Conversion Research in Action ft. CXL Institute (2)<> Review

This is Part 5/12 of learnings that I gained from CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Minidegree.

Continuing with the ResearchXL blueprint, in this segment I will try to finish the remaining setup that you need while you do conversion research. So let’s get right into it.

• Now that you know about survey design theory, its time to send customer surveys via email. Its quintessential to survey them right after they purchase something, like a day or a week later. Anything more than that will give you improper results. Giving some incentives after they finish survey will lead them to stick to it more often. You need at least 100–200 responses to qualify it as a data-set. Ask around 7–10 questions. Don’t ask anything nice to know and not crucial questions. Keep it open ended, ask about who they are, industry they belong to, what made them signup, how your product changed their life, Did they consider any alternatives, biggest challenge while purchasing, and any other feedback or suggestions they might want to throw at you. Analyzing the data that you gather takes time. It’s all manual labor. Now with that, you know your customer pain-points. Additionally, you can create a word cloud based on frequently used words from the responses. It helps you test your hypothesis on what customer wants and what they are getting.
• Before going out and looking for some data, its always wise to know more about your customers from the front line staff that deals with them on a regular basis. Ask them about top 10–20 questions they have to answer every time and also note their answers as that can be used in copyrighting.
• Another great way to survey is to ask people questions while they are on your site. It’s called web and exit surveys. You can put a pop up box when they are about to leave your site and ask them about what made them change your mind if they didn’t buy any services or the products.
• A great resource you can dig in is live chat transcripts. If you have a support button that allows customers to chat with support team then they must have transcripts stored as well. Check the most asked pre-sales questions and try to address them under FAQ’s. You can go through the pages that they don’t understand, and the challenge they face while using your service.
• Next, you need to do user testing. Mind that usability testing and user testing are different. Here you get the idea about bottleneck faced by customers when you do a successful user testing. Sometimes GA will let you know about the pages having some issues and to know what you need to test that with different users. It is to know if the existing solution that you provide has any shortcomings. It’s quite simple, all you do is observe how different people behave or use your service and try to spot abnormal behaviors, or similar patterns. See if you can fix that behavior by throwing in some pop up box or something to guide users around your web service. Do it when you start to optimize a website, it doesn’t needs to be online. Additionally, always do it after you change a critical part of your website or while you add some new features. A sample size between -15 should suffice.
• Mouse tracking is another key variable that you can focus on to get more useful insights. Also avoid heat maps as it generally doesn’t give you much information. Here you want to look at clickmaps along with attention maps to identify most interested items on a web page and even the distraction. It will also let you know where people clicked thinking it was a link but it turned out to be something else.
• Next comes google analytics health check. Here you basically see if your GA is correctly set up. Ask questions like does it collect the data that you need, are there any holes? Nearly all the analytics setup are wrong and that would be the case here too. So do profile setup, traffic filtering, goal and funnel configuration, page and process instrumentation done as fast as possible. Preferably before your next marketing strategy goes live.
• Start making funnels where ever you can. After you make one you will know the drop off points. You must probably setup a third party funnel visualization such as Dashrocks or something else that can give you more insights. Basically what you do next is optimize the page with most drop off rate.
• After that go to audience analytics. Not the usual page visits, or unique number of visitors but the one that has geographic information like region, country that way you can know where your pages are ranking and you can prioritize on website translations in local language if needed. Also it helps in display advertising and you can know if its working or not. You also get information to what regions are not at all covered but you do sell services over there so now you can focus your attention towards that way.
• Configure internal site search. Its quite important. Also do avoid the google search powered results as they are often a huge dropping point for a site. Also turn on the site search tracking on Google analytics. Now you can know what people search on your site. The keywords they input and you can go on about optimizing for those and displaying them readily instead of putting those content somewhere hidden on secondary pages.
• Next you want to check is content reports. See what pages are bringing traffic but are not doing well. The ones with high CTR and equally high Bounce rate. Now optimize those or point users to a right direction. Another thing here is to check pages with high traffic and conversion. See how you can even increase traffic further as they are already a hit and might even fetch you new customers with minimal efforts.

So that was all about conversion research. I hop you gained some valuable insights on how to do it and its importance. I was very intrigued with google analytics and its power so I started Google Analytics beginners course first and skipped A/B testing mastery. I plan to complete both of them in the upcoming week. So till then take care and keep learning.

Read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4