You’re optimizing for the wrong people
👀 Why your store is busier than you think and worse than you know, Half of US consumers now use TikTok to search, and more.
Howdy Readers 🥰
In this newsletter, you’ll find:
👀 You’re optimizing for the wrong people
🔍 Half of US Consumers Now Use TikTok to Search
🏆 Ad of the Day
If you’re new to ScaleUP then a hearty welcome to you. You’ve reached the right place along with 50k+ CEOs, CMOS, and marketers. Let’s get into it, shall we? Oh! Before you forget, if someone forwarded this newsletter to you, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss out!
👀 You’re optimizing for the wrong people
You checked analytics this morning. Traffic’s up. Conversions are fine. You moved on.
That’s the mistake.
Here’s what actually happened: 1,200 people visited your store. 18 bought. You’re thinking about those 18. You should be thinking about the 1,182 who left without a word.
That gap isn’t a rounding error. That’s your business.
The metrics you check every day only show you people who already decided to engage
Everyone else, the almost-buyers, the people who hit your landing page and bounced in 4 seconds, they leave no trace. No data. No reason. Just silence.
You’ve been building your growth strategy around the people who stayed, while ignoring the signal from everyone who didn’t.
A 2% conversion rate isn’t a conversion problem. It’s a friction problem you haven’t found yet.
That friction lives somewhere specific. Slow mobile load time. Product photos that don’t show scale. A headline that attracts curiosity but doesn’t close the trust gap. Shipping costs that appear too late. An add-to-cart button sitting below the fold on half of your traffic’s screen size.
None of these kill conversions dramatically. They each shave off a percentage point. Quietly. Repeatedly. Invisibly.
The store doing 1% conversion and the store doing 4% are often selling the same product to the same audience with the same ad spend. One of them audited their friction. The other is still refreshing the ROAS dashboard.
What fixing your funnel actually means
It doesn’t mean A/B testing button colors. It means going looking for the silence.
Pull your exit pages. Where are people dropping off after showing intent? A product page with high traffic and low add-to-cart is a crime scene. Investigate it.
Watch session recordings. Five real sessions will show you more than six months of aggregate data. You’ll watch someone try to pinch-zoom a product image on mobile. You’ll watch someone look for a return policy, not find it fast enough, and leave. You’ll feel it.
Map your micro-commitments. From ad click to purchase, count every decision a customer has to make. Most stores have two or three unnecessary steps baked in that nobody ever questioned.
Audit your trust signals. Reviews above the fold. The shipping policy is visible before the add-to-cart. A site that feels like a real brand, not a template with a logo. First-time buyers need reassurance at every step.
The math that should make you uncomfortable
$10,000/month in ads. 20,000 visitors. 1.5% conversion. 300 customers.
Fix the friction. Move to 3%. Same spend. Same traffic. 600 customers.
You just doubled revenue without touching CAC.
That’s not a traffic problem or a budget problem. That’s a visibility problem; you couldn’t see where the leak was, so you kept filling the bucket instead of patching it.
The 1,182 people who didn’t buy today weren’t uninterested. They were unconvinced.
Uninterested people don’t click your ads. Unconvinced people do, then they leave, and you never find out why.
Start finding out why. The data is there. It’s just in the silence.
Together with Norton Neo
AI That Lives In Your Browser. Not In The Cloud.
You had exactly what you needed open. Then your browser crashed and took all 23 tabs with it. The research, the doc, the three reference pages, gone.
Now you’re spending 20 minutes rebuilding a session that took two hours to build.
Norton Neo is the world’s first AI-native browser, meaning the AI isn’t an extension you installed; it lives inside the browser itself.
It tracks your open tabs, understands how you’re working, and keeps your context safe so when something goes wrong, you’re not starting from zero.
Recover full sessions across any device instead of rebuilding from scratch
Tabs are organized by context, not the order you opened them
Keep browsing history local so sensitive research never leaves your machine
Block phishing and malicious sites before they compromise payments or logins
No extra extensions stacking up. No AI tools floating in separate tabs. Just a browser built for how people actually use the web today.
If you want early access to what’s coming next, join the Norton Neo Discord and connect directly with the team building it.
🔍 Half of US Consumers Now Use TikTok to Search. But That’s Not the Full Story.
A new Adobe Express survey of 800+ consumers and 200 business owners explores how search is shifting across TikTok, Google, and AI tools. The picture is more nuanced than most headlines suggest.
49% of consumers have used TikTok for search, up from 41% in 2024. But Gen Z’s preference for TikTok over Google halved to 4%.
14% of consumers prefer ChatGPT over Google for search, double TikTok’s number and is consistent across every age group. TikTok’s disruption is niche while ChatGPT is broad.
38% of business owners now use TikTok influencers, but planned affiliate investment dropped from 53% to 38%. Brands are leaning into creators while pulling back on performance budgets.
38% of business owners say turning TikTok engagement into sales is their top struggle. Attention is easy to get on the platform. Turning it into revenue is not.
What This Means
TikTok works for discovery, especially tutorials and product reviews. But don’t build a strategy around it, replacing Google. Invest in AI search visibility now and focus on closing the engagement-to-conversion gap.
🏆 Ad of the Day
What Works:
They’re Bragging About Being Copied - Most brands run from imitation. Clarins leans into it as a flex. “Always replicated” is an implicit admission that the entire industry has tried to steal this formula and failed. That’s not a claim. That’s a reputation receipt.
Four Words Doing Luxury Positioning Work - “Never duplicated” isn’t about ingredients. It’s about category ownership. It tells the customer: every dupe you’ve tried was a consolation prize. You already know the original exists. Now stop settling.
The Drip Is Intentional Desire Engineering - Gold serum dripping down the bottle is tactile, sensory, almost edible. It signals potency; this stuff is so rich it overflows. In a category full of clinical white packaging and sterile imagery, this looks like liquid gold.
Let your market position speak instead of your marketing. If you’ve earned the right to say “everyone copies us,” saying it plainly is more powerful than any efficacy claim you could make.
🎊 Events
🚨 AI Strategy Built for 2026 Scrutiny
March 5 | 11 AM - 6 PM ET | Virtual Event
Executive patience for AI experiments is running out. Join DJ Sampath, SVP of AI Software and Platform at Cisco, and Diane Igoche, Director of Agentforce Governance at Salesforce, as they reveal how enterprise teams protect budgets and build repeatable paths to ROI.
🔥 The Behind-the-Scenes Performance Fixes That Turn Clicks Into Conversions
March 10–11 | Virtual Event
Marketers lose money every day from slow first loads and never see the real cause. At Cloudways Bootcamp, experts will tear down real production sites live and show you exactly what’s killing conversion rate before your offer even appears. If you’re buying traffic, this is the intel you never get.
Advertise with Us
Wanna put out your message in front of over 50,000 best marketers and decision makers?
We are concerned about everything DTC and its winning strategies. If you liked what you read, why not join the 50k+ marketers from 13k+ DTC brands who have already subscribed? Just follow this.
At ScaleUP, we care about our readers and want to provide the best possible experience. That's why we always look for ways to improve our content and connect with our audience. If you'd like to stay in touch, be sure to follow us EVERYWHERE🥰
Thanks for your support :) We'll be back again with more such content 🥳