Kurt Philip – Conversion Rate Optimization

Yeah, because… Okay, so CRO is only for the top 10%. So if you’re making under 10 grand a month… We’ve just started offering what’s called a best practices package, which means we just go in File Size: 1.1 GB

Kurt Philip – Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Next up on the Podcast was Kurt Philip from Convertica, one of the best known CRO’s around. Conversion Rate Optimisation can make one hell of a difference to your website when done by professionals using data and experience to be able to help you get more conversions from the traffic you are getting.

In this episode we talk about a bit about CRO, scaling the business and the operations side of the business, Convertica has grown a great deal since they started a few years ago and its good to see them working with some big clients and getting amazing results if you are getting 20k in monthly visitors and you want to look at increasing your conversions then get in touch with Convertica and see what they can do.

A transcribed version of the podcast below:

So welcome to today’s podcast, where I’m joined by my good friend, Mr. Kurt Philip. Kurt, thank you very much for joining, and thank you for being very patient, for waiting on me as well.

That’s all right, mate.

But for anyone who doesn’t know Kurt, Kurt is based between London, Thailand, and previously was known as the CRO guy on Convertica and doing all the CRO stuff, spoke at Chang Mai and is well known, certainly in that side of the world. But is regularly over in the UK, and regularly kicking about at Brighton and various other conferences and stuff like that.

And great guy, great knowledge. Probably, I think you’re one of those guys that lays underground and people are like, “What is it you actually do?” And they don’t really fully understand what you were previously doing with CRO, and stuff. And yeah, so it’s obviously good to have you on and talk a bit about where you were and obviously where you were going.

So previously you were doing the CRO thing, Convertica, and split test and everything. And you were the go-to guy for CRO, with your experience and stuff. I’ve heard a lot of good things, and you worked with some big, big clients, and obviously on your own projects as well.

I know you’ve changed focus slightly from that, so what is it you’re doing these days?

Well, obviously, when you get to a certain scale or you get to certain business size, like can you name the CEO of ESSA or ASIS, or Compaq or anything? You can’t, right? My business mentor has always told me, “It’s great to be the face of the company, up until a certain size.” Up until about a year ago, we started to move me away from being the face. I’m still the face on the blog and everything. But in terms of me being the face for everything, talking onstage and everything like that, because then it limits your growth.

So I’ve stepped more into a director position in the last year. I’m sort of just working on the vision, setting up the direction of the company, making sure that the staff have the right… We have the right business culture. We’re up to 25 staff this year. We’ve downsized to about 20, just because we’ve automated a lot of processes and so on.

But I’ve hired a guy now who’s going to be doing the conference, [inaudible 00:02:40]. So we haven’t publicly disclosed yet, but he’s done a fair few already and I’m going to be working with him on the first few, but then he’s going to be taking over. He’s much more of a showman than I am. I can be a bit dry and a bit black and white. But he’s a very good showman, he’s done a few conferences before, so he’ll be taking over and doing more of the conference trails. He’ll be hitting every single one up and so on. But Convertica, as a company, is maturing into more of a company, rather than just Kurt Philip’s company, you know?

Yeah.

The direction I’m taking there.

It’s good to hear, and hear that you’re obviously refining that stuff as well. Working in company culture, I think a lot of people just scale too quick and it’s all about going from 25 to 50, to that. And they’re not thinking smartly about maybe cutting back, and as you say, smartly automating things and stuff like that as well.

And certainly the way forward, if you’re wanting growth… I mean, what was the kind of reason for the kind of stepping back from the kind of conference thing? Is that just something that you felt… Was it just purely based on growth, or is that just something you felt like this is not for me as well?

It’s never, unlike yourself where it comes very natural to you, it’s not something that my personality really thrives on. Like I don’t get a lot of fulfillment out of it, for the amount of input that goes into it for me. So for me it was, I just had my first born, so therefore it was more about spending more time with her and being able to develop that relationship, and make sure that I’m there and all that sort of stuff, rather than just building the business for building business sake.

Because there’s this like thing in the business culture where you just keep scaling, right? Why? No one ever really questions why. It’s like, countries grow and if they stop growing, they’re in a recession. So like it’s just built into us to always keep growing, and using and growing. But for me, I read a book called Company of One, and a few other similar books, which talks about strategically staying slow so that you don’t have a business that owns you and that you end up having a job.

Because I’ve always been very good at building companies that provide a very good income and a very good lifestyle. And I did get away from that a bit with CRO Guy and Convertica. But now it’s got to a point now where it’s back again, and I’m still living a good lifestyle again. I pay my staff very well, and I have an operations partner who runs all the operations. So yeah, I don’t take as much profit, but I work much less than I used to. And I strategically stay small, we’re not going to grow any more staff this year, we’re just going to focus on bigger clients.

So we want the same amount of clients, but bigger clients. We’ve got multiple eight figure clients now, very big companies. So now we can work on just honing in those really big brands, instead of the affiliate site type clients. Which we still do the bigger ones, but we’re not so much working with them, which was our bread and butter back when we started the company. Because that’s where I had the name, right? But now it’s more about big brands that have PBC, that have Facebook ads, that have all these different avenues of traffic. Because updates affect our client base too. My clients will drop off when their site gets smashed. Obviously they can’t pay the bill anymore.

Yeah, it’s probably a smart move I think. Obviously having met you in several different places and stuff, you are a guy, you obviously like to get out networking, chilling, going to learn and develop, and spend time at masterminds and stuff as well. So it’s good to have that balance of not working so hard or being drowned, because we’ve got mutual things there. When sometimes master minds on, I’m like, listen, I’m way too busy. Just because there’s-

Yeah, exactly.

And I don’t think that’s healthy in terms of lifestyle, or developing yourself, as well. Because you know yourself. So much value to be had, and even now, although you’re working with crazy clients and stuff like that, sometimes you’re picking up small nuggets at these masterminds and implement it into your own. And so I think it’s obviously important to try and get that balance right.

But obviously scaling up and delegation, for me, I’ve had a business in the past, I grew an agency and it kind of fell apart because I wouldn’t delegate and I never trusted anyone enough to be able to say “You’re in charge of this”. You’re saying you’ve got an operations guy and stuff like that.

How would someone… I mean I’m not going down that route anymore, I’ve been there and failed with it because I just wouldn’t let go. I’m just that type of guy. I just didn’t trust anyone. But for anyone else that finds themself similar to me, how do you… Was that something you were easily able to just, you know, get an operations guy. How do you find a good guy that you can rely on?

Well I just know, with my personality, I’m awful with operations. So I’ve always, as soon as I started, I’ve had probably five or six different companies since I’ve been in business since I was about 20 in about 15 years. I’ve always, straight away when I start a new company, hire someone to do operations. My first company, or one of my first companies, was Jay, who’s now partner at Lead Spring. He was my first operations guy. So he was good, he was really diligent. He didn’t make any mistakes.

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I’m just really good at coming up with ideas and hiring people, and motivating people. I’m not good at doing the work. I’m horrible, I’m sloppy, I forget things. My spelling is always crap. But I always just get things out and improve them over time. I never get them perfect. But that’s how you have to be when you’re an entrepreneur. You can improve them over time. But I’ll get them out at like 50% instead of 80%, which sometimes… But in CRO you have to be perfect, because everything needs to be perfect. So I have an operations partner who makes it perfect. Whereas I go to the mastermind, I get the nuggets, I integrate the systems and the thought and the culture into the company, and then they fulfill the product and service.

A smart way to do it, and I think you have to realize your own strengths and weaknesses as well, which a lot-

Yeah.

As I say, I failed miserably setting up an agency, and I realized that was a weakness of mine, because I was… I don’t know what I was, control freak or whatever you want to call it. And that obviously hampered my growth, and in the end was the killer of the company. Because I had set myself up as the kind of face of it as well, so there’s always so many of us in a day.

Well you see it a lot, you see it a lot in the forums and the threads, and so on. Like everyone always puts shit on running an agency, including yourself. It’s always a good bit of banter and stuff. But like people always say how agencies are awful, and having clients are awful. Well not if you do it correctly. We’ve got three support staff that are always around the clock, there’s always someone on. I don’t ever talk to clients, ever. Its great for us though, because everyone’s scared of agencies and there’s a stigma about agencies being bad and having clients. So there’s much more clients for us to have then.

Because everyone’s doing these affiliate sites but, you weren’t there at the Chang Mai conference this year, but everyone was saying how, I know Carl roof was saying how, “Guys, you need to think outside the square because all of you are competing in affiliate against each other, and you’re all using the same information”. It’s just there’s a limited pool of good niches, and being head of Convertica, I know that every single niche, exactly how much they make down to the dollar, because we work with all the best guys in every big niche.

So we can see that most people, they’re not going to make a lot of money. Because a lot of these big niches making a $100,000 to $500,000 a month, they’re dumping 10, 20, $30,000 a month into, into links. There’s no way you’re entering the top page for that.

Yeah, it’s a hard game. But on CRO, I was wanting to touch a bit on it, because I think a lot of people still don’t really take it that serious. Just in my opinion, the people I talk to. I know a lot of the big guys have taken it seriously for years, and obviously you’ve dealt with them, and you’ve worked with a lot of big people. I think a lot of these small players, and I do a lot of training for guys who want to be affiliate markets and stuff, and you talk to them about CRO and they’re like what? What is that?

And obviously I just wanted to touch on it with you. You’ve been the CRO guy, and this is how ignorant it is. I remember, we were in Brighton a couple of years back, I think it was on your rooftop terrace, and a guy came up to you and said, “So Kurt, I’ve seen you about, and what is it you’re actually doing?”. You’re like, “CRO” and he says like, “But what else?” And you’re like, “CRO”. Let’s guide-

He didn’t think it was an industry type of thing. Oh I remember that, the Scottish fellow, yeah. That’s right.

And he’s like, “What, that’s it?”. And obviously it’s a massive, massive industry to people who know what the hell they’re doing. But maybe for noobs, or beginners, they don’t really appreciate it or understand what the hell it is. I think, obviously, they just think that you guys are maybe changing the color of a button. Because Kurt woke up one day and thinks that the button should be red, that it’s going to generate more sales.

There’s a lot more to CRO than meets the eye. What sort of other things, just for the general public listening, do CRO guys do to obviously increase conversions on a website? Because I know you’re working with data, the software like VWO, or whatever it’s called, and testing and everything else that people maybe don’t appreciate. So what sort of things generally goes on with CRO?

Probably the biggest thing that people miss, because everyone builds their websites on desktop, right? On their laptop or on a screen. No one builds a website on a phone. So what happens is, especially on lead gen sites, but even on affiliate sites, you have to be careful with Amazon because you can’t take this… You have to be a bit flexible with it. But having a CTA, or a call to action, whether it’s a… Let’s just say you have a roofing business and you want people to call and make a booking to use your roofing business, the one test that works every time, and doubles conversions nearly if they don’t have it, is adding a click to call button that’s floating on the bottom of the screen.

Now when you’re on your phone, your thumb moves in that area, right? But most people either put it at the top, the click to call, or they put it somewhere in the header way up here. You need to put it in this region. So if you put a sticky, click to call button that’s floating on the bottom of your local lead gen site, that’s visible at all times, you will explode your conversions. If you don’t have that already. That’s a huge one.

And then we go through an optimized for mobile, because 90% of websites we look at, even sites doing millions of dollars a year, aren’t optimized for mobile. And so we’ll go through and run mobile specific tests, testing different call to actions and so on, and different layouts and stuff like that.

I’m assuming with CRO, you work with people over a prolonged period of time. It’s not like you just ring up you guys and say “I need some CRO”, and within [inaudible 00:14:41] money. It’s obviously something, small tweaks, on a regular ongoing basis until the client’s at a point where you go I’ve achieved the revenue by X, Y or Z. That’s how it works, right? So there’s a prolonged period of time you would work closely with the client.

It’s like SAR, yeah.

Yeah. So is that something that’s on-going, or is it like a year? How long does CRO… I don’t know that the answer is going to be, “it depends on the size of the client”.

But because we’ve got… Like we get probably 15 to 20 leads per day on our website, we’re starting to get a lot of leads coming through. So that allows us to pick and choose the clients we work with, because we have such a high demand. So what we’ve done, as of a month or two ago, all our campaigns are a minimum of four months. And in about, I think the end of first quarter, depending on our lead flow, I think we’re making it a minimum of six months. So that limits the type of clients that can’t afford the service, but it will allow us to focus on clients that that can afford our service, which is where you want to be, right? So yeah, six months.

But we have some clients that have been with us two years now, since I started the company. They have such big websites that it gives them ROI and they see an upside for it. Because even if they get a 2% win, even if we test five times and we lose every time, but then one test we get a 20% win, that could be $100,000 for a month because they’re making millions of dollars a year. So for them, they just have us on a retainer. And then because we’re running so many tests, I think we have 550 tests running at once right now, we can use all our insights from all our other tests and then then the team will go, “Oh man, this just worked really well on this site”. And then when we set it up and test it on their site, and then boom, we get a big win.

It’s not just how much they’re making, but if they’re looking to exit at five 10 mil, in six to eight to 12 months, that could add an extra couple of hundred K to their bottom line. So we work a lot of investment firms too that have a big portfolio of websites, where that’s all they care about. They don’t care about how much it’s making now. They’re just looking for the exit and what it’s going to get for their investors over time, and stuff like that.

Yeah. So aside from CRO, it’s always good to touch on the CRO, there’s obviously a lot more to you now than just CRO. You’re doing other stuff now. What other things are you doing, or what other services are you providing others with?

We’re not providing… I’ve moved offline, I’m going into property pretty heavily right now. So in Thailand, there’s a pretty under-serviced Airbnb market in terms of Westerners owned. And everyone thinks that it’s really difficult to buy in Thailand, but it’s actually not if you have the right lawyers and everything. So I’m taking advantage of that if people think it’s difficult, so then we can go in. My wife speaks Chinese, so there’s a huge Chinese market for Thailand and so on. I’ve just been investing in property, and I’ll probably buy a couple more this year. We’ve got housekeepers that run and manage them, and we’re getting 15 to 20% ROI from property.

In the current state of the algorithm updates and everything, I’m not going near affiliate sites to reinvest my money right now, because it’s just… You see them all, it’s just one after the other, just going, going, going. Of course, not all of them, but even the good ones like appeal white hat and real sites, are getting hit too. So for that reason, I’m just going to go on to property. And if you’re getting 15 to 20% with property, you can’t really complain. That’s not that much behind an affiliate site, which will get your 40 or 50, but with that added risk. You’re not going to have a property disappear.

Yeah. It’s interesting you say that, because that was going to lead on to my next kind of, where I was going to lead the conversation too, was obviously you’re doing CRO and you’re working with the best, and obviously you’ve got all this data and you know how things basically work. I was curious to know if you were going down the route of any revenue and money that you were making was investing that in digital assets.

But it’s nice to hear that you’re maybe doing property. And for me, I’m doing the same kind of thing, property. I do buy and sell some lower-end Amazon affiliate websites, and stuff like that. But I think there’s just too much volatility, and even just getting right people and stuff like that. For me, I think a combination of different problems lead me to saying put your money offline in some cases. I’m not going to put everything offline, I still will buy and sell websites. But it’s interesting to hear you say that.

You have an SEO business, but for me, I mean I used to have an SEO business, so it would be easy to buy affiliate sites and grow them and SEO them. I don’t have an SEO business anymore. So for me to buy affiliate websites, or buy lead gen websites, and grow them, means it takes me away from Convertica, which is already going full steam. So it doesn’t make any sense for me to start buying digital assets.

I am looking at SAS websites, but I mean I’ll bag them much more expensive. Like instead of spending, 100, 200 K on one, I’ll spend half a million or more on one, and really get a really solid one that we can come in and CRO. I’m just waiting the next couple of years. I’m in no rush, but I don’t want to be 10 properties in and no other assets, you know what I mean? So I want to diversify a little bit into other stuff.

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But right now, I’m just being patient. Who knows what’s going to happen when the market downturn happens, if it ever happens. But I also want to be there and opportunity to have cash when there is a lot of opportunity, when people are selling for really low multiples and so on. Because it does happen. I picked up one site years ago, that I picked up five grand, and it ended up making 20… Or niche, we ended up duplicating the site, and ended up making 20, 25 K a month. It used to swing between. So that was the opportunity, once in a lifetime opportunity, that ended up setting me up for the rest of my life because I was able to reinvest that money and go on to other things. So yeah, patience. It’s not always about having the yield. Just sitting passion, just wait.

And one thing I want to ask you, just obviously I need social [inaudible 00:21:02]. So I’ve been at a few events, and I’ve been talking about buying and selling Amazon websites, which I’ve been doing over the past year. I’ve been at a few conferences where I’ve said, and I’ve done it with a real low end case study, so I bought this gold website for 10 grand and built it up and added content to it. Took it from $200 a month up to $1,500 a month, and the presentation I was trying to give was you can take something, invest 10 grand, spend five grand on it in terms of content and some links, and you can double, triple the revenue.

And people are like, “Craig, there’s no way you spent 10 grand on an Amazon website, and there was no way that you can scale up an affiliate businesses”, and stuff like that. People think it’s pie in the sky. But obviously that’s a mickey mouse figure when I’m talking to you, because you’re working with guys who won’t bat an eye at spending 200 grand on a website. But I just want you to verify, for some of the listeners out there, because a lot of the kind of listeners I’ve got are guys on the lower end of the scale.

They don’t believe that you can actually buy and sell websites for millions or pounds, or do CRO and maybe be earning 2 grand a month and you do some CRO and it takes them to five grand a month. People think that’s bullshit. Do you face that, in terms of the people you’re selling to? Or do people just know? Is your clientele just guys that know that this is not bullshit?

Yeah, because… Okay, so CRO is only for the top 10%. So if you’re making under 10 grand a month… We’ve just started offering what’s called a best practices package, which means we just go in and rebuild your website to the best practices. We just do that for sites that make less than 10 grand, that have under 20 grand a month traffic. But that’s something we offer, we get four or five clients a month like that. It’s not our main offering, but it’s just very easy for us. We just look at other sites in the niche that have performed well, and we roll out similar layouts to them.

But then yeah, there’s the bigger guys that, exactly like you said, they dump. They’ve dumped 10 K and they don’t even think about it, because they know if they get a 5% swing, it’s going to mean a lot to them. We don’t really deal with nay-sayers and so on. We’re not trying to convince anyone, because it’s only that top 10% that are our clients. It’s a little bit different to SEO, where there’s a million SEOs.

I only met one guy last year at the Chang Mai conference that was doing CRO. I talked to a lot of people. I didn’t even go to any of the talks, I stood in the hallways with a brutal hangover, as you do, all day long and just chatted to people. So I was networking more than most, and I only met one other guy. And it was great, I talk to him all the time now. I want to create a group of CRO guys, so we can all bounce off each other like SCO, right? You can share the ideas with everyone and you’re not going to compete because there’s a million niches to go in.

It feels like, with CRO, that it’s like when I first started doing SEO in 2007, there was no one doing it. There’s still no one doing it now with CRO, but it also takes a different type of personality. I don’t know… The one thing that’s been different with me, is it’s one thing to know CRO, but to build a team and take on, we have 70 clients at one time, that’s a different skillset. I can teach someone how to do it, like I have a course that I teach people how to do it. I’ve shut it down now. But most people would get three or four clients on retainer, they make 10K a month, happy days. It’s all good. They’re doing everything. But to grow a team is different.

I’ve got a business coach and I’ve had a lot of education, in terms of how to build teams and grow a company, and so on. I have Matts as my consultant, I get on calls with him twice, three times a year to help restructure the company. So that’s a little bit different in that sense too. I’ve got a bit of a tangent there, but the fact is it’s not the same as SEO, where you’re going out to Billy blogs plumbing and trying to flog him SEO for 500 bucks a month or whatever. It’s a little bit different. I’m not saying you do that, but I know a lot of people that do do that, and that’s where you get the push back on on SEO and what it actually is and the belief that you can bump 10K into content and nothing happens, right?

Because it’s just a different world, mate. It’s easy for us to talk about this stuff because all our friends are in this too, so we all have this reinforcing belief in what we do. But as soon as you step out of it and explain to anyone what you do, your parents or whatever, they think you’re selling drugs. That’s it. They’re like, “Yeah, whatever, you’re selling drugs. Yeah, whatever”.

Yeah, no, I’ve had the drug dealer. It doesn’t help with the tattoos and the Scottish accent, and the hat and all that stuff. I probably fit the-

The hat makes us seem… When you got to pulled over like that.

Yeah, obviously. But yeah, it’s just weird when you get the, as you say nay-sayers, and I think there’s lots of them out there, but [inaudible 00:00:26:18]. But you’ve hit the nail on the head. 10% of your audience, or you’re only looking for 10% and you’ve not interested any of the nay-sayers anyways. So it makes total sense. And so, in terms of going forward, if anyone was ever to try and get ahold of you for services, is it still just CRO and high end clients? Or is there anything else in the pipeline that we can send your way, when people are looking for things?

We’ve tried a few different offerings. I had a course that I ran for six months, and it was cool doing it, but it took me away from our main offering. And then as soon as I shut that down and started focusing on our main offering again, we blew up a lot. So it was like we just do best practices and done few CRO.

The done few CRO is if you’ve got 20K a month to a million a month, or higher, traffic. So you have an authority website, if you make above 10K a month on your website. Then it makes sense, because we can run split tests and then it also makes sense from an ROI perspective. You don’t want to be waiting six to 12 months to get your money back from the CRO, unless you’re looking to sell. But most people don’t want to wait that long. So yeah, that’s what we focus on.

And the best website to get ahold of you is Convertica?

Convertica.org, yeah.

CRO guy, as well?

Yeah, I mean if you got to CROguy.com, you’ll always get 301 to come to Convertica.org, so it’s funny. Same shit. On the home page, it outlines our offering, you can submit your website to get a free audit where we go through and our team will actually go through an outline of strategy that we think will work well, in terms of what we would split tests. Some people take that and go “Awesome” and then just run off and take it. But the fact is, these are just ideas to split tests. We don’t know if they’re going to work, but based off what’s worked on other similar sites, that’s what we show. And then, yeah, it has pricing and everything, because every site’s custom. So yeah, that’s how it works.

One question I’ve got for any of those people out there who are thinking about CRO and are not too sure if they want it yet or whatever, and meet the criteria that you’re looking for. Just to give them that nudge over the edge. So you’re using software and you’re doing all this testing, but you’re also using hordes of data on really successful websites that you guys have worked on as well.

So just to reiterate, it’s not guess work you guys do? You literally have all of these clients and stuff like that, where you’re working with. Is there anything else that you would say, when people are thinking about it and they’re going “I don’t know”… As I say there’s a misconception that, and this is a misconception maybe that I’ve just had previously about CRO, I once listened to a guy and asked him what data are you using to make those decisions on those changes? And he’s like, “I just try shit out and do this, that and the next thing”. And I’m like, fuck, that sounds like hell. That’s just a guy waking up, making changes. But you guys are using various different tools, software, and previous historic data?

Yeah. So we have a very high success rate for the first test, because when we get a site in, let’s just say it’s your agency website, we would get that in and then look at all of the other agency websites that we’ve worked on. SEO agencies, right? For instance, you don’t have an agency anymore, I’m just using it as an example. And then we would go, okay, well what lead gen type website, how did it go? What are the tests. We look at the last eight tests that we ran, and then we go, this one has the highest chance of winning.

And we have an algorithm that we use, like a spreadsheet that we use to order the tests, based off what’s worked well in the past. So and then we split test it. So split testing is the data. So we split test the original, versus what we think is going to work better, and then we see the original had a hundred submissions on your lead capture and our variation had 154, boom we’ve got a 50% increase. And then we roll it out and then we do the second test, and so on. So it’s all data. We don’t do any changes unless we split test it.

Good stuff. It’s interesting, as I say, just for the viewers out there and I just wanted to clarify that bit. That there is tested data. I think there are CRO guys out there, that I’ve stumbled across, I think you are probably one of the only ones that I know that do it in a regular, ongoing basis. I’ve seen a few guys at some shitty local little meetups-

Yeah, they fly on the side of their SEO business or whatever. I just had a client come to me yesterday saying they’d been paying some guy 500 bucks a month for the last four months or something, to do CRO. He’s an SEO guy, but he just up sold them, I guess. Nothing’s been done. But I mean it happens with SEOs, too. They get them on a retainer, they get one big win, and then they just keep their recurring subscription going and then don’t