How to do a heuristic analysis of your website with the CXL Institute model

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is often confused with A/B testing. It’s common to think that they are one of the same, but conversion rate optimization is far broader than A/B testing and in fact an A/B test may not be part of a CRO project at all.

A significant part of CRO research is heuristic analysis which is an audit of a landing page or website using our own experience and knowledge of best practice to inform our findings. 

That’s not to say that we do this without looking at any data, as CRO is essentially a data-driven discipline, however a heuristic analysis is the starting point, where we familiarise ourselves with the site and identify the ‘problem’ areas.

A heuristic analysis is a 'site walkthrough' where you look at the site on all browsers and devices. Pay attention to the site structure and for e-commerce sites, go through the product selection checkout process and for B2B download the content and see what happens when you click the free trial / demo buttons. 

However, be aware that we all have biases which limit our objectivity. Biases to be aware of:

• Bias blind spot – the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.
• Confirmation bias is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs.

So - after conducting the heuristic analysis we move onto looking at the data to see if it validates or disproves our findings.

When you analyse a website, the worst possible way to go about it is randomly. To audit your site and conclude “I think this is bad” and “that needs to change” is not enough.

“If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.”

W Edwards Deming, US Business advisor & author 

Within the research section of the CXL Institute conversion optimisation course, there is a recommended structure to follow when carrying out the heuristic analysis and here's my summary of the process.

Clarity 

Assess each page for clarity -  is it clear what’s being offered and how it works?

What to look out for:

How is it useful to me? Why should I do it?

Can I understand what the product / service is, and how it works (in a reasonable amount of time)?

Are there supporting images and/or videos that help me understand it?

Is the product information adequate / sufficiently thorough for making a decision?

Are all important associated pieces of information clear (pricing, shipping info, warranty, return policy etc)?

Is it clear what I have to do next?

Evaluating design clarity:

• Is there strong visual hierarchy in place? Does it follow a most wanted action?
• Are less important things also less important design wise?
• Is there enough white space to draw attention to what matters?
• Are the visuals in place that support the content?
• Does call to action stand out enough?
• How much top priority information is below the fold?
• If there’s more information below the fold, is it clear that they should scroll? Any logical breaks that stop the eye flow?
• Is the eye path clear?
• Is the body copy font size large enough for easy reading? In most cases the optimal size is 16px, but that depends on the font

Relevancy 

Understand context and evaluate page relevancy for visitors: does the web page relate to what the visitor thought they were going to see? Do pre-click and post-click messages and visuals align?

Does the site bring in relevant traffic?

Besides optimising your traffic sources, you need to do the following:

1. Map out all the key sources of traffic, and identify the top landing pages for each.

When I did this for Beacon, I found that these blog pages ‘what makes a successful marketing campaign’ and ‘bot clicks - what you need to know and how to beat them’ and bringing in most of the site traffic through organic search.

2. Compare pre-click and post-click messaging and visuals.

3. Identify any mismatch between what people thought they’re going to get and what they’re actually getting in terms of the offer and the wording of the offer.

Using my Beacon example above, I can see in the search results that the meta description matches the content of the landing page. The bot clicks post also has a featured snippet indicating a perfect match between search query and content. 

Most content marketers know that updating and optimising existing content is a quicker win that creating new content as the URL has already ranked. Be sure to update the meta description too otherwise this is where you’ll potentially get a mismatch between what people see pre and post click.

Motivation and incentives to take action

Motivation and incentives are mostly about the copy. Key questions for evaluating motivation and incentives on a page:

• Is there a clear, benefit-driven offer?
• Do I understand WHY I should take action?
• Are features translated into benefits?
• Is it clear what people are getting when they click a button / fill a form? Is it something that’s desirable / useful for the target audience?
• Is there enough product information?
• Is the content interesting? Does it use simple language?
• Is the sales copy persuasive?
• Could we apply some persuasion principles here that would be a good match, such as social proof, urgency or scarcity?

Friction

Friction is anything that slows people down or stops them from taking action. Minimizing friction is one of your most important jobs. 

Evaluate all the sources of friction on the key pages. This includes difficult and long processes, insufficient information, poor readability and UX, bad error validation, fears about privacy and security, any uncertainties and doubts, unanswered questions.

Example of a hard-to-find ‘search bar’ feature: 

Distraction

Pay attention to distracting elements on every high priority page.  Are there any blinking banners or automatic sliders stealing attention? Too much information unrelated to the main call to action? Any elements that are not directly contributing to visitors taking desired action?

Every key page on your website should have a clearly defined ‘most wanted action’ – what is it that you want your visitors to do on this page? This might be to fill out a form, buy something, click somewhere. One page, one goal.

Everything that does not contribute to people taking that particular action might serve as a distraction, and you’re probably better off either removing those completely or minimizing them (pushing down in the visual hierarchy).

Buying stages 

It’s important to understand that the buying cycle has different stages, and visitors can belong to any of them:

• Awareness – when a customer first becomes aware of your product. Or could also refer to the point where a customer first becomes aware of a need that they want to fulfil.
• Consideration – when a customer starts evaluating solutions to their need.
• Purchase – people are ready to spend money.

While most websites are usually focused on their selling process, a good portion of customers are not ready to buy right away. Hard selling them will just make them leave, so instead of selling them, we should help them do their research, capture their contacts so we could bring them back.

Each of these stages of the buying cycle requires site elements to be designed and structured in a certain way to deliver the information the visitor is looking for.

Understand buying phases and see if visitors are rushed into too big of a commitment too soon. Are there paths in place for visitors in different stages (research, evaluation etc)?

Here’s what it looks like for a SaaS business: 

Questions to assess consideration for buying stages on a website

• If the user is not ready to buy, do we help them in their research and evaluation process?
• Are there secondary calls to action to learn more about the product in the key funnels?
• Is there an effective email capture process? Does it have a proper lead magnet?

Email nurturing program 

The best way to take people through the buying cycle is through an email nurturing program. Use cases, case studies, customer success stories and product comparisons to help provide the data and info that a prospect looks for in their own research. If you provide it for them you make it easy for them to consume that info and move to the step in the process.

Dig into your data

Once you’ve mapped out all the areas of interest, go through all of the website again – but now with Google Analytics, survey data and other sources open in other tabs and see if you can find data to confirm or disprove your findings.

CXL Institute advise to identify areas where you don't have the data (that's OK) and flag them as requiring answers.

Let’s say you identified 10 areas of interest. For half of them you find data that supports your hypothesis, and for the other half you don’t have enough data. Now you get some sort of data collection going for the last 5, and move forward with the first 5 – and see if data points from other research methods (e.g. qualitative research, mouse tracking etc) help you improve them (or re-think them).

About CXL Institute

CXL Institute is the only skill-building platform for marketers that uses the world’s top 1% practitioners as instructors. CXL Institute is for building advanced level skills.

About the Conversion Optimisation course

The CXL Institute Conversion Optimisation Minidegree is an online training program designed to be “the most thorough CRO training in the world”. It is taught by CXL Institute’s in-house staff (including its founder Peep Laja) as well as a collection of the leading marketing practitioners in the business.

The approximate total time for this course is: 73 hrs.

You can find more information here: https://cxl.com/institute/programs/conversion-optimization/