Growth Tip #41: Big Brother Hack

By Pete Rakozy

Growth Tips, Reading

To ensure your website is effective, you have to go out and talk to your audience. But, who has the time to constantly be checking in on focus groups? You can learn a lot about your prospects and the effectiveness of your website without actually having to talk to them. That’s not to say you shouldn’t go out of your way to gather feedback from people—you should.

But there are also other strategies and methods you can use to gain the insight you need to make the right changes for your business.

One way to track in a timely and inexpensive manner is to utilize monitoring tools on your website. We call this the Big Brother Hack. With this, you can gather incredibly helpful feedback, actionable data without bothering your prospects constantly.

How to execute this growth tip

Create accounts on Crazy Egg and UserTesting. Crazy Egg is a tool that allows you to track “hot zones” on your site (i.e. heat maps that illustrate what people click on and what they ignore). UserTesting connects you with people who visit and explore your website and give you feedback on what makes sense, what’s confusing, etc. And be sure you have integrated Google Analytics in your site. This will give you data on each page of your site, and it’s free.

Use the tools to collect data about your website. Remember: your goal is to determine if there any any changes you can make that can help boost conversions. Are there pages on your site that have high bounce rates (visitors are leaving after 30 seconds) or do you have sites that are getting highly trafficked from visitors in a certain country?

Interpret results and make any necessary changes to your website in order to attempt to influence your visitors and boost conversions. Such as, if you have certain blog posts that are getting highly trafficked, boost them! Create spin off posts or have links there to get visitors further into your site.