EP374: More Traffic Isn’t the Answer: Better eCommerce CRO

This is the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast, daily intelligence for serious e-commerce portfolio builders across Amazon, TikTok Shop, Shopify, Walmart, and every channel that moves the needle. Neil Twa and his Voltage team, all day, every day since 2012. Let's get into it.

All right, Christian, thanks for coming on, man. We were just chatting and I realized we probably should have just hit record. Earlier while we were jamming out. It's a fun, you know, I have a fun time talking to you. You're a great guy. And so I'm really excited to talk more about what you're doing today on the podcast. For anybody listening to this out here, thank you so much for listening along to the High Voltage Business Builder podcast. This is a guest episode. If you've been around the block here, you've probably been listening to some of our more curated tactical AI conversations, but I always want to bring the human aspect to what we're doing. I think there's still value in the transfer of that authority. So I like to bring good people on here. And in our pre-green room conversations with Christian, I thought it would be great to bring him in here. He's a cool looking dude. If you're not watching him on YouTube right now, he's slick. He's got the, he's got the, you know, no hair thing going on, but he's rocking it. I wouldn't be able to do that, bro, because I got too many like cracks in my head. I think I was dropped when I was a baby and it just wouldn't look right. But you're rocking it. For those of you who are not looking at him on YouTube, you're missing out. You should go over to YouTube and check it out because he's a good looking guy. And I'm excited to have him on the podcast. Thanks for coming on, brother.

Thank you very much for the invitation, Neil. Happy to be here with you today.

Yeah, man. So what's on your mind today?

What's—

have you had a good day? Did you get your coffee in? I mean, in your time of the world, it's almost evening, right?

Coffee's already prepared, actually. By us, it's actually the end of the day because in my time zone, it's quarter past 5 in the afternoon.

Yeah.

But I was very looking forward to our conversation because I think we were talking about before, actually, you have started the recording, that the whole era regarding digital marketing, e-commerce, and everything is changing so fast. Yeah, it's very hard actually to keep up to date regarding the—

It really is, right? And the things you can create now, there's a balance between creation, and this is something you and I were jamming on, and I didn't quite get to there, but, you know, the value of what can be provided as a service from someone else versus what you can create. There's There are opportunities to do it yourself, and there are opportunities to not waste your time on certain aspects of what AI is doing today and then just go hire the people to get it done. Would you agree or disagree with that?

I would formulate it a little bit different.

Okay.

So what I see, especially in e-commerce space, so I can talk about our areas because usually I have meetings and correspondence with a lot of e-commerce store owners. Yeah, but I see that, okay, AI is definitely a big hype. Everybody wants to do something with AI, but the biggest challenge or the gap, what I see, that they don't have actually a strategy, right? They don't have a concept behind it.

They're just doing it. They're doing it every day.

AI.

Yeah, right, right.

For what purpose?

Well, to make life easier, but more simple, to automate something, to not do more work, like to stop working. I think that's everybody's ultimate goal, right? Is like AI is going to stop me from having to do any work anymore.

Yeah, it's typical, for example, by us, by our tool, an AI-powered SEO tool. I hear it sometimes from clients or even from agencies that they wish they just push one button and—

All the work is done.

Yeah.

We are ultimately on the race to becoming the laziest marketer who wins, right?

Yeah. Yeah, it happens actually like a magic wand in 5 minutes and everything is ready.

Yeah. We know what— I call it planned obsolescence for the AI generation. Like we're AI creating our way into obsolescence in some ways. And this is part of the conversation that I was having with my daughter before this call for like the last 2 hours, as you and I were talking about was, you know, where do you fit? You're no longer the worker in this. You have to stop thinking about the person who, okay. So what I was telling one of the things was she talked about going to Fiverr and helping with editor skills. I'm like, that's super great. However, you can build an editor skill that's 10 times more powerful for you if you understand what it's doing and how to create it and how to utilize it. And I said, at the same time, you know, there are people selling those skills on Fiverr right now who are doing the work. But I literally just saw a guy on X earlier who created an agent that goes creates high, you know, CTR thumbnails for YouTube, has his own Fiverr account, this agent, and then makes money selling YouTube thumbnails on Fiverr. I'm like, what? You can't compete with that.

Wow.

There's no point with you trying to go create thumbnails now as a person and designing them. You just need to know the system and become the marketing coordinator. Where the agent goes and has its own Fiverr account and makes thumbnails or does an editor or creates videos for you and then manages the account and makes money. So each of these agents could be sitting out there doing that work, but you have to be smart enough to coordinate it, know what it's doing, understand what it's doing correctly, or you'll just be garbage in, garbage out. And that's part of the thing we talked about earlier, right? There's a lot of garbage coming out right now. And that's what we have to be careful about because there's a shiny object syndrome, right? Right? Like the squirrel, you know, people squirrel and they're like going in different directions on AI. And one of the things I constantly talk about and where you're headed with this, I know in our pre-conversations was AI is not going to fix all the problems, be single push button marketing of your entire engine and just stop you from working, go sit on the beach and nothing's going to happen. You have to be in control of what it's doing. You have to understand where it's going. You have to apply it correctly, especially in e-com. And if your fundamentals, your foundation is broken, AI is only going to 10x the garbage.

Definitely. It can't make any big magic. So, it's so important what you have mentioned that you have to understand the basic lines. If you have never heard about conversion rate optimization, you don't even understand what does it mean.

You're just going to get 10x of the non-converting optimization.

Yes, definitely.

You get a lot of revenue but no profit. You get a lot of vanity but no sanity. The end result is yes. The thing that I keep talking about, the thing that I want people to understand, and I think you're on the same boat, is you must have the fundamentals in place first, understand what's actually working, and then see how AI can 10x that output, that revenue stream, that opportunity, that workflow, and then make sure that it's doing it the right way and doesn't break something because you actually understand what it should be doing, not expecting it to know everything it's going to do and you expecting to not know anything of it because, well, AI knows it all. Ecom owners are making that terrible mistake right now, and I see them going to growth hack conferences. I see them looking at the idea that CRO is well yeah sure it's just you know conversion rate optimization. I just have to convert higher. It has to optimize better. Well that's very simple, isn't it? I mean the concept is simple. That's what I'm really saying. The concept is simple. It's the execution that fails, right?

Yeah, that's correct. That's correct. And actually also very typical. Failure. What I see, one of my favorite stories. If, for example, e-commerce stores owners ask us to okay, I would like to start with AI-powered CRO because it sounds very great.

Real sexy question.

Okay, how many visitors do you have? Approximately two thousand unique visitors per month. Sorry, you don't even need CRO.

And you need more visitors because you don't have a CRO problem.

Right. Traffic problem.

A traffic problem.

Try to increase your traffic.

Traffic, traffic.

Below a special traffic level, you don't even need to deal with conversion rate optimization and especially not AI-powered because as we know, all the AI tools need data. If there are not enough data there, also the output will be not so magnificent, of course.

Well, that's exactly what happens. Again, garbage in and garbage out. So for those who are listening, if you're in the new seller space, welcome to the episode that teaches you how to not look at stupid stuff. If you're an existing seller, welcome to the episode that teaches you how to not do stupid stuff. It really is a, it's a common problem with new, existing, or even growing or expanding operators, right? The idea that I'm, I'm going to get more out of less. Hence the problem with, well, you need more traffic. You don't have enough data to really optimize anything anyways. And then the, you know, problem of, well, how do I get more traffic? I thought I had a conversion problem. Which cart and horse, I mean, which one are you helping to solve ultimately? Where is your skill set?

I would say our real skill is from the level where you have actually reached the level where you can say, okay, this is a kind of established business. There is definitely a product-market fit. The store has already generated some kind of revenue and have Has at least, I would say, 10,000 unique visitors.

10,000 a month?

Yeah, 10,000 a month.

And you're talking about like a Shopify store or a front-end direct-to-consumer channel?

Shopify store, Magento store, WooCommerce. It's actually independent from the platform, not the platform. Independent from the platform.

So you're not really talking about Amazon or TikTok or Walmart, et cetera, where you're really focused is on the DTC side of conversion and optimization for a direct-to-consumer channel market, a Shopify, a website, a WooCommerce, that kind of thing.

Yeah, exactly. And the point is how to make more from your existing traffic.

Exactly. That's real optimization. Yeah.

With hyper-personalization, because it's so important to understand that if you would like to increase your conversion rates, first of all, you have to increase your customer experience.

Right.

First of all, you have to focus on your visitors. Right. If you are able to do that, as a nice side effect, also your numbers, your KPIs, your performance will be better.

So simple is it, actually. Well, yeah, simple. But first you have to get 10,000 visitors a month to your website. So if you're listening to this, folks, and you have less than 10,000, your first goal, if you're listening to this today, is get more traffic, right? And then you focus on your optimizations. And you said personalized optimizations. What does that mean?

When I would like to formulate it very simple, Regarding the onsite messages, show the right people the right message at the right time.

Just in time.

These 3 areas, because I see it very often, the problem that a lot of ecommerce stores still try, first of all, to sell something in the first moment. It doesn't work anymore. The customer journeys are longer than ever before. The more expensive is your product and the more complex is to understand this, The higher is the customer journey, the more touchpoints will be needed from a new visitor to achieve the level on the customer journey that they are ready to buy. And of course, most of the e-commerce store owners don't want to do this whole process. Yeah, that's for the first time they're going to buy it, but they definitely won't buy it. We know it exactly because we know that the average e-commerce conversion rate is now between 2% and 3%.

2% and 3% on the front end is what we see. Yeah, that's really optimized. You get 3% to 5%, you're on the money, double your spend. Like today. So which leads me to optimization metrics. So I hear a lot about ROAS, which I hate. I prefer POAS, not the one from the storyline of the Boaz, Brokeaz, POAS. We want the ones that make a lot of money, profit, right? Have you ever heard that story about the Boaz?

Yes.

Don't be a Boaz, a Brokeaz, or a dumbass. You want to be a POAS and in the wrong way. You want a profit opportunity, right? Profit on return spent. But what are the other metrics? I know people talk a lot about CAC, customer acquisition costs. We talk about the LTV. I don't think a lot of people Yeah, but they don't talk a lot about lifetime revenue of that particular person, which is a different metric. Which metrics are the ones ultimately that are going to create that high customized personalization and say, oh, you are now optimized, double your spend? Like, which ones are you constantly focused on?

I would say definitely average order value.

Okay, AOV.

Yeah, AOV. Yeah. And Revenue per session.

Revenue per session. Let's unpack that one. I think a lot of people have heard of average order value and they, and to summarize that in my language, and you correct me if I'm wrong, is when we are doing that on our DTC channel, it is how much more can I get a customer to buy at time of checkout? Can I get them, they can buy a $25 product, can I get them to $50? If I can get them to $50, can I get them to $100? Right? And then can I get my AOV, average order value, up across a 30-day period from, you know, $20 to $40, from $40 to $60, from $60 to $80 and so on.

Yeah, definitely. With cross-sell, upsell campaigns on site, you can definitely increase this average order value.

So revenue per session, unpack that for me.

Okay. It's a little bit more complex KPI because it actually calculates also the number of your visitors, your sessions, sorry, your sessions, because we know exactly that, for example, One visitor can have more sessions. And the real low-hanging fruit is by the returning visitors, because from experience, of course, the dwelling time, average onsite spend time, is much higher by the returning visitors. And also the e-commerce conversion rate is much higher by returning visitors. So you should much more focus on the returning visitors because we very often use See the Pareto principle. Yes, actually only 20% of the visitors are returning visitors, but they generate 80% of the total revenue.

Very cool. So there's an actual metric you track, a percentage of that where you're shooting for what's an average. We know 3%, 2 to 3% on the conversion rate is amazing. So you should be shooting for that at the cart level. You should be shooting to increase your AOV as high as possible. But what's the percentage of that they should be looking for on that revenue when they get a customer to come back after that acquisition? What percentage and what timeframe?

It's really very hard to say because it's depending from so much factors. Like, for example, in which business model are you? What are your products? How many competitors do you have? Who are your ICPs? So it's very hard. I don't think that it makes any sense to give an average benchmark.

Well, let's give an on average. We have an AOV of 46 on our store. We have at least 5 major competitors in anywhere between $20 to $100 million a year. We are seeing a return rate of about 7.9% over 30 days on our current store. Hmm.

I had to calculate it. I must be honest. Like, I can't say it right now.

You need to take your shoes off and then—

But if I— numbers.

I'll wait. You can take your shoes off and then you can calculate it. No, I'm just kidding. But I wanted to use a real-world scenario to generalize something for people who are listening so they can kind of understand where we're at. Average product price is around $25.99, but we're getting, you know, 46 in AOV because of what we're stacking up in the front and we're increasing additional bundles. I want our AOV target at 75. So that's what we're working after. And we've grown from about 34 since I took the store on to 46. So we're definitely on the right trajectory. And we've watched our growth revenue metric over 30 days go from 3% to 7%, almost 8%. So what we're really focused on beyond customer acquisition costs, which is difficult today with CPMs and Meta and stuff being so ridiculous. Is if we have to pay those costs to get the acquisition, we're getting that acquisition away from our competition. So really it gets down to how well is our SMS working? What is our revenue per session per client? And what does that LTR look like, that revenue for them? Do they come back and buy, you know, $800 from us in a 12-month period or a 6-month period? I'd really like to get it down to 6 months because of the turn, the speed of acquisition. You know, big companies with big budgets we're competing against and we just have to outmaneuver them. I want us to be like a speedboat, right, to their Titanic. So we're really pushing hard beyond customer acquisition to build in subscriptions and return value of customers, get that 8% to like 16% and get that AOV from 46% to 75%. Those are metrics I'm shooting for on our DTC channel. And that's something that, you know, is a real world thing happening right now. You know, the store was doing about $2,000 a month when we took it over and it's done $45,000 last month. So We are definitely on its way to doubling that in the next 60 days, but we're trying to do it, of course, profitably. And this month we're actually finally breaking into profit nearly every day in this process, but it has taken us about 90 days to get there. So these are real-world numbers that we're dealing with because everybody thinks, well, if I put a product up there and I just throw traffic at it and I get a 3% conversion, I'm going to make money. No, they do. That's what they think.

It's so important, this topic, what you have mentioned now, because it's exactly from this one I have posted, I think yesterday on LinkedIn, with 2, I think, mini short case studies that even with 2 times ROAS, can you make a lot of profit? And even with 15 times ROAS, can you have actually loss?

You can take a loss. You can lose your shirt, right? Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. And I see the whole concept of 10x-ing being super cool in its nature, but not the revenue, right? It's easy to 10x the revenue, right? Um, sell a cheap product, get it in front of a million people in a year, you got a lot of revenue. But did you make any money off of that? That's the real question. Did you actually keep—

In the long term.

Yeah, did you actually keep anything in that process? And I've had a lot of business owners who come to me making, you know, $1 million, $2, $3 million a year, even up to $5 million a year, who are very close to a loss. in their business, right? So it's very important we understand where that optimization actually goes and it's post-click. I think so many people worry about the first customer acquisition cost and they are not actually concerned as much about the factor that you're talking about on today's podcast. And that is how much do I keep from that customer? How do I keep them coming back? How do I increase their revenue every 30, 60, 90 days? And then I know that no matter what I spend on the front end, if it costs me $50 to acquire a customer that pays $25 for that product upfront, many would look at that and go, no. And I would look at that and say, did they come back in 40 days with no other customer acquisition costs because they came through an email, SMS, or they just came back of their own general consumable nature and bought another $40, another $70 of product within that 60 days? And then I'll pay $75 for that $25 person, right? And I don't think everybody understands that. Yeah. Well, don't get me started on Temu. Look, I ordered a broom on Temu. I ordered a broom on Temu, and this is what I got, right? So everything is what you— this is the broom I got when I thought I was getting a broom for my deck. I got one of these from Temu. I don't know if you guys can see this, but it's like 3 inches long. No, Temu is just one of those places where you think you're getting a product, and it's— yeah, I'm going to argue with Temu. So I think it's funny. Temu is like AliExpress for 2026. You think you're getting one kind of product, but you actually get something completely different. But no, go ahead, make your point about Temu. I'm just joking.

No, I just wanted to mention that, as I know, they start to earn from the 3rd or 4th product. In the first 1, 2, 3 products, they don't earn anything.

Oh yeah, it's all about bundling. Bundle, bundle, bundle. If you've been on their app, it's like a nightmare, insane schizophrenic moment when you go through Temu's app and it's clicking and it's upping and you get a credit and where'd that credit go? And then you get this bonus deal. It's like gambling when you play on their app. It's like these things pop up.

I feel like I'm in a casino.

When I'm on the Temu app, have you ever experienced— you experienced that, right? It's like, where am I going? A ching, ching, ching, ching, and this thing is here, and I got this credit, and you're like, well, does that apply to anything? And what am I actually buying? If you want the CEO operator blueprint, join Neil Twa, CEO of Voltage, on the next live workshop. He goes over the 5 steps to building generational wealth through almost automated income with FBA. Save your seat at voltage dm dot com slash AI workshop. And now back to the podcast. It's like, well, I got more free crap. So then I ordered something from Temu here recently and I got like a box full of 20 items. I'm like, what the heck did I just get? And I'm unboxing these 20 items and half of them are just crap. Like half of them break, half of them are not real, half of them are just like— I got this thing from Temu not long ago and I stopped ordering on it, by the way. And you guys aren't going to see this, but it's a magic cleaner gel that I got that I haven't even used. It's like this I don't even know why it came in the package. I don't even think I ordered it. But, you know, while I was clicking along on the casino app, I think it added it to my cart because I was going to get some bonus crap, which is good for them and bad for me and bad for the consumer who's playing along with the deal. But I don't even use the dang thing. I think it's for cleaning your car. And he's like, it's the gel thing and you put it in the holes and it picks up all the crap between the— I don't even know what it is, dude. It's literally just sitting up right here and I got it from Temu. But they are a pretty good case study. And how to take somebody from a single product to 6 products and make it profitable.

Yeah. And they're growing very aggressively, actually.

But I can't stand their app. It literally feels like you're gambling. It's not for me. If you get on their Temu app, it's just an insane nightmare. It's clicking and dinging and boxes and stuff just flying around. It's absolutely a nightmare, but it works.

Definitely.

It works. Well, at least until the De Minimis Act got killed. Not so much. Anymore for those kind of product types. But all right, so sorry, that was a rabbit hole that we were, you know, we were talking about the main metrics that actually focus on. What are the, what are like 2 more things? We talked about one big one, which is the right metrics for CRO. What are 2 more things that you want store owners listening to this who have a DTC channel or are considering the opening of, say, a Shopify DTC channel, et cetera? What are the 2 more things they really need to be focused on right now against competition? use of AI, things that are going to give them some heads up today, something they can maybe apply today? It's a long question, but we're getting down to like, what are 2 other things somebody could do today to really impact their CRO?

So one point what I would like to definitely mention are the product pages. As we know, the product pages are the new landing pages because they are— ecommerce stores are now running PMax campaigns, which means that most of the visitors are landing directly on the product page. They don't even see the category pages or the main pages.

Right, right, right.

Therefore, I think it's very important to optimize the product page as deeply as possible. And exactly for that reason, for example, look at the KPI add-to-cart rate.

Okay.

Because this is a very important signal where is actually the bottleneck in your sales funnel. And the next one should be the cart abandonment rate. Because it's also a good sign for that. For example, that for example, the problem is with your checkout process.

Yes, checkout. We've been fighting that for the last three weeks ourselves. I'll tell you about it when you keep going.

But it's so critical.

So critical. Where's abandonment? Why aren't people kicking through? Why are we having a fall-off at the checkout to conversion level? Like why are we not getting three percent or two and a half?

At which point do you lose them?

Traffic lost them. Yeah.

So I would say that these 2 points are very important, that you know a little bit deeper what is exactly, uh, happening in your e-commerce store. Because if you see only the general number, e-commerce conversion rate 1.5%, okay, below the average, but what does it mean exactly?

Where is the problem and how do you solve it? Yes, yes, yes, yes. So our real-life problem right now that's been in the last 3 weeks of auditing every day, myself and my CMO, Going into the details and looking at each incremental change differentiation, rebuilding the Shopify conversions component, looking at the stages of the funnels that top into that and down into the checkout cart aspect, tearing apart the fulfillment connected apps that go to MCF or Amazon where a product is delivered through fulfillment. And you know what we ended up with after all of that got to the bottom of all this technical scrubbing of data down to the very bottom? Our shipping costs are too high.

Shipping cost.

And it's really hard to overcome. So what are we planning to do? What's our solution to that shipping cost? It's unavoidable at this point. Like there's not another way. We even have our own warehouse and fulfilling from our warehouse is not cheaper than using Amazon's MCF system through the logistics. And 3PL isn't going to do any better either. We've done that route. So we're like, well, what are we going to do? You turn a challenge into an opportunity. We go the opposite effect. We lead with it. So what we're going to do is we're going to flip that around on its head and we're going to lead with our weakness, which is the shipping cost. So the challenge to overcome that is now to present it as an opportunity to the customer. So we're going to go the other direction. And we got a couple of ideas on how to challenge that. And we started that process Saturday. And on Sunday, we had a 2.57% conversion rate all Sunday where previous days before that, we couldn't break between 1, 1.5, So now we're on the numbers. So now we're on the numbers, right? So we're working on that over the course of the next 7 to 14 days to see if the change in the conversation and the perception of free versus paid shipping and the way that we can bundle the products and perceive the value differently, which is not really anything more technically than how do we perceive the offer to the customer, which is what we're testing right now. will get us above an average of 2.5%, whereas before we were an average about 1.7%. Stay tuned. Yeah, but that's literally what it got down to. So somewhere in your line, you might have a technical problem causing that. We thought it was. That's where we first went. We thought, well, there's got to be a technical problem at the logistics level between the app connecting to MCF and not producing the orders correctly, or it's not allowing people to check out, you know, at the right time with the right product. And so they're abandoning, you know, that conversion rate. What's happening? And we could not find any technical problems after crawling all over that, going to support for help with the app and doing all this crap. We start with the technical stuff and then we got down to the harder problem, which is, oh crap, like we have a shipping problem. People are abandoning it because the cost of the product with shipping, the shipping was making it 50% more than the product. We're like, oh crap, that is a major problem to overcome. Well, we're gonna overcome it.

Alright? Cool.

It's gonna happen. Stay tuned. It's gonna happen. I'll keep updating. Stay tuned. It has to happen because otherwise it's like, well, how do we, you know, we have to increase the average order value since the bundles and components of the product and those who are listening to this should be considering some of these things too. It just gets down to CPMs and value of the product in relationship to the shipping cost. Now everybody wants to offer free shipping, but if your shipping cost is, you know, 30 to 50% of the product cost and you can't get past that, Then free shipping is a challenge for you. And it's not also, believe it or not, the only incentive for people buying the product, right? We've been able to add on shipping costs where they were free previously and people are still buying the product at higher conversion rates.

Hmm.

So you won't know until you test, right? One of the things that's challenging for us, maybe for your clients and things you guys do too, and those who are listening, Is if the product is setting on Amazon and its minimum advertised pricing is also setting on Shopify, Shopify cannot be 5 to 7% more than Amazon or their bots will catch you and they'll suppress your listings on Amazon. Yeah, there's an antitrust lawsuit going on in California right now. Go check this out, guys. I haven't covered— I think I covered an episode of that not too long ago, maybe 250, let's see, 266, I think 265, somewhere there. No, it would have been sooner than that. Sorry, I'll look it up later and put it in the show notes. But It's, it's in relationship to the lawsuit happening where Amazon has been holding a little bit of a Gestapo tactics against the other platforms by forcing them behind the scenes, business to business, that we'll kill your traffic, stop your referrals if you don't lower your pricing and make your people lower their pricing to keep us the lowest base pricing online. There's a lawsuit going in California right now for that. So we have to balance that out. So I can't increase the perception of the value of the product by simply raising its price point on our store. If it goes higher than the minimum advertised pricing on Amazon, or their bots will catch us.

Yeah, definitely.

Some of the CRO stuff that we have to deal with at the end of the day. Dude, all right, man, this has been a fun convo. We better cut it short for here. Now I can talk to you for another hour and people are gonna be bored with just this. Maybe, I don't know. I'm not bored. This is what we live in, man.

Cool.

Anything cool? Anything else? Anything else you didn't bring up or something you want to talk about that I didn't get to yet?

Actually, just maybe last takeaway, but I think it's also very important to talk about. You have partly mentioned this importance of A/B testing, but first of all, to make data-driven decisions.

Data-driven.

I think it's also very important to talk about that. Firstly, you have to know your data, your most important KPIs as e-commerce store owners, and to make as much as possible A/B testing. I think, I mean, nowadays it's so easy to set up And test everything, ever.

Let's all the way through the end. Test the pixels, the pages, the shipping, the conversion. Test your backend. Test your fulfillment apps. Like, you just go down the line and everything you can think of, test it because you never know.

Assumptions.

Do not make assumptions. Do not get emotional. I know it's so hard. We tell this to people all the time. Keep your emotions out. Facts. You know, feelings have nothing over facts. Get into the data.

Edward Deming has said that. Without data, you are just another person with opinion.

That's cool. I like that saying. Without data, you're just another person with an opinion. You know what we say in the Americas about that?

Edward Deming?

No.

No?

No, about that aspect. Everybody has an opinion just like everybody has a butthole and they all stink.

Yeah, I think I heard he does well.

Yeah, that's pretty true. Oh, with that, that's the end of the episode. And thank you all for joining. No, I'm just kidding. Well, we are kind of coming to the end of this, but this has been fun. Anything else you want to share? We didn't talk about you. I just think you're a super cool guy. I mean, I don't know a lot of Canadians that live in Portugal, but you are definitely— wait, no, that's not you. You don't live in— you're not Canadian, are you?

No, I'm from Hungary. Yeah, I know. Hungarian.

That's not Canadian at all, dude. Well, the accent just kind of threw me off. Really?

No, I'm just kidding.

Are you from Hungary?

Yeah, I'm from Hungary. Yeah, definitely.

Oh, you're native? You're native Hungarian?

I'm native Hungarian.

Yeah, I'm native Hungarian. Very cool.

Born in Hungary.

Have you lived there your entire life?

Uh, actually, I'm still living here in Hungary.

Yeah, definitely. Have you, have you lived anywhere else?

Uh, in Germany.

Germany. Well, that's different.

Yes, actually my second native language is German.

Okay.

English, I have also only started with 20 to learn. That's the reason that my English is not so perfect, because it's actually only my second or third foreign language.

How long did you live in Germany? Because I caught the German accent a little bit more than Hungarian.

More than 10 years.

Yeah.

I was working on German cruise ships for a long time.

I wouldn't want to be on a cruise ship right now if you paid me money to get on the cruise ship. Not even going to go into that. Although it'd make, you know, trending videos. But there's that, you know, certain viruses and things happening on cruise ships. And my wife and I were looking at each other like, we're never going to go on a cruise ship. Are you kidding me? Locked into bars with people. What were you doing on the cruise ship?

But it was a very funny time because we were just traveling around the whole world. It was a great opportunity, actually.

So you were a guest on the ship. You weren't working on the ship.

I was working.

Oh, you were working? What were you working on?

I was a cruise director.

Oh, a cruise director. So you were the entertainment guy.

A kind of, yeah, a kind of showman. Yeah, definitely.

What is kind of a showman? Did you sing? Did you act, dance? Did you do things or just—

No, no, not this one. But I mean, I was the conferencier by the events. I have made all the announcements and I was also organizing all the excursions and board programs. So I was working with the artists together who have delivered the shows and so on.

How does a cruise director become a CRO specialist?

Oh, it's a long story.

Well, we're still here.

Go summarize it very short. After more than 15 years spending on different cruise ships, I was just burnt out. So I knew, okay, I would like to change something different, some very big different big change I needed in my life. And then I have started my career shore side, let's say. And I knew exactly I didn't want to be an employee. I, I hated the 9-to-5 job. I was just not able to do that, right? So I have started, uh, as a freelancer and I have started to learn digital marketing. It was, I don't know, 15 years ago, absolutely different time. And I was absolutely, um, amazed by digital marketing. So I have started first of all to make the first courses and everything in Hungarian.

Yeah.

And I have discovered if I would like to improve myself, I have to learn also English. So I have started to improve my English in order to understand the English language courses. Then I have made all the possible courses behind me on the wall. You can see totally 23 different certificates I have achieved in different areas of digital marketing. And then I have started my own digital marketing agency, which I have led for more than 5 years. It was a full-stack digital marketing agency. And now, as you know, I am the international partnership manager and CRO expert by Optimonk. That's it. There you go.

So the question becomes, would you rather be an employee on a cruise ship or a CRO specialist in your own business?

That's a very good question. Both, if it's possible.

Both.

I enjoyed that time as well, and now I enjoy it as well.

Did you do it by yourself or were you married? Take a significant other along with you?

I'm married.

Okay.

And I have my daughter as well. So for— we was living— we were living in Budapest for more than 20 years, and 5 years ago we have moved from Budapest in a very nice small town called Venice. It's the same name like the Italian city, but it's a very small town in Hungary.

I'll have to look that up. I don't know a lot about Hungary. I know about Budapest. I've never been there. I don't geographically— I'll have to check that out. But it's a little more country.

It's a little country. Yeah, we have only 10 million people living here.

Yeah, that's kind of small.

Yeah, really small.

But probably a little more quiet. I think, well, we live in Missouri and I think there's like 4 million people in Missouri alone, just in this one state. So there's a lot of open area out here where we live. Are you on some acreage? Acres? Or do you live in— do you live in like a city there or do you live out in the country?

Small town. I would say it's a very small town. I think we have 5,000 people living here.

Yeah. Okay. About— that's a small town. Yeah.

It's very calm.

Very relaxed.

For example, when you hear— when I'm looking here through the window, I see a forest.

Oh, good. That's a little nice. You like that better than looking at the city in Budapest?

Quite different.

Quite different. Oh, that sounds like a conflict. We don't want to unpack that.

It's too overcrowded for me after a time.

I've lived in big cities. I understand that. Yeah. We spent some time in Denver. I spent time in Kansas City. I lived in New York. I understand the big city life. And, I'll tell you, living on almost 40 acres here plus our family acreages puts us at around 60, 65. I like it a lot more than staring at the city, listening to the noise, and dealing with the traffic. Our traffic out here is—

Yeah, traffic sitting in a traffic jam.

All that nonsense, dude. And, I hate it. I did it for so long. And now, our traffic jams are watch out for the tractor or the people on the Amish carriage. That's our traffic now. Slow down, there's people in an Amish buggy. Watch out for them. That's my traffic at the end of the day or animals in the road whether it's deer, dogs, or horses sometimes. You just have to kind of move over and get out of the way. I like that a lot more. It's a lot more peaceful, a lot more calm. And, when I'm looking out, I can see our pool out there and I can see the acreage. I can see the chickens and ducks hanging out in our gardens over there and it's just all nice and green and lovely. Such a much better view than the other stuff.

Definitely.

It sounds like you appreciate that, which is super awesome. Well, look, man, you've been a great guest. I've very much enjoyed this conversation.

Thank you very much, Neil. It was a pleasure.

You want to give a shout out real quick to your website? Everything in the show notes and stuff, of course, but go ahead and tell everybody real quick where to find you.

optimung.com. This is our website. If you're interested, you can sign up for a free Of course, for a free plan, for a free account, if you would like to test it out, our AI-powered CRO tool. And I think we can also offer a special coupon code. We can put it on later.

Okay.

With your name. And then if somebody would like to even use one of the paid plans, then we can offer them a special discount as well.

Yeah. That's wonderful.

Yeah.

Or just giving you a shout out if there's a referral code. That's cool too. But definitely, guys, check out the way CRO is impacting your business. Check out what you know or don't know about it. Certainly, Go check out what Christian's doing if you need to know more. Make sure you're qualified. We mentioned some of the criteria today. You gotta have at least, you know, 5,000, 10,000 or more visitors a month to really see the right kind of metrics be optimized. And then you might actually find quite a bit of money. Change between 1.5% to 2.5% at your conversion rate is a big impact against additional traffic. May even make you profitable when you weren't or make you more profitable than you currently are. So I would encourage you guys to all check that out. Christian, thanks for being a guest on the show today, brother.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

All right, guys, check out the daily episodes that come out. They are curated by me for all the additional operator topics that come out every day on voltage dm dot com forward slash podcast or on your favorite podcast person or over on YouTube. Like, subscribe, comment. Help us beat big tech in the engagement. I just leave a note, say hello, put a snide comment. I don't care. It all helps. Push it out there. And of course, we have a free Substack that you can get access to on our website as well, where we give out those daily updates for operators and sellers who want to become CEO operators and build their business to an exit. I enjoy helping people do that. So go check that out and see what Voltage is doing, if that can help you out. And CRO is one component of that on an omnichannel platform strategy that you definitely should be doing in 2026. You should be on every platform you can get your products on and grow them up so you have a real live business, not just a platform or a single product. Which is very important to business and of course to the saleable asset that you are building. If you're listening to this podcast, that is what you should be doing. I wish you all the best today. And remember, as I always say at the end of my podcast, do something imperfect and something perfect will happen along the way. I'll see you guys on the next episode.

Christian and I broke down why buying more traffic is often the wrong move. If you have under 10,000 monthly visitors, you do not have a conversion problem. You have a traffic problem. AI cannot fix a broken foundation. It just amplifies your mistakes. You need to fix your customer experience first. Then you can use tools to scale what works. Stop chasing shiny objects. Start with the basics. You do not need more ecommerce noise. Get the 5 ecommerce updates that matter, what changed, and what to do next. The Voltage ecommerce brief is free. Every Tuesday and Friday. It cuts through the hype. It gives you the clear path to better results. Go to voltage dm.com/newsletter to join. We will see you back here tomorrow. Until then, stay high voltage.