CONVERSION RATE

OPTIMIZATION

Welcome to the October 29, 2014 meeting of the Hudson Valley Tech Meetup in Kingston, NY. We’re going to talk about conversion rate optimization. But if you remember one thing today, it’s to never look at the blue stuff without goggles! That was his first mistake…

Paolo Vidali

Founder, Hidden Gears

@PaoloRobot

TESTING

Today we’re going to talk about three things-- 1. why it’s important to test your website’s features and design 2. how to go about setting up your own tests, because testing is fun (especially with wine) and 3. how to interpret and leverage your test results.

CANDY

What are we talking about? I know everyone has Halloween on their minds and candy is everywhere, tempting us. But we’re talking about options, hundreds of thousands upon millions of options. The web is like a candy store for your potential customers and clients. Your website is a single piece of candy at the the far back and bottom of one of those middle bins. There’s so much candy out there it might take someone two years to find you. So what can you do to stand out?

FIGURING OUT

VISITORS USING

DATA

DATA

We have access to a staggering amount of data – analytics, demographics, statistics, feedback, you name it. There’s web 2.0 startups out there that can do things with data we didn’t even know was possible. But what can we do with it to improve our sites?

HUGE PROBLEM

But we have a huge problem. The problem is we’re married to our websites. We’re in love with the way they are, flaws and all. Or worse, you don’t think there are any flaws or anything that could be improved, or you just “don’t have time” to change your site and that can kill your business slowly but surely.

BREAK UP

But I’m not here to tell you to save the marriage. Nope. You need to break up with your website and get in the frame of mind to open up new possibilities. It might hurt, but it’s time to let go of the baby and get a divorce from your website love affair. Disclaimer: This is not my child, and I didn’t make this kid cry.

So how can we do that? Data isn’t everything. We also need to figure out how people think, what decisions they make and WHY. Some things we’ll never know, like when your potential customer abandons a cart because they got a phone call from their grandma and they HAD to pickup because Grandma isn’t on Facebook…yet. But other times, it’s more clear what people are doing and how people use your site, and where the stumbling blocks are. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is at its core the combination of analysis, hypothesis, testing, and improvement of your website’s components that lead to conversions– leads, sales, interactions, or requests that make a difference for your business’ bottom line, or your client’s business. You need to test and experiment.

TOOLS

VWO.COM

VWO is a great tool to set up simple A/B tests or multivariate tests, and as the name indicates, it’s very visual and therefore easy to use. Optimizely is another comparable tool which has a lot of advanced features but isn’t quite as intuitive. It lets you draft and setup simple tests, it iterates multivariate tests to give you all the combos, it lets you visually change elements of your site, and it takes a line of Javascript to install.

VWO.COM

CRAZYEGG.COM

CrazyEgg doesn’t let you test anything, but it does visualize what your visitors are doing on your site in some pretty great ways. VWO also provides basic heatmapping but it’s not as comprehensive. If you keep going back to their website you’ll see a million different versions--they are eating their own dog food and testing constantly.

FUNNEL IT

You need to pay attention to your Google Analytics data too, which means setting up proper goals, digging in and getting ecommerce tracking working (great new reports for that in Universal Analytics by the way), and creating funnels so you can determine where people drop off in the process. Just testing one piece of your site won’t expose or fix endemic problems.

SETUP

Accurate tests require preparation. Just as when you go to a wedding and every napkin and oyster fork has a specific look and is there for a reason, your test must be precise and designed. In order to set it up you ultimately need to answer the question: what are you going to be measuring?

FILTER

You need to remove the noise– what are really the key elements that are going to make a difference? Don’t just pick your favorite, sometimes counterintuitive changes win. You can’t test every color or every image, you can’t redesign the checkout 10 ways, because each one of those changes will mean more and more people have to see it and the baseline standard over longer and longer periods of time to make sure you have enough data to determine a winner.

ANALYZE

After you gather data you need to analyze. Results do not imply causation. Just because a survey came out that said people who drive yellow Subarus get in more crashes than drivers ofgGreenSubarus, does not mean there is causation. Maybe the study administrators only had 2 yellow cars and 30 green cars in the sample size– you need to dig deeper. Find the patterns first, and determine their validity later.

EVALUATE

What’s the difference between analysis and evaluation? Besides just picking out the trends, the patterns and sorting the data, you need to be able to decide which patterns are VALID. Are they statistically significant? Are they only seasonal? This is really the most difficult part of the process. Setting up tests is easy, determining WHY people acted as a result of a variable is HARD.

FIND

OUTLIERS

Along the way you’re going to find outliers, and you need to look out for them. Sometimes there will be edge cases, visitors who defy expectations and do really weird things on your website. Just because a single visitor from Duluth spent 3 hours on your site and visited 15 times in a week, doesn’t mean you should adapt to target that behavior or demographic. It might be your ex-roomate from college who hates you.

MAKE

CAKE

In the end you’re going to have to make cake—but you’re actually going to have to make a LOT of cakes because the recipe will never quite be right the first time. If you’re like me, you’ll get excited and skip some steps and not read super carefully because CAKE IS DELICIOUS and then you’ll have something that’s a little off. So get used to never being satisfied, and always be testing.

GOOD

So we’re good, right? Good setups of Good tests with smart analysis and impartial, informed evaluations are always GOOD.

QUESTIONS?

THANK YOU

SLIDES AT

SLIDESHARE.NET/PAOLOVI

DALI