User Personification: An important aspect of the Conversion Optimization process

A good User Personification exercise should inform us about exactly, what we need to be doing for the identified personas.

At Nabler, User Personification is an important aspect of our Conversion Optimization process with every client we engage with. Without this exercise, it's quite difficult for our optimization team to determine the objective and motivation of the prospective audience visiting our client's website, and craft an actionable optimization strategy for the client. So; whenever we initiate a Conversion Optimization exercise with the client, we spend approx. 3 weeks in doing the quantitative and qualitative data audit for the client by leveraging the data from the following sources:

• Click-stream Data
• Heatmap Data
• Customer Reviews Data
• Consumer Survey Data
• Any other Consumer Generated content about the Brand, Service or Merchandise

As an outcome of this exercise, we identify some interesting dimensions, which have a significant impact on the key macro indicators, and based on this data; we start the Visitor Level Personification and identify the interesting association between different dimensions. For example:

• Does the visit of a prospective student on the Educational University website under Degree and Financial Aid section, increases their propensity to convert?
• Does the visit of a large % of current students on the website, masks the engagement issues faced by the prospective students segment?
• Does the prospective student segment expect a clear demarcation between Online and On-Campus programs?
• Does the Program Finder widget on the website reduces the probability of the visitor navigating the Site Taxonomy?
• Does the watching of the Alumnus Videos, Job Statistics and Professor Profiles have a strong association with each other?

Once we identify these interesting associations among different dimensions; we open the gate for further discussion with the client, and try to gather some additional quantitative and qualitative context from the client based on their understanding of the various student segments. For example:

• What % of leads generated on the website gets qualified?
• Does the mobile traffic contributes higher percentage of low quality leads?
• What % of the online leads eventually results in a student enrolment?
• On an average how many interactions take place between Student and the Advisor before he/she enrol for the course?
• What is the lead cycle from the initial lead generation stage till the final joining of the class?
• What is the demographic of the current students and alumni?
• What kind of behavior they demonstrate during their interaction with the advisor?
• What is the cancellation rate after the enrolment?
• What is the persistence and retention rate of the current students after 1 year?

These additional insights provide a lot of valuable inputs to our User Personification exercise, and once we marinate this data with our initial analysis, we come up with 3 Core Personas, who represents a large share of audience on the website and results in more than 80% of the conversions.

At the end, we start digging deeper in to the Content Consumption and Navigation Behavior of the short-listed user personas, and put together an actionable optimization plan. In our next post, we will discuss more on this topic and until then, have a nice weekend and please do share your valuable feedback.