How To Have a No — Nonsense Research Approach With ResearchXL Framework?

Growth Marketing is all about finding out stuff on the inside and the outside that will give your marketing ROI an uplift.

On the inside means your website, your existing digital channels such as social media pages etc. on the outside means integrations with other brands, finding out less popular channels to build new audiences for your product.

In this post we will be focusing majorly on the inside channels. Specifically to your website.

The first step of any growth area identification begins with conversion research, as in, observing the current conversion rate on the website.

By observing I mean finding out potential improvements within your website to improve your conversion rate.

For that we are going to learn about the Research XL framework developed by the team at CXL.

I have been using a lot of processes through my career for different clients to uncover conversion boost opportunities. Personally, ResearchXL is by far the best framework you can use to learn & identify problems that convert into a conversion rate surge!

It is simple, clean and defines a set process for the research approach!

Let’s get started.

Heuristic Analysis

Heuristic Analysis is a process of observing the user experience of a website. It tends to evaluate the website from your users perspective. Learning and discovery.

It is the first thing you should do when you are getting into conversion research.

It involves a mix of website walkthroughs & analytics data look up to identify & validate any existing problems with the website or the pages in the website or sections in the web pages.

We are all humans with our biases. As growth marketers we should not tend to fall in the trap of thinking that our judgement is true.

Heuristic Analysis addresses the above problem.

A lot of times, while conducting site walkthroughs we identify or think we have identified a problem and then conveniently assume a certain solution for the problem.

While conducting heuristic analysis, you note down potential problems and validate them by looking into Google Analytics Data. If data backs it you have a problem, if it doesn’t its time to move on from your problem.

Here are the categories or factors you need to identify with the above analysis,

Relevancy: Is the content through the website relevant for your users?

Clarity: Is your value proposition clear?

Motivation: Is your audience motivated enough to take a desirable action (click through, signup, purchase)?

Friction: Are there any psychological factors keeping your users from taking the action?

Once you have identified the problems or the potential issues put them in the above buckets. And then check with GA if your data supports your findings.

For example,

If the content isn’t relevant for your audience you should see higher bounce rates. Which means you need to fix your content copy to improve its relevance score.

If people are not arriving or clicking through the call to actions, then your value proposition isn’t clearly mentioned on the particular page.

If people are not clicking through to arrive at a sales page or any action page, then they might not feel motivated enough to do so. In this case you need to adjust your content copy again.

If they arrive at the final page but still don’t buy from you, then there may be some sort of psychological friction here, maybe the users can’t be trusted to give you their personal information, maybe you are asking too much information from them.

All of these situations can be easily cross checked with Google Analytics.

When you perform heuristic analysis you now have a good idea of what needs to be done to improve the conversion rate at each stage of your website.

Technical Analysis

Technical analysis is a process to identify if your website has any technical issues such as page speed, missing / incorrect URLs, Improper integrations, cross website behaviour on different platforms etc*

A lot of times companies do not cross check if their website is performing on all major browsers seamlessly. They believe their developers have taken care of it. 9/10 times they don’t.

Optimizing for technical factors is important and can give you a major lift in your conversion rate.

Imagine you have optimized the most effective version of the content copy on your landing page. You have put up an information hierarchy in a great order which matches with what your users want and at the end you have created a great call to action that people will absolutely love to click through.

Now imagine, this perfectly crafted landing page takes more than 6 seconds to load…

All those efforts to create a perfect landing page are now TOTALLY WASTED!

The point is, you need to be sure that your website’s performance is upto mark!

People often treat technical analysis where you just optimize for speed. Which is wrong.

Page speed is just one of the factors of technical analysis. You need to identify all of the following:

Performance of the website across all major browsers (and their versions)

Performance across all devices (Mobile, Tablet and Desktops)

Experience journeys on all devices.

Again, all you need to do is to head over to google analytics and generate device based conversion reports, browser based conversion reports, traffic flows on all devices.

This will help you identify:

Is anything broken on your website and where it is broken?

Are there any gaps in user experience on desktop vs mobile vs tablet.

Instrument Analysis

Instrument Analysis is nothing but cross verifying all your analytics & tracking scripts are accurately integrated with your website or app.

If your scripts aren’t installed properly you won’t be able to collect any data, or worse, you will collect the wrong data.

The best way to do this is to assign or hire a technically experienced resource who has an extensive hands on experience in integrating analytics scripts, facebook pixels, third party measurement softwares with websites and apps.

Once you have the correct instruments set up, you will start collecting the right information that will help you identify numerous growth opportunities for a foreseeable future.

User Testing

User Testing is one of the most important parts of any conversion research program. This process involves assigning tasks to complete on your website to certain people and observing them while doing it.

Consider for an example,

You own an apparel ecommerce store.

You gather 6 different people, they could be your friends or family, assign each of them a different task such as, tell someone to find and buy a denim of X waist size, Y color or X brand shoes of Y size Z type.

Before you give them these tasks install session recorders on your website. You can do it from hotjar, crazy egg etc.

Now when these people perform these tasks you can observe what they are doing and uncover following things,

How quickly can they find the product?

Do they have any difficulties while searching the product?

Do they have any difficulties while filling up the shipping form?

Do they hesitate to make any purchase?

Where do they click?

Are the buttons clear enough to understand & identify?

There are literally hundreds of behavioral traits that you could mark with session recorders. The above are a few of the important ones.

This will help you identify the real issues with your website’s user experience. Which when fixed will give you a major conversion lift!

Neato! :D

Qualitative Analysis

Qualitative analysis involves generating insights from your existing customers and from generic website traffic who haven’t yet made a purchase from you through surveys.

For the people who haven’t yet purchased, you can run on site polls where you ask people on the checkout page who are going to click back or cancel button a question like,

You haven’t made a purchase, what could be the possible reason?

Then you add a few relevant closed choices options for your users to choose from, such as,

i don’t trust this site

I don’t think the product is relevant for me

I have pricing concern

I don’t trust the brand of the product

You will generate remarkable insights from these. You will identify the exact problems your users have while purchasing from you. You can then rectify those to improve your conversion rate.

The other way to do qualitative analysis is to send surveys via any medium to the people who have recently purchased from you asking them a few important questions such as,

How was the overall user experience of the checkout page?

Was it easy to find the product / service they were looking for?

Was the content description of the product proper?

You can either keep the survey open end type or closed type with rating scales or multiple choices.

You will identify problems that your users faced while making the sale or signup, they took desirable action despite the existing issues, which means if the issues are important enough and you fix them you increase the LifeTime Value of your customers which in return increases your revenue!

Pro Tip: Don’t collect personal information of users while conducting on-site polls. The agenda here is to collect insights that help you improve conversions and not collect information. People tend to give their honest opinions in anonymity.

Mouse Tracking Analysis

Mouse tracing analysis is similar to observing session recorders where you observe what your users are clicking on and how much they are scrolling below the fold.

Important parameters to measure here are,

Clicks or Taps (mobile)

Scrolls

Mouse Tracking analysis helps you understand whether a user is reading the important information on the website or not.

If you have a call to action at the end of the page and people are barely scrolling through the second fold, what good does it do?

In this case you need to know what steps you can take so that people feel motivated enough to scroll all the way down to the call to action area and take the desired action.

If they are not then you might have to revisit your current informational hierarchy structure. Where you mention the most important stuff first so the user gets the desired info quickly which in return helps him make a positive decision faster!

Conclusion

If you can’t define what you’re doing as a process then what you are doing is useless.

I’m really scraping words here :P

But still,

If you can’t have a system for accomplishing goals with your conversion research, you are not really going to get any good value out of it. Or worse, you will end up focusing on things that don’t matter!

When you decide to pursue growth marketing, you should first squeeze out growth from every inch of your website then go out and look for other opportunities.

What do you think about the Research XL model?

Let me know in the comments below.