Three weeks ago I got accepted to CXL institutes’ conversion optimisation mini-degree scholarship. It claims to be one of the most thorough conversion rate optimisation training programs in the world. As part of the scholarship, I have to write an essay about what I learn each week. This is my third report so far.

In my experience, the majority of people who have analytics set up use it to see how much traffic their website is getting. This is a shame because, with a little bit of effort, it can tell you so much more useful information. Over the next 10 minutes I’ll show you how to understand where your traffic is coming from, and what your conversion rate for each source of traffic is.

How Google Analytics Buckets Your Traffic

To make sense of your analytics you must understand that there are 9 default types of traffic.

I prefer to think of these as five main groups:

1. Organic -...

Two weeks ago I got accepted to CXL institutes’ conversion optimisation mini-degree scholarship. It claims to be one of the most thorough conversion rate optimisation training programs in the world. The program runs online and covers 74 hours and 37h minutes of content over 12 weeks. As part of the scholarship, I have to write an essay about what I learn each week. This the second week’s report.

AB testing is interesting because it promises objectivity. You run a test, one variation performs better, there is a winner and a loser, people’s opinions no longer matter, life is simple.

But then there is the AA test.

To set up an AA test you run a regular test but with the exact same website in both conditions. AA tests are painful because they force you to acknowledge just how random and meaningless AB test results can be.

To distinguish a result from chance, it needs to be statistically...

Last week I got accepted to CXL institutes’ conversion optimisation mini-degree scholarship. It claims to be one of the most thorough conversion rate optimisation training programs in the world. The program runs online and covers 74 hours and 37h minutes of content over 12 weeks. As part of the scholarship, I have to write an essay about what I learn each week. This is my first report.

A conversion rate is just a measurement of how many people in a group do something. If 1000 people visit your website and 20 of them signed up to your mailing list then your conversion rate is 2% (20/1000 X 100).

Improving conversion means changing your website so that more people sign up next month.

Lots of people think that conversion optimisation comes down to good design. Design is important, but I’ve learned that your message is much more pivotal.

A company called Unbounce analysed 40,000 landing...

VWO has a landing page analyser that asks you a bunch of yes/no questions and then tells you what to focus on to improve the conversion rate of your landing page. It’s fantastic, please check it out (link in the footer).

I am not 100% with some of the suggestions though. VWO doesn’t follow all of their suggestions on their own site. So I used their questionnaire as a starting point to come up with the 20 questions I currently use to audit a landing page. I don’t have any empirical data to back these up (I intend to gather it over the next few months). The whole point is to test these for yourself.

What do you do?

• Could a child understand what your product does, based on your headline?
• Does your headline clarify who your product is for?
• Does you byline explain how your product does what it claims to do in ten words or less?
• Does your landing page contain a screenshot, demo or sample...

You know your product’s landing page and sales funnel are not performing as well as they could — but you don’t know how to fix them.

Plenty of designers & copywriters out there offer website tear-downs, reviews, and audits, but at the end of the day, you’re paying for someone’s opinion of your website.

I don’t assume I know what will work. Instead, I combine vigorous research with industry best practices to come up with changes I am most confident will have the largest impact with the least difficulty. Then I AB test my suggestions for you and find out which changes actually have the most impact on your conversion rate.

How I Can Help Your Business

My job is to help small SaaS businesses like yours diagnose and optimise their sales funnels so that they convert more of their visitors into paying customers.

To help your website reach its full potential, I will:

• Diagnose your...

A landing page helps people understand what your product does and why someone should care about it. People of the internet have been building landing pages for a while now and have established a pattern that works. Don’t deviate from this pattern unless you have a good reason. Save the fancy stuff for the rest of your marketing efforts.

A Helpful Headline

Imagine a five-year-old finds your product and asks you what it is. Your response should help the child understand what your product does and who it’s for. Prioritize clarity and brevity.

People don’t read much online. Typically, they just want information quickly. They look at stuff that is either new, unusual or helpful. New gets old. Unusual can be good if it works. Helpful is a solid bet. Use your headline to tell people how your product helps them.

Defining who your product is for in your headline is also a good way to...

When people talk about conversion rates all they are asking is how many people in a group did something. How many people signed up to your mailing list last month? If 1000 people visited your website and 20 of them sign up then the conversion rate for your mailing list is 2% (20/1000 X 100).

Conversion rate optimisation is about changing aspects of your website so that more than 20 people to sign up next month.

Paying too much attention to conversion rates can spell trouble because they are an easy metric to game. You could run a massive sale or promote fake reviews and your conversion rates might go up. The long term, sustainable growth of your business would not improve.

Why Is Conversion Important?

If you look at the larger picture, conversion rate optimisation is about understanding what people want so that you can give it to them. This means understanding what your customers...

Showing up to a new project with a bunch of ideas on how to improve things is a strong indicator that someone doesn’t know what they are doing. Comparable to a doctor performing surgery before asking what the problem is.

Improving conversion starts as a diagnostic process.

Diagnostic information typically comes from three places:

• Analytics
• User Testing
• Interviews

Analytics can include all the data you get from Google Analytics or a similar platform. How long people are spending on your site, goal completion rates, where they are dropping off, that kind of stuff. Then there is the more functional aspect to analytical data, like page speed problems, bugs associated with different browsers, server downtime, etc. Broadly speaking, analytical data is about observing what people do in aggregate.

Then there’s user testing. User testing is about observing what individual people do. This...

A landing page helps people understand what your product does and why someone should care about it. People of the internet have been building landing pages for a while now and they have established a pattern that works. Don’t deviate from this pattern unless you have a good reason to. Save the fancy stuff for the rest of your marketing efforts.

Strong headline

Imagine a five-year-old finds your product and asks you what it is. Based on your response the child should understand what your product does and who it does it for. Prioritize clarity and brevity.

Supporting byline

Now that the child understands what it does, explain how it does it in ten words or less.

Core benefit

Imagine the five-year-old challenges you and asks you why someone would need your product. Explain the biggest problem your product solves for them.

Top features

The five-year-old is somewhat convinced, but...

About two weeks ago, I came up with an idea for a remote accountability group. You get on a video call once a week and a group of strangers help each other set professional goals and stick to them. I posted the idea on Reddit with a link to a google form and 50 people signed up in the first week. That was a slightly better response than I was expecting.

There was no mention of paying for anything, so its not an indication of a viable business. But there was a response to the idea, which is a good start, it indicates that people who work for themselves do want help with accountability from a community.

So the next step was to build it.

There was a similar group that started on Indie Hackers. I joined that to support the idea and to see if we could join forces. We had our first call and it went really well.

Then Sumukh, my partner, set up Doodle to figure out scheduling for everyone...