How to speed up growth with conversion optimization

Anita Princewill
8 min readAug 2, 2021

“In internet marketing, conversion optimization, or conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that converts into customers, or more generally, takes any desired action on a webpage. It is commonly referred to as CRO.” — Wikipedia

There are three objectives or things to measure in your optimization process:

  1. Test or make more effective changes to your website.
  2. Reduce the duration and cost of optimization (generate good test ideas really fast)
  3. Improve the speed of experimentation

So, when we need to do optimization, how do we know that we’re doing it well? How do we optimize our optimization process? And the way I see it, there are three objectives, three things we should measure when it comes to our optimization process. So, the number one thing is that obviously, we need to make all tests more effective changes to our website, to our landing pages or whatever and wherever the website traffic is landing on. This is quite important because no one wants to waste their time testing stupid stuff that makes no difference in regard to the business eventually. We need to know what to test that would have a positive impact and while doing that, we need to reduce the cost of optimization. So we cannot be slow. We cannot be brainstorming for five months about one test

The big question is how do we optimize a website?

If our objective is to increase our conversion rate by 20% by the end of the year. So we have 12 months to get a 20% increase in our conversion rate. How do we do it? How would you go about it? So, you know, what do most people do? So most people when they have a goal, “Oh, I need to improve my conversion rate.” What do they do?

Are best practices a unicorn?

How about best practices? There are best practices for everything, best landing page, best homepage, best product page, best checkout, you name it. There are seven best practices for every page type. Well, can we use best practices for optimization to improve our conversion rate? Yes, but it’s not optimization. Well, best practice is where you start. So when you first build your website, it should be as good as the best practice but then you optimize from there on this best practice is often not optimal for you. It is probably not. And best practice is also common practices. It’s what everybody is doing, not necessarily because it’s based on some industry-level data. So best practice is a starting point, it’s not optimization.

Important questions to ask

What about market leaders? Should we copy Amazon if we’re an e-commerce site? Or you know if we’re in SAS, should we copy whatever is the most famous SAS business in our industry? Things don’t work like that. The success of Amazon is built upon many other things. So just copying market leaders and thinking “Aw, they must have tested it. It’s great.” You will not make money by copying Amazon or any other leader because there’s always the question of ‘why buy from you and not this other guys and if you look like the other guys. People always benchmarking, copying features off of their competitor’s websites but the truth is that they don’t know what the hell they’re doing either. They copied it from somebody else who copied it from somebody else. Do you think they’d tested something? They probably didn’t. So it’s blind leading the blind. So copying competitors, benchmarking, is not optimization.

So how do we optimize? The research process that CXL has been using for over the years, it’s called ResearchXL. So basically what is this process? It helps you gather six types of data to help you make great optimization decisions and come up with tests that tend to win more often and have a bigger impact. So it’s all about identifying problems and coming up with ideas, the best possible ideas to test. So Sean was talking a lot about testing, I’m going to talk about how to figure out what you should be testing and how you should test those ideas. So, the number one step of any optimization or growth work is technical analysis. You need to understand what’s broken in your site. Does your site work flawlessly with every single browser and device, browser and device combination? The easy way to figure it out is you go to your web analytics tool and you compare your key metric revenue per visitor or conversion rate, whatever it might be per a browser device comeback.

  1. Step one is technical analysis. You need to understand what’s broken in your site. Does your site work flawlessly with every single browser and device? An easy way to figure it out is going to your web analytics tool and comparing your key metric revenue per visitor conversion rates per browser device number, i.e. explorer 10 may convert at 5% while explorer 11 converts at 2%. The easiest way to make money is to fix all the technical issues you might have.
  2. Step 2 is a heuristic analysis. Using your experience in the field to assess what might be working and what isn’t. To do this we should go through our website, mobile app and desktop separately, page-by-page with a team of people and critique every single screen based on fixed criteria.
  3. Heuristic analysis is a way to quickly identify possible problems on a website. The results aren’t scientific, it is just a way to quickly figure out possible problems to gather data to either validate or invalidate some assumptions.
  4. Heuristic analysis criteria include:
  • relevancy: when someone searches for a keyword and you come up do they get it immediately or does your product talk about something else?
  • Clarity: do they understand specifically and clearly what your website is about and why they should buy from you? You need to give specific reasons.
  • Motivation: what is being done on the page to increase their motivation to take action?
  • Friction: what makes it difficult to take action, for example, long forms.

Note: if you’re not giving specific reasons as to why potential customers should buy from you, you are losing so much money this message should be on every landing page and every single page should have one desired action.

According to the Fogg behaviour model, the desired behaviour happens when three things converge: there is a high motivation, there are the ability and ease to take action, and lastly there are triggers. A trigger is a time we present action or a call to action. You should not review The CTA until the motivation is high so you need to first work on the customer’s motivation.

The third step is digital analytics: for conversion optimisation and Growth purposes we are mainly interested in four things:

  • Where are the leaks? Whatever your funnel is, where are the biggest leaks between these layers of your website?
  • Which segments? Look at the data across different segments, e.g. mobile, desktop, tablets, and your key traffic channels.
  • What are uses doing? We need to understand what users are doing on our website. This is a massive problem for most websites because they are not measuring every single thing a user can do; every scroll and every click have to be recorded with analytics else you want to know who is using it and what’s the impact on user behaviour if they use that thing.
  • Which actions correlate with higher conversions? We want to get more people to take that action use Google tag manager or heap analytics to measure every single thing that happens on your site.

You can never know why something doesn’t work, you can only guess. So, the question you should ask yourself is how many different ways are there to achieve our goals?

Step 4 is mouse tracking and form analytics. This is essentially the aggregated data of your mouse cursor movement. How far down do people scroll? Where do they click? Where do they scroll? How is user behaviour different between different devices etc?

Tip: the easiest way to get people to scroll all the way to the end of your page is to maintain a single background colour because karma when a background colour change is most people think that’s where the website ends. Also, use visual cues like arrows pointing down show that there is more below.

Forms are how people take action, so before we show uses the form karma we need to increase motivation and lower friction. Form analytics like Hotjar can show which form fields are the problem.

Step 5 is qualitative research. This is all about the why and it’s also about your target audience, i.e how they behave, what they want, what they don’t want, their turn off and turn on.

We need to figure out who our buyer groups are (not personas!). There are three main ways to get these data; first, survey people who just bought your products or signed up using email or a phone call. The other way is to survey people who came to your website and left without buying anything. To do this use open-ended questions because multiple-choice questions assume what the reasons are, so your questions should focus on uncovering friction like asking what their doubts and hesitations were before buying or what questions they have about the products. The last is surveying people who don’t take action. The best way to do this is by putting a pool in the final destination, which is your checkout page that asks what’s stopping them from completing a purchase.

Step 6 is user testing this is when you recruit people who represent your target audience and have them perform key tasks on your website. The purpose of this is to understand what’s difficult to understand and do and where things can go wrong.

A good optimization process tells you where the problems on your website are, tells you what the problems are, shows you why it is a problem, helps you identify the problems and turn them into hypotheses, and it should help you prioritize your ideas of solutions to the problems.

Full disclosure: I’m taking the CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree as part of a scholarship, on the basis that I write one review post per week, over twelve weeks. If you’re interested in reading a really in-depth review of the Minidegree, keep an eye on my Medium page over the next 3 months. 🙂

--

--

Anita Princewill

Data-driven Digital Marketer & Photographer|| Based in Lagos, Nigeria. Find me at linkedin.com/in/anita-princewill/