CXL Institute Growth Marketing Review [Week 8]

This week, I learned about research and testing, the following are some of the things that I’ve learned.

When it comes to optimization, we first have to learn to do it well. There are three objectives, three things we should measure when it comes to the optimization process.

- We need to make all tests more effective, when it comes to changes to our website, to our landing pages, wherever the traffic is landing on. We need to know what to test so it would have a positive impact. While doing that, we need to reduce the cost of optimization.

- The more tests that can be run, at a faster pace when it comes to experimentation, the faster the results and benefits will be reaped.

How do we optimize a website?

As an example, let’s imagine that we have a website for a travel company, airline. The objective might be to increase the conversion rate by 20% by the end of the year. So we have 12 months to get a 20% increase in conversion rate. How can this be done? How would you go about it? Most people when they have a goal, like for example, “Oh, I need to improve my conversion rate.” They go to Google and use Google’s conversion optimization tactics, hack psychic news, stuff like that, and of course you’ll find a bunch of articles like this.

There’s no shortage of articles promising you different tactics to improve your conversion rate. But the question is how valuable is a list like that? Well, they say that “you can easily sort through 100+ techniques to improve your conversion rate. So do we implement all the tactics at once? Well, you can do that, and your website will look like Lings Cars. With big buttons, arrows, visual cues, they got everything. Every tactic implemented at once. It works for this guy but it probably won’t work for you.

Instead of testing all the techniques, what’s the alternative? We could test 100 ideas one by one and then we’ll know which one works and which ones don’t. How long does an average A/B test run? It depends on the amount of traffic and transactions a company has, but on an average website, with average amount of traffic, one A/B test runs for like four weeks. So if you want to test one idea at a time, four weeks per idea, it will take seven and a half years to test 100 ideas. Nobody has that kind of time.

The problem with all these articles with different tactics, is that there’s no way for a growth team to prioritize what to test first, second, third or 97th time. So any such list that you find online, “The 100 Growth Hacks You Can Try”, isn’t useful. The second problem we have is the credibility of the person who is writing these articles. Most of them are not written by optimization people but by SEO people who want to just get more traffic.

What about best practices? There are best practices for everything, best landing page, best homepage, best product page, best checkout, you name it.There is seven best practices for every page type. Well, can we use best practices for optimization to improve our conversion rate? Yes, but it’s not optimization.

A best practice is where do you start. Most best practices are also common practices. It’s what everybody is doing, not necessarily because it’s based off of some industry level data. So best practice is a starting point, it’s not optimization.

What about design trends? Do these help us like ghost buttons, — which could be a trend. But what’s the idea behind a ghost button? It’s a button we want people to click and then we make it less visible. This doesn’t make sense, so following design trends is not optimization. So new flashy things comes out that you can implement on your website, don’t have a guarantee that this stuff is any good for conversion optimization reasons.

For example, a video background on websites could be considered cool. However, there hasn’t been test where a video background did anything good. It typically harmed conversion rate because people are distracted by the background and they’re not reading the valuable proposition of the webpage.They are not understanding what your product is or does.They are not buying it. Therefore, try avoiding adding unnecessary distractions to a webpage.

What about following market leaders? For example, Amazon is doing pretty well. Should we copy Amazon if we’re an e-commerce site? Or you know if we’re in SAS, should we copy whatever is the most famous SAS business in our industry? Well, Amazon’s conversion rate for Amazon Prime members is 74%. So what’s your conversion rate? 5%? So that means that the difference between Amazon’s and your conversion rate is 15 times. But when we look at Amazon, is the design of Amazon.com15 times better than your design? Is their copy 15 times better than your copy? It’s not.

Therefore, if you just copy their approach and expect to get a 15-time lift, this is being naive. The success of Amazon is build upon many other things. Anybody who’s a Prime member knows where it’s really at. So copying, just blindly copying market leaders and thinking that “Aw, they must have tested it. It’s great.” This will not make money by copying Amazon or any other leader.

There’s always the question of why buy from you and not these other guys, even if you look like the other guys. The same goes for the competition. People are always benchmarking, and copying features off of their competitor’s websites but the truth is that they don’t know what the hell they’re doing either. They copied it from somebody else who copied it from somebody else — this is not testing for optimization.

So how do we optimize? If you have no idea, this is a clear sign that your optimization process is broken. Conversion optimization is a process. It’s a systematic way of finding opportunities for growth and developing data-based ideas for how to build upon those opportunities. If you can’t describe your optimization work as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you most likely are getting a ton of random hacks from a blog post.

What does a good optimization process look like? What does it do? It tells you where are the problems on your website. Doesn’t matter if it’s a mobile, desktop, or if it’s an app… it tells you where the problems are. The problem could be the checkout process? Or the product page? You need to find the leak. So figure out where the problems are but also what are these problems. Why these problems are problems to begin with?

Why do these problems come up? A good process will help you identify the problems and turn those into hypotheses as to what can be done to fix these problems. And finally it should help you prioritize your ideas or solutions to the identified problems. Again, the number one criteria of an optimization process is that we need to make our test more effective, by the changes that we are implementing. This comes down to the discovery of what matters. If we actually know what matters to the users about our product, like what kind of pain point it solves, what kind of emotional needs it satisfies. If we know this stuff, we can put forth messages that resonates with them. We can highlight features that they care about and not talk about features that users don’t care about.

Do you know what your users care about? So when somebody from your target audience lands on your website, do you know what is their number one purchasing criteria? Number two, number three, number 17. If you don’t know that, how are you able to sell them successfully anything?

- You have to know exactly what matters to them.

- How are they making purchasing decisions?

- Are they consulting with their wife, their daughter, their boss?

- How long does it take to make purchasing decisions?

- How many different sites does your average user go through before making a purchasing decision?

- What parts of your website actually help you increase the conversion rate?

- Which parts lower the conversion rate?

Start and think about the homepage. Everyone has an homepage. Then go through the next page of content, and the next, and keep going…. Until you have some sort of an order for the content. You’re organizing the order of the content because it will tell you which messages your users care the most about? And the second part is the second most important message?

If you know which parts of your website, if you know what users do on your website, this will increase the likelihood of conversion taking place, now you can optimize. If you don’t know this information, you can’t optimize. So the discovery of what matters is the central piece of any optimization work — this is problem solving. So we need to understand what are the problems and so on.

How do we figure out what the real problem is? We can do it in two ways. One is by testing. So with testing it’s easy. Let’s see if this thing is a problem. Let’s test the different way of doing this specific action. Let’s change the signup process and then see what works. And see if our ideas make it better. We need to start with research in order to know which tests should be prioritized. Conversion research has to be the foundation of everything.

Research is what helps us then identify where the problems are, what the problems and so on and so forth. What you need instead of more data, you need better data. You need data that answers business questions. This can be done using different tools, like Google Analytics and then see what the data says. The data won’t tell you anything. Data is there. Data is passive. It’s just sitting there. It’s up to us to interpret that data, and make sense of the data.

How is that done? First, the data needs to be there for a reason and what is that reason? The reason is of course that before anything, we need to ask a list of questions.So we need to start any optimization or growth process starts with a list of questions. It could be questions like:

- What do they want?

- What do they need?

- Where are the problem or problems?

- Who is the target audience?

Having this list of questions will help us understand what kind of data we should gather that helps us answer every single one of these questions. Typically, as an example, when a consultant works with a client, they may come up with 100 questions.

Questions could be focusing on a feature. For example, if you have filters on the sidebar on an e-commerce site. To filter products by size, color, price and so on. You can ask yourself if these features are being used? Which one is used the most? If they are used, are they more likely to convert, less likely to convert, no difference, all these questions should be asked and put on that list. So every single thing the users can do on your website, everything they can read, you need to ask a challenging question. You need to challenge your assumptions. So you write down all these questions, like for example, how are they shopping. Then after, you need to figure out what the answers are. And if your data is set up to answer these business questions… this will make data-driven marketing seem a lot easier.

Now all the data collected on Google Analytics for example, or whatever tool — you can look through this data and figure out if there is an answer to these questions that you ask to begin with. Knowing this, can also help you avoid analysis paralysis. Analysis paralysis is not knowing what to do with so much data. While going through this data, it’s very important to be aware of your biases. If you want something to be true, you can wrangle the data any way you like to make it appear so — in the way of making it support your claims. This is why you shouldn’t like your ideas too much. In order to overcome this, you can work in pairs, with people sharing their different point of view.

A research process that has been used for years is called ResearchXL. This process helps you gather six types of data to help you make great optimization decisions and come up with tests that tend to win more often and have bigger impact. So it’s all about identifying problems and coming up with ideas, — best possible ideas to test.

Next, we’re going to focus on how to figure out what you should be testing and how you should test those ideas. The number one step of any optimization or growth work is technical analysis. You need to understand

- What’s broken in your site.

• Does your site work flawlessly with every single browser and device, browser and device combination?

I look forward to learning more!