10th Dec 2018 – 
What do we look for in an analytics audit? Basically patterns and outliers in the users’ behavior. We highly recommend doing thorough education in terms of Google Analytics so that you get the most out of this invaluable resource.
Because we observed a 70% drop off for mobile users and session replays with scroll maps indicate users are not reaching the “organic origins” section, we believe that by showing the section earlier to all visitors on the product pages, we will see an increase in “add to cart” rates. We will measure this through the add to cart goal conversion rate over a period of 2 business cycles.
DISCLAIMER: There is no magic formula.
However the power of an educated guess is what sets CRO professionals who regular exceed client expectations from those who succeed with a random test, only to fail with subsequent iterations.
With the amount of guesswork involved, one would think the discipline of conversion rate optimization is wild goose chasing!
Google’s own course, excellent for beginners.
Gain Seeker Meet Hypothesis
And there you have it – a/b testing hypothesis generation that goes beyond the obvious and uncovers improvement opportunities that you would otherwise fail to capitalize on.
These questions are great as you get to know a lot more about your customers – through these surveys, we found out that the majority of our client’s users were over 65 years of age and the entire communication and feel was built around cool, young and successful professionals.
As professionals who live and breathe testing, we do get a ton of requests to “increase click throughs, increase revenue and increase engagement” on a variety of sites. In most cases these requests don’t come with a lot of context. ‘
WASP Inspector – this has absolutely saved us in terms of event tracking and cross domain tracking validation.
Start analyzing the numbers by checking that the data is accurate and correct. You can’t really improve something if you’re measuring the wrong things. Use Google Analytics crawlers and checkers to make sure the tracking code is installed on all pages, get rid of any duplicate data, add the right filters and use dedicated views based on the objectives and particularities of each business. We will explain this in much more detail in a future article as it is a subject in its own.
You can see this example from Confused.com where we have highlighted just a part of the links and calls to action available on the landing page. In terms of user motivation, think of friction as a speed bump in the road for your customer journey. Any element that is causing anxiety, doubts, fear in the user’s mind will slow them down from buying or even entirely prevent them from doing it.
See which elements are contributing to your conversion rate and are being overlooked and test new layouts with that in mind.
How to Generate an A/B Testing Hypothesis, When You’re Done with the Obvious:
1. Obtain and assimilate list of business objectives that the client has – both short and long-term
Launch site polls and customer surveys. By the time you are done with the complete analytics research and insight generation, you will also have a sufficient volume of qualitative information to analyze for your audit.
Also, the questions around what they like about the product will give you an understanding of how your customers perceive and use the product as well as offer great sales copy direction as you will now have their own words and expressions, making your product sales copy much more relatable for your target audience.
The first thing to keep in mind when doing a heuristic analysis is that you should start from the SERP or from the banners or email or any of the other traffic mediums you are using to bring users to your website. Why is this important? Because relevancy has a lot to do with users’ expectation to the content they will find on your website. When they are clicking a link or a banner they are expecting something and it is your website’s role to deliver it.
You can also identify elements that are being overlooked by users as too few of them reach that point. We’ve seen many examples of testimonials or FAQs that were completely overlooked as they were close to the footer but users actually converted a lot more after seeing them. Sure enough, we moved some of those elements higher up and saw an increase in conversion rates.
2. Check your data and then analyze it
On the Thought landing page, we find further references to organic cotton and sustainable clothing.
To eliminate friction on the motivation side of users, just make good use of customer surveys and site polls and identify what needs to change.
The Cambridge English Dictionary defines a hypothesis as “an idea or explanation for something that is based on known facts but has not yet been proved.”
The great thing behind your client’s or your own business objectives is that after you’ve defined them you are halfway done with the measurement plan. As long as you know what you want to track you will also know how to track it.
Generally speaking, the perceived value of a product will make users stay or move forward. If your product does not clearly communicate the value that is relevant to your users then they will just move to the next brand offering what you are.
Now we have to see this Advanced Kit in action.
For example, let’s say you are selling organic cotton t-shirts and users find you organically (pun intended) through a google search.
The features we use for all our clients? Clickmaps, scroll maps and session replays.
http://www.gachecker.com/ – Great for spotting any URLs that don’t have tracking code on – works for Universal Analytics and GTM.
3. Set up qualitative research
Businesses starting out with optimization may already have a very clear idea of what has their visitors stymied. The hypothesis is cut and dried. And the gains from the tests are tangible and immediate.
Cause clients often tend to think that we optimizers have some sort of magic formula that can unerringly take them to big conversion lifts.
When we refer to heuristic research in the CRO realm, we mean a site walkthrough, really. A heuristic research is an experience-based assessment, meaning you simply apply your experience and understanding to the website and define some of the reasons why users are or are not converting. Analytics shows you the numbers while a heuristic analysis will show you why those numbers are like that.
- What can you tell us about yourself -> good to find out their age, gender, location, etc. This will help put more context and validate the insights you have in the demographics reports in Analytics.
- What made your buy our products/become our subscriber/sign-up? -> this is good to identify the main points that convince users to buy so you can emphasize them in further communication with your prospects.
- What doubts and hesitations did you have before buying/subscribing/signing up?
- What would you miss if you could not use our products/services anymore?
- What is the one big thing we are missing?
Some of the tools we are using?
In terms of user experience and design, friction is represented by any element that is preventing users to take the action you want them to take. The most common example we’ve encountered is the overlapping of live chat widgets with add to cart buttons or site polls overlapping checkout forms, etc.
Two great places to improve those analytics skills:
But there is a tried and tested empirical process that turns “suppositions” into more actions, more dollars, more profits and just more for marketers and businesses in general.
4. Conduct Heuristic Analysis
And this process starts with a hypothesis.
There is a clear CTA that gets you a free demo so you can really understand the offer and what you’re supposed to do on that page.
It is crucial to keep in mind that not all clients have the same issues and the same objectives. The end goal is making more money for most of them but you can’t simply assume that. Stop, collaborate and listen.
We love this one from Craig Sullivan @optimiseordie and definitely recommend you use something like it:
If you’re diligent, you can go through the process we’ve laid out.
Anything uncovered through heuristic analysis should not be taken as an absolute truth in any way but it is very useful to outline some areas to focus on and sets the direction for the testing hypotheses. If you want to save time, you’ll be interested in Convert Compass – a next gen hypothesis generation and iterative learning tool for smart testers.
But what happens when you run out of all the obvious options? Do you let go off optimization and rely on increasing your marketing spend by thousands to see proportional improvement in revenue?
As with everything in CRO, hypotheses also have their layers.
This is literally all there is on their homepage and it’s enough. On the other hand, you have zyxel.com who are offering a personal cloud solution but they make you go through some effort to find that out.
Let’s say we are writing a hypothesis based on information from Google Analytics and the scroll maps for the website selling organic cotton t-shirts. The statement will be something along the lines of this:
In science, a hypothesis is an idea or explanation that you then test through study and experimentation. Outside of science, a hypothesis can also be a guess or theory.
You could score this landing page on a scale from 1 to 5, based on how relevant you think it is for the users’ expectation and search terms. We would definitely give it an above average grade.
Where do you launch these site polls? Do a quick funnel analysis and identify the drop-off points. If 70% of your users are leaving on the product pages, there might be something there that is not convincing them. What better way to find out than to ask them? Our typical site poll looks something like this:
One very simple example is that you remove navigation and blog posts and any other widgets from the cart and checkout page as you would not want users to leave those steps to read about your latest press appearance.
We have come across a really well done, comprehensive measurement template that takes a bit of time to populate but the results are worth the effort.
- Distraction
Now that you have all this information at hand and have put it all in a wonderful slide deck for your client or boss or yourself, make sure you have a winning hypothesis formula.
The questions around what they don’t like about your products or shopping experience will help you address those issues and improve the experience users have on your website.
ConversionXL’s Google Analytics Courses – Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced.
The headline is confusing, it could also be that you’ve landed on a personal blog or a travel app, it’s not clear. Also, the body of text can be quite intimidating, especially for first-time visitors. We think they would have communicated that information much more effective if they would have put it in clear bullets.
5. Mouse tracking and session replays analysis
Now, as you’ve probably read before, there are certain elements to keep in mind when conducting a heuristic analysis. We won’t insist on them much but feel compelled to at least list them here.
Clickmaps are great to identify areas of interest, elements that appear clickable but aren’t, should be clickable but aren’t as well as the flipped side of this coin, with calls to action that are being ignored.
Distraction is caused by elements that are taking the user’s focus away from the main action and redirecting them to something less important.
Try to keep your users focused on one call to action and reduce distractions to a minimum. Make sure you offer sufficient information but don’t pull people away from the landing page you paid money for them to see.
Tag Assistant by Chrome – Take this one with a grain of salt as there will be some non-standard configurations out there and you don’t want to be the one crying to your client or boss that Analytics is not installed when it actually is.
Nope. There’s no limit to better, and no limits to testing. So you dig deeper and you read between the lines. Let’s show you how.
- Because we saw (qualitative & quantitative data)
- We expect that (change) for (population) will cause (impact(s))
- We expect to see (data metric(s) change) over a period of (x business cycles)
You can make a copy of this document from Fresh Egg and make it your own by adding in your numbers and objectives.
Make sure you’re eliminating any elements of friction in terms of design before even launching your website, it’s crucial that your website is easy to use and intuitive.
On the other side of the spectrum, we have Purchase Control who are keeping it simple and to the point. Their software helps you keep business spending under control, that’s what they say in the headline and in the ads.
The customer survey is sent out to recent customers, after they have received their product, ideally. Try sending this to customers that are not older than 30-45 days as you want them to remember the experience they had with the website, with the shopping process and also with the actual product. If you send out the survey too soon, you will not get relevant information on the quality of the products or delivery. The questions we ask almost always are:
