Showing up to a new project with a bunch of ideas on how to improve things is a strong indicator that someone doesn’t know what they are doing. Comparable to a doctor performing surgery before asking what the problem is.
Improving conversion starts as a diagnostic process.
Diagnostic information typically comes from three places:
- Analytics
- User Testing
- Interviews
Analytics can include all the data you get from Google Analytics or a similar platform. How long people are spending on your site, goal completion rates, where they are dropping off, that kind of stuff. Then there is the more functional aspect to analytical data, like page speed problems, bugs associated with different browsers, server downtime, etc. Broadly speaking, analytical data is about observing what people do in aggregate.
Then there’s user testing. User testing is about observing what individual people do. This can be done in-person or remotely. You give people specific tasks to complete and then watch how well they do and where they get stuck.
Finally, there is qualitative research. This encompasses things like pop-up polls, email surveys, customer interviews, public reviews and live chat interactions (the data your customer support team is already collecting).
- All this came from a free course on research-driven optimization by Peep Laja over at CXL. They categorise the above differently but it’s the same idea.
- If you’d like to read more posts about conversion optimisation you can follow me on twitter @joshpitzalis.
This is post belongs to a series. The rest of the posts are listed here.