I’m sure you’ve come across dozens, if not hundreds, of image carousels or sliders (also called “rotating offers”). You might even like them. But the truth is that they’re conversion killers.
In digital analytics, it’s all about asking the right questions.
Sure, in the right context, you can probably get by doing what Avinash Kaushik refers to as “data puking,” but you won’t excel as an analyst or marketer.
In addition, you’ll consistently come up short on bringing true business value to your company.
“Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital,” said Aaron Levenstein, a former professor of business administration at Baruch College. [Tweet it!]
The same is true of your data in Google Analytics. Most of what you spend your time looking at (and re-looking at) is merely suggestive.
A study by Google had two key findings:
Moreover, “highly prototypical” sites—those with layouts commonly associated with sites of their category—that also had a simple website design were rated the most beautiful.
In other words, the study found that the simpler the design, the better.
Back in 1984, Dr. Robert B. Cialdini wrote a book called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. This posited six principles of persuasion and explained how to use them. Since then, it’s been widely hailed as a seminal book on marketing—something everyone in conversion optimization should read.
In 2016, he published another key book, called Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. This added a seventh principle of persuasion to the list, and provided new inspiration to a whole new generation of marketers. Robert Cialdini’s influence on the field of marketing has been immeasurable.
What if there were a method—even a process—that you could apply to increase website sales? Wouldn’t that be swell? Well, there is.
I’ve turned it into a checklist.
User flow is the path a user follows through your website interface to complete a task—make a reservation, purchase a product, subscribe to something. It’s also called a user journey.
And it has a massive impact on conversions.
To maximize your conversions, you have to get the user flow right on your site. Do it by building a user flow that matches user’s needs.
How you design a survey will affect the answers you get. This includes the language you use, the order of the survey questions, and, of course, the survey scale: the default values and ranges you use.
Customer journey mapping is a widely used and impactful technique that can help you improve your product, marketing, UX, and merchandising decisions.
However, like other UX research techniques (including user personas), there’s some vagueness and obscurity around how to actually create user journey maps.
One thing many people forget when dealing with data: outliers.
Even in a controlled online A/B test, your data set may be skewed by extremities. How do you deal with them? Do you trim them out, or is there another way?