On how to visualize your web users’ journey & address their pain points for a better UX

[00:00:00] Andreea: Hey data lovers, Andreea from KPI studio here. You’re listening to Eyes on the KPIs, talks on all things, data, data-driven decisions, data visualization, and business intelligence. You’ll hear the stories of the people behind the numbers and their tips on how to grow your company by focusing on your data.

[00:00:21] Andreea: Today is a great today. We’re having our first ever chat! Our guest is Russell Wojcik, a content marketer and strategist at heart, who is well acquainted with SEO, analytics, CRO, all those good stuff. Right now, he’s running the show as the content manager at Mouseflow, a tool with almost 170,000 customers worldwide, that reveals how people use websites and what frustrates them in the process. This way, website owners, like you and me, can get feedback and optimization insights from real user data. You’re going to learn how to make sense of data, how to visualize your users’ behavior, and how to validate or invalidate your assumptions about how your audience is using your website.

[00:01:09] Andreea: All the notes for this doc will be on KPIs.Studio slash eyes on the KPIs written hyphenated. Please enjoy our conversation with Russell Wojcik!

[00:01:23] Andreea: Hi, Russell, thank you for accepting our invitation and for being our first guest!  For people who don’t know who you are, can you tell us a few words about yourself? 

[00:01:32] Russell: Yeah, yeah. Thank you for having me again. It’s really great to be here and speak with you, and run through some thoughts on marketing, analytics, and KPIs, of course. I am the content manager for Mouseflow, which is a website behavior analytics tool. We are based in Copenhagen, as well as Austin, Texas, with a remote team as well. So really embracing that whole dispersed workforce kind of deal. 

Personally, I come from a, way back, more of a public relations background on hospitality and travel. I was with an agency in the US that did a lot of international work. I transitioned more into digital marketing kind of naturally; also did a lot of freelance content writing PR writing. So it came up through that before joining Mouseflow and yeah, kind of took what I’d been doing in the past, which is really content, content strategy, conversion rate optimization as well, and things like SEO and analytics and all these and kind of combine that into this role here where I can help really evangelize what Mouseflow does in terms of our behavior analytics, as well as tell that story too the audience and just embrace the different audiences we have that use our tool in a lot of different ways. 

I have a background in writing. My formal education is in writing and that just naturally translated into things online, digital marketing, and technology and, you know – follow the opportunity. So, yeah, that’s kind of where I come from.

[00:03:04] Andreea: We invited you here today to talk about exactly this. So Mouseflow does all these user behavior analytics, and you’re a content marketer. We are curious if you think data analysis is a must-have skill for people having this role. 

[00:03:24] Russell: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, content and content marketing. There’s definitely a lot of ways to be in it and be involved. Whether you’re on the design side or you’re specializing in copywriting. You know, strategy again is as a lot of where I came up and analytics plays a role for all those folks. I think strategy, especially, and understanding how your different content assets perform.

[00:03:49] Russell: How effective they are in terms of your business goals and converting purchases or leads or signups or whatever that might be, and really understanding the value of the content that you’re putting out or that you already have, or that you’d like to have. And data analysis really gives you that, that extra quantitative layer in understanding your audience and what works for them.

[00:04:14] Russell: So you’ll look to other sources to do audience research and competitor research and understanding your users’ journey prior to getting into content. But then once you set a plan and you’re running, you really want to have that strong talent or that – especially starting dashboard viewpoints – into your data to make sure things are on track to make sure it’s living up to your expectations, and learn how you can improve and optimize, and all of that fun stuff.

[00:04:44] Russell: I always say, when it comes to analytics, don’t be afraid to ask questions, ask smart people. You know, you guys obviously are, are really strong in analytics and I’ve worked with a lot of CRO’s and SEO’s folks like that just have really strong analytics skills and can really help you get things set up and running properly with whatever tool you’re using.

[00:05:05] Russell: And that’s another reason I really love Mouseflow and why I was attracted to the product even before I joined the team. It’s just how intuitive it is to use, really just plugging in a URL or selecting your channels or your filters. And you get a really easy-to-understand visual representation of your data.

[00:05:26] Russell: So you’re not just pouring through lines of numbers and metrics and URLs, but you’re able to look at things like heatmaps that show you behavior hotspots and session recordings of actual user journeys. And you’re really getting that real-life understanding of how your content is used in the real world.

[00:05:47] Andreea: And you’re understanding that in an instant. Like – you have it right there in front of you and you can make the decision on the same day. 

[00:05:58] Russell: Definitely. Yeah. That’s, I think, a really big benefit of data visualization and why I love data visualization, just that communication aspect of it. I mean, if a picture’s a thousand words, data visualization is literally 10,000 words; and being able to commute very quickly and efficiently and effectively to whoever you need to, whether it’s a dev, you need to set up a test, or a CEO you need to convince of something of why you’re moving this important button or something like that. It can really help add the context that just gets things done or makes things really clear, or just adds that confidence to what you’re doing or what you think you should do.

[00:06:39] Andreea: Yeah, exactly! When you go live with your content plan and you also start promoting that content, how are you measuring the success of your content strategy? What are some of the KPIs that you are watching? 

[00:06:53] Russell: I think what’s important is to understand what you’re leading and lagging indicators are going to be. You want to understand your clear purpose what’s your end goal. And that end goal is typically something around revenue, related to the leads you’re driving or the products you are selling or the traffic you’re getting, if it’s that kind of media publication site, maybe. 

And a lot of ways to understand if you’re going to get there or if it’s working are these SEO metrics, keyword ranks, your traffic metrics, but also really your engagement metric. As you’re driving traffic to new content, you don’t just want to see your keywords hitting the right SERPs, the right results pages, and the right positions. And you don’t just want to see traffic coming in from organic and from, your email, or your social promotion, whatever your strategy is there. You also want to make sure that the audience is actually valuable. And find value. So that’s why I love to use Mouseflow. It’s really easy to understand things like friction points and scroll depth and, and just looking at heatmaps and heat signatures and time on page and custom funnel conversions to really see if we’re bringing in an audience that can value this piece of content and then continue their journey and maybe consume more content or learn more about our product or our solution, or even convert into a sign-up or a trial or a purchase or whatever e-commerce, SaaS or kind of site you’re working on. So those I think are really most important.

[00:08:28] Russell: Of course, things like likes and shares on social media and engagement. There is going to give you some of those leading indicators, but I think those on-page metrics can be visualized as heat maps or as scroll depth maps or click maps or attention maps; those really tell you that users came here, they clicked your jump links and your table of contents and they scroll down to your content and they’re spending time reading it. 

Even comparing what you would expect a reading time for say your thousand-word piece; pretty simple math, and then compare that to your actual time on page. Is that enough time for people to actually be consuming this content or are they simply just skimming it? And that can tell you maybe if something needs to be optimized if something’s better served visually, all of that. So of course it takes time to – and that’s the other hard part – you don’t put a piece of content out unless it’s super newsworthy or viral or something like that, and immediately see traffic supporting it.

[00:09:30] Russell: So it’s kind of that understanding of the timing of this. Being from an agency background, explaining that content and SEO and all these things take time to take effect. Is typically tough we’re impatient as humans, so we want to see our results as quickly as possible.

[00:09:49] Russell: So having the right setup in terms of dashboard and analytics viewpoints helps you get there, helps you see that progress. And then these on-site engagement metrics can really give you that more specific data sooner, you don’t have to wait for months to see how your content is performing on an engagement level, because you can look at some of that initial traffic and really get some understanding and make some decisions there. And of course, let that marinate for a few months as well, and look back again and see how things might’ve aged.

[00:10:22] Andreea: Really good advice. I think a lot of people just create tests and then they set it and forget it. They have this attitude. And especially getting back to after a few months to reanalyze that data, that’s something really rare, as far as I’ve seen with most businesses. 

[00:10:42] Russell: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s another thing I love about Mouseflow is that once you do install it, it’s recording a hundred percent of your traffic and a hundred percent of your pages by default. I’ve used other platforms in the past where you do have to go in and set up and tell it and say, I want to track this amount of traffic. And I want to look at this page to get maybe that heat map data or that engagement data. And you kind of have to do that preemptively as you’re launching your content, or you’re not gonna be able to get that data in three months. Whereas using Mouseflow, any new URL you’re putting up is going to be automatically tracked based on that code. So you can, you can hop in right away if that’s part of your process or, again, three, six months down the line you can hop in and look at the last three, six months of data. And audit compared to other content but really be able to have that kind of lookback analysis at any time without needing to set up a new tracking campaign maybe for each piece of content. 

[00:11:44] Andreea: I think a lot of teams don’t do this because it requires a lot of time to invest in watching, for example, individual recordings. And I was curious – how much time do you think a team should invest in this? 

[00:12:00] Russell: That’s a really great question. And that’s one I’ve actually put two other CRO’s and other data analysts and things in my own network, our customers, anyone I can ask really. And it really depends on your relationship to whatever domain you’re working on. If you are in-house and your role is focused on website performance and data analysis and all that sort of optimization, you may be able to spend a couple of hours a week maybe just watching session recordings and understanding user journeys and things like that.

[00:12:35] Russell: I’ve had a lot of in-house content web data analysis folks say that what they love about their role is that they can do that. They can have this unstructured block of time to just kind of poke around the data, look at different session recordings, see where the data takes them essentially.

[00:12:53] Russell: And on the flip side, if you will, maybe in that agency mindset or consulting, or, you just have a brand with multiple domains and your time needs to be split up between a lot of different focus areas, then that’s where things like our dashboards are really helpful. Setting up a dashboard with the most important information to you, whether that’s traffic or that’s your engagement or the performance of your latest content.

[00:13:20] Russell: Or even just going into your session recordings list and looking at different segments of your audience and using things like the friction score to just devote some of your time to those user experiences that are standing out as high friction. And then, instead of reviewing a handful, you can review a couple, get the gist of what’s going on by realizing or by reviewing rather the only the problematic session recordings and that’s a good way to kind of bide your time and make sure you’re going at it efficiently so that you can attack the fires that are burning, that can get your intention. And sometimes it’s not about the time you want to spend, but the time you have to spend.

[00:14:05] Russell: I think that’s why it helps too that we have multiple features within one product in that you can review your session recordings, and if something jumps out to you, you can watch it. But you can also view a heat map of that same page or pages that you found within that recording journey. And get those multilayered data visuals for that. And then maybe jump into funnel analysis and look at how that page is performing as part of the journey, even drill down into the forms that might be present on those pages. If you just noticed that your traffic and your journey and your funnel progress all seems to be there, but you’re losing people right at the end of this journey where they need to fill out a checkout form or they need to provide you their information, their contact info, that’s when the analysis optimization tool can help you look at the individual drop-off points within your form fields. 

So you can really do this bird’s eye view and just look for the sad faces that point out the high friction, or you can really, really dive in there and look at specific session recordings or specific form fields to find out what’s worth spending time on.

[00:15:24] Andreea: So do you have this feature where you can show the sessions with higher frictions? 

[00:15:30] Russell: Yeah. So what we have is our friction score and how you’ll see it in the list of session recordings is actually: if it’s a high friction score, if there’s a lot of click rage, people hammering on their mouse, or these other elements that signal to Mouseflow “Hey, this person’s unhappy, they’re not having a good experience on your website.”, you’ll see the little sad face pop up on their recording. And that’s going to give you that visual cue to say: “Hey, let me dive in here and see what might be the issue.” 

A customer recently did just that exact method to understand why the users just weren’t able to complete the form. This was actually healthcare, medical patients were trying to book appointments.

[00:16:13] Andreea: Yeah, that can be frustrating! 

[00:16:14] Russell: Yup. Yup. Yeah. And already not a fun experience. But so many weren’t able to complete the form and it turned out to be just an issue with how the backend insurance and medical data was connected to the CMS or the form builder. And solving that solved it, but they were able to jump in and view those session recordings that had that issue, realize it was this error message that was popping up around their certain selection, solve that, and all of a sudden that form completion rate jumps back up to normal and they’re able to get those, in this case, those patients, the care they need, which is of course very important. 

[00:16:54] Andreea: Yeah, that’s a lot of value right there. So speaking of medical stuff, are you getting high on your own supply and using Mouseflow for Mouseflow?

[00:17:04] Russell: Yeah, definitely. Actually, a previous SEO director that I worked with at the agency I was with had used Mouseflow in the past. And that was kind of my first experience with it back then. And I wasn’t too involved at that point. But later on, I did, and in joining now as a content manager, that was a big thing for myself getting trained up in the tool, which is already pretty approachable but being able to use that for my own purposes.

[00:17:33] Russell: So we have a couple of feedback campaigns going. So if you head to our website, you’re going to get asked on certain pages maybe what brought you here, what problems you’re trying to solve, what content you might be looking for, or if the content you found is effective.

[00:17:49] Russell: I love reviewing the responses to those. It’s a literal goldmine for optimizations and content ideas and all of that. But everything else as well, I mean, I set up funnels to look at ideal user journeys as we put out new pages or as we evaluate existing user journeys. Or analyzing our own forms, which are admittedly and purposely very simple. We try not to ask for too much in terms of getting users signed up. Because it does aid conversion and those are things we’ve learned. But yeah, looking at session recordings and heat maps it’s something my whole team does.

[00:18:27] Russell: And of course our support team is always in there. As we build our website, as we are looking at new content or just new campaigns that we’re running, even on PPC or social, and analyzing traffic and landing page performance, we’re in there every day, as much as we are in any other platform, for sure. So it’s very much a core analytics tool in our kit and something we lead with. 

[00:18:53] Andreea: The strongest companies will be these ones, that will put focus on analytics scent and will train their entire team to think in that way.

[00:19:07] Russell: It’s nice as well to have that extra layer of behavior data, because we of course look to some other sources, like Search Console around keywords and HubSpot, because that helps with our CRM and the relationship and sales tracking and SEMrush for things like optimizations and link building and all of that.

[00:19:27] Russell: And having that right mix of analytics to give you the right perspective is really crucial. So we spend a lot of time as a team analyzing our analytics to see if everything is matching up. What does it mean if data shows up here? How is it related to how these collect data or the view that they have on it? So a lot of fun, a lot of challenging conversations to get all your tools to play nice together. But what we love is that Mouseflow is sort of that hundred percent traffic, a hundred percent pages, so it can validate almost any other analytics tool in that if you’re having questions on performance or how that page might be valued, I’m pulling it up in Mouseflow, understanding session recordings and how users behave and where they’re coming from and, and where they go next as well, which I think is really important.

[00:20:19] Russell: All these has been really valuable for us and it really does guide how we evaluate our strategies and how we plan for what we do next. 

[00:20:28] Andreea: I’ll get back to the feedback that you mentioned a couple of minutes ago. I’m curious – aren’t people reluctant to giving, taking away of their time, and just writing even a sentence of feedback. Sometimes I think people are reluctant to do that. 

[00:20:45] Russell: I think that’s a fair assumption. And I think most people, myself included, tending to have a little bit of blindness to little chat pop-ups and things like that. Yeah. And usually, you might be thinking “Oh, I don’t need customer support, so I don’t need to engage with your chat.” I do get plenty of responses that are valuable. And I think that the important part is it’s not coming from every single visitor. It’s only coming from those who have something to say. And I think they value that you’re even asking and that their opinion can influence… something, whether that’s content; it’s often that someone may come to your site trying to get a certain question answered. And if they can’t get the answer to that question, I want to know that and give them a chance to have that answer. Even if it’s this indirect method of this feedback campaign, they’re able to say I actually came here to understand XYZ. And they tell me, “Hey, this isn’t quite as clear as it should be.” I’m going to make an update to that so that other users don’t have that same lack of info. That’s useful in a lot of different cases. 

We actually have a customer in the automotive industry that every now and then has to deal with major international product recalls and repairs. So when they have online portals for that recall information, they use the customer feedback tool in a similar way and say “Hey, if the question you have is not answered on this page, drop it here.” And that tells us that’s something we need to include on this page and for the next recall campaign that we have to run. And that’s also helping them reduce call center volume and customer support volume because they can collect these questions and answer them preemptively.

[00:22:45] Russell: As opposed to needing to be contacted individually. And I think when someone has a strong enough opinion, they’re happy to get it off their chest, I guess. 

[00:22:55] Andreea: Great, great! And I think it also creates this feeling of empathy, right? People feel that they can have a voice and a dialogue with the company.

[00:23:08] Russell: Definitely. And I always preach about empathy and content marketing, content strategy. I mean, I spend tons of time, as I kick-off content strategy diving into that, to that audience to build that empathy. And really getting the whole company involved to understand how people, in our case, are using the product, what kind of onboarding discussions they’re having, what kind of sales discussions they’re having, and that from-the-horse’s-mouth, so to speak, customer feedback is really the most valuable.

[00:23:42] Russell: So whether that’s customer interviews or market interviews and that kind of market research or you’re asking the people that you already have on your website, it’s really going to give you the most valuable and the most specific and the most effective insights on what you can do.

[00:24:01] Russell: If your audience tells you they want something, give it to them. 

[00:24:06] Andreea: Totally agree with that. I had an example for you. And I took the KPIs Studio website as an example: let’s say we realize that people are checking our portfolio pages, but they don’t click on the call to action.

[00:24:22] Andreea: And you mentioned earlier the assumption; the assumption, in this case, is that the CTA is not visible. And the question is – how can we make sure that we’ve got our assumptions right? Or on the contrary, prove to ourselves that we came up with a wrong assumption or hypothesis. 

[00:24:42] Russell: Okay, yeah. First off, I think you’re just in the right mindset of “prove me wrong, please.”

[00:24:48] Russell: Anytime you go into this kind of optimization or analysis you want to have that – maybe not always, but I think it helps to have some kind of hypothesis going into it – but, more importantly, is that attitude of “I’m not looking for a winner necessarily, I’m looking for valuable insight”; and that’s something I’ve learned and taken that advice from some really smart CRO specialists. Testing is always going on and you never really know what to expect. You’re always going to get surprised now and then, so look to the data, don’t let your assumptions guide you, be open to having them totally shot down or thrown in a different direction. You just never know. 

[00:25:29] Andreea: Haha. Be prepared to be hurt.

[00:25:31] Russell: Yeah, exactly. Don’t get too attached to any assumption, for sure. I think the best way to start with that is probably going to your heat maps of that page. So just start off with all the traffic that you’re getting there.

[00:25:48] Russell: Unless you feel that one is specifically problematic, maybe you feel the social or the organic traffic is giving you the most problem there. But pull up that heat map and look at it for the past few months, and see if you are seeing that the heat signature is in the places you would expect them; it should be over that CTA, maybe over your important links, and if it’s not, of course, that’s an issue. Maybe it’s something visually that needs to be improved. Maybe it’s, again, the offer that you’re giving. What you can do with Mouseflow too is actually go a little deeper beyond just heat signatures, but see if people are clicking, if they’re just hovering and sort of thinking about clicking. See what that behavior looks like on a more granular level. Maybe they’re finding your CTA, but they just don’t find it compelling enough to click or they feel like they need more information. So they’re clicking over to a different page before they actually make it to clicking that CTA somewhere else. And that can tell you – you need to bring that information onto this page.

[00:26:50] Russell: You can also even pull up your geo heat maps, which is not going to look at your page, but it’s actually going to look at the world and tell you where that traffic’s coming from. So that can point out that maybe you’re getting bots or you’re getting spammed by a certain region or you just have to be performing well in a certain region, but you have a really strong competitor in that region, maybe.

[00:27:12] Russell: And you might want to shift your strategy to a different region. All of those, the heat maps can just tell you a million things. So that’s always the best place to start. That will take you naturally into reviewing some session recordings. As you identify the ones that are maybe high friction and you’re going to want to look at those that did convert and see what their journey was and how they interacted with your website by watching that recording.

[00:27:36] Russell: And of course, looking at those that were frustrated or didn’t convert, or just exited. Look at the grumpy users and see what was, or wasn’t working for them. And again, build that empathy to say “all right, I put myself in their shoes, I see that this just isn’t working for them or they can’t find it, or they need more information”, whatever it is. And beyond that, you can look to funnels as well. So if you are starting to understand that ideal journey or what you hope is the ideal journey, you can set up a funnel for that as well in Mouseflow, and then be able to see from a page to page level, is your journey working for them? Build a couple of funnels and compare them. 

Is your CTA the right next step, or is there maybe a page that needs to come first before you’d convert them? Or are there too many steps in your journey and you really just need to give them an option to convert much sooner?

[00:28:37] Russell: And there’s a lot of questions. That could be answered by looking at those funnel conversion rates, and then looking at those dropped and those converted sessions, similar to how you would approach looking at some heat maps sessions. And that’s where some of that AB testing can come in as well, where you can have your AB tests set up and then analyze with Mouseflow and really understand that performance. 

[00:28:59] Russell: And forms as well. I think in this case it sounds like you’re more concerned about a click and not so much a form field, but that’s the other thing to think of too – are they clicking and then just maybe not completing your form because it’s too long, it’s asking for too much or, a field breaks or… that kind of stuff can always pop up.

[00:29:16] Russell: But I think the one thing I would do there as well is let the users tell you. That’s a great opportunity to have that – maybe – time-delay or scroll-delay feedback campaign / pop up to say: “What questions can I answer for you?” Or “What are you looking for?”, or even “What has you hesitating from signing up?”

[00:29:36] Russell: Any of that can give you that important information to say – oh, they just needed to know that we operate in this country or what our pricing is or this or that. And boom, you can see performance increases. 

[00:29:51] Andreea: Yeah, and go in multiple directions. About the forms – how can you tell what is the behavior of a user that feels that it’s asked too much?

[00:30:03] Russell: What you’ll see when you have the form analysis set up, it’s that it actually turns your form into a funnel view almost. So treating each field as the first, second, third, fourth, however-many-stage in your funnel with that final one being – completion. So that’s going to be your form conversion rate, and you’re going to see which fields on that form are giving you that friction.

[00:30:27] Russell: So if someone spends a lot of time trying to create a password because you have super strong password requirements, that’s going to pop up and you’re going to see the time signature on that getting longer. You’re going to see the friction on that rising, and that might tell you “Hey, maybe I need to suggest a password or I need to loosen my password.”

[00:30:50] Andreea: Or I need to just add a field where I explain what the password requires. 

[00:30:54] Russell: Exactly, yep. That’s a solution one of our customers had, actually. “Hey, we just realized that our instructions aren’t clear enough.” And there you go. In a lot of cases, especially in B2B, you’re going to see that you’re just asking for too much information. Maybe it’s a white paper that you’re asking for contact info to download. And instead of just asking for an email address and a name you’re asking for their company and the company size and the region and their job title and different things about them. And for a smaller conversion like that, that’s not booking a demo or getting right in touch or becoming a customer right away, that might be too much to ask of someone that just wants your PDF. 

So the form optimization tool is really gonna tell you what’s slowing them down once they’re at that point of conversion and you know where you might need to clarify, to change up your form, change the order, change the wording, remove fields, add certain things. Yeah, very, very informative. 

[00:32:02] Andreea: Informative, but do you think sometimes it’s difficult for the website owners to translate this information into something actionable? Something like changing the website, like you just mentioned. 

[00:32:18] Russell: Yeah, yeah. I think it depends on which way you go and address a user’s friction point and it depends on your level of savviness in data analytics, but also the implementation side.

[00:32:31] Russell: It might be that your role is just identifying and understanding problems in the journey. And you identify this form as one, and you can see the form analysis data, but it’s something you need to pass off to your web developer or your SEO team or your marketing team, whoever is more familiar with that to actually make the change.

[00:32:53] Russell: And I think that’s what’s really useful within Mouseflow as well is that you can pretty easily share and export, download whatever your data is, and get that to the right people. So maybe you want to ask your CRO consultant or you just want to get your team’s feedback on that. We try to make it as easily collaborative as possible. You can have as many users on your account as possible and set up these custom dashboards and all that. So if you are feeling stumped, there you go. And our support team is really great as well. Often someone may be using it and be in that situation of I’m not quite sure what this means and our support team can also help decode some of that and say “Hey, you’re seeing this because X”. The other easy way to do it is if you are identifying these issues in your form and you just don’t understand why it’s happening, check out the session recording. So click where it says “watch dropped users.” Just go watch them that will give you the real story of what was happening when they found the issue with your form or whatever it is. 

[00:34:06] Andreea: Do you think there’s the risk of segmenting the data too much? Because Google Analytics (and by the way, I’ve seen your talk where you say that Google Analytics is not really useful sometimes and I’m curious about your view on that.) has data aggregation and definitely doesn’t tell the whole story, but the opposite of that is segmenting, going too granular – can it be too much? 

[00:34:38] Russell: I think that would just depend on what you’re trying to understand and what you trust in terms of a data pool. If I’m putting together some kind of content piece around survey responses, what’s more trustworthy? Ten responses, a hundred responses, five hundred, a thousand? What’s actually viable to collect?

[00:35:01] Andreea: So that means setting goals too. It’s important to do that. Am I understanding that correctly? 

[00:35:08] Russell: Yeah, definitely. Understanding what you’re looking for and what your segment actually includes. If you’re looking at a certain campaign’s traffic, a certain UTM specifically, and some really strong trends are coming out, but you realize that it’s not quite a large enough data set to totally have confidence in that, then you can widen out your segment there to look at. Maybe all your PPC campaigns, all your paid traffic and compared that to all your organic traffic. Take those steps back to see if those trends hold up. Don’t let a handful of users constitute a trend.

[00:35:49] Russell: If you are seeing something like that, again, pop into the session recordings and see if maybe it was a technical issue. You never know. So I think if you know, that’s a great way to validate any of your segment trends – pop into session recordings and see if that holds up.

[00:36:06] Russell: And of course, compare it to other segments as well. And see if it actually is specific to this, or if it’s a more general trend, or again if it’s too small of a sample set to warrant actually doing something right now. Maybe it’s something you’re just keeping an eye on and you’re throwing out there as a hypothesis. And you’re waiting to see if more data supports that or refutes that.

[00:36:27] Andreea: Again, Mouseflow can help you check individual recordings of how users interact with the website. And you can also check the website’s heat maps. Can you share with us some best practices when using tools like Mouseflow? 

[00:36:43] Russell: Yeah, yeah. In terms of getting started or just kind of getting the most out of it?

[00:36:49] Andreea: Both, I think both. 

[00:36:52] Russell: I always come back to that looking broadly and looking specifically. So as you come in, our friction score really helps highlight problems. So if certain pages or certain segments are showing high friction, that’s a good place to start that helps prioritize the time you spend in Mouseflow. And aligning any test recommendations or any optimization strategies, or even just content planning or website planning strategies with data is really helpful.

[00:37:29] Russell: Using it to prioritize where you’re spending your time. So it’s going to help you say you might have these grandiose plans for a certain pillar page or a certain feature page on your website, but you might go in and realize “Hey, it’s actually performing really well, converting really well.”

[00:37:48] Russell: Whereas this other page seems to have a lot of friction and it’s causing problems in our conversion funnel, and that’s going to help you get to that. I think if you want to pop in and get some quick insights, what I love to do is pop in and look at maybe the blog section of a website or specific resources or even just important pages and look at scroll depth.

[00:38:12] Russell: It’s a really easy metric to kind of visually zero in on when you’re looking at session recordings and it gives you that quick understanding. Are users only seeing the first fold of this page and leaving, or are they actually scrolling down and consuming? And that gives you some quick insights. Just watching some of those frustrated session recordings is where you’re probably going to come away with a handful of things that you can look into.

[00:38:38] Russell: And then just being able to share that with the rest of your team is super helpful. I think evaluating your content organization is a really effective way to get a lot of value out of Mouseflow. Because it’s looking at things like scrolling, your heat maps to say “Hey, you have this great content.”

[00:38:56] Russell: But the really juicy part is – four folds down and 70% of the way down the page, and you do a lot better at getting people interested. If you move that section up to maybe your first or second fold and those kinds of small adjustments that you can really only get when you’re in this sort of visual behavior data can just make huge impacts that you really can’t do confidently with Analytics or other data. And I think you find out that just that whole being able to see things – either see the live recording or see the visualized heat map or see the funnel progress or the form efficiency or whatever it might be – it goes a long way from looking at a lot of tables and graph and trying to wrap your head around those. 

[00:39:47] Andreea: Definitely. So what about the getting started part? There’s a lot of talks lately around privacy. And you mentioned that the sessions are 100% recorded. How’s the GDPR part with your tool and what do you feel about that and the cookies acceptance and everything?

[00:40:13] Russell: Most of that tracking fires after everything else, after your page loads. So it won’t affect page speed. CCPA in California, GDPR in the EU, cookie policies, we’re all very tight on and we make sure that we try to make sure that all our customers are doing that as well.

[00:40:36] Russell: At the same time, we also clarify that the data we’re collecting is very much anonymous, and can be also made even more anonymous. So to the point of CCPA even in certain regions, IP addresses only go so far, so you’re not going to be able to knock on someone’s door and know that they visited your website, but you can know that they came from California or a certain Metro area.

[00:41:03] Russell: PII personally, personally identifiable information can be automatically hidden. So if someone’s typing in a form, all you’re going to see on a session recording is the asterisk popping up, like you would a password, and that’s not even collected. You’re really able to get all of this data without invading privacy.

[00:41:26] Russell: I kind of equate it to a security camera in a brick and mortar store you’d walk into. That one, it’s probably going to see your face, which I feel like is more invasive, but in the sense that it doesn’t have your phone number and it doesn’t have your name and things like that.

[00:41:49] Russell: So it’s going to see – what are you doing in my store? What are you doing on my website? You know, what aisles are you walking down – this and that? A lot of the big retail giants do a lot of analysis of that customer flow and real-life customer journey, so to speak. It’s why Walmart puts the milk at the back of the grocery store so that you can walk past all this other stuff to buy on the way. It’s really a similar analogy to how you set this up for your website. You’re completely respecting privacy, but just taking a look at the little characters running around your store and where they’re going and what they’re clicking or picking up. 

[00:42:33] Andreea: Or hr how can we help them. 

[00:42:35] Russell: Exactly, yeah. And that’s the other important part, I’m glad you mentioned that. Because it really is not about surveillance or tracking, but what everyone’s looking at here is – how can I make things better for your experience?

[00:42:53] Russell: I think bringing up the healthcare examples is great and healthcare and HIPAA in the US are very strict on what information can be shared. So we make sure to serve those customers to the highest standards of what needs to be achieved in terms of privacy.

[00:43:08] Russell: And they’re still able to go in and understand “Hey, our patients are having trouble booking their care online.” And now I can see why, it’s this simple thing where if I solve this problem, they won’t get this error message, and now they can book their appointment and get the care they need or see the telehealth doctor more quickly.

[00:43:28] Russell: So it’s really just about looking at these interactions. Most of the time, unless you’re looking at a specific session recording, you’re probably checking out a heat map or a funnel analysis, which is a big group of hundreds or thousands of users that’s layered into that visual analysis. So it’s looking more at these trends maybe than the individual. Looking at the mouse cursor is what we’re looking for, not necessarily the identifying details behind any of that. 

Aside from some geography, the standard metrics that Google Analytics would pick up, things like device type and referral source and country, and things that are going to help you understand your audience.

[00:44:15] Russell: To a similar degree, I think data security is something that we hold in really high regard and are always making sure to stay up to date on and push the boundary on. We even have data centers in Europe for European customers and in the US for the US and North American customers, because that’s also part of GDPR, that European companies, data must be stored in Europe. I think there are even other platforms out there that aren’t doing that. So, in that case, your data is not fully up to the letter of the line in terms of how you’re doing that. So we really make sure that if you’re a customer using our tool, you really shouldn’t have anything to worry about when it comes to that.

[00:45:02] Russell: And we can even help with privacy policy language and giving the right links so that if a user’s worried, they can always learn what we do. And obviously, we’re trying to be as friendly and approachable as possible because there is just such a wealth of information that can be gathered in it. It really does, in the end, just helps the users or the customers or the patients or whoever you might be serving. 

[00:45:28] Andreea: Yeah, that’s the ultimate goal. Thank you for your time, Russell. I have one last question that is getting back to the fact that you are a content marketer. Here we go – if you had to choose only one metric for your content strategy, what would that be? 

[00:45:49] Russell: That’s a tough one, but I’ll still cheat and probably give you a couple, but I think it all really comes down to revenue and conversions. That’s typically the goal in doing any sort of content marketing – to make an effect on the bottom line, whether that’s new customers or retaining customers or upgrading customers or whatever that may be. So being able to see that lift is a guiding light that tells you you’re going in the right direction and you’re getting ROI and they’re really valuable. 

And then anything that can give you the tip that you’re going in the right direction on the way is helpful. So looking at page conversion rates and funnel conversion rates, I think is a really great way to tell you that the content’s actually working and you’re appealing to the right people. 

You’re giving them the right offer and you’re filling your funnel. So everything that leads up to research, and keyword ranks, and SEO, and audience, and journey, and all this stuff, all work up to getting people to your site, converting in whatever way that means for your business, and making that difference.

[00:46:57] Russell: So try to tie that to anything you do even if it’s further or much higher in the journey or the funnel, understand what that connection is going to be. Maybe what the value of that click-through is, or what you’re hoping to learn or gain from this and tie that to business goals.

[00:47:14] Andreea: So you kind of created a Maslow pyramid of KPIs there. With the revenue on top.

[00:47:21] Russell: Yeah, yeah, there you go. I focused on that for a while, even in digital marketing, in an agency setting. When we were working with clients, that’s what we really tried to get to the root of is you’re here and you’re spending time and money and resources on analytics and on marketing and on this and that.

[00:47:48] Russell: What you really want to know is – is it making you money? How much money is it making you? And is that a good return on the investment you’ve made? Everything should ladder up to that to making the right decision or you can pivot, whatever your business goal is. It can go beyond revenue as well, that’s the common denominator, but I think that’s the guiding light, the one you want to hit your wagon to, and make sure it’s taking you in the right direction. 

[00:48:17] Andreea: Thank you, Russell! It’s been great and extremely insightful. 

[00:48:23] Russell: Thank you for having me. I love learning from folks like you that know analytics better than I do and can string all these together and make really rich dashboards. I’ve of course fallen for behavior analytics and visualization and anyone who’s that kind of data nerd or appreciator. I was really going to have fun with this and just find a lot of value. I came to it pretty naturally and I think anyone who is interested – hey, go check it out! And I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

[00:49:03] Andreea: And Russell, where can people go to find out more about you and what you do and maybe get in touch with you? 

[00:49:11] Russell: Yeah, totally. Head to Mouseflow.com, you’ll learn all about what we do and how it can help you as a a marketer or a product manager or a UX researcher, or a designer, CRO specialist, data analyst. We’ve found a lot of different ways that this data can really help and be used by teams as well, be used not just by the marketing department, but multiple teams that can get value from this. 

If you want to find more about me, LinkedIn is probably the best way. I’m always happy to meet and chat and if you have any questions, definitely reach out! I think we can share that link Mouseflow and to my LinkedIn. And yeah, I’d love to hear from you. And like I said, I always love to follow smart people and learn from people; we were talking before how LinkedIn is such a great way to stay in touch with just smart people from around the world. Looking forward to hearing from everyone! 

[00:50:18] Andreea: Thanks Russell, for being our first guest and for sharing with us these knowledge nuggets on how to understand our users’ behavior and improve their experience on our website. 

Thank you everyone for listening to this conversation, the Eyes on the KPIs talks are for now an experiment, so please let us know if you liked it, if you think it adds value, or if you have any questions for Russell and me. Shout out to the entire team that made this episode possible. Check the show notes to see who these awesome people are. Until next time, keep your eyes on your KPIs!