Kris Irizawa

How I used HotJar Recording feature to improve my conversion rate

February 7, 2017

As I was building out my site and adjusting the email sign up form, I didn’t realize my lightbox email sign up form code was still active and was executed through Google Tag Manager.

What happened is, once you’re cookied the form is designed not to serve to returning visitors. Given that I’m the owner of the site, the form did not recognize my sessions as a new visitor to the site.

One of my favorite marketing technology tool is HotJar.

HotJar provides analytics capabilities ranging from Heatmap, visitor recording, poll, survey, etc. Given that my site’s sign up volume was low, I was pretty concerned.

After analyzing multiple recordings of my blog pages, I’ve noticed a pattern of behavior where my site visitors were going toward the top right of the screen to click off something. After going through my site in another browser after clearing my cookies/history, I noticed the pop-up came up, and the close button (represented by “X”) is what the users were clicking.

It is probably not surprising to understand (at least for most people) that pop up newsletter sign up form are pretty annoying. I immediate removed the code and switched to standard embedded forms.

That resulted in near 0 conversion rate to the newsletter sign up to almost a 3x lift in newsletter sign up conversion rate.

I have successfully used HotJar recording capabilities to improve my blog’s conversion rate!!

I will not cover all the features of HotJar, but it is certainly one of those tools you may want to try on your site. You can gain tons of valuable insights from your customer behavior that you may not be able to read from the quantitative data.

Here is an example mouse movement of the describe problematic behavior I mentioned above.

Key Points To Know For Your Digital Marketing Strategy

December 7, 2016

Without a well-planned digital marketing strategy, you can invest a significant amount of money and resources and end up with little or no return on your investment.

The problem is not with the marketing solutions themselves, as there are wide varieties available to help you build your brand, connect with customers and market at scale. A study conducted by Smart Insights shows that 47 percent of businesses are engaged in digital marketing but have no clearly defined strategic plan.

This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to find your way through the maze of interconnected, real-time data powered Internet environment. A closer look at what it takes to see the necessity for the creation and investment of a digital marketing strategy is needed.

Making sure your marketing strategy and overall business goals are moving in the same direction is essential. Define your business goals, then create a construct that will help you reach them through digital marketing.

If your focus is on acquiring new customers, draw up a digital roadmap that will help you achieve the goal. This same thinking applies to every other part of your business plan: opening channels for new products or services and building brand awareness for specific market channels. Setting specific goals will flesh out your overall marketing strategy and work to determine your tactics, channels, messages, and who you should partner with to realize tangible, bottom line results.

Prioritize investment in technology

An outstanding customer experience is a key factor in determining the success of a digital marketing strategy. To accomplish this you need to prioritize your investment in technology, everything from marketing platforms to analytics tools. The best returns will be found when a marketing strategy is clear and dollars spent on technology translate into a positive ROI.

Determine your KPIs and data collection methods to achieve your business goal

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are critical to accurately deciphering customer data. It is easy with modern technology to amass volumes of data on customers. But of all the data, which is the most valuable? Working within the boundaries of a strategic digital marketing plan helps to determine the most important KPIs and the best data collection methods to achieve that goal.

Digital marketing quickly becomes complex, and often the result is increasing amounts of waste and duplication of effort. It is content to create, social media accounts to manage, and customer data collection to implement, all which add to the difficulty of an already difficult job. Knowing what your specific tasks and responsibilities are can be found in the digital marketing plan, so you have a point of reference that will enable you to avoid wasted effort and duplication.

Establish benchmarks and set goals to work on

Establish benchmarks and set goals to work on continually improving your performance. ROI is a key metric in determining when or if you should modify marketing strategies, and where to invest resources. A digital marketing strategy will be your guide in assessing which KPIs are the most important. According to Convince and Convert, some of the key KPIs are traffic, conversions, channel-specific traffic, and search trends. The more you know about what matters most, the more you can put the right analytics tools in the right place and create optimum data feedback loops.

Marketing technology and tools are evolving

Because data marketing tools are constantly evolving, it is important to be prepared to experiment with new approaches. Wearable technology and expanding social media platforms open the door for new technologies and approaches to be developed. Brands that are innovative stay current with new technologies and are proactive with their approach to testing out new formats and channels to see the responses from their target audience.

Digital marketing is at its best when it realizes its interdependence with the rest of the company and seeks to integrate and optimize its services. Multichannel campaigns can have their message amplified and integrate their efforts with traditional forms of advertising, achieving the results in collaboration with digital marketing.

Having a digital marketing strategy, like digital marketing itself is no longer an option for a successful company. Everything from looking for basic information about a company or product to looking for support and interacting with a business, customers are increasingly turning to a digital marketing presence.

Creating a focused campaign through the use of digital marketing tools is essential for defining your goals and avoid being pulled in too many directions. The result will be achieving your most important business objectives and a bottom line ROI that will reflect the wisdom of your digital marketing strategy.

Win the micro moments to be in front of your customers

December 3, 2016

Many brands are working hard to get int front of their consumers and wanting to win every “micro-moments” brand have with them. Ever thought about how users even get to search for something and eventually arrive at your website?

We all do this in this age of the internet where we all use our smartphone to search stuff in the real world. And this video from Google shows those micro-moments where something triggers people to search.

What about your business? Is there something people encounter before making that journey, or micro-moments they encounter prior to visiting your website, or store? This is actually an important question business owners will need to ask, especially if you have a desire to acquire more customers or traffic to your site.

Take a moment to think your customer’s possible micro-moments. This video by Google is an excellent example that shows what I’m talking about.

For me, when brands get it micro-moments right, that means the friction for what I want to achieve or get out of the brand’s service is very minimal.

A great example would be Amazon. I can rely on Amazon to transact seamlessly. Desktop or on mobile or even with one click, and to make sure the shopping experience and transactions go smoothly.

It is not only the transactions but also following up with the order and its shipment status. These small things matter.

These small moments add up. I think that is why Amazon is able to be the defacto shopping site when people want to search, compare, and buy.

What about your brand? Are you guys doing a great job delivering your brand’s promise and awesome service that meets this generation of consumers?

Conversions are down. Data you need to analyze to avoid it.

November 25, 2016

Are you panicking because your website is driving fewer sales or conversions? The first thing you’ll need to do is open up your analytics tool and start digging into the issue. This article will talk about some of the key things to look for when your website stops performing.

What to consider when you look at your web data is the fundamental of the web performance equation. The equation is:

[Traffic x Conversion Rate] x [AOV] = Revenue
Traffic x Conversion Rate = Orders
Orders x AOV = Revenue

This is a pretty universal equation for digital marketing and e-commerce.

If your problem is that the revenue is declining, then you’ll need to take into account of the AOV (average order value) impact.

Let’s start looking at the impact of the key metrics, and see how we can diagnose the issue breaking it down by ‘traffic’ and ‘conversion rate’.

Conversion drops because of lower web traffic

One main reason your orders are down is due to the fact that the site’s traffic is down. Traffic of your website could be impacted by many things, but if you’re in Google Analytics or similar tool, the first thing to look for is what traffic source you’re seeing the decline is coming from.

Look into channel report and see which bucket of traffic is declining. Then Look into which source and medium are causing the traffic to decline. If you’re paying for advertising, look into if there is any issues with your ads or campaign set up.

ga-sourcemedium-112016 — Google Analytics traffic source report.

There will be times where traffic sources aren’t an issue as overall traffic is not down at all. In that case, you’ll need to look at the traffic from the perspective of user behavior. If you have a marketing funnel, then look at the funnel and see if there are any major changes in traffic within the funnel.

In Google Analytics you can use the reports within Behaviors and Conversions section. Start looking at the traffic pattern and see if you have any traffic drop off that could be impacting the traffic going into your cart. That would definitely lower your conversion rate and a number of orders.

Conversion drops because of lower conversion rate

In your web analytics tools like Google Analytics, you would usually set up goals that you want to track. When you set that up, usually the tools is able to start reporting on conversion rate (# of goals occurred divided by the traffic). Using this conversion rate metrics, you can use that to see if particular sources of traffic are causing a lower conversion rate. Usually, you’ll compare the data from different date ranges, like a month over month, or current week vs. last week and such.

Some the key reports to dig into where the conversion rates are dropping is.

Funnel report
Goal flow
Channel and source/medium report

These are the basic reports, but sometimes you make changes to websites (i.e. adding a link that may take away users to another page away from shopping cart or flow). In such case, you need to dig into if people are going from certain page to another page. In such case, you can use the Behavior > Site Content > All Pages, and chose a page and look into Navigation Summary. If you see that more people are going away to another page that doesn’t matter than you may have an impact and explanation to why your conversion rate is dropping.

ga-funnel-112016

Average order value (AOV) is declining

When you’re looking at the revenue decline, and realize traffic is not declining, and conversion rate hasn’t changed, then you may have a decreasing AOV. When you’re AOV is declining, the number of orders is decreasing, and that could mean few things.

People are ordering items at a lower price point
People are using promo/discount codes more so than prior weeks
People are buying fewer number of items within a transaction

More people are visiting a product page with a product at a price point fewer than the average price sold
In many cases, this issue is less about your website unless the traffic is lead to a page with the product at a lower price than average.

So hopefully, this gives you a basic understanding of how you could approach analyzing data once you start seeing the conversions go down. Don’t panic, just go into your web analytics tool like Google Analytics and follow the steps I mentioned above. More advanced users will look into more strategic and tactical things, but this is probably a start.

Mobile marketing – Only few marketers have strategies set

August 21, 2016

I wanted to share some of these stats around mobile, to get marketers thinking and improve mobile moment. Very few marketers are investing in mobile marketing while the whole world has moved on to mobile as every data indicates. It has already surpassed desktop in terms of time spent, being the key first touch point in shopper’s journey, etc. Here are some basic stats:

1) 50-60% of emails are now opened on a mobile device. source

2) United State’s mobile time spent on in-app is growing and expect to grow while mobile web is flat. source

3) 84% of smartphone users who used the device while watching television did so on a daily basis. source

4) 65% of online searches begin on a mobile device, yet only 16% of marketers have developed a mobile strategy. source

Since what’s going on on the internet as well as what we do in digital marketing, things move fast and change a lot, I chose these stats given that they reflect data including 2015 onwards.

These stats signifies a lot of things, and what we all know for sure is mobile is real and marketers aren’t doing enough to win mobile moments.
I wonder why… We already know from our own behaviors that when we turn on TV, 100% of our attention or eyeballs are really not focused on TV, yet marketers still spend tons of money on TV ads.

We also know customer journey already begins before desktop, even maybe before people are searching online for a mobile device. What are smart brands doing to win that moment?

A bit of an old data from Think w/ Google, but already in 2012 they noticed how mobile played a key role in early part of the path to purchase. Earlier HubSpot data indicates more percentage of shoppers are starting from mobile.

: Source: 2012 Think with Google Path to Purchase

For example, in this Google’s customer journey tool, you can see that for this specific segment of the industry in Japan, Social plays a key channel in the first touchpoint before making a purchase. I’m guessing the channels on the earlier stage of the funnel are likely going to be on mobile. Hence marketers need to plan to win those moments by getting in front of the target audience.

: Source: Mobile Customer Journey Path to Purchase

These are my own thoughts, but maybe we all can share some learnings or thoughts, but definitely I see these as some rudimentary areas where marketers can win the mobile moment.

Facebook, both messenger apps, and mobile ads are winning, and marketers should not ignore it
Where are the conversations taking place? Brands got to be there.
Don’t just acquire, but also engage after you acquire beyond e-mail, and take into consideration of how your target users are using mobile in their daily routine.
Videos and syndicate it. How many of you click the video play button on FB and just watch those content your friends shared? If you do that on a mobile device, then I see that as a moment to get in front of your target audience.
Champion the timing. If you look at your analytics and user access to your site by device type, I bet you, you may see some interesting differences like mobile users are accessing your site more after work, at night, or in morning during a commute. Check your data, and make your ad dollars more effective by targeting at the right timing.

Also, it is important to understand the macro issues if there are any, given you may have no full control of it, but you may be able to be part of the change. Meaning, a lot of the reason why marketers don’t have mobile marketing strategy could be:

Due to organizational issues. You may be too busy getting your major project out and it is all due the needs and desire of the highest paid person’s opinion and their priorities.
Systematic issues. Project kick off, insights, media planning, all the way through to tracking are structured from how we do marketing from 10 years ago. Hence how you operate is basically designed and aligns to how content/product/services are launched through the desktop web.
Fear of its complexity
No management visions that connects the dots. HiPPOs…
Don’t know what to track and what to measure and report on. Tracking marketing outcome on the mobile app or mobile web? Don’t know and don’t get the right tools in place to track attribution.

Take a hard look at your mobile strategy or even why there are no plans if nothing is really going on. It is time to start asking marketers wtf they’re doing to win mobile moments.