# CVR Optimization - How the Buyer Journey Matters

You're doing all the right things: iterating on your creative, testing your ads, and [scaling the winners](/content/blog/from-ad-testing-to-ad-scaling-when-and-how-to-make-the-leap/index.html). But it's not translating into conversions like you'd hoped.

In episode 5 of Resting Ad Face, Tyson Quick — Founder and Chief Growth Officer of [Postclick](https://postclick.com/) — joined Susan and I to talk about how the cure lies in the post-click experience and why the full buyer journey is greater than the sum of its parts.

### Here are some highlights:

## To compete today, you can’t be content with 2% CVR

Marketers have come to accept the fact that a 2% conversion rate is the standard. But Tyson says that the key to thriving in today’s ecomm landscape is to find ways to double or triple that baseline CVR.

This can be done most efficiently by using high-conversion, industry-specific landing page layouts and filling them with the highest converting content possible.

## The heavy lifting of CVR optimization falls on your post-click experience

High-performing ad creative doesn’t guarantee high conversion rates. Most often, the problem occurs when buyers land on a site that:
- doesn’t instantly deliver what was promised in the ad
- is difficult to navigate
- isn’t aligned with their expectations

These problems can’t be solved by swapping out ad creative or putting more money behind the campaign. Marketers need to spend more time thinking about what happens _after_ someone clicks on their ad when it comes to boosting conversion.

## Using machine learning to optimize lets marketers get back to marketing

Marketers spend loads of time parsing, analyzing, and presenting performance data now that it’s so readily available.

Tyson argues that, with the availability of machine learning to do the heavy lifting of data analysis for us, it’s time for marketers to get back to the more creative aspects of marketing — differentiation, messaging, creative execution, etc.

ML and creative automation allow us to focus more on creative strategy so we can meet the demands of today’s ecomm realities.

For more, subscribe to Resting Ad Face [on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEebJ8GiKKhM9p4ALCEZhWauhrmNo42ld) or [your favorite podcast platform](https://restingadface.transistor.fm/).

#### Transcript

**Jess:** Hey, everybody. Welcome to Resting Ad Face. I am Jess Cook, Head of Content at Marpipe and I'm here with my amazing co-host, Susan Wenograd.

**Susan:** Hey, everybody. Nice to be back.

**Jess:** And we are here today with our first guest ever. This is such an exciting day for us. Today we have Tyson Quick. He is the Founder and Chief Growth Officer at Postclick. And we're really excited to have you today, Tyson. Thanks for joining us.

**Tyson:** Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited to be the, the first guest here.

**Jess:** Yes, you are the inaugural. So would love to hear a little bit about who you are, your background, how you created Postclick, and what Postclick is all about.

**Tyson:** Yeah, definitely. So my name's Tyson and I am the former CEO, but sole Founder of Postclick. And today I am the Chief Growth Officer. So today I focus on really the intersection of product and marketing, the two areas that I'm most passionate about.

**Jess:** And how do you focus on advertising conversion? Tell us a little bit about how Postclick actually works.

**Tyson:** Absolutely. So Postclick is what we like to call advertising conversion cloud. And that cloud consists of a few core components. And before I get into those core components, let's talk a little bit about the current state. So we are operating in a world where we have a $600 billion digital advertising ecosystem, and it's still growing double digits every year. So here in the next, probably by the end of the decade, we're talking a trillion dollar digital ad market. Now 60% of that market is direct response. So marketers want someone to click on that ad and take an action right then and there, whether it's a purchase or a lead, they're bidding on that action. However, the vast majority of these ad clicks don't convert.

**Tyson:** And we really focus on what happens after the click. So in today's spend, we're spending about $400 billion on direct response advertising, the current conversion rates on Google, where it's a high intent search. It still only converts just barely over 3%. So our goal is like, can we get that 3% to 6%, 10% assuming that if customers found what they were looking for, they are gonna take action.

**Tyson:** Now, not everyone, because you're still in the discovery mode, but can you get that more to like a 10%? And if so you could make that, you know, $400 billion worth essentially two to three times more.

**Tyson:** Right? So it's a multi-hundred billion dollar, trillion dollar opportunity of inefficiency. So Postclick focuses on, well, how are we gonna make that happen? And today we believe it's a relevancy problem. Most people don't find what they were looking for. It doesn't match their intent.

**Tyson:** And in order to find intent, it's a couple things. It's the user experience — did the user experience help augment the story and the content to, to make it easy to consume the value and, and, and answer your question. Is this what I'm looking for? Is this what I expected? And it's also the optimization and experimentation of usability and also messaging and narrative.

**Tyson:** So we've really infused a lot of technologies to make it both highly scalable, so you can build these Postclick landing page experiences, if you will, and then use machine learning to recommend content or automatically change the user experience on your behalf so that we can really mainstream the idea of conversion automation.

**Jess:** That's great. Talk to us a little bit more about the, the testing and the optimization. So, you know, obviously that's what Resting Ad Face is all about. Marpipe is the pre-click, everything you see in the ad to get you to that conversion event. And so talk to us a little bit about what you do to help bring more people in and get bigger conversions.

**Tyson:** Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You know, it's kinda like a science experiment and what drew me to marketing and to the conversion space, is it, you know, I was fascinated by the fact that we have these powerful technologies to reach people, right? The pre-click, the area you, that you focus on at Marpipe. You can really, with precision, pay to reach someone and drive them to your, you know, product or service.

**Tyson:** It's a powerful thing. And you know, in terms of the conversion, I felt like, well, this is great. If you really can master that and you have the tools at least to do it today, you know, it takes time, it takes expertise still, but you have the tools. But if without the post-click side matching that scale, matching that optimization, then you know, you're just driving clicks and you're not converting them.

**Tyson:** So my passion was like, well, if you can really figure out the science behind, you know, fully utilizing that pre-click and you can do the same on the post-click, then theoretically, any company with a valuable product or service should be able to profitably do customer acquisition.

**Jess:** Yeah, it’s so funny you say that. So we ran a study. We basically threw out a quiz and we showed like five sets of two ads side by side. Each of them had one difference between them and they had been multivariate tested on Marpipe. And so we would say, you know which of these had an ad-to-cart rate increase of a 350%? Which of these images dropped CPA by 67%? Things like that.

**Jess:** And people could only guess correctly, 52% of the time. Like, you might as well flip a coin.

**Tyson:** Yeah.

**Jess:** And, and it's universal across length of career and its universal across all the different titles within marketing.

**Tyson:** Yeah.

**Jess:** I mean, we had CMOs and VPs of Marketing, taking this all the way across to creatives, and, and, you know, content managers, things like that.

**Tyson:** Yeah.

**Jess:** So it is, it's a universal issue. It's something that we have the data at our fingertips now to like get rid of it. And yet it's still a really pervasive problem. And so, hopefully, you know, things like Postclick things like Marpipe are gonna help kind of eliminate that a bit or, or do what we can to get brands, to be more data-driven in their creative decisions than they have been previously.

**Tyson:** Yeah, and let the machine be more data-driven, right?

**Tyson:** Like, yeah. Don't try to be a data scientist yourself, because let's be honest, like marketers by and large are not data scientists. Marketers really want to be thinking about how we're gonna be different? How what's their main communication that we're doing?

**Tyson:** Not, you know, again, not these scientists that are like, I'm a UX scientist. I am optimizing UX every day. Like that's really by and large of function within product organizations.

**Tyson:** Right? And you know, what kind of videos can we create? And, and these like more creative expressions connecting with the customer because we, you know, we went into a creative field, right, as marketers, like that's really by and large what, what, what makes marketing great.