The popular website optimization tool, Google Optimize, is set to be discontinued in September 2023. This announcement has shocked the digital marketing community. Many businesses rely on it to perform their optimization experiments to boost online conversions and improve overall user experience.

If you are currently using Google Optimize, you might be wondering what alternatives are available to you. In this blog post, we explore some of the available options to help you make an informed decision about your next steps.

While this move might seem objectionable, it’s important to note that Google has promised to support Optimize until the end of its lifecycle. This means that you can continue to use the tool until September 2023. But, as we all know, time flies. Migrating data and training team members on a new tool take time, so the sooner you transition the better.

What are some of the Alternatives to Google Optimize?

There are many optimization and personalization tools available in the market. We are not going to list all of them; that would make this article unreadable. However, we want to highlight some tools that our team members at Making Science are using or have used to help our clients’ conversion rate optimization (CRO) efforts.

Visual Website Optimizer (VWO)

VWO is a website optimization tool that allows you to create and run experiments on your website to improve its performance. This tool also provides heatmaps and session recordings to help you understand user behavior on your site.

One of the biggest advantages of VWO is its user-friendly interface and easy-to-use What You See Is What You Get editor. It’s easy to use while still providing advanced tools for developers that do have coding knowledge. Additionally, VWO offers a wide range of integrations with other tools, such as Google Analytics and Salesforce.

Optimizely

Optimizely is another popular website optimization tool that allows you to create and run experiments on your website. With Optimizely, you can run A/B tests, multivariate tests, and personalization campaigns to improve your website’s performance. It also provides advanced targeting capabilities, allowing you to target specific user segments with your experiments.

One of the key benefits of Optimizely is its powerful reporting capabilities. The tool provides real-time reports and insights, allowing you to quickly make data-driven decisions about your website optimization strategy. Additionally, Optimizely offers a wide range of integrations with other tools, such as Google Analytics and Salesforce.

Monetate

Monetate is a leading personalization platform that helps businesses deliver personalized experiences to their customers across multiple channels. One of Monetate’s key features is its AI-driven decision engine, which analyzes customer data in real-time. This allows you to deliver personalized recommendations and experiences that are tailored to each individual user. When businesses deliver relevant and engaging experiences, they are more likely to convert and have higher customer loyalty. 

Additionally, Monetate’s platform includes a range of testing and optimization tools, which allow businesses to test different variations of their website or app to determine what works best for their audience. This helps businesses improve their conversion rates and increase revenue over time. Overall, Monetate is a powerful tool for businesses looking to improve their customer experience and boost their bottom line.

Adobe Target

Adobe Target is a website optimization tool that allows you to create and run experiments on your website to improve its performance. With Adobe Target, you can run A/B tests, multivariate tests, and personalized experiences to target specific user segments. The tool also provides AI-powered recommendations to help you optimize your website even further.

One of the biggest advantages of Adobe Target is its seamless integration with other Adobe tools. If you’re already using other Adobe products, such as Adobe Analytics or Adobe Campaign, then Adobe Target will integrate seamlessly with them. Additionally, Adobe Target provides a wide range of integrations with other tools, such as Google Analytics and Salesforce.

Dynamic Yield

Dynamic Yield is another popular personalization platform that offers a range of features to help businesses optimize their customer experience across different channels. One of the key benefits of Dynamic Yield is its ability to unify customer data across multiple touchpoints, including websites, mobile apps, and email campaigns. This allows businesses to create a complete view of each customer’s behavior and preferences, which can be used to deliver personalized experiences that are tailored to each individual user. 

Dynamic Yield also offers a range of testing and optimization tools, which allow businesses to test different variations of their website or app to determine what works best for their audience. This helps companies to improve their conversion rates and drive more revenue over time. Finally, Dynamic Yield offers a range of integrations with other marketing tools and platforms, making it easy for businesses to incorporate personalization into their broader marketing strategy. Overall, Dynamic Yield is a powerful tool for companies looking to improve their customer experience and drive more revenue from their digital channels.

Which Tool Should You Choose?

When it comes to choosing a website optimization tool to replace Google Optimize, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Each tool has its strengths and weaknesses. You’ll need to evaluate your business needs to determine which tool is right for you.

That being said, we can offer you a few tips and recommendations:

Ease of Use

If you’re not familiar with coding or website development, then ease of use should be a key consideration when choosing a website optimization tool. Look for a tool that has a user-friendly interface and doesn’t require extensive coding knowledge.

VWO is a great option for beginners, as it has a simple and intuitive interface that allows you to create experiments quickly and easily.

Advanced Features

If you’re looking for a more advanced website optimization tool, then you’ll want to consider a tool with advanced features such as targeting and personalization.

Optimizely, Monetate, or Dynamic yield are good options for advanced users, as they offer a wide range of advanced features such as adaptive targeting, which allows you to personalize your website based on user behavior.

Integration with Other Tools

If you’re already using other tools for website analytics or customer relationship management, then you’ll want to choose a website optimization tool that integrates seamlessly with those tools.

Adobe Target is a good option if you’re already using other Adobe tools, as it integrates seamlessly with other Adobe products.

Final thoughts 

In conclusion, while the discontinuation of Google Optimize may come as a surprise, it’s important to remember that there are many other website optimization tools available. Take the time to evaluate your business needs and choose a tool that meets your specific requirements. Whether you choose VWO, Optimizely, Monetate, Dynamic Yield, Adobe Target, or another tool entirely, the most important thing is to keep optimizing your website to improve its performance and boost conversions.

If you’re interested in learning more about conversion rate optimization, check out some other recent blog entries:

• Personalization and testing: how CRO can boost your sales

• The Get It Done Guide To Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Part 1

Or, get in touch with our team today and we can help you make the right call.

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Converting your e-commerce visitors into customers can be challenging. You need to apply the right strategy, as well as implement the right tools and technology to ensure that the visitor has the best possible user experience to trigger sales and conversions. Let’s not forget that these days, consumers are more demanding than ever. They demand personalized experiences that are adapted to their needs.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) can help you elevate your strategy through A/B testing or web customization. But, what are A/B testing and web personalization? In this article, we tell you the most notable differences between the two, their benefits, and how to activate them.

A/B testing and web personalization: driving sales and conversions with CRO

At first, it may seem that A/B testing and web personalization are the same. Really, they are quite different. And, used together, they can help us build a winning strategy.

Before attempting to carry out any testing or customization action, we first have to understand our users better: 

• Learn about their interests. 
• Figure out where on the web they spend the most time (either by preference or necessity). 
• Discover their pain points, etc.

Then, we can use all this data to make better decisions about what we should do on our site to improve the chances that someone will convert during a page visit. A/B testing and personalization are two ways to activate our data to incrementally improve each step of the customer journey.

• A/B testing: A/B testing refers to the various experiments that we can perform to demonstrate, empirically, what our users want and what works best.
• Web personalization: with personalization, we seek to make each message and experience relevant for our users. Consider how you feel when you receive the same offer from the same footwear brand 34,567 times (even though you already bought something from them). We can avoid situations like this by personalizing the user experience. We should do the same for banners, featured website sections, and related articles. If these are adapted to the tastes and/or needs of the user each time they enter the site, the chances of sales and conversion will increase.

A/B Testing: test, test, and test… until you find the key

Before beginning a test, we must define the hypothesis, the conversion objectives, and the different tests to be carried out. The art of testing consists, as we said before, of launching different versions of a landing page or a product, but including changes in each iteration that help us detect user preferences. These variants can take into account user interactions with the key elements in the different tests (buttons, colors, CTAs…). The ‘interaction,’ as it’s commonly known, is measured and the behavior is analyzed in order to draw conclusions that determine which test has won. From there, we can determine which changes we should finally apply to the site or product.

Web personalization: how to get the most value out of your user data

We all want to feel special, especially when we buy something. We feel we deserve it and thus we demand more personalized experiences from brands that share relevant content which meets our needs and tastes at the right time through the right channel.

Would you sell the same computer to a web designer and a gamer? They have different needs and therefore need different products. The same happens in messages, websites, and communications of any kind that we make with users, and all of them must be personalized. How? Based on the data we receive from them every day: clicks, pages, product modules, messages… Make the user feel that each element has been designed by and for him! Why? To convince him to buy from you!

Do you want to know more about CRO and testing and what it can bring to your online business? Our team of experts will be happy to attend to your specific case. Get in touch today!

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Taking it one step further: User Journey Optimization

When talking about conversion rate optimization, it can be easy to get caught up in things like:

• Improving your CTR (click-through rate)
• Decreasing your bounce rate
• Comparing conversion rates on one test versus another

At the end of the day, CRO isn’t just about improved ROI. It’s about really trying to understand the pain points of your audience, and what problems you’re trying to solve for them. 

Think of it like telling a story. If you were going to read a story, you wouldn’t start in the middle. And if you were going to tell a story, you wouldn’t start in the middle, either. Conversion rate optimization would certainly be part of the story.

What else do you need to consider?

Telling a story requires you to consider the hero, the knowledge the hero needs to be successful, and the conflict. As a company your issue might be low sales, so this can be a helpful exercise to ensure that what you are selling is useful for the market. 

Your Hero

First, take a look at how your hero (in this case, our audience, or website visitors) might arrive at your page. How did they end up on your website? What problem are they looking to solve? Do they have special needs? What specific qualities might they embody (are they millennials? Do they have kids? Maybe they are aspirational)? Keep in mind that data is incredibly important as you consider who your hero is and what issues they’dl ike to solve. The bottom line is that we want our heroes to be successful, and we want to help solve their problems.

Avoiding a Bumpy Journey

Once you learn a bit more about your hero, you can focus on understanding the problem they are trying to solve. Data and heat maps can also give you helpful information about where users are struggling. As you analyze the steps different people take their issues, you will gain insights about what information might be missing. You will also start to see patterns you can iterate on to ensure users have a smooth journey through the funnel.

Helpful Knowledge

Finally, you can take a look at what knowledge your hero needs to be successful in his or her quest. This is how you set your company up as your hero’s helper. It’s important to actually interact with some customers when you are setting out to solve this. You can do this through a survey, a focus group, or by doing individual user testing via recorded sessions. This will shape the way you structure your site (and the other touch points – social media, physical store locations, etc.) And don’t forget to consider the different phases of the marketing funnel. A potential customer’s needs may change throughout the process.

How do you put it all together?

Again, creating a funnel can be a helpful way to really understand your User Journey. This will help you find places you can optimize it using data and customer insights gathered from surveys or focus groups. 

As you can see, User Journey Optimization and Conversion Rate Optimization are closely linked. By taking CRO beyond facts and figures, you can create a lasting, iterative strategy that continuously improve on-site experience (and thus, your ROI). Who doesn’t want that!?

Now what?

Throughout this series, we’ve discussed:

• What is a conversion?
• What is the CRO process?
• Types of testing
• CRO tools
• What can you optimize?
• User Journey Optimization

It’s a lot of information to process. But our team has got you covered. If you want to learn more about CRO, User Journey Optimization, or even just discuss what tools are right for your organization, our team is here for you. Get in touch today!

What can I Optimize?

In order to have a successful conversion rate optimization strategy, you need to ensure you know two main things. First, what on your website should be optimized? And second, who are you optimizing for?

Once you answer these two questions, you can move on to the fun part: figuring out which elements will have the most impact on ROI. Here are a few ideas to get your juices flowing. We’ve often seen that optimizing these items on your site can be highly impactful.

Parts of your site

• Call to action (CTA): Used to tell your users exactly what to do next or what action to take. For example, you could test a button that says “Register” vs. one that says “Save my spot”.
• Home Page: Do you have the most important information above the fold? This might be a form you want users to fill, or a special promotion you’re running. You don’t want people to have to scroll to find what they’re looking for. To slightly misquote a popular marketing joke, “Where does a digital marketer hide a dead body? Below the fold!” Ha, ha.
• Product Detail Page (PDP): This is the page where you tell page visitors all the details about your products. Ask yourself (or even better – ask users or compare with competitors) if there is anything missing. Are there questions about sizes, dimensions, reviews, or colors that you frequently receive in your contact form? Integrate this info (through text and graphics) to ensure a good user experience.
• Search or Search Results pages: If you have a search feature integrated into your website, does it actually help users find what they are looking for? Do you have filters (e.g. for size, color, availability, price)? How are results presented (do you simply give them the results or add a few other product suggestions)?

Moments in the journey

• Conversion funnel: When a user visits your site, they must take a series of steps to complete a goal, e.g. purchasing something. Is it clear where they are in the checkout process (for example with a tracking bar on the page)? Do you show security information to your users to help them feel that your checkout is secure? Do your forms ask only the necessary information to complete the process?
• Usability: This refers to the general best practices for ensuring your site is user-friendly. Think about the last time you had a smooth e-commerce experience – you were probably encouraged to come back to the site (and you might’ve even told a friend about it). You are also ensuring that friction points are being removed which in the end will help increase conversion. It also must be easy to navigate your site, with proper search functionality. And, of course, you should show the right content at the right time in the right place. 
• Other areas to consider testing:
  • Pages that are of high quality and value on your website
  • Pages that are underperforming & have a high bounce or exit rate.

Always remember that everything mentioned above should be rooted in data. Otherwise, there is no point to begin an optimization process at all.

How to get started with Conversion Rate Optimization

First, understand the basics of CRO and get the right tools in place. Then, you can start to really optimize your site.

Shoot us a message to get started today ;-). And remember: always be testing.

What tools do you need?

Conversion Rate Optimization involves strategy – both analytical and UX-focused. In order to get the right data to measure your customer’s journeys, you’ll need the right tools in place. Let’s explore a few of the tools we frequently work with. That way, you can better understand what capabilities you might want to add to your tech stack.

Keep in mind that this is not an exhaustive list!

Analytics

• Adobe Analytics
• Google Analytics

User Experience Tools

• User Feel
• Hot Jar
• User Testing
• Session Cam
• TryMyUI

Conversion Rate Optimization Tools

• Kibo
• AB Tasty
• Adobe Target
• VWO
• Dynamic Yield
• Google Optimize
• Optimizely
• Quantum Metric
• ContentSquare

How can we combine these tools?

Below we discuss an example of integrating Respondent, eSurvey, Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics & Content Square for User Journey Mapping.

Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics 

Websites:

• https://business.adobe.com/products/analytics/web-analytics.html
• https://business.adobe.com/products/analytics/adobe-analytics.html

How we use it for User Journey Mapping: Analyzing data to understand the online behavior of our customers is a fundamental part of our methodology. Analytics platforms, such as Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics, provide data points about that help us make important decisions. For example, we can learn about who website visitors are, what channel brought them to our page (i.e. search or email campaigns), the journey they take on-site from initial visit through purchase, and any pages where thre is a significant bounce rate.

UserTesting

Website: https://www.usertesting.com/

How we use it for User Journey Mapping: When you create user journey maps, it’s essential to really get into the mindset of the consumer. Likely, you have looked at your own website hundreds if not thousands of times. A site like UserTesting can help you actually watch a customer try out your booking form or read your latest newsletter. This really helps you understand user behavior, needs, and pain points, as the tool helps you pay users to test your site. Then, it records the user’s facial expressions, scrolling activity, and even what they say while they’re navigating. What better way to really understand how people use your site or product?

ContentSquare

Website: https://contentsquare.com/

How we use it for User Journey Mapping: ContentSquare is a digital experience insights platform that helps us to quickly visualize how our page visitors interact with our site. For example, the tool can be used to visualize if users are clicking on an area of the page that’s not meant to be clicked. Or, it can show us exactly which elements of a page receive the most interactions. In this way, it empowers marketers to make data-driven decisions to optimize the user journey. Other features inclue customer journey analysis and session replay, to really understand the buyer journey.

Conclusion

These are just a few examples of tools (and combinations of tools) that you could use to improve user experience on your site. By carefully selecting which ones you use, and how you integrate them, you will have a wealth of data. This data can be used to optimize different parts of your site, which we’ll discuss in the next installment of this series. 

It can seem overwhelming if this is your first time getting into CRO (or even if you’ve done it many times before!) That’s why we have a team of experts dedicated to helping you choose the right tool and get it set up in the most efficient way.

To learn more, send us an email to info@makingscience.com or get in touch with our team via www.makingscience.com/contact. We look forward to hearing from you!

At Making Science, we are evangelists of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). That’s why we decided to write this guide. It will be published in several parts over the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for upcoming posts.

Types of testing

Last week, we showed an example of a simple A/B Test.

What is an A/B Test = A method of sending some percentage of website visitors (say, 50%) to the control version of the site, while the other percentage of visitors see comparing two different versions of something to see which one users prefer. 

The idea of ​​the split test or the AB test, is to apply all the changes at once (either on a new page or on the same page) and face both pages to see which one gets more interactions with the search button.

Many times, as experienced marketers, we simply assume we know what a website visitor wants to see. These A/B tests help us prove a hypothesis with data. 

In some cases, the testing strategy may call for a Multivariate Test.

What is a Multivariate Test = Multivariate or multi-variable testing refers to testing multiple variables or elements at the same time, usually 3 or more.

Example of a multivariate test:

For each element, we define the variants to be pitted against the current content (control).

A testing tool (for example, Dynamic Yield) will create all possible combinations of each element with their variants: 

And distribute the users among them to find the winning combination:

How to get started with Conversion Rate Optimization

Start by ensuring that you understand the basics of conversion rate optimization. Be sure that you have a conversion rate optimization tool and a strategy in place. And, always be testing! Testing allows you to learn (whether you’re using a simple A/B test or a Multivariate Test).

Talking to us at Making Science can also help you get started ;-). Begin improving your conversion rate today by visiting makingscience.com/contact!

Stay tuned for parts 4-6 in the coming weeks. Next week, we’ll be discussing different tools you can use to optimize your site.

At Making Science, we are evangelists of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). That’s why we decided to write this guide. It will be published in several parts over the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for upcoming posts.

The CRO Process

The Conversion Rate Optimization Process is here to really help us unlock the possibilities, the potential, and the opportunities that may exist on our website. Here at Making Science, our CRO Process involves 2 key steps:

• Ensures that the change you want to make to your website is Analytically driven i.e. Data-Driven decision making to ensure we have facts. Data allows us to be sure we are not just making a decision on a gut feeling nor based on the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) that many organizations have.

• Ensures that our team steps into the shoes of the user to see how they feel i.e. User Experience (UX) is a key part of the change.

Once we understand the above 2 key areas, we can start to generate ideas about what to experiment with. These strategic ideas help us present recommendations for improving certain elements on your website, on your mobile site, or in your app. When we start experimenting, conversion rate optimization takes place.

Experimentation within Conversion Rate Optimization

As explained CRO involves generating ideas or recommendations for elements on your site. These are validated through hypotheses. I know what you’re thinking… That seems more related to science than marketing. But we’re here to tell you otherwise!

Hypothesis = A suggested solution for the possibility, the potential problem, or challenge found. It’s an opportunity to improve. 

The formula we use for creating a hypothesis is: “If ____, then ____, because ____.”

Here’s an example of a hypothesis we might form, based on data:

Opportunity Identified

​​There is a 25% bounce rate on the search results page. 

Hypothesis

If we change the color of the “Book Now” button to one that stands out more, then people will be more likely to click it, because it is more visible.

Methodology

Within our testing tools, we create a Test to see if our hypothesis improves the KPIs we are tracking. For example, based on the above hypothesis, we updated the color of the book now button to green to draw more attention to it. Our main metric to track was “clicks on book now” compared to the control (see example below). 

Using a testing tool like Google Optimize, for example, you can track which version is more likely to encourage users to click on book now (the metric specified above). In this case, the variant beat out the control, so it was implemented for 100% of page visitors.

How to get started with Conversion Rate Optimization

Start by ensuring that you understand the basics of conversion rate optimization. Be sure that you have a conversion rate optimization tool and a strategy in place. And, always be testing! Testing allows you to learn.

Talking to us at Making Science can also help you get started ;-). Begin improving your conversion rate today by visiting makingscience.com/contact!

Stay tuned for parts 3-6 in the coming weeks. Next week, we’ll be discussing different types of testing (A/B Tests vs. Multivariate Tests).

The term Conversion Rate Optimization, also known as CRO, often sounds mysterious to many. Especially to those who may not be in the world of digital. But here at Making Science, we believe that it is of great importance. That’s why we decided to write a guide. This will be published in several parts over the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for upcoming posts. 

To understand Conversion Rate Optimization, we must first understand a conversion.

Part 1: What is a Conversion?

Simply put, a conversion refers to the moment when a visitor completes a specific goal on a website. Specific goals might include:

• Purchases – Booking a hotel, a pair of shoes online
• Newsletter signups – Receive up to date news or information
• Shopping cart adds – I’ll come back later. I need to think about this purchase a little more
• Form submissions – I’d like to learn more about your school courses.
• App downloads 
• Form/document downloads – I need some more information about something I am researching 

When the user takes action, that’s considered a conversion. Conversions are directly related to the goal or the purpose of the website.

So what exactly is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

Wouldn’t it be great if we put up a website and everyone who visited bought something or we had success with our website goal? Absolutely! Well Conversion rate optimization helps us do that.

CRO refers to increasing the percentage of Conversions on a website, mobile device or app. Turning visitors into leads and leads into customers.

The idea behind conversion rate optimization is to help you understand how users move through your website, what actions they take, and what is stopping them from completing the goals that your site has.

How do you calculate Conversion to measure success?

We calculate conversion to help us understand how many people that visit your site actually convert into a paying customer.

The formula is: Total Users That Converted / Total Users That Visited Our Website x 100

EXAMPLE:

• I had 5,000 users buy beer on my site this month (caught your attention didn’t I)
• But I had 10,000 visitors to my site this month
• x 100 (to get a percentage)

5,000 / 10,000 x 100 = 50% Conversion Rate of Beer!

Why is Conversion Rate Optimization important

At this point you should understand the basics of CRO. We understand that when we have found an opportunity on our website we should ensure it’s both data driven and user centric. At this point we form a Hypothesis and we should test it. The same way as when a doctor aims to find out what his patient’s heart rate, their blood pressure or perhaps how tired their body feels under certain levels of physical strain or activity. Our take on stress testing with Making Science is about ensuring your team, the tool you are using, your organization as a whole can pass a stress test! Knowing your limits will help you figure out how to plan. 

By introducing conversion rate optimization into your business, you can quickly improve conversion rates on your website. You have facts that show you what to test, where and how. 

How to get started with Conversion Rate Optimization

Start by ensuring that you understand the basics of conversion rate optimization. Be sure that you have a conversion rate optimization tool and of course a strategy in place. And, always be testing! Testing allows you to learn.

Talking to us at Making Science can also help you get started ;-). Start improving your conversion rate today by visiting makingscience.com/contact!

Here you can find parts 2-6:

• The Get It Done Guide To CRO: Part 2 – The CRO Process

• The Get It Done Guide To CRO: Part 3 – Types of testing

• The Get It Done Guide To CRO: Part 4 – What tools do you need?

• The Get It Done Guide To CRO: Part 5 – What can I optimize?

• The Get It Done Guide To CRO: Part 6 – Taking it one step further: User Journey Optimization

Cass: To kick things off, what does personalization mean to you?

Tracy: As a dev/strategist who’s done a bit of everything in this field for many years now, it’s definitely been evolving quickly. Before we focused on the idea of a consumer, or statistical consumer segments. And now we are really honing in on an individual level. I think it’s just more attention to turning consumer to a customer. 

Cass: And Marilyn? 

Marilyn: I think it depends on who you ask. A lot of people, when they think about personalization from the brand perspective, only think about product recommendations. Product recommendations are certainly part of it, but personalization is a strategy (not necessarily a tactic or a tool). And so it’s about being able to create an experience that’s made just for me. Building that obviously takes time, and also takes data – it requires a lot of data structuring as well. And, of course, it takes tooling, but before any of that, it’s a strategy. So you need people to think in terms of personalization, in the way: 

• things are deployed
• things are built 
• campaigns are executed, etc. 

So for me, personalization is definitely a strategy. 

Cass: Something that has to be really deeply embedded. 

Marilyn: Yeah, throughout the organization. And you can have different degrees of it, depending on your resources, your data maturity… With today’s privacy issues,  brands have a responsibility to manage that as well. So that does add an extra layer of complexity.

Cass: Can you guys mention maybe an experience you’ve had where you were online and you experienced personalization in action? Maybe it was a good experience, maybe it was a bad experience. 

Marilyn: One common issue is when you visit a website, and actually make a purchase – but then you keep getting retargeted with it. It’s like, no, I bought it already! So, I don’t need to see that ad anymore – but then I see it everywhere for days. 

I’ve also had problems when I wanted to return an item but the return button didn’t even work. As somebody who has purchased something, you should be able to simply recognize who I am, because I’ve created an account. I’ve put billing information, I’ve ordered something, and now I want to return it. At the very minimum, I should be identified and be able to go through that user journey without a hassle. And you should test that user journey to make sure that you’ve achieved your goal: to get a paying customer. Now you’re losing that paying customer because you’re giving them a terrible experience returning an item. 

So I think these days a lack of personalization feels almost like a personal sleight. Even though maybe I’m just a random user out of hundreds or thounsands. Like, I had to return this and it didn’t work – it can be so annoying, you feel like it’s a terrible website, terrible experience, and so immediately you start forming these opinions about the brand even though it’s just some error or bug that somebody missed. So those are a couple of experiences that come to mind. 

There’s definitely a lot that goes on there in terms of UX. For the customer, it might not be personalization “gone wrong,” but it feels personal because I’m a user and I’m having a one-on-one experience with the brand. So it’s important you get the whole journey right!

Tracy: Yeah, we’ve all experienced that I think. Especially from from our standpoint, as an agency. And usually we’re there to fix it, so I feel you. To give one example, think about Siri. You always kind of feel like your computer is listening. You know, when you’re talking about something and you start seeing ads for it everywhere. I mean I know it’s psychological, because your mind’s on it, in more cases than it’s actually targeting. But you wonder sometimes. 

Cass: Can be good can be bad! And also, thinking a little bit about this idea of creating that really personalized experience… As we move toward the “cookieless future,” and the importance of first-party data, can you talk a little bit about contextual personalization and why has that been such a hot topic in marketing lately? 

Marilyn: What I see, from more of a macro view, is that companies have to want to attract users and consumers. They want to encourage them to understand that the brand is worthy of that information… that they’re gonna properly manage it, etc. And, there needs to be a value proposition in exchange. 

So, if I’m gonna create an account, there has to be something driving me to create this account… Why should I:

• Create this account? 
• Sign up for this newsletter?
• Give any information to you as a brand?

And so I think brands have a responsibility to customers today to understand what is important to them. It also has to be messaging that’s adapted, right? So I think there’s a lot of testing that needs to be done around this topic of messaging. In those first touch points with a customer, you have to make sure that you are creating that sense of trust. You are communicating very clearly with the customer that if we take their information, we’re responsible for that information. 

Then, on the other side, what am I going to give in return? In exchange for answering a couple of questions, I’ll give you:

• a personalized shopping cart or 
• insider access to sales or 
• You’ll get a more personalized shopping experience 

So it’s more about thinking about, “how can I provide value for the customer in exchange for that personal information?” I think brands that are successful in managing privacy and still getting sign ups and more interaction with customers are the ones that manage to improve their messaging, and create that trust. They do a lot of testing around these entry touch points. 

Tracy: I’ve seen it evolve starting decade ago from a standpoint of, Well somebody does this on the site, so show them A or B and just kind of send them down a logic tree… Or even with an on-site questionnaire, to try to show them what they’re looking for (or, better put, guessing what they’re looking for). And usually this kind of approach has shown very positive results. So it’s something worth pursuing, in a world where you don’t have access to those third-party cookies anymore. 

Cass: It’s kind of “back to the future” right? For the last few years, we got so specific personalizing to individuals and now we’re kind of moving back to a more linear experience.

Marilyn: Well yeah that decision tree logic – it really has to do with a combination of factors. You can have simple “if, then” logic, but you can also use AI if you have the right tools in place. These tools can add to the data you have access to – this is why the privacy part is important because if there’s only so much you can do, depending on where you are and what rules you have to follow. 

Here in Europe, and in France specifically, there are a lot of restrictions around data. You have less leeway around what you can do. If a user that visits your website and they click on one thing and you just have that “if and then” logic, then, if they click on shoes and they’ll see socks. This is where recommendation engines come in. A lot of of people right now, when they think of personalization, they think of product recommendations because of the way that you can use volume and data to feed an algorithm and be able to propose something contextual without a lot of personally identifiable information, right? 

That’s where AI comes in.

That’s where you’re using historical data or behavioral data, which will help to define or modify these algorithms. But the reality is that you can only go so far because you have different audiences, you have different segments that have different preferences. And so, if you really want to have impact with contextual personalization, you need to at least be able to segment your audiences. So you need information from those audiences. 

Contextual personalization is good, but it’s kind of logical that when someone logs in, you know who they are and, if you have a CDP then you can know what kind of audience segment they’re in. Then you can have a treatment that recognizes that user as a certain type of user. 

Maybe it’s a high lifetime value (LTV) customer that returns often that shops certain things. Maybe they’re frequently looking at black dresses. Well, the algorithm is going to tell you that this audience is always interested in what’s going to be hot next season. So instead of the black dress from last season, you’re gonna show the one from this season first. So I think the more you’re able to convince that customer to share their information, then the better your contextual personalization is going to be, of course. And so, there are a lot of different audience segments, some that are higher value and some that you don’t know yet because you’re just starting to to interact with them.

I guess the challenge for companies is, how much time do you invest in long-tail segments vs. how much do you spend on those high LTV customer segments? So, you have to have a value proposition and create that trust to get that information to be able to better personalize, so you don’t have to rely on only contextual personalization moving forward. 

What is online experimentation?

“For centuries, scientists and engineers have relied on experiments, guided by their insight and intuition, to learn new information and advance knowledge… In the business world, experiments have led to the discovery of both technical solutions and new markets.” – Experimentation Works, by Stephan Thomke

As you can see, the goal of business experimentation is much like that of scientific experimentation: to challenge existing knowledge and think outside the box. It takes more than luck and the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion to continually improve your website performance.

The process

We start by identifying areas of opportunity by analyzing your web performance data. Then, we construct user personas to better understand who is most likely to take a specific action on your site. Finally, we create hypotheses about ways we can improve the onsite experience to lead to more conversions.

A simple hypothesis might be: Many people visit the Contact Us page, but few people fill out the form. We believe that if we simplify the fields on the contact form, people will be more likely to fill it. Using testing tools (like Google Optimize to name just one) we present 50% of users with the simplified form and the other 50% see the original form. We wait for a designated period (perhaps 2 weeks) to see which variant performs better. Then, we are able to declare a winner. Then, we can implement the winner for 100% of page visitors. 

The “surprise” factor

In these simple cases, it can seem obvious which variant will win. But sometimes even our team of experts is surprised – and that’s what makes experimentation so important. We may assume that we know the best way to accomplish a goal. This means that sometimes our experiments fail. This failure, or learning as we like to call it, can show us how to tweak an experiment. This often leads to even better results in the future.

Let us help!

It’s a relatively simple concept, but it can require a team of developers, UX designers, and analysts to implement it successfully. It is useful to begin this process with an experienced agency that can help you properly implement the correct testing tool. 

To learn more about how to get started, join our webinar: Optimization 201 on March 24th, or get in touch with our team today!