Types of Analysis

There are 5 types of analysis that can be run to determine the insights required for split testing a brand:

1. Heuristic Analysis - Identifying areas of interests, and checking key pages for issues and improvements on the topics of relevance (is this relevant to the target demographics?), motivation (how is this helping motivate the customer to buy?), and friction (how can we make it easier for the user to move to the next page/purchase?). They key method of doing this analysis is going through the pages, and taking any relevant and actionable notes. Identify issues and opportunities, and formulate hypotheses around them.
   
   
   1. What are some example insights that can be gained? Usability bugs, functionality issues, page loading issues, copy or design elements that may be intrusive, etc. In many ways, this is an intuitive analysis.
      
      
2. Web Analytics - identifying key areas where we are not performing. Biggest topics are demographics, device category, OS, browser, and affinity categories. Where are we performing very well? Where are we not?. The goal here is to do two things - know where we are strong, and communicate it to our traffic teams - and solve for where we are weak. This is to be done in conjunction with other types of analysis - if we perform poorly on mobile, why do we do so? What happens when you test it, do you see any issues? Are our mouse tracking analytics showing deeper insights into the topic? To sum up - web analytics are meant to identify leaks, but other types of analysis are to be used to determine root causes.
   
   
3. Mouse Tracking Analytics - Leveraging heatmaps, scroll maps, and video recordings to identify opportunities and trends. Heatmap and scrollmap review should be done frequently (every two days), but screen recordings should be leveraged only based on insights from web analytics, as to maximize efficiency.
   
   
   1. For heatmaps - What elements are drawing the user's attention? Is that where you want the attention to be? Are there elements that should not be drawing the user's attention, that are?
   2. For scrollmaps - Are there elements that you want the user to see, that most of them are not? 
   3. For screen recordings (once you've identified tertiary issues) - What are the habits of users who are purchasing? For the issues you've identified in web analytics, what appears to be the root issue the user is experiencing?
      
      
4. Technical Analysis - This may be called proactive heuristic analysis - and is basically testing the offer yourself through your insights in the other categories. If we are weak in mobile, what issues are you encountering in your tests through mobile? 
   
   
5. Qualitative Analysis - This is typically in the form of customer and traffic surveys. What insights can we gather from the direct feedback of our customers?

Each of these analysis feeds into one or the other, but should generally be done in below cadence:

1. Start with Web Analytics and identify your strengths and weaknesses. Do the same with Mouse Tracking Analytics, heatmaps and scrollmaps only. Do this daily, and develop a list of strengths and weaknesses
2. Combine Heuristic and Technical Analysis via direct website testing to add to above list. Only conduct this analysis when you have new pages, and new insights from above
3. View screen recordings to above problems, note your thoughts. As with Step #2, conduct only when you need to.
4. Run Qualitative Analysis using a standard template, and just narrow down your template. Use the survey to get qualitative feedback on your weakness list as well.