Master the Essentials of

Conversion Optimization

Written By: Peep Laja

Summarized By: Austin Walker

Conversion Optimization

• What is the goal of conversion optimization?

• Growth

• How do we optimize the website so that the business will grow?

• SEO is clogged and difficult

It’s About Marketing

• Figure out which pages cause the biggest drop-offs

• Can understand your customers better

• Finding where the problem lies, you can identify the what

• Most of the world still operates by guessing what might be a good change

and hope sales will go up

• They don’t use the data

Use Data to Form Hypotheses

• Turn unsupported and baseless opinions into data-informed, educated

hypotheses

• Know what’s happening and understand why

• Set goals, set up measurement, gather data, analyze data, turn data into an insight, test

hypotheses, get data from tests, go back to data analysis. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

The Data-Informed Approach

• We need better data

• Gathering only “must have” data

• Avoid analysis paralysis

• Two steps/frameworks are extremely important:

• Technical analysis

• Heuristic analysis

Technical Analysis

• Cross-browser testing

• Cross-device testing

• Conversion rate per device/browser

• Speed analysis

Heuristic Analysis

• Identify “areas of interest”

• Check key pages for relevancy, motivation, friction issues

Expanding Technical Analysis

• Bugs are the main conversion killer

• Fixing annoying or functionality errors amongst different platforms/interfaces will be a huge improvement

• Speed analysis

• Page load and interactive time to ensure the user doesn’t have to wait for pages to load

• Use Google PageSpeed Insights to list out problems, then resolve these issues

• Ping website to understand how long it takes to relay information back and forth from the server to an end-user

Expanding Heuristic Analysis

• Almost like sharing an opinion, but not quite

• Can be done quickly

• Optimizing using results-based

experience

• Avoid random comments

• Best done in a group

• Use screenshots to capture ideas, comments, etc.

Become a Google Analytics Expert

• If you’re skilled, as most marketers aren’t, time to learn is a must

• Career depends on it

• Need to know impact of ideas, proven through data

• Know in advance what you want to analyze – figure out the “what”

• Use qualitative research and heuristic analyses are the best for figuring out the “why”

Measure Important Stuff

• You’re ahead of most companies if you only measure what matters

• KPI – key performance indicator

• Helps you understand how you are doing against objectives

• Ex. Conversion rate, revenue per visitor

• If you can’t figure out why something is important,

Mouse Tracking and Heatmaps

• Heat Maps

• Representation of mouse action or hovering on page

• Red is hot, blue is cold

• Click Maps

• Representation of where people have clicked

• Make words or place people want to click, without a link, into one

Scroll Map

• Sees how far a user typically scrolls down a page

• Helps to understand where to put priority information

• Helps you decide where you need to tweak designs

• Can be used to understand what users think is the “must have” information

• Watch scroll maps and see where people stop scrolling

• Add things like color lines to tell people something is different below

Website Surveys

• On-page Survey – someone fills out a survey while on your site

• Both can be useful

• Help to derive important data

• To ensure that people don’t get frustrated, only do surveys for a short time

• Only ask for important, measurable data – help improve KPIs

• Exit Survey – as someone is about to leave, you hit them with a popup

User Testing

• Creating protocols

• Limit one session to 20 minutes

• Ensure key actions are understandable

• Identify friction

• Use test user mistakes as a way to see

what of your website sucks

• 5-10 testers is enough

Data Collection to Test Hypotheses

• Placing problems and traffic leaks into 5 buckets for translation and solution:

• Test

• For traffic leaks, you test different hypotheses to see what is going wrong

• Hypothesize

• Found problematic page, but not sure where the problem is

• Instrument

• Reporting in analytics is poor and needs to be re-evaluated

And These Buckets…

• Just Do It

• Fix is easy to identify and it just needs to get done; Do it!

• Investigate

• Some testing needs to be done with particular devices to triangulate the problem

A/B Testing: : How to Get it Right

• It’s time to test the hypotheses

• Pick appropriate testing tools for each hypothesis

• Get a developer to help

• Sample size needs to be big enough

• In order to test validity of results, a valid sample size is needed

• Can use statistical calculators; all available for free online

A/B Testing, Cont’d

• The more segments tested, the higher sample size needed

• Test has to be long enough

• Just because the sample size is valid, enough

time must be allowed for a full business cycle

to get a good representation of data

Learning From Your Results

• First off, be prepared to test.

• A lot. Then some more. Then again.

• Inconclusive tests happen often and are okay

• Usually happens with a wrong hypothesis

• Learn from failure