The High-Performance Landing Page: 3 ways to maximize conversion with the power of coherence

hello everyone we are back and it's good to see you I'm watching you as you're logging in from Michigan Colorado Toronto looks like Florida Cincinnati Spain and perhaps New Mexico keep coming and keep identifying as you do we're glad to have you I want to take you immediately to the day's topic which is the high-performance landing page we've heard all of that before but we will not have heard much of what we're going to talk about today as we focus on the power of coherence to do that I might suggest that you send in some pages for review we have some already prepared but they'll be critical for me to explain why the live-up you've seen us do in the past is insufficient in the meantime I want to share a video with you I don't know how well this is going to play depending on where you're out in the world but you can always google this simple headline and find and watch the video yourself but let's try it so on my right is Austin Spitz a Scotsman and look at the video if you haven't figured this out that's cash blowing out of the back of an armored truck and those are people trying to pick up the cash it's a fairly long video but I think you might get the point somebody had a red-letter day a lot of cash blow out of that truck and as you can see somebody got some of it I'd like to emphasize that point I would in the in the tradition of Oprah Winfrey love to have each of you with a big surprise under your chair right now and you could reach down and there'd be a stack of cash not likely going to happen however I think I can help you find a stack of cash in your landing pages if you stay close with me and I'd like to point out that there's something in the psychology of that approach and the psychology of those people that we can learn from the day because there reaching down trying to get some of that cash nobody gets all of it and that's the tragedy in its own right for the person who doesn't get it and yet everybody is trying to get some of it and this reminds me of the way we conduct our meetings around the development of new websites and landing pages and optimization projects around our campaigns for paid search for display ads etc and indeed there is a sort of connection between our approach to optimization and the chasing of that money in many cases we chase random ideas that come up in our meetings we we somehow integrate them into our designs and we hope that we make money we are looking for that found money already existing in our pages if you've just tuned in it's very likely that your current funnel is leaking cash every day and as it leaked out of the back of that armored truck you are tasked as the marketer many times to go get that money the problem is the best we can do is reach down and try to get a few pieces while the rest blows away and while other people and food indeed our competitors are getting the rest there is a systematic way for you to approach this process of optimization focused on the concept of coherence that can help you produce a whole different type of experience and in a sense help you vacuum up all that leaking cash that's currently falling out blowing out of your funnel now as you think about that I want to suggest to you that this happens for three very specific reasons and those three reasons are going to power three principles that we'll talk about later but the first reason is something I call pages before hypotheses you may want to take notes on this but too often we develop a page and I'm going to abbreviate and we do that before we develop a hypotheses and if you develop your page before you develop a proper messaging hypotheses you have cash blowing out of the back door of your process indeed that's the first deadly mistake here's another one diagnosis without prescription so I'm gonna again abbreviate and I want you to think about what I'm trying to say but how many of you would be satisfied if you went to the doctor and you explained to him that you were having a serious pain and let's call it let's let's raise the stakes perhaps internal bleeding and and then you go to the doctor and they carefully diagnose a whole number of problems going on with you it might be that your right leg is shorter than your left leg is that causing the internal bleeding no but it's a problem it might be that that affects your hip and thus you have hip pain and at the same time they diagnose that there's something else going around over here with perhaps your eyesight and and then they look closer and they diagnose that you may have a very serious internal problem I don't know but it goes I don't really want to go to those negative thoughts you make this illustration too negative but ultimately you come away with a third diagnosis you discover you have 21 problems and then they send you home would you be satisfied with that outcome what's missing in that conversation what's missing in that analysis indeed what's missing is that the doctor failed to move from diagnosis to prescription now you may say yeah and that's hard because my eyesight and internal bleeding are probably completely unrelated yes and it's the same thing when I look at your landing pages many of you who are you know members of our community who've been with me for years who've listened to me do live up in fact if you go to marketing experiments calm there are pages and pages and pages where I do why our clinics and I'm showing you where I see errors the problem with that approach it's my own approach is it's not enough it's necessary to use a piece of philosophy in fact you may study this look it up it's a necessary condition but it's not a sufficient condition it is important it needs to be done but it is not enough and that's all I can do when I'm doing pure diagnosis these are issues and I I'm hoping that you'll be able to take some of that diagnosis and see problems and fix them but in reality until you know how to move from diagnosis to prescription you can't achieve coherence and you're not going to see the major lifts that you could achieve any of you are watching these videos and being able to pick up some more cash coming out of that truck good but you're leaving still too much on the ground so stay with me as I tell you the third problem I see over and over again you know a lot of my students are in agencies I am NOT anti agency but it's particularly true in marketing departments and I see it in agencies all the time and here it is the third problem so one two three the third problem is creativity and I can't get down very low here so I'm just gonna go creativity without science creativity is not the enemy of science indeed you need the creativity in order to generate great hypotheses but then you need science in order to validate or at least analyze thyself a disease now without science creativity can actually get you in trouble creativity has nothing to discipline that while reach which is so essential which is what powers it the lateral thinking that allows you to see in a different way it's vital it's important but you need the science and once you know you have the comfort of science to discipline the creativity you can release the full power of your I have three problems these are not the primary point we're going to teach today we're going to talk about a way to think a new way to think focused on coherence that addresses all of these problems but beware of building a page before you develop a hypothesis beware beware of doing a diagnosis without a prescription and beware of creativity without science now having said that Nathanael I hope that got you the first point and the answer to your question if you're new to these YouTube live programs I'm watching in a monitor right there all of your feedback over there I see myself in the whiteboard behind that is a gigantic screen and it has the handful of slides that will touch on my right is austin spence who is running all of these monitors and back in the control room is a team led by a cliff trainer our executive producer who's helping us get this done today i'm grateful for them but now let's concentrate on the answer to an important question and that question is this how can I move from low probability performance that comes with just good ideas to the high probability performance that comes with strategic messaging how do I get into that zone I could simplify that problem by saying how do I get all that cash that's falling out of the back of my truck that's what we're going to talk about today and do so I'm going to erase the board and begin with the first point so we have three points we're going to look at pages and with those pages we're going to start to see a problem and as an example let's pull up some pages shifting over go full screen if you would cliff so they're easier for me to see and our audience and here's a page it's forget everything you know about insurance let's shift that's a good page take a look at it how would you fix this page what's wrong with this page in fact somebody right now give me two or three main two or three problems you see we're diagnosing now what's something you would do to improve this page you have ten seconds and I'm going to look to another page ten nine I'm watching here on the chat eight by the way welcomes Slovakia it looks like should I can't pronounce your name I don't think is it here are some better let us know so we pronounce it properly but we're glad to have you Shane no clear suggestion Kyle our child says false bottom Ilan says no value prop okay you're keeping coming three seconds two seconds one second I like it keep thinking let's go to another one take me another page quickly I'm gonna come back but I want you to show I want you look at another page here we go again paid submitted by people in our audience you have ten seconds what is wrong with this page bringing data rich enterprise applications to your I can't kubernetes platform if you pronounce that way alright here it is keep them coming lots of big words vague headline you're right boring says eat loud right I have no idea we're selling Shane says what's kubernetes generic headline no clear prop not specific color of text gobbly goo it's ugly no CTA no outcome this is the audience speaking I would be much more kind than these people I'm just teasing these are good insights but how do you go from those diagnosis to a high performance page it's not enough to see the problems it is certainly important to see them in fact if you can't see them you'll never get the rest but if you see them and you don't know what to do once you have seen them you are still stuck so I bring you to the deck again and show you one simple case study and tell you an example of how we saw an amazing impact in fact the impact was so high that the company who financed this group you'd know them one of their senior leaders ran for president who back and they came to us and said can you help us with our other investments the results were so remarkable for them this is a nationwide a roll up of a you know it's a it's a huge organization here's the problem how can they generate more enquiries more leads for a sort of medical treatment that being said here we go control congratulations on finishing that course chain control this is the original page now look at it it's attractive it's professional it has a lot of good things going for it but if you were to look closer if you were to get beneath the page rumor it's not really a page it's a single set chewing thoughts and ideas in the mind if you were to look beneath the page into the mental absorption of what's happening and then beneath that into the actual performance results there's cash falling out of that truck that armored truck and it's an armored truck it's a it's an organization with so many billions of dollars it would stagger you but they're leaking and with all the money they have and with all the high paid people and all the resources they can't get the cash off the ground so there it is I want to show you the new page before I do you'll see coming up some of the problems with the page unnecessary nav headline offers little value ultimate sounds like what you were saying while ago from learning and working together with us and that's right there are these problems and many more now look at the fix it's counterintuitive number one it's a much longer page and in most marketing groups we would we would vote on the page to the left if I had began the broadcast saying which page produces the highest performance many of you would have chosen the page and the left certainly those of you not familiar with our methodology now long copy is not the reason this page is performing long copy was necessary because of the reason expressed in the hypothesis as a as a function of coherence now there is something happening in this page beyond diagnosis there is a prescription and it's not a bunch of little fixes did everybody hear me it's not reaching down and picking up this little piece of cash in that little piece did maybe a piece over here it's a it's a mechanical device that vacuums up all the cash what is it and how well does it work that I can answer for you the how well does it work pieced has been validated with some pretty solid science but what happened what's really going on well that's what this first point is about we need to understand and here it is you may want to write this down the transition from diagnosis to prescription and when we do we can see these types of returns now many of you would think wow that's a big return or some of you might think yeah but but what is that really translated into dollars it translates into a lot of dollars and it's shocking because it's in an optimized page the first page was considered optimized the control was considered optimized and a fortune must been under control now there's nothing wrong with a financial group that owned this page and backed it invested it that owns the company that owned all the others that they rolled up and by the way Britney Spears was connected with that particular center that you're looking at right now this is a very famous place and yet still huge increase what happened what happened was the prescription carefully diagnosed in the form of a hypothesis produced a new page that produced a different impact in the mine that produced a different set of financial metrics so let's unpack how do we do that well that brings me to the second point we need to work from a point of view rather than a sense of talent now all over the world we see this by the way while I'm talking take a look at that man see if you can tell me who he is anybody that can guess who that is you get a bunch of extra points and of course with those points you can get austin spence to come to your house mow your lawn for you take care of wash your cars right Austin you know the winner of this will win the the 24 hours of care and attention I'm sharing that with you simply to say pay attention because that man said something you need to know he needs a philosopher that's your first hint but while you're thinking about him I want to go back to the point we need to work from a point of view rather than a sense of talent many of us sit down as especially if we have a background in marketing or some experience we are you know working at an agency and we come in with our sense of talent and creativity and think we should do this and I think if we do that I watched these meetings sometimes they blow my mind I'm sitting in meetings at Johnson & Johnson for instance I was sitting in meetings with a whole table full of experts and agencies and they're all talking and moving their hands and it looks like a scene from Mad Men but they're launching without the solution I'm talking about right now and they had already spent 25 million dollars and they were spending 90 before it was done and I could see in a matter of minutes it was going to be a complete disaster because they didn't understand this second point how to develop a point of view and count on that more than your Bureau sense of talent what we need to get to the right answer is a special viewpoint not a special gift so stay with me and I'll try to tell you how that viewpoint begins to develop I experienced this yesterday I was sitting down with a team of leaders from our side doing what we call HD hypothesis development HD informs you know so many of our experiments and so we have to think and I'm asking many many questions it's a research partner of ours in Africa and and they have a complex sight in a global business and I'm looking at their work for the first time and I really can't make any suggestions I'm asking questions I'm I'm pulling threads together I'm weaving them together I'm looking at previous experiments I'm wondering where is this traffic can be drum and all this time it looks like a random conversation with random disconnected comments insights and questions and yet in truth we're weaving a mosaic to develop that point of view do you say well how do I translate this into my problems how do i how do I think about what you're saying in a context that will help me do better tomorrow on the job let me say there are two things you need to understand first of all the point of view is dependent on something that Martin Buber understands I've looked at your thoughts and a loud you're right it's Buber I don't know how you recognize that did you guys do facial recognition tell me because unless you have really read his work that's pretty impressive they focal thought it was Santa but we make allowances for Dave he's in our special program I'm Dave I hope you guys we if you're new don't be mad at me dave has been on here forever and we're friends Martin Buber that is who it is famous philosopher and what boomers doing that sort of interests me is he thinks about philosophy dialogue he's an Austrian and he's known for a phrase called the other he thinks a lot about the relationship we have with the other I first encountered his work when studying with the Jesuits in the University of London at Heythrop where I did graduate work in philosophy and theology and Buber makes you question your relationship to the other how does that connect to what we're doing here I want to make a statement it's careful every word is written down in front of me it comes from a whiteboarding session where we were planning this time together and I wrote these words their point of view that's the other their point of view yields my point of view what am I saying here I am saying that the first thing you need to do to develop a prescription after doing your diagnosis is start to see through the customers eyes it's when I take on their point of view I can begin to develop my point of view so this requires me to think about a webpage in a different way so now I'm going to go to one of the pages that you've submitted let's think about how that would impact our work on one of these pages and I don't know which one Austin let's go full screen cliff and stay there for a while and I'm thinking about any of these pages I only saw them about two minutes before we began but I think we'll go to that get information page I don't know the nurse practice in nursing go to that page I can see the tab all right complete your BSN online okay RNs : complete your BSN online are you ready to get started now team I know that you've been a part of what we're doing many of you and exposed to our methodology long enough to see problems remember diagnosis so if this was the webpage we're looking at here's what we typically are doing I am now I am now drawing a printed web page okay just pretending that it's printed okay so here is the page and across it we have a headline take a look at the page I actually need to see the page then you can come back to the board cliff it's not your fault I'm just trying to see it so I get it right then there's a small sub header and then there's a button and then there's a bar that runs across then there's another headline and then there's another sub header then there's a lot of space and some text right here and then it starts talking to me in three different ways I'm representing those three boxes three dots now this is only a signal scent it is not a page in fact we just print it or it's never page and even when we do it's designed to trigger something in the mind now I don't know how to fix this page by just doing this I'm changing pins and I'm going to start to mark problems on the page and I'll do that by thinking about the page we just saw for instance the headline let's go to the headline complete your BSN online let's say that's a weak headline I'm gonna put an X there and then are you ready to get started I didn't come for a question I don't even know why you're asking me that and by the way how would I be ready when all I could see is a picture of two women smiling at something and I have no idea what they're smiling at so I don't think that's very good I mean this gracious slimming this kindly request information your wife's when I came to the page for why do I have to request information didn't I come to the page to get information so now I'm not too keen on the button either but let's stop for a second so I'm just getting started I've put an X at the headline I've put an exit the sub-headline I've put an exit the button I see problems I am right now a physician and I am diagnosing but as I mentioned earlier covering my diagram with X's it does not fix the problem so I've got to go from that to a new page but it shouldn't be a new page it should be a new hypothesis and where does that pop sisters come from it comes from a new perspective so how do I get my new perspective well what we said just a moment ago was their point of view yields my point of view so let's go back to the page not necessarily entails me understanding what they're seeing and how it's impacting their thinking so I want to back into that saying well how do I get that sense of what they're seeing how do I get that sense of what they're thinking well here it begins first we see by connecting the from two and the reason why I talked about two things just now I'm gonna write them on the board the from two and I'm gonna just put reason with an R to stand for reason the reason why now what's going on here is in fact let me put the from to what I'm trying to say is where do they come from and what were they trying to get to so that requires me to go back into the channel and say what stimulated the last behavior what caused them to click on the button and decide against other options to come to this page because every oh this is important every time they make a choice I learn more about them every single micro yes is more than a victory in the momentum for the page it is an insight into the mind of the person and so what's happening is I'm studying what stimulated the behavior that led them to this place and when I do that I start to get a sense of the most important driver of momentum and the most important driver of brand impact expectation what are they expecting to see now once I think about that I've started to move through the eyes of the other into the from and towards the two which leads me to an insight into the mind team are you following me give me feedback I know that this is more advanced I thought this would be more advanced but you've had a lot of the other so if I'm I'm going too deep tell me but I want to stay focused on try to help you learn so it use your comments if you could to talk to me but let me keep going I also have the Y and the Y so the reason why so you could call that the reason why or the Y so but let's just think about that so if I have seen where they've come from and where they're that sort of points it's like if you look at my tracks on the beach you get a sense of the direct I'm moving towards and if you look at my track on the beach you might even see that there's a you know a restaurant on the beach and get a sense that I might be going there you don't know for sure but you definitely know I'm not going out there into the water because my tracks are going that way you definitely know I'm not going back there cuz my tracks are headed that way and you definitely know I'm not going over there you know a lot by simply eliminating all the other points in the compass that I am NOT headed towards and with that in mind it very well may be I'm going to that restaurant but let's suppose there's two restaurants and a bar there you know know which ones of those I'm going to but I'm going in that direction and you're getting closer to getting into my mind to understand my expectation because to cash in the from and the two you have to understand the why so why so so why am i walking that way well by looking ahead you may be able to see team I'm starting to develop perspective and that perspective is going to give me wisdom and if you are the marketer you are the customer philosopher of the organization you should be the one who understands the customer what matters and their mind now let's go back to the landing page all right so let's suppose I clicked I don't know where they came from but they've either typed a search term in or they clicked on a display ad or they're returning let's just take those who clicked on a display ad now if I think about where they were I'm going to be able to say what did they expect why did they come here and this says complete your BS online now that might be important but the reality is there's going to be many other people offering the same thing online so I don't think it's sufficient it doesn't tell me why they kicked on my ad instead of all those other ads offering the same thing bring a nursing degree online is sort of like offering food in a restaurant but let's say that more specific so it's offering let's call it I'm in the South southern food in a southern restaurant there's more information but not enough there's a lot of southern restaurants there's a lot of nursing programs so now I'm there but I don't have any valuable information and so why are you asking me this question are you ready to get started here's why here's why that's a problem number one how could I possibly be ready to get started back to the beach I have even got there yet I don't know enough yet I could see some tracks going there I'm already started I'm on a journey but I'm certainly not ready to start applying for your program but the only headline you offer me is complete your BSN or online that hasn't helped me choose I don't have enough information I'm starting as a marketer to get a point of view about what's going on in the mind of the person coming to this page now with that I could start to imply the power of implication then the the power of inductive logic is the marketers way to move from something on a page to something in the mind so back to the button back to the button what is it right here request information now it's starting to be more apparent the problem with this page I'm starting to get some ideas about how to fix the top of that page because request information let's talk about what's wrong with it in high speed what information you're gonna call me you gotta send me something what are you gonna send me how big is it how long is it who wrote it do I have to fill a long form I don't know any of those things and why would I click on a request information what I don't have enough information to know that I want any more information the guys you don't have to be a genius to see this you start to see these traces these behavioral traces I don't need to see the data may I say something that's gonna sound problematic for many of you we depend on data too much yes data is powerful yes we use data every day here is for us behavioral traces but sometimes marketers use data because they're not using the power of implication I already can tell you what the data is already saying I can already predict the bounce right there I can already tell you're not getting a lot of clicks there now here's why you're offering me something vague that doesn't it all satisfy my expectation set in fact it's annoying and more than that it's threatening I don't know why I would want that information I don't know what you're gonna do when I click on that button I don't know what I'm giving the exchange for a process that will value proposition and of that button and then if I get past all that because it's not satisfactory I hit a new thing overview oh wait a second if I've got an overview curriculum admission tuition expenses and accreditation why do I need to click on the damn button isn't it right there you following what we're saying now I know these people I'm not at all trying to be harsh I'm trying to help but I also have to assume the the mindset of the frustrated prospective student who's being bombarded with offers and information now let's get mini fed headline go fullscreen cliff so what's the difference when the headline under the blue and they have on above RN to BSN program option first of all that's not a statement so now you you're not getting any momentum from me I'm already I'm already on the verge of clicking away if I haven't already advance your degrees in as few as three semesters that's the first piece of interesting comment I have a Content I read but it's buried it's like headline stacked on headline with not enough of the work done by the other man I want to share you slip over to the slides I've talked about this person before he is a philosopher in his own way though he wouldn't say he was but he is and it is Robert McKee Robert McKee is a master of story he dr. screenplays in Hollywood he teaches courses the greatest directors in the world come to him for help for guidance because he knows how to craft a story I've seen him break down amazing insights from the archetypes in Star Wars and why it worked so well and seem applied in highly sophisticated ways his book the power of story or the magic of story anyway it's on story is it's right it's Robert McKee is fantastic what I want you to understand here is we don't have enough coherence in yet to get this page right we're starting to get a picture a story is a is a picture expressed over time and I need that picture and that time to figure out what to get to do to get this page right so imagine that I click on a page looking for information let's go back to here if I want to generate a lead then then then I I could start to prescribe a way to fix this page I could I could take a picture of a powerful informational piece by the way I've done this test precisely with a whole series of universities and drove remarkable breathtaking conversion increases in fact in one group probably meeting with next week in Chicago we saw 44 percent increase in revenue quarter to quarter when we got this right so I'm not pulling this out of my my my my hat I've seen that if I could more match the top of this page with the expectation promising information visualize the information tell you why it's valuable tell you how easy it is resolve your anxiety and your stress give you a button that promised a value in exchange told you is an instant download even put the form field above the button and put it all together the top of this page I'd probably drive conversion up significantly giving the prospective University more enquiries in their hand with contact information that they could work with before I get to any more of the page now I don't have time all day here with you now to continue to build up my perspective from what's happening below but I'm trying to illustrate for you what happens when you think their point of view yields my point of view I'm going to help you see that we do see by connecting the from to and the why so all right which brings me to my third point my third point all right let's go to right here move from elements to coherence what is coherence well I take you to another person and skip ahead Thomas Kuhn take me to ya take me to Thomas Kuhn here's up here's a phenomena the slides cliff this is a book that's had a lot of impact on thinking it's the structure of scientific revolutions I would have recommended perhaps Thomas Kuhn and also Karl Popper with his challenge of science in in Koons work he shows you that science doesn't move deductively forward but with wild leaps and intuition where does this intuition come from it comes from a unifying explanation these are my words coherence Karl Popper would argue in ways that I think are too complex to discuss right now challenging our very nature our method in science but to get to that intuitive sense of what's going on here you need more than a bunch of problems or a whole bunch of fixes on a page you need a unifying explanation that ties all the variables together without it you make foolish mistakes trying to fix a page in ways that won't fix it I'll give an example I'm gonna erase this page and I'd like you to go to something that I got on LinkedIn recently this was sent to me on LinkedIn ask yourself if these people understood the from - and the reason why I asked him if they had a point of view or a perspective or maybe they know something I don't know so here I am on LinkedIn if you haven't joined me on social media please do if you're fine do they helpful please share and subscribe but on LinkedIn I get this ready for your next opportunity follow here it is Flint it's hard to read the headline from here JCPenney is hiring now maybe they know something I don't know maybe I'm headed for some really serious problems in my life work but all I can tell you is the very page we're on my own LinkedIn page if you look at it how could you possibly connect that to JC Penney's is hiring well it's easy to do when you don't have a point of view it's easy to do when you're looking at data without wisdom it's easy to do when you don't understand how to move from elements to coherence however let's talk about how to do it right and so let's shift over and I'm gonna get very very prescriptive myself in talking to you about questions you should ask yourself in fact in a moment I'm gonna share three of those with you but first I'm going to talk about the power of variable clusters how many of you test I don't know we should all be testing I have to talk about testing for a moment I have to talk slightly complex but just slightly and then I'm gonna shift over and I'm gonna talk to you about the three questions you need to ask yourself in order to get a unifying explanation and to know what you should change on your next landing page design to do that I just want to suggest to you that when testing first began and if you don't know our history we built the first Behavior Research Laboratory in history using the internet as it's sort of field it's it's ecosystem to run our tests within and more importantly we built the first certification program in testing and we patented some of the first methodology that's used even today for something called split testing a and B split testing and in fact I have show them the patent here's an old patent I just thought I'd pull up for you and in that patent we talk about something called a variable cluster it's not very brilliant the patent isn't but it has heuristics and the concept called a variable cluster we patented what's called a growth engine long before those words were used on the internet using the variable cluster to figure it out and and a variable cluster is thinking up the elements on a page in a way that allows you to test multiple elements at the same time now anybody that has any background testing says what have you changed more than one thing you won't know which thing it was that caused the lift or the loss but that's not true people in the internet who try to test one element at a time will never learn anything number one it takes too long to run you'll be lucky if you get a button right after six months of testing it's all I'm only going to change one thing go back to the page cliff we just looked at I'm gonna change that button I've had those same people argue with me who don't understand a variable cluster or the science by the way if you're saying well this is going somewhere that I you know is beyond me stay with me because it's gonna get simple and practical just hold on that button well let's talk about if you change that button and put a new button there you gotta ask yourself is that really one variable because are you going to change the shape will you slightly change the length if you change the words if you change the words how many variables are you really changing which word that you changed made the difference if you change the color now you've got color and you've got shape and you may have size and then you have words what am I trying to say nobody test single variables we just fooled ourselves because we've been thought deeply enough on the other hand if you just test a bunch of random ideas you're in trouble this is why here me most of the AI optimization work that you see is some exaggerated hype like many things on the internet and in business and I was there when single factorial testing was challenged by multi variable clusters or multivariable testing multivariable testing is to random testing many things but there's no coherence it just scrambles stuff it's brute force with no wisdom multi rate testing doesn't typically get big lips AI which I've so far been testing and we're running our own software but I've tested the big AI providers out there it's very valuable in various ways but it is not building coherent marketing and messaging hypotheses anywhere yet that can do what a human being can do with the power of synthesis and induction is opposed to deduction so what does that mean about everything I'm teaching now go back to the page you can change several things on this page as long as they represent one unifying explanation for what's going on here how to fix it it's not about changing the button it's not about change the headline the first thing you would do if you just tested the top of the page is you would change the message to reflect where someone is in the thought sequence and to do that you would change multiple things even the picture in the background is doing nothing I said it before I got people with their heads cut off smiling it's something I can't see looking down at who knows what accomplishing nothing to support the value proposition or even the draw my eyes into the text below it's a waste of ink and so what I would change believe it or not if I were building this page is not a bunch of random elements or variables I would change all of the elements at the top of that page that are interfering with or preventing me from expressing one unifying explanation for why this didn't work and what will work going forward to do that I would purposely create a headline and a hit and a sub headline that talked all about the value proposition of the download I would visualize instead of pictures of smiling girls a picture of the download I tell you how many pages it had if it was too long as long I would tell you it was comprehensive it was short I would tell you was an executive summary I might show you a copy of the table of contents and then once I had all the value-laden on that page ah I might run that test or I might run it with the negative side of the fulcrum removing all the negatives that is the fear that your going to spam me that is what you're going to do with my email address and privacy that is anxiety about you know those pieces or the value connected to the overall download being a disappointment using perhaps testimonials and other things to strengthen it but just the top of that page from here to here would all represent one unified coherent here's the key word hypotheses and thus I would get the result I'm aiming at not by cleverly identifying problems but by carefully prescribing a solution in the form of a coherent hypothesis in with that in mind I'm gonna tell you how to think about that how to do that more thoroughly in the last few seconds last few minutes I'm going to give you three questions you can ask and with those three questions you can zero in on a unifying explanation a coherent hypothesis okay are you ready so here are the three questions and this is not for this page this is for anything in fact I'm gonna do it like this I'm going to suppose that we looked in another page and we drew up a number of flaws let's let's letter them we looked at the page and let's draw two let's draw this page and I'm gonna say that you this was a web page and you uh you looked at it and you said hmm I see a problem here and I'm gonna letter that one a there's a problem with the headline over here let's maybe that was an image and and there's a problem with a sub header here there's a problem down here with the call-to-action and in the body text there are long long paragraphs with no bold font no eye path we'll call this one II so this is an image over here this is a headline you get the idea and before long we say what are the top five problems with a page I'm not even trying to list them all I'm just trying to get up most that money not every dollar yet that's falling on the ground and to do that I might say okay these are the top five all right that allows me to start to ask my three questions here's the first one what are the most important problems that's what we just did here all right and and so we've identified those but if you just do that you can't get the thing right here's your next question you may want to write these three questions down here's the next one which problem if solved will likely have the most impact on conversion sometimes it's just one big thing and maybe maybe in the first experiment all we do is fix this huge problem with a call to action let me give an example maybe the page overall isn't great but maybe the call to action has the form filled on a second page and you're losing 80% don't click through to the second page and if I can just fix this problem I can have something we here call an H P Z now you may not know what that is but that's getting a page in the high performance zone it's not in its highest but it's in the high performance zone you say does that ever exist I'm thinking right now of a big company that works with Southwest Airlines we're talking a multi-billion dollar company I had this same problem on the fourth stage of the checkout you're booking travel you're booking tours and vacations they lost 96% of their people oh wait a second that told me something I don't care what I did on page one page cure page three the final it's not going to matter I'm still gonna lose ninety-six percent on the fourth page now I had the from two so I got to the why so and in the Y so I discovered what it was they covered that page with cross sells and upsells that confuse people so they couldn't finally check out they were too busy trying to process the cross selves and upsells I knew that I could fix one thing take the cross cells off and put them on the next step and revenue would go way up and the page would hit hpz I also knew being on that we could go back and fix each page and get them right but that wasn't that was an example of one most important element that if I fix it page is better it had a unifying explanation and the unifying explanation was something like this remember if you don't know about hypotheses we've taught it elsewhere go back into the YouTube videos and watch it it has four switches if by then and because you have to have a statement for each of those four when you word them properly you'll form the hypothesis can't teach it now I've already taught it but in the end that the that four switches allowed me to see that I could form one unifying change that got rid of all the cross sell upsell and what would happen what we predicted would happen is a significant lift that's how these things work however in some cases in many cases you don't see that one thing that you know is wrong so you have to go to the third question I'm gonna read the first two and then the third and we're all the first one is what are the important problems the second one is which problem we'll have you know if we fix it the most impact the third question is which combination this is a trickier one that's a really good one I get lifts every month in experiments by asking this third question which combination of problems will have the most impact in doing that we're able to go back and say okay all of these are wrong but there's something about let's leave the box around D and but let's suppose that we see that if we just fix C and a they're connected let's suppose that by connecting B C and a fixing just those I can get a well-articulated value proposition maybe I fixed the image so it so it shares value maybe I get the sub-header and key text here too to indicate the value proposition and I fix the headline maybe that alone getting the value proposition clear will get more people down into the other micro guesses maybe that is my unifying explanation which equals coherence which becomes my hypotheses which leads to my left that's how the pieces come together now another time and but if you think about this in the way we're talking about you'll be able to translate our frequent diagnosis into working prescriptions and you know what you can reach down like that with a tool set that gets Ojo or at least most of that cast right now is blowing all over the road and right out of your phone I'm out of time I hope this has helped you we've got more coming I'm gonna be teaching in Chicago next week if you're in Chicago you can't get into it it's the private but who knows maybe we'll get a chance to connect I'm going from Chicago to Canada Royal Bank of Canada and then from Canada to Toronto I think I'll be in Toronto into France in the France where we are around the world get to where we are let's learn together if you need help we don't run a consulting business we have a research lab but if we sometimes have programs to help you with your pages we can help you get your landing pages right or your websites right reach out to us please like this and I seek questions about travel I'll have our staff answer those we read everything you write here I want a real community of real people doing real good with our work thank you again