BLKDG

10/15/2026

Most A/B tests don’t find a winner. One testing company looked at more than 127,000 of its customers’ experiments and found only about 12% beat the original.

That’s why picking what to test matters more than running lots of tests. If your store doesn’t have huge traffic, testing a new button color or a reworded headline will likely never give you a clear answer.

Bigger changes, like your offer, your pricing, or how a product page is laid out, are the ones your traffic can actually measure.

Shopify now has built-in A/B testing on the Grow plan and up. It’s a good place to start, with one catch: its storefront tests report conversion rate but not revenue. A change that gets more people to buy smaller orders can look like a win when it isn’t.

Two more things to watch. Some testing apps slow your site down for every visitor, not just the ones in the test. And calling a result early because the numbers look good after a few days is one of the easiest ways to make a bad decision. Decide when the test ends before it starts.

Full breakdown here: https://www.blkdg.com/blog/ecommerce-ab-testing/

Want help figuring out what’s worth testing on your store? Schedule a Growth Audit with BLKDG.

Ecommerce A/B testing on Shopify: what Rollouts Experiments test and report, how much traffic a test needs, and when a third-party tool earns its place.

10/08/2026

🚀 The new Hollis.com is live! 🎉

BLKDG partnered with Huish Outdoors to rebuild the Hollis homepage and launch a dedicated landing page for the Hollis Custom Rig Builder (CRIB), the only custom BCD builder of its kind.

Hollis has spent 40 years engineering technical diving equipment for cave explorers, research divers, and instructors in 70+ countries. Their new site now works the same way their gear does.

What launched:
→ A homepage built around the diver’s real problem: most gear is engineered for the average diver, and Hollis customers dive at the edge
→ A CRIB landing page that walks divers through three configurations (single tank, double tank, sidemount), every component of the rig, and a three-step process from build to in-person fitting
→ Clear paths to 600+ authorized dealers worldwide, so divers move from browsing to a fitted rig

The site now does what a good dealer does: names the problem, shows the system, and sends the diver to the right next step.

Congratulations to the Huish Outdoors and Hollis teams on the launch! It was a privilege to build this with a brand trusted on some of the most demanding dives in the world. 🤿 🌊

👉 Take a look: https://www.hollis.com/

10/01/2026

A Klaviyo segment doesn't send anything. It's a set of rules for who belongs in a group. Whether those people actually get an email depends on how the segment is connected to your campaigns and flows.

That's where a lot of accounts go wrong without anyone noticing. Segments don't check whether someone signed up for your emails unless you tell them to, so a segment can quietly include people who never opted in. A new automated flow built on a segment that already has people in it won't send to any of them. And a segment built on Shopify order tags that get added after checkout will stay empty, because those tags never make it into Klaviyo.

Sending to people who stopped opening your emails has a cost too. Inbox providers notice, and your emails start landing in spam for everyone.

Get the basics connected first: consent, who to leave out, and the flows your purchase data should be feeding. The advanced segments only pay off once those are in place.

Full breakdown here: https://www.blkdg.com/blog/klaviyo-segmentation/

Want it run on your account? Schedule a Growth Audit.

Klaviyo segmentation that feeds your flows: consent conditions, daily updates, segment triggers, re-entry, and the sunset, VIP, and RFM segments.

09/23/2026

A good ad account review should give you numbers you can check yourself, not opinions.

"Your account is set up wrong" is hard to act on. "You're missing 60% of the searches you could be showing up for because your budget runs out" is something you can fix.

We wrote a guide to reviewing a Google Ads account using Google's own rules. A few things stood out. Google's account scores are mostly a measure of how many of its suggestions you've accepted, not how well your ads are doing.

Some common setups count the same customer more than once, which makes your results look better than they are. And your daily budget isn't a hard cap. Google can spend up to twice that amount on a busy day.

If your numbers are off, every decision built on them is off too. Get the tracking right first, then cut wasted spend, then adjust the rest.

Full breakdown here: https://www.blkdg.com/blog/ppc-audit/

A PPC audit is a sequence of documented checks, not an opinion. Where to look in Google Ads, what a bad answer looks like, and what to ignore.

09/17/2026

Your Shopify and Klaviyo retention numbers don't agree. Neither of them is wrong. They're just measuring different things.

We traced the retention stats everyone quotes ("5% retention lift = 25-95% profit," "acquiring a customer costs 5x more than keeping one") back to their sources. Three of the four have no source at all.

We also ran the real math on what a repeat rate lift is actually worth, and broke down exactly where Shopify and Klaviyo disagree on returning customers, cohort retention, CLV, and RFM.

If you've never stress-tested your retention reporting, start here.

Read the full breakdown: https://www.blkdg.com/blog/retention-marketing-dtc/

Want us to look at your setup? BLKDG's team runs free Growth Audits. Schedule yours and find out what your numbers actually say.

Most retention marketing statistics don't survive a look at their source. Here's what's actually measurable, with the arithmetic and the vendor definitions.

09/09/2026

AEO and GEO are not a new discipline. They never were. Google confirmed it in writing this July: this is SEO, running on the same ranking and quality systems as everything else. The industry keeps rebranding the same anxiety, and each rebrand is treated as a revolution that makes everything before it obsolete.

But four real controls now decide if your store shows up in AI search, and none of them are about content. A store can do everything right on the content side and still be invisible because of one setting nobody checked.

☑️ A new Search Console setting gates your store's AI visibility entirely, and it inherits from parent properties
☑️ Shopify's default robots.txt blocks the exact pages AI answers need to cite you
☑️ Cloudflare changes its AI crawler defaults on September 15
☑️ Three other switches get confused with each other constantly, and getting one wrong can make your store invisible with zero warning in your rankings report

We broke down all four, what Shopify already handles, and the exact order to check them in. Link below!

Want us to run this audit on your store? Schedule a Growth Audit.

Generative engine optimization for Shopify: what Google documents, the four controls that gate AI search visibility, and how to measure citations.

09/03/2026

Most ecommerce loyalty programs get designed backwards. The app gets picked first, and the question of which customer behaviors you're actually willing to pay for gets answered later, if at all.

The default outcome of an unmanaged program is a subsidy. Your heaviest buyers redeem rewards for purchases they were already going to make, and the profit has to come from somewhere else in the customer base.

The peer-reviewed research on this is consistent: the actual return lives in your light and moderate buyers, not your top decile.

Our latest breakdown runs the effective discount math across seven DTC loyalty programs, traces four of the most-cited retention statistics back to their original sources (most don't hold up), and walks through what Shopify's platform gates actually decide for checkout redemption, tiering, and B2B programs.

If your program is running on vibes instead of margin math, this is worth the read: https://www.blkdg.com/blog/ecommerce-loyalty-program/

08/26/2026

Out of office tomorrow. The whole BLKDG team is headed outside!

Tomorrow is our annual Get Outside Day event. The team is stepping away from screens to spend the day outdoors together. We'll be back Friday, ready to reply to emails and messages. ☀️

08/20/2026

On August 26, Shopify shuts off the Additional Scripts field for every non-Plus store. No grace period, no warning banner.

Checkout won't break. Orders keep processing like normal. That's the problem: your Google Ads and GA4 conversion tags, pixels, and affiliate tracking go dark the same day, silently. Ad platforms don't know the difference between "no conversions" and "broken tracking," so they optimize on garbage until someone notices the ROAS report looks wrong two weeks later.

If you're on Basic, Shopify, or Advanced and anyone has ever pasted tracking code into checkout settings, audit it this week. Full breakdown and a step-by-step fix in the link below. 👇

https://www.blkdg.com/blog/your-shopify-conversion-tracking-dies-silently-on-august-26th/

The Aug 26 Shopify deadline will not break your checkout. It will break your conversion tracking, and you will not notice for two weeks.

08/14/2026

Is your email program actually converting, or are you about to pay more to underperform in a second inbox?

Klaviyo wants to be your full CRM now: email, SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, push, all in one stack. But a new channel doesn't create revenue. It multiplies whatever program you already have, good or bad.

We wrote up why most brands should fix their flows and offer before adding a channel, and how to know when a new channel is actually worth the spend.

Full breakdown: https://www.blkdg.com/blog/you-do-not-have-an-email-problem-you-can-fix-with-sms/