An overview of how and why to test your website for the conversion path for people without previous experience. Presented for the Hudson Valley Tech Meetup in Kingston, NY on October 29, 2014 by Paolo Vidali of Hidden Gears.

1. CONVERSION RATE
OPTIMIZATION
Welcome to the October 29, 2014 meeting of the Hudson Valley Tech
Meetup in Kingston, NY. We’re going to talk about conversion rate
optimization. But if you remember one thing today, it’s to never look at
the blue stuff without goggles! That was his first mistake…

2. Paolo Vidali
Founder, Hidden Gears
@PaoloRobot

3. TESTING
Today we’re going to talk about three things-- 1. why it’s important to test your
website’s features and design 2. how to go about setting up your own tests,
because testing is fun (especially with wine) and 3. how to interpret and
leverage your test results.

4. CANDY
What are we talking about? I know everyone has Halloween on their minds and
candy is everywhere, tempting us. But we’re talking about options, hundreds
of thousands upon millions of options. The web is like a candy store for your
potential customers and clients. Your website is a single piece of candy at the
the far back and bottom of one of those middle bins. There’s so much candy
out there it might take someone two years to find you. So what can you do to
stand out?

5. FIGURING OUT
DATA
VISITORS USING
DATA
We have access to a staggering amount of data – analytics, demographics,
statistics, feedback, you name it. There’s web 2.0 startups out there that can do
things with data we didn’t even know was possible. But what can we do with it to
improve our sites?

6. HUGE PROBLEM
But we have a huge problem. The problem is we’re married to our
websites. We’re in love with the way they are, flaws and all. Or worse,
you don’t think there are any flaws or anything that could be improved,
or you just “don’t have time” to change your site and that can kill your
business slowly but surely.

7. BREAK UP
But I’m not here to tell you to save the marriage. Nope. You need to break
up with your website and get in the frame of mind to open up new
possibilities. It might hurt, but it’s time to let go of the baby and get a
divorce from your website love affair. Disclaimer: This is not my child, and I
didn’t make this kid cry.

8. So how can we do that? Data isn’t everything. We also need to figure out how people think, what
decisions they make and WHY. Some things we’ll never know, like when your potential customer
abandons a cart because they got a phone call from their grandma and they HAD to pickup because
Grandma isn’t on Facebook…yet. But other times, it’s more clear what people are doing and how
people use your site, and where the stumbling blocks are. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is at its
core the combination of analysis, hypothesis, testing, and improvement of your website’s components
that lead to conversions– leads, sales, interactions, or requests that make a difference for your
business’ bottom line, or your client’s business. You need to test and experiment.

9. TOOLS

10. VWO.COM
VWO is a great tool to set up simple A/B tests or multivariate tests, and as the name indicates, it’s very
visual and therefore easy to use. Optimizely is another comparable tool which has a lot of advanced
features but isn’t quite as intuitive. It lets you draft and setup simple tests, it iterates multivariate tests
to give you all the combos, it lets you visually change elements of your site, and it takes a line of
Javascript to install.

11. CRAZYEGG.COM
CrazyEgg doesn’t let you test anything, but it does visualize what your
visitors are doing on your site in some pretty great ways. VWO also provides
basic heatmapping but it’s not as comprehensive. If you keep going back to
their website you’ll see a million different versions--they are eating their
own dog food and testing constantly.
VWO.COM

12. FUNNEL IT
You need to pay attention to your Google Analytics data too, which means setting up
proper goals, digging in and getting ecommerce tracking working (great new reports for
that in Universal Analytics by the way), and creating funnels so you can determine where
people drop off in the process. Just testing one piece of your site won’t expose or fix
endemic problems.

13. Accurate tests require preparation. Just as when you go to a
wedding and every napkin and oyster fork has a specific look and
is there for a reason, your test must be precise and designed. In
order to set it up you ultimately need to answer the question:
what are you going to be measuring?
SETUP

14. You need to remove the noise– what are really the key elements
that are going to make a difference? Don’t just pick your favorite,
sometimes counterintuitive changes win. You can’t test every color
or every image, you can’t redesign the checkout 10 ways, because
each one of those changes will mean more and more people have
to see it and the baseline standard over longer and longer periods
of time to make sure you have enough data to determine a winner.
FILTER

15. ANALYZE
After you gather data you need to analyze. Results do not imply
causation. Just because a survey came out that said people who
drive yellow Subarus get in more crashes than drivers ofgGreen
Subarus, does not mean there is causation. Maybe the study
administrators only had 2 yellow cars and 30 green cars in the
sample size– you need to dig deeper. Find the patterns first, and
determine their validity later.

16. EVALUATE
What’s the difference between analysis and evaluation? Besides just picking
out the trends, the patterns and sorting the data, you need to be able to
decide which patterns are VALID. Are they statistically significant? Are they
only seasonal? This is really the most difficult part of the process. Setting up
tests is easy, determining WHY people acted as a result of a variable is HARD.

17. FIND
OUTLIERS
Along the way you’re going to find outliers, and you need to look out for them.
Sometimes there will be edge cases, visitors who defy expectations and do really
weird things on your website. Just because a single visitor from Duluth spent 3
hours on your site and visited 15 times in a week, doesn’t mean you should adapt
to target that behavior or demographic. It might be your ex-roomate from college
who hates you.

18. MAKE
CAKE
In the end you’re going to have to make cake—but you’re actually going to
have to make a LOT of cakes because the recipe will never quite be right the
first time. If you’re like me, you’ll get excited and skip some steps and not
read super carefully because CAKE IS DELICIOUS and then you’ll have
something that’s a little off. So get used to never being satisfied, and always
be testing.

19. GOOD
So we’re good, right? Good setups of Good tests
with smart analysis and impartial, informed
evaluations are always GOOD.

20. QUESTIONS?

21. THANK YOU
SLIDES AT
SLIDESHARE.NET/PAOLOVI
DALI