Yeah, I’ve been invited to speak to the eMetrics 2013 (23th and 24th of October) and I can’t express how excited I am.

No need to say that the challenge is major due to the importance and quality of the conference (probably the best you can find in Digital Analytics nowadays) and also due to the fact that I’ll be speaking for first time in English. Fun is guaranteed.

My topic will be: 3 months to success. After having done the Analytics foundation in 3 big companies, I have some learning about what to do in the beginning of our role so we can maximize the benefits in terms of productivity and results after a while. Basically what I’ll explain is what we need to do in the beginning so we can spend our time optimizing rather than changing tools, configurations and messing with tracking codes.

Here you have a little appetizer of my talk!

If you want to attend and see some amazing analysts like Jim Sterne, Aurelie Pols, Craig Sullivan or Carmen Mardiros, get your ticket now!

In a world where phones, tv, and even boards are smart… what happened to our websites?  

Let’s take a 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 are ready to understand what’s going on.

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

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. “Quickwins” are OK for websites where the margin of improvement is massive. But if you are already an stablished payer… well, you know it´s tough.

To deliver an Intuitive and Persuasive experience to our visitors, we need data, we need web analytics, and we need research. And we need to combine them all together in techniques and frameworks like “Scenarios”.

Using a CRO framework based on Scenarios may sound new to you. But It’s not. 9 years ago Bryan Eisenberg  already wrote about them in 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 deep dive on how can we use this framework and how can it improve our conversion rates.

Picture yourself arriving home after a hard day at work.

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

What happened?

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

Image by @marphille (Camaloon)

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 in first place.

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.

Before reading this post you can scan this word cloud to see what it’s about

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.

Scan it before you read it:

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

There’s the one thing that 99% of websites just do wrong: Understanding our customers motivations.

Uhmmm… Motivation?

Motivation 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. As the Maslow defined in his famous pyramid, needs are different. Motivation is what makes us move up in to the “needs” ladder.

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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!

San this post:

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?