My First Week in my Mini Degree at CXL Institute

I recently started a Mini degree program through CXL Institute and decided to pursue a Mini Degree in Conversion Optimization. I need the skill as a designer who designs to improve customer experience and thought that this would be a good fit for me. I am happy to report the first week as a success. I spent the first week learning the basics and the overall reasoning behind why someone like myself could benefit from having CRO on their list of skills. Overall, this week was a slow one for me as I wanted to take my time learning and gathering the information from the first part of my Mini Degree Program: Intro to CRO. Here are my thoughts and a general overview of what I have learned throughout the week.

First off, I have thoroughly enjoyed the content of the program. It is engaging, informative, and enticing. The instructors are clear, the information concise, and the overall mood is laid back, but with quality information. I have found the course to be an effective skill builder and I can’t wait to complete the course and get my Mini Degree! I have been excited to gather more skills as I gain more experience, and with the Covid-19 pandemic, I found it hard to be motivated without proper structure. This has given that to me.

Now as for what I’ve learned, Conversion Optimization, according to Brian Massey — the instructor, is a term to describe a way to approach your website in which you collect data to understand how changes on your website impact your visitors, thus impacting the way they interact and then convert into customers/clients. It is the ‘process of maximizing the value you get from every customer visiting your website’. Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, can save companies time and money. By conducting experiments on your website, you can make changes that will produce profitable results for your company. However, if you implement a change without the experiment, this could result in catastrophic failure, for example, in the first lesson, Brian discusses how Finish Line changed their site without testing the changes and ended up losing 3 million dollars within a few months! That is a huge impact just from the changes they made on their site. CRO helps us organize the many ideas that flow through the website building process. There can be a plethora of ideas and too many can end up in, once again, failure. Implementing ideas without tests and experimentation is often time a result of biases. There are different types of biases, the most common being confirmation biases — the idea of being able to accept what looks/sounds/feels/etc good based primarily on personal preference. Experiments help us predict, examine, and analyze our users’ behaviors before we fully implement a change, without the influence of biases and with the help of concrete data.

But how do we manage all of the ideas without the influence of biases? As noted by Brain Massey in the lesson on ‘Managing Ideas’, he recommends a tried and true tool: a list. He goes on to make sure we understand how powerful a list can be. A list can contain all the ideas that are coming at you from every direction, and some of those ideas come from “the people that pay you”. You simply tell everyone that gives you an idea that you will “put it on the list” thus gathering and organizing the ideas in one place. From here, we can begin to write hypotheses about these ideas, formulating questions and statements to solve problems, indicating what you want to do, what you expect to happen, and how you will measure it. This can begin to multiply exponentially! As you get more and more ideas, you can begin to extrapolate on the ideas and write hypotheses about those ideas, and as you can see it begins to pick up speed and before you know it you’re ready to tackle some of these ideas! You can do the first pass-through with this and start to hone in on the best ideas from the list.

For example, say you want to test how a new button will perform on your home page. Well, you can’t exactly just go into thinking well, let’s just put it in and see how it does. You could use testing software, you could measure the data using Google Analytics or even a combination of software! The possibilities are endless! You would write a hypothesis, I am going to add a button, I expect increased engagement, as indicated by Google Analytics, and then you decide to test the theory! You do one pass and you realize such a low-effort item is making a high-impact, and oh boy! You’ve tested and ranked an idea! You’ve determined one of your ideas is what you want so you move on! Yay! You’ve got a success, so then you do another test, boom! You’ve got another idea that’s a winner. And you continue on this path until the best ideas from the previous list are now at the top of the list and thus a bigger priority! Now, deciding which of those ideas is the best of the best comes after you have gathered your research and have consistent results. How can we double-check or gain knowledge on our list of hypotheses? Gain more insight into the things we want to test and which can we confirm or deny? Have others tested this already and it worked for them?

Brian calls the answers to my above questions(and many others who go into CRO) Sources of Insight. These can be researched on the internet through Google, through Focus Groups who review the site and complete audits of the content, and you could outsource to a company like J.D. powers, however, all of these items should be ideas on your all-powerful list! This is your source for the hypotheses you want to address. As Brian says, these should all go on the list; some ideas involve UX, some ideas involve content development, but each of these hypotheses can be researched and ranked. Then, you can really look at the Analytics of the site, determine if a hypothesis really deserves an A/B test in the first place. Brian recommends studying that’s clients Google Analytics account, becoming familiar with the tool, and any tools, that can help increase your efficiency and reduce the number of poor ideas you implement on your site! The better you become with Analytics, the less time you will spend on bad ideas!

So once you determine the best hypotheses to test, you can now move into A/B testing! This is exciting because the A/B test can confirm or reject your hypotheses on the many ideas you’ve gathered up to this point. If you decide the A/B test is the way you want to go, make sure to increase your sample size beforehand, gather as much confidence in the hypothesis you are testing as possible, and in general, don’t be too attached to any single idea! A/B testing could crush your expectations and prove you right to the max, but it can go in the completely opposite direction and end up in a failure! However, the A/B test can be a highly effective and powerful tool in testing what is best for the site because of the amount of flexibility and how quickly you can turn around results on a test. If you have high traffic on your site, you can get results in as little as one day! The longer the test, the more results and eventually you will have an answer to that hypotheses.

Overall, my first week taught me that as you get better with CRO, I will become a better designer, marketer, and overall business person as a result of my increased knowledge on the best way to implement new ideas to the site. CRO is an excellent way to increase my sites’ performance, engagment, and to promote company growth. I am excited to continue my journey into these lessons and can’t wait to see what else is in store for me.