How was the talk "What is CRO and where to start"

The numbers

Registered for the talk: 110 people.
Assistants: 64 people.
It was performed on April 16, 2020 by streaming due to coronavirus confinement.

Important: We remind you that in the tool Slack have a channel registered to organize and to share the management of the meetup, specifically the channel we use is #wpalicante of Slack WordPress Spain. If you want to lend a hand, contribute ideas and become more active part of this community follow the instructions on the following page-> http://wp-es.es/slack/

What is CRO and where to start: The talk

In spite of the confinement by the coronavirus COVID-19, from WPAlicante we want to continue offering you interesting talks and more in these moments where we cannot leave home. So this time we can not see each other in the space of ULab where we usually meet, but streamed to Robert Arteaga Castrofrom kubikexperience.comThe company is a professional in digital marketing trained in Ecommaster and Webpositer, two of the most important schools in Alicante. In spite of having only been in the sector for a few years, he has been stepping on the right foot. He has worked as Ecommerce Manager for well-known companies in the province such as Café Jurado and ToysManiatic.

Of course, at the end of the talk we had the traditional round of questions, but unfortunately this time we had to skip the networking accompanied by refreshments for obvious reasons. The streaming was made possible thanks to our sponsors: WeglotThe WordPress Plugin to translate your website into the language of your choice. You can try it out without any obligation, as it is free to use for translating up to 2000 words into a language, and it takes up very little space on the server. We also have in this meetingup as a sponsor a very cool SEO agency from Alicante: SEO Force Agency. And as if this wasn't enough, we have two other out of series that also sponsor us: the great gamification plugin for your WordPress GamiPresswhich simplifies the whole world of gamification so that you can include it in your WordPress in a simple and cool way and Company Web a specialized WordPress hosting, among other services, with several plans available to suit your needs.

Here are some points that we found interesting, although we include them at the end of this entry The full video of the presentationThis time it was streamed and recorded to be posted on Youtube. We also link you to the post of this presentation that Robert has included in his kubikexperience page and which contains all the information as well as downloads to interesting resources, as well as the presentation he used to develop the talk on CRO.

Fundamentals: What is a CRO?

CRO is a technique to create a satisfactory experience for the visitor, either from a website or an app, and end up turning him into a customer, and therefore a sale. In other words, CRO is completely focused on conversion, on sale.

It is the acronym for Conversion Ratio Optimization, which would correspond to the optimization of the conversion rate and to understand us could be explained as:

Conversion (Conversion): This is any action that the user performs on the website that we propose as a goal of success: customer registration, download, sale, invite a friend, write in the chat ...
Ratio/Metric (Rate): The way we are going to measure this conversion: conversion rate, average cart amount, recurrence of purchase, cost savings
Optimization (Optimization): The conclusions we get from our metrics can help us improve different aspects of our website: the home page, product listings, checkout, forms, blog... It can also give us clues to optimize email marketing and our management of social networks.

Why apply CRO

One of the main reasons for the application of this methodology is when our sales (or compliance with objectives) reach their ceiling and no matter how many actions we take to improve it both in traffic control and advertising campaigns, for example, we do not achieve it.

The CRO is not smoke, it is a real and proven methodology that works and you can really achieve increased revenue in a short time and with a safe investment that is less than what we are currently spending on other techniques to increase web traffic.

CRO methodology

The phases that we have to follow within the CRO methodology are

AnalysisIt can be both quantitative as qualitative. We will now see how to carry it out efficiently to achieve our purpose.
HypothesisWith what we have analyzed in the previous phase, now We propose all the improvements we can think of and above all the we prioritize according to what we think will work best in the business.
TestThe following is a summary of the main assumptions made by the are tested to see if we actually get the expected result from them.
ResultsAt this stage We analyzed with detail and criteria the results of the tests carried out in the previous phase to make the decisions we deem necessary.

Let us now look at the detail of each of these phases.

Analysis

As we have already mentioned, there are two different types of web analysis that we want to improve:

QuantitativeFor quantitative analysis, tools such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics or Yandex Metric. We will focus on the first one because it is the tool we all use and it is free. The important thing in Google Analytics is to have it well configured. To do this, you have to follow the options that Alberto has left you in his post, where there is a checklist that you can download for free, and that will help you know if you have the minimum necessary options well configured.
QualitativeFor qualitative analysis we also have several interesting tools such as hotjarIt also shows a scroll and click map, that is, how far the user goes on our page when scrolling is required or how many clicks he makes on each of the links available on each page.

Hypothesis

With everything we have analyzed in the previous phase, we created a List with all the changes we have detected as possible improvements, actions or errors in our website and we give priority.

We can score them using a model, for example, with three columns that we will value from 1 to 5, being 5 the best score:

PotentialThe more change brings us closer to our goal, the greater it will be.
ImportanceThe person who is conducting the analysis is more subjective.
FacilityThe more simple we consider the implementation of the proposed change, the greater it will be.

In addition to these columns, we will add a fourth resultThe first is the value of the "C", which contains the sum of the three previous values. This result is ordered as follows descending to know what developments we are interested in addressing first. In case of a tie, a fifth column of playoffwhere the values of the Let's multiplyinstead of adding them up.

Finally, we added a column of Experiment YES/NO, where we indicate which of the hypotheses we consider necessary to test. The ones we mark as YES here can be included in a new Excel file containing the . Thanks to this Excel we will be able to keep track of each of the hypotheses, which tests we have performed in the next phase, results obtained...

Test

These are the tests that we are going to carry out on the hypotheses that we had raised in the previous phase. There are several types of possible tests to check the level of success of the proposed changes:

A/BThe following is an example of a change that we want to make to a page and we do not know which one to choose. In this case, the URL will be the same in both cases because the change is minor. In this type of test we can mark the percentage of users we show the possibility A and how many the possibility B.
Split Test RedirectionSimilar to the previous case but for significant changes, which implies having two different URLs, one to keep the original and another to include all the changes made to the page design.
MultivariateSimilar to the previous one, but you can play with several combinations. Therefore, they are usually more subtle changes, but as they are made up of several elements, the casuistry we want to validate is multiplied.
MultipageTo test funnels complete.

Testing ToolsThe ideal is to start with Google OptimizeIt is the free one, and it has easy integration with Google Analytics among others. It allows you to perform up to 5 experiments at once and is very visual. For more exhaustive tests, we have paid tools, such as Optimizely Or ABTasty. In the video you have more details about how to work with Google Optimize.

Results

Once the corresponding tests have been carried out, the results must be analysed. These can be positive, negative or neutral. In the first two cases, it can be considered a success story, since we are dealing with a hypothesis to decide whether it is interesting or not. The worst that can happen is that the result is neutral, since somehow we will have been wasting time with the test without conclusive results.

Google Optimize gives not only a result value but also some other metrics that can help us make decisions. It's a good idea to leave the test running for several days because it's easy to slow down at first and we may make a wrong decision based on altered results. In a few days the results usually stabilize and it is time to make decisions.

Other applications of the CRO method

Email marketingTest: You can do a test to see in two variants, how many users actually open the sent email. For example, you can include in the title of the email emojis or not, depending on the subject.
FacebookTo choose the highest click rate in a campaign, you can launch three buttons that lead to the campaign with three different images and then analyze which of the images has had the highest conversion.

To continue learning CRO

If the subject has interested you enough to go deeper into it, you can continue for:

Follow the great Sergio Simarro in his magnifiCRO newsletter. In this newsletter, every month he shows us new things and teaches us interesting tips.
Review the conversion studies that have been made by the agency Estudio Flat101. This agency from Madrid, led by Ricardo Tayar, carried out an in-depth study last year on the conversion to Spanish digital businesses, a subject on which they have great experience. In addition, you can compare your metrics with those of the study, either manually if you download it or through a free tool that they offer that performs the comparison automatically.
Get more information through the blog Kubik Experience about CRO in Spanish that Robert has created and where he will also be uploading interesting information and tips on the subject.

Final networking questions and issues

QUESTIONDo you know or have you used Connectif? If so, what do you think of this platform?

RESPONSEI do know her and she is highly recommended. When I used it, they gave us all sorts of facilities, made the integration very quickly and were very experienced in customizing funnels and automate them. One of the best things I saw at that time thanks to them was the management of the abandoned carts.

QUESTIONWhat skills do you think a person who wants to be a CRO should develop?

RESPONSEThe first thing is to play a lot with Google Analytics to understand it well and get as much as possible out of it. The goal is to be able to make an analysis as exhaustive as possible. Then it's a matter of learning regular expressions and putting tags in the code.

QUESTIONWhat level of programming knowledge should a CRO have?

RESPONSEWith a little regular expression you can start. There is a tool called Google tag Manager to start measuring. There are many tutorials about it. Then it's a matter of starting with some html to get some more out of it.

QUESTIONHow does a freelance CRO work and get paid? On objectives? Price/hour? Per project?

RESPONSEThe project must be analyzed and depending on the objectives of the project, it is possible to negotiate something more short-term with price/hour or charge it by project.

Glossary

Yandex MetricWeb Analytics: It is the web analytics service of the main Russian search engine. You can find it in English and it is free. Moreover, it seems to include some service that in other tools is paid and can be used simultaneously with Google Analytics. There are also a couple of WordPress plugins both to include the tracking code on the web and to add the statistics it extracts to the WordPress panel itself. Here's a link to more information about Yandex Metric in case you're curious.
FunnelAlso called conversion funnelThe term Online Marketing is a term that brings together all the steps that the user has to take to achieve a marketing objective that we have defined for our website, such as a sale, registration (so the last step must always be conversion) ... as well as determining the percentage of conversion loss that occurs after each step. The objective of this information is to achieve the conversion of as many users as possible.