#25 – What's a Good CRO Budget & 5 Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate

Rate optimization.

I'm Simba, and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live Hour, a show all about a B testing, experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode, Khaled amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like, it's no big deal.

Well, pretty much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we'll talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh, man. I bring tough questions like, do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are. But we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live Hour podcast today, wherever you listen to your podcast. I've spent a month without social media, but I just could not handle it. So social media is back on my phone.

Is it just LinkedIn or any other LinkedIn and Facebook?

Because those are the two platforms that I use regularly.

I don't think I can delete LinkedIn, even though I haven't been posting for some time, but I still just enjoy reading other people's posts and commenting here and there.

Yeah, it's interesting because I did have a lot more free time when I removed all those social media apps from my phone, but I also felt very disconnected. So I'm like, okay, maybe that's not necessarily a good thing. Somebody suggested that I really should be on Twitter. One of our clients, he was fairly active on Facebook, and there's lots of e commerce groups on Facebook, and he got me into some of those. But then he's like, khaled, you should be on Twitter. There's, like, you know, very few people on Twitter who speak about E commerce, you know, so much more than them. He made me feel good. He's like, get on Twitter. But every one of those apps is just an absolute time suck. So excited. Last week we didn't do CRO Live Hour.

Yep. Last week we didn't do it. I think you were busy, right? You had something like that needed your attention.

I got overwhelmed. We had too many, like, you know, client calls, this call, that call, and at some point, one of the meetings that I was in ran over. I think it was scheduled for half an hour. Turned out to be an hour and a half, which I absolutely don't like. So that's when I message you, I'm like, simba, I have four or five other calls. That's just basically because of that one meeting that ran over, got all screwed up. So I'm like, I can't do this.

So what have you been up to this week?

It's been a very busy week at invesp. The economy is such an interesting creature. We have some clients who are struggling. I think our account management and sales team are busier than I've ever seen them. Since we've created invesp, which is a good thing. I'm not complaining. I will take that any time of day. I also before we onboard any new client, before we decide that we are a good fit, I usually spend some time looking at every website, looking at analytics with our team just to make sure that when we start the project we'll actually produce results. So that meant because the sales team is very busy, that meant I am very busy looking through analytics is fascinating, some of the numbers and metrics, because analytics tells you a story but you need to listen very carefully. And it's not what most people do is they just pull one number from analytics and they say, oh, here's what this number is telling us. That's not interesting. Train somebody, you show them how to pull numbers, they can do that. I think what's interesting is when you try and connect four or five numbers together to really come up with a story. I'll give you an example. Not that you've asked, but nonetheless I'll.

Give you an yeah, sure, sure, that's good and normal.

So yesterday I was looking at particular websites and at the very top level, what I like to do is compare the mobile conversion rates to the desktop conversion rate, two different metrics. And with most websites in the US you see that they get the majority of their traffic 75% in some cases. I've seen it up to 85% of the visitors are coming on their mobile devices. Yet at the same time, it's very typical for US based websites to have the mobile conversion rate be about 60 to 70% of that of the desktop. I'm looking at the particular website, their conversion rate for mobile was 2%, for desktop it was around 6%. So it's about 30% of what you see. Correct. That is much worse than the typical numbers that we see. That's an interesting metric, but again that's a metric that anybody can pull. Then I said, okay, well let's pull the average order value for people who converted on their mobile versus desktop, it was $517 on desktop, it was about $502 on mobile. So this is interesting because if we say while mobile visitors are hesitant to place an order, and that's the reason we see that huge gap between conversion rate on mobile devices versus desktop, you would have expected to see some sort of disparity between the average order value on desktop on mobile. But it's not correct. I mean, it's close enough within 5%. So for those visitors who have committed and said, you know what, yes, this is fine, this is the right website, this is the right product, and they go ahead and go through the cart and the checkout, that issue of mobile versus desktop is not a concern for them. I'm like, okay, this may be like, you know, the minute we got somebody committed, they don't really care about the experience prior to the cart page, they are already have made up their mind and they're going to go through the checkouts. So that's an interesting point. But then you want to combine that with another data point because you want to look at the cart abandonment rate and you want to look at the checkout abandonment rate. And that was also very fascinating. Their desktop abandonment rate, and this is the cart abandonment rate for desktop was around 50% typical. That is just a very usual number that we see for a site that's not optimized. We compare that to the mobile cart abandonment rate and you notice that the abandonment rate there is close to 80%. Interesting. So we have said visitors who are committed, they don't really care, and they're going to go through the checkout and they're going to spend the same amount of money regardless, whether on mobile and desktop. But up to the point of the cart and including the cart, people on mobile devices are not very committed. You look at the abandonment rate, that's the other metric that you want to combine. And again, it's all about combining numbers together. And you notice that the abandonment rate on desktop was around 35, 36%. Similar abandonment rate on mobile. Guess what? If I put all of these numbers together and it's almost like you're painting a drawing of the side. The commitment happens after somebody starts the checkout process. It doesn't matter the minute they start the checkout process, doesn't matter whether they're coming on mobile or desktop. They will go through it and they will order the same amount prior to starting the checkout. No, the mobile site has major issues and that's what the numbers are telling us. So it's fascinating to say, yes, there are major issues. Now, this is again, what analytics tells you. It tells you that there's a problem. What is the actual problem? You need to dig through the site. That's where expert reviews, heuristic analysis, heat maps, session recording, talking to the actual customers help. Now, I'm just going to finish with this thing because this site is actually selling something that I'm about to buy. So I'm like, oh, so they're talking to us, and at the same time, I want to buy this product. I tried to go through the experience on desktop and I got so confused. At some point, I got so overwhelmed that I told them, guys, you got my $500, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to give it to you. You presented me with so many options, so many different ways, so many different paths. I got really confused which products I should be ordering at the end. So it's just fascinating. Again, kind of looking through analytics and trying to understand how to draw all of these things together.

That's cool. That's cool. So today we have, like, two questions that we'll be focusing on. We actually had, like a bunch of questions to answer, but we just picked these two because of time we noticed. Most of the time we say that we'll do four or five questions, but then we end up doing two. So at this moment, it was better to just like, focus on these two. So the first one is, what are the five ways that you can use to decrease or reduce your bounce rate and keep your visitors engaged?

What are the five ways to reduce bounce rate? So I will cover those five ways that you can implement right away to reduce your bounce rate on any page of your website. But before we cover that, let's talk quickly about what a bounce rate is. Let's talk about bounce rate in GA4, because I get a ton of questions about that. And then we'll talk about the five different ways. Bounce rate important metric. Some people don't like it because they don't understand what it is. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that come from an external site. So they come from Facebook, they come from Google, they come from email, or they just purely type in your website address and they land on a landing page to the first page on your website, and instead of continuing to navigate to another page, clicking on a button, they decide, you know what? This site is not the right site for me. Goodbye and good luck. So it's counted as a bounce. So bounce rate is very Powerful because it measures the percentage of visitors who actually leave right away. Which means that there is a problem in the website. Something in the website told them no and they said, you know what? Okay, yeah, this is not the right site for me. Goodbye and good luck. There are a couple of things about bounce rate that you want to keep in mind. Sometimes it is okay to have a high bounce rate. If you run a content website. If your SEO is really good, you have a blog and you get a ton of traffic, people coming from Google, they're searching for something in particular in Google, they land on a landing page. You might have the best information about the topic on that particular page. They read it and guess what, you've satisfied the visitor. So it's natural for them to say, thank you Mr. Blogger, goodbye and good luck. And then they leave. They bounce, but they've actually satisfied the reason for their visit. So it's very typical for content pages to have high bounce rates. It is very typical to see bounce rate on blog Pages anywhere between 80 up to 95%. Don't be alarmed, it is just only natural. Bounce rate is very powerful on non content pages. So if you have an E commerce website and people are landing on your category or collection pages and you notice that there's a high bounce rate, you have a problem. Same thing with your product pages. People are landing from an external search, they come to your product page, they land on your product page and they end up leaving. You have a problem. So you want to be aware of that. What's interesting, because people complained and complained and complained about bounce rate and is it useful or it's not? And there's some people who say it's not useful, tell them no, it is useful, but you just need to understand which context you need to look at that bounce rate. So Google Analytics 4 GA4 decided that they are going to remove bounce rate and they're going to replace it with something called engagement rate, which is by the way the opposite of bounce rate. So if your bounce rate on a page is 60% in the old Google Universal, Google Analytics universal, guess what? Your engagement rate is 40% because the visitors who engaged are basically the opposite of bounce rate. Same thing. Correct. I mean you just flipped the formula. Is it better? I don't know. I like to know the percentage of people who are leaving right away, but that's just me. And guess what, you can still add bounce rates in Google Analytics 4. You just need to do a little bit of customization. Now if somebody's interested in finding out how to look up bounce rate, whether in Google Analytics, Universal or GA4. I've recorded a video about that, so we'll leave it in the comments you've asked. Give us five things that you can do right away to reduce bounce rate on any page of your website. Number one, think about continuity. What does that mean? Prior to somebody landing on your particular page, they saw something. If they are searching Google, they saw something. There was a promise that was made to them. If they are opening an email and they see the email, there is a promise that the email is making to them. If they are seeing one of your ads, there is ad copy that tells them. Here is the reason that you should click on this link. When they land on your website, you should have continuity between what the external source. You should make sure that there's continuity between the promise that the external source had made and the page where they are landing. What does that mean? If you're telling them an External source here's 40% off, click here. Guess what? On your landing page you need to have the same language 40% off. If your email is telling them here is how you join a specific campaign, they click on it, they get to your landing page. Guess what I need to mention? I need to mention that specific campaign. So there should be continuity between the source of traffic and the actual landing page. The minute there is a disconnect, people can get confused and they'll ask themselves like, hey, you made me a promise and you're not fulfilling that promise. Goodbye and good luck. So continuity is extremely important. Number two is trust. I land on a website, I land on a particular landing page and it feels not very trustworthy. Guess what happens? I'm going to leave. If I don't trust you, I am not going to transact with you. And we are in a time where Internet users are very savvy. If your website looks not so trustworthy, people will leave right away. How do you increase trust? That's simple. Design communicates trust. So you can always judge your design. You can use social proof to communicate trust. You can use endorsements to communicate trust. There are many, many different ways to communicate trust to your visitors. Number three, and this is a tough one, is the page load time. There's a whole industry around website performance and load time and I Dare say that 90% of it is just an absolute ripoff, just really tricking website owners into trying to improve the page load times. But in reality, most of these freelancers don't do a good job of actually improving the page load time. If your landing page takes 15 seconds, 20 seconds sometimes I've seen landing pages that take over a minute to load. And I'm on a very fast Internet. Because your page is very heavy, your images are very heavy. Guess what? We live in a fast paced society. Goodbye and good luck. I'm going to click out, I'm going to bounce and I'm going to leave right away. Number four is using a tool such as heat maps to understand what areas on the page are really important. So people are always confused. How do I use heat maps to reduce my bounce rate? Run a heat map on the particular page that suffers from a high bounce rate. See if there are areas on the page where there's lots of visitor interaction, but those areas are on the bottom of the page. That heavy visitor interaction is telling you that people are interested in this message, but you might have it at the bottom section of the page. Guess what do you do? You need to figure out a way to move that messaging, maybe images, maybe copy to the upper portion of the page. This way everybody can see that messaging. Number five, add easy navigation that will persuade visitors to navigate to other parts of your website. Somebody searches in Google, they land on your landing page. Maybe that particular page doesn't have all the information that they are looking for. Give them different ways to actually navigate across your website. Don't merely rely on the site header or the site primary navigation. There might be other intelligent ways of redesigning the page where people are landing to drive people to click and view other areas of the website. Now let me just give you an example of this. Let me actually ask you this question. Do you think the bounce rate for category pages is usually higher or lower compared to product pages?

I would say maybe the product pages is higher than the cut pages.

That is correct. Bounce rate for product pages across an ecommerce website will have a higher bounce rate compared to category pages. Why is that? Very simple. On a product page, you're viewing a single product. Here it is, here's the price. Take it or leave it. Take it. Click on that cart or leave. On a category or collection page, here are maybe 20, maybe 30, maybe 100 different products. So there are ways for people to navigate and click on different products. That's the reason you always see that the bounce rate on category pages is lower. And again, that goes back to the point that having multiple ways to navigate across the website on our landing pages is very helpful. Now one last thing that you want to keep in mind. Don't go overboard with trying to fix high Bounce rate on all pages of your website. You want to see pages that gets good number of visitors in the first place that justify the investment in trying to reduce the bounce rate. If a page is only getting 50 visitors a month, should I really worry about the high bounce rate? No. What you need to do is focus on driving more people to that page or other pages of your website. How does that sound?

That was a good and detailed answer. But I have a question. You say like it's normal for a bounce rate of a blog page to be 80%. So is there like a normal also bounce rate for maybe product pages or E commerce pages?

So people absolutely hate it when I say the average bounce rate for product pages and collection pages. But here it is. I will mention it nonetheless. For unoptimized product pages, what we see is the bounce rate is anywhere between 30 to 40% across all product pages for an E commerce website and for category pages, what we see is that the average bounce rate across all category pages is anywhere between 20 to 30%. If I come into a website and I notice that the bounce rate for the product Pages is around 60 or 70%, that tells me two things. One, we might have one of those problems that we've just talked about. Number two, it could be, by the way, a problem with the source of traffic. What kind of visitors are we driving to those pages? Because we might be ranking forward that does not relate to what people are searching for. Or we might be even worse using Google Ads or Facebook ads to drive people to those particular landing pages. But they don't relate to what people are expecting or searching for. So we're spending money to drive unrelated traffic. And guess what happens with unrelated traffic? They bounce and they leave.

That makes sense. One other thing that I thought of when you were explaining, I think one of the ways that you can reduce maybe bounce rate is also like optimizing for mobile experiences and for other browsers. Because I think that might be one of the things that people might forget, especially when it comes to browsers.

So let's talk about mobile experiences. I actually refuse to talk about mobile experiences at this point because regardless to where you live, and I would say in 70, maybe to 80% of the sites that we deal with, the majority of the traffic is coming on mobile devices. So you should not optimize for mobile experience. You should design from the get go. You should be mobile first and then you can add the desktop experience. Most designers until now start designing on desktop and then they'll figure out, oh, how do we make this work for mobile, it should be the other way around. So for us, we always start with the mobile design and then we'll say, oh, how do we actually convert this to desktop? And how do we need to change the experience? So don't optimize for mobile. But here is something else that you can do for a particular landing page that you have. Break down the technology, the browsers that people are viewing the landing page with, and see how the bounce rate breaks between different browsers. Are you seeing some browsers with higher bounce rate compared to others? Because that might tell you there are some errors on that particular page and that is what's causing people to abandon the site or bounce off the site.

So just to recap the points that you made about reducing a bounce rate, you said, number one, you should focus on continuity. There shouldn't be like any disconnect between the ads and the landing page. Number two, trust. Make sure, of course, trust factors are there. Page speed, heat maps, and then easy navigation. Right.

It's funny because there are a ton of articles that talk about this topic, by the way, and most of the information is fluff, unfortunately. And some of the advice in those articles, what you see has nothing to do with a bounce rate and it shows just that the author doesn't even understand what a bounce rate is. So just think about the visitor. They're coming from an external source, they're landing on this page and they have a decision to make, should I stay or should I go? So what can we do to convince them that, hey, stay, we're the right place? You know, let me pique your interest. Let me show you what I have.

So moving on to the next question, what's a reasonable testing and optimization budget looks like? I'm sure this will be like a good, good answer.

I'm also curious to hear, and this is a typical question that we get, what is a reasonable budget? There are two sides to the budget question and then there is. Let's talk about also the time commitment that optimization requires. So whenever we talk about a budget, there is the software cost and then there's the resource cost. Let's talk about the easy one, the software cost. If you are doing any type of improvements to your site, you will need to have software that's going to help you run a B testing. You will need to have software that will run heat maps, session recording on site, polling, exit intent and whatnot. You can spend a ton of money on this software, so it will vary based on your budget. Let's take A website with a million visitors. So we're not going to go really small. We're not going to go really large. A million visitors is somewhere in between. For AB testing software, you're probably going to spend anywhere between 700 up to maybe $3,000 a month just for the A B testing software, and sometimes even more, by the way. So you need to understand that without a B testing software, you're just making changes and guessing. You probably then should not be running an optimization team altogether. A conversion optimization team altogether. You have to have the AB testing software at the very top of the food chain, the optimizelies of the world. Expensive annual commitment. You're probably not going to get away with spending less than $100,000, $150,000 a year. That's a huge commitment. Bottom of the food chain, you might be able to spend anywhere between $1,000 to $1,500 per year. But I ignore that software because usually it doesn't have the functionality that you need to run meaningful experimentations. I would say if you have a million visitors, you're probably spending anywhere between 8,000 up to $20,000 a year. So that's number one. Number two is heat map session recording on site polling, exit intent polls. Those also are important tools. Whenever you're running a conversion rate optimization project, whenever you're running experimentation project, and the cost there also varies tremendously. You can do it with free tools. Microsoft Clarity is absolutely free and you can utilize that, but it has its limitation. Or you can go to the hotjars of the world or fullstory, where if you have a million visitors, it's going to get very expensive. Now the one caveat that I want to add to that, most of these tools that run heatmaps, session recording on site, polling, specifically heatmaps and session recording are going to a model for what they call continuous recording. So they're capturing the movement of every visitor that comes to your website. I'm not a fan of that because imagine this. As visitors are navigating, they're moving their mouse across your website. What's happening is all that data is getting captured and it's getting sent to the server. It slows down the browser. Whether you like it or not, it is going to slow down the browser. So there is performance issues around running those tools. I like to use heatmaps as such recording, but I usually find it very useful to record maybe 3,4000 sessions and do some analysis of them. I don't need to be recording a million sessions every Month. I have nothing meaningful that I can draw by watching a million sessions a month. Nor does our team have the time to do something like that. Continuous heat maps are very powerful, but I worry about the performance implication. What I find is if I have a site with a million visitors, then running a heat map with 10,000 page views gives me enough data that I can use to make solid decisions on. So that is the software side of things. Let's talk about the human side of things and the cost of running an optimization program. You have two completely different options and you can mix and match. Of course, you can just outsource the program to an agency or you can hire internally. At the end, you will have resources for working on the project. So let's talk about hiring the right resources to do an experimentation program, assuming that you're capable of finding the right talents. So at a minimum, you need somebody who specializes in conversion rate optimization and you need somebody who's going to do design, and you need somebody who's going to do development, some quality control. Now, you can probably ask your CRO to help with the quality control and you need some project management. But again, if you have a good, capable CRO conversion rate optimization specialist, then they probably can run the project themselves. But at a minimum, you need those three. A CRO, a designer and a developer. How much does it cost to hire those? It varies tremendously. Where do you hire? Hiring in San Francisco is outrageously expensive. You hire from Eastern Europe, you know it's much cheaper. But then you deal with other challenges. Difference in time zone, language barriers. Many, many things that can come up for us at INVESP is what we do for a living. We have a tough time finding really amazing talent because we work with amazing clients and they expect the best talent. We have a tough time finding CROs with a ton of experience. Whenever we post a position for a CRO, we're looking for them all across the world. Last person I hired was from Denmark. Before that, I've hired in South America. We've hired in the us. We've hired in Canada. You mentioned we probably have hired somebody there. I'm looking for the best talent everywhere. If you're going to hire your own people, you need to figure out the geography, if there's any limitations there, and you're probably going to pay top dollar. I was talking to somebody who had decided to go ahead and hire an internal team and they were telling me that for their CRO they paid close to $150,000 a year. That is a lot of money. And that's just the CRO. Okay, now designers, again, you need to find a capable designer. Think about this. Hiring a designer for a company just to do designs is a lot different than hiring a designer for AB testing. It doesn't require the same amazing skill set because most of the time you are modifying things, you're not coming up with something completely brand new. You can get away with hiring a designer who has five to seven years to work with the CRO team, with the growth team. So that means your budget might be a little bit slower. But again, where do you hire? So the same issues that we talked about, CRO will apply also for design. Finally, you have to have the right front end developer who knows how to work with a B testing. Lots of times people say, well you know, I have a development team, no big deal. And I tell them, a front end developer versus an AB test, front end developer. They're two different creatures and people don't believe that and they disagree and eventually start running a B test. They discover that they are two different creatures. I have seen absolutely amazing front end developers and I take them and I ask them to develop experiments and they struggle. Because a typical front end developer comes at any task that you give him with the mindset of let me develop the best version, usable code, well structured code to really deploy this on production on my live website. And AB test developer has a completely different mindset. How can I take the quickest and fastest shortcuts to be able to develop this functionality? Because I know that my code is going to be thrown away and it's not going to be used on production. Don't try and shortcut hiring the right developer because somebody can develop an A B test, but if it's not well written, it's not well optimized for AB testing purposes. Guess what happens to your A B test? They are slow and you have the flicker effects and you introduce new set of problems to your experimentation program. And the same thing that we said about hiring a CRO or a designer applies to developers for developers. We look for talents everywhere and we have a very rigorous process to really make sure that we hire the right developers who have a ton of experience to be able to develop those experiments. You still have two other positions that we talked about, which is the quality control person, the project management. You can ask your CRO to run those, or if you have somebody from your team to run those, you can do that as well. But at a minimum you need to have the first three positions. Now there's One cost. So we talked about the software cost, we talked about hiring people cost. So really you're talking about a cost of anywhere. If you add those two anywhere, probably from 300,000 to $400,000 a year and could get up to 600, $700,000 a year to run a program. But there's a commitment, it's not a small commitment. Now the right team will pay for itself 10 times, 20 times. Hiring an agency, on the other hand, since we're talking about the cost of doing an optimization program will vary tremendously based on the experience of the agency. The right agency will cost you, I would say anywhere between starting at $7,000 a month and can go up to 30, 40, $50,000 a month. It varies tremendously. You need to make sure that you talk to the right agency, you need to make sure that they do the right process, they have the right history, and then make sure that you don't get stuck in long term contracts. The right agency might not produce results really quickly, but you should be happy with the quality of the work that you are getting from them within anywhere between four to six months. I've seen agencies that require a year or two year commitment, which to me is crazy. Anything more than a year is absolutely crazy. But again, hey, all power to those agencies. I couldn't do it. I don't know if I want to commit to a client or two years. Although the average client stays with us for 39 months. But I don't ask them to commit for that long.

How much do you think it will cost for hiring like a CRO agency? Just throw a number because you mentioned something like building an internal team. Maybe it will cost you between 300k to 600k. How about an agency?

An agency will cost you anywhere from $80,000 up to really and goes up from there. Average agency will cost you probably $150,000 a year. Now this is separate. Correct. Than the software cost. Now at the same time, just keep in mind the agency is not working full time for you. Correct. So the same team that's working for the agency is probably servicing anywhere between four to six clients for us at invesp. And depends just how you run agencies. Our teams max out around three or four clients for the life of me. I mean some of my industry friends are able to assign six and seven clients to their teams. I cannot figure this one out. The minute we go above four clients, people start making some silly mistakes and clients are not happy. So I think we're averaging about three or four Clients per team. Now let's say you hire internally and you have the CRO, you have the designer and you have the developer. Do you have enough work to keep them busy? That's an interesting question. It depends on the site. It depends on how much traffic the site is getting. Eventually, I think as sites become larger and larger, yes, they will have enough work. If your site is only getting a million visitors, half a million to a million visitors, or even 2 million visitors, you probably don't have enough work to keep a full CRO team busy. You can, but at some point that team will probably spend more time on analysis, not necessarily running experimentations, which is very critical. Correct. In any optimization program.

I have like my own startup, right? And I don't have enough traffic. What's the best way forward? Like maybe for someone who has their own startup, but not enough traffic. Should they build their own team then start like maybe optimizing things like for usability or should they just reach out to a startup?

No. So I think if you're a startup, don't focus on conversion optimization. Definitely don't hire neither an agency nor your internal team. You have to get to a certain size before you can start thinking about hiring, whether internally or externally. If I'm running a startup, what I would focus on initially is bringing more and more people to the sites. Now I can probably talk to either UX designer or conversion optimization agency initially to come up with the structure of the website. So I'm not doing something really silly. As I'm bringing people to the side, I'm going to try and capture some of those people. But that's a one time engagement. That's not some monthly ongoing optimization. That's not monthly ongoing a B testing. You just want to make sure that the foundation is there. Now at some point if you have the right foundation and as more and more people are coming, you might want to think about hiring somebody for conversion optimization. I wouldn't hire internally. It does not make sense. And by the way, this applies to whether SEO or PPC or CRO. That's what I do. You know that we have decent amount of traffic coming to invesp's website. What did I do? I said, okay, we don't really need to hire an agency. I need somebody to guide the team. Correct the same thing with CRO. What I would do is say, hey, let me do a conversion rate audit. Give me some things, I can fix them on my own. As I increase my traffic, at some point I can think about hiring an agency. And at Some point, I want to think about bringing this internally and actually doing the work. So it's kind of different stages that anybody, any startup must go through. Build a solid foundation, do some auditing, hire an agency, bring in a full team. That's kind of like the process that I would go through.

So in answering that question, you touched on one of the oldest digital debates. You said you would rather focus on SEO rather than conversion optimization if you're a small startup. Right. So in other words, are you saying that SEO should come first before CRO? Because they've seen that debate all over LinkedIn for some time. Because the CROs, they were saying that, no, you can't just like, invite people to your house when your house is not in order first, like, make sure that your house is in order. Then you bring in, like, some visitors.

Remember what we started with? Start with the foundation making sure that the house is organized. You have few couches in it. You don't have something silly. But in order for me to have things set up correctly, I don't need to have a huge engagement. I don't need to be spending 50 or $100,000. I'm sorry, you know, I'd rather maybe spend 5, 10,000, get that CRO audit, fix things, make sure that, yes, the house is organized, there's no disasters in it, but then a good chunk of my investment goes into bringing people to the website. That's what I say. Foundation is very important. So if you're doing things that are silly and you haven't thought about your visitors, okay, now it's silly to focus on traffic.

SEO first before CRO?

No, I think visitor experience first before SEO or CRO, then SEO, then CRO. It's funny, we had a company reach out to us. They just dropped us an email three weeks ago and all. Honestly, I had forgotten that I talked to them initially. I had to go look through my email. Actually, I had talked to them back in January of 2020, and at that point in time, they had a business idea and they're just starting and they said, hey, we want to hire you guys. And I told them, I appreciate the fact that you want to pay us, but we're not going to produce results. You're getting so little traffic, so little conversions. And at that point in time, I looked at the site, I'm like, listen, you're not doing anything horrible on the website. Can we improve it? Yeah, but don't worry about that right now. Figure out a way to get more PPC and more SEO traffic to the website. They dropped me an email three weeks ago, and they said, hey, we're ready. And they are like, you know, since January of 2020. Now we're in 2023. So three years later, they're getting close to 2,500 conversions a month. And they remembered, okay, we talked to this guy who told us. Thank you. They dropped me an email, and they're kicking off with us in the next couple of weeks. Fascinating. I know they will be happy with what we will do for them, because now they have 2,500 conversions versus the conversation I would have had with them. And I'm sure I could have convinced them three years ago to do work with us, but they probably would have done work for a couple months, and then it would have left a bad taste in their mouth. Now it makes sense for them to come back. And they remembered. They remembered, oh, we talked to this guy. We want to go back to him.

That makes sense. I think those are the questions that we had for today.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you everybody, for listening. Leave a comment. Press like button. We shall come back next week. Until then, Shao.

Bye.