#60 – Expert Reviews: What Is It, Why Is It Important & How To Do It

But nonetheless, if you're using discounts or promotions. Yeah, different ways. But the principles still remains the same regardless of the type of website that you are looking at.

That makes sense. How about like the setup of the team that conducts expect reviews? Because I know like a CRO teams like involve like a few people for.

Us, whenever a client onboards with us. And this is particular to invesp. This seems to have worked for us over the years. So we continue to do it. Many, many people get involved. So at a minimum, all the CROs at Invesp and all the UX designers, Ayat gets involved. And then you have the account managers and the project managers also getting involved. The QA team getting involved. Because the first time when you involve somebody and they haven't seen it. I just mentioned your experience. They're like just sitting there, oh, what's going on here? But then as they do the 10th and the 50th expert review, they know it's in and out. They know the process we do. One thing that is very particular. My name is Khalil Sladeh and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live Hour, a show all about a B testing experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode, Khaled amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like, it's no big deal.

While pretty much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we will talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh, man, I bring tough questions like, do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high testing velocity? How do you measure the success of your conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are. But we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live Hour podcast today. Wherever you listen to your podcasts, Another week, another CRO Live Hour. I like to start my podcast this way. Like another week, another. Another boot trap. Simba, how is life?

I think, like, I'm having, like, really no complaints. So I'm grateful for everything. I would say, like, life is good for me. How about yours?

I'm in a good place for one yesterday. Sorry, guys. Oh, yeah, yeah. You were like, what is this? Like, you know, maybe you guys should do your own soccer Football. It's called football podcast. It's bringing it to C. But you don't understand. CRO and soccer or football go in hand in hand. It's all about scoring goals and having wins and celebrating the wins with the team. So yesterday we did well. So it's funny because couple of people were pinging me and they're like, oh, you disappeared for like a couple of hours. I'm like, yeah, something very urgent to attend to. And then one of them figured out, oh, Liverpool was playing, weren't they? I'm like, yes, they were playing. So before we jump into our discussion today, what's the latest and greatest with the marketing at invesp?

Things are happening. We are seeing the leads coming in. That's a good thing. I made like a post today on LinkedIn about how you should never set your marketing plan in stone for the whole year because you never know like what's going to happen. Like in the next three, four months things will change and sometimes they'll force you to change your. What do you call your marketing action plan. I was just like saying it's best like if you can maybe plan all the details for Q1, but for Q2, 3 and 4, you can just put like an overview of maybe just like some objectives that you like to achieve there. Because whatever happens in Q1 is what will determine what will happen, like in the next quarters that come. We had a marketing plan going into this year and we have made like some few adjustments on some of the campaigns that we are running because I would say not everything like goes the way that you expect. I'm not saying this as in something bad happened. No, it's just we're doing like some experiment like in one of the channels.

And you can share the channel name. It's okay. We're as transparent as we can go for it.

Yeah, yeah, it's LinkedIn. I know like some of our clients on LinkedIn, like for Invesp. One of the things that I've also like learned, like we have different kinds of clients like that fall like into different packages. But there's a certain type of client that we go after and most of them, as we were doing like our research, we just realized that, oh, they're not even like that active on LinkedIn of which we are running like ads on LinkedIn.

Yeah, it's fascinating, right? Because we were active on LinkedIn. Most agency owners are active on LinkedIn, but it doesn't matter. So you're active amongst. It's the echo chamber. Correct. You're active amongst other people. But we segmented the client lists, looked at the company size and where their base and their revenue and so many different characteristics. And then we're like, oh, we have a hundred companies here. Let's see if they're active on LinkedIn. They're not there. Really, guys, you're not hanging out on LinkedIn. So where do they hang out, by the way?

That's a good question to ask some of them. I believe that, like, they are more on Twitter, but that's also why we should always do, like, the jobs to be done to understand, like, the buying triggers and like the channels and places that they hang out. Because some of them, they are not even like, on Twitter. There you might find them, like at conferences. So you'd have to do, like, the jobs to be done to try and understand where you can actually find them.

Okay, so LinkedIn was an experiment. Do we call it a failed experiment at this point or. No, we're still going to try a couple of other things, I guess.

I think we have one more card to play.

One more card to play with LinkedIn. And otherwise, if it's successful, great. If it's not, we, you know, just how we make our annual donations to Google or would have made an annual donation to LinkedIn. But yeah, that's marketing. You're always making assumptions. Sometimes you try and validate them before you jump in. Sometimes you have to jump in and see the data and where the data leads you.

That's true. That's true. The crazy part about all this is with marketing, you can't really rely on what worked last year. Right? Because things change along the way. So you have to come up, like, with a new game plan, like, each and every year, of which, of course, there are certain activities that you can still borrow from the previous season. But I think you always have to.

Be ready to change a big deal for me. Now, most people would laugh at this, but being an experimentation company and people who work in optimizing forms and landing pages, I have always refused to add one particular field on our landing pages. And then that field is. And people would chuckle because they're like, oh, I can't believe you're adding it. Where did you hear first about us? And give people some different options? But that attribution is so powerful. We get 1, 2, 3 contacts sometimes per day, companies reaching out to us. And we ask them during our conversation, hey, where did you hear about us? But I'm like, you know what? I want data. I want data. Even if that's going to impact our conversion rate by a little bit. I don't think it will, but maybe I'm wrong. We'll see. It'll be interesting to see where people hear about INVESP first and then go back and see, oh, here's where they're hearing about us and then making adjustments there.

So today we are talking about expect reviews. I love expect reviews because I remember like when I joined Invesp in 2019, one of the first conversion optimization sessions or processes or tasks, not really like my task. I was also like involved in an expert review. Like I just got into a room where people were doing like that expert review analysis. Then I had to sit in and listen. I was seeing blanks at the time. It was my first time, like being involved in anything to do with conversion optimization. So five years later. Interesting. Let's see. Let's talk about expert reviews.

We have what, 13, 14 people watching us as we're going to delve into expert reviews. Tell us where you're listening to us from. Drop a comment. Tell us where you're listening to us from. Drop a link to your website as well. Let's see what we can do with that. But let's talk expert reviews, my friend.

The first question that I have for you is what is an expert review and why is it important in conversion optimization?

So an expert review traditionally is taking a platform websites, either on a particular device, mobile desktop or an application and walking through it with a set of parameters, industry standards to say, is this page, website, funnel, landing page, are they meeting those standards? There are different types of expert reviews that you conduct. There are usability expert reviews and then there is conversion rate optimization expert reviews. They're looking at completely different things and their goal and the outcome of those is completely different. When you conduct a usability expert review, what you are doing is reviewing the 10. At least that's what we do. We review the 10 NNg principles of usability and as we walk through the buyer journey, the visitor's journey on the website, we say, hey, we have a problem over here. Oh yeah, this is breaking this usability principle. This is. And we jot down all of these problems. So we're using when it comes to usability industry standards to evaluate and try and say there are some usability issues on the particular platform page site that we're looking at. A conversion optimization expert review is a little bit different because it has two components to it. One component is we start asking, so where are the visitors coming from? What type of visitors do we have what are they seeing prior to clicking and landing on the website? And we go through that scenario and journey of that visitor, trying to put ourselves in the visitor's shoes. Now we do two things. One, we're thinking about the visitor and what they might be thinking and evaluating the page. And number two, we're also evaluating the page from a conversion optimization perspective. Almost, I dare say almost every usability issue is a conversion optimization issue and it's not the other way around. Not every conversion optimization issue is a usability issue. When we're conducting a conversion optimization analysis of a website, we're looking or a particular page, we're looking at 185 different elements in that particular page. It's lengthy, it's powerful, it dissects every element on the website. It dissects the copy, the design, the navigation, how people look at the page, the layout. You mention it will be evaluated during an expert review. And the idea there, let me take a look at this and throw as many problems based on my experience finding this out. People love to conduct expert reviews and at the same time they can be problematic. But we can leave that for another question. But that's in a nutshell what an expert review is.

Okay, Yep, that makes sense. I like the fact that you also explained that like there are two different types of expect review. One focuses like on the usability and the other one focuses like on conversion optimization. For the one that focuses on conversion optimization you say like they are almost like 180 and 285, right?

185, yeah.

185 like elements that you look at. Are those elements the same for an E commerce website and also different website? Let's just say maybe a SaaS website.

Yeah, I would say 90% of those elements are the same on a SaaS or an E commerce website or lead gen type website there's 10% that is different because some of those elements that we evaluate are very particular to particular elements on a page. So for example, on E commerce website I will look at pricing and how it's displayed, selection of quantity and how that's being displayed, shipping information, how that's being displayed, that's very particular to E commerce. Correct. On a SaaS we will look at the different plans that you're offering, we're looking at the CTAs that you are using. So there's about 10% that's very particular to the type of website. But the other 90%, for example visitor orientation, that matters. Correct. And visitor orientation could be done in so many different ways. Clarity, clarity of the offer, Clarity around unique value proposition, clarity around messaging. There's so many different things. Orientation, clarity, unique value proposition. Those are very powerful. Think about incentives as a principle and as a concept. You can use incentives whether it's scarcity or limited quantity. It works better for example for E Commerce than a SaaS, than a lead gen. But nonetheless, if you're using discounts or promotions. Yeah, different ways. But the principles still remains the same regardless of the type of website that you are looking at.

That makes sense. How about like the setup of the team that conducts expect reviews? Because I know like a CRO team, like involve like a few people for.

Us, whenever a client onboards with us and this is particular to invesp, this seems to have worked for us over the years. So we continue to do it. Many, many people get involved. So at a minimum, all the CROs at Invesp and all the UX designers, Ayat gets involved. And then you have the account managers and the project managers also getting involved. The QA team getting involved. Because the first time when you involve somebody and they haven't seen it, I just mentioned your experience. They're like just sitting there, oh, what's going on here? But then as they do the 10th and the 50th expert review, they know it's in and out. They know the process. We do one thing that is very particular. Where we take a page, we have the list of 180 elements and we start by giving 10 minutes to everybody. Look at the page, look at the different elements and start jotting the issues that you see. After 10 minutes, people bring in like the issues that they found. You cannot go through 185 elements on a single page in 10 minutes. Correct. But this is the first wave and we start a discussion. You might have 12 people doing the expert review and let's say each of them captured three to five issues. That's a lot of issues. So we gather them, we have somebody who's going to look at the issues and then they start synthesizing them saying, oh, this issue has been repeated four or five times. This issue no one else has mentioned. So they start grouping them in group. At the same time the larger group is going to the next set of elements on the same page. Correct. It's an exhausting process to finish. To do an expert review for a website is probably three to four days worth of work from a lot of people. Correct. Now there are some companies that do an expert review with a single person. Single person sits down, looks, finds and they're done. We like expert reviews. We spend a lot of time on them. We have a very detailed process because every output that we have gets inputted to a database, a data warehouse that we have to compare the issue. Oh, they have a problem with clarity. Okay, what are some of the other websites that had an issue with clarity? What kind of success rate we've had with those? What are some of the examples? So that initial expert review exercise that we go through is very powerful for us in identifying issues and in prioritizing issues as well.

What sort of issues like are we talking about here? What sort of issues do you usually find? Let's just say like maybe on an e commerce website where you think, oh, this has been like an issue for many websites that we have conducted expert reviews.

It really depends on the website. So one thing that we do at the end of the quarter is looking at all these items that we've identified. There's a classification, correct. Under each one of those. This came from, for example, trust, clarity, unique value proposition trust, maybe orientation, maybe messaging. There's an. I'm just mentioning just random things, but we have three different levels that we look for each element of those 180,000. So it's just a lot. There's top level elements, second level element, third level elements. What's interesting is typically you find that a website struggles of the 185 different elements, they will have problems in anywhere between 30 to 40 different elements that consistently throughout the website. Because most websites nowadays have gotten many things right, but then when they have a problem, let's say you have a problem with unique value proposition. When you have that problem, it just, it shows this ugly head throughout the website in so many different ways. Correct. So you will see it appearing in multiple ways. And that's very powerful because guess what, you take that problem, it's like, okay, this problem appeared in multiple ways on many different types of pages. Let me try and tackle it. For example, on what we call our highest value page. Our checkout is the highest value page. If I increase conversion rate there by 10%, it's an additional half a million dollars per revenue. So we assign a dollar value to that. We try to solve the problem there. Let's say you find a solution. You say, I find a solution for unique value proposition trust. Unique value proposition clarity. Guess what? I am going to do two things. One, I'm going to do what we call an exploitation. I'm going to try and build up on that win. Great. Expert review identified the Issue. I tested the solution, it worked. Let's exploit that, let's do additional testing to see if we can do better. And then I'm going to do an iteration, I'm going to take that win and I'm going to implement it on different types of pages. So it's almost like the minute you have a winner, start with an expert review, you've identifies an issue, you came up with a solution and then you split. It's like, oh, exploit iterate, exploit iterate. And the goal is to maximize the benefits.

Listening to you explain this, is there like a way that you validate like some of the issues that you find during expert reviews or you just do the research, right, the expert review, find like some issues, then come up with a hypothesis, or you first like validate using like some other method.

There's two different approaches to this. Traditionally what we've done is we've done an expert review and then in parallel we'll do user research. So on site, user research, exit, end to end surveys, post purchase surveys. So that's a group of activities that happen. And we'll also do data research. So we're looking at analytics, heat maps and session recording, and then we're looking at some competitors. So there's several activities that happen at the same time. And then we might find the issue we've identified through an expert review and we've identified through analytics as well. Analytics is showing us that there's a problem and the expert review is pointing out to the same problem. That is to me a higher priority issue than an issue that's been identified only through an expert review. I don't have data supported, I don't have user research supported, I don't have any competitive intelligence to support it. So it's not enough to conduct an expert review. You still have to go through a list of activities, a whole bunch of activities to come back and you say, you know what, this single issue has been identified in so many different ways, it probably needs to be of a higher priority item. Oh, this issue only been identified through an expert review. Okay. So it's not necessarily a very high priority item. If I cannot find data to prove my point that there's a problem there, that makes it a weaker item. If I find this item appeared only through user research, but I have no data whatsoever to support it and I could not identify the through an expert review, that's something that's going to give me a pause. I need to investigate that further. So there's different ways that you deal.

With Those issues before, like I ask, like some other questions that we have here, I want to take you back again to an expert review that focuses on conversion optimization. You said there are three levels, right, that you look at. Can you maybe just for people who are listening, just to give them an idea of what the first level is, what comes next and what is the third level? Yes.

So I'm actually going to pull up our Panorama module. Panorama is what we call all those 185 different elements and there's three different levels in it. Our first level is very focused on conversion, on the conversion framework. So it talks about trust, it talks about fuds, it talks about incentives, it talks about engagement, talks about the buying stage, it talks about the sales complexity. Those are our first levels elements. The second sub element is within trust. So you have continuity, for example. And I'm actually looking at the data. Continuity, congruency, value proposition, authority, endorsements, social proof. Let's see what else under trust. Assurances, authenticity, clarity, UX issues, those are all classification of the element. Now remember, when we're classifying the problem that we're identifying on the website, we're not classifying the solution. So almost walk to a doctor's office. I always like to give that example and what's happening is like, oh, here's the disease that you have or the potential of a disease. And then I'm going to do some more diagnosis for you and I'm going to try and figure out the issue that you have under each one of those. Let's take continuity. So we have trust, we have continuity. Continuity has the ad copy, the ad design, the ad messaging, the ad branding and then the flow. Those are all under continuity. So that tells you we're looking at the ad, what's the message that you're doing, what's the design that you're doing, what's the flow that you're doing? And are we having that continuity when somebody lands on the website and we might find out that, oh, no, there's a problem, you promise people to get two items for free and you don't even mention it on your landing page? Or using this headline in the ad and you're not using it, you're using this design in the ad and you're not using it on the landing page. Let's take a different one. FUDs fears, uncertainties and bounds. Again, problems. One of the big items under FUDS is clarity. Now notice clarity falls under trust and it falls under fuds. And you have to be careful because again, you are trying to identify the issues. But under clarity, are you one of them? So it's actually a UX issue between the system and the real world. Is there clarity? This is very E commerce around the shipping costs, response, delivery time, shipping time, return policy, free trials, warranty information, packaging, next steps, currency, number of products left clear CTAs, accepted payment methods, accuracy, quality, reliability, productivity. This is all under fuds. So it's important for us to come with that classification because after we conduct, sometimes people tell us like, why all this? Because after we conduct an experiment that we're able to go back and we say we've ran four experiments on this type of element on FUDs, clarity, return policy, for example, or refunds. And of those, three were successful, one was not a success.

Why?

What was the difference between the two? You want to dig through the data. This was the principle. Here's what the data is telling us. How do we actually tie that all together?

That's good. I'm sure our listeners understood. Now, what do you mean by first level, second level and third level? Let's talk about the tools that you use when conducting an expect review. Are there any tools that you use?

The team uses a tool to capture the notes correct. Because they look at the page and they capture the notes and summarize them. There are many different tools. Sometimes people get stuck on the tools and we fell into that trap where people get stuck and I want this fancy tool, I want that fancy tool for us. A Google sheet does the job, by the way, because it's just very first step and it's very quick and everybody has access to it. And you can do some interesting things in terms of pivot table. Correct. Because you can say, oh, give me all the elements under this third, all the problems I've identified against this element and you can just pull 7, 10 different problems correct for one element and then we can compare them, we can group them together. So I find that Google Sheets will do the job really well. By the way, I know it's not the answer some people like to hear, but sometimes the easiest answer, the simplest answer is the best answer.

How do you ensure that your recommendations that you come up with after conducting an expert review align with the overall goals and objectives of the website or business?

Yeah, that's a bigger question. Correct. Because what you do right now is identifying all possible problems. We talked about identifying problems through different methods. Expert review is one of them. User research, data analysis is another. Competitive analysis is another. Usability testing is another. You come up with a roadmap Correct. And then now you want to prioritize this roadmap. I've identified 100, 150 issues on the website. Which one of those actually match what the business objectives are? And that starts by understanding the business objectives. Because if you don't have a clue about the business objectives, then you're just guessing. And if you're guessing, you're probably going to be making mistakes. And some of that is a very fine balance. Correct. Because you are the expert, you know what you're doing. But guess what? You need that guidance from the executive to say here is our priority. So let's say that the executives tell you that. Well, our priority. As an example, let's say I'm an E commerce website. I want to increase average order value this quarter. Everybody tells you I want to increase conversion rates. Okay, great, we'll do that. But what else? What are some of the other things? Maybe retention, maybe average order value. And I've heard so many different objectives as I talk to VPs of marketing at E commerce companies over the years. I want to reduce, like now improve our roas. I want to reduce our cpas. I then look within my list of items I've identified. I need to score each one of them. So through a. We have a very detailed prioritization sheet, which we just did recently. It used to be 14, 15 different items. We've changed our approach to prioritizing to just like in the last couple of months to something that I think is a lot more effective. So we are looking at about nine different elements, but also we're looking at the dollar value of a particular page. And also as we go through those items, we flag the ones that we believe will have a direct impact on the business objective. Correct. I can identify of the hundred issues, 150 issues that I've identified. If I can identify 10 issues that have a direct impact and that are directly related to the business objective, to the quarter's objective, guess what? They get scored higher. Now, it doesn't mean that I only work on those because sometimes, okay, you're trying to improve average order value. And yes, I know that. I have a couple of experiments on the cart that I can do that. But sometimes the journey of trying to get people to add more items to their cart starts prior to that. So you really have to step back, look at the full map and keep in mind this is the strategy, the different items, and it takes a while to get the hang of that. Correct. Because there's just a lot of data inputs. It's one thing when you don't have enough data, it's a whole other problem. We have a ton of data inputs because you really have to be able to step back and look at all the data inputs and synthesize it in a way that's the executives, when they look at it, they're like, oh, we'd like that.

Those are the questions that I had for you today. You answered them in a detailed way. Unless, like maybe would have some questions from our viewers or listeners, I don't think we have.

I see. Paul, thank you. It's been a while since we've chatted, Paul. I think it still runs a CRO agency, actually, in the uk. Fairly successful CRO agency in the uk. So thank you for stopping by. Thank you everybody for listening. This is going to be go live. We've crossed some really great numbers, by the way, on the CRO Live Hour. Thank you everybody for listening and thank you for your support. If you know somebody who would benefit from the CRO Live Hour, please share a link to the episode and to the podcast with them. Until next week. As I always say, happy testing.

Sam.