CXL Institute CRO Minidegree Review Part 5
This is part 5/12 in my series reviewing the CXL Institute CRO Minidegree. I will be posting a new part every week.
CXL Institute offers some of the best online courses and industry-recognized certifications for those seeking to learn new technical marketing skills.
I was given an amazing opportunity to access and review one of their online courses, the Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Minidegree. For the next few weeks, I’ll be discussing the course content and what I think of it as I go through it. Here is part three! I am going to discuss my personal opinion about these topics. As a marketer of how to use them properly, I will also share some of my secrets.
Today we are going to talk about Conversion Research and Google Analytics 4. My favorite part is conversion research.
So.. what is conversion Research?
According to peep laja ( Founder of CXL Institute), “Conversion research is a systematic search for new and useful information about the user or customer behavior. It uses quantitative and qualitative methodologies to build hypotheses that can be tested within an applied framework, such as A/B testing. … Insight is something we can turn into a test hypothesis.”
This is a complete research-driven model. Your opinion doesn’t matter. I want to talk about this because I saw most marketers believe their opinion is the best, or they believe in their gut feelings. According to the Harvard business review, 85% of marketers trust their gut feelings, including Fortune 1000 companies. So every optimization project has to start with conversion research. It’s where you diagnose a website and figure out where and how it’s leaking money. Once we know that, we can go ahead and start plugging the holes.
What is conversion research methodology?
Generally, these three categories of conversion research.
- Experience-based assessment
- Site walkthroughs
- Heuristic analysis
- Usability analysis
- Qualitative research
- Online surveys with recent customers
- On-site polls
- Phone interviews
- Live chat transcripts
- Customer support insight
- User testing
- Quantitative research
- Web analytics analysis (e.g., Google Analytics and other quantified data tools like Adobe Analytics, KISSMetrics, MixPanel, Heap Analytics)
- Mouse tracking analysis
At CXL, they teach us Research Xl methodology. This is the easiest way to understand conversion research. So, let’s talk about research XL.
Image Credit CXL
- Heuristic analysis :
Heuristic evaluation is a thorough assessment of a website’s user interface. Its purpose is to detect usability issues that may occur when users interact with a website and identify ways to resolve them.
When we think about the design of a product, the first thought that comes to mind is how something looks:
- Is it eye-catching?
- Do the colors complement each other?
- Does it have the aesthetic appeal that will lure consumers in?
While all this is technically true for a good design, a great design needs to go the extra mile. How to achieve this?
Making sure your product/website/app not only looks awesome but also provides a seamless user experience. Now there are few things you need to ask yourself when you are doing Heuristic analysis.
- Relevance. Is my web page relevant to the product?
- Trust. Can I trust this website?
- Orientation. Where should I click? What do I have to do?
- Stimulants. Why should I do it right here and right now?
- Security. Is it secure here? How do I know my credit card secure here?
- Convenience. How complicated will it be?
- Confirmation. Did I do the right thing?
2. Mouse Tracking analysis: Mouse tracking is tracking a mouse or where people are clicking. Here we are going to identify two questions, mainly
- where people click and where they don’t (click maps),
- how far down they scroll on any given page (scroll maps)
This analysis will help you understand how much information you should provide on your landing page or the product page. This is the most common question. You will understand how much people are scrolling. If you see people are scrolling 10–20%, then there must be a problem in your hero section or headline. You need at least 2000 to 3000 data to make a decision. If you are a low-traffic site, then you use it, but make sure we need a minimum of 300 data to understand what’s going on the page.
3. Web Analytics Analysis: Now I see most people don’t even know how to use analytics to make data-driven decisions or don’t know how to implement google analytics properly. Proper implementation doesn’t mean you don’t know how to copy code and paste it to the website head section. I am talking about funnel creation, reporting dashboard creation, proper event tracking. Now you need to ask a few questions
- “Does it collect what we need?”
- “Can we trust this data?”
- “Where are the holes?”
- “Is there anything that can be fixed?”
- “Is anything broken?”
- “What reports should be avoided?”
Items you to review:
- Profile setup (configuration and admin)
- Filtering of traffic (agency, office, data cleaning)
- Goal and funnel configuration (key reports)
- Code review (on page analytics code)
- Bolt-ons: Inpage, Outbound, Scroll reach, Viewport, Other
- Page and process instrumentation (funnels, steps, forms)
- Any issues that would prevent Insight!
User Testing: Uses testing as a system to undercover the mind of your customer. When Google analytics says the page is leaking money, now user testing will help explain why it’s leaking money and what kind of problem users are facing when they land on this page.
When to run user testing on your website
- Whenever you start optimizing a new website
- When you’ve done a design makeover for a website, but before you make it live (note that when creating a brand new design, keep usability principles in mind from the get-go)
- Whenever you change a critical part of your website (check the checkout, change category filters, etc.).
The minimum number of people to conduct user testing with is five, and the maximum is 15.
4. Quantitative survey: There are two ways to conduct quantitative surveys. 1. Talk to customers on the phone 2. Email your customers and ask questions. The quantitative survey is also very important in your landing page optimization and copywriting. This is a true gold mine for you. You need to analyze at least 100 to 200 surveys for better results or if you are a new website, if only 100 people are brought from your site, ask at least ten people. Ten is always better than zero.
Now what kind of question you should ask to get better results. Ask open-ended questions. Not anything like, why is the United States a great nation? Ask questions like.
I recommend asking the following questions as they give the best Insight (all open-ended, free format), adjust the wording as you see fit:
- What can you tell us about yourself?
- What are you using [your product] for?
- How is your life better thanks to it?
- What made you sign up for our product / buy from us?
- Did you consider any alternatives to our product/buying from us? If so, which ones / how many?
- Which doubts and hesitations did you have before completing the purchase?
- What’s the one thing that nearly stopped you from buying from us?
- Which questions did you have but couldn’t find answers to on the website?
- What was your biggest challenge, frustration, or problem in finding the right product?
- Anything else you would like to tell us?
Technical analysis :
Its final stage is conducting a technical analysis after the website audit with heuristic analysis is completed in an attention-to-detail manner, ensuring that the website features and functionality conform to the updated requirements — optimization of the features and functionality that can be improved. According to the business requirements and a website you own, the technical analysis can vary greatly.
For example, sometimes, a coupon code is listed in a PPC ad for a specific e-commerce store that won’t work in real-time because of the lack of system updates regarding the newer coupon codes. Also, when the actual inventory in the warehouse doesn’t match the online catalog in your e-commerce store can result in significant delays because the customer doesn’t know the item was back-ordered and would possibly take a more extended period. Another example, when I added a task chair at costco.com to my cart, I didn’t see it out-of-stock until I got to the end of the checkout page, but it was also unexpected when I added it to ‘save for later,’ it was showing Out of Stock there. This is an example of friction.
This type of mistake will hurt your conversion. As a conversion researcher, it would help if you analyzed all of those things to produce better results.
This is all of today. I hope you are reading this. CXL is a great institute to learn marketing from industry experts. In the next part, I’ll cover the google tag manager.
This is part 5/12 in my series reviewing the CXL Institute CRO Minidegree. I will be posting a new part every week!