CONVERSION RESEARCH REVIEW
By: Omolara Sanni
Tags: Conversion, Growth Marketing, Conversion Optimization, Optimization, Website Optimization

CONVERSION RESEARCH REVIEW

How often do you audit your website? Do you have a low conversion rate and a high bounce rate? How do you figure out what the problem is?

Sit, grab a drink, and relax as I take you through how you can carry out conversion research and use your findings to optimize your website, increase conversion, and of course revenue for your business.

This is my fourth article reviewing what I’ve learned in the CXL institute Growth Marketing mini-degree. I’m in awe of how much knowledge I have gained so far.

It is wrong to want to optimize your website based on your guts or assumptions, you definitely need data. You should gather data that you can read and analyze.

The following are the steps you need to take to have an understanding of what is wrong with your website and why it is leaking money.

HEURISTIC ANALYSIS

This is done to assess the experience of your website and there are four major things you are looking for here:

Relevance — How would you feel if you saw an ad that says “Get 3 jean trousers for the price of one” and upon clicking the URL, you landed on a website that sells shoes? You would be pissed right? This is exactly how visitors feel when they get to your landing page and the information is not relevant to what they are looking for. You want to answer questions like:

Are people seeing what they expected to see?

Does the headline match the page content?

Do your call action buttons match the value they will get?

2. Clarity — You sell more when your offer is crystal clear. Rather than trying to persuade people to buy (which is not a bad thing), you get more people to buy by simply communicating your offer in clear terms. Does your page answer questions like:

What can I do here?

Can I understand what the product/service is and how it works?

Is the product information adequate for making a decision?

3. Friction — This refers to anything that slows people down from taking action on your website. Some of the sources of friction are:

Long and complicated processes, e.g long-form surveys.

Slow landing pages.

Asking people for sensitive information.

Difficulty in finding features.

Security concerns.

4. Distraction — Each page on your website should have one clearly defined call to action. What do you want visitors to do on a particular page? Whatever you have on the page that doesn’t contribute to people taking that one action might serve as a distraction.

How do you identify sources of distraction?

Are there blinking objects like auto sliders?

In the checkout pages, are there navigation elements that could be removed?

What could be removed from the page that will not compromise its performance?

5. Motivation — This is what prompts people to take the action you want them to take on your landing page. This could be simply communicating your value.

Key questions you should ask to evaluate your website motivation

Do I understand why I should take action?

Are features translated into benefits?

Is the content interesting?

Is the sales copy persuasive?

The result of these analyses is important in optimizing your website to give visitors the best experience and increase your conversion rate.

Let’s move on to the next step

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS

This is done to ensure that users do not have issues accessing your website. A very easy way to lose customers is for your website to have technical issues. You need to analyze the following

Cross-browser testing — There are various browsers that people use to access the internet and while you may not be able to test your website for all of them, you need to test for the common ones that have the high number of users. (Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge e.t.c) Cross-device testing — Your website should be accessible on all devices, this allows you to capture more users. How your website appears on these devices (smartphone, tablets, laptops) is also important. Speed testing — People have a low attention span and the last thing anyone wants to put up with is a slow website. It is a sure way to lose money. Ensure that your website is as fast as it can possibly be.

DIGITAL ANALYTICS

Tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar have made this easy. With them, you are able to:

Identify drop off points Correlates behaviors with outcomes. Fix measurement and verify data

QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS

By gathering qualitative data, you are able to understand your customers’ experience and it also helps you identify areas of friction. Here, you can carry out on-site polls, ask questions based on the result you want to achieve.

An example is putting a poll on your checkout page where your analytics have shown that people drop off and ask a question like “Is there anything holding you back from buying this product?” You can do this for other pages as well, but take it one page at a time.

You can also survey users that complete a purchase on your website via email. The best time to do this is within 3 days after their purchase, the experience is usually still fresh in their minds.

USER TESTING

This is done using your ideal audience but you can substitute them with other people if you can’t find your ideal audience. When you get these people, you want to test how they are able to navigate your website. Give them two tasks to carry out:

Specific task — Ask them to find, say a pair of blue unisex sneakers in size 40, watch how they go about it. Broad task — Here, you can ask users to assume that it’s the holiday season, they should curate a hamper for a loved one. Also, watch how they do this.

MOUSE TRACKING

While analytics gives you useful information about what happens on your website, mouse tracking gives you more insights into the viewing pattern. You are able to see how users move, what they click, their mouse hovering and this information can be useful in knowing why people drop off on a particular page.

So you’ve gathered data from all of these analyses and you’re wondering what’s next.

After gathering the data, you need to rank the issues based on the level of severity

1- Minor issues

2- Lesser usability or conversion issues

3- Major usability or conversion issues that may not be viewed by all visitors or have a lesser impact.

4- Critical issues encountered by many and have high impact.

5- Severe issues encountered by many, have a high impact, and fixing them would drive revenue

You definitely want to start with 5 as it has more impact and fixing it would increase your revenue.

Conclusion

The conversion research looks like a tedious and long process but it is guaranteed to increase your conversion rate if properly done. There are conversion experts you can hire to help you do this and drive revenue for your business.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I did writing it. Do share your thoughts in the comment section.