CXL Conversion Optimization Minidegree – I am now a CXL Certified Optimizer!

By JD Koch

16 May

This week, while working through CXL Institute’s Scholarship program where they have numerous minidegrees from Growth Marketing to Conversion Optimization, I was working through all the final lessons I had to complete before writing the final exam!

User Testing

I think a lot of people over-complicate things when it comes to feedback. Where the most precious feedback can be from your customers because they are the ones who use your product or service. They know exactly why they bought it and why they continue to come back. Therefore it will always be a good idea to ask their opinion.

Another form of feedback to use, especially on your websites, is Hotjar. They do not only give you the benefits of screen recordings, heat maps, and click maps, but they also help you to make surveys available on your website for visitors to fill out.

What is user testing? User testing is basically asking friends, family, or even hiring people to test out your website. No, the best is not to just put them in front of a computer and tell them to scroll through your website and ask for feedback. The better approach is to have them attempt a specific task, a broader task, and also complete the funnel of the website.

It is also true that you need to try and compensate them for their time. So, don’t ask people to help you without paying them for their time; remember, their feedback is valuable.

Change is tough!

A good and insightful module was when Peep Laja explained how to approach starting your own agency, what to look out for, lessons learned, whom to hire, which questions to ask, and many more.

Like with many things, conversion optimization can cause people to hold back, because it means possible change within the organization and therefore even more importantly needs buy-in, from the entire organization to work. Merritt also gives a lot of tips in order to evangelize optimization within an Enterprise. Because if there is no buy-in and colleagues cannot see the meaning or value for this implementation, the only thing you can expect from them is push-back. So, throughout your journey, share your wins, make changes, jargon, processes, and reasoning as plain as possible in order for everyone to understand.

Tools?

Merritt goes further to explain how you are supposed to approach acquiring new tools for your team while doing conversion optimization. Some tips he provides are trying to make sure you don’t buy double licenses; it can happen, especially in bigger organizations that different teams might have bought the same software but different licenses and therefore communication is crucial and it does not lie with Directors only to decide if the certain tool is necessary.

You can also look for free ware. With software expanding daily, you are most certainly going to find software that is free and capable of doing exactly what you need. Merritt also explained that if whatever you are buying requires more than 5 hours for you to be efficient in using it, it might not be the best deployment.

More A/B testing

There were many modules based on A/B testing and boy was it interesting. My favourite part of everything was where Peep Laja was explaining the different types of prioritization models we can use to rate and prioritize tests and some familiar models were mentioned, like the ICE model, but then out of nowhere (I learned that Peep is intentional in creating models and sheets and whatnot in order to also become one of the great legends who made models available within our industry.) he shows me his PrioritizationXL model, which is not just customizable, but able to expand in any direction your company requires and this was insightful.

I also had instructors like Georgi Georgiev and Wesseling, who was hard to understand at times, but were brilliant in their deployment of these strategies, who ran us through in-depth explanations of elements like why you should be running A/A tests, explaining to us what a p-value is and its role in the process and many other definitions I was grateful to now understand better.

Someone who was also excellent in their explaining and deployment of their lesson was Chad Sanderson, who explained advanced experimentation analysis, where he uses the software “R” to run pre-A/B tests to simulate the possible outcome. This is not the ultimate silver bullet, where you can use this and you never need to run A/B tests again, but rather a second-test before actually deploying the strategies. Of course, you will need existing data to proficiently run these tests.

What’s next for me?

I am super excited to have completed my final exam with CXL Institute and as for what’s next, I can only expect to find customers who might need help measuring their results. I meet few clients who see the value of a decent set-up of Google Analytics and have statistics reported from there. So, I believe that will be a great place to start. Because then and only then is a good time to measure and test results in order to eventually make recommendations.

If you missed my blog posts, here are the links to them, should you like to go through them:

I am truly grateful for having the opportunity to have done this minidegree and would truly advise anyone who wants to take their career to the next level in Digital Marketing, to consider CXL’s courses. It is truly life-changing. To Peep and the entire team – You guys are amazing. Truly, you are. Thank you for being the straight-forward team you are and putting in the time to make these great resources available for us and the entire world to see. I pray that God will bless your institute in abundance!

Conclusion

To whoever is reading this and is considering enrolling for this minidegree; It is worth every cent. What you learn here is pure gold and can only benefit you in your venture to become greater at what you do.

JD Koch

JD Koch is a full-time Agency Owner of DigiPlug in South Africa, a Internationally Certified Conversion Optimizer, LinkedIn Marketing Insider and Marketing Expert with customers across the country as well as in New Zealand. Join JD on in learning about software that could be useful to you as a Digital Marketer, Business Owner, Teams Leader, Manager, Freelancer, Agency Owner or just want to be more productive with your marketing.

+27(0) 72 252 7288

jd@digiplug.co.za