Conversion Optimization Mini Degree at CXL — Review part 5
This week I will review two courses from CXL Institute that are part of the Conversion Optimization Mini Degree:
- Landing Page Optimization by Michael Aagaard
- Conversion Research by Peep Laja
Landing Page Optimization
Let’s start with the Landing Page Optimization. It is the last course in the Foundations part of the Mini Degree. There are four more parts in it and the final exam. Currently, I am 35% into the Mini Degree.
About the instructor
As usual at CXL the instructor not only appears to be an absolute pro, but also a charismatic speaker. Compliments and a thank you for making it a pleasure watching the lessons and going through all materials.
About the content
It says there’s 4h and 22mins of content in the lessons, but it always takes me much longer to actually complete the lessons. I pause videos to take notes and sometimes rewatch them if I feel I didn’t fully understand something. So it’s kind of misleading to look at the duration and assume you can just sit down and do it in half day. Although I’m pretty sure there are people who can, but I prefer to not just consume information.
There are 13 lessons and a final exam for which you get a certificate. It’s not hard to pass the exam if you’re actively listening, but the required 90% of correct answers make it slightly more difficult to pass in the first go, because you can make one or two mistakes only. I personally like it and it makes me think about the earned certificate as a more serious achievement than just something I could get with no real effort.
The course starts with foundational knowledge. The material there surprised me (in a good way) because just once again I didn’t realize how much background understanding is actually needed. They cover topics like fast and slow thinking, cognitive biases, and how they could backfire. Then comes information about dopamine and cortisol, and some tips on how to take these brain chemicals into consideration when creating a landing page.
Getting into the actual landing pages there are two lessons about quantitative research. Michael shows how to get important insights from Google Analytics and how to create a manual step drop analysis. And as a bonus, he shares one of his custom reports.
The next lessons are about qualitative research. Here Michael shows how to do a funnel walkthrough to find the weakest spots and he talks about customer interviews. As a real bonus, in my opinion, is that he gives actual questions that can be used. He also talks about session recordings, heat maps, and user polls.
There are two lessons about copywriting. Michael explains the fundamentals of the landing page copywriting, information hierarchy, and 5 most important copy elements.
Afterward, follow three lessons about landing page design. There are 6 most important design elements, they are similar to copy elements and it gives a bit of understanding of effective landing page design. In the second lesson about design, Michael introduces the 6 most important principles of visual hierarchy. In the third lesson, he talks about forms that are essential to landing pages.
And the last lesson puts it all together on how to audit landing pages. I think this lesson is super valuable, because often in courses there’s just information in pieces without actually putting it all together into a process, but this course is brilliant. It is easier to learn when information is structured, there are lesson introductions, recaps, and the final lesson rounding it all up.
Conversion Research
This is the first course in the second part of the Mini Degree. It is introduced as the most important part of the conversion optimization process.
About the instructor
The course instructor is Peep Laja, who is also the founder of CXL. I find the way he presents information very unique. Every single sentence he says is important. Usually when someone talks I make a note every few minutes. It’s not like that with Peep. Everything he says is important, information is very concentrated, and feels like I should make a note of everything he says haha :)
One discovery leads to many new questions and paths to investigate — all of which might lead to an insight that will boost conversions. Or might not! We have to investigate each lead as if we were looking for a murderer.
About the content
There are 23 lessons in total. Some of them are longer and some shorter, but as I mentioned above Peep’s style is to make the best of his time talking and a lesson of only a couple of minutes is not less valuable than someone’s much longer speech.
It seems like this course isn’t available as a stand-alone course in CXL’s courses, so I will quickly introduce what lessons it consists of. The first lesson is about the fact that there’s no CRO to do if it’s a new business, but customer development should be done instead.
This conversion course becomes valuable to you once you get traffic and data in. Until then… talk to people!
Then Peep introduces The ResearchXL Model, site walkthroughs, heuristic analysis, usability evaluation. This is followed by a lesson on survey design from expert market researcher Dr. Rob Balon. It was incredibly useful to find out about common mistakes and I find his insights very valuable.
Afterward, there are more lessons by Peep (Customer Surveys via Email, Talk to Customer Support, Web & Exit Surveys, Live Chat Transcripts, User testing, Mouse tracking, Ring Model, Google Analytics Health Check, Funnels and Goal Flows, Key Audience Insights, Site Search, Content Reports, Screen Resolutions, Browsers & Devices, List of Custom Reports, Conversion Research Reports, Copytesting introduction, How to use Copytesting).
They are all great, but if I had to pick my top 3 it would be these:
- Google Analytics Health Check. It wasn’t just the information here that was great, but he also added a video of actually doing it.
- Custom reports lesson, because of what he said at the beginning of it:
If you can’t create any custom reports or advanced segments yourself, you can’t call yourself an optimizer.
I think Peep is the type of person who would just tell you get your sh** together in life in general, not just about creating reports in Google Analytics :)
3. Conversion Research Reports. In this lesson, he provides a sample report. Thank you, Peep!
So that much about my 5th week at CXL. I am loving it and I am also glad I’m so motivated otherwise I don’t think it would be easy to keep up with the amount of information, but I feel like a won a lottery to be able to learn at CXL.
