CXL Institute Conversion Optimization Minidegree Review (10/12)

This is the tenth of a twelve-part (10/12) review of conversion optimization mini degree by CXL Institute. They offer multiple programs that help you get to an advanced level in digital marketing and offer industry-recognized certificates after program completion. In this review, I will revisit the “Fast and Rigorous User Personas”, “Heuristic Analysis Framework for Conversion Optimization Audits” and “Google Analytics Audit” courses.

Fast and Rigorous User Personas

Personas are representations of different types of users. Personas help you understand your users’ needs, behaviors, and goals. Usually, people think that personas are waste of time and non-relevant. The truth is that you can develop your personas through user and market research. This way your personas will be based on real data from real people which can help you stand out in the market as well as improve and understand your users. A bad persona is full of details that do not matter because they are not related to your business or are based on personal opinion and guessing.

Through this course I’ve learned that in order to create a useful persona you need to:

1. Collect quantitative data
2. Statistical clustering
3. Build archetypes (to share with the rest of your company)

1. Collect quantitative data

This is the key to building good personas because your persona is as good as is your data. You can survey your target audience through your website using tools like HotJar or recruit respondents on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk. Remember to ask good questions, they must be relevant, actionable, and unbiased.

2. Statistical clustering

After collecting quantitative data you want to identify and group similar respondents. You can do it manually, but if you have a lot of data you can use a computer program to do this at scale.

3. Build archetypes

Once you have sorted similar respondents into groups, you can build your personas. The process is now fairly easy:

1. Start from the needs
2. Include group description (e.g. age, sex, state, company position, etc.)
3. Include some quotes at the end and/or word clouds

How long can you use these personas? Probably for several months, but if you introduce new services or products you can consider redoing them.

Heuristic Analysis Framework for Conversion Optimization Audits

Heuristic Analysis is a qualitative type of research that is conducted both on conscious and subconscious levels with medium to high validity and low effort. The key to successful heuristic analysis is to follow a proven framework. Some of the available frameworks are:

• Jakob Nielsens Usability Heuristics
• Gerhardt-Powals’ cognitive engineering principles
• Weinschenk and Barker classification

The problem with these frameworks is that these people never did A/B testing.

How to do the successful heuristic analysis? Focus on changing user motivation and that has the potential to get you five times more results than improving usability.

There are seven levels of conversion:

1. Relevance — Be relevant to your visitors by knowing where the traffic is coming from and synchronizing website experience with expectations from traffic sources. You want your audience to feel like they are at the right place.
2. Trust — Where trust comes from? There was a research where users evaluated the credibility of websites by these criteria: 46% web design (color, form, etc), 28.5% information architecture, 25.1% information focus (“clarity”), 15.5% key visual, 14.8% useful information.
3. Orientation — You control the attention of the users. You make them see what you want to make them see. What kind of information do users need to find the right product? Help users overcome the paradox of choice by using filters, facets, comparison tables, also show them clear calls to action. Make it easy for them to find what they need.
4. Stimulus — Let people visualize how they can buy on your website. Give them reasons to stop their search and click buy. You need to deliver the right implicit and explicit values. Implicit values are how you make people feel when they use your product while explicit values rationally justify their purchase.
5. Security — Anticipate the inner talk of your customer. Answer typical questions on transactional pages, create a frequently asked questions page, let customers ask questions through forms or chat, explain why and how you use their information.
6. Convenience — Optimize your website for human beings. If you have long forms, ask easy questions first to get people into the flow.
7. Confirmation — after the purchase you should send your customers confirmation that they did a great decision and reinforce the value with benefits.

The process behind heuristic analysis in the context of an optimization program is:

1. Plan
2. Analyze
3. Prioritize
4. Build
5. Measure and learn

You want to use checklists and frameworks for objectivity, personas for customer centricity, user research, and analytics to create and validate hypotheses.

Google Analytics Audit

This was a very practical and interesting course to take. The goal of this audit is to make sure that the data in your google analytics account is correct and that you are tracking everything that is important to your business.

The audit is done by analyzing the google analytics account as well as the website. Some of the recommended plugins to use during website analysis are Google Tag Assistant, Adswerve’s dataLayer Inspector+, and GTM/GA Debug from David Vallejo (Thyng).

This audit is split into ten sections:

1. Overview
2. Property and View
3. Accuracy
4. Data Sources
5. Site Crawl
6. Content Grouping
7. Events
8. Goals
9. PII (Personally Identifiable Information)
10. EEC (Enhanced Ecommerce)

You would go over each section and mark things that are either important or not important as well as urgent or not urgent. This ranking is based on Eisenhower Decision Matrix or also known as Urgent-Important Matrix.

My Thoughts

It is week ten and I have currently completed 56% or 19/33 courses. This is the end of the “Conversion Research” section and in the next reviews I will cover sections “Testing” and “Optimization Strategies”. Thank you for reading about my experience with CXL Institute.