How Mars Men Use Landing Page and Offer Testing to Drive Ecommerce Growth With Juan Cruz

Juan Cruz is the Head of E-commerce at Mars Men, a nine-figure direct-to-consumer brand that raised a $27.5 million Series A. He leads conversion optimization, landing page testing, and offer testing efforts for the company.

Here's a glimpse of what you'll learn

- Why CRO is a decision-making framework — not just a way to find winners — and how it protects high-volume brands from expensive mistakes

- How to structure landing page tests: when to run a standard A/B test vs. duplicating a Meta campaign with a new angle or format

- Why ad-side metrics (CPA, ROAS) don't always align with on-site CRO results, and how to manage that disconnect cross-functionally

- How to evaluate offer tests properly by tracking retention metrics over 35–90 days, not just front-end conversion rate

- Why running only one offer test at a time leads to cleaner reads and better decisions

- The hidden cost of redesigns: how a full rebrand that looked better actually hurt conversion rate by 10% until content was isolated from the re-skin

- How daily communication between CRO, paid media, and retention teams is essential once tests go into production

In this episode…

Raphael Paulin Daigle interviews Juan Cruz, Head of E-commerce at Mars Men, a nine-figure D2C brand that raised a $27.5M Series A. They deep-dive into landing page testing, offer testing, how to reconcile CRO metrics with paid media metrics, why CRO acts as insurance against costly mistakes, and the importance of isolating variables when running tests.

Resources mentioned in this episode

- Intelligems

- Triple Whale

- Meta Ads

- Shopify

Quotable Moments

> "CRO apart from creating successful tests is a framework to make decisions, and once you get to a certain scale, mistakes get really expensive really fast."

> "CRO or what we do here is not just the winning test but the failed test that didn't end up in production."

> "I'm surprised almost every month about the results that CRO can bring — not just positive, but also catching the negatives."

> "We demonstrated that the new website doesn't convert 2% worse than the old one — a non-inferiority test."

> "If it works, it's amazing and everyone is happy, but if it doesn't, you have no clue what happened. So that's why it's important to test one thing at once."

> "Do you want to be really sure that you're making more money in 12 months, or do you want to move fast and at least be directionally correct in two months?"

Action Steps

1. Treat CRO as a risk-management framework first: before shipping any change at scale, validate it with statistics to avoid costly rollbacks.

2. When testing a new angle or offer that requires new creatives, duplicate your Meta campaign and send it to the new landing page rather than running a site-wide A/B test — then evaluate whether you hit your efficiency targets.

3. Limit offer tests to one at a time so you can get a clean read on the impact; run concurrent tests only on content elements like images or copy.

4. After launching an offer test, wait at least 35–40 days (ideally two to three billing cycles) before making a rollout decision, and check retention metrics — not just front-end conversion rate.

5. Set up daily or weekly cross-functional syncs between your CRO, paid media, and retention teams, and log every experiment launched so all stakeholders have visibility.

6. When running a redesign, isolate the re-skin from content changes and test them separately — if the combined version underperforms, run a non-inferiority test to confirm the visual update alone doesn't hurt conversion rate before shipping.

Episode Transcript

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 00:00

In the last episode, we heard from Johnny Hickey, and we talked about how he helped grow a parallel brand perfect white tease to eight figures. Now, today, get ready. I'm chatting with Juan Cruz, the head of e -commerce at Mars Men, and nine -figure D2C brand who also happened to have raised a $27 .5 million series A just a few months ago.

Now, today we're going to be talking about a very exciting topic for me, which is landing pages and offer testing. Now, I'm your host, Raphael Paulin Daigle, and I'm the founder of SplitBase. This is Minds of Commerce.

Now, of course, this episode is brought to you by SplitBase. And at SplitBase, we help leading eight and nine figure brands, such as Dr. Squatch, Hyperice, and Amica, grow through customer -focused conversion optimization programs. Our program's pinpoint exactly where your website is losing money, and then, well, we help you fix it. The result, you get increased conversions, higher AOV, reduced acquisition costs, and then, well, more money, which in return allows you to scale advertising profitably. Now, if you want to learn more about how we can help you grow through conversion optimization, go to splitface .com to request a proposal today and learn more about how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend. All right, Juan, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Juan Cruz: 01:30

Yeah, of course my pleasure Raphael yeah,

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 01:33

Yeah, now, as you know, this podcast is all about going deep and dissecting a couple of key growth strategies so our listeners can get the most value right away. And you guys have been doing a lot of things very well. You've scaled really quickly to nine figures. It's for sure a D2C success story so far. And one of the main things that have helped me get to where you are today has been conversion optimization, landing page testing and offer testing. Right? So now, since you're kind of leading those efforts, can you tell us a bit more like why is it important for you guys? I know there are some brands that it's a bit like an afterthought, but What type of growth has it led for you guys and why is it so important to focus on those things?

Juan Cruz: 02:23

At the at the end of the day, I think like CRO apart from from creating successful tests is a framework to make decisions and Once you get to a certain scale Mistakes get really expensive really fast. So we try to at least and Mars Men we try to like make every decision that we introduced into into the page validated with statistics And then on landing pages, we grab the framework from CRO, the part of research and checking out heat maps and analytics and all that stuff, conversion rate, and we make a decision based on that.

So, of course, I wouldn't say we grew that fast in that big because of me and CRO, but I think it was a pretty big part of it. Creating landing pages based on specific angles, personas, and then we can discuss a couple of... full tests that we launched that were pretty successful.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 03:21

Awesome. So I think the the first place I'd love to the first thing I'd love to talk about is just when it comes to landing pages. So where do you start? Right? So you you know, there's there's obviously I think a couple different school of thoughts here where obviously At the end of the day, everybody would love to be testing everything. We know we can't test everything, a million landing pages at once. So, I think my question for you is, what is this strategy? What do you test first? You've talked about offer testing. Is that what's most important? Are the angles most important? How do you think through all those questions that pops internally and prioritize what you want to test?

Juan Cruz: 04:04

So I think there are two different types of landing page testing. The first one would be, I want to change the main image on the about the fold and that would be a normal label test that we do every single day. But then when you create a completely new angle or you change the format completely, instead of like an advertorial, you start doing listicles, then it's probably better to just like duplicate the ads on meta.

That's why at least here we do a lot of collaboration between creative and paid. Make sure that the creatives and the ads speak about the landing base that we are speaking like 10 reasons why your this natural testosterone support is better than TRT or like consider it before going to TRT. You cannot speak about the product directly and say 50 % off because then there's no coherence between the person is probably a tofu person, he doesn't know about the product so the ad needs to speak to that landing page.

So it's pretty collaborative and I like to think it in two ways. First one, normal AB test and then you want to test another concept or angle or format, it would just duplicate the campaign and you can get At the end of the day, what we hear about is incremental spend that at efficiency.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 05:28

Can you tell me a bit more about how you guys run those campaigns, because this is probably one of the questions I get the most often, which is, you know, like, okay, do we just run the test in Intelligems or in the testing tool, or do we run it, or do we, like, if we have a new landing page, just split the URL inside of Meta. I think the concern sometimes is, hey, if we go in Meta and we duplicate our campaigns, You know, well, then we're losing some of the learning.

The spend might not be even because of how meta chooses to spend. So how do you deal in the cases where you do choose when you have this new angle, this new offer, this new page that requires new creatives or that requires you to test the page inside of meta? How do you handle that? How do you make sure the data is clean or how do you set up the test? So it can actually run efficiently.

Juan Cruz: 06:20

Yeah, so I think of tests as a more like a general type of thing. It's not like I don't necessarily need to split the traffic. At the end of the day, what we're trying to just like create an MVP, so to speak, to validate is the ideas valid.

Sometimes you need statistics like CRO or AB testing. and sometimes you need to duplicate the campaign, grab the best stats on that angle and then create a new asset or a campaign on meta and just let it rip.

And again, the idea here is to look for that incremental spend that would have not happened otherwise. So it really depends on the test, but if we're trying a new offer or a new angle or a new template, it's basically duplicating whatever else we have and sending them to a new landing page, like no, no AB test so to speak, but it's at the end of the day a test in which you're trying to see if something works.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 07:17

yeah, and at the end of the day when you're doing those duplicates instead of just like Comparing it to the others the final question it sounds like is Does this offer work? Are we hitting our targets when it comes to our metrics and what we're looking to see is that correct?

Juan Cruz: 07:32

Yeah, exactly. Can we spend more than we did in the past at a specific efficiency?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 07:38

Yeah You know, I think a hot topic in CRO is you know ad metrics versus you know, website and metrics. And by that, I mean, you know, sometimes you're gonna see a winner in intelligenms or in your AB testing tool and, you know, that test looks great. But, you know, when you're looking at it from the ad side, most of, you know, hopefully, you know, that story is the same on the ad side, but sometimes it doesn't look as pretty in your ad metrics, can you tell us a bit more about that and how do you deal with those situations?

Juan Cruz: 08:20

So when we do CRO, there's an inherent limitation is that we cannot really see the impact directly of whatever test we're running into the ad account or like CPA and Roas. We suppose that there's a direct correlation between whatever we see on the intelligems or a CRO platform and CPAs but that doesn't always work at the end of the day.

It made this a complex algorithm and they react to changes differently and I have one example that happened beginning of the year I believe in which we created a test. and we had like a 25 % increase in average revenue per user and that was coming through a 40 % increase in AOV and then a decrease in conversion rate by around 10 to 15%.

So the logic would be, okay, if I go into meta ads after the test is in production, we would see a decreased CPA but then an increased ROAS, right? I'm sorry, an increased CPA because we have lower conversion rates but then an increased ROAS because we have a higher AOV. And that didn't happen. We ended up seeing an increase in CPA of 50 % and then the ROAS stopped making sense. And this is like an hypothesis, but it probably met the sees that you're having like a better ROAS and they're starting to charge more because they probably think you can. That's a little bit a conspiracy theory. The other can be that they punish websites with worse commercial rate. So we ended up end up paying a higher like CPM or even like CTR so we ended up not rolling out the change even though in intelligence we had like a 25 % increase in average revenue producer.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 10:08

Now, how do you reconcile those metrics? Because I think what I see often is team's work in silos, right? So what does the communication, look like between, say, the media team and the testing team, or are they the same teams? Or is it the CRO team's responsibility to also look at CPAs on the ad side? How do you reconcile all of that? Because it's a lot of metrics. It's a lot of different people and tasks. So communication has to be there, but how do you guys handle it?

Juan Cruz: 10:44

It's easy when you when you're an internal person doing CRO rather than an agency just because you have direct contact with the pay media team I speak almost daily with the head of growth the head of paid media and even the head of retention because we know that changes on the website have repercussions both on the retention side as well as a paid media side and I personally check Triple whale every day to see how CPAs went that day. So yeah it's a matter of like speaking about it often daily being thorough on the commentation and sharing when I look at an experimentous launched. uh what that experiment is about and yeah for like the whole company to have visibility of what we're doing on the CRO website site

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 11:32

And just for our listeners, Kind of be clear on this as well, right? Like obviously if you're duplicating a campaign and you're testing a new landing page, it is a lot easier to track, you know, kind of where your CPAs are heading. But let's say you're running, you know, four. A B. Test on the website at the same time. They're not new landing pages. They're just typical A .B. Test. Like this is a case where correct me if I'm wrong, but I would say we can't really draw a correlation that much between CPA increases and maybe four or five tests running on the mean website. Is that correct? Is that how you see it as well?

Juan Cruz: 12:08

yeah exactly especially when you're becoming that optimized because of the end of the day I was not the first CRO person in the past the people that worked here for years know about CRO so it's difficult to Extract like a 20 % increase in conversion rate from a test just because I mean even shopify gives you already like pretty good templates when we're speaking about like three to five percent which at the end of the day It's a lot of money for companies that make millions every month

That small decrease like or increase is very difficult to detect on something so volatile like CPAs on metads so we like take a We have faith that the actual like CRO test then gets translated into into actual CPA results, but it's difficult to like demonstrate causality and like Yeah, it's it's just like really hard The only case would be if we have like a really really really big impact like the test that I was mentioning But if it's like a three to five percent you need to like trust that That change then gets translated into actual CPAs, but it's difficult to have like a counterfactual what would have happened on CPAs if we would have not had the change from the test

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 13:28

I think people have to remember as well, right? Like your site wide conversion rate, your CPAs, whatever metric you're looking at, when you're looking at those global metrics, unless, like you said earlier, you're testing an isolated funnel, one landing page with a specific set of ads.

There's a million factors that can contribute to those increases and decreases on a daily basis. And likely will be a waste of time to really try to isolate and try, and I think it's probably just impossible to fully isolate, right? What caused what in those cases.

And that's why a bee testing exists. And that's why sometimes, like you said, we want to test landing pages individually in their own funnels and some of those things more isolated.

I'm curious about offer testing because, you know, I've seen so many of your landing pages and I've seen a lot of your tests as well just going through the site over time. You are doing a lot of offer testing for first time customers, for subscribers, different free gifts. How do you think about offer testing? And what I mean by that is one, how often do you test your offers?

Second, How do you decide or figure out what to bundle into an offer test? Because we just see gifts, gifts, gifts, gifts. And then third, how do you measure? Because of course you've got upfront conversions. But that's not probably the best way to measure the success of an offer test. So tell me more.

Juan Cruz: 15:07

so First intelligems has this post test window in which you can see the impact of the test after the test ends, which is pretty cool and I mean To be fair, I have it pretty easy just because we are mostly a subscription brand. We don't offer a one time purchase.

I know that that was a test that was run before I was here. And I think that one of the main reasons that the brand grew so fast. But yeah, definitely we play around with pricing with what to show on the front end with which gifts to show.

And then it's really important to have communication on the retention side because You may have a test that it increases, uh, conversion rate on the front end, but somehow ends up damaging our retention. So we use post - test metrics from intelligems, and then I'm having, again, a weekly talk, um, with the retention team to see how the tests are impacting the, uh, the retention side of things.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 16:16

Amazing and then can you tell us a bit more about how do you decide what goes into those offers like how How how do those decisions get made how many different types of offers do you test at once? What's kind of that process?

Juan Cruz: 16:32

Yeah. For offers specifically, I try to be pretty conservative. I don't like to run more than one at a time. just because I want to have a clear read of the impact of if you're adding a free gift. We do run concurrent tests on like content things like images on the PDP or changing reviews or adding or or be moving one or two elements but when I do or when we do offer testing we like to yeah just like keep it keep it simple just run only one and at least from from when I started at Mars Men I think one of the big value that I Brought to the table is that we did what we didn't ship we tried a lot of a lot of offers that most of them didn't end up seeing the light just because we tested it and showed that it decreased conversion rate or it increases tax So yeah CRO or what we do here what we do is not just like the winning test but the failed test that didn't end up in production

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 17:35

yeah totally and I want to get to that in a minute Just back on the offer testing, I know one of the questions I get often and that, you know, it seems like you work through it as well. Let's say you do this post -test analysis for a new offer, right? Let's say, you know, okay, you've got that new intelligems feature that allows you to look at metrics post -test for a specific period of time. How long? of a period, are you looking at in order to evaluate those tests? Knowing that an upfront offer may impact churn in the first month, maybe in the second, maybe in the third month, right? So there's a lot of variables at play. So which metric specifically do you look at over what period in order to decide if an offer successful or not?

Juan Cruz: 18:22

It's a matter of balance. Do you want to be really sure that you're making more money in 12 months or do you want to move fast and at least be directionally correct in two months, right? It really depends on the billing cycle. We do 30 days. So I would say after like the 35 or 40 day, I can have a pretty good understanding on what is the impact on retention rate. Ideally, we do like two or three months. but we usually make the decision pretty fast around like the first or the second rebuild if it's like a really important thing.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 18:58

Hmm. Okay, super interesting. With a couple of minutes that we've got left, I definitely want to talk about, you know, the other side of CRO that people don't talk about, which is what doesn't work, right? You said earlier that at the end of the day, conversion optimization is also like insurance, right? It's to make sure that you're testing things that aren't going to be mistakes. I think that's one side of CRO people forget. People think, oh, let's test new things and see if it makes us better. But the truth is, you know, most of the time you want to test to make sure at a certain scale that you're not releasing something that's going to be worse. So, can you talk about what are some of the things that, you know, doesn't work and why it's been so important to you guys?

Juan Cruz: 19:45

yeah, so I'm always surprised that even like a really small thing have either a positive or a negative impact. So again, when you reach a certain volume of sales every month, mistakes get really expensive really fast. For example, we changed the description of the product and we seen an increase in conversion rate of like 5 % but then we also because of a sale we changed a little pale that says instead of like subscribing say 50 % off for life we did it for today and then that change got implemented just because and then when we kind of like retested the past version we discovered that this new version decreased conversion rate by like minus 3 % so Yeah, I'm surprised almost every month about the results that CRO can bring. Not just like positive, but also catching the negatives.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 20:43

And I'm guessing that a lot of those changes you generally think they're going to be better. Like, it looks better, it's going to be more clear. Like, it potentially follows best practices and then it just doesn't win. Or makes it worse.

Juan Cruz: 20:57

Yeah, I mean, yeah. Who wants to introduce a change to a website that does worse, right? One really good example is that we kind of rebranded, so to speak. We make the website more modern. We added a couple of sections just because we were just building the page from scratch. and it ended up hurting conversion rate by like 10 % so what we did is like we took out everything we did only the re -skin with the same content and that ended up it was like the non -inferiority test basically we demonstrated that the new website doesn't convert 2 % worse than the old one so then the worst part about changing a lot of stuff at the same time is that If it works, it's amazing and everyone is happy, but if it doesn't, you have no clue what happened. So that's why it's important to test one thing at once. Slow is good n CRO.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 21:57

yeah, yeah, I agree. It always reminds me, you know, and I can talk about this test because it's one of the case studies, but you know, we ran this new PDP test for Dr. Squatch at one point. That looked like a million years better. It was a reskin, but then they were like, you know, a bunch of elements that every team wanted to add to the PDPs and it completely flopped, right? Like it was, you would think it was better in every way possible. And yet, you know, we test it, and it would have cost a brand like more than 100 grand a month. And if not more, over time, the brand was still a bit small at that time. I think it was in our first years. And that's a perfect example, right? Like, everybody was excited about it. Everybody wanted to push it, but at the end of the day, AB testing proved that, well, we still need to iterate on it a couple times before we can actually release something that works. And yes, we eventually got to a point where we had a test that generated more money.

Juan Cruz: 22:55

Yeah, exactly. And part about changing a lot of things at once is that you spend so many resources creating something that you don't know that it works. I'm biased. I like CRO. I like statistics. But yeah, usually we try to isolate the change. If we make multiple changes, make sure that they are following the same hypothesis. If you do social proof, you can add stars and then another thing, but everything around this, it's pointing to the same hypothesis. Because again, if it works, we're super happy, but if it doesn't, we have no clue where to start.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 23:32

100 % agree. We share the same philosophy. We've been chatting with Juan Cruz from Mars Men. Now Juan, where can people learn more about you or like I don't know if they want to follow? I don't know if you're right on LinkedIn and people want to follow you or want to learn more about the brand perhaps? Where should they go?

Juan Cruz: 23:52

Yeah, for the brand, mengotomars .com. Follows Zach Stuck on Twitter if you if you haven't he's pretty active and for myself I I need to start posting more often on LinkedIn and on on Twitter to I just Yeah, I need to like find the time to do it, but uh Yeah, and the the the our the handle is like JCGIUSTO, which is my last name

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 24:19

Awesome. Juan, thank you Juan. Thank you so much for coming on the show. That was a fantastic chat. Really, really excited for everything we've discussed and to get this live to our audience.

Juan Cruz: 24:34

Yeah, thank you for inviting me Raphael. It's it's it's been amazing super fun.