Episode 711: Defeat The New Google AI Max Landing Page Doomsday with Val Riley

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In this episode of Perpetual Traffic, Ralph and Lauren are joined by Val Riley, Vice President of Marketing and Strategy at Unbounce, to tackle the latest disruptions in Google Ads’ AI Max landing page requirements. As AI continues to reshape digital marketing, these changes could significantly impact how you design and optimize landing pages for Google Ads. This episode dives deep into practical strategies and insights to adapt to the new landscape and overcome the challenges presented by these updates.

Chapters:

  • 00:00:00 – Kicking Off the Perpetual Traffic Podcast
  • 00:01:56 – Meet Today’s Game-Changer: Val Riley from Unbounce
  • 00:02:41 – Val Riley’s Path to Unbounce: From Start-Up to Industry Leader
  • 00:04:17 – Google’s Hidden Updates: What You Need to Know
  • 00:06:43 – Why User Experience is the Secret Sauce in Ad Success
  • 00:08:09 – Supercharging Ad Performance with AI Max
  • 00:17:26 – Crafting Landing Pages That Drive E-commerce Success
  • 00:25:06 – Unlocking the Power of Custom Templates for Agencies
  • 00:25:40 – E-commerce Landing Page Templates You’ll Love
  • 00:28:12 – Mastering Cross-Selling: Smart Strategies for More Sales
  • 00:29:17 – Proven Tactics to Maximize Conversions on Your Landing Pages
  • 00:34:30 – Winning Marketing Strategies to Stay Ahead of the Competition
  • 00:38:01 – Dive Into Unbounce’s Best Templates and Categories
  • 00:40:42 – Wrapping Up: The Key Takeaways You Can’t Miss

LINKS AND RESOURCES:

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Mentioned in this episode:

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Unbounce – Code PT10off

READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

Defeat The New Google AI Max Landing Page Doomsday with Val Riley

Ralph: Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, founder and CEO of Tier 11, alongside my amazing co-host.

Lauren: Lauren Petrullo the founder of Mongoose Media.

Ralph: So glad you joined us here today. You always smile like ear to ear. Whenever I say that intro, I say that intro like a hundred times. like you’re

Lauren: It doesn’t mean I don’t like it.

Ralph: compliments. anyway, uh, we’ve got an amazing guest here today who is, uh, patiently waiting in the [00:02:00] virtual green room, and we’re gonna be like dropping more. Probably haven’t heard about as. Aren’t, they kind of sneak, they’re kind of like meta these days. they kind of like around, don’t really tell you what they’re doing, and then it’s like boom. All of a sudden it’s like Advantage plus sales and it’s automated and meta like with no announcement, like which has been an ongoing series that we’ve been doing here on perpetual traffic. like Google’s doing now, doing the same thing and especially relevant with landing pages and.

Lauren: Final URL destination is gonna make a big difference.

Ralph: Yeah, I remember when, like we talked about this with Ta bo Taaz bober. We, we, uh, which we’ll leave links in the show notes to that episode. If you haven’t listed that, definitely go back and listen to it. she was a great guest here in Perpetual Traffic and also talked about, uh, the big landing page update for Google that they didn’t really announce, but it’s like where you send your [00:03:00] traffic, people, we’ve done so many shows on Google especially, we never really talk about this. So I’m kind of excited to talk about that here today. you excited, Lauren? just, you’re

Lauren: Am I smiling bigger than

Ralph: still from like my

Lauren: because I like in our pre-call, there was just all this stuff that we were talking about with her and I’m just like, oh man, my to-do list, to deliver to my team.

Ralph: Yeah, there’s so many juicy nuggets we’re gonna deliver here today. So anyway, without further ado, we have re VP of marketing over at Unbounce, and yes. Unbounce is a sponsor of this show, and the reason is ’cause Unbounce is awesome. That’s why. Val, like, so good to have you on the show.

Like I, my story with Unbalanced was ’cause I got sucked into unbounced like by Ollie, one of your predecessors. And I know you’re in a long line of super smart people there at Unbounce. So, [00:04:00] welcome to the show and, uh, thank Ollie now that he’s sitting on his gazillions of dollars in some, you know, Caribbean island his payout. Uh, it’s, uh, you, you have a lot of predecessors who are super smart bringing us up to this, this, uh, place. So maybe give us a little bit of background of your history of becoming the VP of marketing over.

Val: Yeah, sure. First, this is like a little bit of a dream come true. You guys are in my ears when I’m, um, at the gym or like walking around and, and now here I am on your podcast. So really excited to be here.

Ralph: Very cool.

Val: Fan girl moment. Okay.

Ralph: Done.

Val: Yeah, so I have, uh, just this really strong B2B SaaS background, more than 25 years, sorry to say, like showing my gray hairs. Um, and I came to Unbounce because of an acquisition that was made in July of last year. I was working for Insightly, CRM and that company was acquired by Unbounce. And so we merged the marketing teams and I [00:05:00] was kind of the, the last man standing, and it was hard for me at first because. I had been such an Unbounce user for, in my last three jobs. I mean, you know, it was just synonymous with landing pages. You know, you need a, we need landing pages. Oh, let’s go buy Unbounce. now to be on the other side of that and be at the, at the company that’s a category leader and really kind of sets the tone for the landing page space is, it’s just been exciting and a little bit intoxicating actually.

Ralph: Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Uh, we’re gonna leave some links in the show notes to some of Ollie’s, like older videos. I, I’m gonna find the video. That like sucked me into Unbounce. And then when I was first starting this agency, I used it on every client I got and immediately, like I didn’t really even have to do all that much for the ads, like they were paying me for the ads, but it was like the landing pages that grew all the businesses.

So that was sort of like a secret weapon. I didn’t wanna tell anybody about it, but now everyone knows. So there you go.

Val: knows.

Ralph: of a million people every single month listening to this show. Val. Um, so one of the big [00:06:00] things that we had talked about before we hit record here today is yet another update. Taz talked about the landing page update, which does relate to this update to a certain degree. Maybe you can, we can start there and then kind figure out like strategies specifically after the click. Can increase sales, grow businesses, increase conversions, all that.

Val: Yeah. You know, the, the announcement that that Taaz Bober covered with you in that recent episode, we, we kind of said Google, kind of like stealth, fully dropped that announcement in in February and it didn’t have a lot of fanfare and it sort of. A little bit odd, but we ran with it, of course, because it spoke to the importance of like a super quality funnel, and of course landing page being. The new new announcement coming out from Google is about AI Max. And to me, the way [00:07:00] I’m reading AI Max, I’m almost wondering if Google dropped that announcement back in February that was like, Hey guys, get your house in order because it’s not gonna work. At all now, and it’s really not gonna work if you, when we launch AI Max, if you don’t have these basics down.

And so I almost, I’m wondering now if it was like a foundational announcement because AI Max has been in beta since, um, may and is rolling out, I’m hearing early Q3. I’m not sure what you’re hearing.

Ralph: Yeah. Um, well, we’re gonna be, we have John on the show in a, in a week or so. John Moran, who, you know, if you’ve listened to the show for a while, and he hasn’t really even talked about it, but we, he and I, well, we got access to Performance Max or P Max, which you now refer to it like about a year before it was released.

And it was great then. And then it sucked. It became [00:08:00] like just this massive retargeting for warm traffic. It was like,

Lauren: Well, everyone was using it. It was like no one had been using it, and it was so much competitive advantage.

Ralph: Yeah, unfortunately we kind of screwed ourselves by like telling everybody to use it and then everybody started to use it, and then now it’s just basically a retargeting tool. So I’m a little suspect on this whole thing with Google and all these different changes, but we’re always suspect here. So it’s like until we actually use it, then we can say, yes, it’s good, or yes, it’s total crap.

So you relate this to. If you take a step back, all of these platforms, whether it’s Meta, TikTok, Google, you name it, you’re, you’re spending advertising on there. They want that user to stay on that platform. They want to have a great user experience. Zuck talked about it years and years and years ago.

It’s all about the user experience. Well, now it’s all about like him sucking up to Trump and doing weird things he’s doing Anyway, the point is is that they [00:09:00] still care about user experience, and this is just one more thing that Google is now doing because it’s like if you click and you go to a page and you back click, you know, obviously. Quality score a big part of this, but like I, it seems like this update is related directly to some of the things that we’re gonna be talking about here with the after the click experience. Correct me if I’m.

Val: Yeah. No, and you’re right, like Google has always been like this ultimate customer first organization. Time and time again, we’ve seen that in practice, right? you know, answers at the top of your search results without the need to click through. I mean, I love the new AI powered overviews. Just makes it easy to understand search topics.

So like, I don’t know if anybody’s surprised that Google wants to, you know. Really make sure advertisers are prioritizing that user experience or, you know, they’re not gonna serve their ads. Like, it’s, it’s definitely aligned with [00:10:00] what we’ve seen in the past. Um, what I’m seeing with AI Max that I find interesting is that the. Essentially they’re saying, you know, we’re gonna do smarter intent based matching, right? So beyond your manual keyword list, we’re gonna broad match, right? And we’re, and it’s gonna surface queries that otherwise you, you might not have thought about. Which is great, but if you go backwards from there, right?

It’s almost like what we, it’s, it’s, it’s back to basics. It’s those basic things of having a quality funnel with an ad that matches the content on the landing page that brings people to a user experience where they’re gonna back click, they’re gonna stay, they’re gonna get the information that they want, they’re gonna convert or. It’s just, it’s just, it’s doubling down on the basics to make sure that AI [00:11:00] Max works for your organization. That’s how.

Ralph: Right. And uh, there is, we talked about this a little bit before, is like, if you don’t make the user experience congruent from ad to landing page. A risk more so than ever, I guess with this update is that they might not serve your ads or you know, or either at all. Or at the very least, like, not even worse.

Like that’s worst case scenario. They just simply won’t serve them. The other worst case scenario, which a lot of clients of ours, uh, you know, and we look at this all the time, is impression share. For that particular keyword, so Pi Lawyer Michigan, you know, for example, which is a very competitive keyword.

You might, or a car accident attorney Detroit, like you might pay $879 a click. We actually have a [00:12:00] customer who did pay that converted on it and got an $879 signed case. It’s a great user experience, whether it’s Unbounce or whether it’s not. I know majority of the clients that we have, especially in the e-commerce space, we can get into this in today’s show, just are sending to product pages, which really aren’t that great. Google shopping, obviously like you’re sending to a product page because you know, using catalog. I get that, but it’s like if you’re, if you are competing against, you know, best premium face facial moisturizer in the health and beauty space, and your page about shampoo how great your company is, Google ain’t gonna show that ad. I’m sorry. It’s like, and they shouldn’t ’cause it’s a bad [00:13:00] experience. this is just more of an extension of that. I think. You know, we talked about 2%. Art of of users

Lauren: Two,

Ralph: B two Bs aren’t even using landing pages. So just

Lauren: just going straight to the homepage. Yeah.

Ralph: So it’s like you kind of need to wake up here and say, all right, well let’s stop talking about just what you’re doing on the traffic side. Let’s talk about like where you’re sending it. ’cause now it’s necessity as opposed to just an option. Agree or disagree.

Val: Well, yeah. I mean, you’re talking about providing someone with a four course meal when they just wanted a snack, right?

Ralph: Right.

Val: I, I mean I love that analogy ’cause everybody can relate to it. But you know, I’m searching for something very specific. I want that very specific thing. You might have it, you’re taking me to a place where I have to find it. Oh no. I’m way too lazy for that. I’m not, I don’t wanna have to find it. Right. Um. So I know that that statistic was [00:14:00] staggering and granted it was B2B, but yeah, that 52% of ad traffic still goes to homepages. So again, that’s the four course meal. You’re making me work. I don’t like it. I’m not gonna do it.

I’m gonna back out. And then, you know, the, the quality score just starts to drop. So if you think about it. This is why Google is doubling down. Like it’s, it’s almost like a, a parent who has said for like the 15th time and, and is about to lose their, you know, patience, um, because they’ve said it over and over and over again and people still aren’t. know, getting it. But I think what they’re trying to tell us is with AI Max, those warts are gonna be even more exposed than they were before. Like, you’re not gonna be able to hide anymore if, if that’s the experience you’re delivering. Um, because this AI Max is gonna ex not only expose those warts, but those. Organizations or businesses that have really great funnels, [00:15:00] AI Max is gonna pre them to the point where if you’re not doing it right, you’re just gonna be irrelevant. And like, like Lauren said, you’re just.

Lauren: I think it goes back to like Ralph, you were saying how a lot of the big brands want you to stay on app. Like I think that was was true. I would counter that. It’s now in this like AI slop ecosystem. I think most of the brands are trying to get you to trust them as a returnable resource. So if you’re using Google and every time you do a Google search and you’re landing on an irrelevant page or stop, you’re not, continue to use that search engine to find what you’re looking for and you’re gonna go to chat chip, pt, you’re gonna go to TikTok or some other space.

Similarly, if like you’re running ads on Facebook, they know that we’re sending traffic off platform, but meta. See all the time. When we do audits for campaigns, we see that ads get rejected so often ’cause a landing page is incongruent. And [00:16:00] we like from the meta side, have to constantly evaluate what’s on the landing page because we have found time and time again in case studies, like there’s language on the landing page that makes the whole ad account get banned talking to you, health and wellness folks.

Especially you supplement people. We’ve had to create micro sites specifically because the landing page experience on meta has been so emphasized for the last years. But I think in this like AI slop environment where you’re just surrounded by the wrong answers, it’s making sure that I can trust that if I’m looking for an answer, I’m gonna have a good experience.

And so Google, especially with ai, max is saying, well, part of that experience is that final URL destination we’re sending them to. And if it’s bad, you’re gonna ruin our reputation. So I’m rather not. Have my reputation, the people, my clients that are on Google have a bad experience because of you.

Therefore, I’m gonna decrease your impression, share or eliminate you from being seen at all.

Ralph: And Google doesn’t care. Like they’re making

Lauren: No.

Ralph: no matter what. I mean, like they’re, they could just raise CPMs on everybody [00:17:00] else. Like they don’t really get, like, they, just because you wanna pay them doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily gonna take your money. If it’s a bad experience. maybe we, we use the example with Taz, like all the like software pages that she sends to a revolutionize Best in class us, us. Like those are like horrible pages. And it’s, you just like, take just a little bit of time and say, well, what’s the user actually going to experience once they click the ad? Is it, you know, I’m looking for red shoes, and you send them to a address page. Like, I mean, come on, people. Like, let’s like

Lauren: I get so mad. We yell at, we yell at Google the way we yell at ai.

Ralph: Well, if we joke about it, but it’s so true. It happens so often and hopefully people of the show don’t do that. But just saying people that don’t listen to Perpetual Traffic, because these guys are super smart that we’re talking to right now. The point is, is like this is a necessity now.

Lauren: almost argue it’s more of a necessity because like when you’re talking about you’re searching for red shoes and you get dresses, I think [00:18:00] again, how AI has like drastically changed how we interact online is that we don’t have short and long form keywords anymore. Like we’re looking for red boots to wear at a Texas wedding in April.

So we’re having conversations in our search, and that expanded search is giving more specific intent and relevance demands on the pages that Google’s gonna serve up to someone for that solution. So it’s, it’s getting, like you were saying earlier about like the intent is there and the, the personalization of that relevancy is, um, going to be an almost unfair advantage for anyone that is setting up the user for the best experience.

In that space. And so when you’re building your ad campaigns and making sure that you’re having the best experience with everything, most of the time it’s like cost ineffective to do customized pages and all that. Um, we’ve seen like with the chat posts or a template even, like, I’m really excited you’re gonna share that e-commerce [00:19:00] template.

Share the screen, share the screen, because there’s stuff where it’s like you can drag and drop and you can remove the burden of operations so that you can have that under advantage for however long a max AI max works for Google until it becomes like. P max just becomes cluttered, but hopefully that’s not the case.

But this is like a huge uptick for anyone that’s like listening to this. If you can put together those resources, I think Google’s gonna reward you tenfold. I.

Ralph: Yeah, I mean, we’ll see how ai, ai, easy for me to say AI Max actually bears out here because we’ll obviously be testing it and talking about it. in advance of that, regardless of. There’s an opportunity, I think, for marketers just in general their thinking away from just pure product pages, especially. of the examples that we were talking about before we hit record here today is in the e-commerce space. And yes, you work at Unbounce? Yes, we use Unbounce. Yes. You have paid for advertising on perpetual traffic for Unbound, but the reason is is because this is a [00:20:00] hidden need that a lot of people don’t really do. And I think even showing some examples of, you know, some of the templates that you have, Taz will be so excited if we show her Taz er, know, template. I can’t wait to see it, but be before we ev, before we even show it. Like this is not something that you need to do for a thousand SKUs. Like if you have, now, I was just using this example before you hit record here today. We have a client that has about 30, I said a hundred, it was about 30 SKUs. We’re like, well, what’s your, what’s your best selling product? with the highest profit margin that you don’t have any sort of supply chain issues with. Like if we sell it out, what are those three things and pick that. So they had about three products and it turned out to be one in the gun niche specifically.

And then we created a whole campaign around that. The business went from 3 million to just about 9 million. Now it’s like 8.7 and like in nine months because they focused on one product. And you know what they did? [00:21:00] They created a landing page for that product. So.

Val: Yeah, there so much. There’s so much strategy here. You know, obviously Unbounce, we have customers in all verticals, but e-commerce is a huge one for us. And you by. It’s for e-commerce. So the one issue, or, or maybe misstep we see folks make is if you’re in e-commerce and you’re, you’re running an ad, I’ll, I’ll take Lauren’s example of the, of the red boots, right? Um, that. You, you’re concerned, right? You, you have red boots on your website, but you also have boots of all different colors and, and styles. And so you, you wanna send them to that product page on your website because you don’t wanna miss out on the, you may also like, right, you don’t, if they say, oh, I don’t really like these, and they back out now, now they’re gone. But I think the mistake people make is that you. A landing page and still have [00:22:00] that experience. Right. So maybe this is a template that we have, um, available Shopify enabled. So like, and we also, all of our templates are, um, optimized for conversion. So like, you don’t have to worry about that stuff. They’re optimized for mobile.

Like we’ve taken care of that all. All of that for you. But here’s a great example where you can have this product and then you can have maybe the, you may also, like, maybe you have, you pick your top five or six SKUs in your example, um, Ralph, it was just one sku. Maybe you do this for like your top five or six SKUs.

You provide navigation between those products, right? So you can mix and match in that little ecosystem of landing pages that you have.

Ralph: Right.

Val: Then you get the conversion, right? So this is your most expensive conversion. Hopefully that person’s gonna buy from you repeatedly, right? But then at that point, they’ve converted, right?

You have their contact information. You can hit them by SMS. You can hit them by email, [00:23:00] you can retarget them. Like all of those conversions are a lot cheaper. This is the most expensive one. You’re gonna get this one conversion, and then you’re gonna get the less expensive conversions down the line, which is really what you’re looking for, right?

That’s, that’s how you, um, make the most out of those conversions and, and start getting repeated, repeated business without having to spend, you know, in your example, that eight.

Ralph: So for those of you listening, ’cause I know a lot people listen.

Lauren: Your muscles workout, your marketing brain.

Ralph: right. I actually don’t listen to myself at the gym. I listen to like heavy metal. But anyway, so I listen to Lauren. anyway, it just gets me

Lauren: Wait, did you just make it sound like my voice is the same sound as heavy metal music?

Val: That’s what I.

Ralph: Yeah. It’s pretty

Lauren: Okay.

Ralph: you and Metallica pretty much the same thing. Um, anyway. Get on over to our Perpetual Traffic YouTube channel so you can actually see this. ’cause, uh, the majority of you out [00:24:00] there who are super smart marketers, because you listen to the show, uh, you don’t realize that this is actually there.

And the question is, is do you wanna send traffic to just a generic page or do you wanna create a landing page, which is easy to do and we’ll show you why here. But head on over to perpetual.

Lauren: But it’s not just a easy to do, Ralph. It’s a proven page. That’s got all of this data behind it and it’s so conversion centric. Like I’ve, I’ve built so many custom pages and the time it takes, I’m just like, I.

Val: You know, we, we’ve done the work for you here. And sometimes people will take ’em and run with them, which is great. Um, especially startups or, you know, companies who are just getting out of the gate. Um, but then sometimes people just use them as inspiration. And I’ll flip over. We, we did make a template specific for Taz. Uh, so

Ralph: Here it is. Mm-hmm.

Val: I know this is her big moment to shine. Um, so she has. [00:25:00] Particular direction for product pages in

Ralph: Mm-hmm.

Val: And she said this, this is what works. And so we built it. It’s available on the unbalanced webpage. You can just download it and go. And, um, and so she’s outlined here exactly what she feels strongly works in the B2B space.

So,

Ralph: This is great.

Val: uh. Pretested for mobile pretested for, um, conversion optimization. So again, you don’t have to worry about those things if you start with one of these, but many of our clients, you know, want to do something custom. They wanna create their own. That’s great too. Like totally fine.

Lauren: I just signal it was a huge burden because it was like, okay, then we have to get copy and then these approvals and wait a second on tablet. This shows in a different capacity. I.

Ralph: And the other

Val: I

Ralph: well.

Val: we have, um, you know, if you don’t wanna write the copy too, we, we’ve got you covered. We have, uh, a smart copy, um, which is like an AI copywriting feature on Unbound. So [00:26:00] give us your intent and we’ll get you a first draft going. So it can really be, I mean the, the template, the. The landing page builder itself is drag and drop, but even the content can be a little bit that way, helping. Um.

Lauren: So going back to the Shopify enabled. Component is this essentially saying like, if Canva could be connected to Shopify, this is how you would build landing pages where it just, you have the AI magic wand and then you have your product with the product images already available for where the actual slider is, and then you just Canva play, drop and play way like a third grader could.

Val: I, I like, I like the third grader analogy. You know, we have a lot of folks who work in Canva. Um, and, and Canva actually allows you to create landing pages right from Canva, um, which is a designer’s dream. Uh, but I, I, as a marketer. Um, I want you to make, to do the design in Canva, but I want you to build it in [00:27:00] Unbounce because I know that Unbounce is gonna gimme the reporting that I need.

It’s gonna allow me to use the features like, um, dynamic insertion. Um, we have smart traffic where you can pick, the traffic go to the version of the landing page that’s most likely to convert for that client. So, um, artistic folks might live.

Ralph: Yeah, well plus like in the template, it’s also been tested. And it wasn’t super complex like it was, but it’s not a blank slate. Like when you’re thinking about, oh geez, how do I create a landing page? You’ve got something that’s already been tested, not necessarily looks good, looking good and tested and converts is

Lauren: Don’t matter.

Val: Yeah.

Ralph: the same. I love ugly

Lauren: no, no.

Ralph: pages that are in brand that convert, so,

Lauren: I love ugly landing pages that make me a pretty penny

Ralph: Yeah.

Val: exactly.

Lauren: for Bitcoin.

Val: know that tons of [00:28:00] agencies use Unbounce, right? Uh, so you know, if you’re working with an agency, the agency is probably gonna make you a custom template. Like, that’s totally fine if you’re, if you’re a brand just starting out and you want to use templates, you don’t know about mobile optimization, you don’t know about conversion optimization, like, you know, we’ve got your back.

So kind of serving both of those audiences, but. The beauty of the agency side is that you can like pull down a menu and see like every client that you have and you can

Ralph: Very cool. So let’s show the, uh, the e-commerce one now that we’ve given, you know, Taz, like way too many props here. I

Lauren: She deserves them all.

Ralph: I know. This episodes gonna end up on our socials, uh, all over the place as all those people subscribe to, uh, perpetual traffic and start listening. The point is, is that there’s also other templates that was more of a B2B, like she talked about. SaaS obviously is a huge area of need for landing pages. That’s like, you know, one of the[00:29:00]

Lauren: Oh gosh. Yeah.

Ralph: everything to homepage. Oh my God. terrible. The point is, is like I think is an area where, well, I know doing Google Shopping, it’s going to be sent to the product page a fine.

That’s good. I don’t even know if it’s even possible to send Google Landing discussion. eCommerce. These are. Really cool. And it also talks about that feature that we all know and we all fall victim to whenever we’re on Amazon, is that people who like this also like this other stuff. So let’s talk through, uh, one of these templates.

Val: and just so you guys know, you know the. You can select here, you can select ones with navigation. You can really get super granular,

Ralph: cool.

Val: you know, easy to do. Um, but yeah, in terms of [00:30:00] e-commerce, you know, we, uh, we this template here again, you know, with the, you may also like, so you don’t lose folks if, if they, you kind put keep them in that walled garden, but you are giving them the freedom to select other products

Ralph: Can you scroll up to the top of that one just so we can see that? Okay. All right. So there’s like the brand on the top, obviously in the header, to your point with navigation, you need with navigation now, especially if you’re sending it on Google. So that’s kind of a must. So anyway,

Val: Yeah. And like, listen, if I searched red, uh, windbreaker, you know, waterproof jacket, et cetera, like I’m happy to come to this page, right? Like this is gonna hit the nail on the head if that’s this company’s best queue. And that’s where they bring people in on this windbreaker, like killing it. And then, you know, again, I can keep them in, keep them in the ecosystem with this EMA also like, but I’m still not. I’m not giving them the, the four course meal, like we talked about. [00:31:00] I’m not throwing them into a website where they might get distracted, they might see other things, they might feel overwhelmed, and then all of a sudden, uh, they’re not converting.

They’re, oh, I saw a purse. Oh, I saw a hat. Oh, I saw something else. Now I’m confused. Now I forgot how I even got here. Right? So we’re keeping them in this walled garden, but we’re we’re getting them to the point that.

Ralph: And this is a classic case of cross Sells, which is an that we are going to do. Lauren, I did a video on it a couple ago, which is. like McDonald’s is the example, like when you go to McDonald, I don’t go to McDonald’s. Uh, but anyway, if I did, uh, and when I used to like, you get the Big Mac and then they say, you know, the classic cross sell is, would you like fries with that? Of course. So in these examples here, you have to sort of pick your fries to a certain degree. It’s like you’re, you’re spending money on a $75 windbreaker, but. I’m, you know, [00:32:00] chilly in the cold, not down in Orlando. Lauren, I probably want

Lauren: Hold on, and we have two cold days every February.

Ralph: it gets into like the sixties. Yeah, it’s freezing down there.

Lauren: No, it drops to like 40.

Ralph: my god, that’s unbelievable. You know, water freezes at 32, so 40 is nothing.

Lauren: Well, it’s like 40 degrees Celsius outside right now, so I get to be a salamander.

Ralph: You can get a socks and a beanie and maybe a performance sweater. the point is, is like these are add-ons go along with the product itself. question to you is for marketers who are looking for that, does Unbound do anything, any sort of AI that will be able to choose like these also, you may also like, or is that something that business owner typically will have to do?

Val: So you’ll have to choose the mail. You may also, like here, um, our recommendation would be again, like maybe you have five to six pages like [00:33:00] this. Are all interrelated that you’re again, keeping people within that walled garden with the products that you likely have the best profit margin on, but the products that you’re most likely to get that first conversion on. Right? So if you think through that lens, if, if you’ve got a hundred products or a thousand products, I’m not saying you need to build a landing page for each one, like. That’s just not, it’s just not practical. But if you have the products that the five or six products that usually you bring people in on, what I’m saying, build those landing pages, make them super specific, make them walled gardens. Um, keep them within your ecosystem. Get that conversion and then those subsequent conversions, once you have their email and you’re doing a special, once you have their text and their phone number and you can text them, those are the conversions that are the cheaper conversions, the second conversion, the third, the fourth, et cetera. Then you put them in your referral program. Right now you’re, you know, moving lots of [00:34:00] units, but they’re not as expensive as this click is going to be. Because listen, we all know these clicks are expensive, right? So this is a way you can bring people in on your best performing SKUs, really get the folk focus on the conversion, and then. Move towards those less expensive conversions, you’ve got them in your funnel. So it can really be a strong tactic in e-commerce. Um, so we’re saying, yeah, maybe you gotta build five or six landing pages. Don’t send them to that product page on your website where you have a hundred or a thousand things.

It’s just, it’s just a little too overwhelming and, you know, relating it back to, um, to Google, you know, you Google doesn’t wanna see that back button hit. So if you can keep them and make them move amongst pages within, within this little mini, mini ecosystem you’re created and you get that conversion, well, you know your score’s gonna rise and, and that’s what we all want, right?

That’s gonna make our subsequent clicks cheaper and get us served up more and more.

Ralph: Yeah.[00:35:00]

Lauren: When does, so just to clarify, you’re saying like on the screen, what we’re looking at is you’ve got your windbreaker and then you’re, you may also like this a sweatshirt, the. Beanie and thin socks. So you’re saying the thin socks, oh, my list is coming out. The thin socks and the beanie. Those pages are also done in a similar template.

So what you’re not going from this product landing page to a product display page. You’re going from PLP to PLP to PLP in your, you may also like versus PLP product landing page to PDP product display page, which is our typical product.

Val: That’s, that’s the, the recommendation, right? So, and like I said, maybe you’ve got six of these, maybe you’ve got maybe as many as 10, but that’s it. You know, there, these are your best performing products. The ones that maybe you have the best margin on, maybe not the best margin, but maybe they’re the ones that bring people in.

It’s that first purchase that the one purchase that. That makes them a customer. Um, or, and you maybe you rank order [00:36:00] your top 10 products and then you create these 10, um, landing pages. It’s almost like, like a little ecosystem that you’re keeping them in, but you know, really getting, getting the most value out of those clicks.

Ralph: Yeah, super important. And it’s, uh, uh, there’s, there’s ways to analyze this. There’s a lot of tools that’ll do this, but you can basically go in the back of end of your Shopify store and look at all your past orders in like a run report. somebody is buying the men’s performance anac, which I guess means windbreaker, then like what typically do those people also buy? So you can look at actual user behavior that’s in the backend of your Shopify store too. Like just basic little things like that. Like, don’t guess, look at the data. Create PLPs, not PDPs. For all of those additional products. I suppose you could to really hack it, just do one page and then the people also like go to PDPs.

But in an ideal world, like you’re like, that’s one of the beauties of unbalance [00:37:00] is that you’re not paying by the page. Like you get the thing and then you can create as many as you want. Um, the. That data probably exists somewhere in your business, so don’t take a guess. And I’m kind of stating the obvious, but uh, that’s what I’m sort of known for is stating the obvious because people don’t do the obvious in many cases, Val, because this is killer.

Val: It’s, it’s a little, it’s a work on the front end, right? It’s a, it’s a little bit of work. Is it easier to just send every, everybody to a, a product page? Yeah,

Ralph: Sure.

Val: Um, but I think you’re gonna see your cost per click sustain, you know, like your cost per your advertising costs, right? Like. Are just gonna plateau then.

But if, if you can, like I said, get that second, third, fourth sale by cheaper methods, like SMS or email or, you know, a you’re running a flash sale or whatever, like that’s, that’s where you really [00:38:00] see, you know, your, your revenue, your, your profit margins really go up when you’re spending less on Google, right?

Like that’s kind of the goal.

Ralph: Well, well, thing about it this way, if you’re spending money on Google, and obviously it is not cheap, especially in particular cases. I was talking to a, a cleaning company the other day. They basically competing against like Blue Land. I’m like, don’t even bother With per Click. You’re competing against the Proctor and Gambles of the world that can spend stupid money. You need a better way in which to do it. But let’s say they did that click is so expensive. The cost to acquire that customer is gonna be almost cost prohibitive unless you have a higher NAOV or a higher A OV, which is what we’re talking about here. It’s like you want this thing, but then increase your A OV by having additional clients or additional products.

Maybe it’s one, maybe it’s two. Afford to pay more to acquire a customer on the front end and beat out the competition [00:39:00] as our friend Ryan Deis, who I guess is retired from marketing now, uh, which is total BS by the way, Lauren, he said, you know, anyone, the person who is willing and or able to pay more to acquire a customer will ultimately wins.

Lauren: wins.

Ralph: Yeah. In a competitive. This doesn’t just become, we’re reiterating the same point. This is not like an optional thing. Like you need to do this, and if you wanna be more profitable, let’s say you’re in a space where you’re not really all, it’s not really all that competitive, well, you wanna be able to make more money increase that A OV, that any OV, the new average order value and then ultimately lifetime value, and then that’s how you grow a business.

Val: Yeah, I mean, speaking of competitive categories, like I, I compete in the CRM category, which is the granddaddy of

Ralph: Oh my

Lauren: Oh my goodness.

Val: expensive. I mean, what Salesforce can afford to pay for a click. Uh, you. Family of four for a month. [00:40:00] So, uh, you know, we, we have to find other, other ways to compete. We have to compete on, um, long tail keywords.

We have to have perfect funnels.

Lauren: Hmm.

Val: you know, just to, just to be in the ball game because you’re right there. Uh, we, you know, we also compete with HubSpot. Like these are not small players with small

Lauren: Titans with like platinum diamond, black Amex, extreme daily budgets.

Val: Now, I will say getting your Unbounce leads into a CRM is the easiest when you send those Unbounce leads to Insightly CRM. So it’s a little plug there, but, um, it’s the best experience that amongst all of them. But, um, but yeah, it’s, uh, it’s competitive Categories are, um, you know what, keep marketers up at night.

Ralph: Yeah, it is. Um, at, at the la at the LA it’s somewhere between 1,020 500. Oh, actually, no, I’m looking for CPCs [00:41:00] here. It’s between anywhere between 105 hundred A click easy, if not more like if you’re. Yeah, for CRMs. So I mean, if you’re paying more like it, it’s just, it’s crazy. Like this now becomes so much more essential in everything that you’re doing, depending on what your market is. So, uh,

Val: tell you, a click for landing page builder isn’t, isn’t, isn’t that much different. So,

Ralph: really.

Val: it’s a pretty com it’s a competitive space as well. Uh, the benefit is that Unbounce is the category leader and some somewhat synonymous with landing pages, and that’s ’cause of all the brand work, of all the great marketers that came before me. Um, so it’s like wearing two hats sometimes. On the one hand, I’m a marketer for a category leader. That just has to make the category bigger and then everybody wins. And on the other hand, I’m the marketer for A CRM that is in an extremely crowded space and is a challenger brand. So it’s context switching all day between the two of them.

Really?

Ralph: Very cool. Uh, so there, there’s a ton of other templates that are in there. We just [00:42:00] showed like the, the ta Boer one, uh, we showed e-commerce. Any others on any other spaces that you particularly like you see? Typically we’ll send to a homepage and area where you all are seeing some growth inside Unbounce.

Like with the data, I mean, obviously you’re collecting data on this, so it’s like what are the ones that you really see that, that people get the biggest lift from, and maybe another area of need. E-com Definitely one of them. I see that all the time. What else?

Val: For sure. Yeah. So, um, the with navigation is a new category that we’ve added based on the work that we’ve done with Taz, right? So if you’re, he. If you heard Taz episode or you’ve read the Google announcement, or you’re hearing my voice and you’re like, okay, we need to add navigation to our landing pages, we’ve got you covered. Um, you can just sort here and, and pick all the ones with navigation. Um, health and wellness is a big category for [00:43:00] us, so we’ve got quite a few in that area. Uh, and um. The travel and hospitality, uh, is a, is a growing area for us too. So, um, we let people pick by industry, but hey, if you see one in, if you’re in travel and hospitality and you see one in, you know, education or automotive that you like, Hey, knock yourself out.

They’re all. They’re all optimized for conversion. They’re all optimized for mobile. So we’re, we’re getting you off in the right direction regardless of what you pick. so yeah, so, so many op op options here and, um, we add new templates every month. So we, we just did a, uh, yeah, we just did a big batch.

We’ve launched about a hundred in the last. Couple of months, and now we’re committing, every month there’s gonna be 10 new ones. And, and we look and see what people choose. If, if it’s not popular or it’s not being selected, then we’re gonna pull it down. We’re gonna retool it and we’re gonna reissue it, you know, based on, on user, user stats.

[00:44:00] So we’re learning from everybody who uses Unbounce every day. We’re learning what you’re picking, and we’re weeding those out, and we’re bringing new ones up to match the preferences of the users.

Ralph: Very cool. Can you click on the legal one? I’m just curious. I didn’t click on that one.

Val: Let’s

Ralph: Yeah, do a little demo here. Perpetual traffic.com/youtube.

Val: Oh yeah.

Ralph: Yeah. These are some of the bigger offenders that I’ve seen, especially with the clicks. Yeah.

Val: legacy. We’re getting justice.

Ralph: Mm-hmm.

Val: we got the, you know, very classy law firm look here. So, yeah, I mean, just again, just different options to get you out of the gate, or if you already have an idea of what you have in mind, you can pull one of these down. You can work with them, or go to your designer or your agency and say, Hey, I really like this one, but I want it to be, you know, more for us.

And then your agency kind of works from there, you know, all different options.

Ralph: Got it. Last question for you, like what’s the big takeaway here? Like is it the obvious one that we beat to death with Taz, or is there [00:45:00] something more here?

Val: I, I think the, the lesson is that the are gonna start showing if you don’t campaign. Or per ad, you’re gonna run the risk of not being served. So I think every marketer who can hear our voices needs to really think about every funnel they have. What does the ad look like? What does the landing page experience look like? What is the, how is it converting, how is it doing? And be super critical because with AI Max, essentially it’s gonna get even harder to get conversions if don’t. Your funnel’s really, really tight and, and have a really good user experience. It’s, it’s just gonna get harder.

Ralph: Yeah.

Lauren: After the your a. After the click is gonna matter more than ever, and with the way the, all the different platforms are going to remove all the button pushing and the ad creation itself, [00:46:00] the only thing you then can control is your offer, your tracking, and the destination that you’re sending your ads to.

Val: So fix the warts. That’s what I’m telling people.

Lauren: O. This is like a planter wart. This thing is like deep, deep, deep, deep in there because man, there’s a lot of people listening that have websites that you’re just sending traffic to what’s easiest versus what’s relevant and best for the user. So, whoa, it’s coming.

Ralph: That’s right. So go to the dermatologist. The dermatologist we go to is in bounce, but uh, you can choose your own. But at the very least, it’s been great having you on here today. Where can people connect with you and obviously with Unbounce?

Val: Uh, we’d love folks to follow on Unbounce, on LinkedIn. Um, we are, every time there’s announcements or changes to the industry, you know, as the category leader, we’re gonna get you all that information. So it’s a really good follow. Um, Unbounce on LinkedIn. And I’m Valerie Riley on LinkedIn. Um, [00:47:00] so I’d love to follow there too. We have a podcast for go to market leaders. Closing time, and so love to hear, see you on that. Um, and just get tips every, every week for go to market leaders.

Ralph: Very cool. We will leave links in the show. O notes for all of that.

Val: Thank you.

Ralph: Uh, super great to have you on here. We’ve learned a lot. Hopefully the perpetual traffic listener has learned a lot and there’s like some simple things you can do here. Literally, like we’re not talking about, you know, days and days of effort and just taking little steps in this direction.

You’re gonna see the lift, guarantee you so.

Lauren: I mean, I literally kept muting myself to like send my team be like, Hey, please look at this page. Please look at this template. Please, can we do this? And tell me how long it would take for you to do, because I know how long it’s taken for us to do the testing pages before. And I’m like, oh my gosh. So if you see me on mute, I’m like, give this, give this, give this to them.

Ralph: Custom pages are a pain in the ass. Like they really are like that. I mean, if you really know what you’re doing and you’ve got experience, but it’s like if you have an easy button here, we’ve got a solution for you. So [00:48:00] uh, appreciate you coming on here today. Of course, uh, we will leave links in the show notes over@perpetualtraffic.com everything that we mentioned here and wherever you listen to podcasts. A rating review. Been a long time listener. You know, you could even leave us a rating and review. Uh, and

Val: should.

Ralph: look what I got you here. You got on, you got on professional traffic as a result of you listening. So, uh, very cool to have you on here today. Like I said, um, everything’s over at perpetual traffic com and if you wanna do watch this, that’s perpetual traffic.com/youtube.

You can see the screen share that we talked about some of the templates that we, so very cool stuff. So on behalf of amazing cohost. Till next show. See ya. That’s it.

Lauren: I kept, I literally kept, was like, take this page. Take this page. Look [00:49:00] at this.

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