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By Keith Hagen
Revenue Engineer, ConversionIQ
Everyone knows the value of customer insights. If you know your customer’s needs, wants, triggers etc, you will be able to design, develop, deliver and market a product or service that’s “spot on”.
There are so many ways to get insights into your online users today (many of these methods are NOT online themselves) that it can be overwhelming to figure out which ones you should use. The choice is complicated by:
A. The limited time you have in your day
B. How quickly you need the insight
C. How much money you have to spend (see A for the real cost).
No matter who you are, the answer is probably “I need good insights that I can act on, and I need them now”. This pretty much covers the three key factors you need to consider when deciding where to put your time and money to uncover insights:
A. Quality of Insights
B. Ability to Act on Insights
C.Time to Insights
Quality of Insights is at the core, but in reality, the quality you get is constrained by the amount of time (or money) you have to spend on the effort, when you need results, and on your ability to act on the insights (developing a new feature which you’ve learned your customer needs doesn’t happen over night).
See the theme? TIME.
Many of your problems would be solved if you could reduce the time it takes to gain insights. So how do you reduce the time to insights? Keep reading to find out as we examine various methods in terms of Quality, Action-ability and Time.
A Conversion Analyst’s Ranking and Rating of Methods to Get Insights
Below I have listed the most common methods used by conversion analysts to gain and measure insights. These methods have been ranked according to their cumulative score when rated based on the three factors (Quality of Insights, Ability to Act on Insights, Time to Insights). The highest possible score on each factor is 10 points, which means that the highest rating possible for a method is 30 points.
This is not the definitive list but it is a great place to start and I hope it helps.
#1. User Testing – 28 out of 30
Gone are the days of recruiting people off of craigslist with the lure of $50 to get them into your make-shift usability lab. There are several services that offer you the ability to recruit users online and watch them use your website. The hard part is still targeting the people you need. There are audience recruiting engines in these cases, it just cost twice as much (still a bargain).
· Quality of Insights: = 10 out of 10
· Ability to Act on Insights = 10 out of 10
· Time to Insights = 8 out of 10
#2. Website Analytics = 26 out 30
It does take significant skill and experience to get the most out of today’s analytics tools, and you may not be an expert, but the insights are there. If your site analytics are set up well (the biggest barrier to insights) than a skilled person can read your site like you read the Sunday Post (yes, heavy lifting sometimes required).
· Quality of Insights: = 9 out of 10
· Ability to Act on Insights = 10 out of 10
· Time to Insights = 7 out of 10
#3. Sales Person Interviews/Focus Groups = 26 out of 30
Yes, I know this is not online, but you have to get off the Herman-Miller chair and talk to the people who are closest to the customer! You are trying to do on your website the same thing your sales people are trying to do: sell. If you work in the B2B space, or have people answering sales calls from the site, you have a direct pipeline into infinite insights.
Yes, sales people are busy and focused on the sale so you have to sell them on the benefits of sharing their precious time with you (you may want to resort to free lunches, drinks and participation bonuses). After a while, you’ll be sales’ best friend, getting invited to all their conferences, meeting key customers, etc., etc. Because in the end, they want more and better quality leads). The only downside is their insights may make you want to change too much, including things beyond your control.
· Quality of Insights: = 10 out of 10
· Ability to Act on Insights = 7 out of 10
· Time to Insights = 9 out of 10
#4. Heat maps = 25 out of 30
Analytics will tell you what to people are doing between pages, but it will not do well at telling you what people are doing on a page. What are they reading? What are they not reading (more importantly)? With heat-maps you will learn where people click, where they mouse-over, and even how long they hover before clicking. You can see this segmented by new users and return users (the most important segments you have to consider typically). Some heat-maps bring all of it together (clicks, mouse-overs , hovers, scrolling) into one cool “Attention Heat-map” that tell you where people are paying attention. It is these Attention heat-maps that will save you time!
· Quality of Insights: = 8 out of 10
· Ability to Act on Insights = 9 out of 10
· Time to Insights = 8 out of 10
#5 Site Polls (not Surveys) = 25 out of 30
If you ask the right question at the right time, you will gain insights. Polls are perfect for this, but just make sure the poll is easy to respond to and is unobtrusive. The down side is for Time to Insights, with it taking time to collect responses (typically still a lot faster than surveys).
· Quality of Insights: = 9 out of 10
· Ability to Act on Insights = 7 out of 10
· Time to Insights = 9 out of 10
#6 Form Analytics = 25 out of 30
If you have users filling out a form, then you want to know what fields people are not filling out before submitting, or which ones are taking forever to get filled out (Quick, tell me your VIN # lol). If you do analysis on your forms, you will discover how to optimize them. Easy insights.
· Quality of Insights: = 9 out of 10
· Ability to Act on Insights = 7 out of 10
· Time to Insights = 9 out of 10
#7 Using your own site = 23 out of 30
Need I say more?
· Quality of Insights: = 5 out of 10
· Ability to Act on Insights = 8 out of 10
· Time to Insights = 9 out of 10
#8 Feedback Forms = 21 out of 30
Are you listening? Your site users will tell you what is wrong if you give them an avenue. True, much of it will be mis-directed about customer service type stuff, and you want to mitigate that, but in there are insights like “Need to know the length of the contract” (And this was for a company that was the only one not requiring a 6 month contract, talk about missing a selling opportunity!).
· Quality of Insights = 10 out of 10
· Ability to Act on Insights = 8 out of 10
· Time to Insights = 3 out of 10
#9 Product Review = 21 out of 30
Wow, people are talking about the products you sell, using their own words! Sweet. Copywriting just got a lot easier.
· Quality of Insights: = 7 out of 10
· Ability to Act on Insights = 7 out of 10
· Time to Insights = 7 out of 10
·#10 Audience Panels = 21 out of 30
Online User panels are new. But, in a matter of a few days you can find your target market, recruit people, and have them carry on a research panel over a few days on any topic you wish. By the way, NO ONE (outside of Fortune 1000) seems to do this. What a competitive advantage.
· Quality of Insights: = 10 out of 10
· Ability to Act on Insights = 7 out of 10
· Time to Insights = 3 out of 10
·#11 Forums = 19 out of 30
If I told you about a place where experts were talking passionately about your industry/business, training others, sharing solutions and best practices and venting frustrations, you’d be willing to fly to Chicago, stay at the Drake and attend for $2,300/attendee. Well, there might be a forum that does all that for you. If so, engage now, but give it time, lots of time to become part of the community.
· Quality of Insights: = 9 out of 10
· Ability to Act on Insights = 8 out of 10
· Time to Insights = 2 out of 10
·#12 Site Surveys = 14 out 30
Surveys are hard to pull off, not because the questions might be bad, or there are too many of them, or the way they are presented to POP – IN YOUR FACE (ok, these are all reasons!), but mainly surveys score low on our survey list because people don’t like to commit their time online, leaving you with the narrow segment of people who don’t mind. Sure you can incentivize people, and now you have 2 segments (people with nothing better to do, and people looking for freebies, nice.) Surveys also take time to set up properly and analyze (especially if you have them hooked into analytics or screen recording technology). Surveys also tend to take a long time to gather results. Do yourself a favor and stick to polls (#5 on this list).
· Quality of Insights: = 4 out of 10
· Ability to Act on Insights = 8 out of 10
· Time to Insights = 2 out of 10
·#13 Screen Recordings/Captures = 12 out of 30
It is great to look over someone’s shoulder like a fly on the wall, and see what someone is doing on your website. Unfortunately, flies are a lot better than screen recordings. Flies can see if you have your credit card out, if you are pulling out your hair, and if you are making frustrated looking faces. In other words, the fly has context to your visit, screen recordings don’t. Without context, you can’t interpret what you are seeing. If you don’t get mislead by the samples you watch, you may need a razor before you gain any true insights.
· Quality of Insights: = 3 out of 10
· Ability to Act on Insights = 8 out of 10
· Time to Insights = 1 out of 10
Hope this helps you allocate your time better and gain the insights where and when you most need them!
If you would like to learn how to take your insights and use them to get the most out of testing, then come and see me speak on “Testing What Matters” at ConversionConference!
About the Author
Keith gains insight into what is and isn’t working with a website, and provides companies with continuous recommendations to improve it. Through these continuous improvements, clients get websites and apps that function and sell a lot more stuff.
Following his post-graduate studies, Keith moved from his native Nova Scotia, Canada to Colorado to work as a Internet programmer, and then onto the business side of online. In the corporate world, Keith drove the improvements of over 30 websites (eCommerce & B2B) before co-founding ConversionIQ and leading its website conversion optimization programs.
See Keith Live!
Keith will be talking more about gaining quality insights from testing at Conversion Conference 2012 on June 25th and 26th in Chicago. Join him in his session on “Moving the Needle: Test What Matters.” See the full agenda and read more about this session. Follow Keith on Twitterto say hello and do some pre-conference networking.
Want to save on your Conversion Conference pass? Save as much as $600 when you register with Keith’s discount code CH12307 and our Early Bird Rates. Hurry, Early Bird promo expires on May 11th.
