Using research to discover conversion optimization potential | #3 Review

A research-based approach to website optimization allows for a comprehensive and detailed understanding of your site’s growth potential.

We start where we left-off: the fourth and fifth lessons in the CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree elaborate on user research and apply them to website optimization. The two lessons introduce us to the C in CXL by setting the stage for cutting-edge conversion optimization expertise.

Peep Laja raises the question of optimizing optimization and gives a comprehensive answer in the four-part course “Research and Testing” and the conclusive “Conversion Research” course with 23 lessons on research tools related to CRO. In contrast to the short intro on post-campaign launch optimization in the “User-centric marketing” course, Laja clarifies that it is difficult and almost impossible to do testing with low-traffic websites. He states that you should have at least 500 transactions on your site to test conclusively, but first and foremost, understand that testing is a luxury of high traffic websites.

If you can test, you should avoid a few things: You do not improve your conversion rate by copying competitors — most of the time, they have no idea. To succeed and improve your conversion rate, you should rather identify the problems at hand, prioritize ideas, test solutions and iterate. Like the lean start-up approach of “build, measure, learn” or the growth hacking approach of “analysis, ideation, prioritization, and testing,” the CXL Testing Framework is also circular. It includes conducting research, building hypotheses, creating a treatment, testing the treatment, analyzing the results, and coming up with follow-up experiments. This article will focus on the first part: conducting research.

Conversion research as a discovery process

Focusing on the research, you design a discovery process; you first want to get to know your customer and your website’s problems to understand the situation. It would be best if you tried to get a clear understanding of your customer by finding out whose problem you are solving with your service or product. It is important to figure out what your customers need, what they think they want, and their reasons. Having answered that, you continue to find out how they are making their decisions. At which websites they take a look. And if they compare your site to them, what do they think of your offer? Having that perspective will allow you to see if the product or service you are selling is clearly different from others.

A step by step guide to assessing your website

After you better understand where your customer is coming from, you can broaden your view and look at your website. Your analysis should aim to find out where your site is leaking money. Seeing what customers are doing or not doing on your site will give you an idea about tests that could answer what treatment would increase actions you want to see. The “ResearchXL” Model includes 6 types of data that help to lay build foundation for great optimization decisions:

1. Heuristic Analysis: When starting to optimize conversions, it’s best to understand the user’s experience on your website. When auditing a website for experience, the four aspects to consider are 1. clarity, 2. friction, 3. anxiety, 4. distraction.
2. Technical Analysis: After doing a comprehensive heuristic analysis, it’s time to make sure everything is running smoothly from a technical standpoint. That includes finding out if all devices and browsers work and any differences across different devices. Lastly, it’s important to check page speed since that is an important factor for SEO and usability.
3. Digital Analytics: That step is all about finding out where the leaks are. It is important to take a close look at where people get stuck in the flow and are dropping off. It is the first step of fixing things and getting a perspective on what actions correlate with higher conversion.
4. Qualitative Research: This includes surveys and user testing and on-site polls. It helps you understand your buyer groups and the problems that they are solving. You get a better understanding of how they decide, holding them back, and what else they want to know.
5. User testing: User testing is another great way to get behavioral data. For successful user testing, it is important to invite testers who represent the target group. After sitting down with them, you give them a general or particular task they should accomplish on your site. You ask them to talk out loud while they are doing it. While it is important to see what they have to say, it is also important to see what they actually do — users do know that they are tested, and since people are nice, they want to please the test-giver. All in all, user testing shows you what is difficult to understand and what is difficult to do.
6. Mouse tracking analysis: To give you an impression of what’s important on your page, it is mandatory to look at users’ click and scroll behavior. Often this helps to see what visual hierarchy works. To get an even more comprehensive understanding, you can follow user behavior through session replays.

Building upon discovered problems and opportunities

As shown, we can use a broad tool-set to analyze our website and discover problems. Heuristic and usability analysis can be described as an “Experience-Based Assessment.” Then there are online surveys with customers who recently signed up or made a purchase as part of it, on-site polls, phone interviews, live chats analysis, and user testing, providing us with qualitative insights. Lastly, Google Analytics, mouse tracking, and screen recordings offer quantitative Data, which provide the opportunity to analyze actions. Of course, the amount of data generated with these methods and tools can be overwhelming if you do not know what to do with it. Therefore it is always good to know why some data is important, and you best know that by answering first what you will do with it.

It is only the first step to understand your customer and your website better. After discovering problems and opportunities to grow, you have to deliver tests that leverage your sites and lift zones’ growth and conversion potential. In the next article, we will take a closer look at the conversion optimization process’s delivery part, show what mistakes to avoid and how to prioritize ideas, set-up tests, and scale a conversion program.