TRAFFIC
UX FOR AMATEURS –
A DIY GUIDE
There is a common misconception that user experience is something only big businesses with big
budgets have time and money to do. Oliver Liebscher, head of design at Digital Fuel Marketing,
outlines simple, actionable steps that affiliates of all sizes can take.
MOST AFFILIATES ARE PREOCCUPIED
with attracting visitors to their site —
via SEO, social, blog posts, etc. Essentially,
they concentrate on filling up the top of
the funnel to get more first time depositors
(FTDs) out of the bottom. User experience
(UX), on the other hand, concentrates
on the visitors that are already on your
site and tries to improve their experience,
which in turn should see an increase in
conversions (visitors to FTDs).
For example, an affiliate website that
attracts 5,000 visitors per month with a
conversion rate of 1% would generate
50 FTDs per month. In order to increase
FTDs to 60 per month, using SEO it
would need to increase its monthly visitors
from 5,000 to 6,000. Conversely, by
working on UX to improve its conversion
rate, it would only need to increase the
conversion rate from 1% to 1.2% to
achieve 60 FTDs.
And there’s an added bonus — now,
more than ever, Google analyses UX
metrics such as engagement, time on site
and bounce rates to rank sites. Thus, by
improving your UX, you will also see an
improvement in your SEO. 1
How do I get started?
UX is like being back in science class
— you define your hypothesis, run an
experiment and analyse the results.
1
User testing can be performed at a
variety of levels:
1. Live on site. For DIY UX, this
approach is the most common —
very little work is needed. You’re simply
testing your site in its current form.
2. Design phase. If you’re planning
a major redesign, test it at the design
phase. It’s much easier to test UX
on Photoshop mock-ups or wireframes
than it is developing the site and
then having to rebuild it because of
a UX error.
3. Competitors. Does one of your
competitors have a fancy layout you’re
envious of ? Run a usability study to see
if it’s actually more effective than yours.
Define your goal
Before starting any user testing you need to
define your goal. For example, it could be
one of the following:
1. C
urrently 40% of my homepage visitors
click through to a bookmaker review
page — I want to increase this number.
2. C
urrently 5% of visitors to my
‘Free Bets’ page click an affiliate link —
I want to increase this number.
3. O
nly 10% of visitors reach my
‘Accumulator Tips’ page, I believe this is
because it’s a sub-page — I want to test
how visitors navigate around my site and
increase visitors to ‘Accumulator Tips’.
http://neilpatel.com/blog/the-advanced-guide-to-user-behavior-data-and-how-it-affects-search-rankings/
A/B testing
Once you’ve defined your goal it’s time
to start changing the site and testing the
outcome. This sounds difficult, time-
consuming and expensive, right? Wrong!
There are a plethora of free tools available
that help make this process quick and easy.
Our favourite tools are:
1. G
oogle Optimize: As of April 2017,
Google Optimize is now available for
free. This is a fantastic tool that allows
you to set up A/B tests in minutes. You
can use Google Optimize to duplicate
a page and edit its contents without
any coding — it’s a simple drag and
drop interface, regardless of the content
management system (CMS) you’re
using. Google Optimize then integrates
with Google Analytics to track
your usual user metrics. Once your
experiment is setup, Google Optimize
will split traffic evenly between your
two page variations.
otjar: Hotjar is another free tool that
2. H
takes minutes to setup — simply add
a JavaScript tag to your site (similar
to Google Analytics) and away you
go. Hotjar features a range of website
optimisation tools, however, in this
instance we’re going to use it for
heatmaps and recordings. Google
Optimize shows us data in the form
of numbers and percentages, whereas
Hotjar provides us with recorded videos
of users on our site (mouse movements,
iGB Affiliate Issue 64 AUG/SEP 2017
23