989: FigPii: A/B Testing Can Skyrocket Your Online Sales with Khalid Saleh

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And welcome back to the podcast. We're here with Khaled Saleh, who is the founder of figpi, which is a user insights platform that will help improve your site conversion rate, help with a B testing, experimentation, and so on. So we're going to find out why we need to be using this wonderful tool and what it does and how it stands out. So, Kyle, glad to be speaking with you.

Thank you for having me on. I'm excited to be talking with you as well.

Excited to be speaking with you in addition, because like this whole idea of split testing, it's one of those things where people always talk about it, but then so few people do it. And I, I miss the, the good old days of Google. Google used to have some kind of tool that made it really easy, right? They'd say paste this on this page, that on that page, and it would give you the graph and it could split test and it would show you if like the, when the graphs diverge. And I miss having a tool like that. And there's so many times when, when I have a landing page, I have a blog and I'm like, I wish I could just like run one of those tests. And so is your tool finally the solution to getting back to those good old days?

That's exactly how the tool was born. So it's funny you mentioned this. So I'll take you back in a historical journey. So we've started as an agency trying to help companies improve their site conversion rates. Split testing. Hey, like, you know, is this the best landing page or can we improve upon it? Well, you know, let's test, let's change a headline, let's change an image. And Google back in 2008 had this tool that's called Google Website Optimizer. And we're like, oh, this is absolutely amazing. We don't have to build the technology, we don't have to build software. So we started using it and it was absolutely amazing. I think really that tool is what helped people over the years jump into split testing because it was available free. So easy to use. I still Remember back in2011, all of a sudden, like now we sign a whole bunch of big accounts. It was sort of funny because we're excited, you know, I'm like, when you run an agency, you just want to have a big account. And I get an email from Google saying their Google website optimizer will be sunsetting. And I'm like, what? What do you mean sunsetting? They're like, yeah, it's going to be gone next week. And I'm like, no, no way. We just signed up all these clients. What do we do? So, long story short, that's really how Fig PI was born. But in 2015, Google put out a new tool as well, Google Optimize, to help you again create, like, you know, create split tests and do a B testing. And I'm like, oh, God. After we built figpy, and here is Google Optimize again doing the same thing, making life easier for people. I'm like, okay, it's fine. At least people are getting educated about split testing. Well, Google and its infinite wisdom. And I'm very grateful, you know, to. To Google. January of 2023, they said, well, we're killing Google Optimize. And I'm like, really? Again, you're killing it. But thank you. Okay. So, you know, I was talking to the marketing team at pickpie and I told them, you know, we could have done a million things, but the fact that Google Optimize is gone and at this point is completely gone, I'm like, this is the best marketing opportunity you get this fit by. Because people are already aware of split testing and they're looking for the tool. And we have the tool. People have been websites using it for the last few years. So it's just absolutely amazing.

And when Google pulls out the rug from under us for the second time, when will we ever learn that you can go to the tool that still has it in place? And so if someone doesn't do split testing, or maybe they've heard of it, but like, you know, they. They don't take it seriously enough. Can you catch us up? Can you explain us really quickly if someone's like surfing the podcast or the YouTube and they're like, okay, a B testing. Split testing. And using this tool, can you give us like the. The Cliffs Notes, the condensed version. That way people can jump into it and get excited.

Sure. So let's say you have a website. You know your goal from the website. Let's say you're a business, and if you're an E commerce, you want to sell people something. Or if you have a website and you're trying to collect leads from the website. So let's say, you know, just for the sake of explanation, you're focused on your homepage. You have the homepage, you have some like, you know, headline in it, you have some images, you have a contact form and you're thinking to yourself, okay, so I have about 10,000 visitors who come to my this homepage. And of those 10,000, maybe 100 people contact me. Okay, how can I actually improve the conversion rate? So typically what you do is you'll say, well, maybe, maybe there's a problem with the headline, maybe I can improve the headline or maybe there's a problem with the image. I can use a different image. This image is stock photo. I can actually use an image of myself. Maybe that will appeal to people a little bit more. But you don't know. Correct. You're just putting lots of maybes over there. So what you do is you use an AB testing tool. Well, fake by in this case, and you'll say, you know what, let's create a new version of the page. I'm going to create a new headline and I'm going to use my image. And then since I have 10,000 people coming to the website, the tool is going to split those visitors. 5,000 are going to see the old design, you know, with the old headline and the old stock photo. And 5,000 will see the new version of the page that has the new headline and my beautiful photo. And then I'm going to compare the number of contacts that I get. Well, 5050 of them contacted me using the old design. 5000 visitors came to the new page and a hundred of them contacted me. Oh, okay, so we have a winning design over here. So you really, what an AB testing tool allows you to do is create all these different versions of a page, test them, and really allow your visitors to tell you which version works better for them through actually converting. You know, if you get a hundred conversions versus 50, I definitely would want to go with that, with that version of the page. And that is what a B testing, split testing is all about.

I love it. Wonderful explanation. And you're calling to mind a lot of just harsh but valid marketing truths that we'd all love. We look at a webpage and we say, oh man, I love my own site so much. It's going to convert so well. And then maybe when I was like 19 or 20 years old, I had this huge giant logo on a webpage. And I thought, and this is around when there was some of these Google tools. I was like, let me try a way smaller logo. And the conversion rate went up and I was like, let me try no logo ago. When the conversion rate went up I was like, you know, I have this opt in form and I was like, let me try with video versus no video. And it's just like a two minute video saying you should sign up and get this tool. And I took out the video and the conversion rates went up and so many different times like that of like I had a landing page that converted at 1%. I took out like the first three words and it shot up to 4%. So all these kind of counterintuitive things were like, you, you wouldn't think this change would make a difference. Or you're like, I personally like the way this looks. And then you try it and people vote with their wallets or vote with their conversions and then it surprises you. And so I'm sure you have some fun stories like that, right? I mean, do you have some things like that where you use this tool? You tried the A B test and something just kind of blew you away by like making this change. Just made such a difference.

So I'll tell you, the process of a B testing I always tell people is very humbling because you think yourself, I've created a new design, this looks so much better. And then you say, well you know, let's test it out, let's see if people like the old design versus the new design. And then you're just surprised. Like really people, you like the old design better? I mean this, I've put so much work into it. So we work with lots of, there's lots of E commerce companies that use figpi. And one of the things I always tell E commerce companies, and it's funny because I've said this at so many conferences, wherever I speak, I tell them, listen, why do you have the add to cart button on your category pages? People don't add items to the cart from the category page. Correct. You want to look, you know, category page, you show me a whole bunch of products. I click on one of them and I go and I read about the product. I'm still not sure. I go back to the category page, I click on another product. So really people, you know, rely on the product pages to really click on the add to cart. And every time I tell people, remove that add to cart in the category page. I can guarantee you that's an ab Test that's going to win. Well, we have this large retailer, they said, okay, call it, it's sounds like you know what you're doing. How about we a B test it? And I'm like, ah, we've, we've seen this a B test run so many times before. I am sure it's going to win and I'm going to look really good in front of people. They run the test and it completely loses. And I'm like, what? People are actually clicking on the add to cart from the category page and they're like, yes, they are. And the fact that we removed that add to cart from the category page, our sales dropped by about 15%. And I'm like, whoa, what's happened there? Now this is a website, electronics websites in the Netherlands. And I guess people there love to click on the add to cart from the category page. I'm like, okay, I've learned something new. It's a little bit different. And it's funny. The next conference I spoke at and I'm like, guys, I've always said this, but I've learned, you know, to eat my words. And I've made, I've made a mistake, you know, is actually you need to test it out and you let your visitors be the judge of what works for them and what doesn't work for them. I'll tell you a different story. And like, you know, it's funny because every, every marketing guy gets hired. What's the first thing that they want to do on a website? Let's redesign it. It doesn't look good because you know someone, you want to leave your stamp on the website. It's like, hey, I'm the marketing guy. And it's amazing to me, Microsoft actually just came out with a paper because, I mean, Microsoft's constantly redesigning. They're like, every time we redesign, we think we're doing better. The website conversion rate drops by anywhere 10 to 20%. So I always tell people, I'm like out and make sure that you compare. I know, I know. The new design looks so much better. But you know what? People are really funny. We are creatures of habits. We like old designs, clunky designs because you got used to them. And although you fix so many problems for us in the new design, we still like the old design. So that's the reason you want to test things out and learn really based on how people interact with your website. All of like, okay, so which design we need to go with.

Wonderful. So it's very humbling as far as Changing these things. And there's like the, they say trust but verify, right? Where there's the best practices and there's what you should do to kind of get something in place in order to get the problem solved, get the job done. But then once you have all the fundamentals, then you can start measuring these things and then that way you're not killing your own business. And you're so right that if there's any kind of site that I use on a regular basis, like if Facebook changes their shade of green, I just, I'm so mad for like a week. If YouTube moves some buttons across the screen, I just like, just because it's not even, it's just because they changed it and it's like a little bit of an awkward like makes my brain think I hate it just, just because it's, it's different. Even though I use it for several weeks and it might be better. And so what's great about this whole concept of the AB testing and you know, measuring and tracking is that you always have a winning website, right? That you have like the A and the B. And you said that you know, so many times the what you had in place beats what you experiment with. But even if that happens, you're still, you still have like the number one top winner. And on the off chance that, that the B version does 1% or 2% better, then you're just kind of always getting better and better. And so this is something that we need to be looking at and using. And so you mentioned a little bit about like these industries that use it, right? Like there's like E commerce and electronics. Like is there like places where it should be used and shouldn't be used? Like is it great for landing pages but not great for like blogs or like you know, where's it good, where's it not good?

So I have seen AB testing used across so many different industries. I always tell people, I'm like look at your website, look at your pages. A blog is a perfect example. Look at an E commerce site, a lead gen type website, a SaaS website. When you look get a particular page, do you have a specific action that you want people to take on the page in a lead gen type website? Well, I want them to fill out that form in a blog. Maybe I want them to navigate to read another post. Correct. Maybe I want them to like you know, spend a little bit more time on, on my site and E commerce website. I want them to click on that to cart so you can, as long as you can define a clear action. Okay, so we want people to do this on this page. I can create an AB test and see which design that I have will actually increase the percentage of people that are doing that action. Lots of times people ask me is like, hey, well, you know, it's like, it's funny. The kind of, the most common, common question that I hear, what's the average site conversion rate? And I laugh. I'm like, oh, man. Sometimes we work with companies and they come and they like, you know, they are using fig pie and they're sister companies. It's funny, like, we have two companies, sister companies, both in furniture. You almost the same site design. One of them has a conversion rate of 6%. One of them has a conversion rate of one and a half percent. What is the difference? Well, maybe they're in Target in their targeting and their marketing. It doesn't matter what the average site conversion rate. What you're trying to do is always, like you said, we're trying to improve it. We're always trying to improve and do better year over year, month over month, year over year.

Wonderful. Just. Yeah, just you're. It's kind of like, it's almost like a life lesson, right? Like, don't compare yourself to others. Just the only person you should be trying to beat is yourself. And the same is true with your website. And I love that mentality there of thinking, okay, well, in any kind of web page, what, no matter what it is, what's the goal? What's the action I want them to take? And it's easy to say, oh, well, you know, landing page, sure, I want them to sign up, but if a blog, I'm not really sure. Well, and you say, well, figure out a goal. Figure out if the goal is if they read the blog post, then maybe there's some link to some suggested post or, you know, sometimes I'll be like, on mobile and I'll be scrolling through and I'll be. I'll say, oh, and now I'm reading a second post, right? You finished reading blog post number one. And next thing you know, I'm seeing some other headlines, some other thing. And like, they kind of like that. They kind of fool me a little bit because now I'm reading the. The next kind of thing. And so that's great to think about is what is the goal that I want someone to take? And so, you know, we're talking about some of these big ideas, right? Like if someone says, well, I want to redo the layout of my site and I want to completely change all the interface. Some people might say that's kind of like scary or a lot that's involved. So do you come across those sort of like barriers or objections? Does someone say, well, I know I should be AB split testing, but I'm worried about it messing up my current system or about like, the technical difficulties? So what do you have to say about someone that says, like, the technical aspect might be a barrier?

So I always tell people, learn to crawl before you walk. Learn to walk before you run. Sometimes people come and they ask like, oh, but we're going to have to change this and we have to think about the technical architecture. And I'm like, no, well, let's slow down how many a B test you've launched in the last year or two. They're like, oh, nothing. I'm like, okay, let's start slow. Don't go really big. Eventually you will. But let's start small. Maybe we just want to test different headlines. Maybe we just want to test different images. Maybe we already have a page, our homepage or landing page designed and we're just going to change the location of different sections. Maybe we're going to add some social proof. I'm like, start small. And that's what you want to do for the first six months you start. And as you are running through those small tests, you'll get more and more ideas. And as you see, winning tests is like, oh, my gosh, we managed to increase conversion rates by 10, by 15, by 20%. Guess what? That, that whole, you know, plethora of questions that it's going to be complicated and is it going to be scary or not? It doesn't matter because you have enough data in your hands to say, you know what, yeah, we do want to go into bigger tests, but don't start with big tests because some of those big tests are complicated. I remember one bank decided to use Big Pie. And I'm like, okay, guys, there's just so many things that you can test. And they're an online banking service. And they said, you know what, we are going to start by testing the funnel where people sign up and create their bank accounts. Now, mind you, it's banking service. Financial service. And it's fairly complicated because highly secure. And then they tried to do the code and took them like almost three months to test it out. And I'm like, guys, three months to run an AB test. How about if we had just changed the headline on the homepage or on the landing page? Get people excited, show them that there's actually improvements. And the minute people start seeing improvements and they start seeing, you know, increases in conversion rates, get to guess what, everybody's excited, everybody's thinking to themselves, hey, how about we test this? How about we test that? The perfect example I have is GoDaddy, their CEO. And this is a friend who works in the company. He said, you know what, the CEO has a meeting every month with the whole marketing team and he tells them what are we testing this month? And every one of them will give an idea and then the next month they'll come and they'll present like hey, we tested it, this worked, this did not work. And they have a full discussion for four or five hours, you know, like one day a month where discussing, they're discussing all these concepts, what one, what loss, what are we learning, how are we doing?

That's a lot of fun to think about is, is that like what are you testing this month? And we don't have to get crazy. Like you hear about the stories like one time Google split tested like 52 different shades of blue on their landing page. That seems like a Google level of like godlike testing. But you're saying that the, the usage is more important than the knowledge, right? That like, and I mean even like you know, you do your speaking at events, I'm sure like the first, the first several times you're probably like thinking like oh I'm doing such a terrible job at speaking. But you were actually taking action and there was probably hundreds of people out there who, if not more, who are like the armchair quarterbacks who are afraid to even do like one speaking gig and they're just like studying, learning and it's really easy to self sabotage in that way. Whether it's like taking action on something or just like implementing a piece of software, it's so easy to think too big and to just be too academic or too intelligent or too something versus just getting messy early, trying it out, having a quick win, seeing some results and then being excited to use it again, knowing that it's massive imperfect action all along the way. So that's wonderful to think about in the context of using your tool, but also and taking some action. And so in our last five minutes or so of our conversation here, Khaled, you know, we've talked about some of these kind of marketing tasks that we should do and you've hinted a little bit about some of your, your adventures and some of your like networking and things like that. So in your entrepreneurial journey and your kind of Personal development journey, all these things. Do you have anything to share with us just about your own growth or your own struggles or your own accomplishments? What comes to mind?

You know, it's funny because I think it's when you struggle, I mean, I remember in a previous life, I used to be a software architect. Steady salary, that comes to me at the end of the month. We're happy, you know, we're like, oh, good. Like, you know, we're doing really well. But of course, you get the entrepreneurial bug and you're like, oh, we're going to start a business. Didn't really think about all the details of the business. We just. I just literally quit one day and I started, you know, my. My business. And I remember different moments of the journey of having the business where we struggled really hard, where we made really stupid decisions. I'm like, oh, gosh. You know, it's like, okay, so we got ourselves in trouble over here. We made this mistake. But then when you reflect back at them later on, you're like, oh, I've learned this. And as it makes for. It makes for a nice story. Back in 2015, I was. I'm like, you know what? We're starting to have all these customers in Europe, and we're like, we can't really work with customers in Europe and Asia if we're here in the US the time zone difference. So somebody said, yeah, go ahead and, like, you know, fly to Europe and open a small office. And I'm like, really? A small office? Okay, so. So I literally flew to Paris, flew to London, and way too expensive, a lot more than I anticipated. I'm like, okay. And then somebody says, well, go to Istanbul, Turkey. I'm like, istanbul, Turkey? I haven't been to that place in, like, in almost 25, 30 years. I go there, love the place, absolutely fell in love with it. Open an office over there. And I made so many mistakes. First mistake, I open an office without checking whether people can speak English in Istanbul, Turkey, or not. 99 of the people don't speak English. I'm like, okay, well, that was stupid. I hired 15 people in the first six months. Six months later, none of them was with us in the office. Different culture. You know, in the US we're very transparent. We're very open. You're like, hey, this is going on with the business. This is happen in Turkey. When you're transparent and you're talking to people about that, they're getting scared. Like, oh, what's going on with the business? I'm like, it's normal. You go through the ups and downs I'm trying to share with you. And then I decided, I'm like, you know what? We need to hire people in Denmark. Like, okay, we're going to expand. That was another mistake because the. And not to say anything about the people I hired. Absolutely amazing. But the work culture in Denmark is a lot different than the work culture in the U.S. in the U.S. you're doing 40, 50 hours a week. That's normal for them. They're like, what, more than 30 hours? And you only have two weeks of time off in. In a year where we're used to six weeks. That difference again, culture and kind of learning. I was like, okay, I need to learn about people before I hire. And I think for me, by the way, people and hiring people is the biggest struggle in my journey. I think I have a much better process nowadays. But, oh my God, in order for me to get to this point, I've made so many mistakes and wasted probably tens of thousands of dollars learning the lessons I've learned.

But you had to make those mistakes to get where you are now. And I'm like, sure, in hindsight, maybe you could have made slightly less mistakes, but it seems like that's a barrier that a lot of people don't talk about is that there's the before hiring the right people and after hiring the right people. And you see people that are just afraid to start or afraid to make those mistakes versus the people that, that figure out this hiring thing and build a team. And sure, sometimes things implode or there is a bunch of growth and a bunch of failure. But I mean, in the entrepreneurial journey, like, what else is there? And so we want to make sure that we mention and promote figpie, which is f I g p I-I.com so if someone is excited about this idea, they say, I want to experiment, I want to ab test, I want to use this tool so that way it's simple. I don't have all these excuses I make for myself. I want to start using it. Where should they go? What should they do? And how easy is it?

So literally the one thing that you hear about everybody who tries fit by, they're like, it is so simple and intuitive. I'm like, yes, that's how we designed it. You can just go to Fig by and sign up. It takes less than a minute to actually sign up and create an account. And I have like three or four guys and customer support who I believe they don't sleep because I'm constantly like no matter what time you need help, they are available. So they will help you install figpi really quickly on your website. We have so many different plugins and you can literally have your first a B test up within like, you know, probably 15 to 20 minutes after signing up with with FIGPI. But let me also add in addition to the a B testing piece, I know we've talked a lot about it, Fake pie also gives you the ability to see how people are actually clicking around your website. You can actually watch, we call them session replays. It's almost like videos of somebody landing on your site, scrolling down, click on something which is fascinating. Correct. We record every interaction that the visitor has, think by has like if you've ever thought of like about asking your visitors certain questions, hey, you know, as they're exiting, what, what is it that's in our side that turned you off? Why aren't you buying? Why aren't you filling out that plate form and collecting all these answers? So we have on site polling. There are so many different features that we built and the idea behind every feature that we added to figpie is let us help you improve your site and improve your conversion rates. So I hope that people give it a try.

I hope that they do as well. And you're tapping in this whole conversation, you're tapping into this idea of how important it is to have fun and get excited and it's not a hundred percent of the equation, but it sure is an important part and to use it and enjoy it and maybe get some sort of pleasure in the results you see and solving some of these problems and having these aha. And seeing the people clicking around and seeing why they left and split testing and seeing some of just those changes to your site and how it improves your conversion rate. So if you out there in podcast land want to tap into some of that fun and excitement for yourself, go to figpi.com, go there, sign up, start using it and you'll have a lot of fun in just a few minutes with that intuitive, easy to use interface. And that way you can be on your way to incrementally improving your business and by asking yourself the important questions like how would GoDaddy says, well, what are you testing this month? That way you're not hemming and ha and guessing you're actually basing it on some actual results. So figpie.com is the place to go. And as we wrap up our conversation here, Khalid, I know we kind of got a little introspective a few Minutes ago. But just to kind of really wrap it up, do you have a favorite, like quote, moral or lesson or anything powerful and profound to leave us with what comes to mind?

So the one thing that I tell every entrepreneur, it's a book, actually. So because it's so full of lessons and I wish I found it, by the way, 15 years ago. I just, it just took me 16 years to find it. I'm like, really? I should have read this. It's called the Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham and his theory, his whole theory. And then he has so many different businesses that are very successful. He's a multi millionaire who lives in Texas. But he says that, you know, my businesses would have been a lot more successful if I didn't. I didn't really need to make the correct decisions. I just needed to make less stupid decisions. So the book has maybe about 50 chapters. Each chapter is about two, three pages. And in it he will present the concept and then he will give you lots of questions that you really do, some introspection. And you ask yourself those questions and you'll find many aha moments. So every time a friend tells me that, hey, I'm thinking about starting a business or they're in the midst of the their entrepreneurial journey, I tell them, read this book and thank me later.

I love it. Well, we need to check out that book, the Road Less Stupid. So that way we just do slightly less stupid things to lead us to those better decisions that comes about by asking those introspective questions. So check out the Road Less Stupid. But also more importantly, check out Figpie, that's F I G-P-I-I.com to start a B testing and experimenting. So we will see you there. And thank you very much, Khaled, for just blowing our minds and really giving us some wonderful information. I appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. I enjoyed the conversation as well.

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