CXL Scholarship — 6th Week Review

This week of my CXL scholarship was good and bad at the same time. I went through the exciting and boring stuff and because I don’t have this habit of skipping over items, I watched them all. But it all ended with good things. Because you know what? My lovely google tag manager course got started. Let’s go see what happened this week.

11- Landing Page Optimization by Michael Aagaard — Continued

• One simple piece of advice: the more your customers are aware of the product, the less you need to elaborate on the copy.
• One thing that Michael says repeatedly is that there should be a logical connection between the ad and the source. The users who are coming to your website after clicking on the ad must see a page that continues on the promises of the ad and be visually similar to that.
• He talked about different parts of the copy that needs your attention, title being the most important one.
• Michael gave 3 main formulas for writing better copies for titles, but I don’t like any formulas when it comes to titles.
• One great thing that was mentioned is that you should know what your users are expecting. If they want to know something, you should’ve prepared something that meets their needs. This gives your users a sense of respect.
• It is great to know about the elements of a landing page. But after knowing that, you have to know where to use them, and at what frequency they should be used.
• One of the best things I learned about in this course and maybe in the whole program is Visual Hierarchy. If you pay enough attention to the size of elements, space between them, their colors, and fonts, you can effectively guide the visitors’ attention to specific items. This is a priceless fact to know and I’m thankful for knowing that.
• I have to say that it is not a bad practice to design a landing page first and then try to populate its lorem ipsum texts with persuasive copy. You shouldn’t do that under any circumstances. Not at all!
• Forms are as important as the rest of the landing page. Users must know what the purpose of the form is and what happens after filling it out. You should manage their expectations by giving them enough information.
• If you have a responsive website (which you should), you have to take care of the forms and check if they show properly on different devices.
• I just did the final exam and got an 89% score. I think it has been written somewhere that I always fail at the first attempt!

12- Conversion Research by Peep Laja

• We have Peep here again. He talked about a framework that he has developed named the Research XL (RXL). I think that this framework isn’t anything new and in this course, I’ve encountered them countless times. It is kind of boring to hear about them again.
• Use your site as your users do. Make sure that every device (mobile, desktop, tablet) and every browser sees the site exactly the way intended.
• I read a long article titled “heuristic analysis” and I don’t know what was wrong about it that I haven’t learned anything new! What was this, Peep?
• I learned something awesome. I didn’t know the difference between user testing and usability tests so far. But now I know that usability is something that users are unaware of being tested. Did I say it wrong? Anyways, there are major differences between these two. One is implemented using an artificial setup and the other one is very genuine.
• When we are conducting a survey, we shouldn’t mix behavior questions with attitude questions. For example, if we are asking them for their opinion about our product, we shouldn’t continue by asking which product they prefer. Something like this.
• When you are running surveys, you need to differentiate your existing customers from non-customers. These two groups don’t share common grounds and should be treated differently.

• One new thing that I heard from Rob Balon here was something called “Reading the room”. In this bias, you tend to give your clients what you think they want to hear from you. Actually, you are not helping them this way.
• Another great thing: tell your survey audiences that you are running this and what might come to their minds. Rob says you have to debrief your audience.
• Peep is talking about sending out surveys. These surveys are sent to previous customers. They have already bought something from you and know how you operate as a business.
• Peep says that you should never use predefined answers. Because it says that you know what you want. But you know that you don’t know about them.
• Use open-ended questions and let the users speak themselves. You can use these answers for various purposes and get actionable insights out of them.
• If you want to look at the survey results, you can use word clouds. Never think about only using them. You need to personally assess what people have said.
• Never ask about why, because everybody tries to rationalize their decisions. This was shocking for me to hear the first sentence because everybody says that whats aren’t important but the whys are. It seems that you have to seek the answers to these questions elsewhere.
• When you want to ask non-customers about what is holding them back from buying, you can use exit surveys and exit polls. It would be a better option to first ask them a yes/no question and then, ask them the main question. This is based on the consistency and commitment rule (Cialdini).
• If you are using live chat, you’d better record all the transcripts. This will give you insights on what is holding people back and what problems they encounter during the process.
• I actually like the law of diminishing returns. After a certain number of test, you won’t earn any useful data.

• Click maps (aka heat maps) and scroll maps are very useful when it comes to measuring usability issues. These maps give you invaluable qualitative data and you can use them to get to your answers.
• Peep talked about funnels and goals in google analytics. He also gave a checklist that was absolutely boring stuff.
• If your returning visitors convert better than new users, it means that your messaging lacks clarity and can’t persuade new users to buy.
• A bunch of boring reports are being talked about. I really don’t know why.
• Peep said in a short video that a recent Unbounce study showed the importance of copy over design. A copy has a bigger role in convincing people to act, but it is very hard to measure its effectiveness.

• Copy needs to be clear and valuable. People need to understand what you are offering and understand the value you are trying to convey. This is what Peep called Copytesting.
• I just learned about a website named copytesting.com. This website offers a great service that is unique to its kind. You upload a screenshot of your website and ask users to comment on different parts of it.
• Copytesting users can give you ratings based on clarity and care. You can understand what is going on in their minds. This is something that you can not get by using A/B testing. You can understand the Whys by running a copytesting experiment.

13- Using analytics to find conversion opportunities by Jeff Sauer

• This seems to be another google analytics course, but this time with Jeff Sauer. I have been acquainted with him before, on his site, and youtube channel. He has a lot to say about GA, but I don’t understand why we should hear about the things that have already been talked about (I mean the Chris Mercer course).
• Well, congratulations Jeff Sauer! You officially taught me nothing new and I’m sad about it.
• I didn’t find anything worth mentioning, so I wrote nothing.
• But I’m excited because the next course is about tag manager and the lively Chris Mercer is in charge. So let’s go check that out.

14- Google Tag Manager for beginners

• I’m very excited about this course. The lovely Chris starts the course by talking about the differences between google analytics and google tag manager. He had previously talked about this in the GA course, but it is totally ok to hear them again.
• He talks fast and energetically. But it kind of gives you the feeling that you are hearing something important and it is great.
• I now know that GTM tags are about what we want to know. By tags, we tell google tag manager what we want to measure.
• Triggers are the fun part of the GTM. They tell the tool when to fire tags. Triggers are categorized into 4 different types: page load, click, engagement, and custom.
• Now, let’s talk about variables. Variables are things that both tags and triggers use to their job. Each variable will be compared with a specific value and helps triggers to fire this way. But I don’t know for the moment how they help tags directly.
• I remember the time that I was learning a bit of Javascript and I got introduced to the key-value pair concept. Back then, I did know there is something called dataLayer. But I didn’t know what it was. Now I know that it is something like a virtual, temporary file cabinet to store key-value pairs. But what happens when techies say something got pushed to the dataLayer?

• I got my answer. Google’s documentation page for dataLayer says a lot of good things about this matter.
• The next topic is about organizing your GTM account. This is really what I want to thank Chris for. It is a great way of organizing tags, triggers and variables using naming conventions.
• Chris here repeats another sentence which is absolutely important. He says in GTM, less is more. I have previously heard it from the mighty Steve Jobs and admire it. The thing is if you can do something with less, stick to it.
• The RegEx is a thing here too. You have to know about it whether you like it or not. It is there to be used and if you resist using it, you’re harming yourself.
• I already knew about the preview mode in GTM, but hearing Chris talking about it kinda consolidated my understanding. He pointed out some useful tips about how to minimize it, refreshing the preview mode and other things. I am satisfied so far.
• Now, let’s talk about workspaces in GTM. workspaces are virtual spaces that you can assign to your team members in order to stay away from clutter. They finally go away after the changes are published and gone live.
• I love this idea of versioning. It has been implemented in all of google products and is very good for staying organized. Using versions in GTM, we can manage to see which version has what changes. if they shouldn’t be in place, we can simply roll back those changes to the previous working one. This is great.
• He just taught me something I was looking for: how to use GTM instead of GA for tracing my website hits. Migrating from GA’s own tracking code to GTM’s method is scary and exciting at the same time. But according to Chris Mercer, you have to trust but verify everything.

Wrap up

And this was everything I learned in the 6th week of the program. I am now halfway through the course and there are a lot to come. I wished that every course was something like GA and GTM. but it can’t be done. We need to know about qualitative stuff, too.

That’s it. Goodbye for now. See you soon in the next week.