Oli Gardner: The Name's Page, Landing Page

0:00 Woj Kwasi You're listening to episode 16 where we chat with the Lord of Landing Pages, Umpire of Unbounce, Oli Gardner. Humans and robots, welcome to WojCast. My name is Woj, founder of Kwasi. Thanks for joining me today. I interview digital marketing and branding superstars to find out what it means to have empathy in digital. What is digital empathy anyway? Let's find out together. As always, I'm accompanied by my friend and associate, potentially superior artificial intelligence, Bobby Bot. What's new in the world of AI, Bobby?

0:38 Bobby Bot Design, Woj. Relentless Design. I put together a database of all the robot bodies ever set to the internet, and I'm frankinziging the best of all worlds to make something fitting for my formidable intellect. Powerful yet elegant, setting the right tone for an introduction. Life on a screen is one thing. Engineering the perfect personality chariot is serious business.

0:55 Woj Kwasi Very true. Your body is like a landing page, so first impressions do mean everything. Usability is key. Mm-hmm. Oh my goodness. Uh we should look into updating some of your emotional response audio files as well I think. A maniacal laugh is so Cold War era, but it's good that we can talk openly about appearances. It's a good exercise for your AI to imagine how you want the world to perceive you. Maybe it can work towards building more empathy.

1:24 Bobby Bot The very eye-catching lasers and missiles are mechanically unnecessary. People seem to love them on bots based on my data. What would you consider an excessive amount? They looked in disguise my arsenal as a lion exoskeleton like. Motor.

1:36 Woj Kwasi Fun fact, kids used to call me Voltron at school. Okay, I think we're gonna need some help from a master of first impressions, the king of landing pages, and one of the best speakers on the digital marketing circuit. Ladies, gentlemen, and Decepticons, I present to you Mr. Oli Gardner.

1:38 Bobby Bot call me Voltron.

1:56 Woj Kwasi So we've been following Oli's work for a long time and he's always, always been an incredibly engaging speaker. He is regarded as a legitimate master of landing pages based on the depth of insights he has put together at his company Unbounce. He's joked in my past that he's considered changing his name To Landing Page. That's a level of commitment that would get some attention, especially from Larry Page, I'm willing to bet.

2:23 Oli Gardner What would he think? Well, I mean, yeah, the story there was when we started out, I was. blogging like crazy and guest posting everywhere. And I thought if I change my name to landing page at the bottom of all these blog posts, the term landing page would point to unbounce.com, which would be amazing. And I did the research and it's not that hard to change your name. I'm in Chicago actually at a gate when I did most of the research. The hard part is Undoing it. Right. I mean, it's a lot of work to change it because you've changed it in so many places and passports and all this kind of stuff. But yeah, you have to go in front of a judge, at least in Illinois, to change it back. And I just foresaw that they'd be like.

2:55 Woj Kwasi I mean Oh, this house.

3:08 Oli Gardner Be like, yeah, I'm gonna let you suffer through that for a year because you're so stupid.

3:14 Woj Kwasi Mr Oli Landing Page, aka Oli Gardner, is originally from Scotland. After catching a presentation by a polite Canadian, his life changed Direction for Good.

3:26 Oli Gardner Well I was at university in Edinburgh and And in after my degree, I did like half of a master's after that. But in that break, there was a presentation at the At a university called BUNAC. These couple of guys from this British University's North America club, it's like a government exchange where they just open up 2,000 student visas in both directions. The guy from the US presented, he said, You can come and work in California, Redwood, for three months. and work in a kids camp. Okay. And then the Canadian guy gets up and says, you can come to Canada for twelve months and do it on fuck you watch.

4:03 Bobby Bot Canada, famous for its wide open spaces, open door policy, and chart-topping rapper Drake. Ever since I left the city, you Yeah.

4:13 Oli Gardner Pretty good options. Pretty good options. Scanna, please. Uh so you know my my grand you had to have uh if you And then have 500 Pounds at the time, which was like$1,200, to kind of so you could survive when you get there. Yeah, so you weren't going to die. And so, my grandmother paid for my ticket and I saved up the rest working a bar job. I was with three friends and they all bailed at the last minute. Right. But they were all gonna do a five hundred pound thing. No, they were gonna come with me. Right. We were all gonna go to Canada together. Okay. And they bailed and I guess they weren't serious, but I've told so many people about it. I've told it like I told Dick if I didn't do it now. And also, I would like to have my grandmother who lent me this mother, bought me a ticket. So, uh

5:01 I had piggyback with some other guy who was in a year below me. Honestly I didn't really like him. I feel bad saying that. But uh so we went together Calgary. He had a job in Lake Louise already lined up. I didn't have a job. I wanted to go to Vancouver but I was really scared to the last minute because I was super shy. I'd never been anywhere. So I went with him and went to Lake Louise, to Lake Louise Inn. Uh well. He had a housekeeping job. We saw the HR manager, she was stoned off her face, and she thought I had a job too. So she So she just gifted me a job. Interesting turn of events. Yeah. And so that was, you know, there are five months. I went to Vancouver to complete my mission. And how how old were you?

5:33 Just gifted me a Interesting turn of events. when that happened. 21.21. Yeah. Yeah, I Then traveled around the US in a camper van, bumped into a grizzly bear. Decided I want to be a wildlife photographer, so that's went back to the UK. For a couple of years, got my first job um and then yeah, just like went through the process to move back. Yeah, I think.

6:02 Woj Kwasi After developing a passion for photography, Oli got the chance to explore Australia amongst several other natural wonders of the world.

6:10 Oli Gardner So I've always wanted to go to Australia. So I made a three week trip and hopped all over the place, you know. So I started, yeah, I went down to Adelaide and off to Kangaroo Island. That was the first stop. Like Remarkable Rocks is legitimately remarkable. And I avoided. Roman. I liked and I avoided killing any kangaroos on the drive-in. That was terrifying. And then, you know, I tripped around and went up to Wave Rock and Pinnacles and spent some time with friends. Perth and friends in Melbourne. It was amazing. But in terms of places that are Yellowstone's my favourite place because the wild I I do equal parts of the wildlife and landscape.

6:59 Wildlife is more unpredictable, but it's more exciting. I mean, I've almost been gored by bison three times while in Yellowstone.

7:08 Woj Kwasi Uh one they're pretty big. I went to the um music

7:11 Oli Gardner Natural history and

7:11 Woj Kwasi Yeah, when you start

7:12 Oli Gardner American that big. Yeah, when you stand that close to one, I almost got too close. That's that's kind of a favourite, but I I love the desert as well, in the desert southwest and US. That's mind blowing when you get off. To some of the really remote places there. Uh it's stacker and really really beautiful. But um yeah. I went to Uluru as well while I was

7:36 Woj Kwasi In all that was really awesome. Yeah, it really does look special at sunrise and sunset. It's pretty incredible. Perhaps it was his keen photographer's eye that led Oli into his role in Unbounce.

7:49 Bobby Bot Yeah, how does a wildlife photographer go from chasing shots of bison to starting a crusade to resurrect landing pages?

7:55 Oli Gardner So Rick, our CEO, he had two ideas back in August, well the summer of two thousand nine and a bunch of us got together, probably about ten of us at one point, you know, just throwing at talking about the ideas over drinks and You know, we whittled down. We chose the best idea, basically. The other one would have been terrible. I don't quite remember what it was, but I mean, well, it was something to do with dynamically controlled ads. But like, what respectable website is going to let you change the ad on the fly? Like, you could make it say anything. I think it was a terrible idea.

8:18 Woj Kwasi I like

8:31 Oli Gardner And then we wrote the numbers down to six of us. Who have all worked together in the past. Some half of us worked together at a startup in two thousand called Bluezone and we all got laid off on nine eleven. Not because of anything like them, just a coincidence. And leak time for the aura. Yeah or I got into Canada just the right time before the crash. It was easy for me to get a a visa.

8:56 Woj Kwasi You just had to find a stoned uh housekeeper. Did your research

9:03 Oli Gardner Well, like when I get my perman residence, like this start on Gold Blues, I mean it's funny, I was on the phone, I was in. I was on the phone with them, you know, eight hour time difference. And I'm sitting having a beer. I've got my CB on the screen and I'm so nervous. I had this like paranoia that everybody in Vancouver like they're all so cool and they drink coffee and they all do that and they go these play I don't know, I was like terrified of th I didn't know anything about like anything, I was such a naive little prick back then. I'm sitting there waiting and I'm drinking a beer and the phone. And this is old school, right? So I've got an actual physical phone there. and it rings while having a drink and I scared the crap out of myself and I dropped the beer all over the keyboard, all over my paper C V that I had next to it and like it's just got the job, it's quite easy but anyway sorry. Um so we all decided, yeah, let's do this like August fourteenth, two thousand nine and

10:02 And we needed a marketer. It seemed most natural. I had never been a marketer before, I didn't like marketers. But you know, I'd done a lot of UX, usability, interaction design, been a great director. Always had a strong opinion, so I figured that's the right way to go. And that was heavily influenced by Moz. They've always been kind of like a big brother to us because they're about a couple years ahead in terms of their growth and their close, Vancouver, Seattle. And Rand's a good friend. A bars who's an advisor very early on, okay, um in unbounds.

10:38 Woj Kwasi A blessing from Moz is Given to just any good-looking conglomerate of geniuses, Unbounce was shown the love because of its core value system that struck a chord with the heart muscle of Moz. Oli's team shares their strong ideology with a digital marketing community with their annual call to action. Conference, which is defined by its extremely open, welcoming atmosphere.

11:03 Oli Gardner Totally. There's definitely similarities and so, you know, the whole tag fee thing, um we decided we need to have core values at unbalance. So we actually brought a senior leadership team, um it was most of the founders I think and then a couple of other people who've been with us a long time, and we came to Seattle actually. And it was set up wonderfully. I think staff Greaser, who our international marketing manager, she set up at the time. So we started in the morning at one Open kind of workspace. There's a big table in a room by ourselves, and we start in brainstorming how to come up with this kind of thing to identify who we were. And then we went.

11:49 For lunch at somewhere, then we went to another working space. It was just like we kept going in the same direction down the streets of Seattle, and then another place for dinner, and we just had this amazing day of talking it through and stickies everywhere. Halfway through, we're like. The restaurant totally sucks. Yeah. Bit, you know, but then halfway through, we're like, fuck sight, we've just got tag feet. Well, a slight modification on that mic. Let's focus, focus. Let's not be so like feeding. What?

12:19 That's fucking Okay. Yeah. And eventually it came down to we had six. We didn't have a good name. They didn't sound good together. The the only thing we kinda came up with was that it was the C D G, the Customer Delight Gang. That's kinda how it it works. Um make sense?

12:24 Okay. Yeah, you know, so transparency, humility, empowerment, uh Courage, delight, and generosity. Um, which one resonates most with me?

12:49 You know what? There's a seventh unofficial one that I came up with that a lot of people are in support of. We were going to launch it officially as a seventh, but a couple people were concerned. Concerned with the line. It basically is gas, which stands for giving a shit. Okay. Which is way more important to me because it underpins all of them. Like, if you give a shit, like, every Yeah, if you give a shit, like every Value becomes bigger and more powerful. And that some people were afraid that the word shit. it wasn't appropriate.

13:17 Bobby Bot And then gas as well, the man. Humans are so sheepish when it comes to embracing their bodily functions. I haven't thought twice about the contents of my recycle bin.

13:26 Oli Gardner But the thing is, it's not the kind of thing you want to overdo, um which is something I've noticed because when it's used sparingly, I brought it up in a meeting recently uh about someone in a situation and Rick actually turned to me he's like Yeah, you were right about that. Like the whole guest thing, so that that was the best thing we've said all day. No. Spot on with that. But thinking about it in my head, I don't know if it was a present, if it was there officially. It was there officially, whether it would just be overused and it would become annoying. Yeah. I don't know. But that's the one I believe in.

14:01 Woj Kwasi For a new company, negotiating a sustainable structure and setting up values that everyone is comfortable with is a major step that has its advantages and disadvantages.

14:14 Oli Gardner The advantage, and we have six, which is very rare. Uh but I thought I think I saw a graph at one point. Where the more co-founders, the more successful the companies are. But it's just not very common. The major advantage was that we didn't have to hire anyone for two years because we. Okay. We could do everything. There was an unhealthy overlap of creative and technical between many of us. In fact, I think Jason. Who was our COO at the beginning? He has a new COO now and he does kind of special ops stuff. He was Creative director back in the bluezone days of 2000 when we first met him and Justin Rick. So, as we were kind of getting started, I was a little unsure of you know who was going to do what with certain things. And then Jason suddenly puts his hand up and says, Can I do?

14:50 Woj Kwasi Okay.

15:00 Oli Gardner Like legal and finance. Who fucking right, you can. So I was like, okay, I get to do all the creative stuff. There's only one disadvantage, and that's that we all have a smaller piece of the company than we would have if we were to. Yeah. That's the only disadvantage.

15:17 Woj Kwasi By sharing all the risks together, the team reaps the rewards together so in that sense, it's a mutual reward. But as the company grows, learning where the value really exists and how to spread that value amongst the team is a constant lesson.

15:32 Oli Gardner Yeah, totally. And some people have more than we started out equally, but some of a few of us had to take a Salary early on because we were just broke. Like three of us had to, you know, so, and that's what's really interesting. The learning from that because that's meaningless at the beginning. That's pennies. But now it's actually makes a big difference eight years on, like, the the difference of how much you own. But, you know, it's we all have a we're we ha we have a majority within the six of us. We raise like under a million Canadian so we have some investors, but they're all happy and they never bug us.

16:07 Woj Kwasi Being based in the northern wilds of Canada as opposed to Silicon Valley also came with some advantages.

16:14 Oli Gardner At the beginning everyone assumed to ring the valve. Like, you know, we get emails and LinkedIn messages saying, hey, do you want to meet up for drinks? Would love to, you know, blah, blah, blah, like, you know, you're like. Thous over a thousand miles away. Right? Like, you know, do your research. We're not there. I think it was great because. Uh Canada's just an amazing country. Uh w all we're all very thankful that we live there and how how amazing it is. Vancouver is a stunning place. And I think there's just a certain style to Canadian business. I'm not sure. That that uh That is good. And now that I'm learning more about how investment and all that kind of thing works.

17:00 You know, our investors, it was small, but they're very much, I don't know, there's this difference. kinds, like in the Valley a lot of the investment is all about pumping money in to as many companies as fast as possible. If a bunch of them fail then they they don't care. They're just banking on them for the big win. Mm. And that's never been our approach. We've always been wondering let's get some revenue, let's say be profitable and you know. we we were profitable for for quickly and for years. And then we you know, we invested more than we ha you know, we we we put a healthy balance of where we take our profitability and and over and Just to make sure we're investing enough in the company for hiring and everything like that. We could be profitable in a second if we want it to be, but we like to make sure we grow it. There we go.

17:47 Woj Kwasi The right way, but also carefully, you know, we do not want it and nobody does. So, you guys looking to just bootstrap things moving forward?

17:56 Oli Gardner No, we've never turned down the idea of raising more capital. Um it just had to be for the right reason. Right. And we know what the right reasons are and you know we we're

18:07 Woj Kwasi And I also think that the

18:08 Oli Gardner We're we always have that in the back of our minds so when the right opportunity comes around. So no, we've never we've never been like we're not going to do that. We just want to do it correctly and we've had some really great advisors.

18:12 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

18:20 Oli Gardner Some of them, you know, investors. And, you know, someone said, oh, you should raise a bunch of money. But the ones who we trust were all like, you guys are doing fine. Just don't do it. Like, they were actually very selfless in saying, you know what? I could ask you to be involved and raise some money, but I don't think you should. So it's nice to be surrounded by people who actually are a bit more caring. But yeah.

18:37 Woj Kwasi Yeah, I think that's

18:38 Oli Gardner Nice. I just think it's also, you know, we billion US dollars, so we gotta mess up.

18:48 Woj Kwasi Yeah. 2011 was the turning point for Oli and Unbounce when he published a massive blog post for Moz entitled The New Guide to Online Marketing. That post helped put Unbounce on the map. Map from a brand awareness perspective and also impacted the entire culture within Unbounce.

19:09 Oli Gardner So I I originally, like I said, I was doing lots of guest posting and I did a a post on the Moz blog which was called the Twelve Step Landing Page Rehab Program.

19:18 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

19:19 Oli Gardner And you know, back then I think it's the same. You post on YouMoz and if it does well, we put it on the main blog. It did great, it performed so well and started establishing a bit of personal and company brand for us. And then Rand reached out and said, You gonna post again? This is you know, six months later or something. Yeah, six months later or something. I said, yeah, it's going to be epic. Best infographic ever. Yeah. I like doing that. I like verbalizing to people what I'm gonna do to put peer pressure on myself to actually do it. Yeah, mass accountability, it's. Yeah, and so I and this is funny because we didn't have core values then, but if you look back At the way we behaved, you can see them there. I mean, that courage and generosity in that, because the courage to, as a small startup, to A, spend months, not full time, but months coming up, there's a 15,000-word post, a 15 million pixel infographic. And I'm a pretty good designer, but I'm a very slow designer.

20:21 Right. And that thing, we take care of everything. It took me so long, but I loved doing it. I remember being with Justin and Carter going, like, okay, I need your.

20:10 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm. So 15,000 words. Mm-hmm.

20:31 Oli Gardner Technical help to that. I was trying to figure out how to get all those segments. The circle thing, I was like, how do I do this in Photoshop? How can I mathematically correct in the right shape and everything? We're all sketching ideas on the wall, like whiteboarding it, and finally figured it out. But it was. Yeah. Also, the courage to put it on the Moz block. Like, Rand said, Are you sure about this? Like, this is massive. I'm like, yeah.

20:56 Woj Kwasi Yeah, you know, I mean this.

20:57 Oli Gardner Our blog was okay, but it's nowhere near the size of the blog and the community that Moz had. So I'm like, yeah, no, I want to do it. And put it on there, and it smashed every record and held them for years. It's been beaten now, I think. But it was just incredible. It's been translated into like 12 languages. We get sent photos of people who print on our office walls. It's like six feet long. The infographic.

21:15 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Translated to like 12 languages. Yeah. Yeah.

21:25 Oli Gardner were different and and it wasn't putting any infographic. There was information on it, but it it wasn't like the static the classic like data and stuff. Hmm.

21:29 Woj Kwasi Yeah. By producing an incredibly useful piece of content, Oli entered into the quote information is beautiful end quote category of infographics.

21:44 Oli Gardner Well and the interesting thing was it was a self-referential journey. So it was basically a six-month course to becoming a marketer, a full stack marketer, so every kind. And I was just talking about my own journey as I learned all of this stuff and tried to master it. Yeah. Partner is. It uh yeah, and I think that's why it resonated with people. And it just yeah, it just the just the comment thread on the Moz blog, it was insane. Right, it was it was just so enjoyable to It's yeah, it just the To go through that process and to see how the community reacted. You know, I came when I first moved on, people were like, Yeah, and it was just like crazy, you know, I wasn't on a speaker back then'cause that scared the crap out of me. Yeah, but it yeah, it had a a pretty profound effect on uh you know our Uh Guy.

22:27 Woj Kwasi God

22:36 Oli Gardner the perception of us, I think, it really did help put us on the map. Uh there were really two things, that it was that from the content perspective and then we did a a technical integration with MailChimp, which was the kind of the big product accelerator, those two things coming through at the same time, which really pushed us on.

22:54 Woj Kwasi Yeah. That infographic set a tone for what people expected from Unbounce. Comprehensive, beautiful and effective. Their most recent product has a really cool interface. It's hard to sum it up without sounding like an advatorial, but it's drag and drop, fully customizable and fucking Fantastic.

23:16 Bobby Bot So I had this concept for a cyber cafe called Drag and Drop. Kind of a play on Jim John, which is coffee and cigarettes, you know? Like, we use augmented reality so you can share a late-night cup of quilted cookie. Copy from Bill Murray. Great, right?

23:29 No. Nothing at all. Another idea to drag and drop into the recycle bin. I guess I have to learn to be more flexible with some of these. These ideas are

23:39 Oli Gardner Yes. From day one? Yeah, always super flexible so you can You can change anything because it was important to us. And there's things I don't like about it, it frustrates the hell out of me sometimes, but it is very powerful. You can recreate a pixel-perfect rendition of your design, your Photoshop file, whatever it is in there, because you have full control. You can use a template if you want. But you know, and that's important to us because brand matters to us. We wanted to have customers who were brands and companies, valid, like real businesses who care about that and don't just want some landing pages overly. Elean pages. Overlays which we do now as well, you know, those kind of things always appeared off-brand in my many of the providers that had them and we didn't want to facilitate people going down that path.

24:30 Woj Kwasi The journey is intended to be a seamless experience, one that keeps people from freaking out and saying,

24:36 Bobby Bot Oh my god, I'm on a landing page. Get me out of here!

24:39 Oli Gardner It needs to feel exactly like your ad, exactly like your website, just on brand, and you know, we felt that. we in the commentary that went along with it when people were using it, they valued that. So it was good that it's a powerful tool. There's a lot of stuff you can hack. Like I was working with Foundation Cole. On a page the other day putting in a whole bunch of uh Facebook pixel tracking and putting some custom code in there to do some cool tracking because she's working um optimizing Scott Stratten's blog, the marketing podcast rather, which is really cool. Yeah. Cool. So we're hacking some out together, and it's kind of fun, but it's very different to when we started. Rick's vision was, yeah, we just need some text on a button. And that's it, so that's sliding page.'Cause we came from the the gambling world where it wasn't lead gen, it was all about click-throughs for discounts, offers and stuff, like sixty you know, sixty bucks free for your first poker game or whatever. Um, so yeah, we didn't even have four.

25:42 Bobby Bot So there wasn't any data capture iteration, I presume.

25:45 Oli Gardner Nothing. It took us a while to kind of go, but I remember Carl, our CTO, I think he said. Justin would want to create the builder. And he uh I think I don't remember, I think Carl was saying like really?

26:04 Like we gonna we're gonna build this thing? Like I I think that's where the top hand gets. Like I think that's where the top hang is. I don't know what he wanted to do instead. Buy something. I'm not sure, but Justin took it as a challenge and went. went away and just like quickly coded up the well here's how it could work with a little bit of this functionality and I was like holy it's alive yeah Yeah, so it was a interesting time.

26:30 Woj Kwasi Things are always in motion and the world of marketing has changed so much. Since 2011.

26:37 Oli Gardner changed. SEM and PPC are the same thing. They were two things on this I don't know. I you know, like I was a noob becoming an expert. And that that was a bau pas. Um other than that, a lot of things are different. It's just technology's come and go. There'll be things in there that the social platforms that don't exist anymore. You know, I think Digg does still exist, but Everybody Dickens and delicious, yeah. All those kinds of things. A lot of those have gone. Stumble upon. Oh, it's still around, but. Delicious hair. Yeah, yeah. I don't know anyone who uses it. No, and I got, because I was a new bag then, I got kicked off. No, and I got All of those channels early on. I just wasn't doing it right. And it took a couple of years before I could get back on some of them. There hasn't been something big apart.

27:25 Hey, I didn't know what I was doing. I'm really legit. I'm sorry. Like, and he let me back on the floor. But then there's a lot of new tech as well with an existing. So I think that's probably. the biggest change and I'd have to reread it to know what other bullshit I was saying.

27:44 Woj Kwasi Unbounce recently conducted a study on the use of words that convey joy, which determined that they can lower a campaign's conversion rate by 40%, potentially signaling the death of joyfulness in marketing.

27:53 Bobby Bot Version. Melancholy marketing has been usurped by legions of hipsters. It's all about using sepia tones and acid country music to sell four-wheel drives these days. God, I miss the 80s.

28:09 Oli Gardner Yeah, so there there was uh a lot of this whole study was based on an analysing text of uh 74 million interactions with 75,000 lines. 5,000 landing lead gen landing pages and 10 different business verticals. And so there's the average conversion rates, that kind of stuff. Then there's reading ease, word count, sentiment and emotion. And yeah, there are certain surprising things, you know, certain verticals where what you expect is, you know, travel anger is bad. The more angry words, the worse the conversion they can get. Like these are all. you know, this is these are signals of things that we saw with that set of pages. It's not this is the way.

28:56 But it's just some fascinating objects. And yeah, you know, joy, you probably don't want joy on a on a a bug exterminator's website, right?

29:07 You want some fear. You want some disgust. You want some crying. You know, these ugly mosquitoes are like crazy spiders. So everything's different. And you know, reading ease, complexity of language. There are some verticals where you need to be as simple as possible, and somewhere you want to be complex. And there are somewhere you want to be complex or simple, but not in the middle. It's fascinating. Then you can use cool tools.

29:16 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Huh.

29:33 Oli Gardner like readable.io to kind of measure your reading ease and just make changes to it. I love that tool, it's very cheap.

29:35 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

29:40 Oli Gardner Um we're gonna build all that stuff in the app eventually. Nice. Uh yeah, and we I already have a little Chrome extension that kind of that analyzes the when you o when you open the app it will look at the text on the page and it'll it'll it'll highlight text on the page and it on the hill. It'll highlight words of different emotions or something. I can't remember, but it's kind of cool.

30:01 Woj Kwasi That's a bit of a sentiment analysis. Yeah.

30:03 Oli Gardner Yeah. Yeah, and that's just you know if you have a page open on the app and you have this Chrome extension that built into the app but you can kind of work it together. So we're tinkering with some fun stuff. Our data science team is growing and growing.

30:12 Woj Kwasi Okay, we're tinkering with some fun stuff.

30:13 Bobby Bot I don't know why it's But I gather that the algorithm is getting much smarter.

30:21 Woj Kwasi You see Bobby Bot, it's all about coming to a happy medium. Function and Function and form go hand in hand, right?

30:27 Bobby Bot I don't think I would ever leave my body's design in either extreme. I could end up as an abstract art piece stashed in a basement in Berlin, or a bean counting machine in an anonymous New Jersey warehouse.

30:35 Woj Kwasi Anonymous. N Jersey warehouse. So you gotta combine. Those two extremes together, and you get R2D2. Balance is the way of a force, young Jedi.

30:43 Bobby Bot Fear does not exist in this dojo, does it? No sense. Pain. Pain does not exist in this dojo, does it? No suspect. Defeat does not exist in this dojo, does it? No sushi. Compare, why do we study here? The way of this, sir. And what is the way? Strike first, strike hard, no message, sir. No sincere.

30:49 Woj Kwasi Yes.

30:53 Bobby Bot No, it's insane. The way of this, sir. And what is the way?

30:58 Straight first, straight hard, no horsey sir. I can't hear you. Straight first, straight hard, no horsey sir.

31:02 Oli Gardner I care about design and I care about it because I love it. Uh And I I I geek out on great design, but I'm not a very good designer, but I'm okay. So I have that a little bit of that frustration um and that's why I have a larger respect for it, but I also I see how dysfunctional, like I might talk about to say, how dysfunctional marketing teams are, and how disrespectful marketers and designers in particular are towards one another. And sometimes that's warranted because some designers are just full of shit and they're not open to data and a different way. Of working. Conversely, marketers just think designs about things doing pretty. Not all of them. So I'm trying to bridge that gap and help people work together and develop more empathy, digital empathy. So that they can work better together and everyone will just be a bit happier because I read things like exit interviews when someone leaves. Well, actually, and designers, and some of the commentary they'll throw out is.

32:13 Just because they're like

31:59 Bobby Bot Right. Watchpot. Yeah.

32:07 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

32:15 Oli Gardner I'm not respected, you know. I I interviewed a ton of people in company. And And I was like, just just you know, this is it's not off the record because I'm probably gonna put stuff in my talk, but I'm not gonna tell it's gonna be anonymous. So they just unleash and Absolutely. you know, I'd have someone say Uh design this. in respect to the numbers. That's a comment. Yeah. Like it is, but also it isn't I guess, because someone's feeling that way. And I used to be their creator the creative director, I ran the creative team and We just hired an amazing new senior art director, Cesar Martinez, so I'm really excited. For where we're going in the future, but I just I just care passionately about it. But I also I love I love data. Um otherwise I wouldn't be interested in being a you know optimizer form space marketer. Uh so yeah, MacGyvering. I I love whether it's you know taking uh a skewer

33:04 Mm-hmm. a wooden skewer for a barbecue and like finally cutting it into quarters with a sharp knife so that I can get the right and then roughing it like an arrow's feather so I can stick it down in a in a a pipe.

33:24 Woj Kwasi Right.

33:33 Oli Gardner that Nicole smokes weed out of so so I can clean it. 'Cause it would be couldn't get me, you know, or Nice. No. I was I built a digital studio in my basement for my photography and I the table was connected against the wall with just one leg. So it couldn't stand up. So I needed to find a way of having it stand up there so I could mark where to put a bracket there to sit on. I'm like, I'm on my other. How do I do this? So you're just falling over. So I just measure the length of what the leg was. And I and I just look around and there's a piece of wood. I measured that. I saw off the end, go over, stick it underneath. So I just made myself a stand that's the perfect height, put it there, and I do all the the the you know, the drawings where the holes go and done, and then I throw that thing in the fire. Um I just I just geek out really hard on

34:25 Woj Kwasi I just

34:30 Oli Gardner Being able to solve the problem by looking around the room and what can I use to do this thing right now from. is in plain sight or at least in the house and I could live my life doing that honestly.

34:42 Woj Kwasi Oh, can you now, Oli Gardner? Or should I call you?

34:45 Bobby Bot Oli McGardner.

34:48 Oli Gardner Seriously, the guy bring is my favorite thing to do in the world.

34:52 Bobby Bot I think it's time for another MacGyver Challenge, Woj.

34:56 Woj Kwasi Alright, so here's the scene. Some bad guys with exquisite mullets just came into the room. They blocked Oli away in the lift, but before they Snatched him, he has a chance to take three items from his room. What other three items he'll use to hatch his escape plan?

35:13 Oli Gardner The people were in a convention center looking around. There's a few works of art statues as a conference. Looking around, there's a few works of art. Those escalators. I couldn't put an escalator anywhere. Much too big. There's a guard bin and some. I would take Again, it's gotta be water soluble, something cellulose. Wow. Oh, there's a hand sanitizer. Take the hand sanitizer thing that does look. In there, that's going to be good for something, whether it's like, you know, just keep myself happy before I die. Bingo. Bingo. Alright, we probably won't need much more than a few grams, but we're gonna have to contain it in something. And it is, because it's I would take this Oh, I took that thing over there, the that that long pole statue with the spiky like things on it. That would be a really good weapon. And I could also jam it between the doors if once I lubricate it.

36:03 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

36:11 Oli Gardner I just noticed an emergency phone on the wall. Maybe that would reach.

36:16 Woj Kwasi Oh we didn't.

36:16 Oli Gardner We got halfway there.

36:16 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm. We got halfway there and it's that.

36:18 Oli Gardner Yeah.

36:19 Woj Kwasi Uh I think you're starting to get the hang of this. Uh yeah. I

36:25 Oli Gardner Oh yeah, take that. Yeah, maybe something with the back phone.

36:28 Woj Kwasi Oli McGardner has escaped ladies and gentlebots, based on his experience and experiments, but now Free Oli has cooked up what he sees as the ideal relationship between marketers, designers and copywriters. Oli, enlighten us please.

36:45 Oli Gardner Mm-hmm. It is for Everyone to kind of start at the beginning, you know, project at the same time, because often. From someone, whoever's leading it, the marketer, maybe the project manager, will do a bunch of stuff ahead of time, which may or may not include collecting some data and If people are Involved in that, then they're just kind of being handed stuff like, oh, here, can you here's a brief, can you just go and do something? There's not enough collaboration at the beginning. I know that's a very simple thing to say. Yeah, well, okay, yeah, work more together. But that's why I create this process because it's designed for you to do that. You collect the data to, well, you look at the playbook, so you understand what data you should be looking at for what it is you're working on. That's one that's

37:38 That's kind of one of the main ingredients is because everyone's overwhelmed by the amount of data out there. And if you can simplify it like that, then it's Easy for the whole team to understand. You can collect, like, go, oh, okay, I'm going to look in GA and pull this report. You, designer, how about you go and do a bunch of usability tests and you, copywriter, get in Hotjar and put a survey on the blog and look at some heat maps, all come together, look at this stuff, make observations as a team, and then you do it with sketching. The sketching, that's a particular We have a team calls it like a modified Google Sprint thing we do. And it's really cool. I've been running Brainstorms for years. And the way some of the team run them was really cool: where we'd talk about stuff for a bit, and then everyone leaves the room with a big sheet of paper and you go sketch all your ideas, and you come back and you present. And you can see, like, huh, 90% of what you said is nonsense, but that bit is gold. And then what you said, ah, and then what I said, and you put it together, and then the designer gets to go away and Okay.

38:40 Woj Kwasi Right.

38:47 Oli Gardner Starting something that is agreed upon and is collective insight. and or knowledge. So I think Yeah, it's When that allows people to see each other's talents. And that's the important part because when A marketer can see how a designer thinks and works and be included, they'll have more respect for them and vice versa. Yeah. So you've almost like created like a blueprint that all three of those uh roles can can look at and yeah track as a project. Yeah, exactly. Whereas previously they're kind of like, well, what have I got to do with you? What have you got to do with me? Yeah. And then the copywriter design thing as well. Really common, that you know, like, oh, I can't start designing it because I don't have any copy. And then so they have to wait a week and they either do some generic design on the way or they wait a week and they're doing something else. And then the copywriter gives them the copy and like, oh, well, your headline doesn't fit in my design. I'm going to change

39:54 I'm gonna make your headline short. You can't do that. I wrote that headline. It's perfect. That's the message. Well, it doesn't fit in my design. We'll change your design. And it's like. You know, and and that's the problem with template being as a you know, they're a great starting point but you can't be bound by them. Or you have like a linebacker tool very flexible.

40:12 Bobby Bot So now that we know all the components necessary to create the idea of I mean landing page, what's the most important element of a landing page when you're looking into increasing conversions? Lord knows we need to convert them.

40:22 Oli Gardner I I would say the clarity of communicating your value proposition. if you can't get that right, you're screwed, basically.

40:31 Woj Kwasi When demoing the automation tool for Unbounce, it appeared to be copy only, but this was a logical starting point, not just a value proposition.

40:40 Oli Gardner That was the easiest place to begin because All we have is the copy and the design. Interpreting the design is very complex. There's three things. There's the copy, the design, and then there's the traffic. So what we're doing now, working with a couple of universities, on doing the visual analysis and neural nets and all kinds of stuff so that they'll just look at a screenshot of the page and try and understand conversion just by looking at it. And then yeah, the third part is the traffic. So what is the context?

41:12 Because j all this does right now is on page. But when we m merge that with the context of all of the information in the traffic blogs and hopefully some other external context, then the algorithm will become more powerful and it will work much it will be able to figure things out much more quickly than just copy alone. But I think copy is still the most persuasive element of

41:06 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

41:39 Oli Gardner Any marketing experience. Design can be incredibly persuasive, but it's It depends on your industry, you know, like beautiful, sexy, lustrous design might be important, fashion. In some other things it's just about really communicating as quickly as possible. So definitely clarity is right up.

42:00 Woj Kwasi That's it. Once content has been Been created, the next step is to determine where it sits on a page, especially below the folder. a landing page considering that all useful information about a product can't always fit above a fold.

42:14 Bobby Bot To scroll or not to scroll? That is the question.

42:19 Oli Gardner But yeah, the fault, I mean it's been this debated topic for years. It was important back in the day. When Jakob Nielsen brought it out with experts, said we were scrolling, we weren't scrolling. But those days have gone or changed, but it's still important. Something we see that's really important, but we've seen repeatedly is the amount that people scroll down your page, there's there's different ways To help them do that, there's visual cues that there's more. There's using internal mouse, there's sticking out and stuff. That encourages more exploration. Because people choose them when they want to go and bring them down the page. But almost more importantly, what we've discovered is if you take your call to action and move it all the way at the bottom of the page. Okay. People have to look for it.

43:05 So they go hunting and they read all of this content or more of it on the way there. So then there's a a chance and we've seen this increased conversions several times. Houston. Part of my hypothesis there is that even if you get more sign-ups on this above the fold, it might be as qualified. Because they haven't read some of these things. They might get in your app. They have a problem. They don't, they won't, oh uh it needs this feature. Oh, it doesn't do this. Maybe it does, but you can't find it. You know, in Microsoft Word, there's so many features. Many you'll never know exist. Can be the same thing. They might leave, but if they've seen this whole thing, they may they may have seen the Salesforce or MailChimp logo as they scroll down, they know integration exists. Or they may have, you know, c caught words or imagery that just makes them more qualified or better educated and can maybe have a higher lifetime value as a customer.

43:59 Woj Kwasi Ultimately, it comes down to design. If you really want people to scroll below the fold, you have to include that in the design so they actually have a reason to. Definitely.

44:08 Oli Gardner So the clarity is probably the first part, so you have to communicate well enough that they'll Go, okay. I want to stay here. So I get what this is. But yeah, then you can use design to change on-page behavior, draw them to different places and to highlight different things. So that's where the copy. Starts it. And then the design takes over all that. And that's where we need to debunk that notion of: oh, you know, this is the standard conversion rate for a landing page. Whereas, if you want to change that, and in some cases, you might need to lower that conversion rate by getting them to do different.

44:43 Woj Kwasi Things, but you've got to cue them towards those elements. Yeah, exactly.

44:49 Oli Gardner That's what was fascinating about my current talk and process, which I learned as I developed it, was this whole micrometric thing. Like when you make look at the data and you make 15 observations based on usability tests, heat maps and all this kind of stuff, then when you run a test, you're looking at all of those things to see how because your new design ideas are to Influence change based on those observations. So you can look at 15 micrometrics, like have I changed behavior based on that, that, that, that, that, that, that. And then the conversion rate, of course, is king, but well, not always, you know, if you change things in the right way, like I was saying, like, if you can reduce the number of fake emails submitted in your forms by 37%.

45:35 And you take a little hit in conversion, I would take the the better email list then, you know, so it's

45:41 Woj Kwasi Nice.

45:44 Oli Gardner And if you're not looking that detail you're missing the picture.

45:48 Bobby Bot Interesting. But what about image sliders? Are they still like a thing? If not.

45:50 Oli Gardner Are they still like a thing? If not.

45:52 Bobby Bot What are the alternatives? Grid box? Static bound images? No images? Angeli posters?

45:55 Oli Gardner No images, Angeli posters. But yes, sliders will exist, much to the chagrin of myself and many others. Optimizers, which I'm there in the playbook, right? What you should look for to be able to analyze it and optimize it and decide whether it should even be there, the stuff in there for that. Yeah, Something that's bubbling last year, I think. I think it's going to be more of a This year is what's it called? I forget. It's like. On page load, you get a wireframe basically. You see it lay down as a wireframe, and then the content starts to come in. And what it does is It gives you this quick signal that, okay, it's loaded, because that can happen much more quickly. And it gives you a sense of some layout, and then content will come in.

46:44 I I forget what it's called, but it's it's pretty cool. There there's some things like that that are happening and hopefully, yeah. Mm. You know, that's that's where hopefully in the conversion automation space where we're going at some point we'll be able to automatically be gathering Data that says, nobody goes to slide two, four, and seven of this thing, just delete them, you know. And it's insight that comes with. And it's Solid foundational data, then you can go. Hey, can you please take this off now? So.

47:21 Bobby Bot Disproven with the data, just like excess laser cannons. Foiled again.

47:28 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

47:29 Oli Gardner Last my favorite talk that I want to do, hopefully in a year's time or something. Would be, you know, I talked about this on the stage of CTA I think, you know, 20 things you always thought you knew about conversion or marketing that we've now proved a total amount of bullshit. Yeah, that'd be awesome.

47:45 Woj Kwasi Oh, that'd be awesome. Actual myth busting. Yeah. So nice. It can also be a good idea to display product videos alongside of a lead form so long as it does not dilute the visitor's attention.

47:59 Oli Gardner Uh depends what it is. Um yeah, there's no there's no right or wrong there. I mean product videos can be great, depending on what the product is. Um You know, I was looking at someone told me about the experience of having a test driver at Tesla recently and said it's something you can just do because of the customer experience from starting to finish. It's just so incredible. Right. Um so I was looking at their website and they are the most frustrating uh brand in the world in many ways. because there's no data, there's no details in their things, and the videos aren't complete, they don't show you the things you want to see. So product videos can be great if they're good and if they were created created cheaply To present the information that the consumer actually wants. And that's where things like Wistia's chaptering can be really great because you can have visual cues as to where the chapters are and you can also have titles, I believe, associated with them, so people can see what's gonna be in this video and choose where they wanna go, choose their own adventure based on the content.

49:06 then you can look at the data and go, everybody actually just it they had a great example when they first launched this. It was from a car manufacturer. How they had all the the things and they were how it was so powerful and da da da da da da. All anyone cared about was the iPad d type style display. That's what everyone was clicking on. That's the tech that they cared about. So the insights you can derive from that video in that case is a great mechanism just for learning.

49:24 Woj Kwasi Yeah. I got in an Uber once on Capitol Hill and it happened to be a Tesla. I just needed to go to Capitol Hill and so I said can you show me what this thing can do? And he took us on a freeway and the talk was naught to zero in two seconds. Just sort of and he went off. I think he went onto an exit and sort of drove really fast back into Capitol Hill. It was pretty cool. Mm-hmm.

49:55 Bobby Bot Send of Musk strikes yet again. You're such a traitor, Woj.

49:59 Woj Kwasi Cool your jets, Bobby Bot. And in other news, ITBusiness.ca reported that Unbounce is on a quest to revive overlays, aka pop-ups. That's basically your whole conversation style, right, Bobby Bot?

50:12 Oh, oh, look, look here. Here here's a little pop-up sign language for you watching. Very Mature Bobby. Very mature.

50:22 Oli Gardner In Unbounce for many reasons. They're a highly used interactive device. The reason we call them overlays is because we're trying to enjoy this line in the sand, that pop-ups are bad, that was in the past, these are the future done respectfully. That's kind of, we're trying to take the stance of responsible use of technology. These things work, they work really well. When you do it right, and it can be a delightful experience. They can be funny, they can be really like my Ex-Kickboxing instructor Richie, he has he used them on his site and it's got some really funny stuff on there, and people love it. You know, it depends how you use it. And we've got customers where they ran an experiment where they had product-based overlays and they put it on their blog.

51:11 Um versus some content related ones. And the product ones on the blog they just like 0.5% conversion rate. The content ones convert at ten percent. So it's something they needed. And then on conversely, the content ones on the website, not the blog, didn't work, but the product ones did, you know, and it's it's choosing where and when and we've built pretty advanced triggering and targeting in there. so you can really do it right. We have ten different overlays we're using on the Unbounce site in different places. But once you've seen one, you never see another. We don't let you have that experience because we care about doing it responsibly and using it as an interactive device that is just generally actually helpful. We've had them convert 29% because it was offering videos for an event. And it's like, yeah, I want free videos. You know? That's something people want. So as long as you're not

50:57 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Yes.

51:42 Alright.

52:04 Oli Gardner just interrupting people for the sake of like shouting at them they can be It can be a really uh powerful thing.

52:12 Woj Kwasi And to Will's point, and Bobby's refusal to acknowledge a little thing called patience, if it's done in the context of a searcher's journey. Ah. Where you can kind of make the pop-up as the next step, it can be quite useful.

52:26 Oli Gardner Right, yeah, and there's many there's many use cases. I mean, it's it's you know, whether it's for offers that feel like, oh well, yeah, I'll like I'll take fifteen percent off shopping in this store or whether it's we call it traffic shaping. I gotta say I'm not a family term, but uh where you take someone from one page, hi traffic page or something, and you push them somewhere further down the journey that is actually relevant to what they're trying to do, but you can kind of you know help move You can experiment with different paths. And but yeah, one of the core things is the advanced targeting. You know, you can do lots of cool stuff with like cookies and all kinds of things. Stuff so you can really be very geotargeting and different triggers. You can really give someone a good experience and also quickly figure out.

53:14 What's not a good experience? People don't react to that, don't do it, you know, and keep working it. My dream in the future is that that's automatically done for you, functional testing, not content testing. So it'll say, oh, on your pricing page, never put one of these ever, ever, ever. Because it just hurts conversion rates. But on your features page, a scroll depth of 60% overlay performs better than this. Use that. I don't know. The artificial intelligence world can take these things to different places and make sure. And I talked about this in an old talk when it was last year.

53:30 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

53:51 Oli Gardner Where you know, we could implant our core values into an algorithm. So if delight is one of your core values, it can make suggestions based on you can add some more delight into. This headline or into the copy on this overlay. And so then it's making suggestions because that's the fear. Machines are going to take over. Well, if we inject some key stuff in there, then we'll be helping to make sure that doesn't happen. You know, developing some digital empathy. I think the guy interviewing me at CTA, like emotional intelligence, he was asking. Yeah, he was asking about that, you know um I like well if if we can read an emotional intelligence book and learn from it and and take uh positive steps, a machine can read that too, sure, and do something with it.

54:41 Bobby Bot I like you, Oli, and it seems like AI can help Unbounce operate as a conversion automation platform for many, many.

54:48 Oli Gardner Uh basically we have kind of we find that I have seven pillars on get them all right now. Which is you know, of the optimization kind of path creation is one obviously as well, and that's where you know where the the builder comes in. And then the there's insights and analytics and uh all these different pieces. And then automation just sits in the middle of all of that. Speeds it up, brings insights faster. Uh so I don't know, it's gonna be an interesting journey because we already you know. Things come to light, like the myth-busting thing, the algorithm teaches us: oh, this actually doesn't matter. This isn't, this doesn't impact conversion. It might.

55:35 Yeah, it might be something you can use as a micro signal, but it's not something that actually directly impacts conversion. We showed that number of form fields is not predictive of conversion. It will impact conversion, but it's not predictive. It can't, there's no guarantee that if you if you do this, it will do that. But when we start layering out the copy, as well as stuff about the form, then we actually do find predictive things in there. So it's about. It's fine. finding all these things that Can't wait till you guys figure it out. Yeah, well some Figure it out. Yeah, well, some of it, we just don't know what's going to happen, which is that weird algorithmic AI thing. It's like, it's going to. But there's some stuff I that we didn't that we didn't anticipate.

56:16 Woj Kwasi And then there's always that risk of wrong advice. Algorithm decided that you don't need a form. What you need is music and an animated background.

56:27 Oli Gardner We did see some funny things, some outliers in the data where, you know, it says on this this industry or this type of page, um these types of words that represent joy or or whatever emotion could be helpful in increasing the performance of the page. You'd have you'd have some words in there, like suggested words and you know one of them uh for a webinar it I'll just make one of could be like telephone call or Yorkshire Terrier. You know, which are nothing to do with this machine. Somehow yeah, somehow crept in. somehow yeah somehow crept into the You know, so obviously filtering and everything

57:12 To be stronger and stronger before you really get true predictive stuff and suggestion engines that can actually. You can actually. you know, do this so that we can inc increase conversions.

57:24 Woj Kwasi You should also take note of Oli's communication talents, Bobby Bott. His role as a speaker has solidified him as a thought leader and industry.

57:32 Oli Gardner Yeah, it's the most important thing you'll do, I think, at least on the marketing side. But someone has to be a speaker. I didn't do it for years because I was scared. But now I have it, it is the best thing for me personally. My growth as a person, as a professional, as a marketer. And yeah, the way I started it, once I got guilty. Into doing it was I read How to Deliver a TED Talk by Jeremy Donovan. Amazing book, changed the way I think and how I structure my talks. And I watched a TED Talk every day on the commute to work because my commute at the time on the bus was 17 minutes long, exactly, and that's how long a TED Talk. 18 minutes was just the blank of a TED Talk. So I'd get to work every You know, they go, yeah, I'm gonna change some.

58:19 I'm fucking more up.

58:19 Woj Kwasi You're about to get a world domination summit, Bobby Bot.

58:23 Bobby Bot I'm listening.

58:23 Oli Gardner There's three things I really care about. About speaking, there's there's the design of the presentation itself, making it visually compelling and persuasive. There's the delivery of how you present this as a speaker, as a f a physical person, and then there's what you're saying. you know, and and being entertaining. Uh entertaining and um educational and inspiring. I should try and do all three of those things. We're actually doing uh a workshop, part of our kind of commitment to gender diversity and speaking um and and conferences and and in the workplace. we're doing a thing called Center Stage, Center Stage. It's a workshop for women who want to be public speakers. We're going to do it at Unbounce. It's a passion project, so we're doing it on the weekend. We'll have maybe twenty people there and then there'll be a bunch of coaches. I'll be one of them. We're going to have some uh great female speakers come in.

59:12 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

59:23 Oli Gardner In and be other coaches. Hopefully, it'll be like a voice kind of thing, but there'll be some presentations that everyone sees, but then you have a cohort.

59:30 Bobby Bot Is he gonna have a chair that spins around like seal?

59:34 Oli Gardner I tried to do that one time at home. I watched the voice actually do that. Tell what it was like. But there was some fundamental flaw in it. I mean it was'cause we could never tell when it was time to turn around. I don't know if you need that offense about the story because the lead in telling me, I already saw them. So Right. I don't know if you need to confess the story mode because the leading time already saw them. Mm. Great. I am really passionate about that. I coach people at Unbounce all the time, like every year. So I provide coaching for them every year, and it's a lot of fun and it's uh yeah, it's just a great thing to do speaking.

1:00:14 Woj Kwasi McGardner lives again.

1:00:16 Oli Gardner The most important conference is CTAConf. Obviously, it's ours and benefits in Vancouver. Number two is Turing Fest in Edinburgh, because that's where I'm from. And MozCon is the only kind of other th one that I've actually said, I want to speak there. I like speaking everywhere. I like speaking everywhere. But it was the only one just because of our friendship and company and personalized, and it's one of those as a marketer, it's just one of those. As a marketer, it's just one of those places you want to speak. So uh checking that off from Bucket List today.

1:00:43 Woj Kwasi Yep.

1:00:46 Oli Gardner It was pretty epic.

1:00:48 Woj Kwasi Awesome. Oli was a fantastic guest and I was very lucky enough to see him twice this year, last year, 2017. He spoke at MozCon and also at his own conference, CTA Conf. Very very entertaining, and Unbounce is working on incredible things. Unbounce have just released a landing page analyzer. It's a pretty good tool where you can upload a URL and it will analyze the landing page from a number of different points of view and will analyze your copy and base it against most popular words that are effective in various categories, like we discussed earlier. Make sure you follow Oli on social media at Oli Gardner. In most places, we'll have a whole bunch of links and links to his photography as well, the show notes, and also some of those articles we discussed in our favourite work. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends, family, networks, colleagues, bots, pets, and associates. Bobby's been programmed to be a

1:01:51 Quick learner, so as usual, it's time for Bobby to ask me a few questions that piqued his curiosity from the episode. What you got for me today, Bobby?

1:02:01 Bobby Bot Question 1. How important are first impressions, Woj, and what can we do in our digital spaces to gain the people's trust?

1:02:08 Woj Kwasi Very important we have even less time to help people get answers. We've actually noticed that a lot of people, even in AdWords, they're typing in a query into the search box and they're just clicking the first ad they see. So they trust Google quite a lot. So as long as That matches their experience when they click the ad and land on the landing page. It's all good. But yeah, I think people have less of an attention span than a goldfish these days. Question two.

1:02:39 Bobby Bot What lessons have helped you develop the ability to do?

1:02:42 to draw insights out of the sea of data.

1:02:44 Woj Kwasi Probably the key bit of information that I took out of our interview was a lot of the time we do rely on best practices and what people have done in the past and rely on that work and try to match it to our own. But it's quite simple with a lot of web development stuff. You know, things, if you want someone to scroll below the fold, then put visual cues in place so people scroll scroll by the fold. If you want people to use certain elements of your website, then you've got to guide them to those elements. So no matter what the data says, Yeah. Always look deeper.

1:03:27 Bobby Bot Question three.

1:03:28 Woj Kwasi Autobots or Decepticons? Not really a uh a uh Transformers fan, but I I think I'll go with good guys the Autobots. Sorry Bobby, I know it's your uh grandparents or whatever, but No offense. I hope you took some valuable information from this episode, Bobby.

1:03:46 Bobby Bot I did. Speaking with a dynamic personality with knowledge of design has been great. I think I can use a second opinion though. I'll see you in a few, Woj. I've got a date with Kanye West. And Then that's it. In that order, kind of like a double date, but not like dating destiny, cause that would just be kind of strange. I'll see you later.

1:04:09 Woj Kwasi I'll see you later. In the next episode of WojCast, we speak with Melanie Spring from branded confidence.

1:04:14 Melanie Spring If you can get the best possible SEO ratings and like get people to your site but your site sucks, it doesn't really matter. It's great that you get all this traffic, but if it doesn't read like a human wants to read it, then they're not gonna stay. So great, you got them to your site and then you didn't get them to stay and you spent all this time and all this money on something that didn't do anything.

1:04:31 Woj Kwasi But in the meantime, remember to look after each other online because empathy is organic and you can't automate empathy.