Conversion Optimization MiniDegree at CXL — Review 10/12

This week I have finished three courses at the CXL Institute that are part of the Conversion Optimization Minidegree. One from the third section, one from the fourth, and one from the fifth. This might sound like a rather unusual decision to take courses in random order, but life happens and my decision to do so was based purely on their duration because it varies greatly.

So the first course was Advanced Experimentation Analysis by Chad Sanderson in the Testing section. The second course is Digital Psychology & Behavioral Design Training by Brian Cugelman in the Optimization Strategies section. And the third course was How to Design, Roll Out, & Scale an Optimization Program by Merritt Aho in the final Conversion Optimization Program Management section.

Advanced experimentation analysis

For marketers or product managers, understanding the fundamentals of experimentation analytics will help set you and your team apart when it comes to managing and launching great experiments

The instructor starts the course with some inspiring statements like the one above and says that at the end of this course you should be able to recognize and understand just how deep the rabbit hole goes when it comes to this subject. He says that if you have that ability, it already puts you ahead of all the data analysts who don’t understand that they’re working with something extremely complex.

Part of every lesson in the course is dedicated to R coding language. The instructor said this is not a course to teach the fundamentals of R and he’ll be focusing on more high-level concepts like what are data frames, and how certain functions work. Sadly I have to say that I was disappointed by this approach and even though I can understand why CXL wanted to have it as an advanced level course in the program, I don’t feel like I got much value from it. It was beyond my abilities, but I certainly understand how deep the rabbit hole goes and I know how much I don’t know :)

And before I go to the part about what I liked, I will mention a couple of phrases that came from the instructor that made me think he didn’t expect many students to fully keep up: You don’t really need to know what that value does, I know you’re probably not following because a lot of these words are technical jargon.

Of course, it wasn’t that bad and here’s an example of some valuable info I got from the course.

I liked one of the first lessons that talked about metric hierarchy. The instructor says it’s one of the most important things that any business can focus on.

• At the top of your hierarchy should be what’s called the NorthStar metrics. These are the things that you are trying to optimize for consistently if you have a relatively optimized website.
• The next stage below that is Tier 2 metrics. These are metrics that aren’t necessarily our NorthStar metrics but might seem to correlate with our North Star metrics. It could be things like conversion rate or average order value
• Below there are Tier 3 metrics. These are metrics that may or may not be correlated with our NorthStar. These are things like visits, clicks, or page views.

Digital Psychology & Behavioral Design Training

The promise of the course is that you will learn the essence of behavioral design while developing a broad perspective on the psychology of online behavior.

Some interesting facts from the course:

• Emotions drive behavior
• Psychological models on emotions are ok, neuroscience models are wonderful
• Secure emotion is the ultimate goal
• Processes have to be so clear people will fly through it
• A good call-to-action must always ultimately lead to a reward
• If we under-promise and over-deliver people are much more likely to engage
• What neuroscience shows is that having children doesn’t mature people, it actually changes them physically. And so they are actually different people
• Eustress is the idea that there’s motivating stress that’s tied up with productivity, and so we know that if we don’t have enough stress it’s hard to get things done
• There’s a lesson about Netflix’s sign-up page. The instructor goes through it and audits the emotional design. Super interesting!

I liked this course. The instructor has academic background and you can feel it, but he’d definitely be one of the favorite professors if you’d be taking his lessons :) and I’d say he delivers on the course promise and you do get a broad perspective on the psychology of online behavior.

How to Design, Roll Out, & Scale an Optimization Program

A 20 min course, but full of good concentrated info.

The promise is that in this course you’ll gain industry-specific insights into hiring models, tracking success, and scaling locally and globally. Do they deliver? Yes.

So to summarize, there are 7 short lessons and the instructor touched on quite a few different topics:

• What business model to implement. The difference between a Centralized model and a Distributed model, and in which organizations you will typically find them. Merritt will help you understand the pros and cons of both so you can assess which will benefit your company best.
• Find talent that’s right for your business needs and the skillsets you should seek during the hiring process. CRO roles can stay open for a long time, even for over a year.
• The key business metrics to track in order to measure program growth, how the expectations should evolve as your program grows.
• How to communicate the program’s value in terms of dollars. Merritt will suggest supplementary metrics to track so your past test results can better enhance the development of your program, how to translate what you’ve tracked in a way that demonstrates the value of your program in terms of dollars.
• Make big wins early on. When starting a CRO program, it’s important to understand how big you can reasonably start out, and how fast you can grow. Merritt will also provide advice on scaling locally and globally.
• What kind of problems to expect when growing and how to avoid them.

I have two more weeks to go and during them, I’ll have to finish some more courses in the program and of course, then will come the final exam. I am excited, but it will feel a little unusual to have the evenings and weekends back to myself again :)

See you next week!