Competitive analysis is competitive advantage.

What if you knew exactly what each of your major competitors was doing to attract, convert, and retain new customers?

• You knew which channels were bringing them the most customers.
• You knew how real customers were engaging with their websites.
• You knew how customers were being onboarded, retained, and upsold.

Now forget the “what if”, because by the end of this article, you will know the exact steps you need to take in order to understand how your competitors are running their businesses.

This isn’t going to require a tremendous amount of time, money or expertise.

It is going to give you an immediate competitive advantage.

I’ve never made this claim before, but if you haven’t already spent some time researching and analyzing your competition, this will be the most valuable and actionable article you read all year.

Let’s get started.

Want to use the same scorecard we use to evaluate competitors here at Conversion Sciences?

The 3 Phases Of Competitive Analysis

If you’ve been following along with us at Conversion Sciences, you know that we love systems – proven, repeatable processes we can use to consistently get results.

Our competitor analysis process can be broken down into three distinct phrases.

1. Find out who your real competitors are.
2. Find out what they’re doing to attract, convert, and retain customers.
3. Turn that intelligence into profitable business decisions.

The first phase is often the most misunderstood, and in the low-barriers-to-entry world of ecommerce, we’ve found that many business owners don’t actually know who their real competitors are (more on that in the next section).

The second phase is where data analysis really comes into play, and we’ll be talking about several tools that will provide you with the required data, and more importantly, how to use them.

The third phase is where your own expertise will come into play. We’ll show you how to acquire and analyze your competitors, but how you apply that intelligence to your business is going to come down to your own strategic capabilities as an entrepreneur or manager.

We’ll give you the spear of ice. You hit the dragon.

And as we begin discussing specifics, keep in mind that competitive analysis is often a team effort, as Angie Schottmuller explains:

Remember to share and collaborate on competitive research with other team members. It’s common for a PPC specialist, copywriter, and landing page designer to individually perform competitive research. If research requirements are shared cross-functionally, steps can be consolidated to save time while also improving common understanding across teams.

– Angie Schottmuller, Growth Marketing Advisor

1. Find out who your real competitors are.

If you don’t know who you’re competing with… who you’re really competing with… you can’t gain an advantage over them.

You probably know about major players in your approximate niche, but in many cases, those big brands aren’t your real competitors, as Theresa Farr explains:

The first step in doing any type of competitor analysis is to make sure the competitors you’re analyzing are worth looking at! Don’t just pick the big dogs in your industry for two reasons:

1. 1. The strategies that work for household names usually don’t work for smaller brands
   2. They might have big margins or other reasons for their success despite unsophisticated digital marketing. Don’t assume they know what they’re doing just because they’re a big brand. Check out what Brian Massey says about big brand failures.

– Theresa Farr, Conversion Max

Sometimes your real competitors are other businesses similar in size to yours, big business out of your niche that happen to offer a side solution similar to yours, or alternative solutions you haven’t even considered.

The question you need to be asking is, “What alternative options are my potential customers considering?”

There are a few ways to answer that question.

Ask Your Customers

The best way to find out who else your customers have considered is to ask them, as Jason Quey describes:

Most companies that do competitor analysis are too self-focused and as a result, fail to truly serve their customer.

To start, you need to find out who your customers say the competitors are by asking them in a survey. This does two things:

1. 1. You find out who are the biggest competitors are in the mind of your customer.
   2. You find out about new competitors you did not realize you were competing against.

From there, you need to research how you plan to outwit your competitors and win the battle over your customer’s mind. You can only do this by becoming #1 in a product category.

For example, Tom’s of Maine toothpaste did this by becoming the natural, healthy choice. And while Colgate, Close-Up, and Crest fought for shelf space at the local grocer, Tom’s of Maine became the only choice at whole food stores across the country.

This strategy can work in numerous other ways, whether you target different keywords or write content that fits a different audience. But the goal is to learn how you can serve your customer better than the competition… by asking them.

– Jason Quey, The Storyteller Marketer, VP of Marketing at Codeless

Talking with your customers is the single most effective way to identify who your real competitors are.

If you are B2C or B2B with little 1-to-1 customer interaction, using something scalable like surveys will probably work best. Just like with any customer touchpoint, remember to keep it simple and make it about the customer, not about you.

For example:

1. What alternative brands, tools, or options were you considering when you decided to go with us?
2. What most attracted you to these options?
3. What would you like to see improved in our product/solution to give you the best possible experience?

How can we make YOUR experience ideal? That’s ultimately the goal of competitive analysis. How can we be the best possible choice for our customers and then communicate that value to prospective customers?

Ben Jesson offers some additional tips:

If you don’t know how you differ from your competitors, there’s a good chance your customers can tell you. Asking “How would you describe us to a friend?” reveals why your customers like you.

Similarly, you could ask a question along the lines of the following: “Which other options did you consider before choosing our product or service?” or “Why did you decide to use us?” It’s particularly important to ask questions from this group before you undertake any re-branding exercise, so you understand what your existing positioning is.

– Ben Jesson, Conversion Rate Experts.

Direct client feedback is the best way to learn about your competitors, but it’s not the only way. There a few other strategies at your disposal.

Ask Customer-Facing Staff

Sometimes you can ask the customer without ever asking the customer. Custom-facing staff on your team should be regularly queried for input on what customers are talking about, and the competition is a natural part of that intel.

Ben Jesson elaborates:

Talk to people who spend their whole lives speaking with users. For example, salespeople, consultants, and customer-support staff. We call these people “Voice-Of-Customer Aggregators” (or “VOC Aggregators”).

VOC Aggregators already understand the users, the marketplace, and your competitors. And they don’t just know facts like “The average user is 40 years old with 2.4 children”; they know the users intuitively, much like you know your own family. When you talk to a VOC Aggregator, you harness the wisdom of thousands of hours of conversations with users.

– Ben Jesson, Conversion Rate Experts.

This is applicable for both phase one and phase two of our competitive analysis process, but I’ve found that it tends to be most useful for identifying key competitors.

Use Competitive Analysis Tools

There are quite a few different tools that specialize in competitive analysis. Most of these are primarily phase two tools with some phase one capabilities built in.

For example, if you want to find out who is targeting the same keyphrases as you, just enter your website URL into Ahrefs.com and it will show you 10 websites targeting similar SEO keyhprases to you.

If you want to find out who is targeting the same paid keywords as you, simply enter the keyword into iSpionage and it will show you competing websites and their monthly Adwords budget.

If you want to see who is writing on the same blog topics as you, just enter the topic into Ahrefs Content Explorer.

There are many other tools you can try, but these are some good ones to get started.

Use Google Search

The last method we’ll discuss today can be pretty hit or miss, but it’s free and relatively simple, so it’s worth mentioning.

Just start typing relevant keyphrases into Google and see what comes up. There are a number of ways Google can point you in the right direction:

1. The search algorithm (obviously)
2. Paid ads (similar to the data iSpionage pulls)
3. Google’s search autosuggest function (dropdown menu when you start typing)
4. Google’s related searches (bottom of page)

In addition to identifying competitors, you can also use Google alerts and other alert tools to be notified in real time whenever a competitor is mentioned, as Ben Jesson explains:

Use search engines (to be notified when people say things about your competitors). Several search engines track mentions in real time, allowing you to discover what people are saying about your competitors on blogs, forums, and in social media. The following tools can be useful: Moz Fresh Web Explorer, Google Alerts, Talkwalker Alerts, Mention, NinjaOutreach, Twitter Search, BuzzSumo and Facebook. Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides powerful tools for real-time analysis and monitoring of social media

– Ben Jesson, Conversion Rate Experts.

Search engines are listed last for a reason, but if you don’t have many customers, don’t have any staff, and can’t afford any tools, it can at least get you started, and you might get lucky and find your most important competitors just be using Google.

2. Find out how your competitors are attracting, converting, and retaining customers.

Now that we know who our competitors are, the next step is to find out what they’re doing.

Similar to our overall competitive analysis process, we can break this phase down into an additional 3 phases:

1. How are our competitors attracting new visitors and leads?
2. How are they converting new customers?
3. How are they onboarding, retaining, and upselling those customers?

There’s really only one way to find out most of this information.

Competitive analysis tools.

Yep… I’m about to throw a busload of tools at you. Some are expensive. Some less so. A few have been offered at $50 for lifetime access via Appsumo.

If you are serious about competitive analysis, you’ll need at least a few of these.

How Are They Attracting Visitors?

We’ll need to use different tools for different traffic channels, so let’s discuss a few of the primary traffic sources you’re likely to find:

1. Organic search
2. Paid ads
3. Social media
4. Other referral traffic

I alway start with organic search, because you can learn a whole lot in a short amount of time using a tool like Ahrefs.

Let’s use our friends over at Convert.com as an example. When we enter their website, we can immediately see some key information.

Backlinks, referring domains, ranking keywords and total organic traffic are all key insights on how Convert.com is pulling in search traffic. We can immediately see that they are getting around 5k search visits per month.

Click “Top Pages” in the sidebar and we can see which pages are responsible for the bulk of their traffic.

We can also look at which specific keywords are bringing them the most search traffic.

If I’m a competitor of Convert.com, I immediately know that most of their organic search traffic is from their branding efforts versus their SEO or content marketing efforts. If I were to analyze some of Convert.com’s competitors and find that they too were driving significant traffic via unbranded organic search, I might conclude that organic search isn’t an effective traffic source for my business OR that there is room to become the content marketing leader in my space.

Next, we could look at Convert.com’s paid ads using iSpionage but since they don’t seem to be using Adwords, we’ll look at Visual Website Optimizer instead.

We can look at all search terms being targeted.

Compare multiple competitors’ ad spend at once.

And even view the ads themselves.

For social media, there are several different management tools with built in competitor benchmarking, but I haven’t found any of them to be significantly more effective than simply eyeballing social profiles.

You can see pretty clearly just by looking at a feed whether or not it’s generating significant engagement. Don’t be fooled by account follower numbers or page likes. Those are easily manipulated. Look at individual post engagement to estimate click-throughs.

Monitoring paid social ads is a bit trickier, but there are a few tools here that collect and archive Facebook ads in huge databases for you to look through. You might be able to find your competitors’ ads in there… or you might not.

Moving along to referral traffic, you really can’t estimate it. Instead, you can focus on reviewing the competitor’s backlink profile and seeing who is linking to them and how often. This can give you ideas for publications to target with your own outreach efforts in addition to giving you intelligence on the competing business.

We’ll head back over to Ahrefs for a backlink profile on Convert.

That’s enough about traffic analysis for now. Let’s dive into our favorite topic… conversion analysis.

How Are They Converting New Customers?

Now that we understand where our competitors’ traffic is coming from, the next step is to identify how they are converting that traffic.

There are a few different ways to slice this, and we called on our network of conversion experts to provide you with a well-rounded take.

Theresa Farr bridges the traffic analysis process we just discussed with this new section in describing her process below:

I like to use Spyfu or SEMrush, plus the browser extension Ghostery, to quickly see how sophisticated certain competitors are.

Spyfu and SEMrush will estimate how much your competitor is spending on paid traffic, which landing pages they’re sending it to, and how long they’ve been doing it. Why is that useful? As Spyfu’s founder and CEO, Mike Roberts, often says, “Companies might lose money on advertising for a while, but not for long.”

So if you see that your competitor has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending traffic to a certain landing page for several years, you can probably assume that page is working well for them.

Ghostery will show you the scripts that your competitor has on their site. If you only see the Facebook Connect Social Tracker on a competitor’s site for example, you know their marketing isn’t very sophisticated. But if you see several different analytics scripts, including tools such as Hotjar, Lucky Orange, or Crazy Egg, as well as A/B testing scripts, you can have more confidence that they’re making data-driven changes to their website.

Then, once you’ve determined that a competitor is worth watching, use iSpionage to get notified whenever they start a new A/B test, or when they’ve found a winning variation. Seeing your competitors’ winning A/B tests speeds up your testing plan immensely.

Just remember, don’t make changes to your site or landing pages to copy your competitor. Use what they’re doing as one of many ideas to incorporate into your testing strategy.

– Theresa Farr, Conversion Max

By identifying your more sophisticated competitors, you can piggyback off of their investments and find your own wins for pennies on their dollars.

On a similar note, there are several tools that will help you understand your competitors’ site architecture and identify the tools they are using, as Dennis van der Heijden explains:

We love BuiltWith and NerdyData to get an idea on what websites use which tools. It’s fairly easy to get an idea of customer spending and growth of competitors in the A/B testing market. We know in US Optimizely kills it and moved to the enterprise market pushing for higher yearly deals and you can see the installs grow there with segmenting high traffic sites in BuiltWith they do 90M ARR now.

The second A/B testing tool in the US is VWO that are spread out over the lower and mid segment of traffic with 10M ARR and we with Convert.com are third in the US with A/B testing and Personalization, right between those segments.

Review sites can be also helpful for competitor analysis. We once looked and analyzed over 1,000 reviews from G2 Crowd, Siftery and Trust Radius and build word-rankings on those and there you see how often “service” or “features” are mentioned in those reviews and that gives an interesting ranking of the market that is not instantly visible. That’s a little hacky but gets new insights on if your segment (ours is focused on service, no-blinking, and affordability).

– Dennis van der Heijden, Founder and CEO of Convert.com

As Dennis also mentioned, review sites can be a great source of direct customer feedback.

Another approach is to use direct user testing like you would on your own website, but run the test on your competitors! Paul Rouke discusses this at length:

End users are a company’s secret weapon when conducting competitor analysis.

Why? When conducting qualitative, intelligent user research, either remote or ideally moderated, including competitor websites in the research has a range of benefits:

• • it provides users with different experiences from which to compare and contrast – this is hugely important
  • it makes it easier for users to identify the strengths and weaknesses of different experiences
  • it ensures that users don’t have any idea which website they are mainly been asked to provide insights on, so it keeps bias out of their feedback
  • it allows you to observe users conducting the same tasks on both the main (client) website and at least one competitor
  • it helps to understand how the different value propositions influence user behaviour and the decision making process
  • you can research a range of different approaches to delivering a user experience for a similar product and service, to see which suits the target audience ie. from simple and basic to more creative and progressive

As an added benefit, capturing video footage of users waxing lyrical about a competitor’s online experience compared to yours/your clients, which is then presented to the C-suite and decision makers within the company, can prove vital in gaining attention and traction as to the importance of improving their user experience.

Competitive analysis sits under what should be the overarching goal of any progressive, ambitious, high growth business – that is to truly become customer centric. And customer centricity comes from speaking with and genuinely listening to customers and potential customers. Period.

– Paul Rouke, Founder & CEO of PRWD

By watching real customers engage with both your website and your competition’s websites, you can get incredible insight into your competitors strengths and your own weaknesses. It also makes for incredibly actionable intelligence in optimizing your website.

And even though we are focused on the online experience, sometimes there are insights to be gained from offline competitors, as Ben Jesson explains.

You can learn a lot from carrying out method marketing with competitors, particularly with offline ones. Most online businesses have offline equivalents that you can visit. Offline companies are less subject to ivory-tower syndrome than online companies, because they have face-to-face contact with customers. Their sales funnels tend to be more sophisticated.

– Ben Jesson, Conversion Rate Experts.

Last but not least, engaging with competitor sites on your own time and exploring their funnels can provide you a wealth of information, and frankly, it’s the only way to track how they onboard, upsell, and retain their customers.

How Are They Onboarding, Retaining, and Upselling New Customers?

This one is pretty easy to do, and it’s as effective as you want it to be.

Hit subscribe or start free trial and then observe and document.

For example, I’m currently working on a copywriting course targeted at freelance copywriters, so I am actively tracking a competitor who targets freelancers in general and learning from his funnel.

I do this for several of my competitors. It costs nothing, and it’s my data to use as I wish forever.

Easy peasy. Next.

3. Turn competitive intelligence into profitable decisions.

The final step in our competitive analysis process is to turn the data we’ve discovered into strategic, profitable business decisions.

As I mentioned before, that will ultimately rely on your expertise and creativity, but there are a few things we can recommend.

First, as Theresa Farr mentioned earlier, focus on your most sophisticated competitors. If you have someone in your niche doing everything right, you can leverage their success to secure the #2 spot in the short term and then focus your creativity on overtaking them specifically in the long term.

Second, remember to apply rather than copy, as Rich Page explains:

Competitive analysis can be a great source of ideas to improve your website and your CRO efforts. You should perform a detailed review of the websites of your competitors initially and then every few months to look at what they have launched or redesigned. In particular check for improvements to key elements like headlines, imagery, forms, and CTA buttons. You should also often review best practice websites like Amazon.com and AO.com for inspiration.

Don’t presume ideas from competitor websites will have a good impact though. It can work well but can lead to disappointing results. Why? Because every website is different, with variations in value proposition and types of visitors. Don’t just copy ideas from other websites, always aim to tweak and improve them. To reduce risk of poor results you should also A/B test ideas before launching them.

– Rich Page, Website Optimizer

Speaking of AO.com, Paul Rouke has a very intriguing case study to share on competitive intelligence and application you might find helpful.

AO.com is now one of THE most customer centric pureplay retailers I have ever seen, but just 5 years ago, they were not customer centric at all, and they had run exactly zero A/B tests.

Our team at PRWD worked with them to propose and help deliver user research on a larger scale than we had done before or have done since. We planned a large scale remote research project using whatusersdo.com. 150 videos. Tons of insights. Far too many videos for 1 or 2 people to watch and analyse themselves.

The key to our rollout and the catalyst to AO.com starting down the path of becoming customer centric was that we provided each of the C-suite and senior decision makers with 5 videos each to watch. We sent them the videos and simply said, “Watch these videos of people using your website, and let us know if you feel there is anything we need to change or improve to make the website better for visitors”.

The feedback came flooding back. The big decision makers – classic HIPPO’s – all quickly realised that their online experience wasn’t as good as it could be, and that they had had a lot of misconceptions about how users were interacting with the site.

The rest, as they say, is history. This case study is one of the few that I am most proud of in my 17+ years in the industry.

This exact same technique of cheap, remote testing at scale can be harnessed to also include all users carrying out the same scenario on 1 or 2 competitor websites.

There you have user research and competitor analysis at scale, with the added potential for this activity to be the “shock tactic” (as AO described it) to becoming a truly customer centric brand.

– Paul Rouke, Founder & CEO of PRWD

If you are reading this as a manager, marketer, or any position depending on a higher decision maker, visual user testing can be incredibly powerful both for intelligence AND securing buy-in “upstairs”.

Click here for a number of effective user testing tools you can use to pull this off.

And of course, we wouldn’t be Conversion Scientists if we failed to mention our favorite pursuit: conversion rate optimization.

Competitive analysis is a key part of data collection in our A/B testing framework. Once we understand how users are interacting with a website versus the website’s competitors, we can develop an effective testing strategy to plug leaks and optimize conversion funnels.

As a final thought from our own Brian Massey, remember to incorporate competitive intelligence rather than letting it completely dictate your testing strategy.

Don’t give your competitors’ ideas more priority. Don’t assume they know anymore than you do. Add any ideas you have to your hypothesis list and then go through your typical prioritization process based on what is most important in your unique funnel. Here at Conversion Sciences, we add them to our ROI Prioritized Hypothesis Spreadsheet which you download here.

Conclusion: Competitive Analysis Is Competitive Advantage

When you know what your competitors are doing, it positions your to make better strategic decisions. You can learn from their investments and learn from their mistakes. You can emulate what they do right and find ways to outmaneuver them in the process.

Most importantly, you can use the intelligence gathered and the gathering process itself to better understand your customers and the market you are trying to reach.

We’ve given you a lot to work with today, but we’d also love to hear from you as well. What is your go-to competitive analysis strategy?

Here at Conversion Sciences, we tend to focus a lot on website optimization, but your website isn’t your only option for driving sales.

Over the last few years, social media sites have begun building ecommerce solutions directly into their platforms, allowing businesses to attract and sell to their target audience directly through their social pages.

With a few niche-specific exceptions, we would never recommend making social commerce the central piece of your sales strategy. It’s never a good idea to put all your eggs in a basket someone else controls.

But that said, if you aren’t taking advantage of social commerce in some capacity, you are most likely leaving money on the table, and we want to help you scoop that money right back up.

What is Social Commerce?

Social commerce is selling that takes place directly through social platforms. Instead of using social marketing to drive visitors to your website, where you then convert them into customers, visitors are sold to directly on social media either in the form of a complete checkout experience or a “Buy Now” style click-through that triggers an off-platform checkout.

This is a fairly natural and predictable next-step in the evolution of social media. After all, 74% of consumers already rely on social networks to guide their purchasing decisions. Eliminating the extra steps streamlines the process for consumers and brands alike.

There are currently three major sites for experimenting with social commerce:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Pinterest

Each platform is a bit different, so we’ll take a look at each individually.

How To Sell On Facebook

Facebook led the pack when it comes to intertwining its platform with ecommerce features by introducing a “Buy Now” button back in 2014. While the button was active and used by several brands with some success, ultimately it was more of a beta test, as only select businesses could try it out.

Eventually, Facebook opened the doors for all businesses to use the feature and has made a number of innovative additions since that time.

So, how do you set up a shop section on your Facebook page?

1. First, click the “+ Add Shop Section” button on your Facebook business page.

2. On the following screen, click Add Shop Section

3. Agree to merchant terms and policies on the next screen, and then click Continue

4. Add business and payment processing details such as your email address, business address, and Stripe payment processing login details.

5. Follow the prompts to describe what your shop sells, and then click Continue

6. On the next screen, you will be prompted to enter photos, the name of your product, price, description, shipping options, tax rates, and inventory count. Click Save when you are finished.

The finished product should look something like this:

Clicking on any of the product pictures or blue text below them will bring you to a checkout page where you can see more in-depth details on availability, purchasing, and ship times.

Arguably, the biggest advantages of using Facebook for social commerce can be described in two words: targeting & messaging.

Targeting is an area where Facebook is lightyears ahead of Twitter, Pinterest, and every other platform. Facebook sports a robust collection of data on all its users and has seriously sophisticated reporting features that give you the ability to specifically target your ideal customers to a very fine level of specificity.

For example, with your ads, you can target new mothers, who have a Bachelor’s degree, within the age range of 18-38, within a 25-mile radius of Dallas, who have an interest in fashion, and speak English.

Messaging is another area where Facebook has a competitive social commerce advantage. The number of Facebook’s mobile daily active users recently exceeded 1 billion and continues to grow. With this growth came a greater interest on Facebook’s part for streamlining their mobile experience, not only for content consumption but also social commerce.

In early 2017, Facebook extended its “Buy Now” button to its Messenger application. This ecommerce integration gives your customers the ability to interact with a retailer’s bot which gives them yet another option to purchase products without ever leaving the Facebook platform.

The bot conversation typically will start from a potential customer seeing an advertisement for your brand on their news feed. As an advertiser, you can select Messenger as a destination and have a bot walk them through the purchase which will show them the price, tax, shipping cost, and allow them to enter their shipping and payment info.

Customers also get the added features of tracking product availability and shipping updates in real time.

Facebook Social Commerce Case Study: Spearmint LOVE

A quick way to utilize social commerce and get your store in front of potential customers is through buying advertisements. No platform is greater for your brand’s reach than Facebook. With 2 billion monthly users and an intensive arsenal of targeting features, the choice was a no-brainer for Spearmint LOVE to start advertising their line of infant clothes and accessories.

The Spearmint LOVE team knew the power social influence could have on revenue and immediately started utilizing Facebook as a tool to share complete infant outfits with its followers. Shari Lott, the founder of Spearmint LOVE said, “I put up a photo of not just a shirt or shoes, but of an entire outfit. And moms will come to the site and buy everything in that picture.” Shari put her heart and soul into creating intricate blog posts and sharing them with compelling images on her Facebook page to grow her following. Eventually, she grew her brand to the point where she had over 200,000 fans, and an astounding 62.48% of them were actively engaged as shown below.

Once Facebook launched their “Buy” call-to-action buttons, Shari and her team leaped at the opportunity to offer yet another channel to sell their products on. They wanted to give their customers every conceivable way to buy from them. This strategy quickly gained a lot of traction, and they found themselves with an extremely scalable and profitable advertising model.

After careful analysis, John Lott, the CFO/COO of Spearmint LOVE, stated: “We’re looking at ad spends where we’re getting at least $5 of revenue or more, preferably closer to the $10 mark for every dollar of ads spent.” To acquire such a view of their ROI, John would measure total net new customers, and the net new customers acquired through aggregate ad spend. Spearmint LOVE has had a year-over-year (YOY) growth of 991% in revenue since launching their store with BigCommerce in 2013 and grew their revenue 1,100% in 2016.

How To Sell On Instagram

Instagram burst onto the scene in late 2010 and rapidly grew to 10 thousand users within mere hours of launching (thanks to beta sign ups). The site has grown to 700 million users over the last 6 years and became one of Facebook’s key acquisitions along the way. The platform has made a name for itself in the marketing and ecommerce spaces as the top platform for direct engagement with brand followers.

In late 2016, Instagram began testing new CTA buttons which allowed companies to add links to their posts leading users off Instagram and onto their website or online store. You can select 1 of 4 CTA buttons which include “Shop Now”, “Install Now”, “Sign Up”, and “Learn More”.

While Instagram has yet to include a complete checkout experience on-platform, given Facebook’s recent history, it would not at all be surprising to see fully on-site checkout experiences coming to Instagram in the near future.

Instagram Social Commerce Case Study: The Pink Lily Boutique

The Pink Lily Boutique is a unique women’s clothing retailer that has leveraged their nearly 250,000 Instagram followers to create a 1 million dollar per month business. It’s founders, Tori and Chris Gerbig, went from storing clothes in their garage and selling on eBay and Etsy to fulfilling over 600 orders a day from their warehouse.

Creating this highly profitable store using Instagram was accomplished through a number of strategies:

1. Seek Out Feedback: Seeking out feedback from customers can give you much-needed insight into what products to sell and what not to. Pink Lily Boutique accomplished this through asking its followers to choose between two options.

This strategy not only gives them much needed-feedback on which products to sell but also increases engagement rates on their posts and gives their followers a sense of investment into their brand.

2. Post Often: Pink Lily Boutique posts as much as 8-10 times a day. This strategy is effective because it gives their followers fresh content more often which keeps them coming back multiple times a day.

3. Offer Giveaways and Hold Photo Contests: activities like these increase engagement even beyond Instagram’s already high engagement rate.

Pink Lily Boutique runs contests where entrants must share a post and tag a friend to gain an entry to win free outfits and accessories. People love free stuff and giveaways will create loyal brand ambassadors. They also leverage their followers to create content for them through the use of hashtags. If anyone posts a selfie wearing Pink Lily Boutique clothes and uses the tag #pinklilystyle, then they will get featured on the front page of the brand’s channel.

4. Think Like A User: last but not least, they always ask themselves before posting: “Would I click on this ad?”. Tori and Chris know that you have to catch your audience’s attention in a few seconds or risk losing their interest altogether. This exercise of putting themselves in their customer’s shoes has proved extremely successful to their Instagram strategy and has aided them in driving over 25,000 visitors per day using Instagram.

How To Sell On Pinterest

With an impressive 175 million active users, Pinterest has been a mildly underappreciated selling channel for sometime now. Pinterest a niche paradise and a place for DIY enthusiasts, fashion lovers, chef extraordinaires and the businesses who cater to them.

And while Pinterest has always been an effective marketing channel for certain niches, in the last few years, it has jumped into the social commerce ring by offering “Buyable Pins”. These pins are ideal for social selling and make it incredibly easy for users to purchase products directly from a Pinterest page.

Similar to Facebook’s shop feature, Pinterest users can purchase without being redirected to an online store off Pinterest. This makes the interest-to-purchase cycle shorter and more consumer friendly by eliminating a number of extra steps. A user can browse Pinterest and stumble upon something that has the blue “Buy It” button which puts them within two to three taps of completing an order in full and receiving a receipt through email.

To get started with Pinterest for Business you will want to follow these simple instructions:

First, head over to Business Section of Pinterest and click “Join as a business” to create a new account or Convert to Business by logging in using your existing Pinterest login credentials. Going this route ensures that you will keep all your existing pins, followers, and boards in tact.

Once you’re set up as a Pinterest Business page, you can start utilizing Buyable Pins. To get started, you will already have to have an account with either BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, or Shopify. These ecommerce solutions will integrate with Pinterest using an extension and will automatically create buyable pins to match existing products on Pinterest to those in your store.

If you have any products that aren’t on Pinterest yet, then you will want to create new pins for those so the extension can match them. This process can take up to 5 days to get approved.

Pinterest Social Commerce Case Study: MVMT Watches

Yes, I know we’ve used MVMT Watches as a case study before! This is different. This isn’t about their Kickstarter or their meteoric rise to fashion retail prominence. This case study specifically highlights their use of Pinterest as a direct selling platform, and it’s worth your time.

MVMT Watches is no stranger to social selling. After initialing building their brand through Instagram, the company has also used Facebook extensively as a social commerce platform. In 2016, they began experimenting with Pinterest’s buyable pins and ran a promoted pin campaign resulting in double their typical conversion rate and the highest average order value they have seen from any traffic source.

This strategy was so successful that over a three-month period, MVMT saw a 12-fold increase in Pinterest traffic and over 11,000 sales.

Here is what MVMT’s Pinterest strategy looked in action:

A customer is casually browsing Pinterest looking at cool watches. They come across a compelling product image and decide to investigate further by clicking it to get a better view or find out which company sells it.

This action takes you directly to the products checkout page where you can customize your watch and have it in your cart in a matter of seconds.

This social commerce strategy utilizing Pinterest cut down the path to purchase for MVMT customers by using pins that linked directly to the products checkout page. They found the promoted pin to be the best bang for their buck because unlike other ad formats, you would continue to drive sales after the promotional campaign had ended, as the pin stays up on your Pinterest board.

Conclusion: Social Commerce Is Changing The Ecommerce Game… Kinda Sorta

As of this writing, optimizing your own website is still the most important investment you can make in ecommerce. Relying too much on a 3rd party platforms can easily backfire and destroy your business overnight.

That said, what were are seeing today in the emerging social commerce field is just the beginning of a future where creating your own selling platform will no longer be viable. Like machine learning, this train has started and it will permanently change the game.

If you’ve begun experimenting with social commerce for you own business, I’d love to hear about it. Drop me a line in the comments.

If you’ve ever heard me speak at a conference, you know I like to wear a white lab coat.

that coat tho…

It’s not a gimmick, and I certainly don’t wear it because of its slimming properties.

No, I wear it because of science.

There is an area of research called Enclothed Cognition. It is the study of the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer and those around him.

Scientists have studied the lab coat. When someone puts on a lab coat, they score higher on cognitive tests. So, when I put on a lab coat, I will actually make fewer errors than if I was wearing my street clothes.

When I’m wearing a lab coat, I think I’m smarter than I really am.

Scientists have also studied the effect of uniforms and authority. When I wear the lab coat, what I say will carry more weight with you.

Not only do I think I’m smarter than I am, you will think I’m smarter than I really am.

In other words, I am gaining an unfair advantage based on behavioral science. Today, I’m going to show you how your business can gain an unfair advantage in the marketplace using behavioral science.

Why “Creative” Marketing Is A Cover-Up

We tend to have some preconceived notions about what is creative and what is “mathy.”

Beginning in the 1960s, Madison Avenue agencies led companies to believe that the team with the most creative minds would win in the marketplace. Even after these same agencies began installing mainframe computers and monitoring TV viewing habits, they still led companies to believe that it was the creativity – the novelty of the campaigns – that brought success.

No, they didn’t have Google Analytics. Or Omniture. Or brain scans. Or any of the numerous tools that even the smallest business has access to today, but better believe they were using research to make creative decisions.

Yet, when the web became a thing, we continued to embrace this belief that advertising and marketing was a purely creative endeavor.

We do the market studies. We run the focus groups. We send the surveys.

But, ultimately, it is still up to the designers and developers to make the final choices.

Here’s how the typical web design process works.

1. A company hires an agency.
2. The agency does a market research study with lots of insights about who would buy the company’s products.
3. The agency delivers a beautiful report for the executives to ponder.
4. The agency then creates three design options, and it asks the company executives — the least qualified people to make design decisions — to pick the best design.
5. Finally, they eagerly jot down the executives’ changes and publish the new site.

Everyone is getting their “creative” on.

Meanwhile, someone else is tasked with writing the content, and the content is just pored into spaces in the design.

This is not creative. It’s chaos. And worse, it’s waste.

The problem is that, even when we do research, designers don’t really know which design is going to be the best. There are no longer any boundaries on what we can do digitally. I can create anything, any color, any text, any images. I can add video. I can add live chat.

How can anyone decide with so many choices?

The answer is behavioral data.

It’s not about guessing or being creative. It’s about analyzing how visitors are engaging with a site and then turning that data into testable hypotheses that can be measured against the existing site via a statistically valid testing process.

For a long time, collecting and analyzing data was too costly for small or even mid-sized businesses to consider. But today, it is essentially cheaper to collect and use behavioral data than it is not to.

Let me say that again: It is now cheaper to collect and use behavioral data than it is not to.

While most businesses continue doing launch and see design, the marketplace will reward you from taking a data-first approach.

In many ways, it’s an unfair advantage.

The Two Brains That Drive Behavior

Our brains have two very different personalities, these two personalities are said to live in the two halves of our brains. It’s almost like we have two distinct brains.

The right side of our brain is believed to be the home of the painter in us, the musician, the dancer, the writer, the child. Unrestrained by time or place or social norms, our right brain is capable of creating entire worlds from thin air while chasing butterflies and writing symphonies.

This is all very frustrating to the left side of our brain, which revels in process. It values time and order and systems. It delights in giving thoughts expression as it is where speech is processed and created. It catalogs our past and projects our future. It worries about our businesses and our careers. It balances our checkbooks and then worries about what will happen next month.

Together, the two halves of our brains are crayons and calendars, elephants and emails, moonbeams and money…

For the purposes of business, your right brain is the idea generator. It comes up with way more stuff than we could ever process and execute on. And that’s why the left brain excels at throwing stuff away. When the right brain says “butterflies and symphonies”, the left brain has trouble making sense of it and discards it without further evaluation.

This is why we struggle.

Too often, we let our left brain run our business and this creates an imbalance. Behavioral Science will restore that balance.

You might be thinking that anything called “behavioral science” is something that only the left-brain could love.

This is only somewhat true. Behavioral science is like raw meat to a ravenous left brain. It is a way to tell the future, solving one of our left brain’s biggest problem.

But it’s ALSO a way for the left brain to deal with the right brain.

When the right brain says “butterflies and symphonies”, the left brain will now say, “I don’t know what it means, but I know how to test it.”

This is a fundamental shift in the relationship. Marketing, advertising, or any kind of communication is a dance between the creative right brain and the expressive left brain.

When I started Conversion Sciences in 2007, I didn’t have clients with budgets for high-dollar testing tools. My primary service was to facilitate the understanding of the people coming to my clients’ websites. I spent several weeks with their site and their analytics. I interviewed the employees that knew the clients. I scoured their sites for poor practices and itemized them all.

Then I composed empathetic personas, highlighting the struggles of their prospects, spinning the story of their journey to the site and offering solutions that could be implemented on the website. It awakened their right brains and we had meaningful, connected meetings about these people they called customers!

And then…

… nothing changed.

They dried their eyes, shoved my personas into a drawer and dealt with the fire of the day. I had awakened their right brain, but ultimately the left brain won them over. It didn’t know how to use this information to predict the future.

And then AB testing tools became cheap. I still reviewed our clients’ sites, interviewed their employees and composed my brilliant personas.

But then we tested our ideas.

As it turns out, most of the ideas that came from this in-depth work were wrong. The tests revealed that many, if not most of my ideas did not result in an increase in conversions and revenue. It was a very humbling experience.

But more importantly, it allowed us to start getting predictable results for our clients. Nowadays, we never know which change will improve a client’s conversion rate, but we have framework in place that helps us identify the right tests to run and virtually guarantees we get results in the end.

We can consider bigger and more creative ideas. We have the ability to test almost anything our right brains can come up with. Testing has turned out to be the best way to determine which of our amazing ideas work and which don’t.

At Conversion Sciences, we call this rigorous creativity, and it’s the reason our clients see a 20% average conversion lift.

It’s also the reason anyone, including you, can harness your creativity for the purpose of data-driven optimization. But before you can score, you need to first understand the rules.

The 6 Rules of Behavioral Data

We all make decisions every day based on what other people are doing. You are wired to navigate the world using behavioral data.

When you check Facebook to see how many people like and comment on your most recent post, you’re using your built-in behavioral know-how. When you select a movie based on the Rotten Tomatoes Freshness Score, you are getting your behavioral science on. The New York Times Best Seller list, the Billboard Charts, and the laugh track on The Big Bang Theory are all sources of behavioral data that we use to make decisions every day.

If you don’t believe me, let’s use an example. When my son was 14, he built his own gaming computer. He had meticulously researched every component, from the high-frequency monitor to the mouse pad. His last decision was the motherboard, the foundation of the computer that every element plugs into.

He had narrowed it down to two alternatives. They had the same features and were priced within pennies of each other. Reviewers of the motherboards had given one a four-star rating, and the other a five-star rating.

If we didn’t understand the first rule of behavioral data, we would have simply chosen the five-star motherboard. Five stars is better than four, right? But even at the tender age of 14, Sean was smart enough to see how many reviews had fed those ratings.

hmmm which one is legit?

The five-star motherboard had five reviews, while the lower-rated four-star motherboard had 250 reviews. You have no doubt about which rating is most reliable. Your little brain, like my son’s, is doing the math. We know that the five-star rating is just as likely to be a three- or two-star rating.

The data isn’t in.

You are intuitively calculating what statisticians call n: The Sample Size of the data collected (the reviews). And you know the first rule of behavioral data.

1. Larger Sample Sizes Are Better Than Smaller Sample Sizes
2. Data Over Time Is Better Than Data At One Point In Time
3. More-Recent Data Is Better Than Less-Recent Data
4. Observational Data Is Better Than Self-Reported Data
5. Customers & Prospects Are More Believable Than Pretenders
6. Quantitative Data predicts the Future Better than Qualitative Data

Well designed A/B tests are created to follow all of the rules of behavioral data. They are designed to deliver observational, recent data, taken over time from a statistically significant sample of prospects that can be quantitatively analyzed.

As a marketer, you can tap into this innate scientific know-how, using it to predict the performance of your campaigns and make them better.

For a deeper look at these rules with accompanying examples and case studies, read: The 6 Rules of Behavioral Data Built Into All of Us.

Research vs. Intuition

In 2014, Marks & Spencer redesigned their apparel website. Marks & Spencer is a £10 billion company running food and apparel stores in the UK and Europe. In 2013 13% of their sales went through the web. That’s about $1.5 billion. With a B.

In 2014, they launched a website redesign. The effort cost £150 million. Today that would be about $180 million.

Even the largest brands can stumble.

The UX community–and their designers–thought the redesign was “positive.”

More research would be needed for us to give a thorough UX opinion but our first thoughts are that it’s a positive redesign.

— ExperienceSolutions

The customers didn’t agree. Upon launch, the site saw an immediate 8% drop in sales. That’s about $10 million per month in lost sales. This number doesn’t take into account the loss of brand trust.

The best way to build brand online is to deliver what your visitors want.

For $180 million, we expect that they did a great deal of research into their customers and visitors. So what went wrong.

This is the battle being waged in your businesses. Intuition vs. research. Best practices vs. behavioral science. Left brain vs. right brain. Both are necessary. But if you continue to find yourself struggling to get value from the visitors that you pay to bring to your site, there is an imbalance.

Intuition is our ability to apply our experience to new situations. We admire those who can discern the important aspects of something without study.

When behavioral data was expensive to acquire, campaign planning and development was dominated by intuition. If we invested in research, it was done at the beginning. This was primarily qualitative data based on surveys and focus groups.

Then the designers and developers would apply the data to the best of their ability, but relied on their intuition to make the thousands of little decisions necessary to complete a project.

When collecting data is expensive, we rely more on the intuition of experts during development.

It is at the end of this process that true behavioral data is collected. It’s called results. If the results were positive, then the campaign can be replicated and continued. If the results were disappointing, then the campaign would be scratched, and the process would start over.

This is the classic launch and see approach.

What does a campaign development process look like in an era of cheap behavioral data. For most businesses, it looks the same. But for industry leaders, it looks like this:

When data is abundant and inexpensive, we can optimize before launch.

Qualitative data is collected at the beginning. But now we can go back and test components of the campaign again and again. And we collect inexpensive quantitative behavioral data.

Intuition has its place and always will. But now we have balance. At several points along the development path, we can answer specific questions about our campaign.

Obviously, it’s important to get this offer right, it makes sense to do a study. I’m going to use this word “study” a lot because it means, “Stop and look for some data.” A study can mean evaluating existing data or collecting new data. It may take months, but can also be done in a few hours.

Offer Selection & Continuity

I’m going to use the term “studies” frequently. A study describes our process of collecting and evaluating behavioral data. Studies are often short processes, but don’t have to be.

We do a study when we ask the question, “Do I have some data to support a decision, or could I collect some data to help me make a decision.”

If we decided to do a little study of offer language, where could we look for some behavioral data? Well, any place we make offers.

If you’ve been running ads on Google or Bing, you have a sample of offers. You can compare the click rates and their conversion rates of these ads to learn which offers appealed most to prospects.

For one of our clients, we looked at their Adwords ads and saw that the best performing offered either 20% off or $100 off.

Adwords Ad

These are what we call “Transactional” prospects. Their greatest fear is paying a dollar too much for something. The landing page used for these ads didn’t lead with the discounts, however.

Before

We focused on the $100 off offer and this became part of the primary offer. This page increased leads by 40% after we made this simple change.

After

Other sources of behavioral data? How about a study of emails with high click-through rates? What offers get the most clicks in your email? This data is kept in any email service for easy evaluation. Pull them into a spreadsheet and see what offers appealed to prospects.

Your ad and email teams should be thrilled to hear from you. At some point, they may come to you to learn what landing page copy is delivering the best conversion rates. They can do a behavioral study of your landing pages.

Why is this data valuable?

1. First it is behavioral, not self-reported.
2. Second, it is a sample taken from prospects and customers.
3. Third, it’s a big sample. It will typically include a sample sizes of thousands of impressions or recipients, and hundreds of clicks.
4. Fourth, the data spans months or years. If seasonality is an issue, you will want to zero in on a timeframe of data that matches the timeframe that your landing page will launch.

You’re not guessing. And you’re getting value from the ad spend and email outreach you’ve already invested in.

If these sources don’t exist for you — if this is a new offer or product, then your study may include launching several ads to see what works. The copywriter may recommend some images to support the copy. If you leave the images to the designer, they will scurry over to iStockPhoto and populate your page with ineffective stock photography.

Image and Headline Selection

Wow, great effort on the photos…

We call this business porn. You can tell business porn is on your site using the caption test. If you can’t write a caption for a picture that makes sense, then it’s probably business porn.

The caption for shaking hands might be, “We want to shake your hand, so we can start sending you invoices.” Headset hotties are all the rage. The caption might read, “I don’t work here, but you should call anyway.” And the caption for a random graph might read, “We don’t know what this measures, but it’s going up and to the right.”

Your visitors know the difference between a studio picture and a picture of your customers or employees. This is a waste of valuable space on our landing pages.

Marketing 101 says, “Show the product.” This is because no one is going to take action on your landing page until they’ve imagined what it will be like to take action. Spend as much time on the images as you do on the copy. Images are a powerful way to advance the value proposition.

You may have several images to choose from. We’ll do a study to help you pick images that work for your copy.

Unfortunately, we rarely know if we’ve chosen the right copy and image.

So many choices, so little time

More likely, we’re struggling with a number of options.

All of these satisfy the offer, but can be expected to perform very differently.

Let’s do a study!

Finding the Right Headline and Hero Image

Why not give ourselves some creative latitude. We could probably come up with some different headlines and images. Why not collect some data on this to narrow down our choices?

We can pretty easily narrow down our choices using a five-second test. This test can be done very inexpensively at UsabiltyHub.com or Verifyapp.com.

The five-second test flashes your page in front of test subjects for five seconds. The subject is then asked questions about what they saw. It’s a good measure of the immediate impact of the copy and images, revealing how well they communicate the offer.

This is a great way to gauge the effectiveness of headlines and images.

Finding the right hero image and headline

Here’s what we learned about a homepage we tested with the five-second test. This is a typical scenario for this company’s products. We then asked them if this company would solve their problem.

User survey

It is clear that visitors aren’t getting a clear understanding from the home page. This test took two days and cost about $2.50 for each of the 25 respondents.

We can put several versions of our landing page through the test, different headlines, images and copy. Our landing page doesn’t even need to be functional for this kind of test.

Let’s evaluate this data. Sample size? Small. Little n=25. Strangers or customers? This is a sample of people who aren’t necessarily customers, so their input must be taken with a grain of salt. Qualitative or quantitative? This is clearly qualitative, and we were able to ask several more questions to understand their impressions of the page.

For our landing page, we can use this test to narrow down the best two headlines and best two images. Then we can do a more quantitative, behavioral study with a larger sample size to get our best offer and image. Before we dive into that, there are a couple of other elements we’ll want to include in our landing page before we test.

Understanding our Visitors’ Preferences

What could we add to a page that would enhance our visitors’ perception of our credibility? The folks at Stack asked this question using a Question Test from UsabilityHub.com. They wanted to know what kind of social proof would enhance the perception of credibility for their home page: a testimonial or customer logos.

They created three versions of their home page, one without social proof, one with a testimonial and one listing the logos of their well-known clients. Then they asked the question:

Does this company seem credible to you?

The results favored the logos somewhat.

Expedited vs Testimonial vs Social Proof

This information is directional in nature, but it narrowed the choices that could be used in a more rigorous AB test.

This is a great example of using panels to inform decisions. It can be applied to a variety of components of a page.

• Copy length
• Page Layout
• Navigation
• Image choice, size and placement
• Trust symbols
• Proof points
• Headlines

This allows designers to be more creative, since their choices can be easily reduced with a question test.

Helping Visitors Solve Problems

Are visitors finding the information they are looking for on our pages? This was a question that insurance provider RACV wanted to know. It was important that their customers be able to find their roadside assistance number in an emergency.

To gather some data, they did a Click Test from UsabilityHub.com. The click test measures how long it takes a participant to click on the page. In this case, they asked participants to click on the roadside assistance number of their current page. The results showed it took 20 seconds on average for these participants to find and click on the right place.

#buried

The click location is shown by the heatmap in the lower right corner of the page.

Clearly, they needed a redsign. Their new design put the roadside assistance number in a band closer to the top of the screen. They ran another click test and reduced the time it took to find the link to 5 seconds on average.

#lessburied

This was a significant win for RACV.

You will use a test like this to determine how your page is functioning holistically.

• What calls to action are most clickable?
• Are visitors able to find the next step in the process?
• Do you have too many calls to action on a page?
• How is your home page helping visitors choose a path?

Answer these questions and you will deliver a better experience.

Studying Page Layout

Notice that we haven’t yet gotten a designer involved yet. There’s a reason for that. Designers tend to add things to a page that satisfy their ego, or that they believe will satisfy you. They want carousels, animated video backgrounds, sliding logos and such. These are all bad ideas, unless you have some data that suggests otherwise.

A professional design is important to credibility, but the primary job of the layout design is to get our visitors eyes to the important information on the page. In this way, we want our designer to be more of a draftsman, using their knowledge of font, color, white space, positioning, negative space, grids, and visual cues to direct our visitors experience. We don’t need designers to be persuasive or manipulative.

Before we call the designers, let’s find out what is wrong with the layout. The more specific instructions we can give our designer, the more likely we are to keep them from going crazy.

Thanks to the amazing increase in webcam resolution and the steep drop in price, we can track where a persons eyes fall on a monitor with surprising accuracy. This means we can do inexpensive eye-tracking studies.

We did an eye-tracking study in 2012. Back then, we needed a special infrared camera and expensive software. We recruited 23 people from around Austin and brought them into a room one at a time. We calibrated the camera to track their eyes and asked them to watch one of three videos while we tracked, and to then fill out a survey.

This took weeks to setup and days to execute. The camera and special software were not cheap, at $7500. All in the study cost $15,000 to $20,000 in time and materials.

The World’s Least Inexpensive User Test

In 2016 the I was asked to give my opinion on a landing page for inbound.org. They didn’t have any data on the page, so I asked my friends at Tobii (formerly Sticky.ai) to do an eye-tracking study of the mockup. Their technology used everyday webcams to track the viewer’s eyes. These studies cost around $500.

Here’s an example of what they delivered in about a week.

#heatmapsaregreat

This view is called a heatmap view. Like rain in a weather report, this tells us where the eyes of 50 test subjects fell most. Red means that many saw that part of page and lingered. Yellow, less so. Green even less. Clear means that these parts of the page got very little or no attention.

This is helpful information when considering layout. From the data, we speculated that the second section was more interesting to the visitors than the hero offer. Few people were being enticed to scroll down the page. And the big screenshot in the middle was acting as a stop.

Watching these interactions in motion can deliver insights as well. Such videos are automatically generated. I wish we had these back in the day.

“You’re waiting for a train…”

We may choose to iterate our campaign elements now using usability tests and eye-tracking studies, but at some point we are going to declare a version of this page the control and launch it.

Our behavioral science doesn’t stop there.

After Launch

We are going to use a few tools to give us some very helpful data about how this page is performing with real prospects.

• Analytics database
• Click tracking software
• Session recording software

And if we really want to take this decision to the supreme court, some AB testing software.

Analytics is a large database of behavioral information. It sits behind our website collecting the behaviors and details of our visitors — anonymously. It is the best source of quick studies. This is a topic for another post.

Heatmaps

To increase the size of our samples, we can turn to click-tracking software. Instead of tracking where visitors’ eyes go on the page, this tracks their mouse movements and where they click. We get similar information with a much larger samples size.

Is our copy too long? Is key information being missed? This can be answered easily with a scroll tracking report.

Scroll tracking

What elements on a page are getting visitors’ attention? Which are being ignored? With click tracking, we can see the interactions of thousands of visitors in a single heat map. Here’s an example of a pricing page.

Click tracking

These are tools that cost a few hundred dollars a month to have running on your site.

Here’s a heatmap we saw on a college website. Why is this one part of the form red hot?

Heatmap

This field is “Program of Interest.”

Follow the colors

It seems that the site didn’t do a good job of communicating what programs were available. When we added “Program of Interest” to the body of the pages and took the potential students to the right part of the site, information requests went up by 20%. That’s a big deal when you’re selling something that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Supreme Court of Data

We have a page that we expect to convert well out of the gate. Our big decisions have been supported by research–an offer study, a copy study, a 5-second test and an eye-tracking study– and have been colored by our intuitive abilities as communicators.

With sufficient traffic, there is another kind of study that we consider the Supreme Court of studies. It’s called an AB test or a split test.

Like our other tools, AB testing tools cost $500 a month or less, and our old data friend, Google, has released a free AB testing tool called Google Optimize.

AB testing tools give us the ability to change just about anything we want on a web page without messing with the backend of our website. In other words, we don’t need the developers’ help. These tools manage everything for you.

They split your traffic equally among two or more variations of your page.

They keep track of which variation generates leads or sales.

They do the statistical calculations for you so you know when your sample size is big enough.

And this data follows all of the rules of behavioral data. It is customers and prospects. The tests are done simultaneously, so the history effect is minimized. The samples sizes are large. The data collected is behavioral, not self-reported.

The only thing we don’t get from AB test results is the deep qualitative insights. That is why we continue to do other studies like site feedback like site surveys.

One of our favorites It involves a single-question popover survey on the thank you page, or the receipt page of the site. A typical survey question is:

“What almost kept you from buying today?” or “What almost kept you from signing up?”

The input is free-form text.

In this example, we asked customers why they chose the Lite version of a product over the Pro version.

Why did you give us less money?

The results of this can be very enlightening when asked like this giving us new ideas about what to test.

Designing AB tests is an intensely creative process.

Conclusion: The Gold is in the Data

This is data gold. But it costs like copper.

When you ask every day what data is available to help me make creative decisions, you can be more creative. You can do more with less because you’re not spinning your wheels.

Investing in behavioral data is now cheaper than not investing in behavioral data. Are you excited about behavioral data now?

Many of the results I’ve shown you are from our clients. A Conversion Scientist named Ruth Mayer created them. A year ago, she was working in a flower shop. Today she is is finding revenue at some busy websites.

Do you really thing behavioral data isn’t within your reach?

When it is expensive to do research, we can’t afford to invest very often, but digital data gathering has become very inexpensive, and it allows us to capture what is happening on our websites, advertising networks and mobile apps in real time.

How would a store owner know that people who looked at a pair of shoes also tend to look at a pair of capri pants? They’d have to follow their visitors around with a clipboard. That’s not practical in the real world. It’s common online.

“Market research is for researchers. Behavioral science is for doers.” –BAM

I’m not going to stop until everyone comes to love behavioral data. Like throwing raw meat to your left hemisphere to free up your creative right hemisphere.

Imagine how you would approach the world if you knew you were creating what your audience really wanted.

How will I know if you love data? Let’s do a study…