Conversion Optimization Minidegree by CXL — Week 6 Review

Major milestone alert!

We finally finished the first section of the course: Foundations!

It’s… pretty crazy that it took me this long to finish this section, as I’m supposed to be at the 50% mark by now.

But well! Let bygones be bygones, and we shall march on to this week’s extremely insightful (if a little redundant) insights.

What’s up this week:

• Landing Page Optimization taught by Michael Aagaard
• Conversion research taught by Peep Laja

Landing page optimization

Let’s start with Landing Page Optimization, taught by Michael Aagaard (double-checked to see if I wrote his name correctly).

Michael‘s course is structured so well that I think anyone who just popped in randomly and wants to create a landing page within a few days can get everything he needs from this one course.

There are a lot of actionable examples (especially on what not to do) and pointers if I want to punch up my copy real quick.

But here’s my only problem with his course: There is some overlap with previous lessons. It’s redundant. Which is bad for my exhausted eyes and strained ears.

Some examples of this is the copywriting and design lessons, most of the points in this course is already made by Momoko Price’s Product messaging course. I’ve also heard of Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 a few times by now. And Google Analytics.

That said, the last lesson really helped me envision how the process actually works overall. It teaches you what actually happens on a landing page optimization project. Here’s the gist of it.

This is a slide from Michael’s presentation. Very helpful, no?

Conversion Research

Next up, we have another 4-hour long course: Conversion research with Peep Laja.

I have to say, every course involving Peep is a gold mine that I had to make a mind map of. Easy, considering most of it is in text form, so I don’t have to write like mad to get all the points.

But here’s the thing: Michael’s course overlaps with Peep’s. There are some sections discussing research and audit methods, as you can see from the image above.

So… redundant? Yeah, definitely. Amplified by the fact that this lesson is just after Michael’s.

That said, there are still a lot of things in here that aren’t covered by previous courses. Let me break it into five main parts:

• Heuristic analysis
• Usability testing
• Surveys
• Mouse tracking
• Google analytics

Heuristic Analysis

Heuristic analysis asks you to give a subjective judgment on the website you’re about to optimize.

Note that it’s subjective. So what you learn from this analysis?

They’re all hypotheses that you still need to back up with data later on.

So get your suggestions, put them in a spreadsheet (or a list), and go hunt for the data that will support or disprove your theory here. Watch out for bias, though!

Here are a few categories you can go through in a heuristic analysis:

1. Clarity —make sure that it’s clear what your offer is, its target audience, and the benefit of your offer.
2. Relevancy — one question here: where is your audience coming from? Is it a relevant page that they expect to see? If their expectation doesn’t match, you might notice a higher bounce rate or exit rate on your page.
3. Incentives + motivation — now, this is mostly about copy. Check out what kind of incentives and motivation your copy offer. Are they tempting enough to move your audience into action?
4. Friction — while you can’t eliminate friction completely, you can minimize it. Check for things that might cause friction on your page. For example, extremely long forms or bugs causing frustration.
5. Distraction — that is, things that aren’t contributing to your page’s goal. Are they important enough to be there? If you can’t take them off, minimize their impact so people can stay focused on your goal.
6. Buying phases — there are three phases your buyers are most likely in: awareness, consideration, and purchase. If you know which stage your audience is in, you can create an appropriate page that can help them do what they came for even more efficiently.

Usability testing

Which consists of a site walkthrough, usability evaluation, and user testing. The main goal of these three processes is to see if there’s any friction in your user experience that’s causing a drop in conversion.

Ideally, you want a usability expert to do the evaluation for you. However, if you don’t have one on your team, you can always use a checklist. Like this one by Nielsen Norman Group or this one by User Focus.

Don’t forget to write the issues you found on a spreadsheet. Once you’re done, assign a rating to your issues with:

• 1=“very easy to implement”
• 2=“will take 2–5 hours to implement”
• 3=“will take lots of designer/developer hours to implement”

In a site walkthrough, you want to check the user experience of your website across different devices and browsers. Is the experience device-centric?

Use whichever devices most of your visitors use and see if you can identify any issues with the overall user experience.

You’d also want to see how your users actually go through the flow of purchasing your product and see if there are any suspicious pages or parts that might impact your conversion.

Note down the issues you found and save them in your “Areas of interest” notes to see if you can find some data to back up that they’re causing a problem and need to be resolved.

Last: user testing.

You can either do this in-house (significant cost, not to mention inconvenient, but you can add biometrics trackers!), or remote testing (moderated or unmoderated).

Remote testing is usually cheaper, with unmoderated testing more convenient as you don’t have to be there. But moderated testing lets you clarify any confusion your testers might have and will result in a higher chance of quality feedback.

Surveys (and interviews)

Here’s what it boils down to.

You should always talk to your customers to uncover insights. You ask:

• new customers to identify friction and why people buy (survey)
• visitors to ask what stage they’re in or any source of friction
• customer-facing personnel to get top questions people ask when they come through your page. (you can also do this with live chat transcripts!)

Going through 200+ responses won’t be easy. And I reckon you’ll feel the burn in your eyes as you do. But the hours you’ll put in front of your screen will be worth it when you finally find insights into your customer's decision-making process and fixes that will improve your conversion rate.

Mouse tracking

There are three kinds of maps you can see here: click maps, attention heat maps, and scroll maps.

While these three maps are wonderful, and they do very well in client presentation thanks to their colorful nature, they don’t really give you much info.

Attention heat maps show you where your audience’s mouse is resting or moving. Not very useful, considering people don’t really use mouse movements to keep them focused.

Click maps show you which parts of your page people are clicking on. You can identify which buttons aren’t clicking on (even though they should) and which ones are they clicking on (even though they shouldn’t).

Scroll maps can help you identify false bottoms or when your copy stops being engaging by showing where most people stop scrolling your page.

Google Analytics

First and foremost, always start with a health check. Review your client’s or your Google Analytics account to make sure that everything works properly. Check your data availability, integrity, and if there’s anything broken that you can fix.

When that’s done, you can dive into your reports.

Use funnels and goalflows to identify leaks in your funnel, as well as how people move through your website before they convert.

Use content reports to identify high-traffic pages that have low performance. What’s going on there? Is there something you can do to improve the performance?

Use site searches to see what people are looking for in your website. (Hint: it’s great to see opportunities you can fill!)

Use audience insights to get a clearer sense of who your best-converting audience is and if there are optimization opportunities based on demographics.

Week 6 ends with an example of a research synthesis report (very helpful if you need a quick win with clients) and a demonstration of Copytesting (now Wynter).

Wynter lets you test your messages on real people which you can configure to get as close to your target audience as you can.

You can identify which parts of your copy people react well to, and which ones cause a negative reaction, so you can tweak your copy before launching it into a live audience.

Finally, next week brings about another week of Analytics (and possibly carpal tunnel) with Mercer coming back with his beloved Google Tag Manager and a course on finding conversion opportunities with analytics.