Monthly Archives

September 2019

UX and CRO

Essential CRO Audit That Doesn't Need A-B testing

Posted on September 28, 2019
fogg

With traffic of all types (SEO, PPC and referrals) becoming more expensive and difficult to get, conversion rate optimization is becoming more important than ever. Doubling website traffic is becoming way more expensive than doubling conversion rate, and both of them can lead to the same objective which is more sales or leads.

CRO is defined as: "Conversion rate optimization seeks to increase the percentage of website visitors that take a specific action (often submitting a web form, making a purchase, signing up for a trial, etc.)", this could be done by applying human behavior principles to website elements and methodically testing alternate versions of a page or process to find which version generates the best results. In doing so, businesses are able to generate more leads or sales without spending more money on website traffic, that will result in increasing their marketing return on investment and overall profitability.

Human Behavior:

It is very important to understand that big part of CRO is understanding human behaviour and what signals or triggers lead humans to take certain actions. Fogg behaviour model is one of the most popular models that can help us a lot to understand how humans take actions, see the chart below:

fogg

The model in a nutshell suggests that humans likelihood to take a certain action rely heavily on the motivation and the difficulty of taking that action.

Core motivations:

  • Pleasure / pain
  • Hope / fear
  • Social acceptance / rejection

Ability Variables:

  • Time, does it take a long time? Does it worth my time.
  • Money, can I afford it? Does it worth it?
  • Physical effort, do I need to leave my house to do it?
  • Non-routine, can I do this my usual way?

So when optimizing a website for a better conversion rate make sure any improvements you make can either:

  • Increase users motivation to take an action.
  • Make it easy for users to take an action.

There is another model that you can have a look at called the Lift Model.

Conversion Tracking Setup:

"If you can not measure it, you can not improve it", deciding the right KPIs and setting up goals (possibly events also) to track them is vital for CRO, having an analytics software (i.e. Google Analytics) installed on the website is a must in order to set up goals to track the KPIs. Try to track as many actions as possible, tracking is not retroactive in Google Analytics, it is better to have more than less. Divide the goals into hard and soft goals.
The KPIs that could be measured are almost infinite, here’s a list of the most popular KPIs to track on a website:

  • Form submissions.
  • Cart abandonment rate.
  • Checkout conversions.
  • Traffic to sales pages.
  • Unique visitors.
  • Returning visitors.
  • Scroll depth.
  • Time on page.
  • Phone calls.
  • Funnels.
  • Form dropoff.

Many of the KPIs above are tracked by default in Google Analytics, however there are many others that need to be manually set up.

Have a KPI discussion with the client and understand their business model, based on that create a list of hard and soft goals that need to be tracked.

How to start a CRO audit:

A CRO audit relies heavily on studying user behaviour then making changes to web assets then finding if those changes improved conversion rate, the best tools that can help with that are:

  • Mouse tracking (could be done using Hotjar)
  • User journey tracking (Could be done using Google Analytics)
  • A-B testing (could be done using Google Optimizer)

The three tools above are not easy nor cheap to run, if you are facing a low budget situation the only way to do CRO is what I call "CRO Fundamentals Audit" which is simply running the website against a check list of CRO fundamentals >> then evaluate the website against each of them >> then make recommendations.

In this post I will provide you with a step by step guide to check the CRO fundamentals and create an essential CRO audit.

Essential CRO Audit  - Sep by step:

This guide will assume that Google analytics is installed with a long enough history of goal tracking (soft goals and hard goals). Based on the most popular human behaviour models I created a checklist of 13 items that influence users ability and motivation to be checked and evaluated:

  1. Site speed.
  2. Conventions and standards of  web design.
  3. First impression (production quality and relevancy).
  4. Page layout, Clarity of headlines (people scan do not read), sublines and bullet points.
  5. Navigation and website hierarchy clarity, breadcrumbs and internal search.
  6. Images analysis (consistent with the website message and offering).
  7. CTA and distraction.
  8. Trust elements and security (legitimacy of the company and trust).
  9. Remove fear (30 days money back guarantee).
  10. User generated reviews and testimonial (social proof).
  11. Users analysis.
  12. Sense of reciprocity (free content).
  13. Forms.
  14. Maximizing users value (exit-intent popup windows, chat and chatbot).

Step 1 - Site speed:

There is no shortage of studies that show how faster websites will enjoy better conversion rate (in some cases 3X better than slow websites), and a lower bounce rate. You can read this post to find what tools to use to evaluate website speed. A 3 seconds or less speed index is considered to be good.

Step 2 - Standards of  web design:

Standards and conventions of web design are a set of best practices that are followed by majority of websites on the web. Those best practices gradually become guidelines that most web designers follow, knowing that they align with visitors’ expectations. Examples of those standards:

  • Logo in the header (top left corner).
  • Main navigation is in the header.
  • Value proposition is at the top (above the fold).
  • Call to action is located above the fold.
  • Search box is in the header.
  • Contact us page is included in the upper navigation.
  • The design should fit any device especially mobile devices.

In this step just make sure the design follows the standards of web design as much as possible.

Step 3 - First impression:

Visual appeal can be assessed within 50 ms, suggesting that web designers have about 50 ms to make a good first impression, this first impression depends on many factors:

  • Structure
  • Colors
  • Spacing
  • Symmetry
  • Amount of text, fonts, and more

It is very difficult to assess your own website in an unbiased way, you can setup a 5 seconds test asking a question like "What is your first impression about this website".

It is very important to understand users entry points to each landing page and make sure the messaging on the landing page is in alignment with that entry point, here are few different scenarios/examples:

  • If you are running a TV ad you need to make sure users that are coming from this ad land on a page that is consistent with the messaging in the ad.
  • Running a PPC campaign with a broad match can drive traffic from keywords that do not match the messaging on the page.
  • Google can rank pages organically for keywords that do not really match the messaging on the page, those pages need to be adjusted or new pages need to be created.

Step 4 - Page Layout and clarity of headlines:

People scan (do not read) in most cases, they need to find information quickly with less efforts. A good page layout (with the characteristics below) can help a lot with that:

  • A clear strong headings/headlines must be used and placed at the top of the page, a strong headline on the homepage is critical to validate that the user is in the right place.
  • Break down extraneous blocks of text into separate paragraphs.
  • Breakdown text walls into paragraphs, lists, or even segments with appended / additional headings.

Step 5 - Navigation and website hierarchy:

At any point of time a user should be able to tell their location (which page) and how to go back to the previous page, a breadcrumb can be very helpful for that. The upper navigation should be well-thought-out and provides users with a quick access to the most important information/products/solutions the site provides. Site search is recommended (placed at the top in a clear box, with a magnifying glass icon, with autocomplete and common spelling error support), it helps in situations where a user could not find the information they are looking for using internal linking or the navigational system.

Step 6 - Images analysis:

"A picture is worth a thousand words", images can improve conversion rate and support the story told by the text content, images also are big part of the brand identity. Few points to consider while evaluating if images can improve conversions or not:

  • Clear and tell a story.
  • Text is easy to read inside the image.
  • They support the product or the service offered on the website.
  • They evoke emotions.
  • They help clarifying a confusing concept.
  • They are original and look professional with a high quality (no stock photos).

Background images can work better with a colourful overlay that matches brand colours, which will reduce brightness and complexity for the image, for text that will come at the top of a background image use solid background container.

Step 7 - CTA and distraction:

Key-points when designing and placing a CTA:

  • Make it visible (above the fold or close to triggers)
  • Make it clear that it is clickable (frame it with a shade) and include actionable text in it like "buy now" or "read more".
  • Respect human attention ratio, do not place too many CTAs on a page and get them to compete with each others.

Step 8 - Trust elements and security:

Unless you are a big brand there is a good chance that first time visitors do not know you yet so you need to increase their trust level, and decrease their anxiety which could be preventing them taking the actions you want them to take, here are few elements that you can include on the website to address that:

  • Media mentions (i.e. as seen on CNN, you can include a logo with a link to reference your media mention).
  • Awards and achievements.
  • Partnerships.
  • Case studies and surveys.
  • Client lists with their logos.
  • Security badges (work well for shopping carts).

Step 9 - Remove fear:

Remove fear by using guarantees/security seals: Survey your customers for their pre-purchase concerns then formulate guarantees which pre-empt these concerns. Possible messages that can help to remove fear:

  • 30-day product guarantee.
  • Same day shipping.
  • Lowest price guaranteed.
  • Largest range of products.
  • No contracts cancel anytime.
  • Include the services or the products prices clearly where possible (in other words avoid the request a quote button).

Step 10 - User generated reviews and testimonial (social proof):

Social proof is an important part of CRO, customers buy products that make them feel good about themselves, products that change them and make them better, social proof will help customers to make a decision, feel confident about their choice and feel a part of something bigger. Popular forms of social proof:

  • Testimonials.
  • User gendered reviews.
  • Social media widgets.
  • Data/numbers "X customers served" "Y projects completed".

Step 11 - Users analysis:

Understanding the website demographics and user persona can help a lot with:

  • Improve messaging.
  • Identify needed shifts.
  • Flag technology needs.
  • Adjust PPC campaigns audience settings.

Step 12 - Sense of reciprocity:

Creating sense or reciprocity is a good way to improve conversion rate, it could be done in many different ways:

  • Free ebook.
  • Free consultation.
  • Free tutorial.
  • First month free no credit card required.

Step 13 - Forms:

Forms should:

  • Be as short as possible, long forms could be split into multiple pages.
  • Field labels must be clear and explain what information should go in each field.
  • Support auto filling.
  • Work well on mobile devices.
  • Fields with validation must show a clear message how to be corrected if filled wrong.

It is recommend to track form dropoff count for each field using tools like Hotjar and tweak the form based on the collected data.

Step 14 -Maximizing users value:

Offering users more help using online chat and chat bots is proved to improve conversion rate. Intercepting users that are exiting the website with a popup window giving them an offer or asking them to subscribe to the news letter can also improve conversion rate.

 

The 13 checking points above should help you to conduct an essential CRO audit without doing any A-B testing, if resources are limited this type of audits will be still helpful until you have enough resources to invest in a contentious A-B testing program.

 

 

Tracking & Analytics

How To Build Your Own Call Tracking System Using Twilio

Posted on September 8, 2019

This post is an extension to the previous post I did explaining how to connect Twilio to Google Sheets and Google Data Studio , the missing part in that post was how to designate different phone numbers to different mediums or sources of a website traffic, and this is what I will be covering in this post.

Step 1:

Decide what mediums or sources you want to track, the most basic tracking if you have a low budget is tracking three mediums: organic, paid and others, a more advanced tracking will be:

  • Organic Google
  • Organic Bing
  • Paid Google
  • Paid Bing
  • Referral
  • Direct

You can also consider tracking email campaigns and offline campaigns like radio. Obviously the more mediums/sources you want to track the more phone numbers you need.

Step 2:

Assuming you are going after a basic tracking (organic, paid and others) you need to buy three phone numbers, I will assume they are:

  • 111-111-1111 for organic traffic
  • 222-222-2222 for paid traffic
  • 333-333-3333 for others

Make sure to redirect those numbers to your own phone number, I will call that the default phone number and it is 000-000-0000

Step 3:

We need to save the source, medium and term for every website visitor in a cookie, you can do that using UTMZ-replicator  just add it to your website using Google Tag Manger as a custom HTML tag and let it fire on every pageview.

GTM-UTMZ

Step 4:

Make sure the phone number on your website is contained in a unique class, something like below:

<a class="default-phone-number" href="tel:000-000-0000">000-000-0000</a>

Step 5:

Add the JavaScript code below as a tag in Google Tag Manager and let if fire after the UTMZ tag in step 3:

....
var findnum = [
{ "number": "111-111-1111", "medium": "organic" },
{ "number": "222-222-2222", "medium": "cpc" },
{ "number": "333-333-3333", "medium": "others" }
];
function searchMD(findnum, medium){
for(var i= 0, L= findnum.length; i<L; i++){ if(findnum[i].medium=== medium) return findnum[i].number; } return ''; } var ga_source = ''; var ga_campaign = ''; var ga_medium = ''; var ga_term = ''; var ga_content = ''; var gc = ''; var c_name = "__utmzz"; if (document.cookie.length>0){
c_start=document.cookie.indexOf(c_name + "=");
if (c_start!=-1){
c_start=c_start + c_name.length+1;
c_end=document.cookie.indexOf(";",c_start);
if (c_end==-1) c_end=document.cookie.length;
gc = unescape(document.cookie.substring(c_start,c_end));
}
}
if(gc != ""){
var y = gc.split('|');
for(i=0; i<y.length; i++){ if(y[i].indexOf('utmcsr=') >= 0) ga_source = y[i].substring(y[i].indexOf('=')+1);
if(y[i].indexOf('utmccn=') >= 0) ga_campaign = y[i].substring(y[i].indexOf('=')+1);
if(y[i].indexOf('utmcmd=') >= 0) ga_medium = y[i].substring(y[i].indexOf('=')+1);
if(y[i].indexOf('utmctr=') >= 0) ga_term = y[i].substring(y[i].indexOf('=')+1);
if(y[i].indexOf('utmcct=') >= 0) ga_content = y[i].substring(y[i].indexOf('=')+1);
}
}
if (!((ga_medium =="organic") || (ga_medium =="cpc"))) ga_medium = "others" ;
document.getElementsByClassName('default-phone-number')[0].innerHTML= searchMD (findnum,ga_medium);
document.getElementsByClassName('default-phone-number')[0].href= "tel:"+searchMD (findnum,ga_medium);
...

gtm_utmz

At this point you can be sure that phone number will fire only based on their correspondent medium, at this point you can start building your dashboard following the post here

Tracking & Analytics

Connect Twilio to Google Sheets and Google Data Studio

Posted on September 7, 2019

Call tracking is a vital service for any marketer, and when it comes to call tracking, Twilio is the largest telephony infra structure provider in the market that can help a lot with that; however, Twilio is geared more towards developers, nontechnical users can not do much using Twilio and they have to go for a plug and pay services like, Dialogue Tech and Call rail.

In this post I will provide Twilio's nontechnical users with a solution to create a friendly dashboard using Google Sheets, which could be eventually used with Google Data Studio for better visualization.

Step 1:

Make sure you have a Twilio account with at least one active phone number that redirects to your own phone number, Twilio has a nice guide here that explains how to find and buy a phone number, after buying the phone number you can use Twilio's built in web-hook to redirect it to your own phone number (see below)

twilio-forward

Just add your phone number to the end of the web-hook's URL: http://twimlets.com/forward?PhoneNumber=111-111-1111

You can buy multiple phone numbers and use each of them to track a different medium, like organic, paid, and others. In this tutorial  you can find how to rotate phone numbers based on incoming traffic to your website, if you are using the the numbers on dedicated landing pages or other mediums like off-line, number's rotation will not be required as each number will be served only for one medium.

Step 2:

Find your Twilio's API credentials by clicking the gear icon at the top >> settings >> copy ACCOUNT SID and AUTH TOKEN

twilio-token

Step 3:

Replace your ACCOUNT SID and AUTH TOKEN in the code below that we will be using in Google Sheets:

function myFunction() {
var ACCOUNT_SID = "*********************************";
var ACCOUNT_TOKEN = "*********************************";
var findmedium = [
{ "number": "+1**********", "medium": "organic" },
{ "number": "+1**********", "medium": "cpc" },
{ "number": "+1**********", "medium": "others" }
];
// you do not need to edit anything below this line
function searchMD(findmedium, num){
for(var i= 0, L= findmedium.length; i<L; i++){
if(findmedium[i].number=== num) return findmedium[i].medium;
}
return '';
}
var numberToRetrieve = 10;
var hoursOffset = 0;
var options = {
"method" : "get"
};
options.headers = {
"Authorization" : "Basic " + Utilities.base64Encode(ACCOUNT_SID + ":" + ACCOUNT_TOKEN)
};

var url="https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/" + ACCOUNT_SID + "/Calls.json?PageSize=" + numberToRetrieve;
var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url,options);

var theSheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();

function search(xyz) {
var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getActiveSheet();
for(var i=2;i<12;i++){
var value = sheet.getRange(i, 6).getValue();
if(value == xyz){
var match = 1 ;
}
}
return match ;
}
var startColumn = 1;
var theRow = 2 ;
var dataAll = JSON.parse(response.getContentText());
for (i = dataAll.calls.length -1 ; i >= 0 ; i--) {
var found = search (dataAll.calls[i].sid) ;
var calldirection = dataAll.calls[i].direction ;
var midnight = new Date();
midnight.setHours(0, 0, 0, 0);
rowDate = dataAll.calls[i].date_created;
var theDate = new Date (rowDate);
theDate.setHours(theDate.getHours()+hoursOffset);
if (!found && calldirection == "inbound") {
theSheet.insertRowAfter(1);

theColumn = startColumn;

if(isNaN(theDate.valueOf())) {
theDate = 'Not a valid date-time';
theColumn++;
}
else {
theDate.setHours(theDate.getHours()+hoursOffset);
theSheet.getRange(theRow, theColumn).setValue(theDate);
theColumn++;
}

var callduration = dataAll.calls[i].duration/60 ;
callduration = +callduration.toFixed(2);

theSheet.getRange(theRow, theColumn).setValue(dataAll.calls[i].to);
theColumn++;
theSheet.getRange(theRow, theColumn).setValue(dataAll.calls[i].from);
theColumn++;
theSheet.getRange(theRow, theColumn).setValue(callduration);
theColumn++;
theSheet.getRange(theRow, theColumn).setValue(searchMD(findmedium, dataAll.calls[i].to)); //tw searchMD(findmedium, dataAll.calls[i].to) ;
theColumn++;
theSheet.getRange(theRow, theColumn).setValue(dataAll.calls[i].sid);
}
}
}

If you are using multiple phone numbers for different mediums replace the values in the findmedium array, otherwise just leave the code as is.

Step 4:

Create a new sheet in Google Sheets and name the first 6 columns in the top row as below (feel free to change the names to any other names keeping the same order)

twilio-sheet

Step 5:

In Google Sheet go tools >> script editor >> delete any existing codes and replace them with the codes from step 3

sheets-script

Step 6:

In Google Sheets script editor click on the clock icon to create a trigger >> Click + Add  Trigger (bottom right corner) >> Time-driven >> Hour timer >> Every hour >> save

trigger

Once you do that, in few hours the data will start to show up in your sheet as below:

sheet-data

Having the call date in Excel will give you a lot of flexibility to manipulate and extract data, for more visualization read step 7 which will explain how to create a simple report in Google Data Studio.

Step 7:

Connect the sheet you created to Google Data Studio by going blank report >> Create data source >> Create new data source >> Google Sheets >> Choose the spread sheet created in step 4 >> Click connect

Google-data-studio-source

You should be able to see an empty Google Data Studio report with a grid, now Insert >> Time series >> Add to report

If everything works fine you should be able to see a report like below (a daily total calls duration report) :

GDS

There is a lot you can do to customize this report but I am not going to go through all of that, watch this video here to learn more.

Finally I want to say that this post was inspired by a great post provided by Twilio How to Receive SMS Messages into Google Sheets with Apps Script and Twilio and part of code was used in my post.

Please feel free to comment if you have any questions.