CXL Scholarship — 7th Week Review

This was a big week for me. I spent several hours learning the CXL course materials and a big chunk of it was seriously joyful. We hag Chris Mercer Again here and other theoretical stuff was present as well. Let’s dig in.

14- Google Tag Manager for beginners with Chris Mercer — Continued

• In the beginning of this week, I learned how to install tracking codes of 3rd party websites on my site using GTM. this is really fun stuff because you don’t need to manually install tracking codes. You simply provide GTM with needed information and it automatically installs them for you. Isn’t this great?
• Some websites have predefined tags in GTM and you just need to enter a number in the related field. But some others like Facebook don’t have anything readily available and you need to install its code using custom HTML tags. It is scary in the beginning, but once you install one, you understand how easy it is. Do freak out! Just test!
• This was a hell of a lesson. I learned about how to set up click triggers and timer triggers and connect them to tags. The result was so fascinating because I could see the outcome in GA live!
• Google Tag Manager can use multiple variables and combine them to give you full control over what you want to measure. Using dedicated triggers and assigning them to tags is something that once you learn to use, you can’t neglect.
• This tool gives you the power of understanding what your users are doing on your site. I don’t mean just understanding what pages they are visiting, but I mean what actions they are taking and what items they are interacting with.
• I’m really enjoying this course. Just learned about scrolling triggers. They should be first enabled in the variables and then can be used.
• Scroll trigger variables measure the depth, unit, and axis of scrolling. But you only need to know the first two of them.
• Using scrolling measurement, we can simply understand how much our users are engaging with our pages and our site content. How cool is this?
• Scrolling can be measured vertically and horizontally, based on percentage or pixels. I think almost everyone decides to use vertical scrolling based on percentage.
• Chris is really adept at GA and GTM and I think is the best person to learn these tools from. He can bridge between great tools and show you what you can do to become a pro in them
• It is really fun to see how your scrolling can be stored and measured right in google analytics and in the future, your users will be measured too. I think it would be a better option to only use it for important landing pages and marketing-related stuff. Overusing it might result in frustration and make things worse!
• I liked the scroll depth trigger.
• The next topic is also about tracking engagement using GTM and this time, tracking video. It is kind of a good thing to know because you might be in a situation that your boss wants to do that.
• It has a limitation though. You are limited to tracking youtube videos and other video providers aren’t supported by default. I don’t know if you can add them using custom methods or not.
• The next lesson is even scarier. It is about dataLayer!
• Wow! I thought it to be intimidating, but dataLayer wasn’t intimidating at all. As a matter of fact, it was very easy and joyful. And of course, this was because Chris Mercer had taken the wheel!
• I am thankful for the recent course that I took with Codecademy and learned a little bit about JavaScript. It helped me understand what is going on here.
• Writing a few lines of code did real magic in the custom HTML tag. I didn’t believe it to be that strong and change something as scary as a dataLayer in a snap!
• Chris uses GTM masterfully and you really enjoy watching him do these tricks. He believes in the theory of “less is more” and he forces you to learn to do more with less! I like this mindset.
• I have learned about how to push something to the dataLayer, but I don’t know how I can use it in practice. Hope there’s more to come.
• This is too much information for me to digest! I don’t think I can bear this much in a single day! But after using a custom HTML tag to push to dataLayer, I learned how to extract that data.

• Using a data layer variable or simply known as a DLV, I extracted the exact thing that was pushed to the dataLayer. After that, using a custom trigger I told a tag to inform GA about the changes. This is madness. This is pure madness. Chris is a wizard or a devil incarnated to better describe him!
• I need some sleep right now. This is at the midnight and everything is silent like hell. I’m going to come back tomorrow with a fresh mind.
• We have arrived at the Ecommerce part. This is actually the fun part of the GTM and it is very important because you are dealing with reporting the revenue.
• This time again, we have to deal with the dataLayer, because Ecommerce deals with the dataLayer only. We have to push our Ecommerce details to the dataLayer and then, send that data to GA.
• Chris Mercer did this job fantastically. Using custom variables, custom events, custom HTML tag, and the Ecommerce part of the universal GA tag, he did wizardry. I really enjoyed his job and want to be his intern.
• I feel it is taking too much time for me to keep up with this great course, but it’s definitely worth it.
• The next part was about cross-domain tracking. It is not something everybody would need, because you have to use different products at the same time and the user must be redirected to different domains to do a job. But it was very good to know how it actually works. It was fairly simple.
• Tag sequencing was another part of the course. It was very short and also important. Using tag sequencing, you can set the order of tag being fired. You know, I get that it is important. But I don’t know where it is good to use this feature.
• And formatting variables were good to know, too. You can change the value of variables using formatting. You can change the lowercase letters to uppercase and vice versa. If any variable is undefined, true, or false, you can assign values to them. How cool is this?
• And everything came to its end in this course. But Chris suddenly drew something out of his sleeves and talked about measuring leads using GTM. it was good to know how to track leads, but it wasn’t that comprehensive. I feel the tutor just wanted to point out that this thing too can be done using GTM.
• Anyway, this is it. I’m getting prepared to take the final exam. Wish me luck again.
• You know what? It was very easy to pass the test. Just 10 simple questions and that’s it!

15- User Research by Megan Kirsted

• Shoe started the course by talking about what is user research and why is it important. It was a bit boring. She was mainly trying to justify her own job and prove its importance.
• It was good to know why user research is important. But I didn’t really understand what is the difference between regular persona and marketing buyer persona. What is the difference between user testing and interviews and surveys? I’m looking forward to hearing more about these topics in the remainder of this course.

• She talked about knowing your goals of running user research. She said that you have to answer the five Ws and how about your goals.
• This course is a bit vague. Although I understand what the tutor is talking about, I can’t summarize what she said and why she said that. Isn’t that odd?
• She also talked about the behavioral and attitudinal goals. You should always ask why we should run this test.
• One great point: whatever questions you ask from your customers or prospects, it needs to be in direct relation to your business objective.
• What people tell you and what they really do doesn’t necessarily match. You have to put them in context and make them meaningful.
• Running surveys and conducting interviews are kinda supplementary to each other. They are supposed to give you qualitative data, But I think they can be used as a source for quantitative results as well.
• The tutor says they you’d better ask a lot of whys during the interview sessions. This leads you to know the users’ pains, motivations, and beliefs which is great.
• When it comes to conducting interviews, you’d better ask your users open-ended questions. Using scripted questions and answers won’t give you that much the information you desire.
• The best tests are the ones that combine qualitative and quantitative measures.
• Interviews and user testing can be moderated or unmoderated. Each of these methods has its pros and cons. If you want to run unmoderated tests, you need a tool to record the users’ faces and their actions.
• In asking your questions from users, try no to direct their attention and minds towards specific things. Try to be as neutral as you can. They have to have the option to tell you exactly what is on their minds.
• If you want to run quantitative research, you will need a big sample size to avoid errors. But in qualitative research, a small group of people will suffice.
• When you want to conduct a research program, try to choose people who are related to the problem you want to solve. For example, if you want to solve a low-converting shopping cart, don’t use the already paying customers. But instead, go find the people who haven’t yet bought from you.
• If the tests are long and time-consuming, you have to compensate users for their time. This will give them enough motivation to continue the test willingly.
• In a user testing scenario, 5 users can uncover almost 85 percent of the issues. Each user might uncover almost 30 percent of the issues. I don’t know how correct are these numbers, but they have been declared in the course.
• Megan talked about something called the synthesis framework. In this framework, the goal is to find patterns in the data and kinda make the data into insights. You can also look at this method as a form of categorizing data so you can better use them.
• The final lesson in this course was mainly about building personas. In the persona, pain points and success measures are contemplated and you can understand who they generally are.
• Persona isn’t necessarily exactly what you see in every one of the people in that persona. It is an imaginary character that is only designed to give you a better understanding.

16- Fast and Rigorous User Personas by Stefania Mereu & Eric Taylor

• They say that user personas should not necessarily be time-consuming. These personas need to be relevant and actionable.
• When you are trying to build buyer persians, you have to stay away from using stereotypes.
• They say building a persona could be managed in three simple steps: collecting data, categorizing data into groups and coming up with archetypes.
• A great point: your personas are only as good as your data. Feed the machine with good data and it will give you a good product.
• Quantitative data needs to be based on surveys. Surveys must follow these three rules: they should be relevant, have actionable questions and not direct the user toward any specific direction.
• If you are using grid questions on your survey, you have to customize the beginning and ending labels so that your users can simply understand exactly what you mean.
• Stefania says she prefers using a tool named Qualtrics which I don’t know personally. But she says it gives her the freedom to ask any type of questions. It isn’t free, but Google Forms is!
• Before sending out a survey to the masses, you’d better first send it to a small sample group to find what can be improved.

• You need to simplify the data you have collected. One method is EFA (exploratory factor analysis). You can extract the key issues that these questions and their answers are addressing.
• All of your questions can be categorized in three to four factors. Think about how you can summarize questions into more general factors and then look at how the respondent values each one.
• After the previous step, you need to look for patterns between different user responses. This is called clustering. Like minded people can easily be merged with each other and be looked at like one.
• Using tools you can understand what are the main groups of like-minded people.
• After that, using qualitative and quantitative data you can add extra details to the main groups (aka personas) and represent them visually.
• In creating a persona, you need to visualize qualitative data. One great way to do this is using word clouds. They will show you how often people say a specific word and you can understand their importance this way.
• Visualizing user journeys is another great example. What stages users go through in order to make a purchase? Document this in a beautiful chart.
• Personas usually last for a certain amount of time. But as markets change or your product changes, you have to revise these personas that you have developed.
• And this is the end of this course. Although I think it was valuable, I think you can trust this method and put your destiny in its hands.

17- Heuristic Analysis frameworks for conversion optimization audits by Andre Morys

• This is another lesson about heuristic analysis and I still don’t know what heuristic actually means.
• Andre says that we need to answer the why. We need to know why users are acting the way they are acting, so quantitative data doesn’t give us everything we need.
• And merely relying on traditional qualitative data isn’t enough as well. He says heuristic analysis gives us valid data that doesn’t demand for very big effort and answers our questions rather completely.
• He then talked about a model he has personally developed named as 7 Levels of Conversion. He seems to be teaching in this course based on this model.

• The first item on Andre’s framework is relevance. It says there should be coherency and consistency between the ad and the landing page. It basically starts from the time your user starts to search for a keyword on google and finds results.
• Put yourself in your users’ shoes. Ask yourself this question: is this message relevant? Are the images I have used relevant to the message I want to convey?
• Trust is the second item. People usually select the thing that other ones have picked before. When it comes to websites, visual design and graphics play big roles in getting people’s trust. Using testimonials and authority rules may help you achieve what you desire.
• Orientation is another determining factor. People need to know where to click or what to choose. You have to implicitly direct their attention toward the items you want them to choose. Do you pay attention to pricing tables? Almost always one of the items is bolder and more eye-catching than the others. There is a rule behind that!
• Andre talked about stimulating users to buy your products. He said you have to propose a value prop and make it relevant and clear to the audience.
• Your users have to understand that your products have some explicit values and also implicit ones. Explicit values are your main characteristics. But implicit values are kinda the story you tell and make an impact on your customers. They are basically defenseless in confronting good stories.
• Using basic compliance rules is also notable here. If you want to get a yes as an answer, use emergency and scarcity rules. If the customer really thinks that the offer will be gone in case of not taking an action, he/she won’t remain still!
• He also talked about something called Rubicon that I didn’t understand very well.
• Now is the time for your users to ask this big question: is it safe here? Is it secure enough? And you have to be able to answer their questions.
• Users have a set of questions in their mind and you need to be prepared to answer their questions. Anticipate what they want to ask and answer them in advance.
• Andre told a great thing in this lesson: there is an anticipation of convenience and real convenience. These two things are quite different. You need to give the users a feeling of anticipated convenience. Meaning no matter how hard (or easy) it is, it seems to be convenient enough to complete.
• The final stage of this framework talks about confirmation. It is the stage that the purchase has happened and the customer feels he/she has lost the money in the bank account.
• You as a dealer have to give the customer confirmation that the deal was good enough for taking action. In this stage, praising the customer’s action will go a long way and gives the customer a good feeling.
• You will most certainly need to benchmark the competition. But try not to be subjective and don’t tell your boss that you think the website is crap. Instead, try to be as objective as possible and tell them you have analyzed the competition. Show them a report and talk to them based on numbers.

Wrap up

And here we are. I am looking at what I have written and it counts to three thousands words! It seems like a big article, isn’t it? At the end of the next lesson, I’m going to finish the second chapter of the course. Now, I have passed 53% of the course’s materials and good parts are yet to come.

See you soon, again.