Diving Deep into Conversion research with CXL Institute <> Review
This is Part 3/12 of learnings that I gained from CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Minidegree.
Running growth experiments
This week I tried to complete two courses under section two. First one was a talk on ResearchXL formula that acquaintance you with the basics of conversion research a specific formula determined by CXL institute to go on with what, how and when to optimize.
The another one is more towards implementation theory of ResearchXL, going deep into doing conversion research. Honestly, even for a single section you think that you have consumed too much of content and it is quite heavy that it takes a bit of time for you to sink in. CXL institute also takes care that you don’t forget what is taught by throwing a quiz to attempt and it does helps by keeping your doubts and nervousness at bay.
Research and testing | Peep Laja
A total of 4 videos (talks)that introduces you and help you understand the Research XL formula. So what exactly it is? Keep reading to know more about speeding up your growth with conversion optimization.
Let’s start with a little bit of background on Conversion Optimization. As a growth marketer, my responsibility would be to come up with an all rounder unicorn solution that helps skyrocket company revenue in one click. Well here’s how its done.
- The first point that Peep raised was on how do you optimize the process of optimization. You might think of answers such as making more effective changes by testing a landing page, or you pick the things that can be optimized faster then the others and hence reducing the time (efforts or work-hours) and cost to do some change, and some of you might even say experiment faster in order to get quick results, then look at the charts (numbers) and there you go optimizing your pages.
- Well, all the answers are correct, but how do you go on about actually doing it. Most of us follow a freely available checklist or might have come across the one that says 99 ways to optimize your website for conversion.
- Now the underlying problem is, for an A/B test to run, it takes a minimum of two weeks before you get some results and a good sample size as well, so if you are suppose to test all those 99 ideas then it would take you seven years of testing which is completely nuts.
- He further gave an insider on how such lucrative checklists are created, most of them don’t care about which is the correct way, its just there for getting website traffic and written by carefully stuffing conversion key words to rank number one on the search engines. Plus the writer himself must have got a freelance GIG and might not know absolutely about conversion optimization. Here Peep also mentions a famous digital marketing blog who published 7 best Facebook ads strategies and it also had a tactic that failed them miserably. (won’t take names in review to find out who I am talking about, subscribe to the course from here).
- And now, to counter this argument comes the best practices. Well you must follow those but again it comes with 10 or 25 or even 99 best practice checklist so which one is actually best for you might take a while to find out.
- Now, comes the part where you get this awesome idea about just copying your competitors. Well, here’s the thing, if you are a small eCommerce startup who tries to replicate Amazon, you will just fail. What works for others may not work for you. Plus most of your competitors don’t know what they are doing so its better to not take the copy cat track.
- So now that all the foul practices have been ruled out, let’s get right into the part where everyone struggles, which is, From where to start your optimizing journey?
- Here you need a systematic process. It starts with answering questions like where, what and why of the problems are. After this what you do is prioritize the fix of the identified problems.
- With prioritize, it means that to select instant fixes and the ones that won’t cost much in terms of work-hours and the cost to implement that fix. Of-course if there’s a major issue then you might want to fix that one. Again it completely depends on what you are working on.
- Now that you did some testing and research, you got a lot of data on customer behavior patterns and other miscellaneous data along with it. But does that makes you just another guy with some data?
- So in order to fix everything at once, all you need to do is ask right questions and collect the data related to those questions. Some of the things that you could ask is what do customers need, how you will be solving a certain problem, or what drives the decision process and how doing a certain UX optimization will lead customers to do X.
- So here’s where the ResearchXL blueprint comes into play. It is divided into the following parts:
Technical Analysis:
This one is where you must start with asking questions. Here all the technical aspects of a website comes into play. Check if your website works as it is supposed to do in all the browsers (do a cross browser testing), check site speed, see if it is responsive
Heuristic Analysis:
Now its time to hot the right spots and start the research part of the optimization. See if your website copy makes sense to what you are trying to sell. Check the relevancy of what is displayed with customer intent, find out the friction points where people don’t take action. It’s basically to ask tough questions like why buy from you and not from amazon.
Web Analytics:
Here you check where people go on your website. What are the triggers that leads to conversion and with that data you optimize the low performing pages and change the product sequence or do whatever that you find which leads to conversion. Even if you think there’s not much looking into such numbers but just set it up as you might need all the data going ahead in the future.
Mouse Tracking:
It is another form of analytics where you record user behavior. Enabling this will help you answer the question like how much someone scrolls down to the bottom, and where do they click. It’s basically to make sure that users are not behaving like some monkey and are actually following a funnel that they are meant to.
Qualitative Surveys:
Now this one is done wrongly by 99% of the companies. It’s an art to conduct a survey correctly. Here you don’t ask people their email addresses, you focus on the things that matter and the stuff that you really want to know from them. Like what’s their pain-points and how do they find your service, take suggestions from them ask them what they actually want to see.
User Testing:
Now comes the part where you ask users on their experience while doing their business on your website. Are there any difficulties that they faced while maybe checkout process or some other activity. Here also best way is to watch session recordings because you really cannot trust your users to leave an honest feedback every time.
So that was all about the ResearchXL formula. Belive me I have just touched a small aspect of it, next weeks article will be more detailed on all the ResearchXL steps followed by A/B testing, and hopefully this time I guess I will falunt my A/B testing mastery certificate as well.
Also for the folks who want to know more about ResearchXL can go on and consume this free ResearchXL course which I belive explains everything that you read in more detail.