Peep Laja is my special guest for this post, and he is the leading conversion rate optimization expert in our industry with his blog ConversionXL.

And since I’ll be speaking at Peep’s event in Austin on March 28-30th, I wanted to get him on the blog to teach you how to implement a smarter testing strategies for your ecommerce store.

You might not know this about me, but what originally made me famous in this industry was my conversion rate optimization strategies and tactics.

Now I focus more on direct response marketing and paid amplification, but I still love nerding out on data and testing and talking to experts who do that for a living.

In this post, you’ll meet ConversionXL founder Peep Laja and learn his strategy for testing and optimizing ecommerce stores, how to begin identifying the problems on your own site and a few CRO tactics to get you started.

Then I’ll do a shameless pitch for his event, because I’m super excited to speak at it.

And if you already planning on attending, make sure to use the discount code: “ezra-sent-me” to save 20% off your tickets.

The 80/20 Rule of CRO

I think there’s a lot of mystery around how to do A/B testing or multivariate testing for ecommerce business owners. But Peep’s been doing it for seven years, so I asked him where he would start with a new brand that’s never run a CRO test and what his playbook would be:

“As I see it, the conversion optimization in general consists of two things: 80% of conversion optimization is actually research, gathering data, analyzing data. And the other 20% is testing.

…80% of the work is figuring out what is the problem with my site: Why aren’t I selling more? Or smaller details like: What’s the problem with my product page? What are the problems with my card pages? Or my positioning?

Because only when you understand what the problem is, can you decide what might be good solutions to these problems — and even if you know what the problem is, you don’t know what the best solution is. That’s why you need to test.

So, when I work on a brand new site that I’ve never seen before, I always, always, always start with research. I look at Google Analytics to see where people are dropping off.”

Google Analytics: the Nitty-Gritty

As an ecommerce business owner, you would benefit greatly from tracking “goals” in Google Analytics. It will tell you from which pages people leave your website, how many people make it from the product page to the shopping cart — things like that. And Peep can tell you how to look even deeper:

“And you don’t need to stop at goals. You can get more nitty-gritty, where every single click, every single interaction has to be recorded. If you use Google Analytics, you should use events.

For instance in category pages, if they change the sort order from bestselling to cheapest first, you need to record that; or if they use certain filters on your category pages by size or price or whatever. Because you want to look for correlations and which behaviors correlate with higher sales.

People who sort products from least expensive to the most expensive, maybe those people convert more, maybe even spend more money. So we change our sort order from default to cheapest prices first, things like that.

Google Analytics is always the number one thing to view, but Google Analytics only tells you what is happening, how much and where — it doesn’t tell you why.

So, in addition to analytics, you need the qualitative side.”

Qualitative Data: Surveys & In-Cart Polls

For my ecommerce business, Boom By Cindy Joseph, I use post-purchase surveys to directly communicate with my customers and find out ways to improve.

So I asked Peep how exactly he uses customer surveys for CRO:

“You need to talk to your buyers. Figure out what kind of problems they had, hesitations, doubts while they’re still remember their purchasing experience.

You might send a survey a couple hours after they buy when it’s still fresh in their mind. I recommend incentivizing them with a coupon, a free gift or whatever you can afford. You want like 200-250 responses, and you want to only ask open-ended questions like:

‘Specifically what was the one thing that nearly stopped you from purchasing? What kind of doubts and hesitations did you have? What kind of questions did you have about our products that you couldn’t find answers to?’

You want to understand their intent and what problem were they solving for themselves.”

Not Sure What’s Wrong? Ask.

From Peep:

“You can also put polls right on your pages.

I have this case where only 30% of people proceeded to the checkout page when the industry average is like 50%. We could not figure out what was wrong with it. So we put an on-site poll where we asked on that same page:

‘What is holding you back from completing this purchase?’

With Hot Jar we triggered a popover after there had been like 15 or 20 seconds of inactivity on the page. And then we we waited…

Depending on the traffic, you get like a 2-4% response rate on average. So you might have to wait a couple of weeks to get 200-250 responses. But what they told us was ‘shipping costs’ …but just by looking at this page you can’t put two and two together.”

Quick Win for Your Store

“If you have forms of any kind, you need form analytics.”

According to Peep, billing and shipping forms are another problem area, so here’s a quick win for eCommerce stores:

Shopify recently added the Google autofill, and everybody can add this technology because that’s a free API that works for everybody.

When NOT to Invest in Split Testing

But what if you don’t have the capital to invest in a CRO agency, and you don’t fully have the skillset yourself, how do you do a good enough job?

Should you set up some real basic tests so you’re in the game — or should you save up capital until you can afford to hire an expert? Here was Pep’s answer:

“First of all, I ask myself can I even run A/B test? Meaning do I have enough volume for statistics to give me accurate answers?

My ballpark is if your store has less than a 1,000 transactions a month — doesn’t matter what the price points — if it’s less than 1,000 purchases a month, it’s too early for A/B testing. You need adequate sample sizes before stats will tell you anything useful or accurate.

However, you can still do optimization, you just can’t do testing and conversion optimization.”

How to Optimize Without Split Tests

“As I said, conversion rate optimization is 80% about research and figuring out the problems. So, let’s say that you do this analysis and you find 50 problems that you know that are there.

You may not have 1,000+ transactions to test and see if your solution worked or how well, so here’s what I suggest that you do now:

Come up with your best idea for a solution to those 50 problems and just implement all 50 solutions at once. Make changes on your product pages, checkout cart, homepage… you name it.

Change everything at the same time, because the more changes you make, the higher the likelihood that all combined they will have an impact that you can detect with your naked eye.

If you look at your conversion rate in Google Analytics, it fluctuates 10% week by week. So if you change something and it gets 7% better, you can’t see it in the data actually — you need to get a 20% improvement or higher.

But, if you had 100 purchases a week and now you get 120 purchases a week or more consistently… It’s probably because of the changes you made and it’s not the normal fluctuation.”

Get 20% Off Your Ticket to ConversionXL Live with Discount Code: “ezra-sent-me”

So this is where I go into the shameless pitch for Peep’s event, because I’m a huge fan of his content and of going to industry events.

A lot of my major leaps forward in my career and a lot of the influential relationships that I have, all came from getting out of my daily routine and putting all my attention on my business during a live event.

Heck, I even send my employees to events. So, let’s say you are someone who’s interested in this subject matter, I asked Peep, “Why should you go to this event?” Here’s what he said:

“The event is three days long, and you should come if you’re interested in one of these three topics:

1. Growth marketing

2. Conversion optimization and testing

3. Digital analytics

All the content of the event is about how to do those three things better, and we have a head of growth for Instagram and Shopify coming. We also have optimization people from Kayak, Airbnb and Google.

And our event is designed to make you meet people. That’s why we b