, you've got navigation, search, whatever. Then on the anxiety side, it's the information. So, what's the desk made of? What color is it? What mechanism does it use to to raise and lower the uh the the uh the desk? Um does it have any kind of stands and things for hanging things on? And and how much weight can it hold? Um,

that's all the functional thing. That's the anxiety piece. So, the motivation piece is then why would I actually buy this thing? Right? I can buy a standing desk from a dozen different companies. What is it that makes me want to buy your standing desk from your brand? And that's where the motivation piece comes in. And another example I always use is True Classic, right? True Classic sells

plain T-shirts, right? That's that's it really. You can buy these t-shirts on Amazon for probably $5 each or you can buy them from True Classic for $25. So all their marketing ties into why is their product better, right? On the website, you'll find information about sizing and standard things like that, but everything they do, all the videos on their website, all the videos in their advertising focuses

on why these t-shirts are going to be better for you than the $5 dollar ones. And that's why they're a I think about a $400 million a year brand. Now, uh so I think a key thing that I want to get into is also conversion rate optim well CRO we don't really view it as conversion rate optimization. It doesn't really make sense. Uh especially in e-commerce, right?

On the B2B side, it does. You want to get demos, you want signups, you want leads, that sort of thing. Conversion rate makes sense. For e-commerce, it doesn't because if we increase conversion rate, other metrics might be impacted negatively. So, we view it as customer revenue optimization. So, what are all the things we can do across a website that will make you more money and whether that

is done by increasing the amount of money people spend or the increasing number of people who spend money, but also potentially decreasing your costs of doing various things. So coming back to that funnel earlier, um this is this is what we look at on a on a daily basis with our clients. We rarely look at the actual conversion rate of the website because if it's Black Friday,

conversion rate goes through the roof. After Black Friday, it plummets. Absolutely nothing to do with what's happened on the website. If a brand suddenly sends a load of Tik Tok traffic to a website, conversion rate is going to come down, etc. You get the point. Um, so we're always looking at can we increase the number of people who who who view a product. So if you increase

that by 15% you make more money. If we can then increase the number of people add to cart again more money start checkout complete checkout an AOV you know in theory if you increase all these by 15% you should double your revenue. Doesn't obviously happen like that uh exactly in real life but that's the that's the kind of process um and outlook that we have on things.

you know, if we we just want to increase these individual metrics that should then increase your conversion rate, increase the amount of money you make. And uh yeah, just an example I wanted to show with with um Space Goods, which is a brand that I I buy from. Um they tick all the boxes on this really. So even on this product page, actually kind of uh these

three bullet points in the middle there are kind of the UAM method there. So you've got in the middle you've got uh drink with water or milk hot or cold. So you're dealing with the usability of the product itself. You've got uh the anxiety piece. So zero jitters, anxiety or crash. So people the reason people buy this is because they don't want coffee which and caffeine which

makes them crash. And then you've got support, focus, energy and mental performance which which is the motivation piece. That's the desired outcome. What do people want to achieve from this? And then they've just massively I don't know if it's a loss leader for them, but they they give you everything possible with their starter bundle in order to get you to try and convert to that instead of

their standard subscription. They want you to take the bundle, so they want you to pay £39 down from £120. They give you all the free stuff because they know and I know if I use that uh that whisk, that scooper, that cup every single day, I'm not going to stop subscribing with them. It's also really tasty. Not the coffee one, the the chocolate one. Uh so, but

the real value after all that, and I know the real value everyone really wants is the money. Um but the real value in CRO comes from uh the understanding not just the results of each each individual test. So bad CRO is testing button colors. It's focusing just on UI changes, you know, just moving stuff around or changing colors and fonts and things like that. Checklists and best

practices and not really understanding why you're doing things and just running through lists and doing it. Uh lack of customer research and a failure to iterate, which I'll get on to in a sec. Because good CRO involves messaging hierarchy uh focusing on the customer mindset. So who are the people landing on your website? What information might they want? So if they're from Google, they're obviously a different

intent to people from uh from Meta, from Tik Tok. You've got problem based testing, uh customer research backed and learning and iteration. So the key thing for learning and iteration is um what we don't want to do is just run a test, see the result, and move on. Because if that test is a losing test, you've just wasted time and money running a test on a website

and you've got nothing. So if you're learning, the idea is to learn and iterate from everything. So we want to run a test. We want to get a positive result. We want to make more money. But really, one of the big benefits of CRO is looking at it and saying, "Okay, we tested adding some videos to a product page that had an improvement in conversion rate. Therefore,

people respond to video content. Let's do more with that. let's run advertisements with it. Let's get it in the product gallery. Let's test it elsewhere. It gives you direction and things to do next. And that's the iteration. So whether it's a losing or winning test, you need to be learning from this and thinking what what can we do better next time? Um how do we actually make

more money from Uh so customers don't don't just buy products, right? They're always buying them to solve a a problem, which is that motivation piece I talked about earlier. It's you know what's the pain point that they're trying to solve or the desired outcome that they want to uh they want to achieve with a product. So while most brands are talking about features which is the the

anxiety piece the you know this is how the size of it the weight of it the price and all that sort of stuff the brands that convert the best are speaking to the why like why do people actually want these products and therefore convincing them to buy them and then it's understanding the why now also behind a purchase which unlocks the conversion rate right uh conversion so

people will always you know you can sell products to people the people are always looking for these things but if you find out why they want to buy them and what triggers it. If you get that in your messaging and your ads, you get more people to the website. If you're then focusing on the website, you get more Uh so it's really about price and specs. One

of the biggest mistakes I see a lot with uh with surveys and questionnaires and things is closed ends questions which have price as an answer because I can guarantee price will get probably 50 60% of results if that is one of the options in a multiple choice because people just it's the easy pick. It's the one that people see and go yeah price was too high. Um

really it's about the problem they're trying to solve. they did not see that with your product and on your website and so and so they left, right? So they're not seeing uh how this product's going to solve a problem for them or they're not seeing the outcome that they're hoping to achieve with it. Uh and CR coming back to the the kind of iteration and learning piece.

So CRO is is basically customer research at scale. So again obviously we want to run positive tests. We want to get improvements on the website and uh and generate more money. But again like the key thing is then we're learning from each test. We're seeing whether, you know, if a test has a 1% improvement in conversion rate and revenue, that's still a very different result to one

that's got an 8% because that 8% tells us people reacted really well to this test, so we should do more with it. Whereas a 1% you might say, okay, fine, let's have a look at our priorities and see what we can do next. Uh, so we use a lot of insights from surveys, reviews, on-site behavior, um, custom service tickets, things like that. uncover you know what the

pain points are um what the outcomes your your customers want to achieve and then really focus onsite testing and changes on those uh so test solutions that highlight those points and then again iterate educate sorry what I mean by educate there is educate customers educate internal team as well um a big part of CRO again you know the learning is those tests and learnings from your CRO

program should also be fed into email marketing PPC paid media, they can learn from it. It can feed into your your product team, your fulfillment team. There's there's always stuff you can learn that can be fed into other areas of a business to either make you more money or save you more money. Uh and then uh yeah, evidence-based testing, which is really important bit. So, how to

decide what to test. One of the biggest questions we get is, you know, brands have loads of ideas, which is great, but they just don't know where to start and how much impact they're going to get from these things. So always start with a problem statement. So this is just you know we found a particular issue. What do we think it is and why? Um so it'll

be something like you know users are landing on this page. They don't add items to cart. So from the funnel that I showed you earlier you'd identify that your your ad to cart is low. Um you'd use you'd then combine heat map data. So products like Microsoft Clarity, Hot Jar, things like that uh with customer surveys to find out why people aren't adding to cart. So you

might find that people can't find a certain bit of information or uh or no one clicks on the image gallery for some reason. Then you move to a hypothesis which is your kind of testable assumption which will look something like if we make this change then this result will happen because and then you reason it with your with your data and insights. So we do this with

every single test that we run with the client and I'd recommend doing it with pretty much every change you're going to make. So whether it's a change to a website, a test, a new ad campaign, a new email, whatever it is, whatever you're looking to do, it's worth running it through a problem statement or hypothesis because this is going to help you just just kind of decide,

are we actually doing this for a good reason or is it because we've just said we just want to redesign our website because it's old, which is painful to hear. Um, so prioritizing tests. So follow the evidence. So we've got has it come from customer research? Is the problem evident in the clicks? So again, that's the heat maps and things. You know, where are people clicking? What

they doing? And then does it fit into a UAM framework because I need to plug that again. And then if you want uh I've got a free download on this horrifically designed slide. Um we put together a prioritization GP. Basically takes a there's a Google sheet that we use with our clients and we're scoring against 13 different questions to decide how impactful a test should be or

a change. Um, and this is helping us prioritize the the ch the tests that we run for our clients. We basically put this together as a GPT. So, you'll be able to um kick off the GBT. It'll ask you all these questions. If you say no to any of them, it'll kind of prompt you and suggest that you get on with it and do it. Um, and

if you at the end, it will give you a score. It'll tell you whether it's low, medium, high impact. And also, it will then ask you if you want to discuss that test or change and, you know, make some improvements to it. So, it kind of guide you through that process as well. And then, yeah, if you got any questions, reach out to me. Uh, if you

want a copy of that GPT, again, just connect with me on LinkedIn, drop me a message, um, and listen to the podcast.