Digital marketers have hundreds of tools to measure the performance of websites, ads, social media and other campaigns. However, they rarely understand why their visitors don’t convert, or why they leave.
When creating landing pages or trying to improve conversion on current pages, marketers often go with their gut, or the input of their team or hippos (highest paid person in the room) with the belief that since they can A/B test the “challenger” with a small percentage of visitors, it doesn’t matter.
When doing a completely new design (often agency led), marketers may run a few user tests to see if there are any obvious usability or content changes that should be made. However, these are generally tests with a very small number of testers and take a massive amount of time. Imagine if you under your visitors the amount of time it takes for vacation?
The bottom line is that while digital marketers are swimming in analytics tools, there are very few online tools for marketing insight that are fast and actionable and let you know your visitors. With more than 8,000 vendors in Scott Brinker’s 2020 Marketing Tools Landscape, how do you select the technology that will help you get to know who your visitors are?
The State of Customer Insight
The challenge for digital marketers is that there are few ways to get customer insight on web and landing pages that run at digital speed. The most common are in three traditional categories: site analytics and A/B testing (including pop-up surveys); custom online surveys – either market research led or self-serve, and qualitative input via user test.
There is also a new way, which shifts the focus on the technology behind testing before going live, called Pre-Live Optimization in which digital marketers can test their pages with a live audience before going live. Let’s look at each of these options:
1) Site Analytics and A/B Testing:
A/B testing tools, traditional heat maps, intercept surveys and eye tracking tests (where people click or look) give marketers an in depth understanding of the common paths visitors take, which paths generate the most conversions, and where visitors bounce. More sophisticated marketers can also tell which visitors (and segments) do what on a page or journey and with eye tracking see what on a page captures more visitors’ attention.
Pros:
- Visitor Behavior: Marketers get data on every click that visitors make. They know what paths are the most traveled, what pages are the most bounced from, and what pages visitors see on their journey to conversion.
- Conversion Metrics: Marketers can easily measure conversion and engagement metrics for every page on their site (and new test ones too).
- Ability to direct as much or as little traffic as desired to any of the pages in a test
Cons:
- While marketers can test new or revised pages via A/B testing, they don’t know WHY visitors do what they do, therefore giving them no insight into what would make a page perform better.
- Marketers don’t know WHAT to change, and often make incremental changes colors, images and fonts without the why.
- A/B testing requires that digital marketers create new designs or revisions, get them approved, coded and launched – all before knowing if the page will resonate with visitors.
- For some audiences, A/B testing can take a significant amount of time to achieve statistical significance.
- Marketers can also identify what their converted audience looks like, but they don’t know how other audiences view their page (what if there is something that is a turnoff to a segment?)
2) User Testing:
Marketers can also get a “glimpse” into how visitors view their page by doing user tests. User Testing platforms are online and provide video results of tests for companies that use them.
Pros:
- User tests can be customized by the marketer and can be created to ask specific questions about the visitors’ experience.
- Speedbumps or sections that cause users to be confused or irritated can be uncovered, and marketers can get verbatim feedback from these visitors.
- Marketers can run as many or as few tests as they want, and they can be done in a day.
Cons:
- User testing is generally done with 6-8 participants which yields good qualitative insight but is not statistically significant.
- Marketers can get anecdotal feedback, but not know if relevant to their larger audience.
- User test platforms provide the raw video back to marketers – leaving marketing teams the work of curating and analyzing results and then making their own recommendations.
3) Online Surveys:
Marketers can also survey their customers and prospects to get quantitative data and some and qualitative input. These can be highly customized, generally with hundreds of survey participants and can yield statistically significant results.
Pros:
- Marketers can create customized questionnaires that answer their key questions, and get results that are statistically significant.
- Data can often be “sliced and diced” in many ways to reveal key segments or behavioral pattern.
- Marketers can get at key insights about their audience.
Cons:
- Marketers do all the heavy lifting: survey development and testing, selection of audience (filters and screeners)
- Marketers do all of the analysis of results which includes cleansing and hygiene (many panelists should be eliminated).
- Time to design, field and analyze survey results can run in weeks or months.
4) Pre-Live Optimization:
The newest entrant in the marketing insight toolkit is Pre-Live Optimization. It provides fast, actionable insights to digital marketers looking to improve their users’ experience on their site and to increase conversion. By doing Pre-Live Optimization, marketers can send only the best performing designs to A/B testing and then use behavioral tests to fine tune improvements.
Pros:
- There is a reduction in time spent waiting, Pre-live is fast for its users, with only two weeks or less
- Pinpoints what on page works and doesn’t with analysis on why. Marketers no longer have to guess based on a heatmap, it gives the analysis on what works.
- Using real people as viewers, it takes in the Visitor mindset and expectations in the analysis and delivers customer verbatim
- Instead of just one page, it compares multiple pages
- Can add 1-2 custom questions
- No need for live pages (test designs)
Cons:
- Difficult audiences can take slightly longer
- Test is specific to a webpage
- Test is proprietary
The key to all of these, is to keep your finger on the pulse of visitors. It is my belief that every marketer should have a fast and easy way to get customer insight on a continuous basis. They need the WHY to make significant increases in visitor engagement and conversion.
About the Author: Janet Muto was the first CMO of Constant Contact, and part of the team that created much of what is known as inbound marketing today. She has also held leadership marketing roles at what is now 3M MicroTouch and HP. After creating HSG, a product and marketing consulting firm, alongside fellow entrepreneur Nitzan Shaer, they soon realized that market research is long, expensive, non-actionable, and does not work at the pace of digital marketers. As a result, they created WEVO – the first company to optimize website experiences before going live. WEVO uses target audience testing to diagnose web pages without the need for live traffic. With actionable, validated insights, WEVO enables you to pinpoint reasons why customers aren’t converting, empowering marketers with a low-risk way to uncover why people take action.