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Marketing analytics for your online business

CRO

How I used HotJar Recording feature to improve my conversion rate

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.

 

Finding Customer Pain Points on your Website

One of the common questions optimization (CRO) experts get is, how do you find customer pain points on your website so that it could be fixed or tested to improve site experience?

Common answer you may get back is finding customer’s pain points on the website and then go fix it by using analytics tool like Google Analytics, Site Catalyst, Webtrends, etc. However, the art of finding the customer’s pain points is usually deeper than what you may expect. Here are some ideas, but would definitely love to hear from you if you have any.

 

Look deeper into error page visitors

The 404 Error Page is something all brands should worry about. There is an unavoidable situation like when I entered some random URL in Google search which gives me the following result. However, if your visitors are hitting this page through existing link on your production site, or your marketing campaign is driving to a 404 page, then that could be a super lame experience for the people visiting your website.

google404

Things to consider in reviewing your error page visitors are by taking a deeper look (or segmenting) the 404 visitors:

  • What URLs people used to arrive at 404
  • What traffic sources are leading to this error page
  • What landing page is driving traffic to this error page? Not all people land on 404 page directly, could be a particular page with an expired link. Could be many other things.
  • Details around the technical environment.  Certain browser, device type, OS, time of day 404 error page increases?

 

Use VOC and segment data on people who could not Task Complete 

What website owners think as an error or failure point may be different from how customers see it. If you have some kind of survey or feedback capture mechanism on your site, then you might want to cater questions that could help you understand customer pain points.

VOC Task Completion for Mobile

Usually, the survey tool allows you to serve the survey on any page you want, or if you have it served across many pages, the data export gives the URL where the survey was taken.

So in this example, you might be able to find pages with high responses from people who said ‘No’ to ‘Were you able to find the information you were looking for?’.  Now you have a good starting point for trying to formulate a good hypothesis on why a particular page sucks, and what needs to get optimized.

One of my favorite analysis and observation points is Clicktale and iPerceptions integration, where I get to see session recordings of people who left negative feedbacks. For example, survey respondent to the iPerceptions survey who have rated the site experience at 0 (0 out of 10, 10 being great), Clicktale will allow you to see user behavior from those who rated 0 on the customer satisfaction survey. You may find something interesting about the site that you did not know about. How awesome is that, to be able to understand what customer exactly went through?

 

Drop off between form submit and actual form submit completed

It is very common to tackle optimizing some kind of behavior funnel, or form submission funnel to reduce people dropping off in a certain step. Example, trying to increase shopping cart closure rate.

What don’t we hear much from this type of analysis is that what if people click on that last ‘Submit’ button, but the data did not go through? In eCommerce example, it is that situation when you’ve reviewed all the information you put in and ready to checkout, the site freezes, or you hit that final ‘confirmation’ button but not sure if you’ve hit the thank you page. This is quite different from page to page drop off because the user’s intent to close the sale is ‘real’, not one of those fuzzy last minute change of decision.

This is a good point to check your data because you can use your analytics tool to track such drop-off. It is pretty common in CRO world to optimize websites from the bottom of the funnel, which is likely to generate quick great CRO results.

 

Site speed or loading time

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the faster the site serving content to users, the lower the bounce rate would be, or maybe even the site conversions. Here is an example of average document interactive time (DOM readiness) versus bounce rate. You’ll definitely see a causation between the speed and bounces. There are things you can’t do much as a brand, such as improving one country’s network infrastructure. But most brands should be able to control common technical things on the site, ranging from minimizing code, reducing the weight of the image assets, etc.

site-load-time-bounce-ga

Monitoring your site’s performance and constantly thinking about avoiding customer having to wait for the content is definitely something to optimize. Assessing this data per site section, by platform, or page level could give you a better perspective where customers are feeling the pain.

 

Top landing page with high bounce rate

Usually, this is the first thing most analysts look at to understand which landing pages are the popular entry point for the site visitors but yet have high bounces. Typically, most analysts would dig deeper in potentially the problematic page. Common data to dig deeper to understand the drivers of the high bounces are:

– Traffic sources that are driving traffic and high bounces (example sources… traffic from social media, traffic from banner ad, etc.)

– Device type.  Is it mobile or tablets that are driving high bounce?

– Timing. Could it be due to some timing with the press release, product announcements, promotional discounts?

– Country and network speed.  Like some emerging country with expected slow network speed may have high bounces

– The specific segment that bounces.  You may have different segments built out in your analytics tool that could be based on a combination of things that defines some kind of group.  Example… Support user from those who purchased before and came back to support page, campaign ad visitors who have returned to site for the 3rd times, or returning visitors who came from email, etc.

– Technical environment.  Like browser and the version of the browser. Don’t be surprised if you get few particular browsers on a certain version that gets high bounces. Talking with web engineer may help you understand why certain browsers can lead to higher bounce rate.

 

In summary, there are so many things you can do with your analytics tool, survey tool, and Heatmap tool to understand customer pain points. It is not just about finding out what is working and obsessing about improving conversion rates. In many situations, it is important to think of the inverse scenario. Like looking at data on those who did not convert, asking and finding what’s broken, a collection of pages not adding value, error page visits and why people visit that page. It is these unsexy things that marketers/analysts should be thinking about that could help build a better understanding of customer pain points. So that you can build a great hypothesis to test/experiment or just fixing the website immediately.

Starting My First A/B Testing Using Optimizely

I’ve been playing around with Optimizely to run A/B and multivariate testing. I’d thought I share my experience around this optimization efforts.

I came across Optimizely during eMetrics and Conversion summit in San Francisco. I happened to be in the breakout session where Optimizely founder Dan Siroker was presenting. He was the Director of Analytics for the Obama Presidential Campaign and Deputy New Media Director for the Presidential Transition. In his presentation, he went through the slides showing the learnings on various tests he ran for Obama’s fund raising.

Anyways, what’s interesting is that the tool allows you to run tests with minimal (or no) involvement of web engineer. Basic test experiments could be activated by putting a simple javascript on the page. The test setup could be done in their WYSIWYG interface where you can change, move, remove parts of the web page on the fly.

Optimizely Features

Optimizely edit elements

Custom rules on different instances to run test could simply do by leveraging the URL parameters, or custom variables defined in the javascript.

The test I set up was a little tricky. The same exact URL is used for two different page because the state of the page is determined by some dynamic logic within the code. I overcame that by defining a custom variable in javascript.

To make sure the proper page is being tested, I added additional parameter and value to make sure it is not impacting similar URL elsewhere.

Another challenge that I encountered was the swapping dynamic element. For example, some images like Trust-e or Geo Trust logos are generated dynamically. So when you use the “move” feature on Optimizely, it doesn’t move the entire logical element, so the page gets distorted when you push the test.

The customer support from Optimizely team is really fast, technical, and friendly. It was actually pretty surprising given that I am using the 200,000 visitor plan, but getting the service level like an enterprise customer. I hope they don’t change that aspect of the service, it really helps to have a quick and accurate turn around on issues that could impact the bottom-line.

I have to say the setting up the multivariate piece of the tool is a little clunky, given my experience from using Webtrends Optimize. However, the price and service Optimizely are just so compelling it really doesn’t matter. What matters is really churning out the test and get back the results, and move on to drive the lift in conversions.

What I learned from few tests is that it goes back to the basic fundamental thing.

Plan your testing wisely.

Because you can quickly set up tests and run little tests here and there, I felt that I was missing the big opportunities to get huge ROI. In my view, good planning would mean to do your planning due diligence:

  • Use your analytics tool measure where the low hanging fruit is in terms of consumer pain points. Find high traffic page with high bounces, traffic from a campaign where landing page is not effective, etc.
  • Create hypothesis on why the page is not effective. Ask yourself why does that page exist, what does that page need to do
  • A/B testing or MVT. They are two different tactics and require a different amount of resource/efforts to deliver. So think and plan wisely.
  • Set the right expectation with business partners/clients that getting results may take time to get accurate and significant read
  • Define your conversion and make sure key stakeholders know what you’re optimizing for

Seriously, these things are really important. Optimizely allows you to run ad-hoc tests really quickly, but it could also disappoint you if you’re not getting the results as expected after waiting few days or maybe weeks.

With Google Analytics integrating their Google Website Optimizer, and companies like Visual Website Optimizer (similar to Optimizely) emerging, the barrier to doing website optimization is becoming lower and less difficult.

I would say lastly, don’t be afraid and just go testing and learn quickly from your mistakes.

First Step to Increase Conversions on Your Website

The ultimate goal for any websites is to convert. An entire book can be written to cover how to increase conversions on your website, but I would like to start off by reviewing where to start and take the first step.

1) Define what is the conversion
This is very important since every site is unique. Some sites are blogs and it may not generate money. However, conversion for such non-transactional site could be to have visitors to leave a comment, read as many contents, etc. Whatever your site is, make sure to define the goals and understand what the conversion is.

2) The path to conversion
I was about to say the point of traffic drop off, but you just have to step back and realize that every action of conversion needs to start somewhere. The path for a conversion could be a check out process for transactional sites. However, keep in mind the options that your site visitors have to convert. Rather it is a necessary path they need to take from page to page, or navigate within a single page, understand the experience of the visitors that they will take to convert.

3) Retention / Drop off / Bounce
Obviously, diving into these metrics and associating it to the path, you’ll come to realize the point of opportunity for an enhancement to increase conversions. It is important to understand your analytics tools and leverage the feature to find the improvement points. Typical metrics and analysis methods are conversion funnel analysis, bounce rate, single access page, path analysis, etc.

4) Optimize
Once you have the metrics and path or points to associate it, it is time to take an action to optimize. Like I’ve said earlier, every site is unique so there is no one solution to optimization. However, the typical method to test out which optimization worked is to use A/B test. i.e. Google has a solution called “Google Website Optimizer”. Do whatever it takes for better conversion process; modify the page, test different form entry process, colors, navigation, make a call to action bigger, etc. A lot of it would probably based on user experience. Make sure to test the results.