In our previous post, I explained a little bit about where we look for test ideas. After identifying the where, the next question is what should I test? To discover what to test, our team uses specific tools to gather insights that give us a better understanding of what people are doing on top opportunity pages or top traffic pages.
In order to understand what we combine it with the where. Our quantitative tools helped us figure out our top traffic pages, or where people are going on your website. Next, we need to figure out what they’re actually doing on those pages. This is where our qualitative data come in to accompany our quantitative findings. Specifically, we want to know what are they actually doing on those pages. In order to do this, we use tools such as heatmaps, user playbacks, mouse tracking, form completion tracking, and so forth.
One of the main qualitative tools we use to do this is called Hotjar. Hotjar allows us to not only create specific heatmaps, polls, and surveys, but it combines all of these elements together to provide more insights into what people are doing, where they’re going, and why they might be leaving. Not only do we use Hotjar to track what people are doing on those pages, but we also use it to create recordings of visitor sessions, so we can specifically watch, understand and experience their journey on the site.
Some behaviors to look out for are how far people scroll down the page, what specific links they click or don’t click on, and how long visitors spend on specific pages. Here are a few examples:
- If we see that visitors aren’t clicking on the call to action, or the links directly related to the conversion goals, then we can start forming hypotheses on what can be done to improve this.
- If a page has a form on it, we might see recordings where visitors are not completing the form in an order that provides a positive user experience. This is an indication that the form may be too complex and might need to be modified by removing some fields.
Previously, I talked about where to look for test ideas, which included focusing on the top pages. Today, with the where information, we now know how to identify what to test. Using heatmaps, recordings, and other tracking, we’re able to really understand what people are doing on individual pages. This helps contribute to the hypothesis, “If I change this element because it’s not doing what I want it to do, then we will see an increase in conversion by “X” because….”
My next posts will take what we’ve learned about the where and what of testing and incorporate the why. Why are people converting or not converting? These three elements are what help build your hypothesis, run tests, and make smarter, data-driven decisions about your website.
View more posts about Conversion Rate Optimization.
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