Conversion Research is using research to improve your conversion model. Conversion Optimization is all the rage nowadays but is it just a buzzword or are people using it correctly.
It goes without saying the first thing is understanding your customers, and using their data to drive your decision making. So what happens if you are a new business and you don’t have customers? You need to work on customer development and acquistion first.
Figure out what you want your target audience to be and then talk to them. You can’t have your target audience be new parents and then sit with your marketing team which has no parents let alone new parents and try to figure out why you aren’t getting any orders.
If you are not talking to and making the effort to understand your customers, you are already setting yourself up for failure. What if you talk to your perceived target audience only to find out that you were wrong? Pivot to the right target audience many well known companies have done that and it’s not a big deal.
I am going to pivot away from Conversion Research and talk about Customer Need Pivot in Lean Startup Methodology.
A pivot in Lean Startup is a structured move away from or course correcting to test and design a new hypothesis about the product, business model or growth engine. Customer Need Pivot is when you get to know your target audience and realize your product isn’t really for them. At times when you get to know your customers, you find out about another potential problem they have and you get an idea for a new startup. It pays to get to know your customers, talk to your customers.
Ok, so back to Conversion Optimization and Research, Peep Laja talks about his tried and tested ResearchXL Model to optimize conversions. ResearchXL consists of six frameworks which teach you how to use data to improve your conversion model.
Frameworks for Conversion Research
Six frameworks are
- Heuristic Analysis
- Technical Analysis
- Qualitative Surveys
- Web Analytics Analysis
- Copy Testing
- User Testing
- Mouse Tracking Analysis
What is Heuristic Analysis?
Heuristic Analysis is an evaluation method that let’s one or more experts compare a product’s digital design to a list of predefined principles. An expert’s opinion of what your digital design is good at and what needs to change. Heuristic Analysis is the difference between me and a weatherperson looking at the sky and predicting if it will rain. My guess might be right and i would probably be looking at the same thing but the weatherperson has years of experience and his guess will be supported by his knowledge.
So what factors might an expert look for?
- Relevancy: Does the content answer user questions?
- Clarity: Is the content clear and simple or does it need to be simplified some more?
- Value: Is the user motivated looking at this content or do we need to increase motivation?
- Friction: Is this content causing doubts, hesitancy or uncertainties?
- Distraction: What on the page is drawing the customers attention away from the CTA?
What is Technical Analysis?
Technical Analysis is looking for bugs or issues in your website. You look at issues like site speed and if your content is tailored more to a specific browser or device. Web Core Vitals are a nifty way of looking at this. You can see if your website has issues in the content that causes it to load slower. A reminder here, Core Web Vitals are Largest Contextual Paint, First Input Delay and Cumulative Shift Layout. LCP needs to be under 2.5 secs for best results, FID needs to be below 100 ms and CLS needs to be less than 0.1. You can read more here.
What do you mean by Qualitative Surveys?
Average eCommerce conversion rate is 4.31%, so understandably everyone who comes to your site isn’t buying something. You want to find out why, you set up surveys on your website: On Page survey and Exit Survey. Most people would say these surveys are annoying and they are right but the data you get out of them is invaluable. Send out NPS and Customer Satisfaction Surveys. Find out what customers liked about your website, what they didn’t like.
Web Analytics Analysis?
Learn Google Analytics, it’s essential for your strategy that you know what impact it will have on your website. You can use Google Analytics to learn what your users are doing, where they are going and where you can improve. Of course, you also need to learn how to understand the data, just having data is useless.
Of course before you think about using the data, you need to make sure it’s accurate. Google Analytics needs to be set up correctly and the tracking needs to be updated periodically with Google Updates. 10 to 1 if you think your Google Analytics tracking is good and doesn’t have holes you are wrong.
Why Copy Testing?
Copy Testing is putting your copy in front of your target audience and monitoring their reaction to it. You could focus group your copy and see what your target audience thinks before you invest time and money into it.
Why User Testing?
You need to find out if your website is intuitive and easy to use. You get a group of laymen together and you give them a specific task and you let them use the website and gather insights from their usage. User testing shows you how real people use your website. Tasks you assign them can differ, for instance assign one to place an order, one to search the best coffee maker on your site.
What is Mouse Tracking Analysis?
We can record what people do with their mouse and clicks if they are using mobile phones and use that to drive insights. You need a good sample size before you start making any changes. At least 2000 – 3000 page views per design.
You can use heatmaps, heatmaps include click maps and scroll maps.
Click maps show you where on your site people are clicking the most. For example if there is an image that people are clicking on but there is no link behind it, you need to add a link behind it. Scroll maps show you how deep people are going on your website. You can add better eye paths and visual cues accordingly. Another amazing thing is user Session Recording, you can record individual customers on their website and see what they are doing.
You can use Hotjar or MS Clarity for all the above. Both of them are super easy to setup and use.
Now obviously you shouldn’t be spending huge amounts on analysis, spend enough to make sure your data is enough for you to work with it not to much. Be smart and work on gathering and using insights from your data to improve. Invest in Conversion Research to improve your conversion rate.
Part of my series on the CXL Institute Growth Marketing Mini Degree. See more posts below:
