Hello Optimization
I have spent more time thinking about how to communicate what I intend to write about the journey so far. I’ll call this series of posts: The Conversion Journey — Convert or Die! (Not literally). I’ll make one post each week covering the Conversion XL Institute 12-week course on Conversion Optimization.
This first post will not cover much content as I jumped on the bandwagon a little late with difficulties accessing my study portal. Either way, I will give my thoughts and motivation for taking up the course and how I hope it will shape my journey.
Having gone through only 3% of the content, and still in the introductory period of the course, I reckon it takes time to unwrap all this and not be intimidated by the big words. I admit I have had trouble keeping up to speed with all the new stuff. I have however tried to get better at it as the course grows in complexity.
So here is why I am writing these posts: I recently won a scholarship this past week from CXL Institute to take a minidegree certification in Conversion Optimization. My end of the bargain will be to make weekly updates through a blog post detailing my journey learning CRO. In the same breath, I am really grateful to CXL founder, Peep Laja, and his team for this golden opportunity to dip my feet into conversion optimization.
Takeaways from Week 1:
You don’t know anything!
One week into the course and I realized that we often don’t know something, at least not as well as we think we do. Going into the first lesson, and having had some exposure writing copy on e-commerce conversion optimization for a DC-based startup, I approached most of the content with a degree of disdain. I thought I knew quite a lot about CRO but I could not be more wrong!
Onto CXL Institute, I have had a totally blowing experience gaining infinite wisdom from CXL’s breed of experts in the field and have also been schooled continually by the handbook of Best Practices. I had never considered the intricacies that surround creating refreshing websites nor formulating and ranking hypotheses for testing. This coupled the concept of split testing (which I must confess was the part I looked forward to) was humbling to say the least. I learnt that I needed to approach each topic on a blank slate, while not taking what I already knew for granted.
Test, Test, Test…
The first week reinforced my thinking that A/B Testing is probably one of the most important elements of Conversion Rate Optimization. It is mostly considered the tipping technology to achieve conversions on websites.
Exploring a multitude of methods you can test for identified metrics can influence the level of success achievable in finding the perfect combinations to drive up opt-ins, subscriptions, and sales.
While successful testing is key to optimizing websites, learning to decipher which version of a creative delivers the most leads, subscriptions, and sales can be troubling if you let your bias to munge the data. And the experts mention that most of the tests won’t work (facepalm)!
On to the Next One
As I look over the first week, I hope to gather steam to cover greater content in the coming week and set aside some time for practice. I realize I also have a lot to chew concerning the prerequisite skills in Analytics (which I am not well conversant with). I look forward to experimenting with data and also some user intelligence tools to shape and come up with testable data.