Let's say that one day you get out of bed and notice you can't walk with your left foot. It just isn't working.
So you go to the doctor and say, "Hey, I need my left foot working. A prescription should do it."
So the doctor gives you a prescription.
You use the prescription. But your left foot still isn't working.
And now you're constipated.
So you go back to the doctor and say, "Hey, my left foot still isn't working. And now I'm constipated. Let's try a different prescription."
So, the doctor gives you a different prescription.
Which you try.
And now your left foot still isn't working, but hooray! the constipation has stopped. But now your eyesight is blurry. You're wobbling around mistaking your spouse for the family pooch.
And you wonder, "What is wrong with the doctor?!"
Now, this would (likely) never happen in real life.
But this is a common scenario in the copywriting world.
Sometimes copywriters are asked to make something work without any testing or diagnosing.
Compelling words aren't enough to increase conversions.
You also need research and data.
Let me explain.
The Crazy Thing I Did in March
In March of this year (2023), I...(suspenseful pause)...installed Hotjar to my website.
Wild, right?
For those that aren't familiar with Hotjar, according to Seer Interactive:
Hotjar is a tool that allows you to visualize and map how users engage with your site with interactive heatmaps of their clicks and actions, recordings of their sessions, gathering of their feedback, and more.1
I'd seen some of the data Hotjar could provide when working with web developers. I also know that many conversion copywriters and organizations, like CopyHackers and Conversion Rate Experts, use it. However, I'd never actually used it myself.
I confess, I'm a little #BehindTheTimes.
Now (like, three months ago) was a perfect time to see what all the fuss was about.
And, boy! did I see what all the fuss was about.
It was kinda like hearing someone talk about the time they went skydiving vs actually jumping out of a plane yourself at 15,000 feet above the sweet, blessed ground. (Which I did. Gag. I think it was a mid-life crisis stupid moment of insanity.)
Hotjar opened my eyes to an abundance of delicious data.
But before I take you into my Little Mermaid secret grotto, you should know that I currently have very low traffic to my site. It would have been even better to have at least 100 visitors to my site instead of 62 (of which I accounted for 1/3 of the visits). However, I was impatient to get into the data. (Had I been one of the kids in that marshmallow test, I would have stuffed my face 0.0001 seconds after the researcher left the room.)
Hotjar Insights That Blew My Mind
Fast forward two-and-a-half months later.
I dove deep into the plethora of data Hotjar had been collecting since I first installed it.
But hold your horses, Fanny-May!
Before delving into the Hotjar data, I tracked the following on an excel sheet:
Changes I made to my website
Screenshots of changes
Dates that I had made changes
Explanations of why I made those changes
I noted my own Hotjar user number for desktop and mobile so that I would ignore all recordings of me and instead focus on my visitors.
Over two days, I watched and rewatched dozens of recordings (it was like Netflix bingeing—minus the chips and ice cream) and created a massive excel document with detailed observations like:
New and repeat visitors
Date and times they came to my site
Country
Where they came from to get to my site
Device they used (mobile or desktop)
What page they first landed on and where they went next
Total time each visitor spent on my website
Total time each visitor spent on a page
Total time each visitor spent on each section of a page (this was particularly interesting, dear Watson!)
What they clicked
Unusual or interesting behaviour as seen through their cursor (you could tell which visitors were quick decision makers, which were more thoughtful, and which were in-between)
Behaviour of repeat visitors
Whew! I slept for, like, 18 hours after this.
Here's a screenshot of a minuscule portion of my excel document:
The red coloured notes revealed some of the most interesting behaviour.
Now that I had all this information organized, this is what I did next.
Simplifying the Information for my Squirrel Brain
I knew it would be extremely difficult to deduce anything with this massive document. So, I simplified the information.
I created a table with bite-sized yummies:
Percentage of new visitor vs repeat
Percentage of mobile vs desktop
Percentage of countries
Percentage of referral sources
Average time on site
Average time on each page
Average time on each section of each page
Pages most visited
Pages that visitors spent the most time on
Buttons clicked and total amount of clicks correlated with time booked on my calendar and new subscribers
Social icons clicked
Here's a sample of this simplified table:
Now that I had organized and simplified the data, I could move onto the next step (my favourite)—analyzing!
My Secret Life as a Private Investigator
If you saw me when I tackled this part, this is what you'd see:
I love mysteries. And this part feels like I'm solving one.
So I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat (the one the real Holmes wears, not Benedict Cumberbatch who doesn't even wear one. Sheesh.) And I got to work.
There's a gap between what my visitors are doing and what I want them to do.
I'm collecting, organizing, and analyzing all this information so that I can hypothesize why they're not taking action as often as I would like, or at all.
In looking at the detailed and simplified data, I came up with a list of 3 possible reasons:
The serious visitors (ones who spent the most time on the site, read most of the copy on the pages they visited, returned more than once, spent some time visiting and revisiting a specific service page and spent time around the deliverables and price) might not have moved forward with scheduling a call because of the price.
There might not be enough times offered on my calendar to book a meeting.
They didn't see enough value, or didn't want, the free 5-minute website review.
I also came up with 4 other observations:
Visitors would come to my site from Facebook (not Instagram or LinkedIn).
Visitors would check me out on LinkedIn (not Instagram or Facebook).
I was happily surprised to see that Google was sending me more traffic than I thought.
Visitors seemed the most interested in the Master Copy package because they spent the most time on this page (5 minutes on average) and, besides my Home page, it was the most visited page.
So, after noting these observations, I went on to the next step.
My Addiction with...Ooh-la-la...Lists
Based on the things I observed and my hypotheses, I made a list of things to do, like this:
But, because I'm a one-woman show over here, I wanted to spend my time first on tasks that would generate the biggest returns, i.e., increase the chances of visitors taking action.
And that's where the Pareto Principle made an appearance—all because I watched a YouTube video by Vsauce the very day I was working on all this. What are the chances? Like, 20%? Or is it 80%?
Using the Pareto Principle to Determine Which Changes To Prioritize
You might already be familiar with the Pareto Principle.
But if you aren't, I snatched this def from Wikipedia:
The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few").[1] Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity.[2][3]2
That meant roughly 20% of the changes I would make could produce 80% of the results I was aiming for.
Keeping that in mind, the next step was to determine which ones were the critical 20%.
No pressure. It's not I'm deactivating a bomb, right? ...Right??
Based on my website goals, the data, and the behaviour of my visitors, I first determined which webpages were the most important to work on. I then identified only 1-2 high-leverage changes to make to these webpages. Why only 1-2 changes per page? Because it would be easier to determine if what I changed was working (or not).
I listed them in order of priority, like this, so I could work through them quicker:
And I implemented 90% of them at the time of this writing. One more task to go.
This is Like a Twilight Sequel
The story doesn't end here, my friend.
I'll be back in three months or so to tell you if the web changes made any difference.
And maybe I'll have a tale or two of the wild west. (I might be travelling to St. Catherines this summer.)
Giddy-up!
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