In the world of smart phones, smart tv’s and even smart boards… what happened to our websites?  

Let’s look back: At the beginning the web used to be static. Then AJAX made it 2.0 and user content stuffed. That lead to social, and now… here we are, in the “big data” era where everyone talks about it, but few really get to use it.

So… Why not using all that data to make our websites smart?

Once you’ve made an Usable and Functional website, increasing conversion rates can become very hard.

After basic usability improvements are done and the best practices are already applied, we need to do something more to keep increasing Converting visitors.

To deliver an Intuitive and Persuasive experience to our visitors, we need data, we need web analytics, and we need research.

Using a CRO framework based on Scenarios may sound new to you. But It’s not. 9 years ago Bryan Eisenberg wrote about a Forrester Report:

“Scenario design helps users achieve their goals. How do you plan scenarios? [...]. You design persuasive scenarios by turning the information you have on your users into personas.”

Let’s learn in detail how to create these Scenarios and how they can improve our conversion rates.

Picture yourself arriving home after a hard work day.

As soon as you sit down on your sofa handing your tablet you remember: My mom’s birthday is next week! You need to get her something. You start in Google, and 30 minutes later…. you have chatted on facebook, checked your email 20 times, seen 3 different news sites and 10 different blogs. But no present for mommy.

What happened?

You just procrastinated. You delayed a task you have to do, but you don’t fancy.

Image by @marphille (Camaloon)

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What's this post about

What’s this post about

So… What’s your conversion problem?

It’s not rare in this business to find practitioners optimizing websites…  without knowing what problems they are trying to fix.

They know what the symptoms are (high bounce rate, low conversion, poor revenue) but they just don’t have a clue what illness they are suffering.

Is it a poor qualifyng issue? The Value proposal is not clear? Are the users understanding the benefits of the product? Is it a trust generation problem? Is the page clear about what to do next?

They just don’t think about it. So they start MayBe testing.

Sometimes, they happen to “fix the problem” and leave after a 5% lift in conversion rate.

Definitely they could do better! As Kim Goodwin states in her excellent book, they’d spend some time “Understanding the problem before solving it“.

In other words, not skipping the stage 2 of the Scientific Method: Research.

Choosing which Landing you want to improve using KPI’s is OK, but it’s just the stage 1 on the Scientific Method: Stating the problem.

Stage 2 implies research to understand it.

In the case of the landing, we could use for this purpose:

• Web analytics data segmenting your KPI’s by traffic sources, and keywords.
• Segmented data for visitor’s dimensions such as location, type of visitor, operating system, isMobile or language.
• Using a heat maps tool to understand how users are interacting with our site (don’t use Google Analytics for that, please!). Crazy Egg costs 9.9$ per month.
• Using Site Search data.
• Recording user’s sessions and analyze their mouse trails. You can use Inspectlet for that.
• Using online survey tool to have metrics like: visit purpose, satisfaction, task completion rate and open fields.
• Using user feedback tools (Kampyle, User Voice, Feedback, etc) and also online chat logs, customer service reports, etc.
• Analyzing some competitors. Pricing, offers, rankings, reviews, comments, industry data and papers, etc.
• Talking to stakeholders (if any) to find out about the product’s background.
• Whatever helps to understand the problem

Notice that so far we are changing nothing. That’s why Usability and User Testing tools are let a side (we would only performance usability test of the current version in order to have insights, but not to test a new solution…. yet).

Like my good friend (and best UX manager) Victor Solà would say, this is just good ‘old UX mixed with some Web Analytics.

And he’s right. UX has been doing this for years. CRO just puts some Web Analytics and A/B testing on it.

Once you’ve done that research, hypothesis will show up for them selves. And you’ll be able to understand better what your problem is. Therefore, you’ll be able to fix it better.

In a hurry? Scan this post before reading it.

Stop... then Start

CRO is different. We’ve been optimizing websites for years, but CRO is a new fresh approach to it.

New tools, new ways, new skills, but the same customers.

So if you are determined to move yourself or your company forward and jump in to CRO, first you must Stop. And then start.

Stop…

Then…

Start.

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Great news over here. Today is the day.

Today I’ll be starting the Conversion Optimization Training in MarketMotive to learn form Bryan Eisenberg and a group of Ninjas (Including Avinash Himself) the secrets of Conversion Rate Optimization that their books didn’t tell.

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Dopamine and reward system

In previous post we’ve discussed long about how targeting user’s motivation will increase our conversions.

Today we’ll get deeper on this topic. As deep as our brain can be. We’ll be learning how motivation works from a scientific point of view and how dopamine is released, what it does, and how it affects our purchases.

Ready? Welcome to the Dopamine world.

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Converting visitors who are willing to purchase in our website is not CRO. It’s called Usability. And we can’t stop there. We need to have more users willing to buy our products.

We need to analyze our website to solve most of usability issues, but once we’ve done usability fixing, we must improve conversions by sending more users to our check out process, and persuasion is the best way to do that.

When talking about persuasion the reference is Dr Robert B. Cialdini (he’s on twitter). On his book “Influence: the psychology of persuasion“, he describes the 6 main tools for persuading / influenciating others.

Indicating it's a "Bestseller" is a common form of social proof

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There’s the one thing that 99% of websites just do wrong: Focusing on customer’s motivation.

We’ll talk long about this issue, but before we go deeper on this…

What is motivation?

Motivation is what moves the world. It’s what gets us doing things, achieving goals, buying stuff. It’s what gets us solving our needs. So if we are hungry, we are motivated to get food, but we wont’ be motivated to read a book or buying an iPhone.

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Few days ago we learned from 7 mistakes I’ve done in A/B testing.

The last, but not least, was the confusion between “Correlation and causation“. It is: testing a modification in a landing page, and assuming that the conversion rate changes are caused by that only change.

It may sound confusing and theoretic, so let’s see an almost-real study case.

Communicating is a key skill that any Web Analyst must master.

Any web or digital analyst must be able to communicate data results, teach how to read dashboards, focus to the important metrics, and make a decision-maker understand that the answers he needs are there, in a report we just made.

If our goal is to drive change… our voice needs to be listened.

In the other hand, i’m sometimes surprised how well use data journalists. Let’s face it: they know how to grab data and convert it in headlines. We could learn some of that too. In deed they are already learning from us: Data Journalism is a hot topic lately among journalists.

This week we just leaned that according to Nielsen, “El Corte Inglés“ was the #1 visited e-commerce site n Spain, ahead from eBay.es and Amazon.es.

For the readers who don’t know it, “El Corte Ingles” is the absolute leader in department stores in Spain, just like Macy’s or Harrod’s in their countries. “El Corte Ingles” is 70 years old but has a very strong and loyal customer.

One of the keys of it’s decades-lasting success is the added value offered, including no-questions refund policy,  great customer treatment and a loyalty card which allows to buy without credit and pay by instalments.

So the question is ¿how is it possible that this 70 old-fashioned stores are having more visits than online champions like Amazon and eBay?. The answer is pretty simple: Customer research. They know their customer and they do know the Spanish customer.

Lets take a deeper look.

I’d like to star with you this section, based on the Web Analytics myths that once or another we get to listen.

One of them, is, of course: The _setMaxCustomVariables option.

If there’s a Google Analytics feature that any CRO expert must master, it is Custom vars. With them we are able to track the specific info we need from our visitors: Visit purpose, demographic info, section visited,etc…

Unfortunately we only have 5 of them.

Here comes the discovery of the existence of a “bug” or forbidden feature, the _setMaxCustomVariables option by Ophir Prusak.

What do you think: Myth or true?

Let’s the experiment!

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I’ll be honest. My initial intend was to write a “5 mistakes you’ll make in A/B Testing”. But first: there are tones of these posts, and second… what do i know about other’s mistakes?

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In one of my CRO’s talks i always start with this slide:

Listing some of the acronyms used in our every day work is a trick/joke i use to swap the auddience’a attitude from ”just another 3 letters acronym for my twitter bio“, to a positive attitude.