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- [00:01]
Ralph Burns
I spent over a decade in the trenches of marketing attribution, tracking over $5 billion in ad spend and over $10 billion in revenue. And here's the truth. Most marketers are overwhelmed second guessing every decision, drowning in data because no one taught them to use attribution the right way. That's why I built the Five Forces, a proven system to give you clarity, confidence and direction to use attribution data with a system Right now, Perpetual Traffic listeners can get $800 off the Five Forces course and system over at five forces.com just use the code PT. You don't need more tools, you need a system. Go to fiveforces.com and get the system. Use code PT to save $800 today.
- [00:56]
Lauren E. Petrillo
You'Re listening to Perpetual Traffic.
- [01:05]
Taz Bober
Are you looking for new audiences for your business? Well, Snapchat is full of engaged users you just might be missing. And if it feels like your current audiences on all those other social platforms are tapped out, it might be time to diversify over time. Snapchat here's why 75% plus of 13 to 34 year olds in over 25 countries use Snapchat. 40% of Snapchatters aren't even on TikTok daily. And it's not just Gen Zers. In fact, nearly one in four Snapchatters are over the age of 35 and 85% of Snapchatters discover new products and brands through social ads and that's 6, 17% higher than non users on the platform. This is an untapped platform. I don't know many people who are advertising on it right now. It's still blue ocean for you because with Snapchat you have the potential to reach a hugely untapped audience and drive incremental growth for your business. So if your paid ad strategy could use a boost, it might be time to put Snap on your roadmap. Go to snapchat.com perpetualtraffic to learn more. Snapchat is now giving away thousands in free ad credits to new customers. Go to snapchat.com perpetualtraffic to find out if you're eligible. Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph burns, founder and CEO of Tier 11, alongside my.
- [02:32]
Unknown Co-host
Amazing co host Lauren E. Petrillo, founder of Mongoose Media.
- [02:37]
Taz Bober
So glad you joined us here today and today we're going to do a little bit of self congratulatory positive reviews that we've gotten for this show. So if you haven't left a positive, hopefully five star, we'll accept A four. Although we have read the ones on air. Those are the funniest, you gotta admit. So we don't really want that. That doesn't really help the show much.
- [03:00]
Unknown Co-host
We want reviews, we want feedback. We want honest feedback.
- [03:03]
Taz Bober
Wanna know what you think? We do this show for you. The perpetual traffic listener. Quarter of a million people listen every single month. Can you believe that, Lauren? Just me and you. I mean, that's larger than, like, you know, five Fenway. So, having said that, what's the latest and who left a review for us for professional traffic?
- [03:22]
Unknown Co-host
We've got one. I'm reading from itunes. Best religious standup comic ever. Thank you from Lily Mooney. I'm in sales and marketing. It's relevant to my job. So when I heard Lauren's comedy, I wanted to come back out and check out more of her stuff. Definitely. Pleasantly surprised. Good content. Someone said, can't put a better label on this. Absolutely amazing. Learned about it at Shop Talk at our S A T O Sato. It was a great listen. On my way back to Charlotte.
- [03:49]
Taz Bober
All right. See, well, that's what you get. You get 15 seconds of podcast fame if you leave us a rating and review. We're on Spotify, iheartradio. Wherever you listen to podcasts, there's so many different places. For crying out loud, why am I even mentioning them? But just leave us a rating, a review, we'll actually mention it here on the air. Get this out to more marketers and teaching them the right way of doing things. Like our guest today is going to teach you the right way of doing things. And God damn it, we've already learned a few things from her on the pre record. Yeah, we've got Taz Bober on today. If you haven't heard about Taz, she is a consultant for landing pages for B2B SaaS. Can you get any more niche? But, oh, my God, that space needs her help badly. And we're going to be talking about that as well as landing pages today. So welcome to the show, Tas Bober.
- [04:41]
Lauren E. Petrillo
Thank you so much for having me. And before you decide to stop listening to this episode, we are not just going to be talking about B2B SaaS today. I promise you it will be relevant to you if you're a marketer running paid, doing landing pages. All of the good stuff.
- [05:01]
Unknown Co-host
Yeah, because we're going into Google's update.
- [05:03]
Taz Bober
When we were talking about this a month or so ago, I was like, what? What? Wait, what? So Google actually had a landing page update, which, if you've Seen a drop off in your Google Ads in the last three to four months. Maybe this is the reason why. So, Taz, thank God, is coming on the show to save your ass, save you some money in the process, and tell you how to remedy this, especially if you've seen any kind of drop off. So tell us about the evolution of this. And it was hard to find when I googled it to try and find the update, sort of seemed like they kind of kept this quiet, but then you figured it out and sort of told it to a larger audience. So spill the beans on this big update here.
- [05:45]
Lauren E. Petrillo
All right, Beans are getting spilled. So the biggest thing is, yeah, they released it stealthily February 5, 2025. And I will provide you guys with a link so you can put it in the show notes so everyone can go read and know that we did not make this up. Basically, they just kind of silently said, hey, here's a recent ads quality update. Just. So slipped it in there. Just ready to ruin your entire life and have you scrambling.
- [06:14]
Unknown Co-host
They tried to roofie your ad account.
- [06:17]
Lauren E. Petrillo
Yeah, they tried to roofie your ad account. I love that. Yes. Slipped it in. You have no idea what's happening, why your ads are falling down the stairs to just keep going with the roofie analogy. Search ads and the importance of landing page navigation is the article. I am not going to read the article to you, but this is the TLDR. Now, with the onset of AI, yada, yada, they have basically traced and created this, like, predictive model where they are tracing and tracking user behavior. Sketchiness aside. Right. Google's always watching. Let's just throw that out there. So if you're suddenly like, what they are doing, what they've always been doing it. Okay, get over it. It's been years. And so they've been looking at user behavior and taking user feedback that says, hey, hey. Every time I click on these ads, they take me to a page that is not relevant to the ad, and then they get frustrated and they come back to search, and then they're trying to refine their search to get to where they want to go, right? So Google's looking at both the behavioral element and the feedback that users gave them, saying that these ads are not matching the destinations. I'm getting annoyed. Or they rage browsing, rage searching, Right? And so Google's like, all right, we gotta figure this out, because people are just gonna stop using search, right? So what they've done now is they're saying this predictive model is gonna go scan your landing Pages and your ads and make sure that a few key elements exist. One, that it is relevant to the ad copy, right? So no longer can you be. Old Navy has an ad for pants. The user searches for pants. You click on the ad for pants ad and you're taken to Old Navy's homepage. And then you have to go find the pants yourself. Like, wtf? Just take me to the damn pants. Right? Very common. Weird, but very common. And then the other component is before, when you'd close your eyes and you'd picture how HubSpot told you to build landing pages. All of them have no navigation. They've trapped your ass on the page, right? And now they're like, yep, I'm gonna trap this person. They can't exit. And therefore they're going to convert single call to action.
- [08:28]
Unknown Co-host
You're like, no, do not pass go. Do not collect $200. You have one button.
- [08:33]
Lauren E. Petrillo
No longer. No longer is that. Okay, so it has to have a navigational element to the page. Now, most marketers will interpret this as cool, I'm just going to put my entire site nav back on these landing pages. Do not do that. Okay? There are still some, like, behavioral elements you need to consider in how people browse and consume information and putting that on there. If you look at the, you know, average human being makes 10,000 decisions a day, you are adding to that mental load of them, like Dory, right? Like the average Internet user is like, ah, what's that, what's that? What's that? And they've forgotten why they came there in the first place. But how do you do that? So my in between solution is to actually just put an anchor navigation on these landing pages, which basically jump to every section on your landing pages quicker, right? So if someone comes on the page and they're like, I just want to look at the testimonials, they can jump down to there, jump to FAQs, et cetera, et cetera, pricing, all of those good things. And it'll actually give you a lot of user data on how people are consuming information on the page, what's really important to them, et cetera. So anchor nav down there. Now the other piece is if you do have a login component to your site, you need to make that kind of visible, which is annoying, right? Because that kind of defeats the 1 to 2 CTA kind of rule. Because you don't. You're like, oh, I get two CTAs on the page and I have to use one of them for stupid login so all they're trying to say is if say an existing customer comes over there instead of a prospective buyer, you just want to give them the option to like find the login component. So you can either put that in the footer or say hey, are you already a customer Question mark. And it could take them to the main page and then making sure that the user always has an out with the logo redirecting to the main website at any point. So that's kind of the in between solution that we are doing which is putting an anchor nav on these landing pages instead. And the whole point is making sure users can get to the information that they want to get to fast.
- [10:40]
Unknown Co-host
It was like three things, right? Three things. We had the anchor nav where you're jumping along a homepage icon that allows you to get to the main site and then log in if there's something a part of your website so that if the customer needs to get in and they clicked on your ad, you're equally not annoying the people that are already giving you money.
- [11:00]
Lauren E. Petrillo
Yes, there's that. Going back to the homepage, just your logo should be clickable. So you don't necessarily need like homepage button. But just making sure that your logo is clickable, they're able to access that, which is pretty standard behavior. It's rare that I will find a website that doesn't do that.
- [11:16]
Unknown Co-host
See it all the time. And I'm like link, go to the homepage. Is this the only service you have or do you do other things? Because I get a lot of software.
- [11:25]
Lauren E. Petrillo
But the biggest, most important thing is ad relevancy with the landing pages they are just no longer tolerating that. So let's talk about some of the consequences here because it's not just like oh, it's not relevant. We're just going to move on with our life. Right? If you fail to meet these requirements one, obviously your quality score goes down. Which if you're in B2B that's really bad news because we already suck. You know what a good quality score is for B2B? Landing page 6 is the benchmark for B2B landing pages. Okay, we are pathetic. Anyway, it does not matter how much money you throw at them, they will not show your ad. So you have risk of completely just getting rejected from your ads being shown. If you keep continuing with this pattern, you will experience suspension. And if you don't address suspension within seven days, your accounts could get closed. So there's a lot of like domino effect type stuff that Happens. But they are obviously taking this very strong consideration. I am also shocked that this didn't get as much traction when it did come out. I don't know why it would not. I think they just put it out there and were like, okay, hopefully someone picks this up and does something with it. But it just didn't get the amount of clout that it should have gotten. And there are lots of campaign managers out there freaking out about why performance has tanked.
- [12:50]
Taz Bober
Yeah, it seems like they've gone back and forth on this issue. I mean, I remember, like, this is old school, like 12, 13 years ago, page relevancy and then quality score was like a big deal. I remember what I'm going to date myself here. Sorry, guys. But I remember when it was introduced and it was everything and it mattered so much in your CPCs and ultimately your conversions. And then it seems like when I sort of steered more towards social and we as an agency sort of steered almost entirely towards like Meta and Facebook, at that point in time, it wasn't really that much of a consideration. It wasn't something that people were really talking about. And then there was like lead pages that came in and all the other vendors and landing page builders and, you know, and then it was no navigation. And it seemed like Google didn't really care for a certain period of time. So is this sort of like a swing back to the days where they actually do care? Or like, what is this movement? I love the fact that whenever they introduce something, they don't really announce it anyway. They're like, yeah, you guys figure it out. But it seems like it's bigger now than it was before. Like, we never really talked about this six years ago, five years ago.
- [13:57]
Lauren E. Petrillo
Yeah, it's 2025. And you would think that common sense would mean we would put the buyer before ourselves, but clearly that is not the case. Right.
- [14:07]
Unknown Co-host
Like, wait, wait, wait. When do we put the buyer before the bottom line?
- [14:10]
Lauren E. Petrillo
Yeah, never. And I think now it's like we've had. So there's like such a huge volume, I would even say majority, at least on the B2B side where I can speak from. Maybe you guys can speak from like the E Comm side. But on the B2B side, you know, 52% of B2B ad clicks go to a homepage. That's half the companies not even bothering putting a landing page together. Then you take the percentage that does put landing pages together and they're terrible, shitty landing pages that just like trap the user in there. So at the End of the day, like, if the user is frustrated and they don't use Google, Google does not make money. Advertisers, like, aren't going to advertise or they're going to kill the channel because it's not working. So it's kind of this push of like, hey, we got to start putting the user first, because if we don't, we're all going to lose money out of it, right? And so this is them kind of like putting the hammer down, which is so insane that this even needs to be an announcement to say, hey, can we make ads that are relevant to like, where the user is going to go after? Like, if you just listen to that, it is ridiculous. Why wouldn't we do that? But we don't for some reason.
- [15:18]
Taz Bober
Well, let me ask you this. So I've mentioned before, we hit record here today. Like, we spent a lot of money on Google, but a lot of it is, it's like obviously this exact match phrase match, broad match, and all of those have changed. Like, I remember in the days when exact match was exact, like you had put in CRM software for, you know, semiconductor companies and you would get that keyword phrase and that keyword phrase alone so you could build, if that was your converting keyword phrase, you build a landing page around that and you're going to clean up. But now with exact match, broad match, phrase match being so different and so amorphous, like, how does somebody actually do this and still maintain relevancy? Because relevancy was your first kind of point here. But how do you do it in that age when you don't really know what keyword phrase is being searched for to go to the right landing page that has that keyword phrase or something that's similar to it. So how do you deal with that?
- [16:13]
Lauren E. Petrillo
So the traditional way or even the current way that we always have done it is we create the campaigns first, we create the ads first. We start with the keywords first, right? And then we do the landing page. It's kind of like this afterthought. And so I flipped the narrative, right? So I'm not talking about the landing pages that are like, get this ebook or whatever. Like, I feel like we all have that covered, right? Like, we all know how to get an ebook download. It's a low friction, low ask people are gonna do it. I'm talking about if you have a product specific landing page and you want someone to take a higher friction action, like purchasing something, right? Pulling out their credit card, purchasing something, or getting A demo, giving their information away so someone can harass them with a sales rep, right? Or a nurture sequence. That's when we're looking at those high friction landing pages. I'm like, okay, you are going to create the landing page first. This is our product. These are the problems it solves. This is how we solve them. Here's the social proof. Here are the FAQs that are also common sales objections that we come across. Here's what you can expect if you reach out to us. You take those things, right? And then from there you're gonna go do the keyword research the ads, all of those things. So when I give my clients documentation, when I say, here's your finished landing pages, what ends up happening is I also give them a distribution guide. And you'll see in the distribution guide, I can picture the document that I used to get when I was client side, which was, here are the ads, here's the description, headlines, which campaign, it goes into the cost, blah, blah, blah. Landing page link is like this column. You have to keep scrolling, right? Right. Until you see it. I start with a landing page and I'm like, here's the landing page. Here are keyword options, including Google's natural algorithm of synonyms. And you know other ways that it would say it, right? Here are some headline options. Here are some description options based on that. You start from the landing page and you work your way to the front. I will say this now if you say something like, I'm a battery analytics software. Battery analytics quality software. Like, Google knows to pick these things up and be like, okay, I understand that. I understand that. Help desk and customer service desk or customer service support center, they're kind of the same. Google's smart enough to do that. Here's an example from a client of mine where it did not pick it up, okay? They call themselves security questionnaire automation software. Okay? Lots of words. What people were actually typing in was vendor risk assessment software. Google's natural language wasn't even picking up that those were the same thing. A security questionnaire and vendor risk assessment, it wasn't making that connection. So I wouldn't stress about phrase match, broad match, exact match. If you understand, okay, you know, if they're close enough in variation. Now, if they're completely different, where they're sounding completely different, then at that point you would consider making a different variation for a different kind of ad group where you're running that for because it is so widely different from what you call your product versus what the users call A product, but if you had to pick one, always go with what the user calls it.
- [19:21]
Taz Bober
So it's doing everything really in reverse. I mean, obviously there's going to be those miscommunications with the algorithm learning in your example there. That sort of comes with the territory which you can read in the data sort of after the fact. And you're probably paying more for the word that it didn't know was related to the first word. But then eventually it starts to kind of learn, I would guess over time anyway. But really the way to do it is build your landing page as best as you possibly can. Can. That's where you come in. But in my experience, most B2B companies, their landing pages or even their homepages are just awful to begin with. It's jargony filled. I mean, you've seen plenty of these, I'm sure.
- [20:05]
Lauren E. Petrillo
Yes. And that's also a reason why I picked campaign landing pages specifically, because I feel like it gives marketers a little more autonomy and wiggle room to play around with the messaging and play around with the copy and play around with the experience without all the noise of, like, Susan in finance and Liam in marketing ops and so and so on product who, like, always has an opinion or like, throw this award on there or change that to seamless and change this to disruptive or whatever. You have paid landing pages that end up being this marketer's sandbox environment where they can test different things and not get in trouble because it's in the name of testing. Right. And so they can take data back and be like, yes, Susan, we would love to put disrupt on the homepage. You do whatever you want on the homepage. We are going to take this set of landing pages here that are going to be very product specific, that are going to have very clear language, that are going to talk about the product in layman's terms. And we're going to come back in our reporting meeting and we're going to see, okay, the homepage had disrupt, whatever ours had very clearly. You know, here's the capability of our product, here's what we do. Here are the problems. And this one did extremely well with our ICP that we've sent here, you know, our audience that we selected and sent here that fit our customer profile. So that's kind of how I look at it. And why I like landing pages is because we have a lot more freedom as marketers when everything else seems to be handcuffed.
- [21:30]
Taz Bober
So when you're doing landing pages, you obviously, you're going to be testing in this environment. But it's like, is there any sort of difference between all the different vendors that are out there that do landing page builders? Like, what's your stance on that? Like, what's your go to? Like, what do you use? In what cases? Does it matter? Is it based on niche? Is like, the mood you're in on that particular day? Like, what's your suggestion?
- [21:54]
Lauren E. Petrillo
You have a couple of options. So, one, you can obviously use your CMS to create landing pages. If you have to do a absolute mvp. Like, you're like, I don't have time to do the research and do all of this stuff, whatever. You can take a product page that's on your website, clone it and switch up some of the copy and that kind of stuff, and that could be your mvp. Like, let's try that and run some ads to it. But a lot of websites, some of them are still like, I mean, how often do you hear, oh, yeah, we're going through a website refresh? It's almost every two years. Right? How many times are marketing teams waiting on development? Oh, development's backed up and they have to build this and they have to do that.
- [22:32]
Unknown Co-host
I feel like you're reading my project manager's memo this morning.
- [22:36]
Lauren E. Petrillo
Yeah, there's always this, like, stop gap. And the funniest thing is, like, it's not the best company that wins. It's the one that can ship fastest and make iterations and improvements and find those learnings faster. Right. And react faster. I feel like marketers are the ones who are like, we gotta get this out. But then they always get roadblocked. Right. With something or the other. Then we need approval for this, we need approval for that. So when I was in house, like, a quick way to stand it up is to use like a landing page builder. So I've used Unbounce for years. There's other ones too, that you could use. But so sometimes when it's like, I gotta do it quickly, I gotta put it up, I want to test different variations, you know, because Susan and finance wants to use Disrupt and I want to not use that. Like, you can run variations. You can say, okay, let's let the data kind of show us what that looks like. You want to build something really quickly without a lot of dev work. 100% user landing page builder. And when this announcement came out, it was funny because I was on the Unbounds podcast and we were kind of trying to talk about, hey, what are some of the topics we could talk About. We could just talk about landing page best practices, mistakes. Da, da, da, da. I've done that a billion times. Okay. So I was like, yeah, we could. I'm like, oh, you know, we could talk about this new update that came out. And Unbounce was like, hold up, what update? And I said, yeah, it's no one's fault. They just kind of said, slipped it underneath. They roofied it in. And Unbounce was the first company that was like, you know, we've recorded the podcast. They emailed right after, and we're like, hey, we think this is a huge deal. You're right. We should be evangelizing this. I don't know why more people aren't talking about it.
- [24:17]
Taz Bober
Hey, you know, when I was first at a consultant actually doing the stuff that we're doing right now in Tier 11, one of the first tools that I learned how to use was from a company called Unbounce. And they are now a sponsor of Perpetual Traffic. And the reason is, is that their landing pages and how quickly you can create those landing pages without having to consult your designer, your developer. With drag and drop builders now built in AI copywriting, it's even better than when it was 10 years ago when I first started using it on my own to create my very first landing pages. These guys are absolutely amazing. They've got conversion optimized templates giving you everything you need to launch pages on your own without developers. In fact, Unbounce is the leading landing page platform for building, testing and optimizing high converting pages. Powered by data from over 2 billion conversions. That is 2 billion conversions with a B. That means they know what converts. So if you want to convert more customers one platform and launch pages fast, Unbounce is offering PT listeners a special offer. They are giving you the PT listeners 10% off when you enter coupon code PT10OFF over at unbounce.com forward/pt. So head on over to unbounds.com forward/pt, enter code PT10OFF and cash in today. Convert more customers of one platform launch pages fast. You shouldn't have to wait for your designers and developers to build and test your landing pages. Get started with Unbounce today.
- [25:52]
Lauren E. Petrillo
And they really just like took responsibility for it. So then they were like, hey, do you want to evangelize this with us since you know about all of the stuff? And then, you know, you talk about it on LinkedIn and stuff. I said, yeah, sure. And then we ended up creating, you know, this whole, like landing page kit and like, how to be compliant with Google's requirements. And then they took it a step further, which I didn't even know they were doing, but they were like, hey, we made an entire category in our landing page library of the ones that are Google compliant. They have a navigation element that users can edit. And also they're launching a task Bobo template.
- [26:27]
Unknown Co-host
Ah, yay.
- [26:29]
Lauren E. Petrillo
That was a nice surprise. It was like Christmas came early. I didn't even ask for it. It wasn't part of, like, any of the discussions we had, but they were like, what do you think about? And I was like, yeah, let's do it. And then we also did this whole video of a walkthrough of the actual announcement, how it impacts marketers. And then I had to swallow my pride, take a landing page that I built last year, showcase it, and talk about all the changes I would have to do based on the new requirements. So go watch that on YouTube. We'll also, I'll give you guys the link to share with everybody. But Unbounce really took it upon themselves to do it, which I'm like, the speed at which we were able to do it, it's like, unseen and unheard of.
- [27:07]
Unknown Co-host
That doesn't usually happen with tech software as companies, because I, like, think of, like, the whole premise of this is that you always want to be relevant to the user, which, like, I laugh because we always do the landing page first as the destination the user is getting to, and then that's how we create our ads. And you're like, well, no, I'm going to write the ads first because that's most relevant to the user, and then make the landing page relevant to the ads. I'm like, oh, I've been doing it wrong. It's crazy because, like, when these things happen, it's way easier for a tech company to be like, I'll get to it eventually. And they jumped on it that quickly. I'm like, okay, hats off to you. Like, I'm impressed.
- [27:44]
Lauren E. Petrillo
The team that they have working on this, like, the three of us joke, because we're all like, type A on steroids. Like, we're just sending Excel sheets and tables back and forth with, like, updates and all of this other stuff. And things are moving very smoothly there with just like, all the stuff that we're doing. So, yeah, I mean, my thing is, like, this needs to be talked about because there are so many marketers probably sitting out there going, I don't understand what happened since March. Why is stuff failing? This could be one of those reasons. So, like, you know, there's a lot of talk about quality score being important or not being important. Ignore it, don't ignore it, whatever. Ultimately I would just go look at that. Use it as a signal, right? Don't use it as the end all, be all. But it's like, hey, these are the ones I should kind of look at first. What is impacting, you know, my score? What is impacting this landing page? And then really just put yourself in the shoes of the buyer. If you clicked on this ad and you went to this landing page, is it giving you the same information that you promised in the ad or in the query that asked for it? It's really simple exercise, Ralph.
- [28:49]
Unknown Co-host
When Taz brought up like rage scrolling, like, I don't know about you, but man, I get so pissed. This happens more for YouTube. And I know that this was talked about in a different core update specifically targeting videos in the film industry because there's just so many rampant fake trailers. Like, oh, Bridgerton season four trailer is out. Bullshit. Oh, Devil Wears Prada trailer. I saw a trailer for Devil Wears Prada three years ago. Lies. I mean, yeah, now it's here, but oh man, you talk about rage scrolling. I was furious. And then like a year ago, Google had an update that was like, oh, people that make movie related videos that are not relevant and not backed by actual stuff was getting this exact same drug slip.
- [29:36]
Taz Bober
Yes, rage scrolling is a real thing and we understand it. And that's what Google is pitting against here. Before we get to the end here, I wanted to ask you about, and we'll leave links in the show notes to that YouTube video where you did actually do sort of the deconstruct of the page. What kind of results are you seeing? You're the landing page expert and then you're working with a media team. What kind of feedback have you gotten? Quality scores, conversion rates, like any of that. Like, what is the downstream effect of this lower ad spend as a result? Like, talk to us about that.
- [30:11]
Lauren E. Petrillo
I don't know if it's directly related to this update because this is something that we've been like slowly doing, you know, and I have to go back with my tail between my legs to previous clients. I'm like, okay, you got to add this. But the anchor nav thing was something that I was doing before the update had come out. And the reason was because a client was arguing with me and said we need to put navigation on landing page. I'm like, hell no, bro. And so after arguing back and forth, I was like, Okay, I gotta come up with a compromise. So the compromise I came up with was, hey, we'll just do like an anchored navigation. So there's navigation on the page. It's not gonna go anywhere, but like, we'll just do this. And he was like, fine.
- [30:50]
Taz Bober
Oh, so you had like the nav on the top, but it wasn't. There was no link when you clicked.
- [30:55]
Lauren E. Petrillo
No, no, it's an anchor nav. It jumped to the different sections of the page. The same thing that we're recommending for you to be compliant with Google's updates. But I'd done this before. But the interesting thing is people are scared of it, including myself. But what it showed me was 2,000 sessions that came to that page. But 15% of the clicks went to, like the fourth FAQ. So people were coming to the page, hitting the FAQs in the anchor nav, jumping to the FAQ section, and then clicking on the fourth FAQ on there. That said something like, hey, this is a lifetime license that I'm buying. What happens if I buy this license and then I have to switch devices? Very normal question to ask. It's a sales objection, right? I mean, 15%. It was like 165 clicks or something just on that fourth FAQ. And so we ended up taking that FAQ and making it its own block and saying lifetime license regardless of your device. And then we kind of handle that objection in a block. And not free trials, which was One of the CTAs on there was Free trial or Buy now. We saw 265% increase in buy Now. They were like skipping the free trial. They just bought it.
- [32:09]
Taz Bober
That's cool.
- [32:10]
Unknown Co-host
But you added Buy now to the navigation.
- [32:13]
Lauren E. Petrillo
Well, yeah, in the navigation, you could do free trial or Buy Now. We had a dual CTA and they skipped the free trial. And they just bought now just from that one change.
- [32:22]
Unknown Co-host
265%.
- [32:23]
Lauren E. Petrillo
265% increase in purchases. Not even just like clicks or something like that? Yeah, it was insane just from handling that one big objection.
- [32:35]
Taz Bober
So, I mean, we were kind of joking about it before. Like, you know, sending traffic, you know, as an affiliate, everything was sending traffic to a landing page that just had one call to action. It was a big orange Belger button, you know, way back in the day. That's what they're called. But the point is, like, if you really think about human nature, that's not how humans buy. Humans buy by clicking around and doing a little bit more research. Especially if it's a free trial. Or if it's buy now on a software that's probably fairly expensive on a continuity basis, like, whether it's B2B or whether it's a $7 purchase, people are not necessarily going to, like, click your ad and then buy. So actually enabling them to find other things and then navigate through your site is a great thing. And it's also a great signal back to Google saying, all right, you're engaging with this audience here. Not to mention the learnings that you get if you, lo and behold, use, like, a lucky orange or any sort of, you know, heat mapping software or anything that's like, measuring all the clicks and conversions and everything else, like, what you're talking about here.
- [33:39]
Lauren E. Petrillo
One of my POVs on LinkedIn, notably my largest, is that the way buyers buy today? Like, I don't even buy. I love using Old Navy as an example, so you'll. You'll hear me use this a lot. I don't even buy $30 pair of pants in the first visit. It will sit in my cart for 75 days until my pants rip and I'm like, shit, I need new pants, right? And then I'll go back and I'm retargeted like hell, right? Until I buy the damn pants. It's called the Amazon effect, right? Where it's like, you go, you see the shoes on Amazon, suddenly that shoe's following you around and you're like, oh, my God, fine, I'll buy you. You've convinced me, right? And then we think the same thing can happen where the product. That's like 102,000, 20,000, 100,000. You really think someone's going to come to your landing page and buy? So I always say conversions and like, booking a meeting or buying something, those are all lagging indicators, right? There's so much research that happens before. And people will do borderline illegal things before they interact with your company. Okay? Before they give you an email, they're going to be like, where else can I get the information before I have to give this person the only piece of leverage I have, which is my information. What do I do? It's so true. Like, my husband won't even interact with a company that doesn't have chat.
- [34:55]
Unknown Co-host
Oh, a hundred percent. We've been putting chat on every landing page because the reality is, is so. Well, you have the navigation, but we have found, at least on landing pages. I don't want to read through this stuff. You just gave me a very long sales page. Can you just answer my three questions for me? Really quickly so I can decide to buy. I don't need to see what you've talked about about for everyone else. Oh, I'm here with your husband. I agree with this a hundred percent. I can't stand when I have to find the answers myself. Rude.
- [35:19]
Lauren E. Petrillo
Yes. So that's what I'm saying. People and buyers today are very information heavy. If they're doing that much research for a pair of pants, is it the right fit? I'm five two, I've kind of got a stockier build. I'm not lean. I am lean. Like all of them. Curvy. I'm not curvy, whatever, all that stuff. Right. They're doing that much research for that. They're going to continue to do more and more research the higher the cost of the product is. So in that case, what you need to be focusing on and you need to optimize around is how people are consuming information and whether you are giving them the right information. Which kind of takes the pressure off of you a little bit. Right. Instead of saying, oh shit, I need to get conversions up. You can actually control the inputs versus trying to control the outputs, which is the conversion. You're trying to control the inputs which are, hey, what are the things I would need to know if I was buying this pair of pants? The fit, the size, the length, product specs. Okay, I need other people who have also purchased the pants. I need some stuff there. What are some common questions that asking. So when you shift your mindset to what does the buyer need in order to make this purchase decision? The purchase comes because you've given them the information that they need in order to take that next action and you have more control over that. And so that's kind of where I focus on it. And I say it's not conversion rate optimization, it's consumption rate optimization. How are they consuming the information prior to engaging with you so that they will engage with you? That's what you need to focus on. So it's all the behavior LED stuff that's, you know, heat mapping, session recordings, rage clicking, rage scrolling.
- [36:51]
Unknown Co-host
So basically we're like six months to two years away from you building variations of landing pages that based off of a consumer's previous browser history before clicking on your ad, they will know that at five, eight and three quarters, you show me anything petite, I'm gone. You lose me for forever. But you already know all that about me. That it's going to arrange the old Navy pants to be 2L 0L only. So I'm not Even wasting time at sizes and lengths that are irrelevant for my body type. So you have that like half a moment or even if it's like a one or two click survey before you get to the page to have that further hyper relevancy. But until that day of AI creating that personalized page for you for that relevance now there's just a lot more opportunity for you to quickly build and iterate on those manually while you can.
- [37:41]
Lauren E. Petrillo
It's coming. I mean you could probably go chatgpt right now and ask it to search the web and get me, you know, what are the best fits, you know, for these pants. I'm five two, you know, curvier, whatever. And it will probably give you a whole list of.
- [37:56]
Taz Bober
I sort of assume Google knows a lot of that about me anyway. So like when I enter something into Gemini like Google knows everything about me. My Gemini AI is getting even better answering the questions with like minimal inputs now because it knows, it just keeps pulling from all the other data that it knows about me.
- [38:13]
Unknown Co-host
You just brought up a great point because there's going to be the growth of close because you're going to have children. I mean there's also there was that big update with Google where you'll be able to buy directly in search now that you're not even have to go to the actual product pages. So you like the way that we have meta shops and TikTok shops. You don't have to go to the website that's coming. So I would be curious then if it's going to bring more challenge and demand because if I am a 8 year old buying or I'm buying for an 8 year old then I'm going to see the next size up because man, I don't want to see eight year old clothes. All his clothes don't fit anymore. Now I got to shop. But I bet you that's coming anyway. Sorry, that was me like going down a. At the end of the day the most important thing is relevancy and tailoring that relevance in a most personalized way possible. And some of the things that you have found with that has been starting with the ads and then having the landing page front and forward, not at the very end of the scroll when you're reviewing what's going to provide the best experience for the user which in a lot of your cases increase 265%.
- [39:17]
Taz Bober
Yeah, it's insane. I mean it brings up a good question about a dynamic landing page. Like do you do any of that sort of stuff? Like we used to do this trick where we would have VWO at the top of our landing page. I think it was actually unbounce and then it would change the keyword and it was brilliant and it worked for a while, but then it just loaded down the landing page. Then our quality score sort of went away. Like how much of that stuff is being done now? I mean, to your point, like all of this eventually will be AI affected, even if that's a word. But what are you doing there right now and how does it relate back to this update?
- [39:51]
Lauren E. Petrillo
Yeah, I don't do the dynamic landing pages because I found that same issue. So I know that there are a lot of companies that use like Mutiny and that kind of stuff and create like all of these like ABM landing pages that are different variations targeting all these different accounts and different Personas. Da, da, da. Absolutely, you can do that. The issue is if you think back to the maturity scale of companies and how they're doing landing pages today, using something like bwo, Mutiny, not really Unbounce, Unbounce you can use kind of earlier. But if you're thinking about that like dynamic stuff on the maturity scale, they're closer to the tens. Right. If half of companies are still sending people to the homepage, you're still having to convince them to use a landing page before they would ever get to. So that is like level 3000 and we are like level two, the dynamic one. There is something to be said there. But also like we do dynamic wrong. Switching out a logo and putting tas's name on there isn't going to make me buy something faster. Like, no. So I feel like you almost don't need the dynamic stuff unless it is something like. I think it makes more sense with E Comm and like I've got personalized like clothing recommendations and things like that. But for like something like B2B where it's like, it's very problem and solution focused and like it can apply to like this ICP as a Persona as a whole. Then it becomes a matter of like just those foundational landing pages should take care of it. If someone is searching for X kind of problem, which is why I always say put the problem on the damn page. So when they search for the problem, you show up.
- [41:20]
Unknown Co-host
I would argue that it'll be coming and it didn't come from me. I actually got this from Richard. But like the idea of having like we all have our love languages for communication and we have our like, relationship styles. Right? Anxiously attached, securely attached, avoidant Ralph is Like what is all this stuff? But we still have personality types and we have objections that we most lean into. Some people are more price averse, some people are more like time sensitive. I believe that there's going to be a personality objection, personalization that's going to be able to coming forth or you can say if this person has a history of deferring to someone else to help make that decision, that's going to be upfront and forward in that type of copy. So that would be where I would argue that dynamic stuff for the B2B side is coming. But again there's just the technology hasn't caught up yet. And until then what you can do is build variations of the page where then you just have different recruitings and maybe that's your level three, right? You're not doing direct competitor anymore. You're doing direct objection busters. And you're like, why this is the biggest value that you're going to have. Why this is something to solve your specific needs need.
- [42:22]
Taz Bober
However, 52% of businesses send to the home page.
- [42:31]
Unknown Co-host
Fair, fair, fair, fair.
- [42:32]
Lauren E. Petrillo
That is an insightly statistic which is Unbox's sister company in the CRM side. So like 52% is insane.
- [42:41]
Taz Bober
That's insane. You do like one thing in this show, like you're getting yourself out of that 52%. I guarantee you're going to increase your business in one way, shape or form.
- [42:50]
Unknown Co-host
So Taz, you had talked about like level one, right? Where those five or six core pages at every B2B. So for the 48% that are doing this, they may not have all of those pages. And for those 52 percenters, what do they need to start with? What are the level one TAS recommendations?
- [43:05]
Lauren E. Petrillo
This is assuming you have one product and one audience. Okay. So obviously the pages will increase if you have one product, multiple audiences or multiple products, same audience, whatever those variations. So you will have a product specific landing page which unbounce and I are releasing a template, the task over template. We're actually going to release it also on LinkedIn in like a graphic format for people to like save and share, whatever. So we're going to be doing that. So that's a product specific one. So that's like if someone types in scheduling software, scheduling software for marketers, right. They'll be taken to like a calendly page. It kind of gives them overview. Here's what calendly does. Here are the problems we solve, yada, yada. Second, if someone says calendar alternatives or meeting scheduler options, right? In the market. Now you have a comparison page that isn't one to one like Calendly versus HubSpot. Nothing like that. It's going to be calendar versus the what are your alternatives in the market for a calendar scheduling tool? So you're going to take more of an agnostic approach and say, yep, you could do it manually. Stocks, you could use other calendar scheduling tools. We literally exist to solve this problem. And then you weave in. Here are features, some different shaders, yada yada. But you can't go wrong if you choose something. It's always better to use a scheduler versus not. So you're kind of taking more of an educational agnostic approach, right?
- [44:25]
Unknown Co-host
Said no pigeon advocate ever.
- [44:26]
Lauren E. Petrillo
But yes, yeah, yeah, if you want to use pigeons. I know a great pigeon guy. You know, that's like kind of the thing. Then the third is if someone says calendly reviews. One thing we never do is do a landing page for reviews. Right? We just leave it up to the universe, the G2s and the capterras and the agnostic stuff. I actually create a landing page review landing page that has kind of the story and the narrative of like pulling an agnostic.
- [44:52]
Unknown Co-host
But do you tailor it so it's always the best reviews, or do you have all reviews available?
- [44:57]
Lauren E. Petrillo
No, it will be anything from like a three to five or whatever. And then always a link to the agnostic spot to see all the other reviews. We also started doing a sentiment analysis. So you know how when you go on Amazon now it'll say, customers say that da da, da, da, da da. You know, customers say that this product is great for fit and da da da. But some people are like wary about the quality or whatever. So we're going to do a sentiment analysis that will end up on those pages as well. So people understand, okay, these all the different sources and then finally pricing, demo or both, depending on the type of company that you are. So those are the ones that we tend to do as like the core four or five that we end up doing based on number of products and Amazing.
- [45:38]
Unknown Co-host
And you're saying unbounce is going to have templates for those pages.
- [45:42]
Lauren E. Petrillo
Unbounce is going to have the template for the product page. But I did talk to them. I was like, well, hell, put the other ones on there too. Let's go. And they're like, you know, we're always looking at templates that we want to update every month. So all of those could be in there at some point.
- [45:56]
Unknown Co-host
So instead of all that jazz, it's all that test.
- [45:58]
Lauren E. Petrillo
All that test.
- [46:00]
Taz Bober
You know, she's a marketer.
- [46:01]
Lauren E. Petrillo
I love it.
- [46:01]
Taz Bober
Anyway, this has been amazing, by the way. You've brought a lot of great stuff. Just a lot of light bulb moments, especially if you're a B2B business. I mean, oh my God. You should send this to your team.
- [46:14]
Unknown Co-host
No, if you're running paid traffic and your landing page, if you're running paid.
- [46:18]
Lauren E. Petrillo
Ads, straight up is not compliant.
- [46:22]
Taz Bober
Well, I mean, I'm thinking about like the 52%. Like, that's insane.
- [46:26]
Lauren E. Petrillo
And that's like the updated stat. It was worse before. So we're getting better, but not fast enough for technology to keep up.
- [46:33]
Taz Bober
Where can people connect with you? Specifically?
- [46:37]
Lauren E. Petrillo
I am on LinkedIn. That is the best place to find me. However, if you're curious about the landing page side of things, I have thescrollab.com spelled exactly how it's spelled, right? Some people like three Ls. I'm like, yeah, there are three Ls in there. And then I also have a landing page and resource hub that I give away for free. It's all website, landing page stuff, tips, tricks. All of my LinkedIn posts essentially organized in categories for things that you can DIY yourself. Go check that out. That's free. Also available on my LinkedIn profile. Find me on LinkedIn. Task over t A s last name Bober. Like sober B O B E R.
- [47:15]
Taz Bober
Great to have you on the show here today and make sure that you do check out all the links we'll leave over in the show notes over@perpetualtraffic.com and of course, once again, if you would like to leave a rating and or review wherever you listen to podcasts, please do so. We will read them on air, especially if they're around Lauren, like she'll read them. I'll forget about mine. But anyway, Taz, thanks again for coming today. Make sure that you watch this over on our YouTube channel as well. Perpetualtraffic.com YouTube but you already knew that. So on behalf of my amazing co host, Lauren E. Petrulo, ciao till next show. See ya. You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.