Drive and Convert (Ep. 097): You’ve Got Data! Now What?

Listen to this episode:

About This Episode:

Many companies conduct amazing research to understand their customers, but more often than not, this research gets lost and isn’t maximized to its full potential. Quantitative and qualitative data from customer survey results, user testing recordings, and interview transcripts can all lead to important learnings for your organization, so how can you make sure to leverage it? 

In this Drive and Convert episode, Jon and Ryan discuss actionable steps that you can take to help your future self and your team use the data you collect.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How to organize the data you’ve collected 
2. How to identify patterns and insights from data
3. How to map data observations to areas of your business 
4. Which areas you can improve based on data

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, hit us up on Twitter. We’re @jonmacdonald and @ryangarrow.

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Spotify
• Castbox
• Castro
• Overcast
• Pocket Casts
• Stitcher
• Subscribe via RSS

Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You are listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan:
Jon, you and I talk to customers constantly, and we advise our clients to talk to their customers and collect data and take actions on it. You want to talk today about what do you do then? You’ve got all this customer data. Great. Now what? But it seems to be a fairly reasonable question. I think, too often, we get caught up in, “Got to collect data, got to have data, got to have it, got to have it,” and then you don’t even think about “Now what? I’ve got it. Where do I put it? What do I do with it?” So what are we going to do with this? You arguably collect more customer… or advise your clients to capture more customer data than almost every other partner we work with in the e-commerce space. So what next? You get it. And then, I guess, what do you mean when you say customer data? Because it’s probably different than what I think of when I think about customer data.

Jon:
For sure. Well, look, I think customer data, I’ll just start there so we can be on the same page, but it might mean something different to everybody. You’re right. But when I think of customer data, I am thinking about all the heat maps, all the surveys you’ve done, all the user testing videos and transcripts and all these artifacts that come out of the intense research process that happens when you’re trying to improve your website or optimize it. And so that’s really what I’m thinking about is what are all these artifacts that come out of the research? That is the genesis of this question.
I was talking with one of our clients and they said, “All right, Jon, you are always recommending that we collect data. I have all this data. Now you’ve got me doing heat mapping occasionally, you’ve got me doing surveying, you’re helping me with user testing, all these things. Now what do I do? Where do I put this data? How do I organize it? What do I do with it?” Not looking for the specific prescription because, again, that data’s going to be different for every site, but how do I get started with it? And that’s really the question here. So once you have it, it just is “What am I going to do with it?” And so that’s what I really wanted to talk about today. I thought it was a great question, and it actually formed this week’s email that went out to everybody subscribed to our email list, little plug there for what we’re calling The Good Question now. We rebranded our email list and so this was a really-

Ryan:
[inaudible 00:02:36] if you haven’t subscribed to his email list, you’re missing out, by the way.

Jon:
Yeah. Go to thegood.com/insights and you can sign up for The Good Question. But here’s the thing. Many companies are just collecting this amazing data, and they want to understand their customers, but the problem is so much of that good data and that research never sees the light of day. And that’s really what I want to help resolve here, because I’m talking, again, that qualitative and quantitative data sets. We’re talking survey results, user testing, recordings, interview transcripts, and these all can be really overwhelming in large numbers, especially if you’re an individual, you’re one person at your team, at your company. And so it becomes hard to look back six months ago what the questions were and how you had all that data. So without some planning and process, good research just isn’t going to be used to its full potential. And what I’m all about is helping people improve that customer journey. So you got to use the data. But the good news is there’s a few steps that the team and I came up with that you can use to help your future self, and you will thank yourself if you do these things. So that’s the genesis of the conversation today and why I want to talk about this.

Ryan:
Awesome. So we’re assuming you’re already collecting data from activities happening on the site, and this is in addition to you’re collecting customer data after transactions and emailing and loyalty and all that stuff. So you are doing something to improve the conversion rates on your site and collecting information. Great. You got the, in my opinion, the complicated, more difficult hurdle to overcome now, like, okay-

Jon:
Actually starting, right?

Ryan:
Yeah. You’ve started. Now, it’s like, okay, what’s the first step once you’ve started, you’ve got all this data, where do you go first?

Jon:
Yeah, it seems obvious, but I’m shocked that more brands don’t do this. And this was the first question I asked in reply, which was, “Well, does your research have a home?” And answer is like, “Well, what do you mean by a home?” And the reality is that the first steps of having a great outcome with data is having a place to organize it and store it and share it with others. And so you need to be thinking about a home for all of this research and someplace that’s visible and accessible.
So this could be a shared Google Drive folder. It could be a dedicated customer research like Slack channel for instance, that you can go back and search through. We love Airtable and Notion, two great tools. If you haven’t heard of Airtable, it’s a database of sorts. It’s extremely customizable with a great user interface on it. And you could even use, as you advance, you could even set up research tools. There’s a great one called Dovetail that works really well for this purpose. But really, whatever you choose, it needs to be something that keeps your research reports in mostly one place, so you know where to go, and everyone else knows where to go, and is known by and accessible to the appropriate team members, so that you can share it.

Ryan:
Okay. So if you’ve got, for example, a heat-mapping software on the site, you need to not just keep the data inside that platform but export it into a shared area. It’s not just good enough to keep the login in that shared area and say, “Hey, go look at our report here.” You need to actually put them in there.

Jon:
I would advise for that for the sake that I can’t tell you the number of brands we start working with, and we ask if they have heat maps, they’d say “Yeah, we did heat maps a couple of years ago, but we don’t have it on our site anymore.” And I said, “Oh, great. Can you share the data with us?” And they say, “Oh no, we stopped paying and our account’s not there anymore.” And so they lost all their data. And it’s like, “Well, that would’ve been nice to have, but we have to start over now.” And so you never know what’s going to happen in the future. And if you want to share it, do you really think team members are going to go log into another system they have no idea how to use, and they’re going to be overwhelmed, they’re going to be intimidated by the software, perhaps it’s not their day job always. So I think putting it in one place that you can send to people is going to be ideal.

Ryan:
Got it. Okay. So you’ve got a place to put it. This is something I’m going through right now, trying to figure out how to organize it. Having a place is great, but what makes sense to let people easily find the information they’re looking for? I mean, the volume of data your clients collect from a CRO standpoint is the large. I could easily get lost, I’m sure, just by looking at a file. So how do you organize those or direct people to organize that information?

Jon:
Yeah. Well, I’m glad we’re killing two birds with one stone, as they say, by helping you and everyone else today with answering these questions. So, okay, once your research has a home, you’ll want to make sure you have just some system to keep it easy to find. One easy way, and this is how we do it at The Good, is using what we call tags. Most people know about tags. It’s a common term these days, where you can then go through and search through all these tags. So what you could do with your tags is create folders and drive, for instance. So maybe you have heat map folder, and then it’s by different pages or dates, et cetera. But the tags really make it easy because it helps make it somewhat searchable. And this is where something like an Airtable, where you can have different views on that data, you can store metadata with it, et cetera, sort it in different tables based on tags.
You want to see everything that somebody mentioned, navigation, or a study we did around navigation. Well, if it’s got a navigation tag, you can go in and find all of those real easily. So examples of different tags that are pretty common or things like top objections, maybe new features that you launched, different motivations that people have for why they’re searching, like can’t find a product, or just labeling a search for somebody who took a search action, and then starting pretty high level. Pain points is a good one that consumers have. Maybe different points along the customer journey.
So I mentioned navigation, but maybe it’s by page or just there’s a checkout tag. So the key here is there’s no right or wrong way to do this. You need to just do it so that you’ll actually use the data. So do what is best for you, and you can evolve it over time. And really, all of this is meant to help you do one thing and that’s share your insights, share what you find. Because data that’s not shared is useless data. What’s the point of it if you’re not going to look at it, use it, and share it. So you want to make sure that all the various teams who need it have access to the data. That’s really what it’s going to help you do.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Ryan:
Okay. Now, you’ve mentioned a couple areas to store data, but for us in Logical Position, we are a Microsoft Office shop, Office 365.

Jon:
I’m sorry.

Ryan:
Have you… I’m like “Oh.” But have you seen companies use SharePoint or OneDrive, or can you use Dropbox or Google Drive,

Jon:
Yeah. Again, I think-

Ryan:
… or are things just too clunky to [inaudible 00:10:28]?

Jon:
I think you can. That’s where you could start. Okay. But what’s going to happen is it’s really hard to do tagging in those, and be able to say, give me everything that matches a checkout tag, everything tagged checkout. It’s really hard to do that. So you’re really going to have to create folders for each of your tags, and then stuff can’t be in multiple folders, and it just, you know. So as a bare minimum, that’s a great place to start. Here’s all our heat maps, and within the heat maps folder, we have each date or each page, some way to know when it happened and what it is. Most heat maps, when you export the image, or even a movement map or any of those types of things, what you’re going to get is a URL that what you downloaded it as, the file name is going to be a bunch of characters, and it’s not going to be descriptive at all in terms of what it is. So when that happens, you’re kind of left without being able to use those insights. You collected the data, but now you don’t have an idea of what you’re looking at.

Ryan:
So the biggest value, potentially, on some of those other platforms you mentioned is going to be the ability to add tags to filter them, not necessarily just, “Hey, it’s 50 terabytes of storage.”

Jon:
Right. The idea here is to identify patterns and then be able to form insights.

Ryan:
Okay. How do I do that? How do I identify, like what are the big buckets you see people using to tag or form those insights?

Jon:
Yeah. Once you’ve organized, tagged, and then started sharing that research, you’re in a really good place to step back and start analyzing it. And I say share the data before you analyze it, because the last thing you want to do is to influence the view that others will have. So you don’t want to bias that data by having your own insights of that data that you have shared with the core data to other people. It’s a scientific principle, right? I’m not going to give you my research report and the samples, and then you’re going to go run your own test on the samples after reading my research report. I’ve now biased your research. We’re not independent anymore. Whether you believe it or not, it’s happening. So, really, what you want to do is share first and then go back and then do what a lot of researchers call finding the arc of the data.
What are the overall trends? That’s the best place to start. So if you’re looking at everything tagged checkout, is it generally negative or generally positive? Is it everybody focusing on the difficulty of one small aspect of it, or are they bouncing and abandoning the cart because they can’t complete something? So you’re going to start seeing these large arcs of data that you can start zooming in on. That’s what you want is the larger trends. And you’re going to have some gut instincts based on this research. You’re going to say, “Wow, everyone hates our checkout,” but I caution you to not immediately run with those ideas, because it’s a good way to introduce your own bias into the data, because now you’re only going to pull the negative stuff, and you’re only going to focus on the part that you’ve noticed initially. So really, you want to look at the overall arc of the data, which means you have to look at all the data. That’s the hard part too. But relying on your gut alone in research, it’s just like testing. It’s going to lead your team on wild goose chases, which you really don’t want to do. So I suggest you take a step back, look for overarching trends like customer segments and different types of improvements like that, I think would be a great place to start.

Ryan:
Okay, so you’ve got your data and you’re looking at insights. Do you put summaries inside the data areas to help guide some people or just avoid it altogether?

Jon:
I wouldn’t. I would keep your data that you’re collecting separate from your insights, ideally. So if I’m handing you data, I’m not handing you my insights with that data. Now, if you are a stakeholder and you want the insights, I can give you the data to back up my insights, because now we’re having a conversation strictly around insights. You’re asking for my bias, my opinion, my findings. You’re not going into the data yourself and trying to form your own opinions based on that. So that’s where it needs to be something that you kind of take a step back from and not share. But you do want to take the next step with these insights and map those observations to areas of your business. So I don’t know about you. I’ve never had a customer say, “You know, if you had advertised your fitness gear to me as suiting up for me time, I totally would’ve bought it.” It doesn’t happen, right?

Ryan:
[inaudible 00:14:59].

Jon:
Yeah, I wish it was that easy. Just tell me what you want. I’ll do it. But that rarely happens. And it’s really part of your job to identify those insights and then map those insights to potential improvements at your brand. And so that’s where having a good understanding of the total arc of that data, and then you can make hypotheses using that arc of data. This is taking that next step. So start looking at places you can make improvements like your ads or your email sequences or content on the site, copy, social media posts, images you’re using, entire aspects of your site. And then once you’ve identified a bunch of these hypotheses, you can start crafting experiments and testing those improvements. But again, generative research gives you evidence of what to test and which directions to go in, but you still have to test for validation. Again, you’re going to have your gut, but you need to make sure you’re validating it.

Ryan:
Got it. Okay. So I’m hearing these big themes. So you’ve got to be obviously collecting data to be able to house it properly. So be collecting it, have something to do. So if you haven’t been to surveys, go start doing those. But once you do, you need to give it a home, and it’s likely you’re going to need a new system for this. Most people’s SharePoints, OneDrive, GoogleDrive is not going to be the best for this, but at least you’ll be [inaudible 00:16:20].

Jon:
Yeah. You’ll quickly outgrow that. It’s a good place to start, but you will quickly outgrow it. So my favorite is Airtable. If you had to choose one, that’s where I would go.

Ryan:
Do we say that Jon sent them?

Jon:
Airtable is a pretty large company. I don’t think they know who Jon is or care very much.

Ryan:
Okay.

Jon:
But I love the tool.

Ryan:
Maybe someday they will.

Jon:
I think it’s great. Maybe someday. Yeah, just go to airtable.com and sign up. It’s a great tool. So fairly cost-effective too.

Ryan:
Okay. So you’ve got a home. Now you’ve got to organize it, and folders are good, but what you really want is to be able to tag that data so you can see multiple different folders talking about that same thing, whether that’s heat maps or surveys, talking about checkout issues or top objections, things like that.

Jon:
Right. So tag your stuff, and there’s no right or wrong way to do it. Just get started doing it. You can always add more later, right?

Ryan:
Yep. And you can change it. It’s almost like you just got to be moving to be able to fix it and figure out what does or doesn’t work in terms of your data and how people going to be looking for different things. But tag it. House it, tag it. And then you want to start identifying those patterns so that you can start building up for a test. So identify it and house those insights separate from the data so that you’re not skewing other people in the organizations looking at that data and trying to make insights.

Jon:
Exactly. And you want to make sure you’re sharing the data, before you form those insights.

Ryan:
Yep. Okay. And so then you’ve got some insights, then you can start testing and seeing what does make a difference or not make a difference [inaudible 00:17:51] on your site.

Jon:
Yes. Yeah. There we are. Hopefully this helped you today, Ryan.

Ryan:
I’m the least organized in our household, and so there’s lots of things I have to work on. So if I can apply this organization hierarchy to many things in my life, it’s probably going to be better and my wife will thank you.

Jon:
Just remember, the tag is your friend.

Ryan:
Tag is your friend. I search a lot of things in our organization with tags, like when we use them in Google ads.

Jon:
Oh, yeah.

Ryan:
I don’t know why certain storage arenas don’t allow for tagging.

Jon:
Yeah.

Ryan:
I would think that that [inaudible 00:18:22].

Jon:
I don’t understand that either. My email is… It’s run by filters with tags. I have everything, as soon as it hits my inbox, it gets tagged in one way or another, and that helps me sort through my inbox real quick, because I know what’s important and what’s not. And you can do the same thing with your data, of course. But why they don’t have that in Google Drive, I have no idea.

Ryan:
[inaudible 00:18:45].

Jon:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:18:45]. Yeah. There you go. Well, unfortunately we’re both-

Ryan:
Well, Jon, thank you for the education. And I think there’s a lot we can do with this across getting going with CRO, so I appreciate it.

Jon:
Yeah. Not the sexiest of topics, but it is a question I get quite frequently. So, thought we should share.

Ryan:
Hey, some things just need to be done correctly. Thank you.

Jon:
All right, Ryan, thank you.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes. You can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.