Conversion Research Essentials - What should you look for?
Conversion Research Essentials

Conversion Research Essentials - What should you look for?

If you are looking to optimize your website for conversion you should exactly know where to start from.

Most of the people who want to get more conversions from digital are making the most obvious mistakes. So it is very important to have a clear understanding of what you need to test because of which they spend time testing wrong stuff and working on a completely wrong direction.

Disadvantages of not knowing What to Test?

  • Wasting precious time of yours which could have been consumed more efficiently.
  • Consuming resources which could have been utilized more appropriately.
  • Spending money in the wrong direction with no or even negative return.

To me, it is not a skill. Mastering it can be. There is a difference.

It is a structured process. It is Science.

What are the most common mistakes?

1.    People do not realize the importance of time in this environment and precious time is wasted on stupid tests (Research please)

2.    People think they know what needs to be done but they don't

3.    People copy other people’s test – your problem is different. Your competitor is going through different challenges. Copying them blindly is a waste.

4.    You should have a decent sample size to test. If the volumes are low you cannot test. People expect to make significant changes with low volumes. That is not possible unless you have decent data to validate your hypothesis.

5.    People just change their home page or something on the landing page and do that test on just one page. (Again you should have volume)

6.    This is the most common mistake as far as I have observed people do not have the patience and they do not want to wait long enough (4 weeks). It can definitely reduce if you have a huge volume of traffic and conversions on your site.

7.    Some people change things way too quickly and do not wait for the weekly cycle to complete. If you do not test full weeks at a time (See conversion rate per day), the data will not do justice. You will have a difference in numbers from day to day basis of a week.

8.    If you are not measuring the correct data and using third party analytics that is also a common mistake. You just cannot focus on your backend business numbers.

9.    Like I have previously stated. Please do not love your ideas. Do not take it personally. If one hypothesis does not work, you have at least gained experience that this test will not work for me. You should not give up after the first hypothesis fails (Please do not give up... Remember Edison)

10. Sometimes if you have not implemented the test properly then there will be something or the other wrong. Your job should not be buggy (not optimized for all devices and browsers). or maybe you are unaware of what is happening in the real world?

11. Focus on minor changes as well. You should not ignore small changes (volume and compound effect can change a lot of things)

12. Last but not least. You should be running tests all the time

You must be saying. Aaahh this seems pretty easy I will keep these in mind and I will be in the right direction

But

You might be missing the most obvious but most important point at this time.

So how can you prevent all these mistakes?

CONVERSION RESEARCH

A man comes to a hospital. “I’m sick,” he says. “We’ll fix you right up”, says the doctor – and leads him to an operating room where he performs immediate surgery. The man is cured!

Well, that never happens.

You will never let that happen. You will question if that is happening to you or any other person you have taken to the hospital.

Plus the doctor will never do it.

What will he do?

He will do his research and diagnose the problem first and then take appropriate measure to solve that issue.

Then why some of the people out there who call themselves conversion optimizers jump on to conclusions prematurely.

Well, not all of those conclusions are premature some of them are very obvious ones.

People do not realize that their opinion without research are just opinions.

Why?

A. Personal Preferences

B. Bias of any kind

These are the reasons which blur your reality.

If you just think YOU are right. You know better. You should just know one thing.

…your opinions don’t matter

Remember that doctor's example will you let that doctor operate without asking him to do a careful examination.

but

if he wants to operate without careful examination there is something wrong.

What conversion research consists of

Largely we can categorize it into three parts:

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, Now some valuable information can also be extracted by platform tools like Facebook Analytics (bit pre-mature but helps to cross-validate findings) and other quantified data tools like Adobe Analytics, KISSMetrics, MixPanel, Heap Analytics)
  • Mouse tracking analysis

Please check out my last post that details Why conversion rate is important for you and I touched on the Research Framework as well in it.

The Research XL Model focusses your attention and gives you a step by step process to collect valuable data the right way.

But why is Data so Important?

Importance of Data

1.    Without data, you cannot optimize You need data to optimize everything

2.    Just stay focussed on the right data. Please only collect Data that matters – You don’t want analysis paralysis

3.    You need data that you can act upon – if you are crossing a road you need the information about the car, not everything around it.

4.    Always keep asking yourself if you can do anything from that data?

Few Frameworks that you can use;

ResearchXL Model by CXL

No alt text provided for this image
  • Step1: Technical Analysis
  • Step2: Heuristic Analysis
  • Step 3: Digital Analytics
  • Step 4: Mouse Tracking & Form Analytics
  • Step 5: Qualitative Research
  • Step 6: User Testing

INVESP CONVERSION FRAMEWORK

The Conversion Framework is built around seven principles:

  1. Trust and confidence (T)
  2. FUDs (F)
  3. Incentives (I)
  4. Engagement (E)
  5. Visitor persona temperament (P)
  6. The buying stage of visitors when they come to the site (B)
  7. The sale complexity (S)

Way Forward

  • Start by collecting the right data, for that you need correct data and measurement strategy.
  • In order to rigorously follow that pick up a model that you are comfortable with for research and work on it extensively.
  • Implement tests and do them quite often but remember all of the learnings shared here.
  • I personally will recommend starting from the easiest and quickest first before jumping on to the bigger challenges - this will just build confidence and clear your understanding. Then you can use any priority model to prioritize your next steps.
  • Keep revisiting your experiments and see if anything can be further improved.
  • If you want to learn it to do the right way you should go for CXL's learning resources.


Faheem Salim Bagwan

Ingeniero Eléctrico Senior

4y

Thanks for the insights. But looks like we need to work on multiple platforms for each step. (I am starting out, so do not know much). Is there a tool where we can do or retrieve/ record and follow-up all of this on a single dashboard/ platform? or a regular project management tool would do great to manage the process from start to finish? How do individual and/ or companies achieve this without letting loose?

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