Website CRO Best Practices: THE BIG THREE

[00:00:11] Kasim: Quality assurance. John referenced this already, but this is an important thing to bake into your systems. So we gave you our checklist, which everybody should have now in our checklist, we're checking conversion tracking once a month at an absolute minimum. If you have a higher spend, we check more often.

[00:00:23] Kasim: The way to do this is, to be your own customer. So you should walk through your site and try to break it. Try to think of all the things that somebody might do. Like if I started on mobile and move it over to desktop, what happens? meaning I'm logged in, I put something in my cart, and then I leave, is the session Id maintaining if I'm, leaving, coming back, breaking things, whatever, like, try to figure out all the ways that you might frustrate a customer and make an actual purchase.

[00:00:44] Kasim: This is something else that surprised me when we ran the first three X Shopify challenge. How few people had bought from themselves on their own site that's the key thing. So go spend the 10 bucks or whatever it's gonna take, create a dummy product for yourself if you need to, but go all the way through to product completion.

[00:00:57] Kasim: And then once you've done that, go hire somebody else to do it. if it needs to be mom, that's okay. But there's actually people that will do this for you. There are people on fiber that for $5 will walk through your site and give you advice improvement opportunities. And you know what, even if you don't agree with any of it, it's a good recorded video to that.

[00:01:12] Kasim: You get to see how somebody else engages with your site, and this is somebody who's completely fresh and knows nothing. make sure that you're doing a little internal qa. Once you've exhausted that, go do a little external qa. I don't like using the same person for my external qa. Because they've already seen the site.

[00:01:26] Kasim: So every subsequent time they're sort of indoctrinated. My important note here, and actually kind of feel this way about all things management offer goals, not guidance. You don't wanna tell somebody how to do something, they're no longer a quality assurance person for you. Now they're just chalking off check checklist.

[00:01:40] Kasim: Just say, Hey, you know, I'd love to see what would happen if you wanted to build, let's say that you've got a site that sells camping gear and you're like, you're going camping, you're going to Yellowstone. You need everything that you, you're, you would need to go camping, build that shopping cart. And now you get to see the way that they approach that, how they're doing their product research and reviews, how it is that they're building their shopping cart, what they're looking at, you know, where they go to look for promo codes, that type of thing.

[00:02:00] Kasim: Offer goals, not guidance. Tell 'em where you want 'em to go, but don't tell 'em how to get there. Any input on that, John? I. No, I think that's a good idea. it's so overlooked too. and that's part of our s o p, we make a test purchase with every new client to make sure that A, obviously converting, tracking working, but b there's not, you know, some oddity where it's like, Hey, unless you have, you know, a one before the phone number, it just won't take your phone number.

[00:02:18] Kasim: I mean, little things like that, that just upset a user, cuz. You know, they might have, three kids running around and, someone's trying to come to the front door and they're trying to order something, and if one of those fields doesn't work, then they just leave. So, yeah, it's just always a, great idea to test, to see if I was half paying attention, could I do this?

[00:02:33] Kasim: What surprised about mis test if I was half paying attention, could I do this? Dude, that's brilliant. cuz that's exactly what's happening. They're kind of like, they're sort of there. I always get some of the themes come preloaded with international settings. If you're only selling in one country.

[00:02:47] Kasim: Get rid of those settings. It's so annoying to find United States. 50% of the way down the dropdown are like John said, like, is it plus one? Or if you're in a different country, make sure, or even a small collection of countries, you can typically narrow down on those options. And just make little tiny micro improvements that make it a little bit easier.

[00:03:01] Kasim: Go look at your competitors. And this doesn't have to necessarily be somebody that sells the exact thing that you're selling. It can be like an analogous product to yours. But figure out what they're doing, like what have they done? And then try to reverse engineer why. And o oftentimes just asking yourself that question yields really phenomenal results.

[00:03:16] Kasim: Like, why would it be this way? What is it that they've figured out that they haven't figured out? Sometimes it ends up being kind of a functional difference. You'll notice that competitors have built in, product options or imagery just because it's easier for them to scale. One thing I see in the e-com space a lot is it's the same image and then they use Photoshop to customize product customization or colors.

[00:03:33] Kasim: Mm-hmm. while that's not my favorite thing, the whole wide world to do, if you have a thousand t-shirts, that's probably a little bit easier than taking a thousand different pictures. So you can kind of inform how it is, you plan on approaching things by looking at your competitors.

[00:03:44] Kasim: Some notes maybe pro tips. what did we use last? Lucky Orange. this is, screen recording software and you can install software on your site. Full disclosure, it might slow down your site but you can install software on your site and you can actually. Track from a heat map perspective where people's cursor goes, and you can also see what they do both on desktop and on mobile.

[00:04:02] Kasim: This is amazing, especially for new e-commerce sites. If you're driving traffic and people aren't converting, you get to figure out why. And what you'll see is we saw this on our site. People were clicking on things that they thought were clickable, that ended up not going anywhere, and they were trying to take action.

[00:04:14] Kasim: You know, that something that looked like an accordion, wasn't an accordion or something that looked like it would've been a hyperlink, wasn't a hyperlink. The other thing that I noticed is We had a piece of content of significant value that was below the threshold at which the majority of our traffic reached on our homepage.

[00:04:28] Kasim: and it kind of gave us a sense as to how to order some of our content. So I'm pretty sure Hot Jar, one of 'em has a free version, true Conversions owned by Digital Marketer. We're buddies with them, so if you wanna use 'em, that's great. I think they had an Op Sumo deal at one point. I think Luck, Jorn is like $12 a month.

[00:04:42] Kasim: So it's fairly inex. Expensive. Expensive. Yeah, hon? Jar is free One Hot Free. Yeah. Hot Jar is free. I like lucky oranges, just cuz I what's really cool about it is yeah, it's like $10 a month when you get 25,000 business a month, but you get a live chat oh, it's super creepy feature.

[00:04:56] Kasim: You get to pop so you could actually watch people on the site live. And wherever they're going, if you want to, you can sit, start chat, and you can type in the custom message. So if someone was on like the checkout page and they're clicking around, you can actually pop up a chat bar, be like, Hey, do you need any help checking out?

[00:05:10] Kasim: Like you can actually send people messages and start chatting with them live. That I don't see any other, tools doing that. That's a heat mapping and screen recording software. But that one's, it's pretty cool because you can actually start to chat people and, if they don't engage the chat, even if we'll talk about live chat, you can actually, ask them a very specific question that you get really good engagement with.

[00:05:27] Kasim: And sometimes it's like, yeah, I was, gonna buy this, but I didn't know A, B, and C. It's like, perfect. And instead of waiting for them to come, if you can be proactive and go out to them. Here's the analogy that I wanna offer everybody.

[00:05:37] Kasim: This was given to me by Ryan Dice. Ryan says that digital marketing, specifically traffic driving is pouring water into a leaky bucket. And the leaky your bucket, the less effective your marketing. The more you're able to shore up your bucket, the more effective your marketing becomes. What this type of software does is it allows you to diagnose where those leaks are, and so, It's frustrating.

[00:05:57] Kasim: It's actually a really good visual. the traffic that you're driving from Google is really, really, really expensive water, and you're pouring into this bucket and you have no idea where the leaks are, that's a catastrophic error. Not being able to see where your bucket is leaking from. That's just a recipe for disaster and you're basically, you're hemorrhaging money and you're doing it intentionally.

[00:06:13] Kasim: So putting yourself in a position, and you do that with things like Google Analytics screen recording software. Record reports are necessary, data analysis tools that let you see where your leaks exist, and then you get to go plug the leaks. Sometimes you'll misdiagnose, that's okay, that's gonna be part for the course, but I'd rather see you taking action than just, pouring a bunch of water into a leaky bucket.

[00:06:30] Kasim: Most of the clients that come to Solutions eight that are already running Google ads, I can't say most. a really large percentage of 'em though. They think they just need to spend more money or improve their Google ads, but really what they need to do is they need to shore up their bucket.

[00:06:43] Kasim: And sometimes one or two really basic changes makes us look like rock stars, cuz all of a sudden the efficacy of the campaign doubled. But, we just made sure that we're capitalizing on everything that you're already sending to the campaign. Michael's asking, do you typically only leave it installed for a limited time to diagnose issues or leave it permanently?

[00:06:57] Kasim: It's always been for us, a diagnostic utility. Like we added Lucky Orange to ourselves and I think we removed it within 90 days once we were fully converted. Yeah, a lot of times it's for specific testing. So yeah, if you have like a new product or if you have This is now, we used it for lead generation, so we wanted to see, well, we put our pricing on the page, but it was at, about 60% down the page, and we found out that 65% of the traffic only makes it 50% down the page.

[00:07:20] Kasim: then now we're, missing our pricing. So half the people that are coming to our website are asking what's the price is, and we're, it's on the homepage. We're like, why isn't, why are people not knowing what the price is? It's on the page. Then we found out that they didn't make it down that far.

[00:07:31] Kasim: So thinking like, how would you start to optimize your product pages? Well, what if all of your. Amazing videos are below your pictures, your price, your descriptions, your social proof, and then all of your amazing videos. And then, lucky Orange, as an example, says, your heat map shows that people scroll down.

[00:07:45] Kasim: 50% of your traffic only go to here, the other 50% of the traffic go down further. And then it shows like 40, 30, 20 10. And so you might not see that only 30% of your people that come to your product page aren't seeing your videos. You know, maybe you need to possibly switch to a theme that supports your image gallery to have a video in the image gallery itself.

[00:08:02] Kasim: So this way people can actually see a product demonstration that will, you know, now 70% of the more traffic is seeing your videos. So things like that. Or if you see that, you know, your banning cart rate is 85%, and you're like, why is my banning cart rate 15% higher than the average? Well, using those type of screen recording software, you can see that when they go through the checkout, there might be issues there that happen.

[00:08:20] Kasim: People might always, end up, hitting an email one, and for whatever reason, that one just always shows an error on that page. and what's nice about it is the one, another, another reason why like lucky you aren't better is it shows you the device, the operating system, it's something else.

[00:08:32] Kasim: I forget exactly what it is. Yeah. Nice os browser. Yeah. But if it's like, hey, we noticed that the people go to, six pages on average and stay the longest, but don't ever buy when they're on an apple. Safari. But on, Apple and Chrome, it has a great, conversion rate.

[00:08:47] Kasim: Well, maybe your, checkup page has an issue with that browser on that specific device. it's really good for diagnosing. You can always run it kind of right in the beginning and just say, Hey, is there anything there that I might not have known? And just watch people make their purchases and say, yep, this looks good.

[00:09:00] Kasim: Everything's fine. And then you can remove it. If you ever said, man, I really would like to know what people are doing on my site. That's the tool to use. Yeah. I was trying to get into our old dashboard, but it's disabled when we canceled. There's another quote from Ryan who y'all will forgive me.

[00:09:12] Kasim: I'm just such a fanboy. So I'm gonna quote him a lot, but he says that prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. And that's really worth taking into consideration when you're doing this type of task, prescription without diagnosis of malpractice. and I've done this myself, the classic example is you send an email.

[00:09:27] Kasim: The open rate is abysmal. So you rewrite the email, nobody saw the damn email, rewrite the subject line and send it again. But we, tend to go towards optimizing the thing that we feel is important instead of paying attention to what it is that the customer feels important. I think John's example is phenomenal.

[00:09:42] Kasim: If your media isn't prioritized on the page, then don't recreate the media, just change the page layout, those types of things. So make sure that you get a, prescription before you diagnose. And the way to do that is, software tools like this.

[00:09:54] Kasim: