How do you achieve growth through conversion optimization? You need high-quality research and experimentation. In this episode, Peep discusses why research is critical to understand the problems on the website and why you need to develop multiple hypotheses in order to find the right solution.
Speaker 1: Growth through
optimization is research plus
experimentation and the research
bit is 80 percent of the
results.
How can you grow your company through conversion optimization? There are two things that go into it. One is you need to figure out what are the actual problems people are having with your website. So that part we call research. There's qualitative research talking to a target users you know after they've bought something while they're using your side the checking into usability it's all the qualitative bits. And then there's the quantitative bits. Digital Analytics quantified data like how many people did what where and qualitative answers why. So understanding this problem set. Understanding what people are doing and understand what are the problems and why these problems are problems to begin with helps us formulate our hypothesis. So once we understand the problem we can now formulate a hypothesis like if we would change x y z to ABC we would expect this behavior to change and as a result we see this result. Now even if we understand what the problem is we do know what the optimal solution is. So let me give you an example. So a couple of years ago I was doing conversion research for an e-commerce site. They were selling pool parts you know like outdoor pools and there's various parts that go into it. So the number one reason that people didn't buy a pool or sorry didn't buy parts for their pool was that they weren't sure whether the parts they were looking at fit their pool. That's the problem and I think like 40 percent of people that we surveyed that didn't go through with the purchase stated that that's the number one reason. That's a big problem. But now we understood Aha it's a big aha moment for us. This is the reason they're not buying more because they're not sure whether it fits their pool logic right. But what is the solution. Well in this case there is no obvious idea sometimes there might be an obvious idea like I can't read your fonts which make them bigger obvious but in most cases there are no obvious answers and hence you need to come up with multiple good hypotheses for solutions as many as you can. And ideally all the ideas are very different from each other. And now you need to do experimentation to basically A B test A B and test. Which of these ideas for a solution actually works or works the best because some idea might work but some of that is another idea that works even better. It never ends. What also often happens is like the first and the most obvious idea for a solution is not the best one the seventh the eighth idea is actually the one that is that is the best. So what I like to I like to do is like gather around people like a cross-functional group. So we have designers you X people engineers customer success people marketing people all together debating or not debating but like discussing what could be the best idea for a solution where essentially we're brainstorming and we get a variety of ideas and some and then then we'll score these hypotheses we like to use the P Excel framework Google it to then ranked ideas because we can if we come up with nine ideas for a solution we can really run a Navy test with nine variations. In most cases you don't have enough traffic for that and then hence you need to prioritize which which idea to test first second and so on and so forth. So as I said growth through optimization is research plus experimentation and the research bit is 80 percent of the results. If your research is not done or is done sloppily what you experiment with does not matter because most mostly you'll be experimenting with stupid ideas that will make no difference.
How can you grow your company through conversion optimization? There are two things that go into it. One is you need to figure out what are the actual problems people are having with your website. So that part we call research. There's qualitative research talking to a target users you know after they've bought something while they're using your side the checking into usability it's all the qualitative bits. And then there's the quantitative bits. Digital Analytics quantified data like how many people did what where and qualitative answers why. So understanding this problem set. Understanding what people are doing and understand what are the problems and why these problems are problems to begin with helps us formulate our hypothesis. So once we understand the problem we can now formulate a hypothesis like if we would change x y z to ABC we would expect this behavior to change and as a result we see this result. Now even if we understand what the problem is we do know what the optimal solution is. So let me give you an example. So a couple of years ago I was doing conversion research for an e-commerce site. They were selling pool parts you know like outdoor pools and there's various parts that go into it. So the number one reason that people didn't buy a pool or sorry didn't buy parts for their pool was that they weren't sure whether the parts they were looking at fit their pool. That's the problem and I think like 40 percent of people that we surveyed that didn't go through with the purchase stated that that's the number one reason. That's a big problem. But now we understood Aha it's a big aha moment for us. This is the reason they're not buying more because they're not sure whether it fits their pool logic right. But what is the solution. Well in this case there is no obvious idea sometimes there might be an obvious idea like I can't read your fonts which make them bigger obvious but in most cases there are no obvious answers and hence you need to come up with multiple good hypotheses for solutions as many as you can. And ideally all the ideas are very different from each other. And now you need to do experimentation to basically A B test A B and test. Which of these ideas for a solution actually works or works the best because some idea might work but some of that is another idea that works even better. It never ends. What also often happens is like the first and the most obvious idea for a solution is not the best one the seventh the eighth idea is actually the one that is that is the best. So what I like to I like to do is like gather around people like a cross-functional group. So we have designers you X people engineers customer success people marketing people all together debating or not debating but like discussing what could be the best idea for a solution where essentially we're brainstorming and we get a variety of ideas and some and then then we'll score these hypotheses we like to use the P Excel framework Google it to then ranked ideas because we can if we come up with nine ideas for a solution we can really run a Navy test with nine variations. In most cases you don't have enough traffic for that and then hence you need to prioritize which which idea to test first second and so on and so forth. So as I said growth through optimization is research plus experimentation and the research bit is 80 percent of the results. If your research is not done or is done sloppily what you experiment with does not matter because most mostly you'll be experimenting with stupid ideas that will make no difference.
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About The Pe:p Show
The Pe:p Show is a series of short and to the point videos. Topics that I’m covering go way past conversion stuff – it’s about optimizing all the things: your life, health, relationships, work, and business. I will also be interviewing industry peers on various topics like digital marketing, growth hacking, and more.
