https://soundcloud.com/matchnode/olie-gardner-matchcast-episode-60
[0:33] Intro
[0:46] What is Unbounce?
[1:20] The innovative culture at Unbounce.
[2:34] What percent are going mobile?
[3:20] Was there a jump in conversion rates after going mobile?
[4:50] What are some of the upcoming betas?
[5:45] What is Machine Learning?
[10:28] What are some of the larger trends in conversion right now?
[12:18] Using Unbound as part of the hiring process.
[14:40] What is one thing you can do to help conversion on a landing page?
[14:53] What is your biggest pet peeve on a landing page?
[14:53] Final Thoughts
BRIAN: OK, welcome to this episode of Matchcast. Today we are honored to have on the pod one of the co-founders of Unbounce, Oli Gardner.
Most of our listeners should know that Unbounce is matchnode landing page platform of choice. We just got back from their call to action conference in Vancouver where we had a chance to speak and had a great time.
Happy to have you on the pod today, welcome Oli. Happy Canada day!
OLI: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.
BRIAN: Cool, well most of our listeners as I said should be familiar with Unbounce but can you give a brief overview for anyone who hasn’t heard of Unbounce?
OLI: Sure, it’s a landing page platform. Basically the goal of it is to empower marketers to do their own work without relying on technical people like developers to IT so you can build publish and a/b test landing pages without the help of IT or technical people.
It’s loaded with templates that are mobile responsive. It’s really easy drag and drop, you can really put a page together in minutes, and get it published in one click without dealing with anyone technical.
So it’s a really good way to let marketers go about their own business.
BRIAN: It is pretty fantastic not having to wait on Dev all the time to get things published or very, very quickly and test different things.
One of the things Unbounce allows people to do is speed up their innovation, and we actually have been really impressed with the speed of innovation within Unbounce. Around a year ago Unbounce wasn’t even mobile responsive and now it’s almost a mobile first kind of platform.
Can you talk a little bit about the culture and the speed of innovation that’s happening at Unbounce?
OLI: Yeah, I think in general, the industry is in a vulnerable place right now, I’ve commented before the SAS business model is kind of mature so it’s in a place where companies can now grow really quickly by following a basic kind of formula, and what I think will define the next few years will be an innovation spike where someone does something dramatically different.
That’s where we are at, it’s something we are constantly focused on. You know, innovation is really hard, there’s no recipe for it, only facility and desire, and by facility I mean being able to actually do it. Are you empowering your employees to think about innovation? And I’m really excited about the next year, because we are going to be doing some pretty incredible things that aren’t being done right now.
BRIAN: Awesome, as far as getting back to mobile a little bit. How many of your pages right now are you guys seeing as percentage wise are going mobile first?
OLI: I’m not too sure of the numbers, it’s funny though, too many people I would say are still not doing it, or doing it right. I was talking to Wil Reynolds from Seer at a gig we were speaking at in Minneapolis last week, and I don’t know all the details yet, but he’s working with a client they’ve had for a long time and they’ve never done anything with mobile so he just built a bunch of mobile landing pages on Unbounce really quickly based on the existing pages they had and they’ve been having incredible results with PPC just by the fact they’ve got this customized experience that’s a lot easier to use and a lot more delightful.
It’s a simple opportunity but not a lot of people, well not enough people are embracing it.
BRIAN: If that’s the case they really need to get on board. I’m sure you guys saw conversion rates just jump across the board once you went mobile responsive.
OLI: Yeah what’s interesting though is in the responsive debate, it’s crazy popular, it’s necessary, we had to build it because it was the number one thing our customers were screaming for.
BRIAN: We were one of them.
OLI: If you look at the debate now though, it’s going backwards. It’s going back to an mdot. A mobile-specific experience, or adaptive design instead of responsive. The reason is that when you have responsive and you change the size of the device, it makes decisions for you, it kind of wraps everything down and gives you an interpretation of the current page, which isn’t always good enough. Which is why we built it differently in Unbounce. Instead of being responsive it’s mobile responsive.
The difference being when you’re in the page builder you can hide or you can show any of the elements in the mobile experience so you can have a full thing for desktop. But then you can move things around, customize and hide some elements for the mobile experience which is great because sometimes you need less information or in a different order than it is in desktop.
So that’s kind of why we innovated a bit there in the way we built that feature.
BRIAN: Continuing along the lines of innovation, what are some of the things you’re working on and betas that customers can hope to see in the next year?
OLI: A couple of things but right now we are working on something we are calling embeddable CTAs. As for what we are in the middle of right now, I can’t talk an awful lot about it, but just imagine a call to action anywhere in your web properties, something that you can embed or different interaction modes that can happen not just on your landing page anymore, but anywhere on your web properties, your website, anywhere else.
And these CTA’s are built with the powerful Unbounce builder, and with testing built in so it’s not just testing a page that you would do with testing tools with Optimizely. It’s testing a very specific part of it without touching the rest. It’s going to be really interesting I think.
And then the even more exciting thing is when our machine learning is going to kick in.
BRIAN: Alright well, let’s dive into that, your keynote at CTA was all about machine learning, it’s a huge buzzword, we see it in commercials, to a lot of people it seems like an IBM catchphrase really than something that means something to them.
I thought your keynote did a great job breaking it down what It means to marketers and what it will eventually mean to lots of different small businesses and really framing some specific use cases that made sense to a lot of people.
So can you kind of summarize that a little bit?
OLI: Yeah, what I was trying to communicate at CTA was drawing a connection between what’s possible now, which are the conversion equations I was talking about, and what will be possible in the very near future.
So we’re working on, Tommy, our data scientist is working on, models and algorithms to try and automate conversion optimization. And when I say automate, don’t be scared of robots taking over. This is more just analyzing hundreds of thousands of landing pages and your website in the future and figuring out which factors actually are predictive of conversion. We’ll find that some things aren’t.
Like something I think I touched on, the number of form fields on a form impacts conversion rate. Not always but it can, it’s kind of obvious. But it’s not predictive of conversion rate. You can’t specifically say that if you go from four fields to two it will have this difference; it will be different for every instance. But then when you connect that to other things on that page, so sentiment analysis we are working on, and just on page copy. Then it actually does become predictive and we are able to start seeing what does have an actual impact. And it’s going to be a little piece of this mixed with a little piece of that. Kind of stuff that we would never figure out by ourselves and that’s what’s going to be beautiful about it.
And even more amazing is that we don’t know what’s going to happen, we don’t know what it’s going to tell us. I mean, right now, Tommy has his model to the point where, and it’s getting better every day, with 80% certainty he can look at a landing page with his model and know whether it’s good or bad, in terms of the 50th percentile, compared to all these other pages is it “good” or is it “bad”.
And then the sentiment analysis will see that if we add a little more disgust it’s 8% more likely to swing further to the good side. Now that could be because it’s a bug killing service you have. Or maybe if you have marketing software maybe you need a little more happiness or whatever the sentiments are.
And also the words, we were looking at an Uberflip landing page. And interestingly, some of the sentiment stuff was quite obvious, like a bit more joy, less sadness, are good things. But the word “marketing” actually was having a negative impact.
BRIAN: Scary! Marketing!
OLI: Right, you’d never think that, but it’s a lot of things combined, which is what’s really cool. It’s all really cool, but then looking at some pages and looking at where does this word appear that seems to be having a positive impact and it was in a pricing grid. Which is just incredible. If you can start seeing things that can help or hinder areas of a page like that. The potential is kind of limitless.
BRIAN: Is there a time frame where you guys are looking to bring some of these elements to life?
OLI: That’s really hard to say, we are about to form a little squad to deal specifically with this. So it’s going to be a matter of as we keep adding more pieces into this, more algorithms, more models, we are going to uncover things, but we don’t really know what they are going to be yet.
You know, we start with some things so we’re going to be doing a visual analysis of a page, we don’t know what that’s going to uncover. Now interestingly, I was talking with Carl Schmidt our CTO, because he’s going to be involved in this, so is Tommy, so am I, so are some other people. They were talking about this visual analysis of a page and Carl was asking like I was, what if we can see if this would have an impact, say a smiling face or whatever if we could recognize that.
And Tommy was like, no we don’t need to look at it from that perspective, the analysis will tell us what’s good and bad, and it’s like what?! How can it tell us that without us telling it something?
So we don’t know where it’s going to lead us, and the reason I’ll going to be involved is so I can bring the marketing perspective that we can put it up against the learnings we are getting, so we know where to steer it as soon as we start getting some insight.
BRIAN: Awesome, well zooming out a little bit and talking about these larger trends, what are some of the larger trends you’re seeing in conversion these days?
OLI: Every year there are new interaction design trends that come to the marketing world. People are probably familiar with things like welcome mats which I think were initially started by SumoMe.
That’s where you arrive at a homepage or webpage and either immediately without seeing any transition or it will kind of flip down, you’ll have a full screen inter-spacial CTA which is saying, ‘Hey would you like to blah blah?”
And you have to bypass that sometimes by scrolling or closing it to actually get where you’re going. And these things used irresponsibly can be very damaging. But it’s our job as thought leaders in this tool space and the speakers and what have you to guide people to use these responsibly so it can be delightful.
But these things come around every year, so last year or the year before you’ve got parallax, you’ve got ghost buttons, scroll jacking, which was the worst thing on the internet. It’s where you try to scroll and it runs away from you, it tries to do it for you, some idiot thought they could redesign 20 years of browser interaction and it’s just a train wreck.
Then you have video backgrounds, so we’ve built a lot of these into Unbounce, video backgrounds, parallax. But we did it, again we always try to do these things differently. When you see parallax, that’s when two things are kind of moving when you scroll against each other. It can look OK, but it’s also a little disturbing, so we built it with a one-way scroll, so as you move past the page section the background will go through it. It looks amazing, it’s not disturbing because it’s not this two-way jiggly, kind of confusing thing. So again, we are trying to be responsible with our implementation of the things people are asking for.
BRIAN: One of the things we learned through Unbounce that we actually stole from you guys is actually using Unbounce a little bit in our hiring process. There’s a lot of different ways to use Unbounce other than just as a landing page, and we use it in a lot of different ways at Matchnode.
Can you talk about how you guys use your platform for hiring?
OLI: Yes, since day one I think it was Carter Gilchrest, he’s our chief product officer, it’s his idea. Basically if you send us your resume or CV, we’ll delete it without looking at it. If you give it to us in person we will tear it in half, I think I’m the only person who’s done that one.
BRIAN: What was the look on their face?
OLI: He came into our office, we had a little chat, he gave it to me and he left. I then turned to the team and tore it in half, so I didn’t actually do it in front of his face, that would’ve been really mean.
BRIAN: That’ would’ve been really harsh.
OLI: He actually later on did figure out the proper method of applying which is to open a free Unbounce account and build a landing page telling us why you want to work for us and why we should hire you. And the creativity that goes into this incredible, and more importantly actually, all the people who aren’t really concerned about working for you, don’t apply.
BRIAN: It’s a great filter.
OLI: Yeah, it self-selects the people who really care, they’re passionate about working for you, the pages they create are phenomenal. It really lets people shine more than a LinkedIn profile or something like just dry and horribly boring. It’s worked fantastically for us.
BRIAN: I think one of the really cool parts is 95% of the people, maybe they’ve heard of Unbounce, but they certainly haven’t used Unbounce before. And it speaks to the platform’s ease of use, and how far someone wants to dive in deep into learning some basic designs and learning some real basic things within the platform, but they can really bring something pretty complex to life very, very quickly.
OLI: Yeah and actually, another benefit of going to this process is that these applicants have touched our product. They’ve come in there and have started to falling in love with it or hating it. Whichever way, and they go, oh this is the kind of thing I’ll be working on or supporting, whichever thing it is. And our customer success team will be talking to them as part of the onboarding process as a customer so they really get a sense of how our culture and our company and our product works.
So that also takes away some of the work we need to do if we hire them.
BRIAN: Awesome, well a couple more, quick take-aways. What is one underrated thing that marketers can do to their landing pages to help conversion right now.
OLI: Just tell people what you do! This frustrates me to no end.
BRIAN: Well that fits my next question too, what’s your biggest pet peeve on a landing page?
OLI: Yeah, just not stating what you actually do, I’m a big observer of design problems in the real world, and things frustrate the crap out of me when they don’t work correctly, especially when the answer is staring me in the face and really obvious. And when companies can’t even get the simplest interaction correct, telling someone what you do, I want to throw physical objects at their websites. I don’t really want to smash my monitor but.
It’s crazy how many headlines don’t explain what a company does. It’s just a clever reference to an internal joke, or their trying to be smart.
BRIAN: A lot of adjectives.
OLI: Yeah, like hyperbolic statements, people copy Grey Goose vodka. And the example I showed at CTA conf, they basically just wrote marketing software on the page fifteen times, and it’s like what kind of marketing software is this? It drives me crazy.
BRIAN: Well, loved having you on the pod today, anything else you want to plug?
OLI: Yeah, CTA conference next year! It’s a little way away, but I think if you go to the website right now, CTAconf.com, we have the lowest price for tickets you’re ever going to see, it’s a $1000 ticket normally, and right now you can get 2 tickets for $600 so $300 Canadian for a ticket which is like $5 US.
It’s going to be amazing next year, the speakers we are going to line up will be even better than this year. Which is going to be hard to beat. Actually just a little nugget of information for people. Our average speaker rating was 4.43 out of 5. That is unheard of, I speak everywhere, I know how this works, and that’s smashed everything I’ve ever seen at other conferences or ours in the past. You’ve got to come.
BRIAN: And the listeners can also check out last year’s speakers including me, myself. On the CTAconf website. Once again Oli, thanks again for being on today, and we will talk soon.
OLI: Excellent, it was my pleasure.
Resources:
–intro and outro music from our friends at Sabers: https://sabersmusic.bandcamp.com/releases