Take a look at these two pairs of underwear.
One is plain gray. The other has an American flag and an enormous eagle on it.
Which one sells more?
If you picked the eagle, I can see the logic; Stand out. Be different. The gray pair isn’t exactly begging for attention.
Except, according to Jacques Spitzer, gray is the bestseller.
Now guess what most of the ads selling all that gray underwear look like.
Close-ups of the fabric?
Something about softness and comfort?
The gray pair photographed from every possible angle?
No.
They show the eagle.
The eagle gets your attention. You buy the gray ones.
What makes us look and what makes us buy can be two different things. Fair enough. But follow that thought a little further and it raises an awkward question about how we build a customer journey.
Suppose we take our best-selling product, our most-clicked ad, and our highest-converting page. Put all three together. Have we built the best possible route to a sale?
I’m not convinced.
A lot can change between the scroll and the checkout.
When you’re scrolling, you’re deciding whether something deserves a moment of your attention.
Once you’re browsing the products, you’re working out which one suits you.
By checkout, you may be wondering whether you trust the brand, whether the product will live up to expectations, and whether it’s worth the money.
All of that can happen in a few minutes.
One plausible reading of the underwear story is that the eagle earned a closer look. Then, with the products in front of them, people chose something they’d actually want to wear every day.
Each part of that journey has a job to do.
Trying to explain everything in the first ad would be exhausting.
Repeating everything at every step would be confusing.
And by the time someone is ready to pay, an answer to the question they had five minutes ago may be no help at all.
We need to understand the steps people take and design for what they need at each one.
The oddity that sparks curiosity in an ad might offer very little reassurance at checkout. The simplicity that makes paying feel easy might make an ad easy to ignore. An impression that helps us early on can even become a liability later.
Your winning page has a history
There’s another complication: each stage inherits whatever happened before it.
A page converts beautifully.
Great.
Who’s landing on it?
People who already know the brand?
Someone sent by a friend?
Someone wondering what on earth they just saw in an ad?
Even one person could read that page differently depending on the ad that brought them there. Promise comfort, and they’ll look for evidence of comfort. Show them an unusual design, and that’s what they’ll want to see.
The ad shapes what they’re looking for before the page has had a chance to say anything.
This is why winning an ad test and winning a page test don’t necessarily add up to a winning combination.
Change the ad and you change who arrives, what they expect, and what they’re trying to find out. Remember the U.S. Open story 👇
Calling something “our best page” leaves out quite a lot. It was best for a particular audience, arriving with particular expectations. Connect it to another ad and you may be running a different experiment altogether.
With this many moving parts, it’s a wonder anyone buys anything.
Imagine a language-learning app. It has quick lessons for travelers and a comprehensive program for people who want to study regularly. Both are genuine parts of the product.
The ad team tests two approaches.
One promotes steady learning.
The other pitches the travel lessons: “Order dinner on vacation without guessing.”
The travel ad gets more clicks. We have a winner.
Meanwhile, the team working on the product page finds that highlighting the comprehensive program gets more of its current visitors to start a trial. Another winner.
Naturally, the teams put the two together.
Someone clicks because they’d like a few useful phrases for their trip. They land on a page full of weekly goals, proficiency levels, and long-term progress. The lessons they wanted really are in the app. They might leave without ever finding that out.
Come Monday’s meeting, clicks are up and the page test looks good. Both teams have made reasonable, evidence-based decisions. The experience they’ve assembled still leaves the customer stranded.
Putting travel photos everywhere won’t necessarily fix it. A page that takes people straight to the travel lessons might help. Or the less-clicked ad might bring in more people who stick with regular study. The better choice depends on what the business is trying to achieve.
When do we call it a win?
That’s the question I keep coming back to with the eagle boxers.
We need to judge the ad, the page, and the buying experience on the jobs they’re meant to do. We also need to test how they work together.
An ad’s value depends on what happens to the people it brings in. A page’s performance depends on where those people came from and what they expected. And a sale still has to deliver something worthwhile when the customer uses the product.
So after asking which ad won, ask what happened to the people who clicked it.
Did they buy the gray pair and enjoy wearing it? Leave without finding what they wanted? Start a trial and never come back?
You won’t necessarily find those answers in the first chart.
Of course companies need separate teams. Someone has to run the ads, someone has to build the pages, and someone has to make the product. But customers carry the promise of an ad onto the next screen, long after the ad team’s report has ended.
Customers don’t follow our org chart.
Sometimes the most useful change we can make is to the point at which we declare success. The company could already be losing a customer while a team is celebrating a win.
And this goes well beyond marketing. Think about the decisions you’ve seen at work or in your own life that seemed impossible to explain. “Why would anyone do that? It makes no sense.”
Before we call those decisions irrational, it’s worth asking how much of the journey we’ve actually seen. There may be more going into them than our explanation allows.