Mozcon 2017: Matthew Edgar

Matthew Edgar At Mozcon 2017

DISCLAIMER: This post is written as a live blog from Mozcon. There may be typos and grammar to make my high school English teachers weep. Please excuse those … it’s a fast-paced conference with back-to-back sessions and no time for proofing or even proper writing.

Matthew Edgar makes the stage after the first break to chat about UX. The key here to me is – he’s going to show us how to measure and prove it matters.

He starts by pointing out that Google with HTTPS, PageSpeed, etc. is basically telling us that UX matters. He goes on to talk about good content and how it matters for SEO and that UX does too despite that fact that many believe it doesn’t (though personal note – even though I’m mainly a technical SEO I think anyone who claims UX doesn’t matter is not paying attention).

So how do you show your clients it matters?

He talks about the limitations in surveys and their bias on the questions.  He also talks about the limitation of heatmaps on the current site not what it should be.

So here are three ways to see what we can do …

By deafult we don’t track internal links as an event in Google Analtyics.  If we track them we can understand how the use our site.  The code to do that will be accessible below.

Using a related bit of code we can time track how long it took them o the previous page to click a link. This leads us to question whether it’s taking people too short or too long to do that.

The next question we want to ask is how long are they spending on the next page.  Then we can break down how people act on a page based on where they came from.

Understanding Content

He recommends the Parsnip scroll tracking script to understand not just how far they got down and whether they hit a call to action but how long it took them to get there and how long they spent there before clicking. We can add click tracking here to understand the clickthrough rate.

We can then start testing different layouts for clicks and conversions and what’s wrong with our site by understanding what part of the exit page they left from.

He goes on to a large number of uses for this ability but it’s not hard to think of them and I couldn’t get them all written down.

User Error

We also want to understand where the user makes an error. We can track form entry errors like incorrect phone number digits, etc. and really get an understanding for what errors people are making on forms and compare the conversions rate of the form vs people that didn’t make an error.  If we find it impacting significantly we know it’s a high priority to fix and clarify.

With this we can really put a number and a win or loss to SEO and the bottom line.

Download his slide deck here.