The ResearchXL Model by CXL for CRO

I was fortunate enough to stumble upon CXL institute’s course Research and testing which is taught by Peep Laja, Founder of CXL Institute. The course revolves around a Conversion Rate Optimization framework called The ResearchXL Model and how you can use the model to drive Conversion optimization across your funnel and website. So basically what this process is, helps you gather six types of data to help you make great optimization decisions and come up with tests that tend to win more often and have a bigger impact. So it's all about identifying problems and coming up with ideas, the best possible ideas to test.?

Technical Analysis

The number one step of any optimization or growth work is technical analysis. You need to understand what's broken in your site. Does your site work flawlessly with every single browser and device, browser and device combination? The easy way to figure it out is you go to your web analytics tool and you compare your key metric revenue per visitor or conversion rate, whatever it might be per a browser device comeback. So you see in Chrome converts at 5%, in an Internet Explorer 11 converts at 2%. That's almost two times the difference, what's going on? So probably you need to do some cross-browser testing there. There are probably some nasty bugs over there. So the easiest way to make money is to fix all the technical issues that you might have. The same goes for slow pages and all that stuff. You can have the most persuasive website in the world, but someone is not going to buy from it if it doesn't work on the specific browser that the person is on right now.

The Heuristic Analysis

The second thing is we need to use our experience in the field to assess what might be working, whatnot. So we should go through our website, mobile, and desktop separately, page by page with a team of people, and we critique every single screen that we see based on fixed criteria. This is called heuristic analysis. It's a way to super-fast identify possible problems on a website, but it's the results are, it's not scientific, the results are suboptimal.

Web Arts uses 7 levels to assess each page:

Relevance. Does my perception fit my expectations?

Trust. Can I trust this provider?

Orientation. Where should I click? What do I have to do?

Stimulance. Why should I do it right here and right now?

Security. Is it secure here? What if…?

Convenience. How complicated will it be?

Confirmation. Did I do the right thing?

Digital Analytics

In digital analytics, we are mainly interested in these four things. Number one, where are the leaks? If you look at the shopper's journey on your website, so if you're e-commerce, the journey is category per product, cart, checkout, and however many steps you have there. If your SAAS, it might be in a landing page to features to pricing, onboarding step one, two, three. So whatever your funnel is, where are the biggest leaks between these layers of your website? we need to know that.?

Secondly, look at the data based on across different segments. Of course, mobile, desktop, tablets, your key traffic channels, whatever segments are important in your particular business. And then we need to understand what is it that the users are doing on this website.

Mouse tracking & Form Analytics

Mouse tracking it's essentially aggregated data of your mouse cursor movement. How far down people scroll, where do they click, where did the scroll, and so on, and how are the user behavior is different between different devices. How far down the scroll on a given page is very important. If you have five blocks of important information on a page to increase user motivation to take action, but only 25% of people scroll all the way to see all that stuff, you know that you have two things going on here. It's like, you either need to make the page more compactor you need to change the design. Usually, when you look at the scroll heat maps, you'll see a dramatic drop-off. Of course, you're at the fold, but also when you have strong horizontal lines, background color changes, a massive photo is a background for a dev, all those things are false bottoms. A bunch of people think that this is where the website ends or what follows is not related to what came before, so they quit. By far the easiest way to get people to scroll down all the way is to maintain single background color.

Qualitative Analysis

Number five-step in the research process is in qualitative research. Analytic is quantified data. It tells us what is happening, where and how much, but it doesn't tell us why. Qualitative research is all about the why and also it's all about our target audience, how they behave, what do they want, what is that they don't want, what's their turnoff, what's their turn on? We need to, you know who our buyer groups are. we need to understand the problems that we're solving, what do they want to buy, how do they want to buy it. And there are two main ways how we can get this data. We want to talk to two different groups here.?

We want to survey people who just bought from us, who just signed up, by doing that they are already qualifying themselves that they just gave you money, so it's a person worth talking to. Now you can survey them over email, you can call them if that's time-wise doable, and then the other group is that people who came to your website and left without purchasing anything. We want to understand why not, why they didn't buy anything.

User Testing

User testing is where we recruit users and we'll have them perform tasks, we want them to do key tasks on our website and we see how successful they are at doing it. So we want to understand, what's difficult to understand what's difficult to do or where things can go wrong.

For user testing, you want to give them three types of tasks. You want to give them a task to find some specific product. You want to also find something broad. A broad task would be to find the product you like. You want them to go through the funnel so, buy the product, sign up for the product, whatever your funnel looks like, and you want to observe how they do it.